Defector
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Zheng Qinwen Survived A Near-Death Experience At The U.S. Open
Given that tennis is effectively professionalized, legalized psychological torture, a choke and an epic comeback often go hand-in-hand. Take, say, when Zheng Qinwen faced Madison Keys at the U.S. Open on Saturday. Zheng won a match in which she was down 6-1, 6(3)-7, 5-1 and had to save a match point on her opponent's serve. A comeback, absolutely, but also, perhaps, a choke on Key's part. So: yea or nay? If one were to point to said match to support the case for "yea"—shown in the extraordi...
A Loss Would Have Been Less Embarrassing Than Michigan’s Win Over Western Michigan
Even before it slipped into janky comedy in its dying moments, you wouldn't necessarily say that Michigan's season opener against Western Michigan on Saturday was "a good football game." But also just making such an assessment would be missing the point to an extent. It was certainly shaping up as a very specific type of college football game. It's one in which a power conference team playing poorly loses to a MAC team—it has to be a MAC team; that's the type of game it is—that makes fewer mis...
Perfect Spiritual Fit Between NBA Player And NBA City Achieved
Sometimes the chaotic, unforgiving universe briefly and ecstatically snaps itself into harmony, like when the Fibonacci sequence shows up in a head of Romanesco broccoli, or a small rock balances atop a bigger rock, or when a certain permanently adrift Australian basketball player brings his destiny into sudden coherence. By which I mean: Ben Simmons is a Sacramento King. Simmons has taken the long road to Sacramento, though every step of his career has brought him closer to what Rudy Gay i...
When All You Have Is A Hammer, Every Headline Looks Like A Nail
As the media has covered the NBA's severe punishment of Steve Ballmer and the Los Angeles Clippers as a result of the Kawhi Leonard investigation, a common idiom has emerged: League commissioner Adam Silver dropped the hammer on them. He did not throw the book at the Clippers, or take a crowbar to their knees. No, there was only one tool in his toolbox, and it was dropped on the perpetrators. Obviously, this phrase is not unique to this specific scandal; anyone old enough will remember NFL ...
Why Your Team Sucks 2026: Seattle Seahawks
Some people are fans of the Seattle Seahawks. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Seattle Seahawks. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here . Your team: Seattle Seahawks. Your 2025 record: 14-3. Super Bowl champions. One of the best teams in modern history if you go by DVOA, which I don’t because Aaron Schatz has never revealed the formula behind his hallowed metric. He could calculate it by mashing on an old C...
Art Can Be What You Smell
The first time I consciously contemplated a museum’s installation-specific smell was in Fernando Romero’s “El Sol” at Kristallwelten in Innsbruck, Austria. Viewers stand in a cave-like, red-lit room under a Swarovski crystal sphere exactly one-billionth the size of the sun. It even sounds like the sun—the University of Birmingham’s School of Physics and Astronomy spent 30 years recording solar acoustic wave data, which has been sped up about 100,000 times to create the installation’s soundscap...
Defector Has A New NFL Podcast, And It Won’t Have Any Gambling Shit In It
If you’re as horny for football as I am, you’ve probably noticed that a vast, vast majority of NFL podcasts have some unwelcome amount of gambling/fantasy chatter in them. Corporate pods are often directly in bed with the sportsbooks, and a great number of indie pods have to take the books’ sponsorship money if they…
How The U.S.’s Oldest Natural History Museum Might Meet Its End
In 1858, William Parker Foulke, a member of the Academy of Natural Sciences—a group of naturalists committed to public education and outreach—was on vacation in the quiet Quaker community of Haddonfield, New Jersey. There, he befriended a local landowner, John Estaugh Hopkins, who showed him some unusually large vertebrae that had been dug up in a clay pit on his property 20 years prior. With Hopkins's permission, Foulke hired a crew to excavate the old pit. Around 10 feet deeper, the diggers'...
Mike Lombardi’s Gone And UNC Smells Rotten
It's been more than a month since UNC general manager Mike Lombardi was placed on administrative leave , and now he's gone for good. Lombardi and the school announced on Thursday that he is stepping down from his role. According to reporting from WRAL and ESPN, Lombardi's resignation may be just the beginning of the ugliness for North Carolina. When Lombardi was placed on leave in July, he was the subject of an internal investigation related to an HR complaint that was made by a former UNC ...
Katie Taylor Goes Out As The Belle Of The Brawl
Boxers almost never leave on their own terms, let alone get to say goodbye with the fight of their dreams. Then there’s Katie Taylor’s going away. The Irish superhero will take on Flora Pili of France for the undisputed super-lightweight championship Saturday night in front of more than 80,000 fans at Croke Park in Dublin. Taylor, who turned 40 years old in July, has promised to hang up her gloves, win or lose. Either way, she’ll go down as the most beloved and internationally accomplish...
How Do We Make Sense Of ESPN Duffing Its Big Clippers Scoop?
As the dust settles following the NBA's obliteration of the Clippers over the Kawhi Leonard–Aspiration scandal, one of the more interesting vectors of fallout is on the media side. After all, the scandal kicked off following a series of reports from podcaster Pablo Torre, who is mentioned in the first line of the official investigation's report , and was later stage-managed for the public several times over by ESPN, Torre's former employer. Despite the company's status as the big dog of sports...
Why Your Team Sucks 2026: New England Patriots
Some people are fans of the New England Patriots. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the New England Patriots. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here . Your team: The New England Patriots, who are just outside of frame here. I swear it.
Steve Ballmer Betrayed His Fellow Billionaires, And They Are Not Pleased
For all the fulminations about the million-ton craphammer dropped on the Los Angeles Clippers and owner Steve Ballmer for trying to evade the NBA salary cap, almost nobody has yet identified the situation as the entertainment bonanza it is about to become. Yes, it's time for another edition of the game show to end all game shows, and maybe also to end everything else: Billionaires Eating Billionaires . You've seen it, because it airs reruns on basically every channel. A bunch of insanely ...
There’s Too Much Football Happening
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. Ray: Week 0 is behind us, as well you might want it to be if you watched South Carolina State beat Savannah State 87-0 in Saturday. There will be more of that this week, undoubtedly, and every one of those games will serve as blessed relief from the hailstorm of turgid analyses about North Carolina being 1-0 wi...
There’s A New Loser In The Russini-Vrabel Scandal
We can officially stick a fork in the fallout stage of former Athletic reporter Dianna Russini's long and handholdy relationship with Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel. Russini resigned in disgrace and remains unemployed, while Vrabel suffered absolutely no professional consequences. And now The Athletic has completed its five-month review to determine whether her work was up to the company's ethical standards. Spoiler alert: It was mostly fine. The review was published Thursday morning and c...
‘It Ends’ Is The Gen Z Horror Movie Of The Year
Earlier this year, Curry Barker and Kane Parsons became young Hollywood phenoms in quick succession. An actor and sketch comedian, the 26-year-old Barker wrote, edited, and directed Obsession , which is the story of a meek romantic who uses a magical novelty toy to make his crush fall in love with him with predictably disastrous results. Parsons, at 21, directed Backrooms , a feature-length adaptation of his own creepypasta-inspired web series about a labyrinthine extradimensional space that s...
You’re Trapped Under Rubble And These Guys Are Your EMTs. WYD?
A nightmare has happened. Maybe you were minding your own business in the office when an earthquake hit, or maybe you were spelunking in some wretched cave never meant for humans to enter. Yet regardless of how you got here, you are now trapped and in need of urgent medical attention. There's too much debris to clear before a paramedic would be able to reach you ... a human paramedic, that is. But this guy? This guy eats rubble for breakfast. This is a giant burrowing cockroach, and it i...
The Funniest Emails From The Kawhi Leonard Investigation Are Also The Most Clarifying
The 35-page report released on Wednesday by the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, which contains a great deal of evidence that Kawhi Leonard and the Los Angeles Clippers circumvented the NBA's salary-cap rules , makes for some surprisingly fun reading. It includes some juicy and/or embarrassing emails and text messages sent by some of the parties involved in the Clippers' scheme, and my favorite part of the report is this one: In December 2021, Mr. Sanberg discussed with senior Asp...
Tom Dundon Isn’t Acting Alone
Tom Dundon and the Portland City Council remain in a standoff. In early August, the city approved a $120 million expenditure of public money for renovations of the Blazers' longtime home arena, located in the city's Rose Quarter entertainment district. The city's proposed terms included a new 20-year lease, a $3 million annual payment to the city (compensation for property taxes the team avoids by playing in a publicly owned arena), and for the team to commit to using unionized labor. Dundon's...
NBA Crushes Clippers After Kawhi Leonard Investigation
The NBA has concluded its investigation of the Los Angeles Clippers and Kawhi Leonard, and the punishments are major. The league announced Wednesday that the independent probe, conducted by the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, uncovered "a pattern of misconduct and multiple significant rules violations by the Clippers organization, a prior offender of the salary cap circumvention rules," and as such the team will have to forfeit five first-round picks. The NBA also issued fines and sus...
Why Your Team Sucks 2026: Denver Broncos
Some people are fans of the Denver Broncos. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Denver Broncos. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here . Your team: Denver Bron—***THE DEFECTOR OFFICE GETS HIT WITH A SUDDEN CATEGORY 12 BLIZZARD, PREVENTING ME FROM WRITING ANYTHING GOOD FOR THE REST OF THIS PREVIEW*** Your 2025 record: 14-3. Only three years removed from Nathaniel Hackett coaching Russell Wilson in the Sunset Bo...
Interminable U.S. Open Night Sessions Are Bad For Everyone Except Me
Two hours after Tuesday night lapsed into Wednesday morning in the Eastern time zone, Alexander Zverev served out his grueling U.S. Open first-round matchup against Lorenzo Sonego. The final match of the night was a real thriller, with the top seed and the feisty Italian challenger letting each other have it for nearly five hours, on and on until Sonego stopped being able to hit a backhand with any zip and, at the exact right moment to avoid a catastrophic upset, Zverev remembered how to serve...
How Can I Be A Good Parent If I’m Conflict-Avoidant?
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, Ray answers a question about making sure you don't turn into your own father.
Gael Monfils Can Make The Crowd Dance To A Swan Song
FLUSHING, N.Y. — One set into the first-round match, I wondered when the Gael Monfils show would begin. Tuesday was his 40th birthday, and this could be his last-ever match at a Slam—didn't he want to party? We did. Seven years after his last deep run at the U.S. Open, the elastic, buoyant Frenchman still held onto a well-deserved reputation for spectacle. But already down a brisk 6-2 set to Adolfo Daniel Vallejo, the world No. 60, Monfils seemed to be offering an uncharacteristically low-watt...
TCU Bans Hometown Newspaper After Locker Room Fight Report
On Aug. 23, Texas Christian University Athletics announced they were pulling the credentials for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram . The announcement came after the paper reported on a locker room fight that led to the hospitalization of wide receiver Dozie Ezukanma and the team expulsion of high-profile transfer player Jacob Fields. According to TCU spokesperson Kyle Neaves, the credentials were pulled because the newspaper's source "lacked direct firsthand knowledge of the locker-room incident an...
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