Welcome back to Minor Dilemmas, where a member of Defector's Parents Council will answer your questions on surviving family life. Have a question? Email us at minordilemmas@defector.com.
This week, Albert answers a question about kids and lying.
Technically, the Chicago Sky are not the worst team in the WNBA right now by record; that honor would belong to either of the teams with one fewer win, the Connecticut Sun or the Seattle Storm. But after Monday's WNBA slate, which featured the Sky's 92-63 loss to the Sun, an...
The San Francisco Giants have permission from Major League Baseball to wear Pride-themed gear. This was explained by commissioner Rob Manfred in a recent letter to Josh Hawley, Republican senator from Missouri. The Giants and Dodgers have a special exemption: Other teams hav...
In 2018, I became convinced that flamenco had South Asian origins. I hadn’t listened to much flamenco, if any at all, until my roommate Jake introduced me to Rosalía. I watched her dance—using her feet to strike the ground, making an instrument of her body, raising her arms ...
NEWARK, N.J. — I went to Delaney Hall, a privately run ICE jail in Newark, New Jersey, for the second time on June 12, three weeks after 300-plus detainees initiated a hunger and labor strike. The strikers’ demands include an audience with Governor Mikie Sherrill, the releas...
For a little while there, it looked like Texas Tech quarterback Brendan Sorsby was going to wriggle out of this jam. After committing the historically career-ending sin of gambling on his own team, he won a preliminary injunction against the NCAA, overturning their ruling th...
Miami has been of two minds on the anti-aging serum that is Pat Riley for about a decade now, roughly since LeBron James pissed off back to Cleveland. This is mostly because 1) Riley was getting old, except of course facially, where he's been 45 since he was 20, and 2) becau...
As if they were trying to win the 2019 NBA Championship seven years too late, the horrible Washington Wizards made two of the most interesting moves at the deadline last year, relieving the Dallas Mavericks of Anthony Davis in exchange for basically one good first-round pick...
The first round of the NBA Draft is tonight! Who will go first overall? Will any of the top four teams deviate from consensus? In what order will the huge swarm of point guards go after the fourth pick? On this week's Nothing But Respect, we answer some of these questions, but we also get into larger-order matters of draft philosophy, scouting, and why draft people use such crazy language. Our guest this week was David Lee, the writer and analyst, not the former NBA All-Star.
We also discussed Harry's new podcast/magazine project, TRANCHE 001. He put together five one-off podcast episodes with smart, interesting people from around the internet on such topics as the Palantir chore coat, Chaotic Good and the question of the Geese psy-op that drove people crazy, and the history of the word "based." It's only $5, which is a steal.
Thanks to the luck of the draw and the blessing of the soccer gods, Monday was the second matchday of this World Cup in which all three of Lionel Messi, Kylian Mbappé, and Erling Haaland took the field in back-to-back-to-back matches. Thanks to sheer superhuman talent on dis...
For half a century, a house on the coast in southern Lebanon has kept vigil over Al-Mansouri beach and the blue Mediterranean waters beyond. Mona Khalil's grandfather built the house in the 1970s, around seven miles from the border with Israel. A decade later, the Khalil fam...
If there is a funnier MLB broadcast duo than Jason Benetti and Andy Dirks, I am not familiar with their work. Regardless of how the Tigers are playing, you can guarantee that Benetti will arrive at the booth ready to pepper his play-by-play with clever one-liners, deep-cut r...
Waist Deep, the debut novel and international bestseller by Danish writer Linea Maja Ernst, reads like it's inspired equally by television sitcoms and A Midsummer Night's Dream. The premise of Waist Deep fits both genres, with an ensemble cast in a cinematic location: Five o...
It's over! The Milwaukee Bucks finally did it: Late Monday night, they picked the better of two competing offers and finally agreed to ship out differently gruntled superstar and franchise icon Giannis Antetokounmpo. That deal sent him to the Miami Heat in exchange for a blo...
In March, Vivian, an undocumented transgender sex worker from the state of Chiapas, Mexico, was driving from San Diego to her house in Santa Ana when her biggest fear came true: She was stopped by Immigration and Customs Enforcement at a traffic checkpoint. "Thank God they l...
After a few months of cheeky silence and misdirection, plus an experiment on the doubles court, Serena Williams is completing her comeback to professional tennis. The 44-year-old has accepted a wild card into the singles main draw at Wimbledon, which begins next week, causin...
The San Francisco Giants are a stinking cesspool of bad vibes and bad baseball. That is not the newsy part of this post.
Sure, the Giants' place in the standings (currently 15 games below .500) and the collection of petulant homophobes on the roster have given the publ...
Fresh off reasserting his extraterrestrial talent by opening his sixth World Cup with a hat trick, Lionel Messi proved on Monday that he is in fact still human. Seven minutes into the match between Argentina and Austria, Lautaro Martínez sprinted through on goal only to be t...
Alan Greenspan died Monday. The longtime Fed chairman was once hailed as the most powerful man in the world. Greenspan was 100 years old.
Back to me: A couple of cool, smart, and nice D.C. friends of mine wrote a book that came out in the summer of 2009, and other cool, sma...
Every international tournament, the widely used and abused "dark horse" designation is bandied about as pundits, fans, and cretins (gamblers) try to be the first to predict a deep run for an unexpected team. The term dark horse itself is vague enough to apply to about half t...
Things big and small are going bad for Donald Trump. He’s losing bad enough on land and at sea in Iran, but worse at a pool back in D.C. One might say the growing algae debacle on the National Mall left him up shit's creek without a paddle, and so he had an Olympic can...
The Father's Day crowd in downtown Detroit was likely unanimous in its disappointment that Keider Montero was on the hill for the Tigers. It's nothing personal against Keider, but until a few days prior, this game against the White Sox was looking far more momentous. Justin ...
Special solvers solve special crosswords. This week's puzzle was constructed by Erik Agard and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Erik is a crossword editor and would like to dedicate this puzzle to his dad John and brother Vince, the football fans of the family (le...
Last week, the U.S. military killed eight people and stranded six others in three illegal boat strikes, bringing the total number of people killed by “Operation Southern Spear” to at least 215. The ongoing campaign—allegedly targeting drug smuggling—has long ceased to be maj...
Brady Tkachuk will join his co-podcaster Matthew on the Mar-a-Lago Panthers. Let's address the hockey stuff first. A scary forward group gets even scarier, and more irritating to play against; there are no real soft spots or ceded shifts in the three top lines. After a lost ...
On Sunday, Cape Verde scored one of the best and most meaningful goals of the 2026 World Cup. In the 21st minute of their group-stage game against historic powerhouse Uruguay, just the second World Cup game in the tiny archipelagic nation's history, midfielder Kevin Pina sto...
There's really no such thing as a "team." If you've ever come across a guy in an Argentina jersey playing with a soccer ball at the park, and watched as he managed about three clumsy kick-ups before accidentally toe-poking it down a hill (by the way, next time you see me out...
If there has been a worse performance in World Cup history than Tunisia's, be content. They still have one more chance to cement their place.
The Eagles of Carthage are already eliminated from the competition after failing to keep an audience against Japan last night somewh...
Among the things COVID does not get credited for—and think of the last time you read that sentence—is the way it has helped bad baseball teams perfect the art of bottoming out. Since the pandemic made us more comfortable with the idea of catastrophes, we have seen the worst ...
We can cancel the last 66 games of the World Cup right now and fast forward to the final, because we've seen all we have a right to see. Put Curacao and Cape Verde in the final, make it The Revenge Of The Postage Stamp Nations and call it a win. The final may take three days...
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