Laura Mata López was born and raised in a low-income community in San José, Costa Rica. Some of her earliest memories were of the impact poverty and a lack of support for mental health had on her neighbors. Mata López's mother and grandmother had migrated to Costa Rica from ...

On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton under the headline "Tom Cotton: Send In The Troops, For Real." The piece was ostensibly written in response to the protests against the Trump administration's anti-immigrant crackdowns curr...

I’ve made my fair share of terrible relationship decisions. There was the time my college sweetheart and I decided we would break up at the end of the semester, but stay together for the ensuing four months. There was the time I decided to date an ex of my nemesis. There was...

By at least one measure, the Boston Red Sox of 2025 are doing just fine. They've outscored their opponents on the season, modestly, but at a better clip than that of, say, the Philadelphia Phillies, who are presently nine games over .500 and slotted into the final National L...

Cal "Big Dumper" Raleigh is an outlier in the obvious sense—he is the current MLB home run leader—but pile on the descriptive adjectives, and you wind up with an amalgam of three truths, all theoretically past their prime: Cal Raleigh is a switch-hitting catcher who plays fo...

It is the nature of a really good catch to make you feel like what you've just seen is the coolest thing ever to happen. That is how you know that what you've just seen is really good, and you can tell that you have seen something sufficiently cool if, for a moment, you find...

The fact that you are never quite as safe as you should be is one of the facts of contemporary American life, although the nature of that hazard varies from one American to the next. An unreasoning horror at and fear of the unknown is at the heart of the nation's dominant po...

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 the NBA, dogs, Los Angeles, and more.

Kurt:

When Golden State Valkyries coach Natalie Nakase sat down with ESPN for an interview shortly after her team's inaugural season began, the first question she fielded was an obvious one. What were her expectations? Her answer was honest, relatively optimistic, and riddled with...

Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music I’ve been fixated on recently.

There’s a profile of the Clipse in the latest issue of GQ. Timed to the imminent release of their long-awaited reunion album, Let God Sort Em Out—executive produced by Pharrell but no Chad Hugo—it’s full of little tidbits about Pusha T’s label drama and Malice’s long break from rap and all the things you might expect.

When the Panthers acquired Brad Marchand at the trade deadline, it kind of felt like putting a hat on a hat. Or a rat on a rat. This was a team already known and feared and hated for the way they relentlessly antagonized their opponents, and the division-leading defending ch...

I heard Marc Maron announce he was ending his podcast the way that I imagine he'd've wanted me to—while walking through my neighborhood in Los Angeles, through wired headphones, just a little too hopped up on caffeine. A younger version of Maron would have given an "Oh, come...

"Well, definitely, the third period is an unraveling," Oilers coach Kris Knoblauch said, and he was underselling it in a nice little piece of dry coachspeak. Edmonton seized the opportunity of getting blown out to take out all their collected frustrations toward the Panthers...

Cork upset dynastic host Limerick at a sold-out Gaelic Grounds on Saturday on penalty shots to take the 2025 Munster hurling championship in the first final decided on penalty shots in the 147-year history of the annual provincial competition. With the win, Cork booked a spot in the semifinals of this year’s All-Ireland tournament. 

The match, a non-stop affair full of lead changes and roughhousing, was the latest in a string of instant classic playoff tilts the ancient Gaelic game has delivered fans in the last few years. After regulation and two overtimes, the score stood at Limerick 2-27, Cork 1-30, or 33 points apiece. 

One of the fun, mildly disorienting experiences inherent to watching the Oklahoma City Thunder is having to remember just how many guys they have. Were you aware that they traded five second-round picks last summer for a rookie from Weber State named Dillon Jones, and that J...

The Nations League is, at its core, a money grab. Replacing international friendlies with an ostensibly meaningful tournament is a sensible idea on paper, but UEFA's (and later CONCACAF's) main motivation for it was to wring more money out of the previously low-stakes, low-i...

Mia Scott is a menace to every team unlucky enough to face her. At third base, she's an immovable object and a nightmare for all right-handed batters. In the batter's box, she demonizes opposing pitching. Over the three games of the NCAA Softball World Series last week, Scot...

Joy Binion learned that she had lost her job as a social science analyst at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, or SAMHSA, on April 1. So she posted on Facebook that she had been affected by a reduction in force, or RIF. A month later in a conversa...

Megan Courtney-Lush was ready to retire. She played four years of college volleyball at Penn State and then went on to play professionally in Puerto Rico, Poland, Turkey, and Italy. After 10 years, she had decided that it was time to come home and move on to the next stage o...

If you can't handle the heat, don't try our Monday crossword. This week’s puzzle was constructed by Rebecca Goldstein and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Rebecca is a research scientist and crossword constructor in the Bay Area. She is also a co-director of Westwords, a crossword tournament taking place in Berkeley, Calif., and online on June 22.

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.

I have spent all weekend replaying and marveling over Connor McDavid's assist. Between me and McDavid, that makes one of us who spent any time thinking about it.

The Oilers star was at practice yesterday, two days after his absurd first-period carve-up was relegated from pivotal play to mere highlight-reel staple by the Panthers' eventual double-overtime victory. The unwritten rules of postgame press conferences dictate that questions won't dwell on a play that ended up not affecting the game's outcome, especially for the losing team, and McDavid wouldn't have wanted to talk about it on Friday anyway—the usual blank-faced captain's deflections would'n't have made good copy. But I was hopeful, at Sunday's skate and media availability, that McDavid might've moved on from the loss and been willing to walk us through exactly what was in his mind when he did this:

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

As a voter in the New York City mayoral race, I keep thinking about the rats and the garbage cans. The story of the election, as generally framed, is that Andrew Cuomo has come down to New York from the suburbs and back from political exile to offer his own hard-nosed, practical experience as an alternative to a field of candidates who are some combination of too idealistic, too leftist, or too unseasoned to handle the serious business of running a great and difficult metropolis. The city, he declared in Wednesday's mayoral debate, is in a "management crisis"—as well as a "fiscal crisis" and a "societal crisis"—and he is the one person who is prepared and willing to take on "dysfunctional city management." 

Shai Gilgeous-Alexander was, during the competitive portion of a not-very-competitive Game 2, about as good as it is possible to be at the sport of basketball. There was an insanely cool sequence in the first half where he seemed to take a horse-hair bow and go fiddle-mode o...

A match that perfect deserves no restraint, so: Carlos Alcaraz's 4–6, 6–7 (4), 6–4, 7–6 (3), 7–6 (10–2) French Open final victory over Jannik Sinner is the best tennis match I've ever watched, and one of the greatest sporting events you or I will probably ever have the privi...

Oklahoma City led for all but scant moments of Game 1 of the NBA Finals. For around 39 seconds of the first quarter, the score sat at 10–10, between an Andrew Nembhard three-pointer that tied it for Indiana and a floater from Shai Gilgeous-Alexander that untied it and put th...

The aspect from Coco Gauff's altogether impressive French Open final win that I find myself most impressed by is, oddly, something that didn't go her way. Gauff is now a two-time Grand Slam champion, and though are several parallels between her two upsets of Aryna Sabalenka,...

For four years now I have been informing every Dillon (or Dylan) I meet of the existence of a Tigers catching prospect called Dillon Dingler. If you know too much about baseball, you have to talk to the well-adjusted about it at least occasionally. Even if you have perfect s...

Other than every interaction either of them has had with another living being in their entire lives, as well as every single thing that is true about either of their personalities, and everything that either of them believes about themselves and each other and all others and...

The Tony Awards are on Sunday, and that's as good an excuse as any for me to chat with you all about Broadway. Ask any questions you want about theater, or live performance more generally. Alternatively, if you don't have a question from that field, some other folks might drop in to answer any queries related to people named Tony.

Please stay on topic in Tony Chat.

Whenever Yara Haridy, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago, shows off the fossils she works with, people are often disappointed. Unlike the statuesque bones of dinosaurs or even the small spirals of ancient seashells, Haridy's fossils "kind of look like dust, or lik...