For three decades now, the director Kelly Reichardt has been making films about American escape artists: drifters and dreamers, rough sleepers and revolutionaries, full-of-it swindlers and disillusioned soldiers, plus more than a few ostensibly honest people caught up in the...

La Liga’s recent announcement that it was abandoning its long-in-the-works plan to hold a regular season match between Villarreal and Barcelona in Miami this December seemed to represent a victory of common sense over greed. The brainchild of league president Javier Tebas an...

At its heart, American conservatism is a fantasy. It's a vision of a world too evil to be saved or cared about, and fearsome enough to justify any and every impulse toward cruelty and violence that a person might have. A world resolutely unworthy of knowing, except as a dang...

This World Series ended the only way it could, which was frenzied and late. The clocks turned back just a few hours after that; the next day was in another season, shorter and darker. The day after that, basically every MLB player eligible to do so, with all due respect to T...

The New Orleans Pelicans are 0-6 to start the season. Of those six losses, three have been by at least 30 points. No team in NBA history has accumulated three 30-point losses this early in a season.

The Pelicans rank 27th in offensive rating and 29th in defensive rating. They are playing "an unserious brand of basketball," longtime Pelicans reporter Will Guillory decreed Sunday evening. The players "seem to have given up on" head coach Willie Green, per Rod Walker at NOLA.com, who wondered if the coach's time was up. Green, the coach since 2021 and a holdover from a previous front-office regime, nevertheless kept his job during the offseason, which would have been the most natural time to replace him.

One of the underrated aspects of the last few years of Miami football is that, with the decline of UF and Florida State, the Hurricanes have in-state recruiting locked down. For the most part, this has paid dividends. Miami regularly boasts a slew of first-round NFL talent o...

Eleven years ago, when I was a college sophomore in Ann Arbor, Michigan, I made an impromptu drive to Detroit with four friends for the express purpose of seeing Max Scherzer. It was his final home start as a Tiger, and while I'd be lying if I said I remembered much of the g...

So after nine weeks of the NFL season, give or take a shared and very valid dread at the condemned warehouse that is the Cowboys-Cardinals Monday night matchup, we can all agree that the only thing we can all agree on is that Dan Quinn really filled his trousers by not takin...

Manchester City has five players who have scored exactly one goal this Premier League season: Matheus Nunes, Phil Foden, Rayan Cherki, Tijjani Reijnders, and Nico O'Reilly. That makes for a five-way tie for third-most goals for the club, behind Burnley's Maxime Estève, whose...

Imagine you muster up the courage to finally do that thing you've been meaning to do. It's hard enough to overcome your own momentum to get out of the house, but once you've made the leap you might be confronted by the reality of a thousand unspoken rules and norms you never considered. One of the most stressful parts of trying anything new is the unspoken world of context and rules that people seem to just know.

When Josh Gondelman told me he wanted to play pickup basketball for his episode, I was fixated on the unspoken norms that underpin the idea. I have never played in a pickup basketball game, and I don't really have any desire to start now. But how the hell does someone learn what "first to 11 by ones and twos, call your fouls" means?

This puzzle was constructed by Hannah Binney, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Hannah is a crossword constructor living in Cambridge, Mass. She began constructing in 2020, and she has had puzzles appear in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Universal, AVCX, and Puzzmo. When not constructing crosswords, Hannah is a particle physicist.  She has an orange cat named Julius.

Defector crosswords, launched in partnership with our friends at AVCX, run every Monday. If you’re interested in submitting a puzzle to us, you can read our guidelines HERE. Note that we're pausing open submissions until Dec. 1.

There is only one possible silver lining to facing down a 31-point deficit in the fourth quarter of a football game, and that is the opportunity to get your young, recently injured, franchise quarterback off the field before anything bad can happen to him. Washington Command...

Baseball makes you feel bad. I don't mean that in a literate sense ripping off Bart Giamatti's lede, the sense of dreading a sullen winter spent longing for the sensory pleasures of the game. I mean that baseball at its best, when the beats are on rhythm and when the high no...

You can take your World Series and push it up your tush. The NFL delivers excitement similar to that of the high stakes, edge-of-your-seat extra inning baseball the Blue Jays and Dodgers gave us last week. But to see the heroics of Shohei Ohtani or Yoshinobu Yamamoto or even...

We were worried for a few moments that the athletic directors/state governors/rich swine who run college football would forget about their seven-week streak of coach firings, but that is a personal failure of faith in the power of administrative bloodlust. They know what mus...

The Toronto Blue Jays sent 57 batsmen to the plate in the 25 hours between Yoshinobu Yamamoto's last pitch of Game 6 of the World Series and his first pitch of Game 7, so it isn't like they didn't have plenty of chances to avert the doom that was ultimately theirs. Indeed, t...

This thoroughly excellent World Series will go seven games because it needs to go seven games. Not "needs to" in the wishful sense employed by my colleague Ray Ratto, the inveterate maximum-sports-wanter—who, by the grace of the blog gods will be in this chair to write the g...

We followed the Owl Whisperer around the gun battery toward a grove of pitch pines, where he had seen the saw-whet owl. Then I heard someone ask behind me, “Where are they going?”

I turned around and saw a couple I had met earlier. My heart sank. I had learned that they were getting into birding and that we lived in the same neighborhood. I wanted to tell them. I really did. I knew how exciting this could be for them. But there was an owl code in New York.

Hear me out: Evan Bouchard is the Oilers' most important player. This does not mean they'd suffer the most if he were removed from the equation; their pair of all-universe forwards obviously qualify there. It also does not mean he's a constant shortcoming holding the team ba...

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: Good news for SEC teams across the land: The next coach at LSU is almost certainly going...

You might think of Werner Herzog’s new book, The Future of Truth, as the story of two animals. 

On the front cover, you see the silhouette of a lone penguin, somewhere in the middle distance, setting off from icy tundra to the mountains. While never made explicit in the text, this image is an obvious reference to a memorable vignette from Herzog's 2007 documentary Encounters at the End of the World. While speaking to a penguin scientist, Dr. Engli, Herzog inquires about the possibility of "insanity in penguins."

It is a truism, but it is also actually true that you should be careful what you ask for. Distraction episodes are typically right around an hour, and almost always on the short side of the 60-minute mark, and commenters and correspondents have in the past groused that they sometimes can seem to end somewhat abruptly. I'd argue that they always begin much more abruptly, but it is just how we do it. This week's episode, though, despite being a just-the-two-of-us affair, is not like that. It ends normally, and something like 15 minutes later than usual. And a great deal of those 15 minutes are about politics. Is this what you wanted? Are you happy with this?

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.

I have to start with Bill Belichick. I promise I won’t linger on that washed up piece of driftwood for very long, but he serves as a useful, if minor, example. Here is Bill Belichick’s official website. It’s a terrible website. The design is so old that I half expected a pop-up alert telling me that I needed to download Flash. And the copy is so weak (example: "In 2000, Belichick led the Patriots to 20 winning seasons") that Belichick’s weird-ass girlfriend probably wrote it herself.

Last year, Defector’s operations geniuses submitted our annual Tip Jar drives for consideration in the Online Journalism Awards category of “Innovation in Revenue Strategy” for mid-size newsrooms. We did not win. The award instead went to the Kyiv Independent for “building a sustainable media business during war.” While we maintain that “sending David Roth to…

Here we go again. Serie A featured last season's best sprint to the finish, with a tight title race, an intense melee for the European spots, and a five-team relegation scrap. Napoli emerged as champions, Juventus snagged the last Champions League spot, and Empoli and Venezi...

To paraphrase the late, great Prodigy, there are wars going on outside no one is safe from. They are cultural, political, racial, class-based, and literal. It’s increasingly difficult to shake the feeling that across multiple fronts, I’m on the losing team. It is equally difficult not to be overcome by the anxiety that these battles might be marching through my neighborhood and up to my front door any day now.

In an effort to preserve my sanity, I made the decision “unplug” a couple weeks back—no news, no social media updates of egregious political dereliction and moral turpitude. My best friend since age 13 visited from Hawaii for my birthday, and we set about immersing ourselves in art. We started with a trip to the Carnegie Museum of Art on Saturday morning, where we were immediately greeted by white banners hanging ceiling to floor, one of which declared:

The freshwater flatworm Stenostomum brevipharyngium is, by all accounts, a simple fellow. The worm is small and entirely soft. It has no eyes, only sensory pits that control balance and orientation. This simplicity makes it easy for S. brevipharyngium to make more of itself ...

The last time the lasting historical footprint of a World Series was left by the losing team was the night of Carlton Fisk's waved-in homer in Game 6 of the 1975 series. The one before that came when the Chicago White Sox tanked the series for the sake of gamblers ...

All couples in love are alike; each shattered couple, however, has been shattered in its own way. When you fall in love with someone, your friends tolerate you talking about them and fawning over them. But when someone fucks you over—when they break your heart—we want the de...

Wednesday night in Los Angeles it was finally the Blue Jays' turn to benefit from a historic performance. They'd lost Game 2 of this World Series to an unhittable Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who put together nine innings of dominance the likes of which, by at least one measure, had ...