Following his team's loss to the Boston Red Sox on Wednesday, Toronto Blue Jays manager John Schneider engaged in a bit of cope. "It feels like the sky is falling right now, and it’s fucking not," said an animated Schneider. "We’ve got 90 wins, we’re in the playoffs and if t...

Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music I’ve been fixated on recently. Let's talk about Bars, son. What is the state of Bars in 2025? Do they still exist? Do they matter? Jay Electronica certainly believes so: He has descended from the mounta...

The Phillies did not send their best lineup out there on Wednesday night. They needed just one win or one Dodgers loss to wrap up a playoff bye, and there were five games left in the season. It was going to happen; they did not really seem to be in a rush. Similarly, the top...

Remember Modell’s? C’mon, it wasn’t that long ago. If you are a Defector reader from the Northeast United States, you absolutely have some sort of weird attachment to this mediocre but very vigorously advertised sporting goods chain that went out of business in 2020. You rem...

E.Y. Zhao's Underspin is a novel about a table tennis prodigy, Ryan Lo. The book opens with his funeral. From there, it's a beautiful story, told obliquely through the perspectives of people who knew Ryan at different phases of his brief life. He is the charismatic void at i...

At 12:01 a.m. on July 1, Cal Raleigh had 33 home runs, 71 RBIs, a 1.036 OPS, the coolest nickname in baseball (The Big Dumper, in case you needed reminding), and played for a team four games over .500 and farthest from the sport's media center. At that same moment, Aaron Jud...

Roughly halfway through HIM, our protagonist—the promising quarterback Cameron Cade—is instructed by a sinister doctor to spend a few hours recovering in a hyperbaric chamber. The camera shows a pressure gauge inching along clockwise, when an iPhone notification sound dings ...

It was the fourth quarter of a playoff game, so you knew the clutch and mildly infuriating Alyssa Thomas floater was coming eventually. But that shot still only made it a 77-76 game; the Phoenix Mercury would need a little more to complete their Game 2 comeback Tue...

Chicago Cubs infielder Matt Shaw missed his team's 1–0 loss Sunday in Cincinnati. The win completed a sweep for the Reds, presently a distant eight games behind Chicago for second place in the NL Central and clinging to the back of the wild-card contenders. The Cubs already ...

The New York Liberty announced on Tuesday that the team would not be renewing head coach Sandy Brondello's contract, days after the defending champions lost a competitive first-round playoff series to the Phoenix Mercury. Brondello is the winningest coach in Liberty history,...

Defector is ashamed to introduce a new feature we're calling Sports Yorkie Showdown. In the first and realistically last installment of this series, we're going to take two sports-affiliated Yorkies we saw this week on Instagram and pit them against each other, metaphorically. Which athletically associated animal will come out on top? Let's meet today's contenders:

In the red corner, we have Prince, who belongs to Isabelle Harrison of the New York Liberty. Recently photographed by Harrison's girlfriend and teammate, Natasha Cloud, on a Central Park outing after the Liberty's season came to an end, this minuscule menace seems to love attention and hate baths.

The last few years have seen the revival of many dormant musical acts. Oasis is well over halfway through a reunion tour that, for decades, had been the stuff of rumor. Radiohead is set to go on the road after nearly a decade of solo projects. Rilo Kiley kicked off their fir...

Forget everything else, if you can. Forget about the Detroit Tigers' ongoing historic collapse, turning a double-digit lead in the division into a measly one game. Forget about the Cleveland Guardians' crazy surge to make it a race. Just take the moment on its own: sixth inn...

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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Oklahoma State has announced that head football coach Mike Gundy has been relieved of his duties, bringing an end to a 20-year run at the school. The Cowboys have not had a winning season since 2022, but the final straw seems to have come after last Friday's embarrassing los...

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 football, B-movies, peanut butter, and more.

Your letters:

The Canadian Football League had always been fond of its quaint approach to the sport—adding 10 yards to the field here, shaving off a down there, putting 12 players on the field instead of 11 because you can never have too many wideouts, having cavernous end zones and ways ...

Joe Flacco is 40 years old. His beard is graying. He lives in a top-five Philadelphia suburb in New Jersey and has five kids. He is still just eight years removed from being named the most attractive player in the NFL, a prize that has to be just as good as his Super Bowl MV...

Kneejerk America, a phrase that is a redundancy in entirely too many instances, will view the entrails of the Lions-Ravens Monday Night Football match-up and render a swift judgment—that Detroit is pure movie magic, with cutting-edge special effects and a popping script, whereas Baltimore is a black-and-white movie with stiff dialogue that just looks cheesier with age.

That is, of course, simplistic and bordering on nonsensical; a fine straw man that can be blown over with a healthy wind, if we do say so ourselves. You’re welcome for that.

If America is starting to feel a bit early days of Nazi Germany, then I’d say my native Britain is taking on the distinct feel of Austria before the Anschluss. Last year, the Labour party, led by Sir Keir Starmer, were elected into government with a massive parliamentary maj...

Since the website's inception, one of Defector's core beats has been the warped dynamics of stadium construction. Perhaps no other genre of story collects and unites so many distinct strains of malfeasance, among them civic corruption, billionaire excess, and the ongoing pri...

There's good news in Bruce Pearl's retirement as head basketball coach at Auburn, which is that he says he will not run for public office. The bad news is that Bruce Pearl says a lot of things, and does not have a history of trustworthiness. The good news is he didn't have t...

The scariest thing about playing the Minnesota Lynx is not that you don’t stand a chance, which, to be clear, you probably don’t. It’s that for a quarter or two or however long they want, the Lynx will let you feel like you do. Their 82-69 win over Phoenix in Game 1 of the b...

Wake up, sheeple! It's the end of the world. Everyone's saying it. And by everyone I mean a gazillion conservative content creators who made TikToks this past weekend warning everyone to be awake and aware because the Rapture will be happening either Sept. 23 or Sept. 24!

I, Defector's resident ex-evangelical, am reluctantly here to answer all of your most pressing Rapture questions.

Many men of faith struggle with the silence of God. That absence forces the faithful to look for the signs and wonders that act as His guideposts as they seek to fulfill His desires. Many wind up filling that void with their own noise and bluster, mistaking the echo of their...

Formula 1 is a zero-sum game. With only 20 spots on the grid, 10 spots in the points, and three spots on the podium, anyone's rise is necessarily accompanied by another's fall. Likewise, on the level of an individual race, only razor-thin margins separate a rise from a fall....

When you're scrapping for a playoff spot in your last regular-season home game, it's particularly humiliating to lose because of the No. 9 hitter on a last-place team. But if it's a tiny consolation for the New York Mets, Washington's Jacob Young is a very special No. 9 hitt...

At some point when she was growing up, Ceara Jane O'Sullivan created this whole mythology about Girls Who Can Cartwheel: they're organized, they're determined, they follow through, and they're brave. These are not things Ceara thinks about herself, and, coincidentally, she also cannot do a cartwheel.

You see how this becomes a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, right?

Bernie Parent was already a Flyers legend when he retired from the NHL in 1979. It's the rest of his life made him a Philadelphia legend.

The Hall of Fame goaltender, who won consecutive Stanley Cups with the Flyers in 1974 and '75, died Sunday at age 80. The Montreal native spent a decade with the Flyers, then stuck around the Philadelphia area for the rest of his life; he was a ubiquitous presence at Flyers events, on local TV, at charity auctions, down the shore, et cetera. Shoot a hockey puck anywhere in the Philadelphia area over the last 45 years and you might’ve hit Bernie Parent.

This should come as little surprise to those who have studied the broader American condition, but we often hate the very things that we should find most comforting and beneficial. No, we are not discussing vegetables. Those are objectively wrong no matter how they are prepar...