On Friday morning, when the barista at my local coffee shop leaned over the counter, wrinkled his face into a hideous demonic leer, and hissed "Ennnnnn ... Beeeeee ... Ayyyyyy" at me, I will confess, dear Reader, that I had no idea what the hell he was getting at (and my tip...

After the Hunt, the latest film from Luca Guadagnino, is ostensibly about a great many things. It is a film about campus politics, generational divide, the slippery nature of power dynamics, fantasy kitchen apartments, and whether you can be too much of a wife guy. But ...

BONK!

TMZ broke the news Sunday that former NFL running back Doug Martin had died in Oakland, Calif. at the age of 36. Though the precise circumstances of his death remain unclear, one thing we do know is that Martin died while in police custody.

Through a statement, the Oakland Police Department has offered its version of events leading up to Martin's death. According to the cops, officers were responding to a call about a break-in at 4:15 a.m. on Saturday morning. After encountering Martin in the house they were called to, "a brief struggle occurred" and Martin "became unresponsive" after being taken into custody. The police department's statement goes on to say that paramedics were called to the scene, and that Martin later died in the hospital.

The Toronto Blue Jays are worthy champions by any measure, whether that be Vladimir Guerrero's outsized gifts or George Springer's uncanny sense of the moment or Alejandro Kirk's combination of improbable results and very civilian silhouette. They earned their way to this World Series by reducing the Seattle Mariners to Julio Rodriguez, Cal Raleigh, and a bunch of other employees, and more power to them for that.

They're going to need all that power and more given what awaits them, and what we all would like to see—a fully scheduled, extended drama playing out across a World Series that lasts until November. The alternative is the Los Angeles Dodgers administering one final beatdown to an overmatched challenger and a winter of people wallowing in the time-suck that is the salary cap debate.

The Las Vegas Raiders played the Chiefs on Sunday, or at least appeared on the same field as the Chiefs on Sunday. They were certainly there, in their spiffy white uniforms, in Kansas City, but with Brock Bowers and Jakobi Meyers both injured and inactive, “played” may have been asking too much.

Vegas never entered the red zone. Only once did the offense cross midfield. On that occasion, they gazed longingly at the end zone from the Chiefs’ 46. In seven attempts, they did not convert a single third down. They totaled 95 yards—70 passing, 25 rushing—to Kansas City's 434. Vegas lost, 31-0.

Perhaps it should not have been surprising that a matchup between the fourth- and sixth-placed teams in the Premier League produced an absolute firecracker of a match. Perhaps Bournemouth and Crystal Palace are two really good and, maybe more importantly for the purposes of a neutral, really fun sides, and their Saturday showdown at Selhurst Park was just a perfect clash at a perfect time. Whatever the reasoning, the 3-3 classic was the best game of this young season—and yes, I am including all of the Liverpool last-minute nonsense, including the two matches against these very teams—and a thrilling look England's upper-midtable, a place where everyone is a tough out and no lead is safe.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Dm3zj7cUGQ

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.

---

The National Football League has a firings gap. Though still the worldwide leader in commercial interruptions and enormous American flags, the NFL has fallen shamefully behind its college cousin at the vital measure of in-season coach firings; that figure is currently eight,...

After all the debate about fair application of Papaya Rules and which of Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri is really McLaren's number one driver, the answer, as it is turning out, is neither of them. One race is a fluke, two is coincidence, three is when you really start consid...

The first sign that fight night in Brooklyn on Saturday might not be a big success was the disparity between the line at the front entrance, which was nonexistent, and the line at the side door where you picked up credentials, which was long. This indicated that while there ...

Who among us doesn't have musical trauma of some sort? If you didn't cry through piano lessons as a child, maybe you stared longingly at the student band at high school football games, wishing your parents could have paid for a clarinet rental so you could be out there too. ...

It was a lovely, balmy late-fall afternoon. The low sun betrayed the warmth's incongruence for the time of year, and warned of the inevitable approach of winter. It was a lovely day to be alive; a lovely day to be outside and not watching your two-win football team. It was a...

Let’s get in the solving zone. This week's puzzle was constructed by Ben Zimmer (who created our first official Defector puzzle two years ago!), and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Ben is a linguist, lexicographer, and all-around word nut. He has been a language columnist for the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, and the New York Times. He's also chair of the American Dialect Society's New Words Committee and vocabulary judge for the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

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.

You can't say that the Mariners didn't have their chances Sunday night to clinch a World Series berth. Down 2-0 in the top of the third inning, they had the bases loaded with one out and Cal Raleigh up to bat; he grounded into a double play. Down 4-0 in the top of the fourth...

Nick Saban, ex-Alabama coach but still somehow patron saint of college football, had some things to say during yesterday's edition of College GameDay about the "ugliness" faced by his former coaching peer, James Franklin. Saint Nick wants the world to know that it was "unfai...

Aston Villa will be hosting Israeli team Maccabi Tel Aviv in a Europa League match in Birmingham on Nov. 6. Last week, The Athletic reported that the West Midlands Police had requested that Maccabi fans be barred from the stadium and prevented from buying tickets to the matc...

I'm sure Lane Kiffin had a good time working through his Kirby Smart material. The jokes at the presser, the pregame shirtless photo, the "timeout clapping" bit when his Ole Miss team was still up—all killer bits. But at some point, when he was workshopping the routine, he f...

Here is a sentence you never want written about your soccer team: Twenty minutes after Saturday's 0-3 loss to Chelsea, Nottingham Forest fired the manager it had hired just 39 days ago.

That's right, Ange Postecoglou is out. His sacking was announced via terse statement from the team just minutes after Postecoglou himself had stepped off the grass at the City Ground. Pity the mid-level Forest executive who was tasked with intercepting the curmudgeonly Australian outside the dressing room and informing him that he no longer had a job. That guy probably got called some rude names, at least one of them starting with the letter "c."

Shohei Ohtani creates a world in which there are no stupid questions. Could there ever be a two-way player in the majors? Could he become an elite power hitter and a frontline starter? Could he recover from two Tommy John surgeries? Could he close out the NLCS with a six-inn...

Earlier this week, I read Horace Walpole’s Castle Of Otronto for the first time. Published in 1764, it’s widely considered the first gothic novel, the cornerstone of a genre that would include future works like those of the Brontë sisters, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, and ev...

Our old pal Mike Lombardi just can't keep himself out of the news. Following two reports about how nobody in college football can stand working with him, he is now the subject of another flurry of reports about a preseason fundraising trip to Saudi Arabia.

The news of Lombardi's trip, which took place two weeks before the start of the college football season, was first broken by Pablo Torre. A few hours later, The Athletic provided more details. According to statements provided by UNC, Lombardi's fundraising trip was "exploratory," and did not involve meeting with any representatives of the country's Public Investment Fund. Lombardi, according to the university, merely met with a "Saudi National who is a college football fan interested in supporting Coach Belichick."

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: Some malignant and aggressively stupid sludgesmear with a lopsided head full of festerin...

No matter where you reside along the generational divide, last night provided an object, and in some cases abject, lesson for you and all your youth culture nonsense. The National Football League and Major League Baseball both took their places on America’s viewing devices o...

Tom Cruise and I have one thing in common: We both love eating popcorn at the movies. But I am a blogger, and Tom Cruise is not, so here we are.

Rarely do I go more than two weeks in New York City without seeing a movie, whether it's a new release or a screening of something old. Usually, the experience feels incomplete without a whole lot of popcorn, often all for myself. Over the years, as I've become a repeated customer at film spots around the city, I've built up some knowledge, and some taste, and some routines. Over the past year, I've kept notes on my experiences, trying to get a thing of popcorn at least once from every theater I go to.

Kathryn: Hello, hello, and thank you for voluntarily joining me for some Hades II discussion, absolutely zero peer pressure involved. The game has been out for nearly a month, and in that timespan we’ve all developed very different relationships to it, so shall we elaborate on our approaches first?

Barry: I am actively choosing not to check how many hours I’ve put into this game, out of a certainty that the answer would make me respect myself less as a person. Needless to say, my obsession burned brightly and quickly—this is that rare game that wormed itself so deeply into my brain that I think about it when I’m not playing it. Unsurprisingly, I’m the only one of the three of us who has rolled credits (if not exactly “beaten” it, because the definition of beating Hades is kind of loose; there is always more to unlock).

Since I read it in the run-up to the most recent installment of the reading series I do with Patrick Sauer in Brooklyn, I have recommended Seth Wickersham's book American Kings widely. The book is an excellent biographical history of the quarterback as a concept, job, and cultural construct; it is also weird. This is greatly to its credit, because Wickersham takes some chances with storytelling, structure, and perspective, up to and including his own brief high school quarterbacking career in the narrative, that he could just as easily not have taken. I enjoyed talking to him about the book in Brooklyn, and was happy to pick that conversation back up this week when we welcomed him back to the pod this week.

The start of the NBA season is almost upon us, which means that season preview season is in full swing. The Defector staff preview is coming next week in its usual format, but over at Nothing But Respect, we took a slightly different angle: a detailed look at the season that...

The music channel in Defector's work Slack is, paradoxically or not, a fairly quiet place. People will talk about records they're enjoying or not enjoying, Patrick will reply "type shit" to various stuff, but for the most part everyone is off listening on their own and on their own time. But when D'Angelo died earlier this week at the age of 51, the channel lit up first with the sad stuff you'd expect, and then with memories of our favorite D'Angelo songs and performances and personal memories—all meaningful in urgent and individuated ways, often very different from one another, all anchored by this one uncanny and brilliant artist. Here is some of that music, and what it means to six of us.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2r5yqjlVrI&list=OLAK5uy_l3GaVWHBHE3Vwqulz66u2-w4grcvpVYqk&index=2

I have never cared about my car. The first one I owned, a 2000-something Geo Prizm, came to me by way of my aunt when I was 15 and stayed with me until I moved to New York City when I was 24. It got me through high school and college and the first two years of my post-gradua...