On a point-by-point basis, I will remember nothing about the women's final at Wimbledon. Iga Swiatek's 6-0, 6-0 win over Amanda Anisimova on Saturday, which lasted just 57 minutes, was the least competitive major final in recent memory. Swiatek had played for five major fina...

Sometimes you find yourself remembering a book. Such was the case a few weeks ago, when someone dropped this tweet into our DRAB Slack channel. "In 2012 it seemed like every single person in New York City was reading The Art of Fielding," it said. "On Goodreads it ...

On Jan. 21, 2025, Molly was serving lunch in the prison cafeteria when a fellow trans inmate shared the news with her: A day earlier Donald Trump had signed an executive order declaring the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) was prohibited from spending money on any gender-affirming ca...

Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano go at it again at Madison Square Garden tonight. The fight’s being promoted as the biggest in the history of women’s boxing. Who could argue? It’s the first female trilogy match-up of note, in the most famous boxing arena in the world, and the previous two bouts were iconic thrillers. 

But as of this week, tickets from greedy Ticketmaster could be had for under $44, greedy fees included. That’s an astonishingly low get-in price for a fistic Garden party of such stature. The cheapest seat at the same building a night later for the Weird Al Yankovic show will run you about twice as much. 

Welcome back to Make It Nice, Defector’s best design advice column. This month: A search for an attractive ceiling fan, a layout for a tricky bungalow bedroom, and ideas for making the most out of a multi-use workspace.

Alyssa asks:

Ben Healy races his bike like a Frenchman, which is to say that his creativity, pain tolerance, and willingness to gamble extend beyond the scope of his abilities. The Irish rider debuted at the 2024 Tour de France determined to win a stage, and while he rode bravely and twi...

If a typically tight, unexciting late-stage tournament match can be redeemed with a great goal, João Pedro was the savior that Tuesday's Club World Cup semifinal between Chelsea and Fluminense needed. Twice the Brazilian injected into the game the kind of inspiration and pinpoint precision that was otherwise in short supply. His first goal was a long-range beauty, an almost golf-like shot where João Pedro patiently settled the ball, lined up his target, scoped out the hazards in between him and it, measured his approach, and ripped a drive into the far-side netting. His second goal was even better, a strike of such force and purity and exactitude of footwork that I'm compelled to include the following video, which appropriately focuses on nothing but the shooting technique itself:

https://twitter.com/ChelseaFC/status/1942733236205150275

Private equity is the steamroller that crushes all your favorite things. Journalism, for one, and also a once iconic toy store; even bowling these days. Now it has come for minor league baseball, where in little more than three years one private equity firm has managed to buy up a healthy percentage of the MiLB teams in the United States. 

Diamond Baseball Holdings, a company backed by the private equity firm Silver Lake, has acquired 45 Minor League Baseball teams since its creation in late 2021. They own teams from coast to coast, in cities big and small. This means one company now owns more than 35 percent of all minor league baseball teams. And it shows no sign of slowing down. 

The news that the NFL and the Players Association hierarchy colluded to hide an allegation of collusion ought to be more surprising, and not just because the story has been leaking out in drips and drabs for two weeks now. After first being broken by Meadowlark Media's Pablo...

Might as well get it out of the way: Bill Ackman's tennis game is not humiliating in itself. If it's Ackman's humiliation you seek, might I direct you to: his hammy and conspiratorial screeds on Twitter; his use of antisemitism as a cheap cudgel against college administrator...

After two full rounds of the 2025 Euros group stage, every title contender has some kind of weakness. Germany can't stop anyone, Spain can't stop any counter attack, and France is in the middle of a generation shift (which is less a flaw and more of an intentional change, th...

There was a good deal of weather around La Crosse, Wisconsin while I was there. We had several tornado sirens and a couple of touchdowns in neighboring counties. The street I was staying on flooded a few times, and a couple drivers got their cars stuck in the water. People f...

Fair warning: this article is a podcast. I didn’t want you coming into this thinking I was gonna reel off 2,000 touching words about my family or whatever. No, this is a mercenary post. Distraction co-host David Roth is out this week on vacation, fondling gross gas tanks and politely eating lobster rolls. The usual Roth in Maine shit.

That means that I got to be in charge of the proceedings this week, so I recruited both longtime pod favorite Rohan Nadkarni and TV/blogging legend Michael Schur to join me for an hour. This was a fun prospect at first, until both men decided to gang up on me—their host, their friend, their inspiration—for always putting bacon on my burger. After that, the show devolved into a vicious assault that arguably merits prosecution. Is it fair to bully me for bacon? THAT is the subject of this week’s Distraction.

I recently started the seminal baseball book Ball Four, Jim Bouton's diary of the 1969 season. As the book opens, Bouton is staring down the last days of his career. He was a young star for a couple of seasons with the Yankees, but his failure to live up to that early promis...

In almost all cases, if I am referring to someone as a Barf Man, the term is not meant to be taken literally. To me there is almost nothing worse than barfing, and there is certainly no substance worse than barf. A Barf Man, therefore, would be a guy who sucks real bad. It's...

Since its inception, the American version of the hit reality dating phenomenon Love Island has been something of a red-headed stepchild. It wasn’t until last season—which produced not only 30-odd episodes of high-octane hijinks but three couples whose relationships remain so...

Before one copy showed up on a bookstore shelf, Christine Brennan’s new book had women’s basketball abuzz. The longtime sports columnist began reporting On Her Game: Caitlin Clark and the Revolution in Women’s Sports last summer, midway through Clark’s rookie seaso...

Through two games at Euro 2025, Germany hasn't been the most impressive of top sides. The results flatter to deceive. After beating Poland 2-0 in the opener, Germany came back from a 1-0 deficit to beat Denmark 2-1, thereby qualifying for the knockout rounds. That's a tidy r...

When last we checked in on Grok, Twitter's supremely grating and corny embedded chatbot, it had spent an otherwise ordinary weekday in May attempting to impress upon Twitter users the seriousness of the supposed "white genocide" not actually happening in Elon Musk's homeland...

Seattle Mariners catcher Cal Raleigh might just be the best player in baseball this year. There's no need for equivocation when it comes to his nickname, though. "Big Dumper" is the finest sobriquet in the league, and no arguments to the contrary will be heard.

Having an opposing player named Big Dumper come to town is also easy fodder for local broadcasters, who get to regale viewers with the nickname's backstory—it's what you think it is: he has a huge ass—alongside their astonishment at Raleigh's MVP-caliber numbers. But leave it to Michael Kay, one of the weirdest and most curmudgeonly announcers in baseball, to sneer at the majesty of Raleigh's backside.

After long-lived rumors of a power struggle among Red Bull leadership, and allegations of misconduct by a female Red Bull employee, and the suspension of said Red Bull employee for being "dishonest," and meticulous displays of wifely affection in the paddock, and Max Verstap...

There is a difference between robbing and burgling. When you burgle, you waltz in somewhere you're not supposed to be—maybe you force your entry, maybe you don't, but it must be illegal for you to be there—with the intention of taking stuff. It is a property crime. Robbery, however, requires a direct victim. When you rob, you are taking an item or items from someone right there in front of you. The Padres love robbing.

San Diego is making a habit of this. Last week, center fielder Jackson Merrill leapt up in Philadelphia and yoinked a home run ball back into the field of play. Mine! He might have said. He got a taste for crime, and now he cannot stop. Worse (or better depending on your perspective), his crimes were so beautiful that his teammate Fernando Tatis Jr is copying them!

In June, Florida’s attorney general James Uthmeier extolled the benefits of the concentration camp they were rushing to build in the wetlands of the Big Cypress Nature Reserve, west of Miami and just north of the Everglades. The swamp location wasn’t incidental to the 5,000-...

Last night on Love Island USA, a game show my wife watches while I'm in the room, the remaining male contestants played basketball. I do not know if this was part of the contest or just a pick-up game where the players happened to be wearing mic packs. However I do know, via osmosis, that one of the dudes on the show is a professional basketball player.

According to an article on NBC.com titled "Who Is Chris Seeley from Love Island USA? All About His Basketball Career & More," the 6-foot-8 forward played in college for Utah, Fresno State and Division II Cal State–Dominguez Hills (the Toros). Stats on kenpom.com show Seeley played 20 Division I games and made 14 of his 30 free throws. Per Eurobasket, he has played in Australia, France, Kosovo, North Macedonia and, this year, Indonesia.

It's fitting that, 15 years after LeBron James created the most memorable summer in NBA history, we finally have an offseason storyline that threatens to surpass The Decision in its ramifications. It's the question that is dominating every discussion, that every NBA insider ...

On Thursday night, right before a long summer holiday weekend, the New York Times published a triple-bylined bombshell: 16 years ago, in an application form for a college that ultimately did not accept him, New York City Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani checked the boxes for both "Asian" and "African-American." Since the widespread negative reaction toward that article, the newspaper has scrambled to revise its original intent.

The scoop itself could not have been possible without a hack of Columbia University's computers, the purpose of this breach being to find any evidence that the school was still using affirmative action in admissions after the Supreme Court's reversal in 2023. Among the data was Mamdani's 2009 application. The Ugandan-born politician explained why he filled it out in that way to the Times:

The peerless superiority of the Spain women's national soccer team is primarily a matter of technique. There's no national team in the world that can put so many exquisite technical players on the field at the same time. When the Spaniards have the ball—and they always have ...

Tadej Pogacar's 100th win as a professional rider was a perfect synecdoche of the other 99, partially in how he won it and partially because of who finished second and third on the day. In an interview just after crossing the line, he characterized Tuesday's Stage 4 of the 2...

In addition to being deeply bad, the Washington Nationals are also profoundly unserious. These traits tend to go together, but sometimes do not. A rebuilding team can be a serious one, so long as its actions follow a path of logic, and so long as that logic is bound to the g...

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 fear of flying, robot body parts, fancy parties, and more.

Before we get into today’s proceedings, I am officially opening up submissions for the 2025 edition of Why Your Team Sucks. Most of you already know the drill, but new contributors are not only welcome into the fold here, but actively desired. So here’s what you need to do: