FeedCity: Defector

Defector
30 Oct 14:54 • Chris Thompson

The Blue Jays Make The Dodgers Look Fake And Silly

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 ...

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30 Oct 14:54 • Patrick Redford

Beloved Grandmaster Dies Suddenly Amid Harassment Campaign By His Former Idol

On Oct. 19, American chess grandmaster Daniel Naroditsky was found dead in his Charlotte, NC home. He was a few weeks shy of his 30th birthday, and his death, which police say is being investigated as a possible overdose or suicide, has rocked the chess world. The U.S. Chess...

Defector
29 Oct 18:54 • Sabrina Imbler

Why Do Some Spiders Make Web Art?

Spiders are famous aesthetes. Many craft radially symmetric webs, first extruding long silken spokes and then spinning spiraling strands to snag prey. In the mornings, the intricately laid silk sparkles with dew drops. Your average, generic spiderweb spun by the most run-of-...

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29 Oct 18:13 • Diana Moskovitz

The Rise Of Jordon Hudson, Small Business Owner

Before he was stumbling over interview questions on national TV, before he was the guy who made North Carolina football worse, before you could bet on when he might be fired, Bill Belichick was one of the most respected men in football. It may feel like a lifetime ago, but s...

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29 Oct 17:54 • Lauren Theisen

Vladimir Guerrero Jr. Is A Canadian Hero

A superstar slugger cannot be relied on like the take-over-a-game greats in other sports. You can't get him the ball again and again. You can't give him more minutes at the expense of the end of the bench. He needs other guys before and after him in the order to make his con...

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29 Oct 17:18 • Tom Ley

Good Thing Nobody In Charge Of A Newspaper Wanted To Make Olivia Reingold A Video Star

Every day brings with it the same threat: the possibility of learning something new about Free Press reporter Olivia Reingold.

The author of an historically malevolent piece of journalism has not been shy about using social media to let us all know how none of her friends like her anymore, on account of all the genocide denial she considers to be her day job. Now she's using it for a different purpose, and that is revealing to the world that she does not understand how to tell, or possibly even recognize, a joke.

Defector
29 Oct 16:00 • Chris Thompson

The Not-So-Great Defector Bake Off Rages Against Dessert Week

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.

Defector
29 Oct 14:33 • Patrick Redford

The NBA’s Rookie Class Is Getting Straight To Work

The best part of the first week of the NBA season is seeing preconceptions built up over a summer spent consuming season previews shattered by the hard reality of basketball games. Heading into this season, one such widely shared preconception was that the Rookie of the Year...

Defector
29 Oct 13:42 • Kathryn Xu

They Can’t All Be The Most Memorable World Series Game Ever

There is a somewhat prevalent belief among fans that baseball should be boring. That is, baseball is a sport best suited for the interminable regular season grind of 162 games, and is best viewed at noon with a beer in hand, not in discrete odd-numbered series. Even though d...

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28 Oct 19:18 • Sabrina Imbler

Fat AND Sassy? A Three-Legged Lizard Really Can Have It All

Decades ago, the evolutionary biologist Jonathan Losos found himself chasing a lizard around an island in the Bahamas. The island was little more than mound of craggy limestone the size of a baseball diamond, and Losos, an evolutionary biologist at Washington University in S...

Defector
28 Oct 19:18 • Drew Magary

What’s The Weirdest Thing You Ever Received While Trick-Or-Treating?

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 recliners, wallets, frozen buttplugs, and more.

Your letters:

Defector
28 Oct 18:01 • Kathryn Xu

Every Dodgers Almost-Homer In Extra Innings, Ranked

It started as it would end, with Freddie Freeman, and then it just kept happening: Dodger after Dodger in extra innings would smoke a potential walk-off home run off of Toronto Blue Jays near-hero Eric Lauer, almost directly to center field, the stadium would roar, and then ...

Defector
28 Oct 17:33 • Patrick Redford

Everything Is Gambling Now, With Liz Franczak

The first week of the NBA season has been overstuffed with huge news stories that call into question the legitimacy of what we are being shown on the floor—namely, Jaylen Brown's spray-on hair situation. Also, the second night of NBA hoops was followed by the arrest of a cur...

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28 Oct 16:33 • Nicholas Russell

Erin Somers On The State Of Literary Fiction, Hudson Valley Life, And Reviving The Infidelity Novel

In recent years, the literary marriage novel has taken a backseat to the literary divorce novel, the novel of interpersonal discontent and cynicism, with forms like autofiction sometimes used as a means of gaining distance from or interrogating the project of heterosexual co...

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28 Oct 16:00 • Owen Lewis

Felix Auger-Aliassime Is Once Again Threatening To Turn The Corner

Before Wimbledon in 2019, I remember skimming over the list of men’s favorites at a number of sites. Novak Djokovic, Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal … Felix Auger-Aliassime? He was 18 years old at the time and ranked 21st in the world, but no worse than the sixth-favorite anywhe...

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28 Oct 15:06 • Lauren Theisen

The Blue Jays Won’t Let Shohei Ohtani Do That Again

Shohei Ohtani's pennant-clinching game against the Brewers was the greatest baseball performance of all time, and during Game 3 of the World Series, it wasn't hard to talk yourself into the idea that you could be witnessing No. 2. Ohtani smashed the record for most times on ...

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28 Oct 09:18 • Ray Ratto

If You Went To Sleep, Sorry But You Are Not Forgiven

I think we can all agree we got cheated last night, and to be technical about it, it was still last night—at least on the West Coast where the nice people live—when Freddie Freeman hit the 609th pitch of Game 3 of the 2025 World Series into the darkness beyond...

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27 Oct 19:57 • David Roth

Terry Bradshaw: A Man I Believed To Be Andy Reid Recently Tried To Sell Me Pigs

There has always been a strong note of pranking to Terry Bradshaw's work as a NFL studio analyst at Fox. Bradshaw's role is mostly that of a Vibes Guy, the most off-kilter and least self-serious participant in a show that is mostly some guys in suits going "haw haw haw" and ...

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27 Oct 19:57 • Israel Daramola

Be Careful, Indiana, You’re The Hottest Team In Football

Curt Cignetti has not just turned around the fortunes of the Indiana University football program, he's made them into a juggernaut. A team that is not only winning games, is not only expected to win games, but is expected to dominate games. After crushing a UCLA team that wa...

Defector
27 Oct 19:41 • Patrick Redford

The NBA Media Is Not Built To Cover A Gambling Scandal

Hours after the FBI arrested Terry Rozier and Chauncey Billups, and published a pair of indictments detailing the former's alleged involvement in a cooked prop-bet unders scheme and the latter's alleged involvement in a rigged mafia poker game, the sports-watching public tur...

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27 Oct 19:18 • Giri Nathan

Jaylen Brown’s Really Leaving His Mark On Opponents

Carlos Boozer's twin sons are top prospects for the 2026 NBA draft, but he may have yet another legacy in the league: artificial hair. It would appear that Boston Celtics star Jaylen Brown is carrying on the tradition. Over the weekend, Brown had two incidents in which some kind of dark residue on his head, possibly applied to simulate a hairline, appeared to smear onto the clothing of opposing players.

The first of these incidents occurred in the third quarter of Friday's game against the New York Knicks. (His hairline was looking rather painterly in this pregame photo posted that day.) With Knicks wing OG Anunoby guarding him, Brown hit a ball fake and nuzzled his forehead against his defender's torso. You can see the smudge occur in real time.

Defector
27 Oct 18:48 • Luis Paez-Pumar

Alright, What The Damn Hell Is Going On With Liverpool?

Even though Liverpool opened this Premier League season with five straight wins, the cracks in the defending champion's armor were clear for all to see. Sure, as a fan, it was fun to watch the Pool Boys pull off miracle after miracle, and in my most biased moments, I thought...

Defector
27 Oct 18:27 • Kathryn Xu

The Championship Lead Seizes Lando Norris

It is only fitting that Lando Norris would reclaim the championship lead for the first time since April in a controversial, penalty-forward mess of a race in which he was barely involved. This is Formula 1, after all. It's always litigation season. From the very start of th...

Defector
27 Oct 18:12 • Vikram Murthi

Jafar Panahi Returns With The Masterful Revenge Drama ‘It Was Just An Accident’

The sole child in Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident knows right from wrong. In the film’s first scene, a young girl is introduced bopping up and down in the backseat of a car, to the beat of a repetitive dance number all but designed to annoy tired moms and dads everywh...

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27 Oct 16:06 • Ray Ratto

The Coaching Hot Seat Is Now An Ejector Seat

The latest crisis in college football—there's one every week, because crises are oddly good for business—is one of scarcity. With more money in the hands of boosters whose identity revolves around spending it and fewer rules binding those glad hands, every weekend is no...

Defector
27 Oct 16:00 • Tom Ley

Those Steelers Uniforms Looked Like Shit

The Pittsburgh Steelers lost to the Green Bay Packers on Sunday night, and they looked like crap the whole time.

Calvin Austin — Joe Sargent/Getty Images

Defector
27 Oct 15:16 • Maitreyi Anantharaman

The Crossword, Oct. 27: I’ve Seen This One (Themeless)

It's time to wrap up the month with a challenging themeless. Keep an eye out for tricky clues and fun wordplay. This puzzle was constructed by Will Eisenberg and Brian Callahan, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Will is a French horn player, music teacher, and puzzlemaker in the T...

Defector
27 Oct 13:36 • Lauren Theisen

Green Bay Packers Show Immunity To Aaron Rodgers

It would have made for a more dramatic scene if it happened at Lambeau Field, but nevertheless, plenty of folks in Packer jerseys showed up to the stadium on the North Shore in Pittsburgh to watch Aaron Rodgers—suiting up for the team he beat in Super Bowl XLV—take on the Gr...

Defector
26 Oct 20:34 • Albert Burneko

Get A Job, Asshole

The East Wing of the White House is gone; Donald Trump had it bulldozed last week to make room for an inevitably gaudy, oversized, uglier-than-hell ballroom in his signature "what a 12-year-old thinks New Classical architecture looks like" style. I will be honest with you: I...

Defector
26 Oct 20:34 • Chris Thompson

Nico Harrison, Mavericks Fans, And Rooting Against Your Guys

At Defector, in our staff Slack, we have a slogan: Root For Your Guys (RFYG). It's an ethic, and also very often an exhortation. As an upstanding sports fan, your only true calling is to root for those guys down there, wearing your team's colors. However much grumping you mi...