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...

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

Your team: Frauds. Fucking frauds. Frauds on the field. Frauds on the sideline. Frauds in the front office. Literal criminal owners. Fraudity fraud fraud FRAUDS.

Winfield is a sun-bleached spot of a city in the middle of southeastern Kansas’s farmlands. It’s unremarkable except that it is the home of the Walnut Valley Festival, a long-running bluegrass festival that hosts the National Flatpicking Championship. 

My grandmother, Jane Laughlin, worked at the Walnut Valley Festival—”the Festival,” as we call it—for more than 40 years. The Festival is an outdoor acoustic music festival that attracts musicians from around the world every September. “Only the best guitar players played the Winfield festival,” she told me. 

Welcome to Ask The Book Doctor, a recurring series about books and reading them.

I have a terrible memory, but I remember every word of Margaret Wise Brown's iconic 1947 children's book Goodnight Moon. It is perfect because, perhaps more than any other literary genre, children's book must understand their readers. Children love the moon. Children love to say goodnight. But there's also something kind of haunted about Goodnight Moon, and children also love that. Or at least I did.

By night, spectral bats leave their roost and swoop through the tree canopy of Costa Rica, wings outstretched as far as three feet wide, in search of prey: unsuspecting mice and rats, birds called motmots, even other bats. Sometimes, after they snag something good, they will...

Sleep: a practice for suckers. Human relationships: a distraction from the grind. Non-helicopter modes of transportation: too slow.

These are some of the many lessons on offer from Emil Barr, 22-year-old author of a sociopathic Wall Street Journal op-ed published on Monday, with the headline "'Work-Life Balance' Will Keep You Mediocre." The scare quotes should alert the reader that they're in for an extremely familiar genre of story, and Barr capably paints by numbers. He has built two companies, allegedly valued at more than $20 million, and all he sacrificed in the process was everything that makes life worth living:

There's a new sports sponcon documentary out, and this time it's about the little-known story of a mini-dynasty from Dallas that reigned during the end of the last century. That's right: it's the '90s Dallas Cowboys' turn to be exhumed for easy, bloated content. In my best S...

My minivan got broken into the other day. It was parked on a D.C. street around the corner from my house. I left it unlocked, so no window was smashed to get in. As far as I can tell nothing was taken. I only know I’d been burgled because I found a golf putter the perp left ...

If you have read Giri Nathan's tennis blogs on Defector, you know that no one else writes about that sport with the insight, invention, and humor that he does. If you have just read Defector this week, you'll know that he has a new book out called Changeover that enfolds some of the reporting and writing he's done here and a bunch of new stuff to tell the story of the rising rivalry between Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner. It is very good, and I admired it very much. So much so, in fact, that despite interviewing Giri about it twice in the same day—we recorded this episode on Tuesday morning, and Patrick Sauer and I talked to him about it again at our reading series in Brooklyn on Tuesday night—there's still a bunch of stuff I wish I'd asked him about. It's that good, and also I am that bad at interviewing people.

What can’t Paige Bueckers do? What problems can’t she solve? Where does her bag end? Does it? For 39 minutes and 59 seconds of Wednesday night’s Wings-Sparks game, answers were hard to come by.  The learning curve has looked awfully flat for the first overall pick in h...

James Dobson was a nasty dude. He liked to beat children and dogs with a belt and to rain misery and punishment on the vulnerable; we know all of this about him because he said as much in public, repeatedly, over a long and rancid public life. He enlisted a whole bunch of Id...

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

Your team: Frauds. Fucking frauds. Frauds on the field. Frauds on the sideline. Frauds in the front office. Literal fraud owners. Fraudity fraud fraud FRAUDS.

How to describe what I heard from the orchestra? It happened one night at the Booth Theater during a preview performance of John Proctor Is the Villain. Raelynn Nix (Amalia Yoo), the preacher’s daughter, was delivering the final part of her monologue: “One day, maybe, the ne...

New York City-based non-profit news organization The City reported Wednesday that a longtime close associate of Mayor Eric Adams handed one of its reporters a wad of cash stuffed inside an opened bag of Herr’s Sour Cream & Onion ripple potato chips, immediately following...

This week, Left Of Dial published its Essential Listening Poll, a compilation of the 100 best podcasts of all time, according to industry creators, writers, and scholars (Disclosure: I was invited to contribute my selections to the poll, and Normal Gossip ranked on the list, though I was not allowed to nominate my own show). 

Lists of this sort, and really of any sort, are inherently imperfect metrics for measuring the impact of any given piece of work. They function more as a sort of popularity contest, one that reflects recency bias and the scale of marketing efforts much more clearly than anything as slippery and subjective as quality. 

SEPTA, the fifth-largest public transit system in the country, is days away from drastic service cuts that would decimate transportation in Philadelphia and its surrounding counties. Plagued by a $213 million budget deficit, and with no recurring source of funding, the agenc...

If you're curious about what hockey photographers do during the offseason, there's no one better to ask than Bruce Bennett. He is the world's most prolific hockey photographer and the head of Getty Images' hockey imagery division. In his 50-plus-year career, he's shot more than 5,300 NHL games, six Winter Olympics (with a seventh upcoming in Milan), and more than 40 Stanley Cup Finals. 

The first thing Bennett does to recover from the grind-it-out pace he maintains during the season, from training camps to the draft, is decompress. "No texts, no emails, no phone calls. I just want to be in my own head for a bit," Bennett says.

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

A Futuristic Summa, the latest project from Metro Boomin, is a lot more fun to think about than listen to. The 24-track double LP is a love letter to a specific period in music, in mixtapes, and in Atlanta. Period known as the "futuristic era" was a sub-movement within Southern hip hop whose most prominent avatars were the "black boy swag, white boy tags" pioneer Young Dro, and the partying, girl-chasing boy groups Rich Kidz and Travis Porter. Dro was my favorite of the bunch, one because he was the best at actually rapping and could come up with more inventive colorways than Nike or Crayola, and two because the strip club anthem "All The Money" might as well have gone diamond at Tallahassee night clubs.

The injuries came as fast as the goals. One, two, three Chicago Stars players were down and out by the 55th minute of Monday’s match against the Seattle Reign. That moment felt like a low point in what’s already been a dire season for Chicago: second-to-last in the table, a ...

Two weeks ago, news broke that former Boston Celtics minority owner Steve Pagliuca had agreed to a deal with the Mohegan Tribe to buy the WNBA's Connecticut Sun for $325 million, with plans in place to relocate the team to Boston within two years. While the team's outgoing a...

The Alexander Isak transfer saga has gone public. The Newcastle United striker, one of the world's best at his position, moved to the north of England in 2022, and since his arrival in the Premier League, he's scored 54 goals and helped Newcastle complete its Saudi-funded transformation from relegation threat to regular contender for the Champions League places. But Isak wants out, and he wants out now.

On Tuesday, after about a month of speculation and rumors and transfer denials, Isak took to his personal Instagram and released a statement of the kind that even top players with all of the leverage in the world rarely make:

David Garry and his son were making their biggest purchase ever. They just didn’t know how big yet.

David, 43, had gotten back into collecting sports cards in 2020, and 12-year-old Jax was now prime age for the hobby. They’d rip packs of cards and talk about players old and new; Jax, a travel-team baseball player himself, got into players his dad liked in the 1990s. It’s their thing now. The whole experience, as David described it, sounds every bit as wholesome as a hobby like card collecting could be. It sounds magical.

It's not AI winter just yet, though there is a distinct chill in the air. Meta is shaking up and downsizing its artificial intelligence division. A new report out of MIT finds that 95 percent of companies' generative AI programs have failed to earn any profit whatsoever. Tec...