Defector
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Alex Eala Is The Best Show In Town
FLUSHING, N.Y. — As we waited for Alexandra Eala to walk into Louis Armstrong Stadium for the most anticipated first-round match of the tournament, the crowd whooping as a victorious 40-year-old Gael Monfils shed his shirt, I had a quick chat with Dyan Castillejo, the first Filipino ever to play on the WTA Tour. Castillejo is now a journalist; I'd read a number of stories in American publications by American authors that analyzed Eala's spectacular fame, but here was a chance to talk to somebo...
Canada Vs. America, With Jake Bittle
This week on Nothing But Respect , we mostly talked about dumb stuff with a smart guy. The guy in question was Jake Bittle, staff writer for Grist and the author of The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration , while the dumb stuff was Jake's amazing spree of Twitter fights back when that was something worth doing, and also Drake. Jake is a Raptors fan, and Harry knows a ridiculous amount of ball on all things rap, so it was a long time coming. We also talked about t...
Ketel Marte’s Bridge-Burning Hat Raises, Leaves Unanswered Several Questions
This Ketel Marte thing keeps getting stranger, at least linguistically. Marte made his return to the Arizona Diamondbacks on Monday, during their game against the Philadelphia Phillies. Before the game, Marte, who speaks through an interpreter, answered questions about his apparent no-call-no-show from the Aug. 17 game against the Boston Red Sox, serving mostly to generate more questions. "It was a moment of frustration. I'm the type of person that when something is going on in my life, I d...
Folarin Balogun Had Every Right To Blow Up The Transfer Deadline
This turned out to be quite an eventful summer for Monaco and USMNT striker Folarin Balogun. After the red card-that-wasn't at the World Cup, Balogun has now become the main character in a perfect transfer saga for this deeply unserious transfer window. The 25-year-old's move to Everton seemed secure late into the dying hours of the transfer window on Tuesday, but on Wednesday, Balogun remains a player for AS Monaco, and along the way completely bricked three different teams' plans for the upc...
Turn This Segway Around
Once again, Normal Gossip returns to the crucible that is college housing, and for good reason. Not only do stints in the dorms and subsequent apartments provide ample opportunities for self-discovery, but you’re also pretty much guaranteed to come out of the experience with an enemy (or six). Today’s friend-of-a-friend moves in with five boys and one mysterious woman on short notice. If you’re thinking that sounds like a recipe for chaos, you’d be right. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
LIV Golf Hopes Screwing Its Own Players In Bankruptcy Will Secure Its Future
LIV Golf recently sent out a mass email to mark the conclusion of its 2026 season. I imagine this was a somewhat slapdash operation given that the outfit, recently dumped by the Saudi Public Investment Fund, had to lop off the final event on its schedule, the team championship, which was scheduled for the final weekend of August, in Plymouth, Mich. Instead, the player championship and the team championship were both settled in Indianapolis , with stripped down entertainment offerings and drast...
After Imprisoning The Angels In The Toilet For Decades, Arte Moreno Is Cashing Out
To sum up the quarter-century of Los Angeles Angels baseball under owner Arte Moreno requires someone who knows him and them better than we do, so let's go to Anaheim Mayor Ashleigh Aitken, who responded to Moreno's abrupt decision to sell the team on Tuesday thusly : “I feel like it’s my birthday.” And there's your Angels postgame show for today. Our final score again: Yankees 7, Angels 3. We'll see you tomorrow, and please drive home safely.
There’s A New Space Telescope On Its Way To Help Answer The Biggest Question In The Universe
On August 30, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope successfully launched from Florida and will spend the next three months heading to its new home: a Sun-Earth Lagrange point, a million miles from Earth, where the gravity of the two larger bodies are in equilibrium. It's a comfy place to be for a space telescope; Roman can say hi to her old classmate Webb, who got there four years ago and has been sending back brilliant images and doing good science. Roman's a strange bird by NASA standard...
Why Your Team Sucks 2026: Los Angeles Rams
Some pathetic, frontrunning dorks are fans of the Rams. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Rams. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here . Your team: Los Angeles Rams. Your 2025 record: 12-5. Heh. Haha. MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!
You Can Magically Ban One Sports Injury Forever. What Do You Pick?
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 iPhone complaints, America’s infrastructure tragedy, changing clothes at the airport, and more. Your letters: Monte:
The Chicago Cubs Would Like Your Attention
The Chicago Cubs have maintained an awfully low profile for a team that 1) wins often, and by a lot of runs, 2) homers more than anyone, and 3) has an increasingly sure-thing MVP patrolling center now that Shohei Ohtani is slumping through his ouchy season. The Cubs hit nine homers on Monday night in a full 17-3 clocking of the Milwaukee Brewers, the team with the best record in baseball, and it landed as quietly as something that inherently loud could land. That feat has been eclipsed only on...
CBS News Now Performing Oafish Racism On Behalf Of Bari Weiss
It did not take a lot of special insight to suspect that recently installed CBS News boss Bari Weiss played some role in the production of a story the outlet ran on Monday, headlined "Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed's deleted tweets on Sept. 11 attacks invite scrutiny of past remarks." If you know even a little bit about Weiss, you know that such a story combines two of her favorite things: talking about people's old tweets and blatant Islamophobia. That suspicion was confirmed Monday nigh...
Bill Simmons Is De-Apexing
It's been an eventful year for Ringer founder and podcast host Bill Simmons. He ended 2025 and began 2026 at a peak in popularity, thanks to his performance on a podcast titled "Bill’s 50 Most Rewatchable Movies of the 21st Century," which earned him the kind of crossover appeal he's rarely enjoyed. Just before that, he signed a deal to have to have several Ringer podcasts licensed to Netflix. Then he got to tell the world about how the Jaylen Brown trade happened during his colonoscopy. For t...
An Interview With A Biographer Of Renée Richards, An Actual Trans Pro Athlete
As Lauren Theisen pointed out last month, the ongoing, abstracted debate about trans inclusion in sports uses almost no proper nouns and lots of hypotheticals. Back in the late 1970s, there was a very real, very human example of a trans athlete playing at the highest level of a mainstream sport. Renée Richards competed in professional tennis, and her fascinating life is explored meticulously in Julie Kliegman's new biography, Finding Renée Richard s . The book is an invaluable intervention in ...
Philly Is The Star Of The Philadelphia Cycling Classic
PHILADELPHIA — The Benjamin Franklin Parkway was designed in 1917 by French architect Jacques Gréber in the European style of boulevard, specifically inspired by the Champs-Élysées, which means it is a thematically apt and suitably picturesque locale for the end of a cycling race and a horrible—I mean absolutely dogshit , for all involved parties—road. On Aug. 30, the first Philadelphia Cycling Classic in a decade, by simple virtue of being a cycling race that necessitated mass closure of road...
Holy God Damn, Colton Cowser
They don't give style points in baseball, but if you were scoring Orioles-Rockies, you'd want to break out a second, third, maybe even a fourth color of pen to decorate the box with Colton Cowser's ninth-inning catch to save the game for Baltimore. Maybe some tempera as well. You can't make that "F8" pretty enough. All home-run robberies are special, but they come in flavors. On most, the fielder is totally vertical—having had time to settle on the track for a towering fly ball, and lofting...
What Do Booksellers Make Of “The End Of Reading”?
If you haven’t yet encountered the cover story for the August issue of The Atlantic , I have some bad news to share: " The End of Reading Is Here ." It’s an intentionally provocative headline for a slightly less provocative story; while it may portend doom, Rose Horowitch’s piece makes a smaller claim than its headline. She speaks more of a “decline of reading,” and, in a nod to Marshall McLuhan, argues that the U.S. is “postliterate.” Certainly there are crises well-covered within the piece t...
NFL Puts Three Players On Paid Leave
Three NFL players were placed on the commissioner's exempt list this past weekend: Seattle Seahawks cornerback Terrion Arnold, Denver Broncos outside linebacker Jonathon Cooper , and Green Bay Packers running back Josh Jacobs . All three will be unable to play while they are on the list, but they still get their game checks. It's the NFL's version of paid leave. All three have been charged in criminal court. For Cooper and Jacobs, the charges are in cases that include allegations of intimat...
The Future Face Of The Heavyweight Division Gets Disfigured
There are tired fighters, and then there’s Moses Itauma in the ninth round of Saturday night’s heavyweight title bout against Filip Hrgovic. With about 30 seconds left in what would be the last round of this odd but completely fascinating fight in London, the gifted but inexperienced Itauma was suddenly so gassed that he seemed utterly incapable of raising his hands above his waist, let alone defending himself from the durable Croatian veteran who was suddenly swarming him with blows from ...
Kalshi Lawsuit Pits States Against Trump Family’s Corruption Machine
On Friday, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a 3-0 ruling against Kalshi, a ruling that in theory gives states the power to regulate the "prediction market" platform. However strong that sounds, one can't fairly characterize the decision as authoritative. While the San Francisco–based court's unanimous ruling represents the most significant curtailment of the don't-call-it-gambling gambling platform, the fight between the Kalshian cohort of bloodsuckers and those who would regulat...
Novak Djokovic Pukes And Crumbles At The U.S. Open
For the first time in over 20 years, Novak Djokovic lost his first-round match at a Slam. On Sunday he fell in five sets to world No. 49 Mariano Navone, a 25-year-old clay-court specialist appearing in just his third-ever U.S. Open main draw. In other words, the sort of opponent Djokovic has made a career of dispatching, even if it did sometimes take him a leisurely five sets to do it. In this late period of his career, Djokovic has professed his love of the best-of-five format, which affor...
Chelsea Contains Thrilling Multitudes
Two matches into a new Premier League season is the perfect time to overreact. One match is a fluke; three matches feel too real. Two matches, however, give an overeager observer just enough pattern recognition to make claims that far exceed reality. This is doubly true if a club has shown quality and frailty in almost equal part. Therefore, after two barnstorming wins and/or two near-collapses to open the 2026-27 campaign, I feel confident in saying that Chelsea is great, doomed, and a work i...
Why Your Team Sucks 2026: Houston Texans
Some people are fans of the Houston Texans. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Houston Texans. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here . Your team: Houston Texans. Your 2025 record: The Texans won 12 games last year. Their defense stomped around like King Ghidorah ravaging Tokyo. Their offense puttered along like a dump truck with two flat tires and one square one.
The Crossword, Aug. 31: Prepare For Trouble, And Make It Double (Themeless)
We're ending the month with a challenging themeless puzzle. Keep an eye out for tricky clues and fun wordplay. This week's puzzle was constructed by Greg Snitkin and Glenn Davis, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Greg is a dad with three small kids and a hedge fund controller from South Orange, N.J. He's been in a fantasy football league with Glenn since 2013 and spanks him every year. Glenn is a reformed sports blogger now working in the non-profit space. He and his wife live in New Jersey with t...
Daejon Love Will Go Down As A Scammer For The Ages
Last week, the U.S. Department of Justice announced the arrests of two men in Portland, Ore. A 35-year-old man named Daejon Love and an 18-year-old man named Taylor Jamie Chan were charged with wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Those charges stem from Love and Chan running an alleged scam operation that involved defrauding various women through Love (unconvincingly) pretending to be a wide receiver for the San Francisco 49ers. Prosecutors say Love and Chan stole a total of $1....
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