Defector
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We Now Know For Sure That We Know Nothing For Certain
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. Ray: You'll have to wade through a fair amount of mediocre slop to get to the actual prize this week. That would be the Georgia-Alabama blood feud; the rest of it is just college football. The outcome in that game will go a long way toward pissing off one fan base while making the other completely insufferable—...
Even Anonymous Stadium Workers Are Scoring On The Cowboys
As if Thursday's 24-16 defeat to a (formerly) winless Tampa Bay Buccaneers team—a loss which never really felt as close as the final score looks—wasn't already bad enough for the Dallas Cowboys. They now have to deal with everyone seeing a video of Dak Prescott walking to the locker room, fresh after losing at home to those aforementioned Bucs, taking offense to a worker inside the stadium calling his performance "embarrassing." The word was so triggering that it forced Prescott into some glar...
The Not-So-Great Defector Bake Off Has A Gem Of A Time During Biscuit Week
Welcome back to The Not-So-Great Defector Bake Off , where Kelsey and Chris attempt to complete the technical challenges from the newest season of The Great British Bake Off in their own home kitchens, with the same time parameters as the professional-grade bakers competing on the show. When I was a child, there was nothing I loved more than preservatives. I loved soda. I loved fast food. I loved the kind of packaged treats that you get in a box at the grocery store, where each of them i...
Brazil’s Presidential Election Is One Piece Of A Larger, More Depressing Story
If one wanted to understand the alarming state of international politics in the Western Hemisphere through a single story, it'd be hard to beat Jose Antonio Kast visiting CECOT this past January. Kast spent nearly 20 years at the extreme right fringe of Chilean politics, mostly crusading against women's rights. His father was a Nazi, and not in any sort of metaphorical sense: He served as an Oberleutnant in the Wehrmacht in World War II. Various members of the Kast family also worked for th...
Motor Matters
I know how the faint praise goes, but a lot of the important things Angel Reese does actually do show up in the box score. They certainly did in Atlanta’s Game 2 win over New York on Wednesday, a 101-98 overtime thriller that gave the Dream a 2-0 lead in the semifinals. This showed up in the box score:
Is This Guy Who Uses AI To Run His Fantasy Football Team The Biggest Loser In The World?
Why does anyone play fantasy football? This is not a trick question , although it's also not particularly difficult to answer. Perhaps they do it for money, or they enjoy football, or they want a shared activity to help stay in touch with friends or family. Whatever the reason, the fun is in picking your guys and managing your little team and hoping you win more often than you lose. Some people have a healthier relationship to this endeavor than others. Still, if none of it appeals to you, the...
A Novel About California’s Pluckiest Virgin Is Getting A Second Chance
Names, the heroine of Cynthia Buchanan’s 1972 debut novel, Maiden , thinks to herself, “are so vital.” And with a name like Fortune, you’d have to try your luck in California. Although she prefers Fortunée: She calls this a “higher-type pronunciation,” though this also marks it as a maiden name. She’s never gotten lucky. At 30, Fortune is still a virgin, “and her virginity had burrowed in.” “Would life forget about her?” runs her inner monologue. “Overlook her? Pass her by? Misdial? Anxiety be...
Everything We Know And Don’t Know About The Possible Plague Death At The Anti-Plague Institute
You might have heard by now of the scientist in Russia, 28-year-old Darya Shipilova, who died on Oct. 2 of an unknown illness. Shipilova worked in a lab at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East, an institution founded in the 1930s to control and prevent—you guessed it—plagues. Russian health authorities have since quarantined the hospital where Shipilova died, along with staff at the institute and anyone else who came in contact with her. These are the facts. ...
A Blue Wave Won’t Mean Shit If The Chumps Get Their Way
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 . You might have heard there’s an election coming soon. Given that this is The Most Important Election Of Our Lifetimes, No. 536, the campaign industrial complex has rested a 1,000-pound boulder atop the SPAM button in an attempt to curry favor wi...
What Process Are The Orioles Trusting?
Not a lot of owners would have let Mike Elias do what he has done with the Baltimore Orioles. This was true in a negative, how-dare-you-sir sense when the team's John Angelos–led ownership entrusted Elias with overseeing a more strategic approach to bottoming all the way out, following a 115-loss 2018 season in which then-GM Dan Duquette traded away every veteran he could before being fired that November. Those deals netted 15 players; of those, only Dean Kremer would go on to contribute posit...
What Is Wrong With Yankees Fans?
The Tampa Bay Rays–New York Yankees ALDS matchup revealed some intriguing eccentricities of each team's respective ballpark. For example, the Tropicana Field ground rules contain a section entitled "Catwalks, Lights and Suspended Objects," with particulars on if a ball should strike the "C-Ring" or "D-Ring" or "any of the angled support rods that connect the 'C-Ring' to the masts that support the 'D-Ring'" in fair territory, versus those if a ball should strike the "A-Ring" or "B-Ring," and so...
Jay-Z Doesn’t Have Much To Give You
Welcome to Listening Habits , a column where I share the music and musical topics I’ve been fixated on recently. For the longest time, I complained that rap music wasn't getting the Hollywood documentary treatment it deserved. While I've enjoyed experimental, in-depth docs for the Velvet Underground, David Bowie, Kurt Cobain, and of course Bob Dylan, I felt that this kind of serious, prestigious treatment should've been given to our best rappers. For the most part, over the last couple y...
An Antitrust Expert Makes The Comprehensive Case Against The Protect College Sports Act
Marc Edelman has spent much of the last two decades fighting to help college athletes get fairly compensated for their labor. A lawyer who is currently a tenured professor at Baruch College, Edelman has been writing about the NCAA's violations of antitrust law since 2002. In 2023, he advised both the states of Ohio and New York in their antitrust cases against the NCAA. As an antitrust expert who has dedicated so much time to thinking about college sports and how athletes should be properly...
Somebody Fucked Up
We are zooming ahead to the very end of Wednesday night's semifinal game between the New York Liberty and Atlanta Dream, which the Dream won in overtime, 101-98, to take a 2-0 series lead. After Angel Reese hit two free throws to put the Dream up by three, the Liberty had one more chance to engineer a potential game-tying shot with four seconds to play. This is what they came up with: https://youtu.be/N2StGRISYLY?t=730 An astute observer may notice the little orange tick under the word...
Did I Ruin My Child’s Imagination By Being Such An Involved Parent?
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, Chris answers a question about a child who simply will not play alone.
A Uniquely Clunky Sentence Is A Joy Forever
I have tried over the past year and change to find a succinct way to tell this story and instead only keep coming up with longer and more elaborate versions. So: Way back in law school I read a lot of John Buchan novels. If you are not familiar with John Buchan, know that he wrote a series of thrillers, one of which was made into a Hitchcock movie , and that he was also Governor General of Canada. Reading Buchan was not the first time I had heard of him; when I was a small child, I had a set o...
Dylan Larkin And The Red Wings Are Having Agonizing Breakup Sex On Live TV
Dylan Larkin is still a Red Wing, even though he doesn't want to be. His offseason trade request, arriving after 11 seasons with the club and a mere five playoff games (all as a rookie), symbolized the franchise's inability to shift out of neutral and forced fans to stare the worst-case scenario in the face: After all these years of waiting, maybe the Wings remain closer to the No. 1 draft pick than a playoff run. As the team's second-best goal-scorer and top-line center, Larkin would be impos...
The TV People Are Talking About Deshaun Watson All Wrong
If you missed last week’s Thursday Night Football tilt between the Steelers and Browns, don’t grieve. The game itself was inessential, and Amazon Prime’s coverage of the game all but incentivized the audience to do anything else with its evening. That’s because Amazon’s broadcast team decided to treat Browns QB Deshaun Watson, a proven and unrepentant menace to women , with the kind of soft-focus treatment usually reserved for diabetic Olympians. Watson was feted in the pregame show , during t...
‘Content Machines’ Asks The Right Questions About Publishing In The Platform Era
Every season, there’s a particular sort of novel that elicits its own genre of disdain. It’s somehow “too personal” and also lacking in “depth.” It’s called things like indulgent, trashy, lazy, artless, frivolous, embarrassing, or perhaps just very online. This is the mauvais genre of our times, the gimmick of the not-quite-memoir, autofiction. Over the summer, as Rachel Cusk’s Life of M: A Novel took its turn, Grace Byron remarked that by now, speculation over the genre’s boundaries of fact ...
Padres-Brewers Has Been The Best Of October Baseball
The single discordant note in the otherwise effervescent National League Divisional Series between the Milwaukee Brewers and San Diego Padres so far was a brief shot of new Padres owners Jose E. Feliciano and Kwanza Jones watching Game 3. It was easy to imagine them, less than two months into the new gig, assuming that it would always be like this. All they know is winning two out of every three games, playing before sold-out houses, and learning cool inside-baseball phrases like " Goddammit, ...
Cristiano Ronaldo Has Lost His Damn Mind
As someone who broadly finds international breaks boring—and this current double break painfully so—I have to express gratitude to Cristiano Ronaldo for having a complete meltdown over his spot on the Portuguese national team. While his performance at the World Cup was oftentimes funny and almost always more than a little sad, this current freakout is just bizarre. OK, it’s also still pretty funny. The timeline: On Sept. 24, during the first game of this seemingly endless international bre...
Must Every Leafy Thing Be So Freighted With Meaning? Yes, Yes It Must
Let's play a game. What do you expect was the outcome of this 3-on-0? Expectations are a funny thing in sports. They are as subject to the observer effect as any quantum mechanic: When a player or a team is aware of them, they may tend to play up to or exceed those expectations, or play down to them, as the case may be. Or they may be rattled and fall short. All this depends on temperament. The Maple Leafs have more observers than anyone, and their expectations are historically the least...
Christine Brennan Has Fully Lost It Over Caitlin Clark
If you listen to a certain subset of the media—not necessarily the sports media—the state of the WNBA is dire. A generational talent is being squandered. Weak leadership has failed a league on the cusp of great opportunity. Something must be done. Once we figure out what exactly that something is, it's going to get so done. USA Today columnist Christine Brennan, who has written a book about Caitlin Clark , belongs to this subset, and has committed to viewing an entire sports league through ...
Fuck Bucket Lists
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 dumb PA announcers, selling yourself, coaches, and their hobbies, and more. Your letters: Jeff:
“I Got Friends That Will Hurt Her”: Court Documents Describe Audio Recordings And Video Footage Tyreek Hill Wants Kept Out Of His Divorce Trial
To hear powerhouse sports agent Drew Rosenhaus tell it, his client, the once-electric receiver Tyreek Hill, could sign with a new NFL team at any moment. From a football-only perspective, the agent’s optimism makes sense. With so many teams losing starters to injuries, any football fan would expect a veteran like Hill to get a…
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