Defector
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Chelsea Gray Punished Caitlin Clark’s Mistakes
It is a funny twist of fate that the Indiana Fever have become such an engine for maddening WNBA storylines that have little or nothing to do with their actual on-court performances, because those performances are crazy-making enough on their own. Are the Fever a great team capable of melting any opponent in front of them, or a bunch of chumps who can't defend the paint to save their lives? Is Caitlin Clark one of the most dynamic guards in the league, or a bozo who can't stop turning it over ...
Would You Eat This Cretaceous Turducken?
Various journalists have tried and failed to investigate the origins of turducken, that matryoshka-inspired dish of a chicken nested inside a duck nested inside a turkey. One chef in Louisiana claims to have invented the dish but refused to tell the New York Times when or where he created it, or even his age. But turducken is best understood as a modern combination in an ancient lineage of engastration , a cooking technique in which one animal is stuffed inside another. Other famous entrant...
The Washington Mystics Don’t Act Their Age
The bulletin board material the Dallas Wings supplied to Cotie McMahon looked more like posterboard material . On Wednesday night, after the Washington Mystics’ 96-92 comeback win over Dallas, the rookie Mystics guard posted a photo of a scouting report the Wings had evidently left behind in their locker room. Like many scouting reports—who can forget Joe Mazzulla’s Quizlet account ?—this one featured some good bits of found poetry. Angela Dugalić? “In to space floor/Attack her if she guards...
Mugged By Seagulls, With Rohan Nadkarni
Both Drew and I can sense when we are overdue for having Rohan Nadkarni on the podcast. In the way that an old prospector's knee might start barking before the storm clouds have even appeared on the horizon, we both feel a twinge when it has been too long between detailed descriptions of various sandwiches and gentle reminders that we are old as hell. It doesn't really matter who sends the text first. In a deeper sense, the universe sends it, and all of us receive it at the same time. Friends,...
It’s Jefry Yan Time
Years before he figured it out enough to make his Major League debut on Wednesday night at the age of 29, which in turn was long after his career ended for the first time, you could find coverage of Jefry Yan celebrating otherwise unremarkable strikeouts in wild and demonstrative fashion, in decidedly unremarkable settings. MLB.com posted a supercut of Yan absolutely going the hell off in Dominican Winter League games back in 2024, and similar spring training highlights abounded on team-affili...
Why Your Team Sucks 2026: Miami Dolphins
Some people are fans of the Miami Dolphins. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Miami Dolphins. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here . Your team: "To win games, you have to win the game, not lose the game, honestly. And that, that is how you lose the game." Your 2025 record: 7-10, featuring a 2-7 start that got Dolphins GM Chris Grier fired after 900 years on the job. Everyone assumed that head coach Mike Mc...
Oh No: Dodgers In Unrecoverable Tailspin After Sixth Straight Loss
Less than a week after acquiring Tarik Skubal from the Detroit Tigers for the hefty sum of three prospects, the Los Angeles Dodgers are in a tailspin. What seemed at first a pitching upgrade aimed at converting the team's momentum into a cinched playoff spot has, given the perspective of four more games, turned into a desperate, last-ditch move that has totally mortgaged the team's future. Did the Dodgers ruin baseball by trading for Tarik Skubal? Here is the conclusive answer: No. Clearly Tar...
Defector Also Investigating How Our Super Powerful AI Tool Broke Contain
As many of you know, Defector Research Labs is hard at work creating what we are sure will be the most powerful AI coding tool on the market. The goal of DevinBelly is simple: to allow users to scale their natural language-processing capabilities within a wide range of long short-term memory native integrated development environments, without fretting too much about GPU bottleneck stacks or token prefix limits, so they can practice Retrieval-Augmented Generation, balance their multimodality, a...
Paul Skenes Is Stuck Being A Guy While The Pirates Require A Dude
The Pittsburgh Pirates probably are not yet feeling desperate, but desperation can't be very far off. For the first time in recorded history, the organization made smart, aggressive moves at the trade deadline, beefed up their bullpen, and fortified for a push toward the playoffs. There is one problem: They share a division with the Milwaukee Brewers, the team with the best record in baseball. There is another problem: They also share a division with the Chicago Cubs, who have 66 wins, a .574 ...
Claire Stapleton Helped Write The Myth Of Google, But Now She’s Trying To Tell The Truth
It feels a little perverse to be writing this review in a Google doc. In 2018, over 20,000 Google employees walked out to protest working conditions at the tech juggernaut. Claire Stapleton was one of the protest's primary organizers. She had started at the company as an internal communications associate, drafting copy to explain the work product of the company to actual employees. Her quippy emails earned her multiple promotions and even the internal moniker “Bard of Google.” After a few year...
Miles Mikolas Now Better At Hitting Than Pitching
It's been a bad season for the 37-year-old pitcher Miles Mikolas. He's got an ERA of 5.67, and he's made a habit of starts where a bunch of guys just wallop what he offers. Only two pitchers in MLB have allowed more dingers than he's surrendered, and the signs point to Mikolas giving it another go in Japan once his one-year contract expires. The silver lining, however, is that he plays for the Washington Nationals, and nothing that the Nationals do really matters anymore in the grand scheme...
The Mystery Of Google’s Fixation On “The Transwoman In The WNBA”
As anyone who has used Google might already know, when you conduct a search on the site, it will suggest more searches of potential interest under a "People also ask" heading. The makeup of these "people" is not specified on the page, but clearly the point of this feature is to have you search more. In my capacity as the primary editor of Defector's lead WNBA writer, I use Google search often: to verify the spelling of names, fact-check details, and find the time and date of a team's upcoming ...
LIV Golf Claims It Will Be Rescued From The Toilet Any Day Now
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, players made plans to scramble back to the PGA Tour, a lawsuit claiming unpaid invoices hit, and the Asian Tour ended its partnership. But to hear LIV CEO Scott O’Neil tell it , the tour has lined up the investment it needs to s...
Why Your Team Sucks 2026: Cincinnati Bengals
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
Alex Eala Is Catching The WTA’s Best Off Guard
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 extremely loud, because to them you are one of the most important sportspeople alive. A player in these circumstances doesn't have to reach the absolute peak of the sport to have this effect on people. Brazilian fans go nuts for bl...
New York’s Use Of AI For Family Policing Summarizes The Last 30 Years Of City Politics
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 p.m. That place didn’t last long, though. She was bounced from home to home from the time she entered foster care at the age of eight to the time she aged out at 18. Those years were characterized by rampant physical and sexual abuse, for which her foster parents received a $1,200 monthly ...
How Do I Talk To My Kid About Death?
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 [email protected] . This week, Dave answers a question about talking to your child about death .
For One Night Only, A Rookie And His Sweet Folks Make It Possible To Enjoy The Yankees
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 Yankees—once such an inevitability that Bob Costas invoked the word "socialism" to describe how collective action could force them from the mountaintop—are no longer the sport's big bullies. Hell, they're no longer even th...
How Far Would You Go To Save Your Kia Soul?
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 f...
‘Nothing But Respect’ Is Back From Summer Break
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 po...
What Are You Banning When You Ban Influencers?
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 the stand so it wasn't too sweet, just the platonic ideal of apple flavor somehow frozen into slushie form. Before I took another sip, I pulled out my phone to snap a picture of it. The rich brown of the slushie was framed by...
We’re Just Going To Keep Doing 2020 Again Until All The Wrong Stuff Is True
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 single thing befouled by Donald Trump's sticky palm prints, very manifestly going to be made worse and more damaging for all that nasty attention, and was in fact made much worse and more damaging for it. From one moment to the...
Is This The End For Gianni Infantino?
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 unopposed re-election next March. He could have ridden off into the sunset in 2031 and made millions off the connections built during his tenure at the head of FIFA. That wasn't enough for him, though, and so now the walls ...
The Women’s Pro Baseball League Will Eventually Need To Escape The Past
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, Ill., which ushered in the inaugural weekend of the first professional women’s baseball league in nearly 30 years. I have never been happier than I was witnessing that moment. Our lives are all downhill from here. That mascot is modeled after Maybelle Blair, a former pitcher for the All-American Gi...
Concussion Protocols Are A Sham
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:
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