The inevitable has happened. The Phoenix Suns have traded Kevin Durant to the Houston Rockets, as first reported by Shams Charania. In return for the 36-year-old 15-time All-Star, Phoenix gets Jalen Green, Dillon Brooks, the No. 10 pick in this year's draft, and five future second-round picks.
The Rockets reportedly made Durant's small list of preferred trade destinations, but the Suns were still able to wrangle a decent haul for the perennially disgruntled superstar. For his part, Durant learned he was being traded while on stage for a panel at Fanatics Fest in New York City.
A week before I was hired at Defector, I decided to quit vaping. This was kind of a while ago now, but I still have good days and bad. Today is a good day; I haven't even needed a patch today. Yesterday was a rough one. On rough days, I will go buy one single shitty poverty ...
Fifty years ago, the hot comedy skit was Saturday Night Live’s “Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead!”, a play on the coverage of the Spanish dictator’s demise. That gag came to mind when I read yet another update on the terminally ill Washington Post, a newspaper that I delivered each morning back when the Franco punchline and the newspaper were among the biggest deals in town.
Washington City Paper reported earlier this week that, after this weekend, the Post will no longer have a standalone Metro section in its print edition. The paper told subscribers about the move in an email from executive editor Matt Murray. From City Paper’s story:
For the first time in American sports history, a team has been sold on an 11-figure valuation. News broke Wednesday that the Buss family has agreed to sell a controlling share of Los Angeles Lakers to Mark Walter of TWG Global and Guggenheim Partners in a deal valuing the fr...
The best pitchers in baseball were going to pitch on the same day! In the same place! Walking distance from my home! On a day I didn’t have to work! This dream confluence would give me a chance to watch reigning Cy Young winner Tarik Skubal, always a delight, and my first in...
On Thursday night the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres, who do not like each other, completed a four-game series in which eight batters were hit by pitches. Even excluding the incidents in the previous three-game series the two teams played earlier this month, that's...
Reading or watching the news has become a real nightmare for me, as I imagine it must be for anyone reading this. Each day seems to bring some new horror or tragedy, and if the non-stop procession of bad news itself doesn't desensitize you, there's all those hucksters out th...
True heat—the overwhelming hot wall that hits you the minute you step out of a door, that takes your breath and makes it into more humidity, that rips the thoughts from your brain and crumples them—is oppressive. It's exhausting. It's unlivable. And it is here.
Starting Fri...
When it comes to my daughter, I try to live in the moment. I stumbled into this paradigm in March of 2023, when Nora was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder at the age of 2. Nora is 4 now—a fiery, intelligent young lady who leads her classmates in preschool group activit...
It seemed like a small thing at the time. Before last Saturday's game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Francisco Giants at Dodger Stadium, the singer Nezza performed "The Star-Spangled Banner" in Spanish, even after being told not to by team representatives, in a symb...
The Pacers and Thunder have constructed a series that has put the lie to the notion that there are insurmountable leads in basketball. The 20-point lead, once the gold standard, is now 30, and even then there's a little white-knuckling to be done. But like any absolute counterfactual, sometimes the percentages get in the way. In fact, in every case of a team getting a 30-point lead, it was once a 20-point lead. Sometimes an ass-kicking is just an ass-kicking.
Enter Game 7 of the NBA Finals, coming Sunday night to a television near you. The Pacers, who have gained their ultra-plucky reputation as the team that lets the other guy get the 20-point lead before eradicating it, finally went nearly wire-to-wire (minus the first three-and-a-half minutes) in a 108–91 beatdown of the Thunder to force El Juego Definitivo.
We've all been there. Your buddy and former editor-in-chief Megan Greenwell has an acclaimed new book about the predatory industry that wrecked your previous workplace and is eating away at American life everywhere you look, and she's got an hour to spare on her book tour to talk to you on your podcast. So far, so relatable. But! Your co-host is out of town, and also if it was just you and Megan there's a chance the podcast would be like 40 minutes of questions about Jed Lowrie and Brett Anderson and 20 minutes of answers amounting to "will you please stop asking me about Brett Anderson." Not to belabor the point, but this is one of The Classic Scenarios. And yet, this week, it happened to me.
It’s a holiday, and you won’t be seeing much of us today. Consider this your space to talk about the news, your summer plans, tonight’s Game 6, or anything else you wanna blab about. We’ll be back tomorrow with normal programming.
Soon after inauguration, he Trump administration announced plans to slash the size of the federal government, seemingly by any means necessary. The administration enlisted Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to carry out unprecedented waves of widespread firings, buyouts, and reductions in force, many of which faced legal challenges. As of June 6, the labor department has reported the federal government has gotten rid of 59,000 jobs since January. These firings are deeply political. They intend to purge nonpartisan employees and replace them with loyalists.
This series puts names and faces to some of the thousands of civil servants whose lives and futures have been upended. They all share a commitment to public service and a belief that the government is supposed to help people.
“Wow,” Kahleah Copper tweeted yesterday evening. She was the rare WNBA player with the time to post and spectate on Wednesday. The final day of the group play stage of the league’s in-season Commissioner’s Cup tournament involved six games in one night, the first five overlapping. On account of the odd number of WNBA teams right now, Copper’s Phoenix Mercury were the lucky 13th team out. They could simply kick up their feet and take in one of the more colorful nights the league has seen. What was her "Wow" about? We can only guess. These were my own Wows from each game:
Some good news: The New York Yankees have now been shut out for three games in a row. This is in spite of mitigating factors such as facing the "Los Angeles" Angels of Anaheim and being newly Giancarlo Stanton'd up. Take a 2–0 loss to the Boston Red Sox, a 1–0 loss in 11 inn...
Summer happens slowly, then all at once: longer nights, a drink on the porch followed by one more, the trickle then flood of every publication writing (or getting an AI to write) a list of summer books you should read. Just as predictable is the kind of books that will appea...
The United States will host the men's World Cup in a little under one year. The vibe around the program could not possibly be worse, and enthusiasm levels could not possibly be lower.
Some of this funk can be explained by the U.S. team getting embarrassed on the field. Until they hung five goals on poor Trinidad and Tobago over the weekend, the USMNT had lost four straight games by an aggregate score of 9-2. Two of those were competitive games against CONCACAF rivals and two were friendly losses to legit European teams, though there's little point in drawing a distinction between the pairs of matches, because the stakes in both were the same: nothing. Losing is one thing. The larger and thornier issue is that if the team were winning, all they could win would be a reprieve from people paying attention to the program's structural bustedness.
"You can't be a serious critic," New York Times technology reporter Kevin Roose wrote on Tuesday, on Bluesky, about artificial intelligence, "if you're in denial about how useful it is." Narrowly, in strict terms, this is true: You can't be a serious critic of anything if yo...
William Langewiesche died on Sunday. He was a damn titan. Langewiesche hit his stride in longform magazine journalism round about 1998, applying the concept of system accidents to the downing of ValueJet Airlines Flight 592, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9 aircraft that had crashed...
There are some things you can learn about fascism before you actually learn them during fascism, and there are others that you can only learn through experience. The fundamental instability of fascist political formations is one of those. The stupid and scattershot brutality...
Only two teams have ever lost three consecutive Stanley Cup Finals, and they were both under special and antediluvian circumstances. The 1938–40 Toronto Maple Leafs managed it when the National Hockey League was only seven or eight teams deep and all you had to do to compete was not go bankrupt, and the 1968–70 St. Louis Blues got swept three consecutive times as an expansion team when one of the two divisions was all expansion teams.
Thus, it is hard to conceive of the Edmonton Oilers as they are this morning, first beaten and then hammered by the Florida Panthers in successive years, not having to live with this feeling for years to come. Knowing that the other guy is better one year is hard to endure, but knowing that the same guy got almost incalculably better a year later makes this a more existential defeat.
The Panthers are the reason your favorite team stinks. Not because they've ruined all those other teams' records, though they have, but because Florida has successfully built what every front office in a copycat league has and will continue to ineffectively flail toward. Eve...
The Club World Cup kicked off over the weekend in the United States, and it's been a wild ride so far, in the most derogatory way possible. It's not so much about the games themselves, which have been mostly either stodgy goalless draws or one-sided beat-downs (thanks for co...
The San Francisco Giants are about to test the notion that one team's misalignment is another team's salvation. In fact, they have already done it even though the Shiny New Toy In Question hasn't even been unwrapped yet, let alone aligned.
In moving four certified mammals to the Boston Red Sox for designated hitter and apparent pain in the ass Rafael Devers, the Giants finally achieved the big get they hadn't managed since they outbid themselves by $40 million for Barry Zito in 2006. That one was an analytic misstep, unless you count Zito’s two postseason starts in 2012, in which he won Game 5 of the NL Championship Series (with the Giants down 3-1 to the St. Louis Cardinals) and then Game 1 of the World Series. Those two starts made the deal a barg . . . well, okay, not a bargain. But at least some value for the money. Also he could play guitar.
At some point this season, Shohei Ohtani pitching and hitting will once again become ordinary, and only when he does something truly extraordinary will it be worth writing about. We are not yet at that point in the season. The Ohtani coverage will continue until the pitch co...
I guess you could read that headline as some sort of condemnation of the Oilers' brass—that we're at Game 6 of the Stanley Cup Final, an elimination game for Edmonton, and there's still so much uncertainty surrounding a key position. But I mean it in the most literal sense p...
You're a streetcar operator. If you need more specifics, let's say it's fin de siècle Vienna and you've got a jaunty cap.
Oh no! Your streetcar is barreling down on a group of people. But you observe that they lie just beyond a junction in the track whose switch you control. If you pull the lever, your streetcar will move to the other track—and safety!
There was a sequence in the fourth quarter of Game 5 Monday night where I very nearly chewed through my shirt collar. I should not have had it in my mouth to begin with, but there I was, nibbling on my own shirt like a damn toddler. It was nerves! The Pacers, behind and on t...
