FeedCity: Defector

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23 Oct 17:57 • Israel Daramola

Now Is The Time For Hysteria

Israel: We had ourselves the hell week of all hell weeks last Saturday. And in the aftermath, the top of the sport is upside down and incoherent, babbling and whining about which teams are good and which are bad in tones you can otherwise only find from Old Testament prophet...

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23 Oct 16:57 • Samer Kalaf

James Dolan Finds Innovative New Way To Be Cruel And Cheap

Most owners of sports teams are wise enough to understand that their reputations will never be better than when their teams are winning. If they're fortunate enough to see that team capture a championship, they know that it's easy image rehabilitation. Just show some basic a...

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23 Oct 16:57 • Alex Sujong Laughlin

How Can I Hang On To My Digital Life?

I've been watching the "available storage" bars on my various digital storage systems creep up over the last couple years with a growing sense of dread. Each percentage point is a tick closer to an upgrade to my package—money I'll have to pay Apple, Google, and Dropbox to co...

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23 Oct 16:39 • Sabrina Imbler

Catapult Elizabeth Koch Into The Sun

I don't know if Elizabeth Koch would fashion herself a personal essayist, but she has certainly dabbled in the form. In an 11-part essay published in Smith Magazine in 2007, the billionaire's daughter who describes herself as "apolitical" wrote about a trip she took to Japan...

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23 Oct 16:39 • Chris Thompson

The Not-So-Great Defector Bake Off Fails To Rise For Bread Week

Welcome back to The Not-So-Great Defector Bake Off, where Kelsey and Chris attempt to complete the technical challenges from the newest season of The Great British Bake Off in their own home kitchens, with the same time parameters as the professional-grade bakers competing o...

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23 Oct 16:39 • Sabrina Imbler

The U.S.-Funded Plan To Kill Infants In Africa By Withholding Vaccines Has Been Thwarted

This week, one of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s most malevolent plots was finally brought to a halt when police in Guinea-Bissau raided the offices of Danish researchers who intended to carry out a hepatitis B vaccine trial that would have endangered thousands of newborn children ...

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23 Oct 14:36 • Brandy Jensen

Martin Mull Was A Good Painter And A Great Documentary Subject

As a culture, we have a few familiar stories about talent. There’s the all-consuming kind, often first displayed in childhood, that makes people unsuited for the demands of everyday life. There are the stories about talent that goes tragically unrecognized until after a pers...

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23 Oct 14:36 • Ray Ratto

The Connor Hellebuyck Showdown Is About To Get Expensive For The Jets

Connor Hellebuyck goes back on the Winnipeg Jets payroll today, which must come as a great source of joy and satisfaction to ... well, who, exactly? Hellebuyck is, as you may remember from that burst of not-entirely-misguided patriotism you felt back in February during the ...

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23 Oct 14:36 • Maitreyi Anantharaman

These WNBA Finals Are Made Of Steal

ATLANTA — The shooting gods may be weeping, but these WNBA Finals are a steal lover's delight. Jordin Canada, at 5-foot-6, shoots the gap and sneaks behind the unsuspecting. Angel Reese, who can time up a dribble better than anyone, favors the on-ball poke-away to punish pla...

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23 Oct 14:36 • Ray Ratto

Here Comes The Fun Part

Like a tuna fish sandwich, quaint has a shelf life. Also like a tuna fish sandwich, it's definitely shorter than four days. All the charms of two teams meeting in the World Series that have never won a championship before have played themselves out in the time between the la...

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22 Oct 20:30 • Dave McKenna

Let Us Know If You’ve Seen Sponge’s Stolen Guitars

Sponge got their guitars stolen on Tuesday. I know this because the band’s publicist, Leo Lavoro, is going above and beyond his job description by trying to get them back. My email address must still be on a distribution list somewhere, thanks to my previous life as a music critic, because I received the following…

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22 Oct 18:51 • Adam Fleming Petty

Brian Evenson Will Mess With Your Head

Brian Evenson’s first book, a story collection titled Altmann’s Tongue, came out in 1994. It was not widely reviewed. The few notices the book did receive in the media ranged from the curious, to the baffled, to the outright disturbed. “In a capsule review, the Los Angeles T...

Defector
22 Oct 18:15 • Drew Magary

A Cool Night

Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday at Defector during the NFL season. Got something you wanna contribute? Email the Roo. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. I have another soccer game ...

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22 Oct 16:51 • Harry Krinsky

Defector’s Completely Decentralized NBA Season Preview Has Now Been Recentralized

Defector will publish no written league-wide preview for the 2026-27 NBA season. Not even a cute, belatedly published one, either. Instead we enlisted Harry Krinsky, co-host of our podcast Nothing But Respect and avant-garde vertical video artist, to preview each team. He th...

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22 Oct 16:36 • Giri Nathan

Basketball Game Interrupts Shit-Talk Session Between Luka Doncic And Yaxel Lendeborg

For months, I've seen Michigan basketball fans chortle ominously about the big personality of Yaxel Lendeborg, the super-senior who led the Wolverines' 2026 national championship run then sidled over to the NBA draft, where he was selected at No. 11 by the Golden State Warri...

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22 Oct 16:36 • Israel Daramola

It’s Hard To Be A Rich Radical

Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music and musical topics I’ve been fixated on recently. What could compel someone to spend four hours on a YouTube essay mostly about the rapper Killer Mike, a B-tier Dungeon Family affiliate who parlayed suc...

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22 Oct 16:09 • David Roth

Vivek Ramaswamy Is Going After The Abusive Parent Vote

This is not to discredit the existence of some underlying tactical or strategic calculations, and it is absolutely not extending credit to the shockingly vile creatures doing it, but when you see a reactionary candidate being disgusting it is safe to assume that they are doi...

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22 Oct 15:39 • Imran Zaidi

Aaron Sorkin Wants To Pretend The Good Guys Won

In 2000, midway through the first season of The West Wing, Aaron Sorkin started posting on a discussion forum on the site Television Without Pity as “Benjamin,” his middle name. Specifically, he posted on the forum dedicated to discussing The West Wing. “Benjamin” was met wi...

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22 Oct 15:39 • Barry Petchesky

Ottawa Vs. Brady Tkachuk Was Fantastic Theater

There's a type of hate that's easy to love. It's the hate a downtrodden fanbase feels for a homegrown star who forced his way out, to a better or at least more glamorous situation. This hate is full and rich and multifaceted. It contains all the frustrations of decades of lo...

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22 Oct 13:36 • Tom Ley

The Dream Are Making Bully Ball Literal

There's a sequence from the first quarter of Game 3 of the WNBA Finals, in which the Atlanta Dream walloped the Golden State Valkyries by a score of 97-71, that would still be grinding my gears if I were a Valks fan. Angel Reese, fresh off her Game 2 masterpiece, started Gam...

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21 Oct 19:39 • Luis Paez-Pumar

BioWare Becomes First Major Casualty of Saudi Arabia’s EA Takeover

When news came out that Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund had taken a majority stake in Electronic Arts last September, it was clear to anyone familiar with Saudi Arabia, EA, private equity, or capitalism that the move would make an already terrible gaming company even worse. I wrote as much at the time, and though the sale took until August of this year to go through, I can grimly say that I was completely right: On Wednesday, Bloomberg video game reporter Jason Schreier reported that EA had shut down BioWare, the game studio behind such classic role-playing game series as Mass Effect, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and Dragon Age.

https://bsky.app/profile/jasonschreier.bsky.social/post/3myfmzacrps2x

The studio then confirmed the news in a statement.

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21 Oct 18:24 • Barry Petchesky

Robert Saleh Says Jordan Elliott Needs Help, Not Condemnation

Tennessee Titans defensive tackle Jordan Elliott was a surprise inactive for Sunday's game, not traveling with the team. Head coach Robert Saleh told reporters only that Elliott was "dealing with personal stuff." On Tuesday, the Titans released Elliott along with a cryptic s...

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21 Oct 17:27 • Osita Nwanevu

‘Digger’ Is Smug, Cynical, And Perfectly Timed

On the night of May 10, 1968, the most storied night in the last century of French of civil unrest, nearly 40,000 students faced off against policemen in the Latin Quarter of Paris—one of the largest crowds the city's swelling protest movement had yet assembled. Famousl...

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21 Oct 17:06 • Ray Ratto

How Do I Stop My Kid From Crashing Out Over Trying New Activities?

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, Ray answers a question on how to deal with your child's tantrums over trying new activities.

Defector
16:48 • Patrick Redford

A Review Of All The Stuff That Happened Last NBA Season

On this week's episode of Nothing But Respect, the discerning listener can hear me and Harry, both of whom are recovering from minor illnesses, losing our voices over the course of an hour and a half. We had a lot to talk about, including the fact that we finally played bask...

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21 Oct 16:00 • Luis Paez-Pumar

How Much Fire Emblem Is Too Much Fire Emblem?

When I was on the fence about buying a Nintendo Switch 2, I held off with the self-aware knowledge that I would eventually cave come September. I knew that Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave would break me. I needed to play this game like my life depended on it. https://www.yout...

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21 Oct 15:15 • Drew Magary

How The Rams Being 2-4 Relates To The Troy Aikman Saga

In case you didn’t read about it, or you didn’t hear the hints firsthand, Joe Buck and Troy Aikman are reportedly getting divorced. The Monday Night Football broadcast team is the longest tenured booth duo in NFL history, even moving together from Fox to ESPN as a package de...

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21 Oct 13:12 • Owen Lewis

Nobody Wants To Talk About Why The Ringer Is Pivoting To Substack

A media company launching a series of paywalled newsletters is not, on its own and on its face, a strange thing to do. AI’s ongoing cannibalization of online search is ravaging website traffic, and programmatic advertising doesn’t provide the kind of revenue it used to. If y...

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20 Oct 19:06 • Corban Goble

The Pelicans Broke How I Understand Pro Basketball

It's unlikely that you spend much time thinking about the New Orleans Pelicans. However, as a New Orleans resident for whom ball is life, I am rather fixated on them. This team is far stranger than you may have previously understood. They suck in a singular way, and I’ve con...

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20 Oct 18:21 • Chris Thompson

The Guardians Were And Are A Drag

The Cleveland Guardians will not win the World Series this autumn, just as they have not in any of the last 78 autumns. They were eliminated Monday night by the Tampa Bay Rays: out-slugged, out-small-balled, and outlasted. Thus ends what was, by regular season record, an une...