Defector
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Laz Díaz And Modern Baseball Are Mutually Through With One Another
Laz Díaz has had enough of baseball. The veteran umpire will wrap up a three-decade career this week, will hang up the mask and the chest protector, and will bid good riddance to the sport. Major League Baseball offered buyouts to umpires earlier this season, and seven veterans, including Díaz and the dreaded C.B. Bucknor, raised their hands. Bucknor is already missing from the sport, having absorbed a deflected Jacob Misiorowski heater with his facemask back in May, and has not returned since...
I Fought A Pie And I Won
Sometimes a recipe leads you astray. It happens to the best of us, myself included. Sometimes a bad recipe will leave you with no recourse. You simply have to accept that you wasted all of your time and all of those precious, precious ingredients, on someone else's poor handiwork. But other times, if you're both stubborn and resourceful enough, you can get yourself out of whatever jam a shit recipe has put you in. I have one such story for you. The recipe in question was for a chocolate cre...
José Mourinho Gives Real Madrid Exactly What It Paid For
For all of his flaws as a manager, and there are plenty , José Mourinho always provides clubs the full José Mourinho Experience. The Special One instantly becomes the center of attention wherever he goes, no matter the circumstances, and while that might overshadow his players, it also puts all of the spotlight and the pressure on the manager. In the past, this has been an issue as Mourinho gets carried away with playing up the gimmick, but for a club like 2026–27 Real Madrid, coming off of a ...
The Chargers Have Placed Their Own Asses Directly Into The Jackpot
It is generally agreed that the Miami Dolphins are the worst team in professional football not named the Ottawa Redblacks. In fairness, the Dolphins could go 0-13 in the NFL, just like the Redblacks have in Canada, based on all the things they have not done, are not doing, and will not do between now and Thanksgiving. Everyone agreed when the season began that the Dolphins were going to stink to high heaven, so we can move off them. Indeed, losing in Week 1 to the Raiders did not elevate La...
The Crossword, Sept. 21: Cheeky Move
Have a seat and solve our Monday crossword. This week's puzzle was constructed by Hanh Huynh and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu . Hanh is a bankruptcy attorney who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. with his wife and two kids. 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 ...
Jasper Wang Quit His Corporate Career To Do … This
If you're a regular reader of this blog, you probably already know the general contours of Defector's origin story. I'm one of a handful of co-owners who joined the company after it was founded, so my knowledge of the specifics was fuzzy and basically limited to what people shared on Twitter and in this announcement blog . What I do know from experience is that none of this would have been possible without Jasper Wang. Readers will know him from his annual financial report blogs , but it canno...
China Miéville On The “Completely Defining” Book It Took 20 Years To Write
It takes an open mind to engage with China Miéville’s work. A writer for whom the already cliched phrase “genre-bending” is even more banal, Miéville has never opposed the designation of genre writer. As much influenced by Oliver Onions, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Karl Marx, Miéville’s writing incorporates all manner of historical and linguistic snags, at once erudite and irreverent, challenging but inviting. A Miéville novel or story collection is like a rabbit hole, prompting the reader down stra...
The Gambling Companies Need Their Customers’ Misery
Over the weekend, The New York Times published an investigation into DraftKings. The upshot of the investigation is that this obviously exploitative and profit-driven company exploits its customers in the pursuit of profit in all the ways that you might have feared. The story features on-the-record testimony from former DraftKings employees who say that the company not only built tools to identify customers who are most likely to lose and entice them to keep betting, but also shut down project...
Hot Feet On Main Are Only One Part Of The NFL’s Climate Problem
If you found yourself tuning in late for Sunday's matchup between the Eagles and Titans in Nashville, you may have had a number of burning questions: Has Jalen Hurts been replaced with a sack of flour? Is Cam Ward the truth? Why is my television showing me slow motion replays of someone getting their feet hosed down? https://twitter.com/NFLonFOX/status/2101736833084428667?s=20 The heat was a problem for the Titans, as temperatures in Nashville hit the mid-90s and the region was under a...
Caleb Williams Suffers Awful Injury At Awful Time In Awful Game
Caleb Williams was going to score a touchdown. Anyone watching from home, or inside of a thoroughly drenched Soldier Field, knew it was about to happen. The Chicago Bears were trailing Minnesota by an ugly score of 6-3 in the fourth quarter when Williams, boxed in all game by the Vikings’ defense, faked an outside zone handoff to running back Kyle Monangai and booted out to his left. The Vikings bit, and Williams found himself with a relatively easy scamper to the end zone ahead of him when he...
NC State Innovates Brand New Endgame Choking Strategy
The beauty of college football is that there are so many teams, and so many bad coaches, that inevitably, a play that would otherwise have a one in a billion chance of happening actually has quite a good chance of turning into reality. For proof let’s go to Nashville, where the NC State Wolfpack committed an all-time boner yesterday. Roll the tape: https://bsky.app/profile/sickoscommittee.org/post/3mvvj7uilus2r A bit of background. The Wolfpack led Vanderbilt 24-7 at one point in the t...
This Is So Fucking Embarrassing
I guess the addled corpus of Lee Corso was the only thing keeping ESPN’s college football arm from shedding every last trace of dignity. Because if you tuned into the four-letter network's College GameDay program yesterday morning, you were treated to this profoundly nauseating minute of unwanted jingoism: https://bsky.app/profile/awfulannouncing.bsky.social/post/3mvurjqbakl2h That’s human malware Pat McAfee, Corso’s ostensible replacement on the GameDay set, giving the HOO BABY to our...
He’ll Take The Elevator: Defector Reacher Creatures On ‘Reacher’ Season Four
The fourth season of Amazon's Reacher , which was based on Lee Child's book Gone Tomorrow and set largely in Philadelphia, came to a close earlier this week. Defector's elite Reacher Creature team was convened to discuss this unusually brutal and mostly quite good season of the show; you can find our discussions of previous seasons here and here . The post contains a bunch of spoilers. David: Reacher Creatures, how are we recovering from Reacher Season 4: Showdown At Hoagie Junction? I assu...
Lane Kiffin And ESPN Are Both Shilling For Their Agendas
Welcome to the Defector College Football Watch Guide , where Israel Daramola and Ray Ratto will tell you which of the weekend’s college football games are worth giving a crap about. Israel: Sometime between showing college football's highest-rated games of all time, ESPN thought it necessary to bonk viewers over the head with fear-mongering over the sport on behalf of the Protect College Sports Act. We've written about it already , and it is all the talk in college sports: ESPN debased its...
Alex Ovechkin Finally Faces Some Pushback For Supporting Vladimir Putin
Alexander Ovechkin is probably the single most famous Russian athlete. He is also a supporter of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and not a particularly quiet or passive one. This, occasionally, has gotten him into some hot water with the rest of the world, given Putin's corruption and warmaking. In 2017, Ovechkin launched "PutinTeam," a social media movement supporting Putin and his party in the following year's elections, which were widely decried as fixed . In 2022, following Russia's inde...
The Lions’ Defense Is Dyin’ Out There
There are few scenarios for a struggling and injury-riddled defense more nightmarish than the one the Detroit Lions' unit had to face on Thursday night. Just four days after suffering through a 31-30 overtime win over the Saints, during which they were on the field for a grueling 90 snaps, they found themselves in Buffalo, dealing with Josh Allen and the Buffalo Bills in their home opener. And oh yeah, Kerby Joseph and Brian Branch are both still on the PUP list. So it got bad quickly for t...
Cavan Sullivan And The USMNT’s Future Are Here
On Thursday morning, USMNT manager Mauricio Pochettino announced his roster for a forthcoming quartet of games. The first thing that leaps out is that Christian Pulisic's name is nowhere to be found. The story is that the U.S.'s best player will stay in Italy as he heals up from a pair of injuries sustained in his team's embarrassing loss to Belgium in the World Cup, though Pulisic isn't so injured that he couldn't help his team come back and salvage a draw against Lazio last weekend. Per t...
Steve Belichick Is Gone From UNC
Steve Belichick has resigned from his job as defensive coordinator at UNC following an investigation that found "certain actions demonstrated a disregard for Carolina's values and standards of conduct," according to a statement released Thursday by the university. Belichick, the son of head coach Bill Belichick, already had been on medical leave . This follows Mike Lombardi resigning earlier this month from his job as general manager . Little else has been made public by UNC about what l...
Rory Dames’s SafeSport Suspension Has Ended
Rory Dames—the women’s soccer coach currently banned for life from the NWSL, and who has been accused of abuse by more than a dozen former youth players—is no longer listed in the U.S. Center for SafeSport’s centralized disciplinary database. According to a document reviewed by Defector, Dames was removed from the database because a one-year suspension by SafeSport has ended. Per the document, he remains on probation for five years and under a no-contact directive, but those sanctions do no...
Annie Dillard Gave It All
Following this week's news that the brilliant writer Annie Dillard has died at age 81, some Defector staffers wrote about what her work and example have meant to them. Much is made of Dillard’s genius, her wizardry with language, her talent . But the Dillardism that has stuck with me strongest over the years comes from Alexander Chee's essay "The Writing Life," in which he describes taking an undergraduate course with her at Wesleyan in 1989: "Talent isn't enough, [Dillard] had told us. ...
A New Book Examines The Wickedness Of Trump. Sort Of.
There is a cottage industry in publishing dedicated to understanding Donald Trump and his followers. Since his election in 2016, a spate of books have attempted to contextualize, deconstruct, and analyze the President’s ascendency. The second Trump term has been no less prolific. This year alone has seen juggernaut bestsellers like Regime Change by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan and the upcoming Profiles in Cowardice by Jacob Weisberg. “Trump 2.0 is all about this break with the stylistic n...
Zoomer Cultural Exchange Hour, With ‘State Of The League’
This week on the show, Harry and I hung out with the hosts of the State of the League podcast for an hour of classic offseason nonsense. We talked about Paul Schrader getting really into AI , which aging stars should be allowed to do steroids, and Brice Sensabaugh. Oh, you're not familiar with Brice Sensabaugh, the fourth-year shooting guard for the Utah Jazz? Well, you're about to be, as I am confident no other NBA podcast has dedicated this much of its runtime to talking about Brice Sensabau...
There’s A Big New Crater On The Moon
The Moon got whacked. The Moon gets whacked a lot, honestly. You can just look at its beaten, cratered surface to see that. But these days we're pretty good at counting its scars. Since 2010, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has been circling the Moon and constantly imaging its surface, and both computers and humans check those images closely to see if there have been any new kablammos since the last photograph. There often are. The LRO can spot craters as small as 30 feet across, caused by sp...
Everybody Hates Bob Kraft
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 should never find myself in a position where I’m forced to cheer on Macklemore. In fact, we’re so far removed from Macklemore’s brief moment of cultural relevance that I shouldn’t even be forced to remember that this guy is even alive . Sometime ar...
Feeling Sad About Rap Again
Welcome to Listening Habits , a column where I share the music and musical topics I’ve been fixated on recently. The last few months I've been in the throes of reading and watching information about the murder-for-hire trial of rapper Lil Durk . It's a complete circus that seems to have it all from an entertainment standpoint: snitching gang members, rap lyrics and interviews with streamers used as evidence, Machiavellian defense attorneys, an audience of fanboys and stan armies drawing ...
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