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I had a good time talking to students at UNC Charlotte with More Perfect University this weekend. Thanks to everybody who showed up on a Sunday ready to ask tough questions and engage in conversation.

New York State Police are asking for help as they investigate a fatal fire in the Hudson Valley. Continue reading…

Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. Today, we're talking about hockey, Jane Austen, Steven Spielberg, how to start dating, and more.

Drew is off this week, and I'm your substitute. I write about hockey, baseball, and a bunch of other stuff here at Defector. I also just published a book of essays about the movie It's A Wonderful Life, called Every Time A Bell Rings, which I co-wrote with the amazing critic and novelist Emily St. James. It's a great gift for Christmas, but there is no greater gift than being able to answer your letters. So let's get to it.

Ryan:

Without knowing for sure whether this is actually true, we can still surmise that the Washington Commanders felt better about losing Monday night's game than they did about their delightfully grotesque tie against the Giants in Week 5. And we are almost certain the San Franc...

After listening to a critique of the Miss America pageant on a public radio station, Barbara Hammer declared herself a feminist. Then she left her husband. Then she became a lesbian. This was the early 1970s, and it wasn’t long before someone gifted baby gay Hammer a Super-8...

Did you know that October 19 - October 25 is Prison Banned Books Week 2026? This year's focus is grievance appeals. Our stories this week focus on that topic.

Here's a new story about how one writer's broken typewriter led to a lawsuit (and win!) against the Pennsylvania DOC.
https://prisonjournalismproject.org/2026/10/20/how-i-won-a-lawsuit-against-the-department-of-corrections/

First, and most importantly, don't miss Peter Kaminsky's talk today at 4 PM Eastern. Required Viewing I EXPOSED what big tech knows about you by becoming… a data broker, by Chris the Producer, on YouTube. It's brilliant. More about him here. And here. And here. Hat's off to Don Marti for the find. Bonus link. […]

Officials said they wanted to search the phone of Samuel Tunick, a Stop Cop City activist, for child abuse material. It was actually because he was suspected of “terrorist activities.”

Volkswagen told certain ID.4 drivers to limit charging to 80% as part of a recall by October 21. Unless drivers opt out, VW will automatically “apply a temporary vehicle setting” remotely.

more…

Electrify America just opened its biggest charging station yet, with 24 DC fast chargers.

more…

At best, most Trump administration officials can be called “sycophants.” At BEST. But so many of them can be called a lot of other things a bit more insulting. We have a lot of shoe options to work with. Most of them fit multiple people. Rubes, hucksters, useful idiots, bigots, charlatans, window lickers, narcissists, anthropomorphic […]

David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker and the host of The New Yorker Radio Hour, talks about the national political news of the day, plus the conversations happening soon at The New Yorker festival.

Photo: Jon Stewart talks with David Remnick during The 2025 New Yorker Festival at Webster Hall on October 26, 2025 in New York City. (Eugene Gologursky/Getty Images for The New Yorker via Getty Images)

 

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Chelsea Cirruzzo, Washington Correspondent for STAT news, talks about how vaccine policy could change, depending on which party gains control of Congress in the midterm elections.

Photo: A woman receives the seasonal influenza vaccine. (NIAID, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic via Wikimedia Commons)

 

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For this pledge drive, listeners try their hand at a quiz. Today's theme is 2026 news oddities.

Stock illustration by MaxMariz via iStock / Getty Images Plus

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Many critics panned the new Tom Cruise climate movie Digger. Jayson Greene, critic and author of the novel UnWorld and Molly Taft, senior writer for WIRED, covering climate change, energy, and the environment unpack why they think might actually be a great climate movie, despite not being a great movie movie.

Photo: Tom Cruise attends the "Digger" Korea Press Conference on October 01, 2026 in Seoul, South Korea. (Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images for Warner Bros. via Getty Images)

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Each day during this pledge drive, we're talking fall food. Today, Carla Lalli, video host and cookbook author, including her latest, Food is a Feeling (Clarkson Potter, 2026) walks us through how to make a perfect loaf bread with different kinds of fall produce.

Photo by jeffreyw,CC Attribution 2.0 Generic, via Wikimedia Commons. 

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Complexity is a difficult beast to deal with. One of the core challenges of complexity is the strange independence between the parts and the whole. You may find yourself in a situation where learning about the parts doesn’t help much with learning about the whole; sometimes,...

New Nozzle research shows Google has been serving rank trackers normal-looking SERPs with the results swapped out, and 8.4% of SERPs have come back poisoned since September 13.

President Donald J. Trump was returned to office with a clear mandate to end the invasion that Democrats allowed to overwhelm communities, drain public resources, and endanger public safety. In less than two years, the Trump Administration has delivered the largest reduction in the illegal alien population in modern history, driven illegal crossings to an […]

The post How President Trump Ended the Border Invasion and Restored American Sovereignty appeared first on The White House.

The argument over whether engineers should stop reading code is over, because we already have. Faros AI’s new report shows

The post How to review AI code without reading the code appeared first on The New Stack.