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

Your team: Los Angeles Chargers. Celebrating eight years of you forgetting that they’re no longer in San Diego!

Mönch (Monk) is a solid polyester figure, life-sized and jarringly lifelike in its details, depicting a somewhat gaunt man dressed in roughly Franciscan habit: a floor-length cowled robe, a rope cintura with three knots around his midsection. He hunches ever so slightly forw...

As college football administrators deliberate over whether to expand the current 12-team playoff into a 16-team one, monopoly-minded Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti has reportedly conferred with the SEC about an even more dramatic transformation, kicking around the idea of...

For the first time in sports media history, Defector is now publishing a podcast about, get this, basketball. Nothing But Respect makes its Defector debut today, and to mark the occasion, my co-host Harry Krinsky and I were thrilled to have on two of Defector's premier ball-knowers: Maitreyi and Roth.

I have some bad news: Michael "Curious Mike" Porter Jr. has made another podcast appearance.

The former Denver Nugget and prolific podcaster was traded to the Brooklyn Nets a few months ago, simultaneously putting him in a huge media market and making him the best player on an NBA team for the first time in his career, two roles he is not ready for. Porter Jr. is dismally ill-equipped for the former, which was obvious from his ignominious podcasting career spent saying "Nah that's crazy" to anyone who says anything to him and was made even more clear last week after he joined an outer Nelk Boys show to spend 70 minutes talking about, generally speaking, "these females." The specifics of the conversation are predictably nauseating, as is the broader right-wing cultural realignment in which it's constellated.

There’s a way this Washington Mystics season could have been kind of tedious. In the offseason, and again at the August trade deadline, the rebuilding team swapped its veterans for a collection of first-round picks. New general manager Jamila Wideman told reporters recently ...

Musab Al-Debs has lost 75 percent of his body weight. The 14-year-old reportedly weighed 40 kilograms (88 pounds) before he was injured in an airstrike; now he weighs no more than 10 kilograms. In photos published by Reuters, the sharpness of his jaw bone juts out of his fac...

It’s tough being a dad. It’s even tougher raising a young woman in a horrifying patriarchal society that is constantly sending both you and her subconscious reminders that she is not as worthy or inherently good as the boys. And if you’ve also gotta manage a cache of nuclear...

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

Your team: Pittsburgh Steelers.

The Platonic ideal of a chameleon, at least for those of us with televisions, is a small, somewhat nervous-looking reptile with the astounding ability to change the colors of its body in drastic and dazzling ways. They are the original masters of camouflage, more famous even...

Defector turns five next month. At last week’s offsite meetings, we celebrated that accomplishment and talked seriously about the 10-year mark—how we’re going to get there, and what we want Defector to look like when we do. Our business is pretty simple. The odd hit podcast and grant to help build infrastructure for worker-owned publications […]

Welcome back to Make It Nice, Defector's best interior design advice column. Today we have a cavernous bedroom, a tricky living room layout, and a ’70s bathroom. Let’s get into it.

Rein asks:

John Wall announced his retirement from professional basketball on Tuesday, according to a tweet by ESPN's Shams Charania. You could be forgiven for finding that announcement somewhat redundant: Wall, 34 years old, has not appeared in an NBA game since January of 2023, misse...

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 college football, Madden, dirty sponges, and more.

Your letters:

Defector's own Giri Nathan is the father of an insanely great new baby and the author of an insanely great new book. Just as babies transform and master skills at alarming speed, so too have the young tennis prodigies at the center of his book. Changeover: A Young Rival...

When Ray Ratto told you that you could get "hard mathematical reasons" for the Milwaukee Brewers' inexplicable win streak "wherever Nerd Stuff is sold," he was referring to me. At the same time I must necessarily acknowledge that for whatever hard mathematical explanations a...

The first weekend of a new Premier League season is a time for optimism and for excitement. Even after an over-stuffed summer of soccer, which this year brought us the Club World Cup, the women's Euros, and the women's Copa América, there's nothing quite like the return of the club season. Overreactions are part of the fun this early—Viktor Gyokeres is a bust! West Ham is getting relegated!—but so is just watching competitive club soccer once more. The 2025-26 season started on Friday with a bittersweet debut, though, as the defending champions of Liverpool beat Bournemouth 4-2 at Anfield in the club's first competitive match at home since the death of Diogo Jota.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stjx4DyerYA

The climax of the new movie War of the Worlds features cheap-looking CGI'd clips of large robots standing next to large buildings, cut together with b-roll clips of B-2 stealth bombers in flight and Zoom-style laptop camera shots of several exhausted actors making wildly unconvincing Oh no faces. The music is very intense. This would've been exactly as wack as it sounds, except that the sequence is tied together by another set of clips, of 56-year-old Ice Cube running around, lost, in a large empty office space, while shouting for assistance. I am sorry to report that this part kicks ass.

There's this archetype in early 2000s teen movies where the protagonist finally trades the hairbrush she sings into from the safety of her bedroom for a real microphone. There's a climactic performance scene where she reveals her secret talent, and there's a choreographed dance and her crush is usually there, too.

I present the "What Dreams Are Made Of" performance from the 2003 Lizzie McGuire movie:

Nostalgia is the only reason why there's a new Planet Hollywood in Times Square. But my nostalgia is different from everybody else's. While the caretakers of this functionally dead brand are trying to lure diners by advertising "1991 Vibes," my relationship with this restaur...

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

Your team: “OHHHHHHHHHH! BLOCKED! THE CHIEFS HAVE WON! THE CHIEFS HAVE WON!” I love Kevin Harlan unreservedly. I’d like him to call my funeral.

Sounds like you want to do the Monday crossword. This week's puzzle was constructed by Erik Agard and Kelsey Dixon, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Kelsey is a crossword editor for The Atlantic. Erik is a crossword editor who used to watch Stargate: Atlantis. Erik’s favorite remix is the Golden Girls gospel remix. Kelsey’s favorite is the Gucci Mane remix of Mariah Carey’s “Obsessed”. They hope you enjoy this puzzle—a spiritual sequel to last October's "Flower Arrangement"! 

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.

Admit it: The Milwaukee Brewers were beginning to torque you off, right? Every night a win, every night a different way, every win powered by metrics that make them look like the deteriorating St. Louis Cardinals (2025 version) instead of the best team in baseball. Until the...

On a cool Sunday in November, a few days after Donald Trump’s re-election, Zohran Mamdani stood on a street corner in Jamaica, Queens, holding up a hastily drawn cardboard sign that read, “DID YOU VOTE?” on one side and, “LET’S TALK ELECTION,” on the other. It was just weeks after the 33-year-old New York state representative and Democratic Socialists of America member had announced his run for mayor on a progressive platform. Nobody walking by that street corner knew who he was. Five days later, the Mamdani campaign released a video titled, “Why did so many New Yorkers vote for Donald Trump?”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7FcVCYqQNs

It will become clear by the end of this sentence that I am not bragging about this, but there was a time when I felt like I knew how to read a David Brooks column. This is absolutely not a valuable skill, and not really a skill at all—proclaiming "don't worry, I know my way ...

Jay Cutler spent 12 years in the NFL. Eight of those were with the Bears, where he threw for 23,443 yards and 154 touchdowns; he also threw 107 interceptions and had a .500 career record. Even in the season when Cutler took the Bears to the NFC title game, he was still sacke...

Have you noticed how I've been yammering on about the month of August? If it's not abundantly clear, I think August is a top-three month for inducing existential malaise. Sure, I will wish for August in February—but by May, I'm already dreading its arrival. There are two sea...

If there’s one thing I’ve historically been very good at, it’s playing it cool around those for whom I have developed a romantic interest. Ask any of my friends and they’ll confirm that I am skilled at behaving normally about this kind of thing. I cultivate an air of mystery...

Consider this a sister piece to the list of "The Worst Songs That We Love So Much" that ran yesterday, with a slightly different conceit. I asked some of my music and culture writer friends to confess their soft spots for songs that reek of corniness and cheese—the ones...

The moment I had long dreaded finally arrived: the day I’d have to dismantle my childhood. I suppose I should consider myself lucky. It took 43 years to get here, to this spring day in 2025, standing in my nearly empty former bedroom in my mother’s house in Philadelphia, wea...