A romantic comedy often opens with a scene where the protagonist demonstrates that she's not like other girls. In Legally Blonde, that's Reese Witherspoon slipping her freshly painted toenails into wedge heels with a heart on them, before she heads out to the date that will ...

April McClain Delaney, House representative for Maryland's 6th congressional district, did not get off to a hot start in her address to Frederick, Md.'s modest-sized but otherwise energetic and very positive "No Kings" protest on Saturday. As soon as she took the microphone,...

Shohei Ohtani has not pitched in a game since 2023, when in addition to leading the league in all the cool batting stats he also struck out 11.4 per nine with a 1.061 WHIP in 23 starts. I was a witness to one of them.

On April 3, 2023, my now-ex and I had tickets to see Shohei. The Angels were bringing him to Seattle for a three-game series, and we weren't going to miss him. He did not disappoint.

Ladies and gentlemen, your two unfortunates of the past weekend: Lando Norris and local wildlife. The Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, host site of the Canadian Grand Prix, encircles an island in Montreal. It is a gorgeous circuit, featuring the close-hewn walls of a street race, ...

The U.S. Open is a notoriously difficult tournament even under normal circumstances, but forcing professional golfers to play in the kind of weather that tormented the greater Pittsburgh area on Sunday was a televised exercise in humiliation. Battling relentless rain that essentially gave Sunday's action an extended halftime break, contending players like Adam Scott and Sam Burns sunk themselves with final-round scores of 78 and 79 respectively, as a course saturated with water worked to make their lies as miserable as possible. To put golfers in these conditions is like trying to make Sabrina Ionescu shoot threes in a wind tunnel, or Harry Kane take a penalty with a ball made of lead. It stops being about "Who's the best?" and starts being about "Who can survive?"

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Look on the bright side: There's a new crossword for you to solve! This week's puzzle was constructed by Hanh Huynh and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Hanh is a bankruptcy attorney who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. with his wife and two kids.

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.

When the Red Sox closed out their three-game series at home against the Yankees on Sunday afternoon, spirits were high. The win made for a sweep of their division rivals and put the Red Sox half a game back of a wild card spot. A middling rotation haunted Boston for much of ...

There is a defensible reading of Game 4 of the NBA Finals as an aesthetic disappointment, a slugfest of a game defined by Bennedict Mathurin missing a bunch of free throws in the final minute and the Oklahoma City Thunder shooting a collective 3-for-16 from three-point range...

The first big trade of the NBA offseason arrived yesterday, and it was one that no one saw coming: Memphis Grizzlies shooting guard Desmond Bane has been shipped off to the Orlando Magic in exchange for Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, Cole Anthony, and four unprotected first-round...

I wasn't sure what to expect when I started listening to Roommates, the gambling-sponsored podcast hosted by New York Knicks Jalen Brunson and Josh Hart. My familiarity with the two is recently acquired—a friend introduced me to them and their fellow Villanova alumni Mikal B...

All across the United States and beyond on Saturday, millions of people got together and expressed—to put it in probably the most broadly acceptable terms to everyone who went—that Donald Trump needs to get out of everybody's business. Coming after days of anti-ICE protests ...

Brad Marchand. Again. As if the Florida Panthers taking a 3-2 series lead in front of a passionate Edmonton Oilers crowd wasn't brutal enough, it had to be the NHL's premier pest who orchestrated the 5-2 win in Game 5 on Saturday night. After scoring the team's last two goal...

The 2025 Angels have been startlingly okay thus far. Mike Trout hasn't looked himself and is currently the everyday DH, but he's been doing better lately. The various castoffs that make up the rotation are mostly pitching acceptably, and the franchise's strategy of immediate...

There’s been this ongoing concern, I mean like in the air, for a while now, about people’s attention spans. I find it even creeping into my conversations. "Is this boring?" I'll ask a few minutes into a story. "Am I boring you?" People usually laugh and say something like, Y...

When Mary Giovagnoli was in law school, she spent a year working as a junior public defender representing people accused of misdemeanors. "I really liked the work, but it was emotionally devastating, because you got very wrapped up in your clients' cases," Giovagnoli said. S...

Brandy: Let me start by saying thank you, Patrick, for picking this book. I enjoyed it enormously. I will also now immediately display ingratitude by ignoring what you said in your lovely introductory essay and say that I read this book as a metaphor. Specifically, it felt t...

Michelle Cooper took her time. When Temwa Chawinga sent a slow ball to the space in front of her—a ball Chawinga only had because of a turnover Cooper had caused—she moved laterally with it, waiting for it to come across her body. She timed her steps and her shot perfectly. The moment she arrived to the ball was when she had maximum space from both Emily Sonnett and Ann-Katrin Berger, who were moving toward her from opposite directions. But once each piece was aligned—Berger and Sonnett out of the way, the ball on her preferred right foot, and her body faced up toward the net—she pounced. Without any superfluous touches, she slotted the ball inside the far post, past Berger’s desperate reach. 

She could afford to be patient. It was only the third minute of the match.

Welcome to Ask The Book Doctor, a recurring series about books and reading them.

It's natural to fall out of reading simply because of circumstance. Every time I am on vacation, I devour books—put me on a plane, any plane, and I'll finish a book. But plop me back in my normal life where the shelves are dusty and the groceries need to be bought and my friends are going to a bar after work, and the appeal of picking up a book diminishes. It is easy to allow yourself to build a world in your mind when you have space there. It is much harder to make the words on the page into pictures when your mind is far too busy with other obligations.

Trying to figure out how Leon Draisaitl's game-winning goal found glory when it barely found 30 mph is a waste of your time. What you should be noticing instead in the wake of Edmonton's wonderfully absurdist 5–4 overtime victory over Florida in Game 4 of the Stanley Cup Fin...

The Edmonton Oilers' maddening, decade-long goalie controversy is over ... for the next week, anyway. As that next week contains the entirety of what is now a best-of-three Stanley Cup Final, it feels like a mercy. Calvin Pickard, after two periods and most of an overtime of...

Watch basketball games for a living and you develop a certain tolerance for garbage—a fondness, even. Bad teams make visible all the neat and complicated parts of the sport. In an “I can fix them” sort of way, these teams are sometimes the most endearing. It's hard to look a...

Last fall, Defector R&D announced another paradigm-disrupting plan for Year 5. We would once again run a Tip Jar drive to top off our Pay Forward A Subscription fund, but this time we’d give one lucky entrant the opportunity to have Drew Magary come cook them a meal. We drew that winner in early December, […]

It is not a boast and not an apology, but simply an assertion of fact: I could be awakened from a deep sleep, abducted from public transit, or otherwise put under extreme duress and still happily be able to talk about The Simpsons for a solid hour. I am fortunate, I think, that my youth overlapped with a period of time during which The Simpsons was basically the wildest and most innovative television programming that anyone had ever seen. I write "I think," there, because I am aware that all those bits and songs and in-jokes are taking up space in my brain that might otherwise be occupied by, say, "things I learned in college." Still, I can't say I really regret it. If you have to fill your brain up with anything, it might as well be the funniest stuff that's ever been on TV.

There was a time in my youth where the anticipation of a concert was better than the concert itself. I saw a whole lot of incredible acts back then, but my memories of those shows are largely confined to their buildup. I remember waiting for hours—in a line that wrapped arou...

What is visible in most coaching searches is largely iceberg-ish in nature, in that we see 10 percent of the process and then, mostly out of self-aggrandizement, measure it at 90 percent from there. But let's play the game anyway and laugh the fit of our trousers off at the ...

Sports are simple. That is perhaps their most crucial property, the attribute that makes sports interesting to write and read about yet simultaneously makes doing so depend, to greater or lesser degrees, on mistranslation. The French Open final, an afternoon Golden State Val...

It's impossible for me to think about Brian Wilson, who died on Wednesday, without picturing myself awake in my teenage bedroom at some sort of goblin hour. I still have very late nights, but they look a lot different—healthier, more organized. If I lose sleep now, it's beca...

Brian Wilson, the guy behind some of the happiest sad songs in pop history, is dead. 

Take “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” which I’d say is my favorite Beach Boys tune if you asked me right now, the day after Wilson died at 82 years old. The song, the first track from Pet Sounds, the band's peerless 1966 album which Wilson produced, arranged, and wrote most of, finds a young man wanting more out of life and love than he’s getting, and hoping a day comes when he gets it.  Wouldn’t it be nice to be happy? 

The Indiana Pacers left the devil at home on Wednesday night. They didn't need him to beat the Oklahoma City Thunder, 116–107, and take a 2-1 lead in the NBA Finals. Throughout these playoffs, the Thunder have always felt like the constant in the equation that makes up any ...

Pope Leo XIV celebrated his weekly general audience in St. Peter's Square this morning, so you might assume he donned a White Sox ballcap at the request of one of his parishioners. I think it much more likely he just wears this around all the time, even to formal events where it's entirely inappropriate. Have you met people from Chicago? He probably sold his mitre to buy a sandwich.

This fairly definitively puts to bed any lingering debate about which accursed Chicago franchise gets to claim the Pope, though the Cardinals and Padres could still make a case. In any event, the former Robert Prevost surely claims the White Sox—that is the face of a man who just heard that Jerry Reinsdorf might not sell the team until 2034.