Defector
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Dana White Stars In History’s Worst Truck Ad
Vanity pickup trucks: I fucking hate these things, and so you do. The second I see a Ram SuperUltraMegaSoldierDuty on the highway, I already know that it'll have a Blue Lives Matter decal splashed across its rear windshield, a pristine flatbed untouched by manual labor equipment, and a driver who has no fucking idea how to park. These are vehicles made by assholes, for assholes . Knowing all of that, it was destiny that Ram, a brand owned by Dutch auto conglomerate Stellantis, would hire on...
Who Pranks The Pranksters?
Some things are just timeless. Gossip, for instance, has likely been around as long as humans have been able to communicate with one another, and then share someone else’s business. Ötzi, the 5,000-year-old ice man ? Probably a gossiper and definitely a messy guy. Something else just as timeless? Pranks! Normal Gossip is back for its 10th season! Who could have guessed that so many friends had silly, outrageous and harrowing stories they wanted to share with the world. We’re grateful to eve...
The Mets Have Turned It Around 360 Degrees
The crud-ass New York Mets were able to manage a series split on the road against division-leading Atlanta during the long weekend, overcoming severe bullpen issues for 10-9 and 7-6 victories on Sunday and Monday. But before any fan could even begin to think about letting their guard down or their hopes up, New York returned home to kick off a series with the Royals and deliver another entry in this year's contest for "Most Frustrating Loss." Again, the Mets offense did their part, but Kansas ...
You Don’t Have To Love Grass To Win On It
Heading into this year's Wimbledon, neither Coco Gauff nor Naomi Osaka had made a deep run at the tournament, despite winning a total of six Slams elsewhere. Gauff had peaked at the fourth round, and Osaka at the third round, three times apiece for both players. An observer trying to make sense of this history could argue that their styles of play weren't flattered by the demands of grass-court tennis. Osaka's power game relies on rhythm, which she gets from the ball's consistent and reliable ...
The Tour de France’s Infernal Present Portends Its Impossible Future
SAINT-GAUDENS, France — On Monday morning, the Tour de France's media wranglers sent us all a text announcing something genuinely shocking for such a French organization: They had banned smoking. The ASO said nobody could smoke in the TV areas "in order to combat fire risks," as that day's racing finished 60 kilometers west of the Trévillach wildfire, which has forced over 12,000 people to evacuate their homes. That day, the race entered France to 44 kilometers of quiet roads after organizers ...
‘The Furious’ Kicks Ass
What’s the sickest action sequence you’ve ever witnessed on screen? I’ll give you five. There’s the tea parlor shootout at the top of John Woo’s Hard Boiled , of course, as well as Jackie Chan’s multi-level shopping mall free-for-all at the close of Police Story . William Friedkin constructed more than a few throughout his career, none better than the stalking-slashing set piece at the climax of The Hunted . I still don’t know how John Frankenheimer made Ronin ’s Paris sedan chase without kill...
The Atlanta Dream Are Getting Drowsy
A man goes to the doctor and says, "Doctor! Doctor! It hurts when I do this." The doctor replies, "Then stop doing that." To some extent, the solution to the Atlanta Dream's recent woes is for them to play well instead of playing poorly, and head coach Karl Smesko isn't panicking. "I don't think it's anything drastic. It's just a play here, a play there, a call here, a call there," he said after Atlanta's 88-83 loss to Golden State on Saturday, his team's fifth straight loss. "I think as soon ...
Lionel Messi Refuses To Let Time Win
For 79 minutes of Tuesday afternoon's round-of-16 match against Egypt, Lionel Messi was terrible, and by extension so was Argentina. "Terrible" might be overstating it, but when confronted with the enormity of Messi's talent, even at this sunset period of his career, anything other than something we've never seen before feels, well, terrible. Messi spent the first 79 minutes of the match misplaying passes, dribbling to nowhere, missing yet another penalty —boy, am I glad that he made his two p...
The Hot Take Industrial Complex Cannot Be Killed By Conventional Means
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 malls, flopping, hero instincts, and more. Before I get started today, let's go ahead and open up the submissions for Why Your Team Sucks 2026. Does your NFL team suck? Well then, email us here and tell us why. A quick refresher of the guidelines for you. One: put your team's name and "WYTS"...
Meet The Broadway Actor Teaching Public Defenders How To Win In Court
On Sunday, June 7, LeeAnne Hutchison was at the Tony Awards, watching her Broadway debut Liberation win for Best Play. The next morning, she woke up and clocked in at Defenders Academy, a week-long trial skills program for public defenders from across the country. She’s spent the last two decades using her acting skills to teach lawyers how to be more compelling in court. Hutchison and I met over Zoom to talk about what a courtroom has in common with a theater, and what keeps bringing her ...
Paraguayan Senator Gets Shockingly Racist Toward Kylian Mbappé
Heading into the 2026 World Cup, one of FIFA's points of focus was curbing on-field racism. That is the genesis of the "covered your mouth" red card that so far has taken out Ecuador's Piero Hincapié and Paraguay's Miguel Almirón. The logic was sound: Players are probably less likely to do a racismo if their lips can be easily read in the moment, potentially heading off the kind of paralytic he-said-he-said that protected Benfica's Gianluca Prestianni in his racism incident with Vinícius last ...
Is It Mitch McConnell Or Your Own Sense Of Possibility That Has Been Dead For Weeks?
Nobody has seen Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell in public in a while. Is that because the 84-year-old former majority leader is dead? Well now, that is an interesting question. What is death? A man who does not pursue his dreams dies every day. Mitch McConnell's dream was to be a United States Senator, a position he has held since 1985. Could one not then argue that he is in fact the livingest guy around? What after all is "a pulse"? Many things throb rhythmically. That is nothing special....
Plato’s Allegory Of The Crab
Sometime in the late spring or early summer of 2022, a baby three-spot swimming crab was drifting in the open ocean, as baby crabs often do. The crab came across a white plastic bottle that once held Shaoxing wine—a fact both incomprehensible and immaterial to the crab—and went inside. This decision, if it was in fact a choice or rather the result of a chance oceanic current, offered some obvious benefits to the baby crab. A plastic bottle offers precious shelter to something so small, soft-sh...
It’s The Hype That Kills
So what did we learn this time, kids? Other than the cost of accepting gifts from creepy strangers always being much higher than you think, no matter how much you justify accepting the gift as your due, that is. Well, in the wake of Monday night's dopeslap in Seattle, in which the USMNT was the face and Belgium the gloved hand, there are so many lessons to absorb, and that's even after you leaven off the top 35 percent of the vitriol, which is just snark from late-to-the-party nitwits. Tha...
America’s Birthday, Brought To You By Gas Station Hoagies
Perhaps it's a sign from Mother Nature that the two flagship events of the Philadelphia's Wawa Welcome America Festival for the semiquincentennial were derailed by weather. Maybe she was telling us to stop this embarrassing exhibition of unbridled nationalism and look inward. But if she thought that she could succeed in getting Americans to self-reflect, even by replicating the conditions of the depths of hell where our leaders will surely burn, she was sorely mistaken. How naive! Clearly she ...
The USMNT’s World Cup Exit Was Too Sad And Too Familiar
It is difficult to pin down an international team's true quality and character based on the results of one brief tournament. The games are too few, and the environment too variable, to come to any definitive conclusions. But the games are revealing nonetheless, and any team that plays enough of them will have their specific strengths and shortcomings put on display, some more immutable than others. The teams that tend to thrive in the World Cup are the ones most capable of shrinking the distan...
MLB Is Now Promoting A Salary Cap Between Innings
You weren't watching MLB.TV on Sunday, because NBC bought out all of the day's games and locked most of them behind their billions-losing streaming service. But if you were tuned in for out-of-market baseball in the days prior, like I was, you may have been delivered an advertisement from MLB itself that served as a stark reminder of just how badly the league's owners want to cap their players' salaries. The commercials on MLB.TV are part of the league's "Level The Playing Field" campaign, ...
Gifts, Gritos, And A Breakthrough Win: An Afternoon With The Tour de France’s New And Jubilant Mexican Fanbase
BARCELONA — " Pogito! Hermano! Ya eres Mexicano !" sang the gathered dozens. Over an hour after Isaac del Toro won Stage 2 of the Tour de France, an enthusiastic knot of 40-ish tricolor -clad fans was still patiently at the barriers. Some came from Mexico, some lived in Barcelona. Most had been there sweating in the unrelenting sun since early afternoon, though what's that compared to the 36-year wait for a Mexican rider to win again at the sport's biggest race, as Raul Alcala did in 1990? ...
ESPN’s Matt Miller Investigated For Alleged Consumer Fraud While Recovering From Emergency Arm Amputation
Matt Miller, an on-air NFL Draft analyst for ESPN, is presently recovering from, among other injuries, the emergency amputation of his left arm. Probably there are not too many kinds of trouble in Miller's life that measure up against that one. But trouble is waiting, and not very patiently: The Missouri Attorney General's office confirmed late last week that it is actively investigating Miller on consumer-protection grounds. In the time since he and his family mobilized public support around ...
The Folarin Balogun Red Card Brouhaha Is A Vintage FIFA Disaster
Just a day after FIFA rescinded Folarin Balogun's red-card suspension so that the USMNT striker could play against Belgium in Monday night's round-of-16 match in Seattle, a decision that elicited reactions ranging from joyful to horrified depending on your rooting interests, the story keeps on rolling thanks to FIFA's innate FIFA-ness. On Monday, the Royal Belgian Football Association released a statement about the whole mess, which has raised the twin specters of corruption and incompetence. ...
Poor A’s Fans Can’t Even Get Properly Perfecto’d
If there could have been a story to rival England's Jordan Henderson getting yellow-carded and then breaking his arm without actually playing, it would have been Brian Serven homering in the ninth inning of Marlins-Athletics to complete the comeback di tutti comebacks, and that's even allowing for the fact that England-Mexico at the Azteca was arguably a more momentous event than Marlins-Athletics no matter where it was played. That it was played in West Sacramento just added to the mutant ...
The Crossword, July 6: We’re Halfway There
Stay in line, and do our Monday crossword. This puzzle was constructed by Peggy Sue Marlin , and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Peggy Sue works in systems and data automation and enjoys golfing and DIY projects. She won her school spelling bee on the word "cheeseburger," then was eliminated at regionals on "asphyxiation." Her parents shared her disappointment, though they were secretly relieved she didn't know that word yet. Fortunately, dealing with that level of heartbreak at a young age prepared ...
The Ducks Screwed Themselves
I think it's important we set some axioms for discussion of Anaheim's Leo Carlsson signing an offer sheet with Philadelphia , because it helps a superficially mindblowing contract feel something closer to logical—both in that the Flyers were wise to offer it, and in that the Ducks would be fools not to match it. The first thing to be agreed upon is that Carlsson is very, very good: 21 years old, putting up better numbers every year, 67 points in his third season. Whether you think he's neared ...
That’s Why This Shit Rules
Soccer is not usually the sort of sport that causes its players to lose their voices. And yet there was Harry Kane, minutes after his 10-man England squad escaped the Azteca with a 3-2 win over Mexico, nearly unable to complete his post-match interview due to the hoarseness of his voice. It was an unusual thing to see, but befitting of the game Kane had just played, which was so strange, so dramatic, that it was easy to imagine most everyone who watched or played in it being left speechless. ...
Banger British Grand Prix Ends With A Whimper
Perhaps I can at least thank Max Verstappen for the clarity. Before he ran his Red Bull car into the wall on the 49th of the Silverstone Circuit's 52 laps, the British Grand Prix was shaping up to be too exciting to be coherent. It got off to an uncharacteristically slow start, yes, to the point where I wrote "first half shocking processional for silverstone" in my notes and was prepared to place some blame on the sprint format for the ongoing viewership woes. But shortly after, as though the ...
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