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...

There were no real expectations when we launched Defector, five years and one day ago. Plenty of planning went into what we would do with the site and how it would work, and many hours of committee meetings have followed in that vein, but that it arrived on Sept. 10, 2020 was a reflection of the fact that we were ready to do it, and that—you may recall what September of 2020 was like—we were both eager to get to work and didn't really have that much else going on at the time. History has vindicated the decision to get on with it, but in recording this week's episode of The Distraction, the lack of foresight was jarring. Did we really not think, in all those hours of discussion, about how this anniversary falling right after Week 1 of the 2025 NFL season would impact our fifth-anniversary podcast?

Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music I’ve been fixated on recently.

Last October, Young Thug's criminal racketeering trial concluded with the rapper striking a plea deal that got him released from prison. It brought a close to a contentious, high-profile case that could have seen him spend the rest of his life behind bars. Since then, Thug has been observing his probation terms while working on his hotly anticipated next album. A happy ending to a modern rap tragedy, right? Well, it certainly doesn't seem to feel that way for Thug, who is ... working through some complicated feelings.

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.

For roughly one hour, everything in Chicago was different. I saw it with my own eyes. I saw Caleb Williams start off his 2025 season, on Monday Night Football, looking every bit like the second coming of Patrick Mahomes that he was advertised to be. He completed his first 10 passes. He was so deft on his feet that Minnesota pass rushers could never get home. And he spread the wealth, completing passes to five different receivers on his first drive alone. That drive ended in a touchdown, with Williams winning a foot race to the pylon:

If you are human, you might believe that teeth belong in the mouth. If you are a fish, you already know better. You know that teeth belong in the skin too. These teeth are fittingly called dermal denticles: skin teeth. (Mouth teeth are just called teeth, a testament to how t...

Fernando Tatis Jr loves to do a little crime in right field. He is tall, and the wall out there in San Diego is so short, so how can he help it when the ball is so beautiful and so appealing and so available to be robbed? All season, he has been tracking the ball to the wall, leaping up, and snatching it just before it becomes a home run. He did this on Tuesday, too. At full speed, Tatis sprinted toward the wall, his hip slamming into the soft cushion of its padding, and stretched his long body up over the wall to grab the falling baseball. No home run for the Cincinnati Reds! The Padres had robbed another one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdnEYAllI5M

Charlie Kirk, a 31-year-old right-wing activist, was shot dead while speaking at an event at Utah Valley University on Wednesday. On the same day that yet another deadly school shooting took place in Colorado, the New York Yankees honored Kirk with a moment of silence before their game against the Detroit Tigers.

https://twitter.com/Yankees/status/1965913114450501983

There's a chill in the air, and it's at least half metaphorical. Before you know it, the NHL season will be here. For most fans this is a time of hope. For snakebitten fans of some of our most woebegone franchises, it is a sign to start panicking that their time with their b...

When did the Premier League season start? Some would say it started on Aug. 15, with reigning champion Liverpool's thrilling and emotional 4-2 win against Bournemouth. And yes, sure, if you want to be a nerd about it, the new league season technically did indeed begin with t...

The WNBA regular season ends tomorrow, three short days before the first round of the playoffs kicks off. Thankfully, this website employs the English language's best women's basketball writer, Maitreyi Anantharaman, so we had her back on Nothing But Respect to talk through each of the eight teams.

The format we loosely adhered to is designed to provide something for people at three distinct degrees of locked-innedness: those actively locking in, those locked in, and those locked way in. We then talked through who we thought would be the coolest possible winners of the five(!) plausible championship contenders, one of whom will be eliminated in the incredibly tantalizing four-five series. Oh, also, Harry addressed his recent anonymous comments in The Cut.

This month, there's one story on everybody's minds. I'm speaking, of course, about the Iberian harvester ant queens who can clone ants of an entirely different species to breed a subaltern army of hybrid ants whose only purpose is to serve them. If you, too, have been transfixed by their story and are eager to learn more about these ants' whole sick deal, you've come to the right place.

Who are these ants?

Five years is a long time to exist. Let's take a moment to remember some things Defector has outlived: Quibi Tony Bennett Corporate DEI initiatives Henry Kissinger Investment in mRNA vaccines WTF with Marc Maron The second XFL The Biden administra...

In celebration of Defector's fifth birthday, a bunch of staffers have selected their favorite Defector blogs. If you're only just now becoming familiar with the site, consider this something like a non-exhaustive syllabus that will get you up to speed. If you've been reading for a while, feel free to share your own selection in the comments.

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Tom Ley is making me write this. He doesn't give direct orders often, but as it is Defector's birthday, and a lot of staffers are traveling in order to be at tonight's big birthday shindig, we're a little light on the blog budget today. So he told me to blog my beloved Yanke...

Defector has officially been publishing blogs for five years. Allow me to regale you with some of our accomplishments: As I sit here now and think about what it means to make it to our fifth birthday, I’m struck by how perfunctory it all feels. That’s not to say that I don’t feel immense pride…

After organizers cut short Stage 11 of the Vuelta a España to avoid mass protests at the finish line in Bilbao, they were faced with a choice: protect their race or protect Israel–Premier Tech. Protestors made clear both their disgust over the Israeli team's participation in...

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 Costco, Oasis, the VMAs, biscuits, and more.

Your letters:

Where there's smoke, there tends to be a fired manager, and so it was no surprise that Nottingham Forest announced on Monday that it had parted ways with Nuno Espírito Santo. Following Forest's 3-0 drubbing at West Ham on Aug. 31, ahead of the first international break of the season, the club decided to sack the manager who led last season's stunning success. Of course, as avid readers of Defector might already know, the on-field results were secondary to Nuno's fate, and it was really his public feud with both owner Evangelos Marinakis and Global Head of Football Edu that sealed it.

https://twitter.com/NFFC/status/1965192185084526629

There’s a dilemma near the end of Iron Duke. The titular character in sportswriter John R. Tunis’s 1938 novel has to decide whether to run in the season-ending intercollegiate track meet; all of Harvard is consumed by his decision, and the Crimson student newspaper writes an editorial. Tunis, perhaps inserting himself into the text just a bit, gives a summary:

Then the Crimson appeared with an editorial on the subject. It was a real Crimson editorial in which for the first hundred words the writer explained the duty which the Duke owed to the coach and the team, and in the next hundred explained that Harvard was a place where a man did as he chose, and then ended with a couple of hundred words completely befuddling the reader who might wonder just where the Crimson stood in the matter.

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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The Chicago Sky are a bad team with dim prospects and a lot of work to do to contend for WNBA championships again. Their biggest star, Angel Reese, implied as much in a recent interview with the Chicago Tribune where she reflected on the team’s second straight seas...

Men’s tennis is just Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz hurtling toward one another, with loud and incandescent results. Since Sinner returned to the tour in May after a three-month suspension, the rivals have entered the same tournament five times. In all five instances, they...

There is an easy answer to the question "How long does it take to write a book?" but it is not a true one. The easy answer is the duration between when you actually start putting your pen down on the first draft and when the book is finished. Maybe that's two or three years. Maybe it's 10. But the true answer is that it takes a lifetime to write a book.

Like creative art of any kind, the work is an accumulation of experiences. A book is not just words in a random order. It is made up of all the smells and sounds and emotions and people you've ever encountered. At their best, books provide a snapshot of what a person's life looked like for a specific period of time, or at least how they felt. My most recent book, for example, has everything I read and thought and dreamed about for at least half a decade in it.

Say you're a fully-grown adult who has decided to learn to ride a bike. Inevitably there will be a moment where you're standing there in your helmet and pads while other adults capably zoom past you on their bikes and you think, "Why am I doing this?"

But then, maybe the possibility enters your mind: though your overprotective parents forbade you from learning to ride bikes back in elementary school, who is to say you don't possess some latent, prodigious bike-riding abilities that need only an opportunity to express themselves? What are the chances that you're actually the world's most gifted cyclist who has been hidden away unjustly? That possibility buoys you enough to swing your leg over the saddle and make one pedal stroke.

You'd think after getting blasted by TCU in primetime in Week 1 and struggling to put away Charlotte in Week 2, UNC coach Bill Belichick might show a little humility. But not our ol' Billy Badass! Though his teams in recent years have struggled to grind out wins, he personally is still elite at grinding axes, even if it comes at the expense of the people he's supposed to be helping.

Last week, a story came out that Belichick had banned scouts for the New England Patriots from UNC facilities. The man himself was more than happy to confirm this story after his team's win on Saturday. "It's obvious I'm not welcome at their facility," Belichick told reporters, "so they're not welcome at ours."

Melvyn Bragg, host of the BBC Radio 4 programme In Our Time since its very first episode back in 1998, has greeted me in the same delightfully brusque manner hundreds and hundreds of times: Hello. In 1911 the Dutch physicist Haika Kameling-Honors made a remarkable discover...

Jerry Jones's inability to extend Micah Parsons's contract looks like a boon for all of the 538,967 Packer "owners" out there. After an uncertain holdout-shaped summer for the dominant edge rusher and pillar of an otherwise defective Dallas defense, Jones opted to resolve th...

When Aryna Sabalenka dropped the first set of her U.S. Open semifinal against Jessica Pegula, a premature thought struck me: Would this be the greatest tennis season ever without a major title? Sabalenka held down the No. 1 ranking for the whole year thus far. She played 14 ...

Don't back down from the Monday crossword. This week’s puzzle was constructed by Hope Allchin and Matthew Stock, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Hope and Matthew are graduate students at the best institution in the SEC. They love spending time outside, attending volleyball games and gymnastics meets, and encouraging a friendship between their cat and two-month-old baby. Matthew has published hundreds of puzzles; this is Hope's first.

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.

An NFL Sunday has a way of ruining your shit, then putting it back together. Oftentimes you will spend your afternoon watching something that barely looks like football—the Dolphins, or the Giants, say—and it makes you consider a mission trip to North Sentinel Island just so...