This week's puzzle was constructed by Mat Holmes and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Mat is a teacher in Maine and a crossword constructor who is thrilled to be back in Defector. This puzzle was inspired by his longtime love and co-solver Hazel, but probably not ...

I’ve seen enough of J.J. McCarthy. On a weekend where draftmates Bo Nix and Drake Maye assumed full command of the AFC, there was the Vikings quarterback playing football as if he had acute lead poisoning. I’m gonna try to describe McCarthy’s performance in the space below, ...

As a tactician, Dan Campbell is best-known and best-loved for leading with his face. No hill too high, no risk too great, no goofy idea gone untried—that's in considerable part how he made the Detroit Lions one of the best and indisputably the most charming team in the NFL. ...

The Miami Dolphins have been given every reason to throw in the towel for the year. The general manager who assembled them, Chris Grier, is fired; their coach, Mike McDaniel, is a dead man walking; their quarterback, Tua Tagovailoa, has not only played terribly throughout th...

I have cooked lasagna, conservatively, 12 or 15 times in my life. That's probably not a big number relative to, like, I dunno, a Bolognese nonna or whatever, but it's certainly enough times to have gotten the gist of the enterprise. If I am not (and I am not) a Lasagna Maste...

The Texas A&M Aggies played the South Carolina Gamecocks on Saturday, in what only a very few, who may not have witnessed it, are calling a "football game." It was more accurate to describe it as an assault on the senses, an exercise in how not to conduct yourself on a football field from both teams in each half.

https://youtu.be/7DcEb9bIf_U?si=bcr_OlN-nMG5Vzt-

The prefight of the year already has been fought. Conor Benn and Chris Eubank Jr. both made weight Friday in London for their Saturday night rematch at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. As the size of the venue hints, this is a massively anticipated event in England. The actual fight will have a hard time competing with its backstory. 

Backstories, rather. This thing’s got story lines for the ages. Among them: A rematch for the middleweight belt! Will Eubank's détente with his dad (and former trainer) hold through the final bell? These fighters just plain don’t like each other, but their fathers don’t like each other even more after their own set of legendary boughts in the 1990s! There's even an angle involving Neymar.

A game recap of Wednesday's 131-95 victory, published on Celtics.com and NBA.com, praised Boston's leading scorers Payton Pritchard and Derrick White, in that order. That led to an unfortunate headline, which Memphis Grizzlies beat writer Sharon Shy Brown captured in a timely screenshot on Thursday:

Hello and happy Friday! We're getting ready to wind things down for the week, so spend some time asking us questions in the comments section. See ya down there.

Ever since it was disclosed that financier Leon Black had paid Jeffrey Epstein over $150 million for tax and estate planning in 2014, six years after the latter pleaded guilty to child prostitution charges, I have been fascinated by the notion that the disgraced sex offender...

"The New York Jets" is hardly the phrase you begin a story with if you want to inspire a reader to embrace the day with any sense of purpose, let alone joy, so you might be fooled into considering this an apology for cowboy-sneezing on your Friday. But if you've read as far as "Friday," then seeing "The New York Jets" was insufficient deterrent. At that point, you knew the job was dangerous when you took it.

So, to the New York Jets: Thursday was a big day for them. They learned first that the boss is angry enough at his employees' opinions of their workplace that he is challenging their right to say anything about it at all. Later in the day, they lost comfortably to a team wearing the sort of all-gray uniform that belongs in a 1935 preseason game between Mudville and Boghouse Flats. The good news is that they, and therefore we, can take the weekend off.

There’s no wrong way to make a chocolate chip cookie. Let’s get that part out of the way so that we don’t get into a whole big fight about whose cuisine reigns supreme. You put a chocolate chip cookie in front of me, I’ll eat it and be happy. That’s a lock.

That said, I have been monkeying around with chocolate chip cookie recipes for as long as I’ve been a homemaker (nearly 20 years!). Many years ago, I stumbled upon a copycat recipe for Chick fil-A’s chocolate chunk cookies that received a glowing reception from all of the cookie monsters in my house. CFA makes a truly bitchin’ chocolate chipper, so knocking off their recipe as is satisfying for my belly as it is for my sense of justice.

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.

Israel: This week certainly made it clear that the playoff committee is mostly operating off of vibes instead of any concrete, verifiable assessment of who the best teams are. But it doesn’t really matter that much, because no one can tell you which of these teams are actually good anyway. As soon as you think you have a handle on the landscape, a ranked team will just go and do something stupid like almost blowing it against Iowa or actually blowing it against Wake Forest. Why should anyone be expected to go off anything other than vibes?

RICHMOND, Va. — The audience was booing Ira Glass. 

It was the opening session of Resonate, a podcast festival founded three years ago by Chioke I’Anson at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Institute for Contemporary Art. Audio documentarian Eleanor McDowall played a clip of the social media show Subway Takes, where Glass argues that “every podcast is better at 2.0 speed” because “your brain can take it in, you totally can get the information, and you can listen to more podcasts.” I’Anson grabbed the mic back after McDowall’s presentation and quipped: “Our lord and savior losing his damn mind.” 

The relationship between uncle and nephew is riven with questions of the human psyche. What does the nephew see when he looks at the uncle? The brother he never had, or another father to struggle against? What lessons must the uncle pass down to the nephew, and must he destr...

Nikola Jokic had another one of those what the hell is happening right now performances Wednesday night, against the unbelievably depressing Los Angeles Clippers, posting 55 points on 23 shots, plus 12 rebounds and six assists. Because there is never just one way to gawk at ...

Welcome back to The Not-So-Great Defector Bake Off, where Kelsey and Chris attempt to complete the technical challenges from the newest season of The Great British Bake Off in their own home kitchens, with the same time parameters as the professional-grade bakers competing on the show.

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Stefan Fatsis went 17 years between books, but you wouldn't say that he was taking it easy. He was on NPR and co-hosted Slate's Hang Up and Listen podcast for many years, and was writing big feature stories on a fairly regular cadence, but there was no new book until Unabridged, his excellent new history of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, American lexicography, and his experience while embedded with the dictionary's staff of lexicographers, came out last month. That it took nearly a month to get him on the podcast is a reflection of how busily he has been out there spreading the good word since that publication date. But we got him:

Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday at Defector during the NFL season. Got something you wanna contribute? Email the Roo. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it.

By now you know that the only thing that The New York Times does well in 2025 is games. Using both Wordle—which the company bought from indie game designer Josh Wardle in 2022—and their popular daily crossword puzzle as twin anchors, the Times has built a Games app that has boosted the company’s revenues to record levels. The Times’ process for developing games is as thoughtful and deliberate as its reporting is not. So when the NYT Games team launches a new puzzle, I can usually count on it to be a worthy addition to their portfolio.

Once every week or two, I swim molasses-slow laps at the YMCA. I’ve been on something of a fitness journey this year, testing out different forms of exercise to see what sticks—what feels the least torturous and humiliating as a fat person. Swimming appeals more than most ac...

After a brief foray into creatures big, flashy, and famous, we must return to form and focus on the spineless, creepy, and crawling. Today we're shining a spotlight on one of the most loathèd creepy-crawlers of all—the humble spider. You may fear them, what with their eight ...

It is that time of year when college basketball programs fatten themselves up on inferior competition, which makes for a lot of games that can be safely ignored. But wait, before you skim over the box score from Notre Dame's 85–58 victory over Akron on Wednesday night, take a look at what Hannah Hidalgo did.

Are you ready to receive information that could potentially cause psychic damage? Hidalgo finished the game with 44 points, nine rebounds, and 16 steals. Sixteen steals! Against Division-I college basketball players! In just 28 minutes of floor time!

“I know you want there to be a master plan,” the kidnapping victim says to her captor. In Bugonia, the latest movie by Yorgos Lanthimos, Emma Stone plays girlboss biotech CEO Michelle Fuller, and Jesse Plemons is Teddy Gatz, who works at a fulfillment center for Michelle’s A...

Democrats in the House Oversight Committee released on Wednesday a new batch of emails from Jeffrey Epstein, the deceased sex criminal who was notoriously in contact with all sorts of powerful people. By now it is well known that Donald Trump was connected to Epstein in many...

Regardless of whether they authored the most disastrous trade of the century, or considered Jrue Holiday and Nikola Jokic to be equal talents, a general manager getting fired 11 games into the season is pretty shocking. Sure, some coaches get the ax extremely early in the se...

Harry and I did not know that Nico Harrison was about to be fired when we invited famed blogger Ock Sportello back on Nothing But Respect this week, but the timing worked out perfectly, as our planned Brooklyn Nets vivisection (yes that is a threat) dovetailed with the Nico ...

The San Jose Sharks have been beneath your notice for years. As this formerly stalwart franchise has missed the playoffs in six straight seasons, they've existed as a total non-competitive nothing that makes every aspect of the game as easy as possible for their opponents. W...

Some NBA games are starting at 11:00 p.m. ET. This is a new development coinciding with the league striking a new broadcast deal with NBC, which aired Tuesday night's Nuggets–Kings game on the Peacock streaming app. I'm an adaptable person who generally accepts change cheerfully, but trying to watch last night's game made me feel like several media executives were spitting directly into my face.

I know NBA games never start at the advertised time, but it was still annoying to turn on the broadcast a few minutes before 11:00 p.m. and see a big "Countdown To Tipoff" graphic on the screen with 20 minutes on it. That's fine. I can read a book for a little bit.

We’re back, baby! And we’re kicking off our ninth season of Normal Gossip by gabbing it up with Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai! 

In this episode, Rachelle and Malala dig into such questions as whether it’s a good idea to let your college roommate plan a “dirt cheap” trip to Europe for you, whether hitchhiking is an important life experience, and whether comparing hand sizes always means you want to bone. 

Welcome back to Make It Nice, Defector's best interior design advice column. Today we have drill-less art hanging, an extremely deep closet, and a room with too many jobs.

Mario asks: