Defector
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Darren Aronofsky’s AI Videos Are A Fitting Tribute To America, I Guess
Darren Aronofsky's AI production studio Primordial Soup was announced in May of 2025 during Google's annual developer conference. The launch was meant to burnish the pioneering reputations of both entities simultaneously: Google released a new version of its text-to-video model Veo and an AI video tool called Flow, while Aronofsky, like a worrying number of other filmmakers , sought to forge a new and daring path into unknown technological territory by partnering with one of the world's bigges...
25 Rap Songs For America’s 250th
Welcome to Listening Habits , a column where I share the music and musical topics I’ve been fixated on recently. It can be hard to remember amidst the downfall of everything, but 250 years of America is a major milestone. America, more of a grand experiment than a nation, a fantastical idea suggesting a very modern notion that the point of a country is the pursuit of the unachievable, starting with happiness. A nation that aspires toward its utopian principles but at heart is just as muc...
Try To Cool Off In The July 4th Weekend Open Thread
Perhaps it is too fucking hot where you are to do anything outside this weekend. Perhaps you prefer to be locked inside watching World Cup matches while eating popsicles. While you do that, feel free to hang out here and chat in the open thread.
‘The Final Set’ Tells The Story Of Tennis’ Greatest Rivalry Becoming A Friendship
There's a bit of symmetry in the new Netflix documentary The Final Set , a chronicle of the epic, tumultuous rivalry and friendship between Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert. Long removed from their legendary careers, both women were diagnosed with cancer in recent years: ovarian for Evert, breast and throat for Navratilova. After beating back the disease, they each go in for a scan. Just before sliding into the tubular machine, Evert hesitates, then removes her cap for comfort, revealing he...
Your Guide To The 2026 Tour de France
Now that we've covered two of the most interesting fellas who will be riding the 2026 Tour de France, and the theory of why they'll be riding this particular route, it's time to talk about the route itself. This year's Tour, starting on July 4, will span 3,321 kilometers of Spain and France while flirting with the Swiss and German borders. The route's 54,450 meters of vertical gain make it the third-most demanding Tour of the last 20 years, though that's deceptive, since a lot of that gain is ...
The Passion According To A. Frog
Ever since I was scooped up as a froglet from my marsh, taken into this laboratory, and developed a burgeoning freelance writing career, I have felt lost. I know I am searching, but I do not know what I seek. I want to share my life story with someone, anyone. I want to understand who I have been and what I have done, or, rather, what has been done to me. Some days I am not sure even I believe in myself. Am I really so alone in my experience of this world? Have other frogs tasted the noxious n...
Belgium Cannot Be Understood By The Pedestrian Soccer Mind
It has long been a staple of sporting analysis that the last thing you saw is a terrible predictor of the thing you will see. Las Vegas is paved with the headstones of people who thought they figured out a team's future by breaking down its past. And then there's the Belgium men's national soccer team, which takes this adage one fallacy further by being different teams within the same game, and doing it repeatedly so that the cagey analyst just walks away at the start of the national anthem...
Unlike The Defendants, One Of The Prairieland Judges Is Part Of An Organized Cell Of Extremists
Whether you remember his name or not, you've probably been reading about Judge Reed O'Connor and his judicial malevolence for years. O'Connor is making headlines again for being one of two judges to sentence 15 ICE protestors to a combined 547 years in prison. As the writer Lauren Fadiman pointed out in The Baffler , the media often uses "Prairieland ICE shooting" as a misleading shorthand for the protest. What actually happened is hard to capture in three words. On the night of July 4, 20...
Only A Complete Asshole Would Get Married At Madison Square Garden
This here is not a personal diatribe about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. I got no beef with either of these two crazy kids. Swift is one of the hardest-working entertainers in show business, and Kelce is one of the greatest tight ends to ever play pro football. They’re more than welcome to fall in love, and Swift is more than welcome to pen songs about her man’s girthy member . The pair are also free to tie the knot anytime, and any where , they like. Except for … One of the biggest even...
OK, This Is Probably Too Much Talk About The KLF
Up until a month ago, I rarely thought about '90s club legends The KLF. This is because The KLF were never all that big in the States, and thus I only remember them for their biggest single here, “3:00 a.m. Eternal.” If I had been paying closer attention, I would have discovered that the group, led by musicians Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond, were singing “ancients of Mu Mu” in the chorus of that song, in reference to a mythical, pre-Atlantis lost continent . I also would have known that Drummo...
Dead Country Fair
Things come out of Donald Trump's mouth, then just keep on coming out of it. If he says something once, he will say it again, primarily to reinforce how powerfully and unprecedentedly successful he was in having said it in the first place, but also because he so enjoys the sound of his own voice saying all the famous things that he says. The picture-book binaries that define and proscribe his understanding of the world—big and small, good and bad, hot and cold, rich and poor, white and not whi...
This 17th-Century Flemish Painting Held A Gnarly Bat Secret
To Jan Brueghel the Elder, paradise could not be contained to a single biome. Many of Brueghel's paintings teem with menageries of birds, mammals, reptiles, and fish that would never ordinarily meet in the wild: monkeys from the Americas mingling with birds from Europe and ungulates from Asia. Brueghel's paintings were also striking for their scientific accuracy, as Arianne Faber Kolb wrote in her study Jan Brueghel the Elder: The Entry of the Animals into Noah's Ark . In the 1500s, European e...
Celtics Jettison Beloved Finals MVP For Lapsed Podcaster And Some Picks
The Boston Celtics finally found another team serious about trading for Jaylen Brown. Following a couple of weeks where everyone offered their own opinion about the star's true value, the Philadelphia 76ers came in with a real offer—"real" in that it existed and was accepted, not that it was good for the Celtics. Those dreams of acquiring Giannis Antetokounmpo or even Jamal Murray in exchange for Brown did not come to pass. Boston's reality is this, as reported Wednesday night by ESPN's Sha...
The USMNT Suffered In Style
It is said, probably more often than is necessary, that a team that loses a player to a red card must be prepared to suffer. This is particularly true when the team that has gone down a man has a lead to protect. As soon as that card comes out, fans must prepare to watch their team hunker down, absorb constant pressure from the opponent, and pray to god that they can hold onto the lead. It's not always like this, though. Sometimes the talent disparity between two teams is so vast that the s...
Michael Olise And France Are Soccer’s Greatest Evangelists
Though the emotional appeal of soccer is immediate and visceral, especially in the shortcut-to-passion context of an international tournament like the World Cup, the real richness of the game is subtle. The uninitiated often find it difficult to access that depth. For better and for worse, the ball hypnotizes the novice eye. This is good, because what happens to the ball is what's most important. But it's also bad, because it's what happens around the ball that determines what happens to it. T...
The Fish Don’t Stink
The Miami Marlins are a winning baseball team. For now. That revelation comes after one of their finest months ever, a 20-6 run that began, hilariously enough, after being swept in a three-game series by the gangrenous Mets and falling behind them in the NL East race. This would be a point of deep shame for most teams, but the Fish have been coated, breaded, and fried in shame for most of their existence, and utterly wretched since their last World Series championship 23 years ago. They ended ...
The Game’s About The Ballers
If there's one clean, satisfying lesson to be taken from the World Cup action we've seen so far, it's this one: Big games tend to be decided by the big dogs. Kylian Mbappé, Erling Haaland, Lionel Messi, Michael Olise, Harry Kane—all of these guys have been playing out of their minds since the first group-stage games, and each has taken a deserved turn as the tournament's brightest star. Right now, minutes after England's 2-1 victory over DR Congo in the round of 32, it's Kane who reigns as ...
Liv Takes Miles, With Maitreyi Anantharaman
This week's episode of Nothing But Respect was recorded hours before Jalen Duren's representatives committed to using the Sacramento Kings as an unwitting partner in scrabbling a bit of leverage from the Detroit Pistons, which would have been great to talk about, but does not really change too much of the first bit of the show. Maitreyi Anantharaman came back on to talk Duren, Jaylen Brown, and Analyticsgate, but mostly to catch us up on the WNBA season. We talked a ton about her incredible Ol...
Trinket Box Purveyors Are Melting Down
Who among us has not attempted to start a whimsical community-oriented project, only for it to devolve into a site of small-scale authoritarianism? It happens all the time! It even happened in my own town! For a couple of months earlier this year, there was a white box screwed into the outdoor wall of a restaurant on my street. Every time I passed it, people were crowded around it, picking out little toys, stickers, and knickknacks that were stashed inside. One time, I stopped by and trade...
ESPN Retracts Article About NFL Player And Dead Woman In Dominican Republic
On June 18, ESPN published a report that connected NFL free agent Mike Pennel Jr. to the death of a woman in the Dominican Republic. This week, the network retracted the article and issued a brief statement. The article, bylined by T.J. Quinn and Juan Recio, claimed that Pennel had "an ongoing relationship" with Carli Franchesca Guzmán Roche, who disappeared in 2021 and whose body was discovered in January 2026 on Pennel's property in Puerto Plata. The original report, which has since been ...
There’s No Team Scarier Than Mexico At The Azteca
Heading into the 2026 World Cup, the Mexican national team had one mission: Finish first in Group A. Beyond the obvious motivation to not lose a game, finishing top of the group guaranteed that El Tri would not leave the terrifying confines of the Estadio Azteca until the quarterfinal round. It's impossible to overstate how powerful the home-field advantage is for Mexico at the Azteca: In 89 official competitive games there (not including friendlies), Mexico has lost exactly two games. Two! (I...
Cade Cavalli Insists There Was Nothing Racist About Calling Willson Contreras “Boy”
Cade Cavalli, pitcher for the Washington Nationals, used "boy" Tuesday night in a taunt directed at Willson Contreras of the Boston Red Sox. Cavalli had caught Contreras looking at a third strike, and shouted, "Sit down, boy," loud enough for it to be caught on the television broadcast. Contreras, a Venezuelan man seven years Cavalli's senior and with more than 40 times as many MLB games under his belt, took it exactly as intended. In the ensuing brouhaha, Contreras whipped off his batting hel...
Gracie The Giraffe Is Back Home. Now Rich Guys Can Buy Her.
You may have heard that a giraffe named Gracie skipped town—"town" being the Cedar Hollow Ranch in Leakey, Texas. Gracie, who is estimated to be around 3 or 4 years old, had been living there since May. Gracie is a reticulated giraffe, a species known for their clean and geometric pattern of brown spots. The owner of the ranch, Vick Jones, told The New York Times that Gracie had wandered to a fenced corner of the ranch, which is nestled in a canyon, climbed a slab of rock to nibble on some tre...
“We Hold These Truds”: A Search For The Weirdest Piece Of America 250 Merchandise
On the morning of Game 1 of the NBA Finals, I received an email from the U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission (better known as “America250”) promoting the release of new commemorative apparel to mark the occasion. The shirt designs have little connection to the NBA Finals—“NBA” is nowhere to be found, and the only logo on it is America250’s—but somehow even less connection to the country’s birthday. One has a basketball going into a net , flanked by the phrase “Game seven grit and American sp...
U.S. Supreme Court Upholds Bans On Trans Athletes In School Sports
The U.S. Supreme Court, in an opinion released Tuesday, voted 6-3 in support of two state laws that ban trans girls and women from playing women's sports at public schools and universities. The ruling applies directly to bans in two states—Idaho and West Virginia—while bolstering similar bans in more than two dozen others. Writing for the three votes against—all of which came from the court's liberal wing—Justice Sonia Sotomayor said that to the court's majority, "the facts do not matter, e...
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