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

Your team: DOINK!

A few minutes into her Aug. 13 appearance on New Heights with Jason & Travis Kelce, Taylor Swift said, “This is my first podcast.” I thought she was making a little joke—surely she’d talked to Marc Maron, Bowen Yang, or those two exasperated, newly popular ladies who loo...

I've always struggled with the idea of a "guilty pleasure." Truly innocent pleasure shouldn't come with a side of shame. Most guilty pleasures are purposely private, indulged alone or among the friends who are safe enough to confide in. There are adults who skip social oblig...

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

Your team: Seattle Seahawks.

On a breezy spring night in 2023, the Georgia Room at the Freehand Hotel was humid with sweat. Queers of various genders wore cowboy hats and bedazzled denim, camouflage and American flag bikinis. The lights were low and clubby. A New York Times reporter milled around with a...

Once upon a time, in a different life, I was tasked with running a blog vertical devoted entirely to help men, who read a sports site, become slightly better at life. Not exceptional. Not great. Not even very good. Just—adequate. We gave advice on anything and everything—coo...

When I listen to new music, one of the biggest influences I hear—both in the sound and the choices of samples—is video games. Specifically, the games and sounds I remember hearing constantly while I was growing up. There's Pi’erre Bourne’s skittering, glitchy "power up"-styl...

At some point in the thick of the pandemic, I became briefly obsessed with a silly-seeming online controversy over what is known as the double-beat theory. The argument concerns classical music, which normally would’ve been enough for me to move along, prestissimo, but those...

Saturday marks 48 years since Elvis Presley was found dead inside a Graceland bathroom. And so, for the 48th time, his devoutest followers are gathering in Memphis for a week of concerts and various other events commemorating the King—who'd be 90 years old were he still alive. Cleary there’s still some juice to squeeze out of the King’s carcass: tickets for Monday’s tour of Elvis’s big house—hosted by one of his last girlfriends, Linda Thompson—sold out at $7,000 per set of four.

I’ve been among the memorializers. Of the many rock and roll pilgrimages I’ve taken through the years, none combined irreverent and reverent quite like my 1990 trip to what was then commonly called “Death Week” before Elvis Presley Enterprises rebranded the tribute with the far less metal moniker, "Elvis Week."

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

Your team: The Cincinnati Bengals, Where Money Is Always The Object.

In 2018, Mitski released her fifth album, Be the Cowboy. She had been putting out music that was as critically acclaimed as anything in the American indie world, and promoting it in the only way that still seemed to work: by going on tour. But with Be the Cowboy, the buzz re...

Blackpink is the biggest global group in K-pop. With BTS on hiatus and NewJeans in the midst of a prolonged contract dispute, they don't have much competition, so long as they stay active themselves. Yet their current world tour carries a title that suggests an endpoint: Dea...

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

You team: The Arizona Cardinals

For most of my 20s, I did not believe that I had clinical depression. No, what I had was clinical depression's cuter, more manageable cousin: seasonal affective disorder. I bought one of those lamps that is too bright for the afternoon darkness but alleges to make your brain think you are standing in warm, direct sunlight. I took vitamin D pills. I whined about how it was too dark and too cold and blamed my brain's rebellion against me on both.

It was easier to confine the bad feelings to a season. I had just moved from Texas to Washington, D.C., a place with real (if mild) winter. Everyone else was struggling, too! It's much more manageable to accept that you have a seasonal setback than it is to worry about a looming lifelong struggle.

One of the things that a visit to the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg gets across very effectively is that a policy of monstrous repression was built on details—the details of paperwork and procedures and regulations, a parody of rational administration built around deranged and evil goals. Early on, a wall carries a list of the laws that made up the apartheid system: 148 different measures spanning 22 years, a constant process of repression and escalation. 

A little further on, there's a series of personal passbooks on display, turned to various pages. The particular one that brought me up short was opened to the spaces where the passbook holder was required to get their employer's signature every month. There was the same notation, over and over—routine daily existence made contingent and subject to endless re-approval. 

There’s a scene in the new Superman movie that illustrates the precarious nature of music compatibility and how touchy it can get. Lois Lane (you know her, played by Rachel Brosnahan) and Clark Kent (David Corenswet), a.k.a. Superman, have a heated argument about their diffe...

It is easy enough to read about the climate crisis through the dozens of devastating stories that run each week, warning us of the people who will be displaced or otherwise harmed by the planet's rapidly rising temperatures. It is also easy to feel the climate crisis, throug...

Like many who have loved and left New York City, I dearly miss the transportation setup there. The walkability, the trains, the buses—there's not another town in the U.S. where you can do so much (and get so far) easily and without needing a car of your own. Though my 16-yea...

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

Your team: Atl2nt8 Fal3ons.

I finally get Midnights. I don’t just mean, “Oh, I thought this album was whatever when I first heard it, and now I really love it,” though I do mean that a little bit. I mean I get it get it. Like, I get how Taylor Swift concert tickets are as pricey as diamond rings. I get...

If it feels like white rappers are sprouting up all around us, it's with good reason. Though they never really went away—Kreayshawn is somehow still in the news—the last year alone has brought to prominence artists such as ian, who stylizes his name in all lowercase and puts...

Time to channel your inner cruciverbalist. This week's puzzle was constructed by Dan Zarin and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Dan is a crossword constructor and freelance writer based in Portland, Maine. Over the years he has been a musician, a hitchhiker, a barista, an advertising copywriter and a food critic, so making puzzles seemed like the next logical step.

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. 

That’s right. It’s Puja Week and I’m Puja—everyone has to do what I say, or else. Don’t worry, this isn’t my first rodeo. A decade ago, I was a culture editor at the Gawker Media version of Deadspin and worked with many of the writers and editors who make up Defector today. ...

Elena Rybakina must have figured she had the match won. She’d just battered 18-year-old Victoria Mboko in a 25-shot rally late in their Montreal semifinal, sending her sprinting from corner to corner until Mboko’s desperate lob drifted long. Mboko hunched over in exhaustion ...

Every misogynist joke poses a question to its female audience: Can you laugh along? Will you be chill or are you going to make a big deal out of this? Are you going to be a bitch about it? Arriving in the form of a dildo, the joke that is also the question becomes a double entendre: Can you take it?

The first time someone threw a sex toy onto the court, during a July 29 game between the Golden State Valkyries and the Atlanta Dream, many players were inclined to say yes, we can laugh about this. Sydney Colson of the Indiana Fever joked about it on Twitter, as did Angel Reese. And why not? As a bizarre one-off it’s easy enough to laugh. Dildos, especially the ones that aim for anatomical fidelity, are funny objects when they appear somewhere you don’t expect to see one. 

It’s pretty common these days for a television show to hold its viewers in contempt. Most “big-hearted comedies” treat you like a child, most crime shows assume you are very stupid, most dramas take for granted that you are easily manipulated. It’s not unusual to feel like whoever wrote the show you’re watching hates you.

The Sex and the City sequel And Just Like That…, which HBO execs announced would be ending this Thursday after just three seasons, is different. It’s the rare show brave enough to hate the viewer a little bit, and its own characters so much more. 

Hello! We’re about to close up shop for the week, but before we park up our vans and lock up our warehouse, I must relay some precious information to you. Next week the Defector staff will be convening for our annual Business snd Innovation Summit, which means we will once again be leaving you in […]

Hello! It's Friday afternoon and we are ready to chat with our pals. Hit us with your best questions below.

Defector started publishing blogs on September 10, 2020. We are somehow mere weeks away from our fifth anniversary. To celebrate, Defector is throwing a birthday party at Union Pool in Williamsburg on Wednesday Sept. 10, 2025. We’ll have the run of the place, with musical performances in the back room by Avery Friedman and Speedy […]

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

Your team: Indianapolis Colts, like it says in the intro.