The queen is dead. It took three straight titles and 26 consecutive match wins at Roland-Garros for Iga Swiatek to finally lose on the Parisian clay. Aryna Sabalenka deservedly got the scalp, outlasting Swiatek in a Thursday semifinal played at a level so blisteringly high i...

After months of rather awkward courtship, the Pittsburgh Steelers and free agent quarterback Aaron Rodgers agreed last night to spend 18 weeks together in darkness. Sources tell Defector that the darkness will be “vast” and “impenetrable,” casting “a permanent shadow over Western Pennsylvania” that will “extinguish all traces, all memory, of the lighted world.”

This darkness—this total fucking darkness—is scheduled to envelop the Steelers on September 7 of this year and remain in place for 18 weeks thereafter. Earlier this spring, other NFL teams expressed mild interest in having the darkness consume them entirely. But the Steelers, famous for using the color black on their home jerseys, were always a natural match for Rodgers, and for the parasitic void that both parties are now doomed to inhabit.

Oh, you think Thibs has a gripe? Pete DeBoer has made six out of the last seven conference finals, with three different teams—and been fired by them all, after the Stars announced today that they think they can do better. Perhaps even more impressive than DeBoer's run is that his firing isn't a surprise in the least.

“After careful consideration, we believe that a new voice is needed in our locker room to push us closer to our goal of winning the Stanley Cup,” Dallas GM Jim Nill said in a statement, a week after the Stars bowed out in a perfunctory five games to the Oilers. It's the rare team statement that says exactly what it means: DeBoer lost the room. Even a well-respected coach's voice stops having an effect when Sisyphus's boulder rolls back down the hill for the third season in a row.

Here are some relevant statistics from Game 1 of the NBA Finals: The Oklahoma City Thunder had 18 fewer turnovers than the Indiana Pacers; the Thunder attempted 16 more field goals than the Pacers and took exactly half of their shots at the rim; 14 of the Pacers' 24 turnover...

There are some podcast guests who need a little bit of drawing out, or just some guidance into and through the experience of being on this podcast. This is natural enough, given how unnatural it is to be on a podcast in the first place, and the specific unnatural/unholy attributes of ours. But Will Leitch is not one of those guests. He has known Drew forever, and worked with him for only slightly less time than that, and that surely helped. I myself have only met the man a few times, although I have read his writing for many years, but again—that does not matter. Will Leitch comes on a podcast ready to be the guest on that podcast, and buddy was he ever the guest this week.

VARIOUS CITIES (SOME ARGUABLY TOWNS), France — The first time I visited France, I was on the subway when a woman and a group of elementary school–aged girls rushed into the car. It was midday; I was confused, but assumed nothing. Everyone in the seats stood, which is the usual habit for making space in a train car; the chairs by the door fold up, making room on busier trains.

An East Asian woman who was sitting in one of those chairs, whom I noticed because she spent much of the ride engaging in French-style PDA with her partner, leaned back over to me and said, in Mandarin, "Tell your friends to be careful." By friends, she meant my sisters, who were a bit squished to the back of the train car but otherwise untouched. Be careful about what? I told her that I thought they were doing fine, and then she elaborated: "They are trying to trick them."

In a third-grade classroom exercise, Patrick Kelly wrote that he wanted to become a scientist when he grew up. With that interest came an attention to the people that science can help. "I've just always been super-curious about human nature, our interactions with one another...

Twenty-eight NBA teams lay crumpled and destroyed at the foot of the mountain, defeated for all time, never to rise again from their shame. The Oklahoma City Thunder and Indiana Pacers snarl at each other across the bald summit, beneath the darkening sky. One shall feast upo...

After Viktor Arvidsson's slapshot beat Panthers goalie Sergei Bobrovsky in the second period, cutting the Oilers' deficit to 3-2, the on-screen shots-on-goal counter had Edmonton leading 16-8. In any situation where you're doubling up a team in that category while still losi...

As the barrier between NBA players and NBA media dissolves, so too does the illusion that any amount of fame and success can prevent athletes from giving into the media's lamest impulses. It should not be the case that LeBron James and Steve Nash, two universally respected and accomplished world-class athletes with more money than they could ever possibly spend, care about how many people are listening to and enjoying their podcast. That is something that podcasters should worry about, not athletes. And yet here we are, in a media environment in which even these two greats cannot prevent themselves from thinking and acting like podcasters.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DKcq_33p77C/?hl=en

It's not about throwing a punch. We know both these teams can land a haymaker. No team gets this far without that skill, even if each comes at it from a slightly different angle—the Oilers, more straightforward, windmilling their arms as they close the gap on you, daring you...

Without Paige Bueckers, the Dallas Wings look like what they were last year, when they were also without Paige Bueckers, which was a very bad basketball team. So bad, in fact, that they landed in the lottery and got to draft Paige Bueckers. The first-overall pick has missed ...

Members of the Defector staff often send each other animal photos and videos. Some are cute, or doing funny things; others are abominations (mostly Instagram Chihuahuas that Samer has found). Often a theme will be enforced: For example, today we are celebrating Wet Beast Wednesday. A thing immediately noticeable, if one were to observe and track these exchanges over a length of time, is that the viral animal trafficking is much heavier on slow news days, because we are bored. Today, we sunk so low as to share this guy:

https://twitter.com/imagesaicouldnt/status/1930011609914568969

Welcome back to Make It Nice, Defector’s best design advice column. Everyone’s saying this! Here are this month’s dilemmas:

Dave asks:

You, the savvy baseball fan, are almost certainly wise to imagine what Pittsburgh Pirates ace Paul Skenes will look like someday wearing some other team's uniform. If you are a fan of one of six particular franchises, you might even sensibly dare to imagine what Skenes might...

For the second straight year, the Florida Panthers are playing the Edmonton Oilers for the Stanley Cup. I'm not convinced that we can see their futures by looking at their pasts, but I think it's worthwhile to refresh ourselves on how we got here, and why this will be the rare Cup matchup that comes with a history.

Who are these guys?

It probably does not matter who occupies the position of hitting coach for the Colorado Rockies. For the previous three seasons, the job belonged to Hensley Meulens, and his only notable contribution to the franchise's history was illegally clambering into the cockpit of a 7...

This week’s story presents us all with a bouquet of ethical questions. How much unpaid labor would you take on for a dear friend? Nude yoga in the yard: Yea or nay? Under what circumstances can you instruct people to call you “uncle”? 

In the face of such quandaries, we had no choice but to call in Defector’s own Brandy Jensen to be the guest. We wanted to put Brandy’s devotion to an annoying world to the test. Did we break her? You’ll have to listen to find out. 

This spring, a new business opened on the main drag of my West Philadelphia neighborhood, provoking both excitement and trepidation.

“I saw it just the other day and feared it,” one friend texted. “Like what the actual fuck is that shit,” said another. “Why?!!!” said a third. “Who is that for?”

Motherfucking Owen got me so good. Remember the intern intro blog last year where Owen made a goofy little remark about there being a Fibonacci sequence of Defector interns? I took this as a joke, obviously, because as he established, this would get out of hand very quickly. But I remembered it. A year later, […]

Viewed from one angle, Tom Thibodeau losing his job as head coach of the New York Knicks, a development reported this afternoon by Shams Charania, appears deeply unfair. Here's a guy who led his team to a 51-win regular season, a trip to the Eastern Conference final—kicking ...

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 bacon, the NBA Finals, graphology, and more.

Will:

LAS VEGAS — "We often talk about baseball games as a metric for where we are, and we're literally in the first inning," one of the Winklevoss twins gloats. "And this game's going to overtime."

It's the first day of Bitcoin 2025, industry day here at the largest cryptocurrency conference in the world. This Winklevoss is sharing the stage with the other one, plus Donald Trump's newly appointed crypto and AI czar David Sacks. They are in the midst of a victory lap, laughing with the free ease of men who know they have it made. The mangled baseball metaphor neither lands nor elicits laughs, but that's fine. He's earned, or at any rate acquired, the right to be wrong.

It’s 1994. Nike, whose golden goose has put down the basketball and picked up the baseball bat, is trying to figure out what to do with one of the brightest young talents in the NBA. His name is Penny Hardaway. His game is silky smooth, his shot is effortless, and he glides ...

PHILADELPHIA — The Benham Brothers think they are very funny and very smart. They are 50-year-old tall, blonde, identical twins who have a series of scripted jokes that mostly amount to calling each other stupid and effeminate. They are not pastors, which is maybe why they a...

Last summer I attended Rare Book School at Princeton, which is about the tweediest thing a person can do. One humid day, after a morning spent squinting at Gutenberg Bibles, I sipped a coffee with Amy Dawson, a lifelong librarian and cataloguer with decades of experience in ...

I am a bit sleep deprived on my first day of work. I certainly could have slept last night—my excitement for the dream of interning here was outweighed by Amtrak-induced exhaustion. But unfortunately for me, Oregon State was doing something to USC on a baseball field. It wasn't exactly baseball, not as you and I know it. What it was ... well ... maybe you can tell me.

It would have been OSU's two consecutive squeeze plays, which made three consecutive bunts of what would be four bunts in the second inning—that was when I knew that I would have no escape to unconsciousness.

Spend enough time watching the best chess players in the world play, and even a chess amateur will pick up on something: Space is at such a premium in their games that any seemingly innocent, sensible move—sliding the A-pawn to the third rank to prevent the dark-square bishop from forcing check, burning a tempo to line your rook up with the opposing queen even though four pieces separate them—can be punished several moves down the line. The greats can project themselves forward in time and see weaknesses before they even begin to develop.

That is not what happened on Sunday when Magnus Carlsen lost to current world champion Gukesh Dommaraju. The former world champion played very relatable chess, by which I mean he committed an unspeakable blunder to lose from a winning position and then pounded the table in disgust.

Here’s a story in two parts, both of which will be crushingly familiar to you. The main character of our tale is Iowa (uh oh) Senator Joni Ernst, who held a town hall in her home state this past Friday. Ernst’s constituents at that town hall were vocally angry about President Trump’s massive tax bill, which passed in the House a month ago and threatens to cut half a trillion dollars in funding to Medicaid. People will die if this bill passes in Ernst’s chamber. When one audience member informed the Senator of this fact, she responded, with supreme Midwestern condescension, “Well, we’re all going to die.”

That’s the first part of our story. The second part is Ernst’s formal response to the heckling, which she recorded on her phone while walking around a graveyard. Take it away, womanboss.

By sheer power of will, determination, and lots and lots and lots of money, FIFA is looking to turn the previously irrelevant Club World Cup into a quadrennial summer-time blockbuster. Traditionally, the event has been a global supercup of sorts, each year pitting the seven ...