Defector
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Just A Minute More, With Tim Marchman
Generally you would not want to use a word like "catharsis" in relation to a podcast. That is just not what they are for, in my opinion, and it's not really in my range as a podcast co-host or guest to deliver that sort of experience. While last week's episode announcing the end of The Distraction was decently cathartic for me , that was never the point. Of course the final episode of the podcast would be significant for us, and inevitably include a decent amount of Looking Back At All We've A...
The NWSL’s Golden Boot Race Is Red Hot
Across the 2024 and 2025 NWSL seasons, Temwa Chawinga scored 35 goals—more than many players could hope to score in their entire careers. She won the Golden Boot and MVP both years, and deserved to. The Kansas City Current forward was simply inevitable. There’s a real pleasure in watching an athlete like Chawinga, who provides the near certainty that if you flip on a game they’re playing in, they'll do something that knocks your socks off. Scoring is the hardest thing to do in soccer, not t...
Let’s Remember Some Publications That Said We Would Get To Mars By 2026
Good science journalism is by its nature suspicious of grand or outlandish claims. Good science journalism does not take press releases at face value, but rather investigates the evidence behind those claims and the context in which they appear. Good science journalism is more interested in the truth behind big promises, or at least the likelihood of said promises coming true. By contrast, bad science journalism functions as a hype machine, regurgitating company statements verbatim as if it we...
Why Your Team Sucks 2026: Buffalo Bills
Some people are fans of the Buffalo Bills. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Buffalo Bills. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here . Your team: It was an interception. Get over it. Your 2025 record: 12-5. As always, Buffalo's dominant regular season meant nothing. In fact, that gaudy 12-5 record wasn't enough to keep the hated New England Patriots from wresting the AFC East crown away from the Bills after f...
Historic Cincinnati Comeback Offers A Stirring Testament To The Power Of Reds Week
So who believes in Reds Week ? The Reds, you fools. The Cincinnati Freaking Reds. And all the rest of you cynical apostates do too. If you didn't know it before, you damned well know it now. And not just for historical, electoral, or tonsorial reasons, either. We're talking the here and now, because Defector is in constant communion with the gods of sport, and we get results. Proof? Proof, you ask? Try this: The Cincinnati Reds, our adopted baseball team until closing time tomorrow, did som...
Defector Music Club Gets Back Together For Taylor Swift’s ‘Red’
This is Defector Music Club , where a number of our writers get together to dish about an album. In honor of Reds Week , we're discussing Taylor Swift's 2012 pop-rock hit Red. Patrick Redford : I can’t be the only one whose strongest and first thought about Red is that there’s a sound at the end of the first synth swell in “I Knew You Were Trouble” that sounds just like the jail-cell door slamming closed in Akon’s “Locked Up,” right? Lauren Theisen: I primarily remember the screaming goa...
Let’s Remember When Tim Curry Played A Huge Scary Red Guy
The actor Tim Curry died on Tuesday. He was 80. He was as purely and consistently fun a screen presence as anyone else I can think of, a cartoon of a performer, with outrageous charisma and the ability to communicate it through a wild assortment of constraints: obscuring makeup, heavy prosthetics, voice acting, shitty scripts, amateurish productions, small roles. When Tim Curry was in something, it had at least one delightful and magnetic thing in it. Curry most famously portrayed Dr. Frank...
Is My Red Light Mask Doing Anything Or Am I Delusional? An Investigation
As with some of my best decisions in life, I bought a red light mask because Kelsey McKinney uses one. I saw Kelsey posting Instagram stories with her face illuminated under the mask's sinister, Sith-like glow. I was newly 30, albeit not especially flirty or thriving, and I wondered if the red light mask might be a good salve for my anxious vanity. Like many others, I want to grow old but still look young—sue me! Every morning I dutifully smear sunscreen on my face, and every night I apply my ...
An Ode To Redman, The Hip-Hop Court Jester
Welcome to Listening Habits , a column where I share the music and musical topics I’ve been fixated on recently. In the music video for "Time 4 Sum Aksion," the second single from Redman's debut album, you don't really get much of the zany personality that would go on to make him a cultural icon over the ensuing decades. Redman emerged first as a hardcore rapper, combining street tales and golden-age hip-hop swagger with reggae and Parliament Funkadelic attributes. On 1992's Whut? Thee A...
I Played Pat McAfee’s Album For Another Frequently Red-Faced, Sleeveless Baby
If in the future my daughter develops some kind of Pavlovian response to the musical stylings of Pat McAfee, I'll blame the editors who "assigned" this review. But this outcome is unlikely. I almost wish it were a little more plausible. McAfee's debut album, though enticingly titled Diary of a Polarizing Figure , was not powerful enough to polarize any part of my household. If only it had been more stupid, or ugly, or idiosyncratic enough to spark emotion, because in the end it was the musical...
The Red Hot Chili Peppers Beyond Good And Evil
California: Perhaps you’ve heard of it? It is the edge of the continent, it is the apocalypse state, and it is the subject of many songs by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, though fewer than you might think. California is one of Californian rock bands’ favorite things to sing about. The dreamy surface and its seedy underbelly, the all-consuming city and the bone-dry wastes of the valley, the homeless encampment outside the library-themed cocktail bar that is decorated with fake books: This is go...
We Are Living In The Dumbest Age Of Red-Baiting
Have you checked under your bed recently to see if a member of the Democratic Socialists of America is there, waiting, with a pamphlet on taxing the rich clenched between their teeth and the glint of revolution in their eyes? Can you say, with real certainty, that a card-carrying socialist or one of their fellow travelers with a stick-and-poke tattoo is not crouched behind the mailbox, preparing to read you a list of the reasons why it is time for the government to get rid of Immigration and C...
Why Your Team Sucks 2026: Chicago Bears
Some people are fans of the Chicago Bears. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Chicago Bears. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here . Your Team: The Chicago Bears, who are not yet the Hammond, Indiana, Bears. Your 2025 record: 11-6, a staggering outlier for a franchise far more comfortable with 6-11. A new coach, a repaired and better protected quarterback, and the next big running game. We were comfortable w...
Our Favorite Dolly Parton Performances
Following Tuesday's news of Dolly Parton's death, the Defector staff convened to remember some of our favorite performances by her. "High Sierra" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvKRwNR7kXw
The Girlboss And The Drug Rug
It’s a rite of passage to get your ideals smashed in your early twenties, just in the normal course of trying to get your feet under you. It doesn’t seem to matter what exactly you care about, either. Whether you’re voting and then watching election results, or you’re trying to make a college relationship last beyond graduation, or you believe that with enough energy and grit, you and your ideals can save the trees, you’re in for a few bruises. But every bright-eyed youth loses innocence i...
The Not-So-Great Defector Make-Off Dares To Attempt A Red Lip
In observance of Reds Week at Defector, Lauren and Alex decided to try a red lip, as modeled in this brief tutorial . Here, in the style of The Not-So-Great Defector Bake Off , are their results. Lauren: Hi Alex! So as we start with moisturizer, I wanted to ask right up top: What’s your history with red lip, and, I suppose, lip products in general? Alex: The first thing that feels important to note is that my lips have always been a source of insecurity for me, because they are very smal...
The San Francisco 49ers Have Revolutionized The Concept Of Losing The Offseason
The competition for the much-coveted Who Won The Offseason Prize is nearly over. Despite a late rally from the Cleveland Browns, who became the first team to eliminate themselves from the regular season by quintupling down on the disaster that has been, is, and seems hell-bent on continuing to be Deshaun Watson , it seems clear that the winner will be the San Francisco 49ers. Besides, it's Reds Week , not Oranges Week, which means that even with that photo of Jed York in his jail smock, red is...
I’m On That Good Kushner Alcohol, With Harrison Faigen
This week on Nothing But Respect , we spent the entire episode talking through the last 13 years of Los Angeles Lakers ownership drama . Our guest Harrison Faigen is a longtime Lakers media guy, and he joined us for a lengthy discussion on Mark Walter , Joshua Kushner, and Johnny, Jimmy, Jeanie, Janie, Joey, and Jesse Buss. It's crazy they're all named that. The tie-in to Reds Week is that my name is Patrick Redford. You can find Nothing But Respect in Apple Podcasts or whatever podcast...
The Year DMX Painted The World Blood Red
The most awe-inspiring thing in music is when an artist takes over the world. At least back when there was a monoculture, it was possible for a single person to dominate collective attention, at least for awhile. And 1998 should always be remembered as the year DMX did just that. Throughout the '90s, Earl Simmons, a.k.a. DMX, had been making waves that steadily grew into real, earth-shaking tremors over the back half of the decade. Prominent guest spots on songs like Mic Geronimo's 1995 tra...
Tom Browning Devoured Innings And Tormented My Team
There are certain types of baseball players that just are not coming back. Some of these guys have been written out of the story by changes in the game's rules ; future generations will be unable to comprehend the wealth of saturnine lefty specialists whom the world once watched trudge-jogging from the league's bullpens, not just because the mind naturally reels at such beauty, but because the role no longer exists as such. An evolving set of best practices has also narrowed the field of Guys,...
What Do I Do About My Fragile Kid?
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, Albert answers a question about a kid who might be a little bit of a mess.
Every Right On Red Frays The Social Contract A Little Further
A couple of blocks from my office is a steep hill. Sometimes at lunch I go out into the sun and walk up the hill. The hill is very California: asphalt so newly laid that it looks AI-generated; a handful of wheeling turkey vultures; golden dried grass edging up to fortress-like new construction. I usually march up the sidewalk, but there’s also a path that winds through blackberry vines and over the creek, past where people without other places to stay have been sleeping. It’s a Diebenkorn pain...
Here’s All The Court Documents Jed York Asked To Be Sealed
On Monday, the day after his arrest on a criminal charge of engaging in prostitution—later pleaded down to disorderly conduct—San Francisco 49ers owner Jed York, through his lawyer, submitted a motion in his criminal case. Specifically, he asked to the court to seal all records related to it. His stated justification? The owner's request, which you can see in full by clicking here , gave a bit of background on the case before outlining the following reasons: 2. The Defendant is an elig...
Soraya Roberts Was A Great Critic And A Great Hang
A not-insignificant part of my job is fielding phone calls from freelance writers who have questions. The questions can vary—Have you heard of any job openings? Are you interested in this pitch? An editor at another publication is trying to screw me, what should I do? Can you help me get a credential to this…
Why Your Team Sucks 2026: Jacksonville Jaguars
Some people are fans of the Jacksonville Jaguars. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Jacksonville Jaguars. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here . Your team: Jacksonville Jaguars. Your 2025 record: 13-4, which got you a division title and a brief mention on page 18 of the newspaper, right under the foreclosure announcements. Curious how your chronically irrelevant team pulled this off? Put your Crocs in sport ...
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