FeedCity: Defector

Defector
29 Jun 17:00 • Lauren Theisen

The Sharks Just Got A Lot Better, And Larger

The NHL draft was this weekend, and even though we had several weeks to get used to the image of Gavin McKenna in a Toronto Maple Leafs hat, the action in the rest of the top 10 was a good mix of unpredictable and intriguing. The Canucks, at No. 3, committed what has the pot...

Defector
29 Jun 17:00 • Chris Thompson

Malik Beasley Charged With Bribery, Money Laundering, And Wire Fraud In Alleged Prop-Bet Scheme

Malik Beasley has been indicted by federal prosecutors, on charges related to suspicious gambling activity. According to earlier reporting, authorities began looking at Beasley last summer after at least one U.S. sports book noted unusual betting interest on Beasley's statis...

Defector
29 Jun 17:00 • Barry Petchesky

The Yankees Had A Wretched Weekend In Boston

The Dog Days of summer in the Northern Hemisphere don't officially begin until the rising of Sirius, the "dog star." This is usually mid-to-late July, and we can thank the Greeks for the canid construction. "On summer nights, star of stars, Orion's Dog they call it," Homer r...

Defector
29 Jun 17:00 • Maitreyi Anantharaman

The Crossword, June 29: Cooler Heads (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 August Miller, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. August is a vegetable and dairy farmer who recently relocated from Massachusett...

Defector
29 Jun 17:00 • Billy Haisley

DR Congo Welcomes You To Africa’s World Cup

While it would be asking too much to expect soccer to deliver anything like justice, you can usually count on the sport's sense of humor. That's why we probably shouldn't be surprised that the 2026 World Cup, marred from the outside by the racist caprices of the Trump admini...

Defector
29 Jun 14:57 • Tom Ley

We’ve Got A Whole Jaylen Brown Situation On Our Hands

The NBA offseason presents a pit that must be filled with trade rumors, free-agency drama, and delirium-inducing podcast segments. It takes a lot of slop to fill that pit to the brim, which is how you end up with Jaylen Brown and an ESPN dope conspiring to dust off a tiresom...

Defector
28 Jun 20:54 • Dave McKenna

Dublin Pulls Off Comeback To Beat Galway In All-Ireland Quarterfinal

Dublin closed out a thrilling All-Ireland football quarterfinal weekend with a massive and penalty-aided comeback to beat Galway Sunday afternoon in Croke Park, 1-25 to 1-21. Galway was up by six points with just 15 minutes left on the clock. But the game turned Dublin’s wa...

Defector
28 Jun 17:33 • Dave McKenna

Boots Ennis KO’s Zayas In Brooklyn Thriller

BROOKLYN — Boots Ennis survived the toughest round of his career, then KO’d game but overmatched champ Xander Zayas in a beautifully brutal Saturday night title fight at Barclays Center.

When Ennis put Zayas on the canvas for the third time of the bout, Zayas's corner decided to save him from himself and threw in the towel with 1:12 left in the seventh round. With the win, Ennis took Zayas's WBO and WBA super welterweight belts and remained undefeated at 36-0. The Philly fighter also greatly advanced his pursuit of imaginary but highly coveted titles like “the face of boxing” and “pound-for-pound champ.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cb_jO5KUCuw

Defector
26 Jun 21:09 • Maitreyi Anantharaman

Don’t Let Bored Football Fans Tell The Story Of Caitlin Clark’s Season

Covering WNBA games in person is a strange experience. Enriching, for sure: It's cool to hear directly from players and coaches, to be able to pepper them with whatever questions I'd like. Recently, I was able to cobble their insights into an Olivia Miles profile t...

Defector
26 Jun 19:30 • Diana Moskovitz

Lawsuit: Death Of Doug Martin Caused By Negligence From Police, Paramedics

The parents of former NFL running back Doug Martin—who died eight months ago while in Oakland police custody—are suing the city of Oakland, five of its police officers, and an ambulance company in federal court. In the lawsuit, filed earlier this week, Martin's parents say t...

Defector
26 Jun 18:12 • Israel Daramola

How Jay-Z Changed Rap With ‘Reasonable Doubt’

If you went back in time to New York in the early '90s, not a soul would believe you if you told them Jay-Z would end up where he is today. Well, maybe one person would: Jay himself. Jay-Z's relatively delayed breakthrough made him something of a late bloomer, even in an er...

Defector
26 Jun 16:45 • Ray Ratto

The People Have Spoken: Ernie Clement Is The Best Player In The American League Now

The Ernie Clement Voting Scandal shoved all the rest of the news this week into the street—the World Cup, the NBA draft, the NHL draft, the NBA trades, the NHL trades, the Mets firing their manager for the sin of managing the Mets, the latest sports media meltdown around but...

Defector
26 Jun 16:18 • Sarah Borus

What Does It Mean To “Stand Up For Buffalo”?

Now that New York state and Erie County have spent $850 million in taxpayer dollars, the largest public contribution for any NFL facility in history, it's time for the next important step in the process of opening the Buffalo Bills' new stadium: kissing owner Terry Pegula's ...

Defector
26 Jun 16:18 • Corley Miller

Left In The Dungeon

This post originally appeared on June 23 in the Oakland Review of Books, which is worth a subscription even if you don’t live in Oakland or read books.

Carl must slay the naga princess! If he doesn’t, his best friend—the talking cat-wizard Princess Donut—will die instead. But Carl and his team have a plan. They track the princess to the god Khepri’s sanctum in the Vanquisher Club and slay the club’s guards with a MacGyver-demonology contraption. Inside the sanctum, though, Carl is surprised: The beetle-headed attendant supervising the insect banquet within is Khepri himself, god of Rebirth and the Sunrise, summoned as a trap by the devious princess. As a level-250 god, Khepri will slay Carl easily—disaster looms!

Defector
26 Jun 16:18 • Chris Thompson

Tom Dundon Cares Not One Bit About The Portland Trail Blazers

It takes a special kind of creep to stand out for sleaziness among NBA owners, objectively one of the worst demographics our species has ever established. Tom Dundon has been the official majority owner of the Portland Trail Blazers for less than three months, and already he...

Defector
26 Jun 16:18 • Tom Ley

Marina Mabrey Got 53 The Fun Way

"I score in bunches, and then sometimes kinda just level out," Toronto Tempo guard Marina Mabrey said near the end of her press conference, after the Tempo's 125-97 win over the L.A. Sparks on Thursday. It was an accurate description of her own game, which is built on consta...

Defector
26 Jun 14:15 • Patrick Sauer

A Final Day At Aqueduct, New York’s Forlorn And Forgotten Racetrack

Late in the morning of June 13, as most New York City sports fans were mapping out their plans for watching Game 5 of the NBA Finals, I was on the A train headed away from the Brooklyn neighborhood I've called home for 17 years. I was on my way to Aqueduct Racetrack, post ti...

Defector
25 Jun 20:09 • Sabrina Imbler

Would You Eat This Guy? What If He Were God, Or A Baby?

Imagine you are seated at a table. A guy sits across from you. He is vaguely humanoid, with a long torso and two arms raised in fist-like clubs. His full name is Edible Agent, but we will call him Eddie and use he/him pronouns. There's something about Eddie that makes you fe...

Defector
25 Jun 20:09 • David Roth

Folkways Of The Contemporary Sex Idiot, With Kelsey McKinney And Alex Sujong Laughlin

Drew is at the beach, the sun is high and hot in the sky, and all the major sports events are either over or in the early going. If there was ever going to be a moment to give the podcast over to a discussion of podcast industry dysfunction, conquering the fear of failure, a...

Defector
25 Jun 19:42 • Patrick Redford

The Athletics Are An Abomination

SAN FRANCISCO — On Wednesday night I attended a Major League Baseball game for the first time since the final game the Athletics played in the Oakland Coliseum. I have all but stopped paying attention to the sport, less in active protest than as a casualty of no longer being...

Defector
25 Jun 18:54 • Defector Staff

What Do We Think About This Season of ‘Love Island USA’?

Everyone's favorite summer sport is back in full swing. The country is tuning in. There are tears. There are shrieks of joy. There is a surprising and concerning amount of toe-sucking! Love Island USA, in its eighth season, has now aired three full weeks of episodes. With to...

Defector
25 Jun 17:18 • Sarah Borus

What I Learned Watching The Mets Make Six Errors In A 10-5 Loss

FLUSHING, N.Y. — You sit in the upper decks of that baseball park in Queens where you have spent so many nights both dismal and beautiful, and you stare out at the New York City sky. Everyone around you is booing. This is a good moment to wonder what you are doing there...

Defector
25 Jun 16:51 • Giri Nathan

LaMelo Ball Is Headed To Minnesota, Hopefully Not In His Car

The Charlotte Hornets have given up on their goofy, gifted, accursed son LaMelo Ball, who was shipped to the Minnesota Timberwolves in a trade Thursday morning. In return for their franchise player and Josh Green, the Hornets received a pittance: forward Naz Reid, a 2033 un...

Defector
25 Jun 16:51 • Luis Paez-Pumar

Vinícius Has Brazil Believing Again

It is impossible for Brazil, the most iconic team in the world's biggest sporting event, to have anything resembling a quiet tournament, but the Seleção managed to float through the first two matches of this World Cup a little under the radar. Part of that is because it take...

Defector
25 Jun 15:57 • Tom Ley

Lions Cornerback Terrion Arnold Arrested On Kidnapping And Robbery Charges

Detroit Lions cornerback Terrion Arnold was arrested late Wednesday in Tampa, Fla., and charged with four counts of kidnapping and four counts of armed robbery. Jail records showed Arnold turned himself in and was booked in Hillsborough County's Orient Road Jail. Arnold's a...

Defector
25 Jun 15:57 • Emily C. Hughes

Diabolical Motherhood

On June 25, 1976, three and a half years after Roe v. Wade made abortion legal in the U.S., The Omen hit theaters. Most viewers remember the high-drama deaths—by impalement, decapitation, hanging—or the creepiness of Harvey Spencer Stephens’s young Damien, or Gregory Peck’s ...

Defector
25 Jun 13:57 • Kathryn Xu

What On Earth Is “Match Momentum”?

It is easy to miss the Match Momentum graphic the Fox network stamps onto its World Cup broadcasts. The graph pops up only on rare occasion, wedged into the bottom-left corner, less than a third of the height and width of the screen. Often it appears only so briefly that the...

Defector
24 Jun 20:12 • Séamus Malekafzali

The Monarchists Have Come To Harangue Iran’s World Cup Team

Given the circumstances, Iran has played extraordinary soccer in this year's World Cup, equalizing not once but twice with New Zealand in a 2-2 result, and displaying robust defense in a 0-0 draw with Belgium, as keeper Alireza Beiranvand made a save that should go down as o...

Defector
24 Jun 19:06 • Brandy Jensen

Should I Sell My Ludicrously Valuable World Cup Ticket?

Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. Today, we're talking money, U2, lasagna, and more.

Hello! I'm happy to be back guest-hosting the Funbag while Drew is off. Let's get to it.

Defector
24 Jun 16:42 • Sarah Borus

Summer Is For Baseball, Hot Dogs, And Watching A Bunch Of Horny Teens Get Murdered In The Woods

I spent 11 summers at sleepaway camp, first as a camper and then, once I turned 17, as a counselor. Every year around this time, I get nostalgic for the days that moved along to the soundtrack of 2000s pop and Dean Friedman songs, and the freedom of a world where the greates...