When we last checked in with LIV Golf, the breakaway golf league nobody ever watched or cared about, it was ready to be flushed from our lives once and for all. After losing its financial backing from Saudi Arabia, the tour started to come apart. Events were cancelled, playe...

Some people are fans of the Cincinnati Bengals. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Cincinnati Bengals. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here.

Your team: Cincinnati Bengals.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dp-ZZLXoDQQ

In tennis, it can be pleasant to play under the flag of an underrepresented country with a large diaspora. Essentially, you have a network of sleeper cells who can be activated all over the world. They are extremely willing to spend money to come watch you play, and extremel...

Davene Roseborough still can’t believe the number of foster homes she lived in that had locks on the refrigerators and cabinets. At one spot, Roseborough was barred from eating dinner if she wasn’t home by 6:00 p.m. That place didn’t last long, though. She was bounced from h...

Welcome back to Minor Dilemmas, where a member of Defector's Parents Council will answer your questions on surviving family life. Have a question? Email us at minordilemmas@defector.com.

This week, Dave answers a question about talking to your child about death.

---

It used to be that all the normal, real people of this great nation could set aside political and religious differences, and even a well-calibrated distaste for Bostonians, and come together in our pure and righteous hatred of the New York Yankees. Now it's all confused: The...

If we have learned anything from decades of superhero movies, it's that people love a vigilante. Something lurks deep in the hearts of most of us, but is it a sense of justice or something else? If you had the opportunity to go rogue—to solve a crime or right a wrong on your very own, or even just steal back something that was once yours—would you?

Today’s gossip revolves around a woman whose opportunity to embody justice, in the form of hunting down her stolen Kia, fell on the day of the funeral of her girlfriend’s beloved track coach. What’s the right thing to do, under circumstances like these? 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXFS88rZ4yw

Now that I am back from France, so too is Nothing But Respect back from its brief summer break. This week on the show, Harry and I caught up and chatted about the Tour de France and the way I covered the race for Defector; Harry's experimental forays into vertical video; and the ongoing Kyle Kuzma Massive Thinks situation. Harry also makes a fantastic NBA player comparison for a certain former guest and current NBA staffer's game.

Also, we always plug the Broke Jumper Tip Line in these posts, but there will be a dedicated BJTL episode coming soon, so please do submit those.

A couple weeks ago, I bought an apple cider slushie at the farmer's market. It was a hot summer afternoon, and the ice crystals in the slushie sparkled and burst in my mouth with crisp acidity that immediately cooled me down. The cider had been made by the farmers who ran th...

In a bunch of ways, there is no real percentage in remembering what things were actually like during the worst years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Beyond all the uncertainty and suffering and death, there is just not a lot to hang your hat on. It was, in the manner of every sing...

All Gianni Infantino needed was patience. Memory for scandal is short, even in a sport as massive as soccer, and whatever controversies the FIFA president willingly courted during the 2026 World Cup would have soon faded into the background as he won what was going to be an ...

You may think you've experienced joy before, but you had previously never seen a mascot version of a 99-year old woman with a cane dancing and cartwheeling around a baseball field in Springfield, Illinois, which ushered in the inaugural weekend of the first professional wome...

Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. Today, we're talking about flouting the law, botched first dates, jealous dickheads, and more.

Drew is off today. I have seized the means of funbagging and, as is my custom, forgotten to make use of them until the last second. With that in mind, let's get to...

Your dang letters:

Some people are fans of the Kansas City Chiefs. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Kansas City Chiefs. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here.

Your team: It’s over.

Until a month ago, everything was going great for David Ellison and his plan to control American cultural production. He'd successfully made Paramount an outer arm of the Trump Administration, with all the lucrative sinecures and harrowing moral and journalistic compromises ...

Maybe we've been viewing Harrison Bader all wrong. Not that he hasn't behaved like a Thanksgiving ham in a batting helmet, but he may have spurred his soon-to-be former employers to accept their current situation with a clearer eye and purpose. And with some gelignite. ...

A lot of people in and around the WNBA are talking about trans women. In the aftermath of Indiana Fever role player Sophie Cunningham's negative comments about trans people playing sports in an ESPN profile, transphobic right-wing grifters and small groups of protesters have...

The Los Angeles Dodgers got Tarik Skubal, damn them. Damn them for having money; damn them for being too damn good; damn them for ruining baseball. That they got Skubal, the hottest commodity on the stove at the trade deadline, for relative peanuts, well. In this case, you d...

Who is ruining baseball? For me, for today, it's the Washington Nationals. Games played by my home team make up a solid 90 percent of the baseball I watch in a given regular season. Like a lot of baseball fans I was hoping Tarik Skubal would go to the Milwaukee Brewers or th...

Some people are fans of the New Orleans Saints. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the New Orleans Saints. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here.

Your team: New Orleans Saints

Your 2025 record: 6-11, otherwise known as the record of the false dawn. It's a record that looks a lot better than 3-14, until you remember how easy it is for a bad team to scrape together three meaningless wins (or four, or five) at the end of the season, long after everyone else in the league has stopped giving a shit.

This puzzle was constructed by Eli Robinson, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Eli is the Chief Trivia Officer of Water Cooler Trivia. He has far more questions than answers, if you must ask. He lives with his family in Washington, D.C.

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. The AVCX, an independent puzzles and games outlet, invites you to subscribe, or sample the goods with a two-month free trial: "With an AVCX subscription, you get access to weekly themed and themeless crosswords, minis, cryptics, and trivia, by email or in your favorite app. We have no corporate overlord, and we publish top-flight stuff only. We also pay our people fairly, always. Check us out."

DETROIT — It’s 2:00 p.m. on a Tuesday, just one week from election day, and Abdul El-Sayed’s Detroit office is standing room only. The front and back of the room are packed with volunteers eager to hear the senate-hopeful speak before they go out and canvass the nearby ...

DUBLIN — David Hickey was built for Gaelic football, the sport that can’t stick to sports. Hickey, who was a two-time GAA all-star and four-time All-Ireland winner as a half-forward for Dublin, used football’s biggest weekend as a platform for protests.  First, Hickey ...

Weird trade. They must think they can re-sign her. This is more or less what I said before the 2025 season, when the Los Angeles Sparks traded for a year of Kelsey Plum. In a three-team deal that also sent Jewell Loyd to Las Vegas, the Sparks gave up the No. 2 pick...

The “heartbreaking endings to 2026 Chicago Sky games” montage that CBS showed in the final minute of the Sky’s Saturday matinee against the Las Vegas Aces hinted at how this game might unfold. One of the endings was from a game against the New York Liberty in late ...

The Boston Red Sox enjoyed a 15-game win streak that vaulted them back into the playoff picture last month, and they've stayed upright in the days since. Holding a four-game edge over the third and final wild card slot, Boston's preserved their flame with a series of games i...

If Shohei Ohtani doesn't return to the pitcher's mound for the Los Angeles Dodgers this season, they've got themselves a hell of a replacement. Late Saturday night, the back-to-back defending world champions made the biggest trade deadline move possible, acquiring back-to-ba...

There is a particularly unpleasant image of Brian Daboll that I return to in my mind from time to time. You can see it in the 2024 Why Your Team Sucks entry for the New York Giants; the image in that story is a photo of my TV, from an episode in the team's turn as the subjec...

In the spring of 2004, researchers monitoring a population of wild bearded capuchins in a Brazilian woodland saw an infant clinging to Chiquinha, one of the adult female monkeys. The baby was not a capuchin but a marmoset—a much smaller monkey species. The researchers dubbed...

On Friday, CBS Sports announced that NFL analyst Tony Romo is on leave "until further notice," following his arrest in Milwaukee last week for Operating While Intoxicated.

https://twitter.com/adamschefter/status/2083211920094466188?s=46

Romo was given three citations from the Milwaukee County Sheriff's Office after a traffic stop on July 23, when police spotted him driving on the highway, passing cars in a lane he shouldn't have been in. In the bodycam footage of the arrest, a glassy-eyed Romo can be seen failing field sobriety tests, despite him treating them like he was at the combine or something. He refused a breathalyzer, though an open container of alcohol was found inside his car, according to police. Romo has a court appearance scheduled for Sept. 21.