Defector
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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,...
Doofus Chaplain Takes The Giants’ Pride Night Victimhood To Instagram
The San Francisco Giants are a rotten, poisoned, blighted organization. I offer to the jury, by way of evidence, the following exhibit: Monday evening, a representative of the Giants saw a story from the San Francisco Chronicle about fans who still feel hurt and angry over the mess the organization made of its annual Pride Night celebration , and the front office's tepid, quarter-hearted, wildly inadequate response to public outcry. That team representative then logged onto social media so tha...
Trea Turner Is A True Two-Way Player
PHILADELPHIA — I thought I would be miserable going to this game, watching two teams I hate (the Phillies and the Dodgers) ride high on their own egos amid overpriced concessions that jam a “ph” everywhere an “f” should be. I did it only so that I would finally get to see Shohei Ohtani play in person. But where was the phantastic two-way player, six-time all-star, and four-time MVP? Certainly not in the City of Brotherly Love. Whatever phacsimile was at the plate went 0-for-4 with two strikeou...
I Demand We Normalize Chewing With Your Mouth Open
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 food hangups, cockroaches in heaven, shitting your pants on the football field, and more. Before I get started, you guys might know that I moonlight as a weekly columnist over at SFGate . I joke that I work for the only two decent news sites left in America, because it's kinda true. Bu...
Tennis.com Lived And Died With The Internet
A day after the French Open ended in May, the website tennis.com shut down its editorial operation. The brand dates back to the founding of Tennis magazine in 1965, and though the mag folded in 2022, the website continued to produce news, analysis, and feature articles. At least, until after the clay season. The new site amounts to a scoreboard for ongoing tournaments with tabs for the upcoming schedule and rankings. Endure a long scroll to the bottom of the page and you'll find a link to the ...
What Messi Means
"Everything ends badly, otherwise it wouldn't end." As it is in life and love, so it is in soccer. From the outset, the 2026 World Cup was sure to mark an ending for Lionel Messi—not to his career as a whole, and likely not even to his days with the Argentina national team, but to his time on the sport's center stage, the venue which featured the 20-year unfurling of the exciting, hopeful, heartbreaking, agonizing, inspiring, and triumphant story that has defined one of the greatest tales spor...
Dennis Santana To José Caballero: Look Deep Into My Eyes Or I Will Kick Your Ass
This is the fourth MLB season with a pitch clock, so one might think that any beef around the rule change has long ago expired. But José Caballero's got a huge supply of dry-aged steak in the walk-in freezer. The Yankees' base-stealing utilityman, who hits just a tick below league average, has made himself notorious around the league for the way he takes advantage of the pitch clock protocol. The big book of rules says that the batter needs to be ready for the pitch with eight seconds remai...
Can Men Stop Hating Women?
While many of us can agree men are in trouble, few can agree on the exact cause. America has a masculinity crisis . Men are in trouble . The "masculinity crisis" is real . The male loneliness epidemic has received radically different diagnoses from men’s rights activists, religious conservatives, feminists, and heteropessimists. The manosphere, a loose affiliation of men who hold women in low esteem and value “alpha” behavior over weakness, ranges from hardcore redpilled incels and influencers...
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