Indiana Pacers backup guard T.J. McConnell exemplifies a type of basketball player I generally regard with disgust: the Skittering Little Rat Guy. This is the frenzied little gremlin always very visibly going 40 percent harder than anybody else at every single moment, consta...

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.

One of the more exhausting arguments you can have about video games grapples with the idea of value. Specifically, can video games be valuable as an art form? Truly, this doesn't matter at all. Enjoy what you enjoy and if you get value from it, then hell yeah, that rocks. And if someone tells you that video games are stupid or worthless or whatever else, then don't let that take away from your enjoyment and connection to a specific game.

As a general rule, if we are talking about politics on the podcast it is not going to be about good news. That just isn't the way that people talk about politics, but more to the point our politics just have not generated a lot of good news of late. This hasn't kept us from t...

“In 20 yrs, this will all be commonplace.” These words were first penned in 2008 by Chloe Dzubilo. A trans femme, recovered heroin addict, and long-term HIV survivor who had stayed alive more than three decades after she was first diagnosed with a virus that killed her part...

The first round of the NBA draft on Thursday was pretty boring, with a few exceptions. Ace Bailey's strange, oafish attempts to get himself on an East Coast team of his choosing ended with him going to the Utah Jazz at No. 5. The New Orleans Pelicans made what appears to be ...

I want Jacob Misiorowski's internet. This fresh-faced child gets wholesome baseball. "I feel like everything I swiped was me and Skenes, me and Skenes, me and Skenes," said Milwaukee's fire-breather of a rookie pitcher, of the days before his start Wednesday, the third of hi...

The run-up to every NBA Draft has a pleasant, familiar rhythm. Some prospects distinguish themselves in workouts, while some leap up or crash down draft boards after their wingspans and standing reaches are measured. People deploy some of the most fluorescent comparative lan...

On Thursday, ESPN's Jeff Passan published a blog about Jacob Wilson, the West Sacramento A's rookie shortstop currently having a very impressive offensive season of the Luis Arráez variety. He is rocking the second-lowest strikeout rate in the league (behind Arráez) and the second-highest squared-up contact rate in the league (behind Arráez), and, perhaps expected of a man born in the Year of our Lord 2002, Wilson attributes his success to Fortnite.

"Kids are going to love this one. Parents are going to hate me," Wilson said. "I am a big believer in video games. It's fast decision-making strategy. I think that gets me ready for the game, because when you're in the box, you have to process a lot."

If there is one takeaway from Zohran Mamdani's victory in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary on Tuesday, it's that there is no one takeaway. The democratic socialist and his wide-ranging canvassing team built a coalition that brought in voters of all backgrounds, l...

LOS ANGELES—Few have been spared in the raids. They’ve taken people who came to Southern California from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. They’ve taken people from garment shops, street carts, farms, packinghouses, taquerias, big-box stores, home-...

In the winter, my television mostly stays off. The winter is when my brain is at its best. I am reading. I am writing. I am maybe watching a couple episodes of a show a week. But this feels crazy to type right now, at this moment in the summer, because I currently have a minimum of four hours of television I must watch every single day. I do not have time to read or have hobbies or do anything else, because I am too busy being locked the hell in. 

Television has been my best friend for several weeks because of two shows that come on every day. The first show is baseball. I am a Phillies fan, and baseball teams play 162 games over the course of six months every year. I watch most of them. But then I am also committed to another kind of sport called Love Island. 

Like many great Brazilian funk albums, pressing play on Halc DJ's Bruxaria Não É Phonk is a little like fitting a jackhammer bit into your ear canal and waiting for the impending sonic onslaught to render you utterly, blissfully destroyed. Surprisingly, Halc makes you wait a...

Ketel Marte was 23 years old when his mother died in July 2017. He'd recently been summoned to the Arizona Diamondbacks from Triple-A Reno, where he'd been clobbering to smithereens the best pitching of the minor leagues. Marte had already played an accumulated season-plus o...

It's the hottest week of the year in New York City, but the Mets have been ice cold. Leaders of the NL East by five-and-a-half games less than two weeks ago, the boys from Queens now trail the Phillies by 1.5 because of a putrid ongoing stretch where they've lost 10 of 11. That slide includes Tuesday night's fall-from-ahead defeat at home, where even the much-anticipated team debut of 29-year-old reliever Richard "Dicky" Lovelady didn't provide the fans any pleasure.

Part of the sting of the Mets' slump has come from the fact that they're losing to three of the most frustrating and annoying franchises on the schedule. They got swept by the Rays in three by a combined score of 24-9. They managed one win in Philly to break up 10-2 and 7-1 drubbings. And if you didn't know already, I bet you can guess the remaining tormentor: the Atlanta Braves.

A yoga empire struggles to reckon with its past after its guru is named as an abuser.

Eagle-eyed trackheads following the Ostrava Golden Spike in Czechia might have noticed American hurdler Chris Robinson, an NCAA champion at Alabama, winning the 400 meters with some unorthodox form. Midway through the event, Robinson began reaching, after every hurdle, to adjust himself in a way familiar to any penis-haver. Surely even a top track athlete would not be able to win a race, let alone in a season-best 48.05 seconds, with his dong flapping around. Going balls out usually does not lend itself to going balls out.

Some research was needed. Track's not a huge deal here in the States, and the only video existed as a livestream on a subscription service. So we turn to the Swedes, who you'd expect to be all over a penis if one presented itself in Lane 3. From national sport newspaper Sportbladet:

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 socks, mowing the lawn, filth, and more.

My apologies for a shorter than usual bag today. I’m just coming off of a week of work in the field for SF Gate, and I’ve already started in on Why Your Team Sucks, the debut which is on the horizon. So I’ve been a touch squeezed. But fear not, the take lab is still bustling and ready to produce more sterling content for you in the coming weeks and months.

Back in January, an arbitration case between the NFL and the NFL Players' Association came to a quiet end. The case was initiated by a grievance filed by the NFLPA in 2022, which argued that NFL owners had colluded with each other to deny players fully guaranteed contracts. ...

The Las Vegas Aces are bad. Not “bad by their championship standards"—just kind of bad. Two years ago, they lost six games total. In less than a third of this season, they have lost seven. By the grace of the incredibly forgiving WNBA playoff system, they are, with a 6-7 rec...

In the hours before Game 7 of the NBA Finals on Sunday, ESPN desk analyst Kendrick Perkins fielded a contrived gambling question about whether or not Chet Holmgren would score 15 points. His reasoning was that Holmgren would, since the Oklahoma City Thunder big had expressed frustration with his previous performance. Or anyway, that's all the reasoning Perkins could fit in before Stephen A. Smith cut him off to scream about how his co-host was annoying him, because things are different in the NBA Finals. Right before the segment mercifully cut to commercial, Bob Myers mounted a defense of Perkins that wound up being a scathing indictment of the whole operation. "Just because you yell something, doesn't mean it's true," he said.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ztug-Ebgss

In July of 2022, Joyce Carol Oates tweeted that her literary agent friend told her editors are no longer interested in reading first novels by young white male writers, “no matter how good.” She was saying this in support of an article by former New York Times columnist Pame...

Look at that image above. Really look at it. Now. And do not avert your eyes. Satan went to a lot of work to make this happen, and that work must be honored with your attention.

Yes, that is Rob Manfred and John Fisher, shown commemorating the upcoming 70th anniversary of the creation of The Jetsons, in Las Vegas. These two came complete with ill-fitting hard hats jammed unconvincingly onto their hydrocephalic heads, just in case lightning finally, belatedly strikes them down. They are there to celebrate the production of a sign that says a baseball field will be built on a specific site, and they are smiling to celebrate their mutual refusal to consider the evil and greed and stupidity and general imperviousness to failure that they are honoring this day. They look happy, all told.

There is a specific and lacerating shame that comes with talking about New York City politics in places where people who do not live in New York City can hear you. This is not just because the people involved are so often so embarrassing. The alpha goofiness of current Mayor...

The base, corrupting, disenchanting influence of money has allegedly been right on the cusp of ruining everything good, noble, and just plain fun about soccer for almost a century and a half now. An easy year to point to here would be 1885, when England FA's settled the roar...

Welcome to Margin of Error, a politics column from Tom Scocca, editor of the Indignity newsletter.

Five days and multiple government-inflicted catastrophes ago, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer tried to tell people to get their priorities straight. The Supreme Court had just ruled that Tennessee could ban medical treatment for trans youth, in a decision that Justice Sonia Sotomayor described in dissent as "indefensible" and having "no constitutional justification." In response to that news, Schumer put up a post on Bluesky:  

I was convinced it was happening again. With 7:41 left in Sunday night's NBA Finals Game 7, the Oklahoma City Thunder took a 22-point lead, a lead that would have felt insurmountable against any other team in the league. But there is no other team in the league like the In...

In January 2024, Semafor media reporter Max Tani published a small scoop: Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman and writer Buzz Bissinger (most famous for authoring Friday Night Lights) were working together on Fetterman’s memoir, which was to be titled Unfettered and focus on...

No soap operas, just crosswords. This week's puzzle was constructed by Matthew Stock and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Matthew is a crossword constructor in Gainesville, Fla., where he is pursuing a master’s degree in counseling. His puzzles have been published in the New York Times, USA Today, and the New Yorker, among other venues. When he’s not making puzzles, Matthew enjoys cooking, birdwatching and playing ultimate frisbee.

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. 

There are a lot of things we deserve as people. A rational world in which killing civilians for amusement is not an acceptable instrument of foreign policy, as just one farfetched example. But for sports fans, "deserve" is one of those verbs that works way too hard for its w...

Richard Jefferson's exact words—so help me God—were, "If Tyrese Haliburton was still playing, and it was a 15-point lead with six minutes to go, that's right where the Pacers like it." Neither Mike Breen nor Doris Burke seized the opportunity to club Jefferson over the head ...