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...

When seeking optimism, one wouldn't typically look to a backup goaltender for the Calgary Flames. The Wet Logs are bringing up the league's rear, and they've contractually and metaphorically hitched their wagon firmly to Dustin Wolf for the next eight seasons. A No. 2 netminder is not going to get much playing time, and what time he does get will statistically involve giving up a lot more goals than ones viewed from 200 feet away.

Devin Cooley, of all goaltenders out there, probably needs optimism more than most. The 28-year-old's road to the NHL was long and winding and filled with crappy teams, bouncing around the minor-league affiliates of the Predators, Sabres, and Sharks before getting the call-up for all of six games in San Jose in 2023–24. Without optimism, a guy with that career path probably still isn't playing professional hockey.

Louise is some kind of shepherd, a combination of shepherds, a Malinois, Groenendael, something. Belgian, Dutch, German. She came from a rescue in Tennessee; some damn fool bred a litter of puppies to sell and then found he could not sell them and then dumped them on a rescu...

When the National Women’s Soccer League settled with three separate attorneys general earlier this year—following investigations by all three into the league’s years of failure to prevent or adequately respond to player reports of harassment and sexual misconduct—the agreement came with several requirements. One was that the league would pay $5 million to players who…

On Tuesday night, Deandre Ayton received his second-ever alley-oop from LeBron James. The first, Ayton said in press after the Lakers' 140-126 win over the Utah Jazz, occurred when he was in eighth grade, at James's youth camp in Las Vegas. "He was court-hopping, playing wit...

As of publication, residents of San Francisco's District 4, comprising most of the Sunset from 7th Avenue out to the Pacific Ocean, do not have a representative on the city's Board of Supervisors; the 29-year-old former pet shop owner whom the mayor appointed to the position...

Coach John Beam's murder has been a national story, which seems like something that John Beam would find simultaneously hilarious and troublesome. His adult life was dedicated to teaching, and to comforting and confronting students and athletes for three decades at various p...

Entering Tuesday's final World Cup qualifier, Scotland was desperate for a win. Though even a loss would have kept Scottish hope alive via a possible playoff, a win would guarantee that Scotland would be making its return to the World Cup for the first time since 1998. (Big week for the not-since-98ers, it seems.) Tuesday's showdown in Glasgow against Denmark, the group leaders heading in, was essentially a playoff-to-avoid-the-playoff, and it delivered on the excitement implied by those stakes. Thanks to a late Kiernan Tierney winner, and a Kenny McLean exclamation point, Scotland survived 90-plus grueling and dramatic minutes to win 4-2 and book its ticket for the tournament next summer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHLpmnHhJyM

The eyes got me. Sir Thomas More by Hans Holbein the Younger isn't the brightest, or the largest painting in its room—it might be the smallest—but it's easily the most striking. It called to me from the next room over at the Frick Collection in New York, where it's hung sinc...

As I finally got to work on writing Defector’s fifth Annual Report, I found myself noodling on some broader thoughts about the worker-owned media landscape. Tom said some sections would work as a standalone blog, and who am I to disagree with Defector’s Editor-in-Chief? You can find the full version of the Year 5 Annual…

Thomas Pynchon's reputation precedes him. He is literature's ur-diagnostician of the post-war psyche, the author of difficult doorstopper novels, and a sort of prophet of paranoia—someone ahead of his time in seeing the outlines of various malevolent forces lurking beyond th...

True lovers of gossip also appreciate humanity’s fondness for fantasizing, since there’s nothing like a fantasy to fuel speculation or move the plot forward. Someone has a bit of a thing for velvet? Someone’s got a crush? Excellent, yes, we love an appetizer almost as much as we love a meal. 

We’re going all the way back to the 90s and all the way down to New Orleans for today’s gossip, which features a pair of goths, a dashing stranger, and the Anne Rice Vampire Ball. I’m sure you can imagine what might be going on here. You should embrace that speculative feeling before you press play, because even if you were to live a hundred lifetimes, you’ll never get this moment back. 

John Fetterman’s just-released memoir, Unfettered, argues that  he’s turned a corner and has everything under control. Fetterman was a “stubborn asshole” (his words), he was clinically depressed, he was in poor health, but that is, according to the book, all in the past...

Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. Today, we're talking about eating with your mouth open, Epstein fuckery, extended TV title sequences, and more.

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This week on Nothing But Respect we were joined by the boys from You Know Ball for a special home-and-home podcast series. Part 1, which you can find below, was in theory dedicated to the question of which teams this season are cool. I say in theory because we had to first get through an extended Luka Garza segment, a lengthy appreciation of Tyrese Maxey and V.J. "MJ Edgecombe" Edgecombe, and a brief look at the dire state of the New Orleans Pelicans. We then had a discussion around my admittedly vague prompt to name some cool teams as to how to even define that term in the first place. It was a fun one.

Harry and I will be recording Part 2 later this afternoon, where we will be discussing the obverse of this episode's question and conducting a survey of the teams with the worst vibes.

We first meet Izzy Gently, the protagonist of Joshua Wheeler’s captivating debut novel, The High Heaven, as a child. She is alone, wounded, and wandering. The year is 1967, and disaster has befallen the doomsday cult in which she’s grown up after the local Sheriff’s office r...

This late stage of Alexander Ovechkin's NHL career has been a lesson in conservation. As Ovi skates through his first season since turning 40, comfortable in his reign as the league's all-time king of goals, his play feels like it's taken on a certain regal quality. He is gr...

Lance Armstrong is a name synonymous with cheating. The brash Texan stole American hearts by winning seven consecutive Tours de France beginning in 1999, only to break them all a few years later by confessing to doping and having all seven titles stripped. That is the broad ...

Down 15 points in the fourth quarter, deep in their own territory, facing first and 11 after a false start penalty, the Las Vegas Raiders ran a plunge into the line. It went worse than you might expect.

It is worth pausing here to mention that the Dallas Cowboys are a joke. This once-proud franchise, winners of five Super Bowls, is now known for loud and expensive mediocrity even in years when they manage to win a playoff game. They have not won consecutive playoff games in 30 years, and two years ago their season ended on one of the funniest plays of all time. On Monday night they led the Raiders 31-9 going into the fourth quarter. If there were any NFC East team that could blow that lead… well, it’d be the Giants. But the Cowboys are a close second.

There's no discounting the very real possibility that the best, coolest, most emotionally affecting moment of the entire soccer season has already happened. The moment in question came in a match contested by two solid but unexceptional teams, both of which are entirely devo...

On Monday, Vanity Fair published the first excerpt of Olivia Nuzzi's monograph to sexting with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a book titled American Canto. The book, as Nuzzi claimed in a glamorized profile published in The New York Times, was written almost entirely on her phone while she was hiking, and this excerpt appears to be robust proof of this claim. Here is Nuzzi's introduction to RFK Jr., a man who, perhaps in some millennial allegiance to J.K. Rowling—another powerful woman under the delusion that she has been cancelled—she refuses to name:

I would take a bullet for you,” the Politician said. He always said that. “Please don’t say that,” I said. I always said that.

Poking through the 20,000-plus pages of emails from Jeffrey Epstein's inbox that were released by the House Oversight Committee last week can be a destabilizing experience. If there's one exchange that best evokes the sickly feeling that comes from spending too much time rea...

Conor Benn dominated familiar and familial foe Chris Eubank Jr. on Saturday in front of another sold out Tottenham Hotspur Stadium crowd in London. Seconds after the bell for the 12th and final round of the bout, Benn was being carried around the ring on the shoulders of his...

Like the ebb and flow of the tides or the migratory patterns of seabirds, there is an almost pleasant regularity to the recurrence of the Draymond Green Incident. Not that the Incidents are ever pleasant themselves, merely that the metronomic reliability of Green expressing ...

It was a crucial situation in the NFL’s marquee game of the week. The Lions had been unable to do anything on offense, but their defense had played well enough to keep them within a score of the reigning Super Bowl champions. Then the Lions finally did it. They broke through with a big play. And then the refs called a bullshit penalty.

The worst call in the Eagles’ 16-9 win over the Lions wasn’t the pass interference call on Detroit CB Rock Ya-Sin that iced the game with two minutes left. And that was an awful call! Lions fans should spend all week whining about it on either Costa & Jansen with Heather or The Mike Valenti Show with Rico. It was such a bad call that my dad texted me that he agreed with Cris Collinsworth’s assessment that, if anything, it was offensive pass interference on AJ Brown.

Before the pandemic, Zakiya Gibbons was everywhere, all the time. Whenever I saw her, she was on her way to another engagement she’d double stacked that day. She’s a people person. A textbook extrovert. But she lived alone during the pandemic, and like a lot of people, all t...

As UEFA qualifiers for the 2026 World Cup come to a close this week, the quality of the automatically qualified teams is high. So far, England and France, two perennial tournament favorites, have won their groups handily—the former allowed zero goals in eight matches, and th...

The comfort of rooting for a baseball team like the New York Yankees or Philadelphia Phillies is that even when they putter out of the playoffs in humiliating fashion, as they did this season, fans can still grasp a general idea of what next year will look like. The baseball...

Ja'Marr Chase of the Cincinnati Bengals spit on Jalen Ramsey of the Pittsburgh Steelers. Not because he'd taken a swig of water to flush his mouth and then turned to the side and, oops, oh Gosh, sorry, some of that got on the other guy, yikes. Also not because he was talking...

The CFL team in Saskatchewan is called the Roughriders, and today that name refers to the rough hangover that they're going to have to ride out after Sunday night's victory celebrations. In a Grey Cup game that looked like it was going to be a comfortable win, then became ve...