Defector is an employee-owned sports and culture website brought to you by the former staffers of Deadspin.| defector.com
The United States Department of the Treasury has developed, to the brink of production, a dollar coin that features the face and likeness of President Donald Trump, according to a source within the Treasury who spoke with Defector, and as first reported by Fox Business. The die, a stamp that presses the design onto the…| Defector
All the magic is happening at the Riyadh Comedy Festival in the Saudi capital's Boulevard City, a 220-acre retail and entertainment zone that contains a replica of Times Square and "500 electronic games for children." Since we last checked in, a couple of new names have been added to the festival lineup; the Whose Line Is It Anyway?–obsessed 11-year-old in me was distressed to see the addition of Wayne Brady. But how are the comedians who have already performed enjoying the experience? Judg...| Defector
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. Israel: Well, just when you think you have a handle on which teams are good and which are bad, you get a weekend like the last one. Starting off with my squad at Florida State, a team I mistakenly started to believe in. Tommy Castellanos was looking like 2010 Cam Newton and we were right at the goal line for a pe...| Defector
The Israeli navy intercepted 41 vessels carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza and detained over 450 people on Thursday. The first boats of the Global Sumud Flotilla set sail across the Mediterranean toward Gaza last month, along the way picking up dozens more from Greece, Italy, and Tunisia; after moving east for several weeks, the first boats were waylaid by Israeli forces in international waters roughly 75 miles off the coast late Wednesday night. The Israeli foreign ministry announced that the...| Defector
Here is the challenge before you: Name a famous person who is 28 years old. Go ahead. No cheating, no looking it up. Off the dome. Pure, uncut 28-year-old naming. I bet you can’t do it. Zendaya? 29. Gracie Abrams? 26. Paul Mescal? 29. Hannah Einbinder? 30. You’re lower than dirt. You couldn’t name a 28-year-old if you tried. Look at yourself, scrabbling around in the dustiest corners of your mind for a well-known person who looks as if they contain the potent 28-year-old concoction of...| Defector
You'd be forgiven if you'd never heard of Cam Schlittler before Thursday night. A lot of Yankees fans had not heard of Schlittler before he made his major-league debut in July. Not considered one of the organization's top prospects, and until surprisingly recently just another warm body in the system, the tall 24-year-old righty with the cannon arm immediately emerged as one of the Yankees' most dependable starters down the stretch, and so became the clear if still risky choice to start a win...| Defector
Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday at Defector during the NFL season. Got something you wanna contribute? Email the Roo. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. I suppose the fact that I was born in October is among the reasons it’s my favorite month and always will be. I remember a lot of happy birthdays. I remember going to a WWF arena show for one of them, getting to curse out Bobby “The Brain” He...| Defector
In the balmy late summer of 1924, people across the world prepared to receive the first messages from the intelligent alien civilization that was assumed to inhabit Mars. To tune in to these Martian communications, the U.S. military imposed a period of radio silence on the nation that spanned 36 hours between August 21 and 23, coinciding with an unusually close pass between Mars and Earth in their orbits around the Sun. Martians, so the reasoning went, might capitalize on this moment of relat...| Defector
The playoffs started this week, and you have questions. Who’s the best team? Can I, a casual, start calling Aaron Judge a choker? Wait, they let a CANADIAN team take the one-seed in the AMERICAN League? Is that legal? And which team has the wettest guys on its roster, and why is it the Phillies? Those questions, and more, are the subject of the week’s Distraction episode.| Defector
PORTLAND, ORE. — Global capitalism begins with apparel. Slaves were brought to the American South from West Africa to do farm labor, and by the 19th century that largely meant cotton, a ubiquitous puffball that is easy to grow and aggravating to harvest. Seeds would be removed with a cotton gin, and the bulk of…| defector.com
Welcome back to Make It Nice, Defector’s best interior design advice column. Today, we have a tricky living-room layout, an inexplicably round bathroom, and a starter guide on how to pick a backsplash tile. David asks: We have been in our condo for 5 years. We had lots of momentum on minor remodeling when we…| defector.com
There is an easy answer to the question “How long does it take to write a book?” but it is not a true one. The easy answer is the duration between when you actually start putting your pen down on the first draft and when the book is finished. Maybe that’s two or three years.…| defector.com
There’s a new sports sponcon documentary out, and this time it’s about the little-known story of a mini-dynasty from Dallas that reigned during the end of the last century. That’s right: It’s the ’90s Dallas Cowboys’ turn to be exhumed for easy, bloated content. In my best Stefon voice, this documentary has everything: old men […]| defector.com
Psychoanalyzing Jerry Jones is the safest and cheapest dollar there is to be made in all of sports punditry. The template is already there, and everyone uses it. He’s old. He’s powerful. He’s competitive. He’s spiteful. He’s a megalomaniac with the tongue of an auctioneer. Check, check, check, check, and double check. Thus, his decision […]| defector.com
It’s not AI winter just yet, though there is a distinct chill in the air. Meta is shaking up and downsizing its artificial intelligence division. A new report out of MIT finds that 95 percent of companies’ generative AI programs have failed to earn any profit whatsoever. Tech stocks tanked Tuesday, regarding broader fears that […]| defector.com
Once upon a time, in a different life, I was tasked with running a blog vertical devoted entirely to help men, who read a sports site, become slightly better at things. Not exceptional. Not great. Not even very good. Just … adequate. We gave advice on anything and everything: cooking, grooming, relationships. We weighed in […]| defector.com
Did you hear the news? Livvy rizzed up Baby Gronk!!! Despite being a 40-year-old man, I am uniquely in tune with the younger generation because I go to the mall. I am more than happy to explain this all to you. OK, I don’t really know if I need to know any of this. You […]| defector.com
It is a measure of the history of the Florida/Miami Marlins that Sunday feels like the third-biggest day in franchise history. It wasn’t, but this is what happens when your franchise has two World Series victories and seven other playoff games in 33 years. That third spot on the podium remains very much available. Still, […]| defector.com
It’s all that baseball fans can talk about this morning: the huge memorable swing of the bat at the narrative and emotional climax of Monday night’s dramatic game in Arlington, Texas. An incredible, historic moment! Allow me to set the scene: It’s the bottom of the 10th inning, the ghost runner is stationed on second […]| defector.com
Defensive tackle Christian Wilkins was released by the Raiders last week, which immediately scanned as just another instance of the franchise deploying its “trip over your own feet” philosophy of roster construction. Yes, it’s strange to release a guy who you just signed to a four-year deal with $84 million guaranteed last offseason, but that’s […]| defector.com
Some people are fans of the Las Vegas Raiders. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Las Vegas Raiders. This 2025 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: Las Vegas, nee Oakland, nee Los Angeles, nee Oakland Raiders. Your 2024 record: 4-13, […]| defector.com
With last week’s sale of Kotaku, the project that was G/O Media is effectively dead. Its media portfolio is now something of a media one-pager: The only website it still owns is The Root, another publication that deserved better. The Nosferatus in Oxford blue shirts at Great Hill Partners, which owns G/O Media, have polished […]| defector.com
Terry Bollea died on Thursday. The former professional wrestler was 71 years old. According to his longtime manager, Bollea died at his home in Clearwater, Fla.; different reports say that paramedics responded at dawn to an emergency call reporting that Bollea was suffering from cardiac arrest. He’d had some sort of recent neck surgery, and […]| defector.com
Pat McAfee ended his daily ESPN show on Wednesday by finally addressing the role he played in ruining a college student’s reputation. To nobody’s surprise, he was extremely annoying about it. Back in February, McAfee used his show to amplify a rumor about Ole Miss student Mary Kate Cornett having an affair with her boyfriend’s […]| defector.com
Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. And buy Drew’s book, The Night The Lights Went Out, while you’re at it. Today, we’re talking about cleaning up before dying, ketchup, being a new stepdaddy, and more. Sorry for the abbreviated bag today, but Why Your […]| defector.com
I can’t remember exactly what I was thinking about when I first saw them. It was one of those summer days that was defined chiefly by its sprawl. I had spent the morning at the gym; every year my trainer holds a charity competition for his clients, and this year’s was called Bench-A-Palooza. (Because I […]| defector.com
HAUTACAM, France — “Fuck, what a shit birthday,” Laurence Pithie gasps. The Kiwi rider from Red Bull has just summited the Hautacam, a winding, rolling, and, today, infernally hot Pyrenean climb that takes roughly 40 minutes. A better verb for what he did might be survived, as he finished 63rd, more than 31 minutes behind […]| defector.com
BAGNERES-DE-LUCHON, France — As we descend off the back of the Col du Tourmalet, a fan clasps her hands to her head, mouth gaping in disbelief at our speed. Markus Hoelgaard nearly overcooks a wet corner and unclips to stabilize his balance at the last second, with our car and two motos bearing down on […]| defector.com
The Olympic nameplates have a style guide. Though the TV broadcasts favor small caps over lowercase letters, the general rules of capitalization are the same—the given name of the athlete is written out with standard capitalization, and the family name is in all caps. To borrow some relevant gymnastics examples: Simone BILES. Suni LEE. Stephen […]| defector.com
I do not usually have a fear that my friends will change, in whatever facets they may. Change is just an inevitable, wonderful part of getting older. There is, however, one exception: I have recently developed a fear that my friend Will, whom I have known since middle school, will eventually become a Bill, and […]| defector.com
You may have once again noticed that a lot of people on TV, the internet, and in your real life are talking about files. The Epstein files. They want them released! They want Donald Trump in jail! They want to know what the hell is going on! Seriously, though, what the hell is going on? […]| defector.com
For Bill Guerin, who’s been GM of the Minnesota Wild since 2019, the beginning of this month must have felt like finally taking off an extremely tight pair of pants after a very long day. As a consequence of the team buying out both Zach Parise and Ryan Suter, they were stifled by three years […]| defector.com
“You can’t be a serious critic,” New York Times technology reporter Kevin Roose wrote on Tuesday, on Bluesky, about artificial intelligence, “if you’re in denial about how useful it is.” Narrowly, in strict terms, this is true: You can’t be a serious critic of anything if you are in denial about any part of it, […]| defector.com
Hypothetical: You are an NBA head coach and your team is leading a playoff game by three points with 11.1 seconds to go. The opposing team is getting ready to inbound the ball from under their own basket, they have no timeouts, and their best player is stuck on the bench. Do you foul and […]| defector.com
Mars does not have a magnetosphere. Any discussion of humans ever settling the red planet can stop right there, but of course it never does. Do you have a low-cost plan for, uh, creating a gigantic active dynamo at Mars’s dead core? No? Well. It’s fine. I’m sure you have some other workable, sustainable plan […]| defector.com
The boxes came from Tokyo: first by tanker, then overland via container truck from a Pacific port, across the Continental Divide, and finally backed into a driveway at the end of a cul-de-sac in a south Denver suburban enclave. This was a neighborhood with Razor scooters dumped in trimmed front lawns. Where family walks with […]| defector.com
I first met Becca Rothfeld when I pitched her back at the end of 2020. She had just joined The Point Magazine as a contributing editor, but I reached out because I loved her essay “Same As It Ever Was,” published in a magazine called Cabinet. The piece was about the Talking Heads and heaven, […]| defector.com
Happy Holidays to one and all. It’s time to gather ’round the fire with your loved ones for our nation’s oldest and finest tradition: reading about people that jammed things in their holes and couldn’t get them out without medical intervention. All reports are taken from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission’s database of emergency room visits, […]| defector.com
As the biggest entertainment story in decades unfolds, the trades’ practices are being exposed, with reporting that alternates between being useless to outwardly harmful.| defector.com
I went to hip hop’s 50th birthday party, and all I got was a collection of insipid lists. And a new Sprite commercial. To be fair, there were also the usual puff pieces. The New York Times detailed “How Hip Hop Conquered the World.” But I’ve been with it almost every step of the way, […]| defector.com