Tom Brady's first season as NFL broadcaster did not go well. The man who Fox is paying $37.5 million per year to provide color commentary spent most of his on-air season stumbling in and out of awkward silences, while offering up so much boring analysis that at times it beca...

Maybe some things should not be simulated. That is my takeaway—one of them, anyway—from a Tuesday New York Times story by Kashmir Hill about the death by suicide of a California teenager named Adam Raine, who brought his despair and suicidal thoughts to OpenAI's ChatGPT sof...

Early Wednesday morning, Danish public broadcaster DR broke the news that several associates of Donald Trump had been flagged by the Danish Police Intelligence Service for running a shoddy espionage campaign in Greenland to soften the ground ahead of a potential push by the ...

Florida Senate Bill 56, passed into law in April of this year, prohibits "the injection, release, or dispersion, by any means, of a chemical, a chemical compound, a substance, or an apparatus into the atmosphere within the borders of Florida for the express purpose of affect...

Some people are fans of the Baltimore Ravens. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Baltimore Ravens. This 2025 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here.

Your team: DROP IT, MISTER!

In a hundred years, the labels "introvert" and "extrovert" have leapt from Jungian psychology into the realm of personality tests and horoscopes: ways to tell yourself, and the world, What Kind of Person You Are. You risk over-identifying with a set a characteristics cloaked in a semi-medical terminology, which makes it sound more real and immovable.

Yowei Shaw, host of Proxy, believes herself to be an introvert. But over the years, she's begun to wonder whether her introversion is really core to who she is, or a byproduct of how she was raised and the expectations projected onto her. Which raises the question: Can you change something as supposedly fundamental about yourself as your introversion?

When an acclaimed director has a new movie out, I always like to revisit their previous work in the lead-up to the new one. In preparation for Highest 2 Lowest, the latest Spike Lee Joint, I rewatched a few of his earlier movies, including his sweeping 2006 documentary about...

In a joint Instagram post made this afternoon, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce announced their engagement. "Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married," the caption reads. The song attached is Swift's "So High School," the only song she's released about Travis, which includes the famous line, "you know how to ball, I know Aristotle."

Fans have expected this engagement for months. Swift has sung about love ending in marriage her whole career, so it was safe to assume she hoped to marry one day. The two seem happy. They've been spotted on vacation and out to dinner all off-season, and Swift recently announced her new album on the Kelce brothers' podcast. And, ultimately, they are both people in their 30s who have been dating for two years. An engagement felt inevitable.

This week on Nothing But Respect, Harry and I are joined by one of my favorite women's basketball writers, Maya Goldberg-Safir. Maya is the author of two great Defector stories, on Brittney Griner's wrongful detainment saga and on Golden State Valkyries head coach Natalie Na...

It was right around the time everyone left them for dead that the Las Vegas Aces began showing signs of life. At the start of August, the Minnesota Lynx rudely welcomed them back from the All-Star break by nearly doubling them up in Vegas; the 111-58 game was the second-bigg...

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 mice in restaurants, Tulsa, Cracker BarrelGate, and more.

Before we get into this week’s bag, I’d be a fool if I didn’t mention that Defector’s fifth anniversary sale is still ongoing. New subscribers get their first three months for five bucks. This has been the most successful sales push we’ve ever had, and it’s not because we bought airtime on NFL games. It’s because there’s something always good to read on Defector, and five bucks ain’t shit. So tell your friends, your co-workers, your dog, everybody. Get them on the Defector train now to show them what they’ve been missing for the past five years. Also: tell them their team sucks.

The biggest story of the NBA offseason is the federal investigation into former Pistons guard Malik Beasley over some suspicious gambling activity around prop bets on his own statistical output. Beasley is at least the third player, along with Jontay Porter and Terry Rozier,...

After weeks of various outlets putting the silly in "F1 silly season" and reporting on reports of announcements, the American team Cadillac, which will be joining the Formula 1 grid in 2026, has officially confirmed its driver lineup for next year. In a huge win for both sec...

The New York Mets pretty well flattened the Philadelphia Phillies Monday night in Queens, in the first game of an important three-game divisional series. The Phillies struck first, tagging wayward Mets starter Kodai Senga for runs in the first and third innings, but the Mets...

If the parasitic worm that once devoured a portion of RFK Jr.'s brain were alive today, it might rejoice upon learning that yet another parasitic worm has wriggled into the spotlight and captured the heart of our nation, or whatever is left of it. The worm in question is the...

Some people are fans of the Los Angeles Rams. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Los Angeles Rams. This 2025 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here.

Your team: Los Angeles Rams, the only sports franchise in history dumb enough to leave Southern California for Saint Louis. Zero points for having the sense to move back.

With the Alexander Isak transfer storm still raging, Monday's Premier League match between host Newcastle United and defending champion Liverpool was always going to be full of intensity and drama. Despite Liverpool's main crime being that the club is interested in a very go...

For anyone who engaged with MLB All-Star Week, the lasting image of Cal Raleigh is a ruddy-cheeked kid strutting about a yard with a baseball bat and declaring himself the home run derby champion. The Raleigh of now, in all honesty, doesn't look all too different—still baby-...

Some people are fans of the Houston Texans. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Houston Texans. This 2025 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here.

Your team: [George W. Bush voice] Houston Tixins.

There are few things in Podworld, or any other world for that matter, that will erode your faith in the value of a pastime quite like people claiming that said pastime plays a salutary role in the world as a whole. Silly things, sports very much included, can do a person goo...

Judging only by the league table, all seems to be going well for Nottingham Forest. A win over Brentford and a come-from-behind draw against Crystal Palace gives the Trees four points from two matches, a still-early tally but one that nonetheless serves as a good omen for a ...

Daniil Medvedev, who was the No. 1 player on the ATP as recently as 2022, and to me, the most compelling persona in men's tennis, is in the midst of a career freefall. With Sunday's first-round loss at the U.S. Open, he has continued to plummet. But Medvedev nearly turned ar...

The Padres and Dodgers have a nice little rivalry going on. After this weekend's three-game series, in which San Diego took two games, the teams are tied at the top of the NL West division with identical 74-57 records. After scoring two combined runs in the first two games o...

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 Evan Mulvihill, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Evan is a cruciverbalist living in San Francisco, Calif. His crosswords&n...

Steven Soderbergh made The Limey for $10 million in 1998, and by his own account had an absolutely miserable time doing it. Or, more specifically, he made it briskly and seemingly happily, then reconfigured it, even more hastily and much less happily, into a film that would ...

In 1971, the great rock critic Lester Bangs tried to imagine a time when the music of the recent past would seem alien. Projecting himself into the old age he would never reach, he pictured his future grandkids asking him about the music of the ’60s: “What’s all this shit ab...

If it feels like it's been a million years since Everton was Everton, well, that's because it basically has been. Once the paragon of Premier League upward mobility, the standard to which every ambitious but not megarich English club aspired, the Toffees haven't finished in ...

Jerry Jones has not yet brought to a conclusion the latest in his annual series of contract stalemates with high-profile Cowboys players. Micah Parsons remains inactive, a quiet-quitting sort of hold-out, technically due to a back injury but the sort of back injury that will...

TACOMA TO NEW YORK AND BACK — Nobody can accuse me of not being careful. I make very few real mistakes, instead opting for piles of wasted opportunities. Inertia takes me behind the woodshed. Anything worth doing is worth planning out within an inch of its life, and I spend ...

There is a long history of people being weird about Sally Rooney: Her books are too Marxist or not Marxist enough; she glamorizes thinness, stigmatizes BDSM, and promotes unhealthy age-gap relations; her queer characters don’t have queer sex; worst of all, she had the arroga...