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I Crave The Ocean
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 dipping pizza crust, worst great athletes, wheelchair envy, and more. Your letters: Charlie:
‘Citizen Vigilante’ Is The Latest Product Of The Culture Of Petulance
In the movie Citizen Vigilante , the latest Uwe Boll provocation that's gaining attention from the far-right side of the internet, Armie Hammer plays Michael Sanders, an American vigilante righting the wrongs of Europe's woke-and-broken criminal justice system. Why an American has deemed himself worthy of this task, let's not ask that question ... or too many others. When he's not out patrolling the streets, Sanders makes his living as a landlord. One sequence of scenes shows Sanders in one mo...
Why The Explosive Diarrhea Parasite Is Way Worse Than Regular Diarrhea Parasites
Grab a stool, take a seat, and get ready to learn about cyclospora.
‘Famous Men’ And Ambitious Women
Is there a story writers love to tell more than the one about how we became ourselves? Give me all of them: Your künstlerromans, your campus novels, your NYCs, your MFAs. I didn’t go to Iowa, but I’ve read so many recollections of the program that sometimes I think I might have. The pleasures of the genre arise in part from how its entrants play with certain tropes: the struggle to find one’s voice, the anxiety of influence, the labor of constructing an identity, the implicit resolution promis...
How Cycling Solved Sleep
AURILLAC, France — Is the Tour de France the most competitive sleep environment in sports? "Probably, yeah," answered Dr. Jon Greenwell, EF-Education EasyPost's Head Doctor when I asked him. Every athlete needs to recover, though the demands on professional cyclists at the biggest race in the sport are unique. Riders have to be fresh every day for nearly a month, and they spend almost every night at a different hotel. There are only two days off, so they must recover from one day's effort befo...
What Will Happen To My Ambition After Children?
To someone without children, the world of parenthood seems like a walled garden that contains knowledge of the very best and worst experiences of humanity. But will you love it or hate it? Are you still yourself on the other side? Will you regret it? The only way to know for sure is to do it, but you can't know for sure how it'll go until you commit to it. That's a level of ambiguity I find intolerable, and yet there is no other way. I always imagined I would maybe, probably, most likely ha...
The Hornets Aspire To Be An Also-Ran With A Plan
Listening to Jeff Peterson, president of basketball operations for the Charlotte Hornets, talk about the recent LaMelo Ball trade , you get a pretty good idea of what he thinks about last season's team. "There's no doubt in my mind that we had a successful season last year, by a lot of people's standards, and of course LaMelo was a huge part of that," Peterson said, from Las Vegas , upon the formal completion of a deal announced nearly two weeks ago. Eager to sing the praises of the incoming N...
Is There Any Limit To Zack Wheeler’s Spite?
There are four players in MLB with a higher bWAR than Phillies pitcher Zack Wheeler, but nobody can hope to top him in PAR (pettiness above replacement). Last week, after he was left off of the All-Star Game roster, Wheeler struck out 14 batters to tie his career-best performance. To make it very clear where his motivation came from, after the game he called the All-Star selection policies “BS.” Wheeler turned his doubters into his outers at the pitching mound of success, but he’s not done. ...
If Conor McGregor Was A Horse, They’d Have To Shoot Him
Conor McGregor came up lame literally one second into Saturday’s comeback bout with Max Holloway. To open a fight that the UFC claimed drew the biggest live gate in mixed martial arts history, McGregor rushed out of his corner and threw a flying kick with his left leg. The kick fell short of Holloway’s head by at least a foot, and then McGregor had a landing worthy of the " agony of defeat " guy, dropping to the cage floor in a heap without being touched. Then McGregor immediately got up an...
I Believe I Have Located A Ham Truck In France
SOMEWHERE IN THE MIDDLE OF FRANCE — They call it the diagonal of the void: the corridor running southwest to northeast across France where population density is significantly lower than elsewhere in the country. Explanations vary as to why, though after spending three nights in the void, I can confirm it feels empty here. Perhaps the spookiest sight was something I saw on the side of the road as we drove from Perigueux to Bergerac, on the side of a road in a village so quiet it may as well hav...
The Crossword, July 13: Flat Out
You have one last job to do this Monday morning. This week's puzzle was constructed by Madison Shultz, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Madison has too many hobbies. She spends most of her free time skiing, climbing, hiking, and rockhounding, but started constructing crosswords in 2025 as a creative outlet and reason to stay inside more with her two cats. If you like this puzzle, you can find more of her work at her blog Crossword Curiosities. Defector crosswords, launched in partnership with...
Lindsey Graham Dead, World No Worse
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina died on Saturday, after what reports have called a "brief and sudden illness" following an official visit to Ukraine. He was 71. In 2003, Graham succeeded ancient dread Confederate mummy Strom Thurmond in the Senate, and was an actively malevolent force in American society for all the remaining 23 years of his life, at a scale larger than he'd been an actively malevolent force in American society for the preceding 48. Graham's hatreds and ...
Jannik Sinner Reinstates The Regime
After losing the 2025 Australian Open final, Alexander Zverev was remarkably despondent. The man who defeated him, Jannik Sinner, put both hands on Zverev's shoulders and delivered a pep talk to the sobbing runner-up as the duo awaited the presentation of their trophies. "I think Jannik is better than me at the moment. It's as simple as that," Zverev said in his post-match press conference. "I think I'm serving better than him, but that's it. He does everything else better than me. He moves be...
Telemundo Is The Real Winner Of This Year’s World Cup
It was Sunday night in Los Angeles, and the streets of the city legendary for its traffic sat empty. Even Trader Joe's—the beloved grocery chain known as much for its tiny parking lots as its low prices—had plenty of spaces. For once, as the Clueless joke goes, you really could get anywhere in LA in 20 minutes . The reason? Mexico was playing England. In the World Cup. In the knockout rounds. In the vaunted home of El Tri , Estadio Azteca. Well before I arrived at my local soccer bar, an ho...
You Can’t Do That, Man
The master plan is clear to anyone with eyes. FIFA rigged the World Cup draw so Argentina would become the first team to make the semis without playing a side ranked in the top 15. FIFA has rigged every match in favor of Argentina. FIFA demanded that the VAR take away Egypt's second goal over a much-delayed foul call. In that same match, FIFA instructed the referees to not call a foul by Argentina's Julián Alvarez on Mohamed Salah. FIFA even put an all-Argentine referee crew on the France-Moro...
Mikel Merino Is Spain’s Much-Needed Closer
For all of its defensive solidity and possession dominance, Spain has been missing a finishing touch in this World Cup. It hurt the Spaniards in the opening match, the stunning draw to Cape Verde. It made them struggle against Uruguay in an ugly game on the final day of the group stage. The 3-0 romp against overmatched Austria felt like a turning point, but then the dreadful viewing on display in the team's 1-0 victory in the round of 16 over Portugal felt like a regression to the mean. Fri...
The Inter-Red Bull Teammate Drama Is The Best Story Of The Tour de France So Far
BERGERAC, France — The 2026 Tour de France is thus far mostly bereft of big narratives and interesting surprises. The race for the first two podium places seems mostly over. There is no off-bike story that's captivated the race or raised larger-order implications like the saga of Ineos soigneur David Rozman's doping connections. Torstein Træn delighted the race and threatened to upend the back half of the top-10 fight, only to crack on the Tourmalet before falling on the descent and breaking a...
Here’s What Texas Tech’s Leadership Is Being Sued For Censoring
Is Plato’s Republic too gay? This is one of many brave questions posed by the Texas Tech University System’s chancellor and Board of Regents as they implement an “extraordinary system of censorship in higher education,” according to a new lawsuit filed Wednesday in Texas federal court by faculty unions. The American Association of University Professors and the Texas AAUP-AFT said that Texas Tech is violating the First and Fourteenth Amendments by way of sweeping new restrictions on academ...
The AUSL Plans To Do What Other Pro Softball Leagues Couldn’t
Cheri Kempf knows exactly how hard it is to sustain a professional women’s sports league. She was the commissioner of the now-defunct National Pro Fastpitch league. During her tenure, the NPF’s league office had two full-time employees, one of whom was Kempf. It launched in 2004 and went through rounds of expansion and contraction, but didn’t have the television contracts or budget to sustain itself long-term. When the COVID-19 pandemic came and canceled the 2020 and 2021 seasons, the league f...
I Sit In Solidarity With The Norway Fan Who Refuses To Do The Viking Row
Norway's charmed and charming run to the World Cup quarterfinals has been a good time all around. Erling Haaland is probably the most lovingly memed man on Earth at the moment, and with good reason . The Norwegians are getting really into cowboy fashion. It's all very fun. They seem like a fun hang. And they are rowing. They are rowing after wins. They are rowing in Times Square . They are rowing up the escalator. The Viking Row is the breakout celebration of this Cup, with supporters joini...
An Interview With Three Italian Backpackers Who Crossed The Pyrenees And Accidentally Ran Into The Tour de France
GAVARNIE-GÉDRE, France — Millions of people travel to the Tour de France every year, almost all of them on purpose. This is the story of three people who did so by accident. While waiting for the riders to make their way up to Gavarnie-Gédre for the finish of Stage 6, I took a little stroll out to see the Cirque du Gavarnie . The beautiful glacial amphitheater houses the tallest waterfall in mainland France, and the final climb of Thursday's racing made up for its unselective profile by at ...
Make It Nice: Do Not Put Contact Paper On Your Countertops
Welcome back to Make It Nice , Defector's best interior design advice column. Today we have a balcony makeover, thoughts on washable rugs, and a plea to please, please not use contact paper on your countertops! Jessica asks: By NYC standards my balcony is HUGE (11' x 5') but I can't seem to make the layout quite work. The two most important things to me are being able to lounge comfortably, and also have a table/chairs for two. I have a small couch with ottomans and also a gravi...
The Kawhi Leonard Investigation Is Now Holding Up The Kawhi Leonard Trade
In September 2025, the NBA hired the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to investigate the Los Angeles Clippers for potential salary cap circumvention after Pablo Torre Finds Out reported that the team had arranged a no-show endorsement deal for Kawhi Leonard with a fraudulent tree-planting company called Aspiration. On June 30, 2026, the Clippers agreed to trade Leonard to the Toronto Raptors. That trade is now on hold because, somehow, the aforementioned investigation is still ongoing. ...
France Feels Inevitable
World Cups are rarely wire-to-wire coronations. In fact, the competition is so fierce, and the margins so small, that usually there isn't a single clear "best" team that goes ahead and wins it all. In 2010, you could argue that Germany looked stronger than eventual champions Spain, up until the Spaniards pulled off a narrow 1-0 win against them in the semifinal. The Dutch were probably the strongest team overall in 2014, even though they fell to Argentina in the semis. As the legendary final i...
Karolina Muchova And Coco Gauff Played A Tiebreak Neither Will Forget
Nervy tennis is so rich. It can contain both the worst of the sport (in a technical sense) and the best of it (in a narrative sense). You can witness breakdowns in routine strokes, diseased shot selection, and facial expressions that indicate a horrible geyser of bile into the esophagus. But you'll also see the bravery of a player who is flagging, hurting, and still playing gorgeous tennis from a land beyond conscious thought. Rarely will there be tennis nervier than the third-set tiebreak tha...
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