Defector
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A Day In The Chaos Of Cycling’s Most Legendary Arena
ALPE D'HUEZ, France — Roughly halfway up the final climb of Stage 19, and roughly five hours before the riders hit the base, our car indulged the thick snarl of besotted fans who wanted to do the wave with us. This slowed us across a critical speed threshold, beyond which our car was no longer something worth avoiding but rather something worth rocking. I'd seen videos of cars getting shaken the night before, and hoped to get shaken myself, though I was not prepared for how jarring and violent...
The Dodgers Went To Grandpa’s House!
There are aspects of being president of the United States that Donald Trump is really bad at, and others at which he is significantly worse. It goes without saying that none of that is improving, but what is most notable about his performance in the position is the extent to which he has never really bothered to figure out what the job is. From the earliest days of his presidency , there was a sort of inchoate yearning that emanated from the more respectable reaches of the political culture fo...
From Cursed To First? Mayo And Teen Sensation Kobe McDonald Want To Win Just Once
DUBLIN — The All-Ireland Senior Football final, the Irish Super Bowl, takes place July 26 at Dublin's historic Croke Park. This year’s game mismatches Kerry and Mayo, Gaelic football’s biggest winners against the most notorious losers in the ancient sport’s history. Kerry fans expected their team to be here. They always do. They’re the defending champs and will be playing for their 40th title. No other county comes close. Legendary manager Paidi Ó Sé once called his team’s supporters "the ...
LeBron James Is A Philadelphia 76er
Perhaps there was no weirder possible conclusion to this saga: LeBron James is moving to Philadelphia. Shams Charania reported Friday that James will sign with the 76ers on a two-year, $8 million deal with a player option. The 41-year-old won't be ring-chasing with Steph Curry, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Nikola Jokic, nor any other top-10 player, nor his hometown Cavaliers. Instead he'll join an undeniably talented but aesthetically hideous assortment of Sixers looking to take advantage of a reshu...
A Good Tour de France Is In The Eye Of The Beholder
ORCIÈRES-MERLETTE, France — When Richard Carapaz spread his arms in celebration after pounding up the final climb of Stage 18, I felt a sense of relief. The champagne flowed , the tears streamed. The hundreds of days that dozens of support staff worked in the cloistered, unforgiving world of professional cycling had paid off. EF Education-EasyPost had finally validated its strong Tour de France with a stage win. The Tour de France awards a wide bounty of prizes beyond the yellow jersey to i...
Why Your Team Sucks 2026: New York Jets
Some people are fans of the New York Jets. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the New York Jets. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here . Your team: New York Jets. https://twitter.com/iJordanMoore/status/2075649848762569003
You’ve Got To Hand It To Rodin
My eyes kept going back to the hand, so tender and gently placed that you could forget these were bodies forged from marble. For all of the grabbing passion and sexual infatuation of Auguste Rodin’s The Kiss , the hands always seemed to suggest something much softer and loving. The woman, leaning back and on the edge of the rough base stone, could easily slip. But without any grabbing or force, his hand steadies her. His palm and thumb hover over her leg, and the only touch is by the tips of h...
Is Jimothy OK? A Creature Investigation
Jimothy crept into our lives like any good cryptid—as a blurry, scuttling thing. Kiana Hall, the Seattle local whose firsthand footage resulted in Jimothy's newfound fame, first thought she had spotted a cat running under a car. But upon closer inspection, the creature was no feline. "I was seeing some kind of gray, fluffy creature that was shaped sort of like an orb with really long legs," Hall said in an interview with Reuters . Hall's vertical video captures the creature, which she christen...
Danny McBride Leaves You Wandering
I imagine the pitch for Danny McBride’s new short story collection, Thrilling Tales of Modern Men , went a little something like this: Hey, this is Danny McBride’s agent. Yeah, that guy. He wants to write a short story collection called something like Thrilling Tales of Modern Men . And I imagine the response from the editor at Random House was similar to my own, upon hearing about the book: Hell yeah . Amidst a moment in our culture where the question of what defines the contemporary man i...
Arachnid Surgical Robots And Neckless Third Basemen, With Paul Tremblay
Sooner or later, you just run out of sports. There are currently a couple of regular seasons going on at the moment, but after a thrilling NBA playoffs led directly into a blast of a World Cup, a three-game series against the Cincinnati Reds happening 71 percent of the way through a long season can't help but look weak in comparison. This was a fun way to disrupt our normal sports watching biorhythms, but it was not a permanent one. It was with that in mind that we invited the bestselling nove...
The Red Sox’s Streak Is Over, But The Children Have Feasted
There's a Massachusetts–based restaurant chain that offers a free kids meal— kid must be present, limit two per party —the day after a Boston Red Sox win. When the team was scuffling at the bottom of the AL East and manager Alex Cora was fired for a dismal start, the promotion became an easy joke: The children of New England were hungry. So hungry. Offensive struggles and one-run losses had turned them into the wee ragamuffins of Oliver Twist . But around the end of June, after dropping two...
LIV Golf Circling The Toilet From Whence It Sprung
LIV Golf's honchos, the poor suckers, are still out there scrambling around, looking for investors to keep their dipshit tour afloat after the Saudi Public Investment Fund suddenly booted them into the wilderness back in April. Now that LIV Golf has lost its utility as a sportswashing spectacle and as a wedge for market disruption, it is left with zero authentic value whatsoever. Nobody was clamoring for more golf, for golf with stupid team names, or for much noisier golf . A formerly endlessl...
Here Is An Extremely And Needlessly Complicated Way To Rescue Portland From Tom Dundon
In the absence of any actual NBA basketball to watch, the blogscape is currently lousy with basketball-knowers furiously knowing basketball. It couldn't be any other way, although it is all happening at such a frantic rate that one is left absolutely convinced that LeBron James is going to sign with the Fort Wayne Zollner Pistons by week's end because Brian Windhorst's pal/source Spliffy The Dry Cleaner got a tip, and also that Tyler Herro either punched, was punched by , or has never actually...
Leicy Santos Is In The Right Spot
The Boston Legacy is not known for being gentle. The expansion team has earned more yellow cards and committed more fouls than any other club in the NWSL this year. On Sunday, that didn’t matter for Leicy Santos. At least twice, the Washington Spirit midfielder found herself with the ball cornered by three Boston players. With remarkable efficiency, she made them all look like fools. After a few deft touches and even better body positioning, she had evaded considerable pressure and released th...
Sophie Cunningham Is About As Edgy As A Beach Ball
There’s a type of public relations exercise that unfolds like a joke. In it, a notable figure who has chosen to sit for a longform profile, declined to answer a sensitive question through her representative, posed for a corresponding photoshoot, and recently "hopscotched across the country" to engage in "a slew" of "business opportunities and brand activations" insists she doesn't care what other people think of her. Sophie Cunningham sure doesn't. As Hallie Grossman, the author of an ESPN...
Phee’s Back
The Minnesota Lynx are comfy. They woke up Wednesday morning at the top of the WNBA standings with a 21-6 record, the league's best net rating, and a bespectacled point guard who has become the coolest player in the league halfway through her first season. These are the sort of circumstances that allow for an organization to be extremely chill in coming up with a plan for reintegrating a four-time All-WNBA superstar back into the starting lineup. It doesn't get much more chill than a Wednes...
After The Argument Comes The Rest Of Your Lives
The actor Eli Gelb has really found a niche for himself as "unassuming guy in a three-hour play who's able to avoid getting directly hit by the drama." Before catching him in Birthright , the new off-Broadway play from Jonathan Spector, I'd last seen Gelb as the sound engineer Grover in the Tony-winning Stereophonic . In that play, which was clearly inspired by the making of Fleetwood Mac's Rumours , he begins the job ambitious and a little naive before the bad behavior of rock stars forces hi...
Orcas Are Kerploding Sunfish Into A Thousand Pieces
In many ways, the sunfish could not have been better designed as an orca's chew toy. The largest species, the oceanic sunfish Mola mola , can grow up to 10 feet long and weigh up to 6,000 pounds. And yet it is almost unfathomably helpless. Its body resembles a serving platter. It has no tail fin, just a tall dorsal and anal fin, which it flaps in unison to get around. A sunfish often spends its time lounging on its side at the surface of the water, basking in the sun and allowing seabirds to n...
Why Your Team Sucks 2026: Las Vegas Raiders
Some people are fans of the Las Vegas Raiders. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Las Vegas Raiders . This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here . Your team: Las Vegas Raiders.
The Haunting, The Psychic, And The Stepmom
In some ways, the omnipresence of mystery in everyday life can be comforting. Why is it always cold at the end of the hallway? How did my cat make that noise at 2 in the morning? Why does my car’s brake light keep going out on the driver’s side? Sure, there may be explanations, but I’m not going to be the one to get to the bottom of this. I didn’t grow up watching Ghostbusters aspirationally. Today’s gossip raises the age-old question: Who you gonna call? If your house might actually be ha...
What’s Going To Happen To The Rest Of My Life After I Become A Parent?
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, Giri answers a question about how parenting can reorient your life .
A Mathematically Rigorous Guide To The Uncs Of The Tour de France
VOIRON, France — Last week, my colleague Jonny Long from Escape Collective (EC) remarked that he speaks to more old people at the Tour de France than he does the whole rest of the year. It's true, and not altogether surprising: France has an aging population , so they have old guys, and cycling's culture is one of reverence for the legends of yore, so the old guys are here. Tour crowds aren't monolithic—I find myself pantomiming French toward all manner of locals and tourists alike—yet they sk...
ESPN Just Keeps Getting Smaller And Louder
ESPN staff was hit by another round of layoffs this week, which in some sense barely registers as news given that the network is stuck in a constant state of downsizing. This round of cuts was notable, however, due to some of the recognizable names who were let go: Karl Ravech, David Lloyd, Stephania Bell, Cam Newton, Ryan Clark, and Tom Pelissero were among the cuts. Whether you wish to cheer or jeer any particular departure, there's no denying the significance of ESPN cutting loose someon...
Miami Heat Post, Then Remove, Video That I Am Taking To Mean LeBron James Is Definitely Coming Back To Miami
There's not a lot of NBA news happening right now, so we must welcome any sort of chaos we can find, even of the accidental kind. On Tuesday night, the excruciating wait for LeBron James to make up his damn mind about where he is going to play next season wore down the faculties of at least one social media employee, as the Miami Heat accidentally published an unlisted video on its YouTube channel, which signaled LeBron's introductory press conference for the team he won his first (and seco...
Colson Whitehead Talks About Embracing Change, Pulling Off A Heist, And Finding A Good Coffee Table
"The city was question and answer in one," Colson Whitehead writes early on in Cool Machine , the final novel of his Harlem Trilogy. "Cause and effect and everything else, too." You can forgive the lifelong New Yorker for being a little romantic about his hometown, which is both the setting and central metaphor across the tales of Harlem furniture salesman- cum -not-so-reluctant-crook Ray Carney, whose misadventures come to a conclusion with Machine . Carney's capers, inspired by heist movies,...
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