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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On Saturday, the chairman of the Republican Party in Michigan's Oakland County spent his afternoon directing his online followers' attention to local businesses that had not lowered their flags to half staff to honor the memory of the slain conservative podcaster Charlie Kir...

The Washington Post has fired opinion columnist Karen Attiah due to social media posts she made after the fatal shooting of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, according to Attiah's own Substack as well as an email, from Washington Post human resources staff, obtained by the newsletter Status.

Attiah had worked with the Post's Opinions department for 11 years. From 2016 to 2021, she was editor of the Global Opinions section; at the time of her firing, she was a columnist. In the wake of Kirk's death in Utah and a school shooting in Colorado that same day, she wrote a number of posts on Bluesky about gun culture and political violence in America.

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 sex, Tool, Jimmy Fallon, an abundance of Michaels, and more.

Your letters:

Welcome back to Make It Nice, Defector's best interior design advice column. Today, we have a tricky living room layout, an inexplicably round bathroom, and a starter guide on how to pick a backsplash tile.

David asks:

Who says Tom Brady can't have it all? On top of the conflict of interest that comes with being both a part-owner of the Las Vegas Raiders and a Fox commentator, and in between his duties as "guy who says fuck and denigrates Birmingham City, the soccer club he co-owns," Brady has now signed up to do some good old fashioned sportswashing. On Monday, Brady announced that he will return to the football field for the, ugh, Fanatics Flag Football Classic, a three-team tournament set to be held in March of 2025 in Saudi Arabia.

https://twitter.com/AdamSchefter/status/1967697981957706218

Welcome to Margin of Error, a politics column from Tom Scocca, editor of the Indignity newsletter.

Monday, on social media, President Donald Trump announced that he had murdered three people—"three male terrorists killed in action" was how he put it. By "terrorists," the president meant nothing more than that he claimed the three people were smuggling drugs; by "in action," he meant that they were traveling in a boat in the Caribbean when a U.S. military aircraft hunted them down and killed them.

Three years of painstaking roster-building by the Minnesota Vikings needed less than 24 hours to be blown apart. Go back to last week and Minnesota’s newly christened starting QB, J.J. McCarthy, appeared ready to fulfill his destiny as this franchise’s long-awaited savior after engineering a 21-point fourth quarter explosion in a comeback win at Soldier Field. A few days later, his fiancée gave birth to their first child, a boy. A few days after that, he made his formal debut at the Vikings home stadium on Sunday Night Football against the Falcons. The crowd was poised to detonate. Some Vikings fans had been waiting decades for this moment. Here’s what they got instead:

https://twitter.com/AtlantaFalcons/status/1967401276838211980

One strange reaction to the ongoing story of Kawhi Leonard's strange no-show contract with the bizarre and now-failed startup Aspiration and whether or not that represents salary cap circumvention has been bafflement that Pablo Torre, and not one of the more sourced-up NBA r...

QUEENS — My nephew is still learning how to watch the Mets, and it is with roughly equal amounts of pride and dismay that I can report he seems to be picking it up pretty well. It took years, and a decent number of previous trips to the ballpark that were in retrospect trans...

Sometimes you just have to tip your cap to the universe. Before Sunday afternoon, I did not think it metaphysically possible for the New York Liberty’s season to get more unpleasant than it has been for several injury-riddled months now. But a few minutes into overtime of Ne...

If Terence “Bud” Crawford wants to make his case as the greatest non-heavyweight in the history of boxing, he gave himself a helluva Exhibit A late Saturday night in Vegas: Crawford took Saul “Canelo” Alvarez’s soul while earning a unanimous decision win that gave him all of his title belts, too. Crawford remains undefeated and now holds the undisputed super middleweight championship, the only guy in the sport’s so-called “four belt era” to have ever so dominated three separate weight classes.

But after the hyper-anticipated showdown, fought before a packed stadium and a huge semi-non pay-per-view TV audience, comes a hangover for fight fans. Crawford, Canelo, and, hell, all of boxing face the same huge dilemma: What do we do now?  

Is Jérémy Doku's trademark shimmy the most unstoppable move in the Premier League today? With the Kevin De Bruyne Cutback now beheading daisies in Serie A, I'm hard-pressed to even come up with a local challenger to the Doku Wiggle. Doku's move was for me the star of the weekend, as the Belgian winger executed one of his most memorable, merciless, and effective shimmies to utterly flabbergast Luke Shaw and set up Phil Foden for the opening goal in Sunday's Manchester Derby. The match ended in a 3-0 City win, and stands as solid evidence both that United still has not yet hit rock bottom, and that Doku has not yet hit his talent's ceiling.

You will hopefully forgive me including a link to Twitter here, as I cannot resist showing you the following video, which allows you to really savor Doku's exquisite piece of skill in slo-mo glory:

The worst-managed Grand Tour in recent cycling history ended in a fittingly ramshackle manner on Sunday, with the final stage of the Vuelta a España canceled due to overwhelming anti-genocide protests and no official podium ceremony for the riders who had just destroyed their legs for three weeks. Instead Visma put together a makeshift podium composed of three coolers with numbers Sharpied onto them in front of an official Vuelta banner duct-taped to a van. In a Madrid hotel parking lot, a big bluetooth speaker pumped out "Eye Of The Tiger" as Visma's Jonas Vingegaard ascended the cooler, and the jersey winners doused each other in champagne.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DOmGywPDsCK/

I am always engaging in bouts of ill-advised optimism, and yet I, too, was gearing up to retread the same material about the Seattle Mariners that has dogged the team the past couple of years. Just 10 days ago, things were very grim. The Mariners had once again taken a 90-pe...

Bananas Foster describes itself as "the official non-profit of Banana Ball," the barnstorming baseball league that hosts the Savannah Bananas. Its mission, per executive director Jolie Chabala, is "celebrating the foster care community, while educating and inspiring others t...

They said it couldn't be done. They said Aaron Rodgers surely couldn't look as bereft of an inner life and the spark of humanity as he already does. Well, some truly awful technology has proven the doubters wrong.

During Sunday's broadcast of the Steelers' 31-17 loss to the Seahawks, Fox Sports aired an "AI Football Journey" that covered Rodgers's career, from draft day to his current gig in Pittsburgh. It will come as no surprise to anyone that it looked like shit and contained a couple of errors.

I love a good microcosm. It makes for efficient blogging, for one, and it's also helpful to have one play or drive to point to if anyone wonders How It's Going. Well, it's going badly, Steve! Fucking Steve. Fucking Giants.

For 60 minutes on Sunday against the Cowboys, Russell Wilson was awesome; the problem was overtime, where Dallas prevailed 40-37. The 36-year-old, signed mostly to be a steady short-term presence and mentor on a team that is still several years away, looked like the QB1 of old. He was really chucking it! On balls that traveled more than 20 yards in the air, Wilson was seven of 11 with three touchdowns, including a fourth-down precision strike to Wan'Dale Robinson with 2:44 left, and a 48-yard mortar to Malik Nabers with 25 seconds on the clock, both of which looked like they could be game-winners, and neither of which were.

This is our 100th Defector crossword! Don’t solve them all in one place. This week’s puzzle was constructed by Brian Keller, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. This is Brian’s sixth published puzzle, and for novice and advanced constructors, he recommends trying out Crosserville.

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.

The Detroit Lions blowing out the Chicago Bears and their rookie head coach in Week 2 is not the kind of result would normally be a big story, but Sunday's matchup was more than just an NFC North clash, and Ben Johnson is more than just a first-time head coach experiencing r...

The events outlined in the Netflix documentary Unknown Number: The High School Catfish are undoubtedly salacious. In October 2020, Lauryn Licari and her boyfriend Owen McKenny, two teenagers in the small town of Beale City, Mich., start receiving texts from a number neither ...

Last night or early this morning, depending on your timezone, we had ourselves a big boxing match. On Netflix, of all places. Canelo Alvarez vs Terence 'Bud' Crawford, a splashy marquee boxing matchup featuring two premier fighters. One in Crawford, who was punching above hi...

One of the great things about college football as an experience is that with only 12 games and what feels like 100 teams hoping to play for a championship, every game is loaded with the import of the entire world. When you place that burden on a bunch of 20-year-olds, and co...

The 2025 WNBA playoffs begin on Sunday. Here are some questions I’m asking about each team, paired by first-round matchup. If you, the person reading this, are not much of a reader, we also discussed a few of these questions on the most recent episode of Nothing But Respect.

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There’s a big prize fight this weekend. Well, as big a prize fight as can take place in 2025. Terence “Bud” Crawford and Saul “Canelo” Alvarez go at it Saturday night in Vegas with all the super middleweight belts at stake. Among the oodles of intriguing plot lines that make...

Arizona-based outlet PHNX Sports has fired its lead Phoenix Suns reporter Gerald Bourguet after he posted tweets critical of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, in the aftermath of Kirk's fatal shooting on Wednesday. PHNX Sports released a statement on Thursday, but did not specifically name Bourguet:

The opinions expressed by our employees do not represent the views of PHNX or ALLCITY Network. We take matters involving violence very seriously and are committed to ensuring that ALLCITY remains a safe place for our employees and community alike. We have addressed this matter with the individual and made the decision to part ways.

Certainly the dead tend to be thought of more fondly than they were in life. Still, it's quite disorienting to watch American institutions obediently line up to display the utmost solemnity for a bigot, whose career achievements were pushing for hatred and violence toward those he saw as inferior to him.

Charlie Kirk, 31, was fatally shot at an event Wednesday at Utah Valley University. At the moment of his killing, which was captured on multiple videos, he was about to debate a student about mass shootings in the United States. Authorities announced on Friday that they had apprehended a suspect, although the motive is still unclear.

News broke earlier this week that Lakeeta Vaccaro, the estranged wife of Tyreek Hill, said in court records that the Miami Dolphins receiver physically abused her during their marriage. The outlet to break the story, TMZ, reported that it had obtained a new document in the f...

With Defector turning five this week, we have been presented an opportunity to do two of our favorite things: Execute a really stupid bit and allow Ray Ratto to roast us. We have taken advantage of that opportunity with this post, in which Defector staffers have been forced to pick a gift made of wood that costs no more than $20 (it's our Wood Anniversary) to give the site. Each selection has been judged, Taskmaster style, by Ratto. Thanks for indulging us.

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Welcome to the Defector College Football Watch Guide, where Ray Ratto and Israel Daramola will tell you which of the weekend’s college football games are worth giving a crap about. Ray: Week 2 usually blows because of all the 62-7 and 77-3 scores that dot Mismatch Alley (di...