Defector
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Hrishikesh Hirway Learned To Live With Being Uncomfortable
What do you do when the gig you do on the side, that off-hours hustle to help pay the bills and keep busy in service of your real work, becomes the thing that attracts acclaim and recognition? Do you lean into the success? Does the side project become your life? Hrishikesh Hirway did not expect he would become a podcast guy, but the show he created and hosts, Song Exploder , took off, winning awards and making the leap to becoming a Netflix series. Then came other podcasts—maybe you know hi...
Should College Football Have An Age Limit?
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 sentence diagrams, proper oven temperature, forbidden urinals, and more. Before we get to the business at hand, a quick reminder that All Ball , the Defector NFL podcast , debuts tomorrow morning. Co-host Arif Hasan and I are bringing you 100 percent football takes, with no added gambl...
There’s Still Tennis At The U.S. Open
FLUSHING, N.Y. — The U.S. Open is a city in miniature. The food is expensive; wealthy people flock to the tallest vantage points while richer experiences on the outskirts are ignored; influencers bother the masses. Read enough about the tournament, or just walk around the grounds for a few days, and you could forget that tennis is played here. At its worst, the Open feels like a 15-day cocktail party where a couple hundred of the world's best tennis players happen to be present. Those players ...
The Angels Are Just Passing Through
Defector has partnered with Baseball Prospectus to bring you a taste of their work. They write good shit that we think you’ll like. If you do like it, we encourage you to check out their site and subscribe . This story was originally published at Baseball Prospectus on Sept. 3. There is a legacy of bare competence behind the Angels’ 65-year run of never losing 100 games that shouldn’t be taken for granted. If this year’s iteration finally uncorks that bottle of swill, it will be a ...
The Light’s Gone Out At Florida State
Pretty much from the moment the Florida State Seminoles decided to retain Mike Norvell as their coach for the 2026 season, the word out of the football program has been pain and misery. They lost three dozen players to either graduation or the transfer portal, they couldn't entice any of the better available quarterbacks, and they have been famously poor at recruiting throughout the Norvell era. Going into the season, the mood was dour, and an unimpressive victory over New Mexico State in Week...
Barcelona Is The Greatest Show On European Soil
Four matches into the La Liga season, Barcelona has looked like one of the greatest attacking teams of all time. What other conclusion can I draw from the club's start? With Sunday's 5-0 whomping of Valencia away at the Mestalla, Barcelona has now played four matches, notched four decisive wins (5-0 vs. Elche, 2-0 vs. Athletic Bilbao, and 5-2 vs. Rayo Vallecano were the others), scored a ludicrous 17 goals, and conceded only two. The Barcelona monster has been gluttonous from the word go, and ...
Aaron Judge Back
Did you forget about the Yankees? I know you did not because you are not allowed to. But New York has had a relatively quiet season by their flamboyant and national-TV-darling standards. A big part of this is that the AL East has looked pretty much the same for a while now: The Rays have maintained a comfortable but not secure division lead; the less said about what's happening down there with the bird teams, the better; and in the middle, the Red Sox have ended child hunger and positioned the...
The Rams Play In Australia In Two Days And They Haven’t Left Yet
Before the NFL season kicks off this weekend, it will kick off Wednesday night with a primetime game between the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks. And then on Thursday night it will kick off again, with a game between the San Francisco 49ers and Los Angeles Rams, except that game will actually be happening on Friday morning, on account of it being played in Melbourne, Australia. Probably nobody should ask the Rams what day it is when they arrive for the game, because they won't have m...
Summer May Be Ending, But We’ll Always Have ‘Sterling Point’
“I’m coming to the cottage,” Ilya Rozanov growled, and Canada has never been the same—at least the American film and TV industry’s depiction of it. The final episode of the first season of Heated Rivalry introduced the world to Canada’s cottage country, presenting the regions to the north of major cities where many families own second homes as a soft escape from the friction of urban life. In Heated Rivalry , as well as a slew of other recent shows, Canada’s rural expanses are not only lush, t...
The Crossword, Sept. 7: Big Resemblance
You'll have a grand time solving our Monday crossword. This week's puzzle was constructed by Katie Hoody , and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Katie lives in North Newton, Kansas, where she is enjoying the puzzle constructing era of her life. She grew up in northern Minnesota and won a middle school speech contest with a monologue describing the thrill of watching the Twins win the 1987 World Series. Defector crosswords, launched in partnership with our friends at AVCX , run every Monday. If you’...
Heartwarming: Preposterous Doug Eddings Umpshow Unites Cardinals And Rockies In Dislike Of Doug Eddings
The concept of A Cop On The Edge was once a disreputable film genre unto itself. This was not really a good thing in terms of what it indicated about where the culture was on the issue of vigilante violence, among other things. But its passing is also unworthy of much mourning because these movies were bad enough that one of the genre's signature moments was a twitchy and inexplicably be-gloved Sylvester Stallone cutting a slice of pizza with some desk scissors while wearing sunglasses indoors...
Kimi Antonelli Pulled Off A Miracle At Monza
Do you believe that Formula 1 can be romantic? Before immediately answering to the negative, at least consider Kimi Antonelli. He is freshly 20 years old, and just became the first Italian driver to win the Italian Grand Prix since Ludovico Scarfiotti did so in 1966. If your answer is still negative, and fair enough, at least consider that Antonelli achieved his victory by breaking the record for most overtakes during a Grand Prix in F1 history and after starting from P19 on the grid. Consider...
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 ...
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