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

Your team: Las Vegas, nee Oakland, nee Los Angeles, nee Oakland Raiders.

When scientists discover new prehistoric species, the fossils alone fail to conjure the creature in the flesh. It's impossible to summon the entirety ancient shark from a single tooth, or some weird old rodent from a fragment of a jaw. This is where paleoart comes in, with i...

Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. And buy Drew’s book, The Night The Lights Went Out, while you’re at it. Today, we're talking about lead singers, cooking screwups, whining children, and more.

Drew is off! I am your Dread Funbag Lord for today.

Folks with fancy degrees will tell you that kleptomania is a mental illness, but I bet those doctors never watched a San Diego Padres game. On a couple of occasions already this month, Kelsey has covered how the outfielders of the Robbin' Padres so spectacularly take away wo...

VARIOUS CITIES (SOME ARGUABLY TOWNS), France — The Tour de France is over. I hope you enjoyed the racing and the 11 dispatches I was able to bring you from the race, on topics such as how language works in the peloton, a day in the life of a neutral service mechanic, and Tadej Pogacar's stultifying dominance. This is the last one before I go on vacation.

As I hope to have illustrated, the Tour is less a bike race than a rollicking circus that happens to have a bike race at its center. The bike race and the circus both matter, and I've tried to highlight both, though there were so many strange and delightful things that I saw, heard, and experienced that could not fit into otherwise wieldy blogposts. Instead they will fit here.

Defensive tackle Christian Wilkins was released by the Raiders last week, which immediately scanned as just another instance of the franchise deploying its "trip over your own feet" philosophy of roster construction. Yes, it's strange to release a guy who you just signed to a four-year deal with $84 million guaranteed last offseason, but that's how bad teams do business.

Conscious of how a move like this would look, the Raiders had an explanation ready to be disseminated through various league insiders: Wilkins, who suffered a Jones fracture in his foot last October, was refusing to follow the team's recommendation to have a second surgery on his foot, and therefore the Raiders were not only releasing him but seeking to recoup $35.2 million of guaranteed money that remains on his contract.

I am sitting on a dock in the Wisconsin sun. About 15 feet away, Livi Pappadopoulos and Aini Anderson are walking on water. The first and (now) second-ranked women in logrolling are sharing a No. 3 log (13 inches in diameter, No. 3 because it is third-widest) and a full conv...

A 32-point, eight-rebound, seven-assist, four-steal, two-block performance is just the kind of thing you can expect from Napheesa Collier these days. She began the year favored to win MVP, and halfway through the WNBA season, she’s done nothing to sway voters in any another ...

On Monday, ESPN's Jeff Passan reported, and the Cleveland Guardians confirmed with an official statement, that Guardians closer Emmanuel Clase has been placed on "non-disciplinary paid leave as part of MLB's sports-betting investigation" until Aug. 31. This leave comes as pa...

A Gaelic football season of massive upheaval ended just like so many others had: With Kerry winning another All-Ireland championship. The recognized all-time kings of the game, now led by David Clifford, who at 26 years old is already hailed as history’s greatest Gael footba...

In the current my-truth era everyone is not just permitted but encouraged to pretend they're right whether or not they actually are. The deranged and deranging downsides of this are obvious and everywhere, but one of the smaller of those is that heroes are by now pretty much...

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

Your team: Jacksonville Jaguars.

The first time I did yoga was in a beachside studio in Ewa Beach, Hawaii in 2010. I was visiting my family there for the summer and my mom had recently become a regular at the studio. I remember the smell of incense in the stifling room and the shapes of other womens' bodies prone on their multicolored mats, completely locked into whatever physio-spiritual ritual I had stumbled into.

I felt uncomfortable with the amount of chanting we did, but I liked the movement in the class enough to come back the next week. In the 15 years since I took that class, I've introduced several friends and romantic partners to yoga and I recognize the look of intimidation in their eyes when they first enter a studio with low light and lofi beats playing.

CC Sabathia became a star in Cleveland, and became a champion in New York, and this weekend became a Hall of Famer in Cooperstown—but I will always think of Milwaukee. Possibly the greatest midseason rental of all time, Sabathia's 17 starts that carried the 2008 Brewers to t...

It's time to to wrap up the month with a challenging themeless. Keep an eye out for tricky clues and fun wordplay. This week’s puzzle was constructed by Willa Angel Chen Miller and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu.

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. Note that our submissions are closed through July 31. 

PARIS — Four hours before the final stage of the Tour de France begins, I walk the length of the last, newest climb on the race parcours. This is only possible on the course itself, as thousands of fans have packed themselves dense against the barriers, the lucky few enjoyin...

Before this year's rendition of the Belgian Grand Prix, it was all feeling a little bit 2021. The Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps that year was wet and untenable. With race direction unwilling to cancel the event, the cars paraded about for two laps under the safety car before ...

After 360 minutes of knockout play, two penalty shootouts, and three comebacks, England is the back-to-back champion of Europe. Despite losing its first game of Euro 2025 against France, and despite an arduous run to the final that further extended into extra time and penalties, England held off the reigning World Cup winner Spain to lift the trophy thanks to a 3-1 penalty shootout win. It was the last gutsy victory in a line of gutsy victories, each seeing England down and out but never completely lost. The Lionesses are worthy champions, even if they only led for a total of four minutes in the knockout rounds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99bgTARgKD8

The new Fantastic Four movie came out this weekend, and both Luis Paez-Pumar and Lauren Theisen went to theaters to see it. Here are four thoughts that they shared about the reboot of Marvel’s first family.

1. This is yet another superhero blockbuster, but it’s nice that it’s more about space explorers than crime fighters.

PARIS — Tadej Pogacar rolled across the line atop La Plagne wet and miserable. The yellow jersey appeared to weigh him down, like a suit of armor worn to guard against heavy blows which couldn't reach him anyway. His expression never shifted out of bland disgruntlement the e...

Dominique Malonga is an unusual player in unusual circumstances for a rookie. Most lottery picks are consigned to at least one year of joker teammates, demoralizing blowouts, and moral victories only. “Being bad” is generally the reason teams end up in the lottery at all. Fi...

If there’s a line that sums up Such Brave Girls, it might be this one: "Remember the family crest: Ignore, Repress, Forget." The extremely British show, now in its second season on Hulu, isn’t one to let subtlety get in the way of its satire. Such Brave Girls follows the al...

ALBERTVILLE, France — Hours before the start of Stage 19 of the Tour de France, the day's real competition is already well underway. Civilians and workers alike stalk the caravan, seeking goodies. A gendarme engages in barter with a representative from La Vache Qui Rit ...

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

Like everything else in 2025, algorithms and social media deeply influence how people experience the arts, music most of all. In light of these invisible hands that more or less dictate online music exploration, and the growing desire to rebel against them as seen in the comeback of physical media, it is worth thinking about what "personal taste" really means today.

Gene Upshaw would come to town once a year, usually in the middle of the week. There we were, the Denver Broncos, an NFL football team going through the routine of our football preparation, speaking football language, watching football film, taking football hits, and trainin...

On Thursday, longtime Barcelona goalkeeper Marc-André ter Stegen announced via an open letter to the club's fans that he will undergo back surgery, and that as a result he will miss "about three months." A short while later, the club reportedly leaked through Catalonian radi...

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

Your team: New England Patriots.

Fifteen years ago in a sanctuary in Zambia, inspiration struck a chimpanzee named Julie. She plucked a stiff blade of grass, stuck it inside her ear, and left it there. There the grass dangled as Julie played, groomed, and rested. The behavior soon spread to most of the other chimpanzees in Julie's group, called Group 4, and was adopted by her son Jack and chimps Kathy, Miracle, and Val. In the span of just one year, Julie was observed with grass in her ear 168 times; by comparison, the next most frequent observer was Kathy, with 36 grass-in-ear sightings. After Julie died in 2013, her invention lived on, with Kathy and Val carrying the torch.

In the mid-to-late '90s, I was part of a girl gang that invaded suburban homes across the top half of New Jersey. We left our clothes strewn across various surfaces in your carpeted basements, ate your Snackwells in the wee hours, and wrote weird notes to your awkward eldest...

Terry Bollea died on Thursday. The former professional wrestler was 71 years old. According to his longtime manager, Bollea died at his home in Clearwater, Fla.; different reports say that paramedics responded at dawn to an emergency call reporting that Bollea was suffering ...