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

Your team: Chicago Bears

A computer screen is a mirror, a conduit, a threshold, and a void. We peer into them for work, insight, entertainment, communication, companionship, and we peer for so long that the outside world comes to seem like an addendum, an antechamber of the vision granted by the scr...

The Braves and Reds finally got back to baseball at the Bristol Motor Speedway in Tennessee, even if it took them until Sunday! Sunday! Sunday! The game was originally scheduled for Saturday, but it began to rain late in the afternoon. After a long delay and an aborted start, the “Speedway Classic” resumed at 1 p.m. today, and ended with a 4-2 Atlanta victory.

A record crowd was expected. There was pregame pomp and circumstance featuring both Pitbull and Tim McGraw. Then the weather kicked in. The game was delayed for 2 hours and 17 minutes while it rained. When it resumed, the teams recorded four total outs before the game was pushed.

The days of WNBA basketball in Uncasville could be numbered. According to Gary Washburn of the Boston Globe, Boston Celtics minority owner Steve Pagliuca has agreed to a deal with the Mohegan Tribe to purchase the Connecticut Sun, and he has aspirations to relocate the team. I bet you can guess where.

Per Washburn's report, Pagliuca's offer is for $325 million, which would be $75 million more than the price for a WNBA expansion team these days. If approved, it would be the most expensive sale for a professional women's sports team. On top of that amount, Pagliuca would earmark $100 million for a new practice facility to be built in Boston. The Sun would have their games in TD Garden by 2027, even if that meant spending the early part of their season in Rhode Island to get around any playoff schedules for the Bruins or Celtics.

The Minnesota Lynx absolutely obliterated the Las Vegas Aces on Saturday, 111-58—the 53-point victory breaking a 1998 record for the biggest road win in WNBA history. While Aces fans didn't get much of a showing from the home team, they were treated to a better effort from the contestants of the halftime baby race.

The baby race is the best: a game in which confused infants attempt to crawl to a parent at the other end of a court. As halftime shows go, it’s up there with Red Panda, little kids playing basketball, and either of the two guys I’ve seen who balance things on their chin. (I prefer Amazing Tyler to the Amazing Chin Balancer.)

Jerry Jones has yet to find a contract negotiation he won't drag out. Since 2023, the Dallas Cowboys owner has run the same routine with star players Zack Martin, CeeDee Lamb, and Dak Prescott: Lowball, refuse to budge in public, then end up paying more at the last minute. This recurring saga livens up the period before the season begins, and it's certainly more compelling than any of the Cowboys' recent playoff runs.

But this year's edition, featuring Micah Parsons, has taken an interesting turn. The Pro Bowl defensive end chose not to drag out this process until the start of September. On Friday, he publicly requested a trade as he explained his frustration.

After the 2023 season, when the Mariners narrowly missed out on the playoffs despite having 90 percent odds of making it at the start of September, Jerry Dipoto traded Eugenio Suárez to the Arizona Diamondbacks in exchange for relief pitcher Carlos Vargas and White Sox legen...

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

Your team: New Orleans Saints.

Emmanuel Clase's paid leave has screwed up some plans. The news that the All-Star closer is involved in MLB’s sports betting investigation “did not simply deprive the Cleveland Guardians of their top trade chip,” The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal reports, but also “ended any chan...

Welcome to The Backlog, a series in which we will take a look back at 12 games from 2020 that, in one way or another, had a lasting impact on the video game industry.

The summer of 2020 was a strange one. I remember spending afternoons in a park by my apartment in Brooklyn, a park that had drawn circles in the fake grass six feet apart from each other. I saw friends there, sat on picnic blankets and drank out in public, and even got a ticket for it once like an idiot. It was a beautiful summer, as far as the weather went, and for every long walk I took, I could push down a bit of the existential paranoia that crept along day-by-day as the COVID pandemic raged on with only whispers of a future vaccine to ebb the tide of disease and death.

I used to run the following tally for famous people with whom I shared a birthday: Vince Vaughn, also tall, famously made a movie where Las Vegas plays a big role; the poet Ada Limón, not so tall, whom I only learned of after high school, not that my friends at the time woul...

Breathtakingly unhinged baseball executive A.J. Preller wasted a lot of time this week calling every other dealmaker in Major League Baseball when all he really had to do was make one call to Minneapolis. Derek Falvey, the head of ball ops with the Minnesota Twins was cleari...

I had an unusually hard time finding a feature photo to go atop this blog. Almost none of this is the fault of the couple of Getty photographers who hang around the Minnesota Twins. For one thing, I was on the hunt for an image of a player who is still on the team. But ahead...

There is a worrying sense at the moment, present across a worryingly large swath of public life, that everything is shrinking. It is not a matter of any of those things dying so much as they are just kind of diminishing and getting worse, either out of simple neglect or as a ...

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

Your team: The house that David Tepper haunts.

Brandy: This was my first read of The Art of Fielding, though I do have memories of it being like, A Book You Should Read back in the day. I’m not sure exactly what I was expecting but I found it quite winsome! It has an undeniable charm and there is a certain quaintness to ...

It is difficult to pinpoint the moment when transactions became more important than games, but it is indisputably true that fans love the movement of players and money from locale to locale for the same reason we love gambling—because it is busy, and because it is another chance to display our ignorance.

Until baseball's trade deadline brings July's annual Month of Bargains to a close later today, we can all imagine what our favorite team is going to do in lieu of delivering any actual work product; this will keep us both frothily engaged and emotionally and fiscally tied to the teams that otherwise drag us down. We love when our team is buying and hate when they are selling, because one implies belief and the other despair. Buying rocks, selling sucks.

On May 11, 2023, Ellerie Ulfers was pitching for Washburn High School against district rival Southwest in a varsity softball game in Minneapolis, Minn. The start time had been moved back 15 minutes, to 3:45 p.m., to accommodate an umpire’s schedule. But Ulfers shook it off; she was used to pitching under pressure and in less-than-ideal conditions—she’d been on the varsity team since the year before, as an eighth grader. (In Minneapolis, since most middle school sports were cut due to budget shortfalls in 2015, middle schoolers play on high school teams.) The game was tense, with the lead going back and forth, and by the end of the sixth inning, the score was tight: Southwest 15–Washburn 13. 

But instead of getting another chance to bat and close out the game, Ulfers and all the other athletes were told to go home. 

And not just from whipping your head around to track another one of his throws sailing past the first baseman. I'll be here all day. Try the veal.

Yankees shortstop Anthony Volpe has a problem. No one involved wants to use the dreaded Y-word. Yips are for Chihuahuas! It's a "defensive slump," according to his manager Aaron Boone. To Volpe, it's simply "this," as in, "I’ve never really experienced something like this." What this is is a newfound and inexplicable inability to throw a baseball where he wants it to go. Volpe has committed three errors in his last two games to push his season total to 16, the most of anyone in MLB.

People are starving in Gaza. They are starving because the Israeli government is not allowing enough food to enter, and because what food becomes sporadically available can be claimed only by those willing to enter the death traps engineered by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundati...

Perhaps you think that a rematch between two teams who played what might be the most thrilling WNBA Finals in league history should have arrived before the penultimate day of July. Sometimes it's best for these things to simmer, though, and in this case the time away served ...

Gilbert Arenas has really gotta stay away from any card game that ain’t solitaire. The onetime Washington Wizards superstar, who tanked his basketball career in 2009 by bringing guns to a fistfight with a teammate over piddly gambling debts, has been arrested again, this time for his role in an allegedly off-the-books poker operation. 

According to the Department of Justice, Arenas was one of several card players—including a man named Yevgeni Gershman, who the DOJ describes as a "suspected organized crime figure from Israel"—taken into custody in Los Angeles today for running a recurring high-stakes game of poker at a house he owned in Encino, Calif. Details in the DOJ's release give the impression that Arenas was essentially arrested for hosting grim men's evenings:

Perhaps you have given yourself over to Cucumber Season and are not paying attention to the dog days of the baseball season. It may then come as news to you that they're touching it. They're all touching it, all the time, and it is working.

After losing 12 of 13, Tigers outfielder Riley Greene shaved off his beard but left his mustache, and since then Detroit has won three straight. Are these two things related? Is the mustache winning baseball games? Who can say. One thing we can say with absolute certainty is that they are touching it, early and often.

This week, Luka Doncic took part in a time-honored tradition employed by many athletes before him: a news cycle about how he's in the best shape of his life. As the Lakers star made a trip to New York, showing up at Yankee Stadium and Dyckman Park to promote a shoe or whatever, Men's Health published a feature on his summer training regimen. One specific detail about his physique sounded incredible, in the literal sense of the word.

The feature, co-written by Andrew Heffernan and Ebenezer Samuel, presents an inside look at how Doncic is getting lean and strong with his trainer in Croatia. You can probably guess where this is going. He's not just getting up shots—he's lifting weights. He's working on his conditioning. He's doing something with a resistance band. He's eating better:

The Boston Red Sox encountered significant turbulence on a team flight to Minneapolis Sunday night. Big deal, you are saying, from the comfort of your office chair. It is at least a moderate deal. We are not talking about the zippy little Space Mountain stuff that makes pass...

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

Your team: THEY’RE A BRICK! HOUSE!/THEY’RE NEVER RIGHTY/THEY’RE LETTIN’ IT ALLLLL HANG OUT

I just read Leo Tolstoy's 1870s novel Anna Karenina for the first time, and I am treating it like a real accomplishment. For basically all of my life, whenever I've heard reference to Tolstoy—OK, mostly War And Peace specifically, but whatever—it's felt like he's been hangin...

I can still remember the sound of the dull thud, and the scream that came after. It was a tournament game, and our pitcher, Paul, was dealing. He always did, because he could throw 80 mph as a 13-year-old, and he never missed the catcher's mitt. Games with Paul on the mound ...

If you’re not a particular kind of mountain sports nerd, you might not be familiar with the Banff Centre Mountain Film Festival World Tour. But for people who live their lives in the overlapping circles of outdoor and adventure sports, environmental and conservation sciences...

A Hall of Fame case does not get built in the same way, or out of the same things, as a legend. There are plenty of Hall of Famers who managed to build compelling cases, in the methodical and accumulative way that such cases are built, without throwing off much in the way of...