The Phoenix Mercury have one of the best nicknames in sports. It's classical, referring to the Roman god of, among other things, travel, trickery, and luck. It's local, referring to fact that Phoenix is a monument to man's arrogance. And it is scientific, referring to one of...

Big news: Defector is looking to hire editorial interns for the summer of 2026. Wow! That could be you! How could it be you? I am here to answer that question, and many more. What will a Defector intern actually do? They will do what our previous interns have done: publish cool and interesting blogs. At Defector,…

For about a decade at Manchester United there have been too many organizational resets, false dawns, and moments of humiliation to count. Grab any slice of results from this era and you can tell pretty much whatever story you want about this club. Hey, United might be turnin...

The Charlotte Hornets are once again miserable crud. At 4–13, they are down there sloshing in the fermented trash juice of the Eastern Conference. The Hornets are perhaps a somewhat more buoyant grade of filth than the league's absolute worst teams—the Washington Wizards are...

All was well with the Philadelphia Eagles in the first half of Sunday's game. The defense looked dominant again. The offense, which had struggled in low-scoring wins the past two weeks, was churning again. The Dallas Cowboys’ first drive of the game ended on downs. Another s...

Apparently someone at MLB headquarters turned the stove on and accidentally left it going. On Sunday, ESPN's Jeff Passan reported that the Texas Rangers and New York Mets were finalizing a straight-up player swap of Marcus Semien for Brandon Nimmo. Semien will be taking his ...

If current trends continue, historians will look back on Nov. 2, 2025, with consternation and confusion. Entire careers of PhD candidates at major universities will be devoted to the mystery of this one day. There will be theses and dissertations, essays and thinkpieces, all...

This week's puzzle was constructed by Evan Mulvihill and Rafael Musa, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Evan is a cruciverbalist living in San Francisco, Calif. His crosswords have been published by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and&nbsp...

Sam Noakes walked to the ring in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on Saturday with a wholesome smile on his face and opera music blaring. I wondered why. He was on his way to fight Abdullah Mason to kick off the “Ring IV” main card, the latest attempt to drum up interest in Saudi touris...

This article has been adapted from a piece published Nov. 16 on the author's Substack page.

Last week, after masked settlers torched a mosque in Salfit, set fire to Palestinian trucks in Huwara, and beat farmers bloody during what the U.N. calls the worst olive harvest for settler violence across the West Bank since it began keeping track in 2006, things finally got bad enough that Israeli authorities felt compelled to issue strongly worded statements.

So let's investigate the blood-spattered scene of the crime, and by crime we mean the inevitable firing of Raiders offensive coordinator Chip Kelly, for which the word crime is probably misplaced.

We know the why, but what about the when? Did Pete Carroll decide to do it at halftime of the Raiders' latest failure against the equally failure-adept Cleveland Browns, when the Pirates With The Swords Through Their Heads were already losing 14-3 and quarterback Geno Smith had been sacked five times? Did it come after the first possession of the second half when the only plays in Cleveland territory were two more sacks and a run for zero yards? Did it come immediately after the game ended, a 24-10 loss that was significantly grimmer than anyone could have imagined even though the two teams entered the game with a combined record of 4-16?

Imagine that you are moss. (Thank you for subscribing to Defector, moss!) You are one of the most ancient types of land plants—older than flowers, older than grass, older than trees, older even than ferns, which are the usual go-to for old plants. Being so old, you're relati...

I've always wondered what it must feel like for injured players who are forced to sit at home and watch their crappy teams. Do they suffer as much as the rest of us? Do they get mad and pissed? Do they look out their window at the sunny day they could be enjoying and ask themselves, "What the hell am I doing with my life?"

Giants wide receiver Malik Nabers, currently laid up with a torn ACL, brought us an answer to those questions on Sunday: Yeah, kinda. Shortly after the Giants' 34-27 overtime loss to the Lions, Nabers posted and then deleted the following thoughts:

SAN JOSE, Calif.  — Jaedyn Shaw set the tone. Rose Lavelle tapped the ball at kickoff, and Shaw booted it toward the Washington Spirit’s net, which keeper Aubrey Kingsbury was helplessly far from. The shot was just off-target, but the message was clear: Gotham FC intended to score by whatever means necessary. 

A second warning came shortly after, when Esther González put a slipped ball by Shaw into the back of the net, only an offside ruling saving Washington from an immediate deficit. The attempts seemed to spook the Spirit, whose nerves showed for the first 20 minutes. Gotham’s freewheeling attack ran rampant over Washington. The Spirit had no choice but to batten down the hatches and defend for their lives. 

Ja Morant's season—even when he has been healthy or between suspensions—has been nothing to write home about. The Memphis Grizzlies' highest-paid player has been one of the most disappointing performers in the NBA this season, averaging just 17.9 points per game (lowest sinc...

When I went to bed on Saturday night, I wasn't planning to write about the 2025 Las Vegas Grand Prix. After a surprisingly successful opening race in 2023, and Max Verstappen's fourth coronation in a row in 2024, this year's edition of the most Americanized race in an increa...

Losers of five straight headed into a tilt with the Maple Leafs in Montreal on Saturday, the Canadiens, it feels safe to say, were not calling up Florian Xhekaj for his goalscoring. The 21-year-old, 6-foot-4, 204-pound winger has two goals and two assists in 16 games in the AHL this season, and 44 penalty minutes. They were looking for a shot in the ass—metaphorically—of the kind often brought by older brother and Habs defenseman Arber Xhekaj. If one Xhekaj provides a boost in energy and isn't above dropping the gloves to keep opponents honest, what might two Xhekajes produce?

A 5-2 win, to end your suspense. But more relevant for blog purposes, Xhekaj, after picking up his first NHL point, picked up his first NHL fight, going toe to toe with Dakota Mermis (really good names all around).

Soft tissues are having a moment. Warriors head coach Steve Kerr rang the bell on the tissue issue this week when he told ESPN's Anthony Slater that he is "very concerned" about the dangers inherent to the NBA's ascendant style of play. Shooting has warped the floor. Active,...

At this juncture of the baseball offseason, trade rumors are broadly wishful fantasies for Yankees fans. I know this because yesterday, Barry Petchesky dropped a tweet in Slack from a Yankees fan account that read, "Would you rather trade for Paul Skenes or Tarik Skubal?" Ac...

On Thursday afternoon, the WorldTour cycling team formerly known as Israel–Premier Tech unveiled its new form: NSN Cycling Team, which will be licensed out of Switzerland and based in Spain. A few short months after its presence at the Vuelta a España incited fierce protests...

I started running when I was 14. After many years of playing recreational soccer, I realized that I did not have the skills to compete on the high school level against girls who had played on club teams their whole lives. The older kids in my neighborhood ran cross country a...

This piece was originally published on FOIAball, a publication covering college football programs using this country’s robust Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) laws. They are doing great work, so if you like this story please consider becoming a FOIAball subscriber.

---

Welcome to the Defector College Football Watch Guide, where Israel Daramola and Ray Ratto will tell you which of the weekend’s college football games are worth giving a crap about. Ray: Not to keep both of you in suspense, but Oberlin finished its season 0-10, losing t...

On Nov. 19, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—a name that feels increasingly misleading, given Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s track record of sowing outbreaks of infectious diseases—quietly updated a webpage in order to suggest a link between vaccines and autism. To say it up top, this is patently false. Scientists have known for a long time that vaccines do not cause autism, there is no evidence to suggest that they do, and just in case you were wondering, there is also no new evidence to suggest that they do. If you would like to read more about this true fact, I recommend STAT News's explainer, "Here is how we know that vaccines do not cause autism."

Now that we are in agreement, let's move on. The CDC page, titled "Autism and Vaccines," now lists the following "Key Points":

There's no way to know exactly what goes on during a CBA negotiation between a sports league and it's players' union. All we have to rely on is information that gets strategically shared to plugged-in reporters, and our own ability to read meaning into what kind of informati...

My wife and I have been planning a trip for around five years. The idea was that it would be a big one for our 10th anniversary; we celebrated our 16th in August. There were deferrals due to family tragedies, work-related upheavals, a global pandemic, and more work-related upheavals, and there have been other small trips mixed in, but there has always been planning, albeit at the lowest possible simmer. A bubble slowly rises to the surface; a spreadsheet is updated to no obvious end; a Friday night conversation turns, inevitably, to whether it might be nice to go to Greece, or someplace like that. For various reasons, my relationship with the fun, big, enriching kind of travel is almost entirely abstract.

The economist and former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers was one of many high-status figures hitting up sex offender Jeffrey Epstein for advice, as revealed in a dump of Epstein's emails last week by the House Oversight Committee. That correspondence has finally caught...

Elyse Myers is famous for being normal—32-year-old brunette, married with two kids, lives in Nebraska kind of normal. Her press often refers to her as “The Internet’s Best Friend.” In her four years in the spotlight, her content has evolved from straight-to-cam self-narrativ...

Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday at Defector during the NFL season. Today we are turning the column over to esteemed guest and past Defector contributor Sarah York.

They handed me the keys to Drew’s Jamboroo, so I get to bitch and moan about something that’s driving me insane about being a sports fan right now: I can’t stand sports betting, and how quickly seemingly every man in mainstream sports media became such an insufferable loser about it, and how their incessant shilling for this shit has ushered in a crisis that I’m afraid we have no way of mitigating.

The Anaheim Ducks are a Defector-certified Fun Team, despite our firmly entrenched traditionalist bias against the idea of two hockey franchises in the Los Angeles market. The Ducks have spent the last seven years in complete irrelevancy after crashing out of a solid but har...