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Tom Dundon Isn’t Acting Alone
Tom Dundon and the Portland City Council remain in a standoff. In early August, the city approved a $120 million expenditure of public money for renovations of the Blazers' longtime home arena, located in the city's Rose Quarter entertainment district. The city's proposed terms included a new 20-year lease, a $3 million annual payment to the city (compensation for property taxes the team avoids by playing in a publicly owned arena), and for the team to commit to using unionized labor. Dundon's...
NBA Crushes Clippers After Kawhi Leonard Investigation
The NBA has concluded its investigation of the Los Angeles Clippers and Kawhi Leonard, and the punishments are major. The league announced Wednesday that the independent probe, conducted by the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, uncovered "a pattern of misconduct and multiple significant rules violations by the Clippers organization, a prior offender of the salary cap circumvention rules," and as such the team will have to forfeit five first-round picks. The NBA also issued fines and sus...
Why Your Team Sucks 2026: Denver Broncos
Some people are fans of the Denver Broncos. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Denver Broncos. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here . Your team: Denver Bron—***THE DEFECTOR OFFICE GETS HIT WITH A SUDDEN CATEGORY 12 BLIZZARD, PREVENTING ME FROM WRITING ANYTHING GOOD FOR THE REST OF THIS PREVIEW*** Your 2025 record: 14-3. Only three years removed from Nathaniel Hackett coaching Russell Wilson in the Sunset Bo...
Interminable U.S. Open Night Sessions Are Bad For Everyone Except Me
Two hours after Tuesday night lapsed into Wednesday morning in the Eastern time zone, Alexander Zverev served out his grueling U.S. Open first-round matchup against Lorenzo Sonego. The final match of the night was a real thriller, with the top seed and the feisty Italian challenger letting each other have it for nearly five hours, on and on until Sonego stopped being able to hit a backhand with any zip and, at the exact right moment to avoid a catastrophic upset, Zverev remembered how to serve...
How Can I Be A Good Parent If I’m Conflict-Avoidant?
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, Ray answers a question about making sure you don't turn into your own father.
Gael Monfils Can Make The Crowd Dance To A Swan Song
FLUSHING, N.Y. — One set into the first-round match, I wondered when the Gael Monfils show would begin. Tuesday was his 40th birthday, and this could be his last-ever match at a Slam—didn't he want to party? We did. Seven years after his last deep run at the U.S. Open, the elastic, buoyant Frenchman still held onto a well-deserved reputation for spectacle. But already down a brisk 6-2 set to Adolfo Daniel Vallejo, the world No. 60, Monfils seemed to be offering an uncharacteristically low-watt...
TCU Bans Hometown Newspaper After Locker Room Fight Report
On Aug. 23, Texas Christian University Athletics announced they were pulling the credentials for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram . The announcement came after the paper reported on a locker room fight that led to the hospitalization of wide receiver Dozie Ezukanma and the team expulsion of high-profile transfer player Jacob Fields. According to TCU spokesperson Kyle Neaves, the credentials were pulled because the newspaper's source "lacked direct firsthand knowledge of the locker-room incident an...
Alex Eala Is The Best Show In Town
FLUSHING, N.Y. — As we waited for Alexandra Eala to walk into Louis Armstrong Stadium for the most anticipated first-round match of the tournament, the crowd whooping as a victorious 40-year-old Gael Monfils shed his shirt, I had a quick chat with Dyan Castillejo, the first Filipino ever to play on the WTA Tour. Castillejo is now a journalist; I'd read a number of stories in American publications by American authors that analyzed Eala's spectacular fame, but here was a chance to talk to somebo...
Canada Vs. America, With Jake Bittle
This week on Nothing But Respect , we mostly talked about dumb stuff with a smart guy. The guy in question was Jake Bittle, staff writer for Grist and the author of The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration , while the dumb stuff was Jake's amazing spree of Twitter fights back when that was something worth doing, and also Drake. Jake is a Raptors fan, and Harry knows a ridiculous amount of ball on all things rap, so it was a long time coming. We also talked about t...
Ketel Marte’s Bridge-Burning Hat Raises, Leaves Unanswered Several Questions
This Ketel Marte thing keeps getting stranger, at least linguistically. Marte made his return to the Arizona Diamondbacks on Monday, during their game against the Philadelphia Phillies. Before the game, Marte, who speaks through an interpreter, answered questions about his apparent no-call-no-show from the Aug. 17 game against the Boston Red Sox, serving mostly to generate more questions. "It was a moment of frustration. I'm the type of person that when something is going on in my life, I d...
Folarin Balogun Had Every Right To Blow Up The Transfer Deadline
This turned out to be quite an eventful summer for Monaco and USMNT striker Folarin Balogun. After the red card-that-wasn't at the World Cup, Balogun has now become the main character in a perfect transfer saga for this deeply unserious transfer window. The 25-year-old's move to Everton seemed secure late into the dying hours of the transfer window on Tuesday, but on Wednesday, Balogun remains a player for AS Monaco, and along the way completely bricked three different teams' plans for the upc...
Turn This Segway Around
Once again, Normal Gossip returns to the crucible that is college housing, and for good reason. Not only do stints in the dorms and subsequent apartments provide ample opportunities for self-discovery, but you’re also pretty much guaranteed to come out of the experience with an enemy (or six). Today’s friend-of-a-friend moves in with five boys and one mysterious woman on short notice. If you’re thinking that sounds like a recipe for chaos, you’d be right. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
LIV Golf Hopes Screwing Its Own Players In Bankruptcy Will Secure Its Future
LIV Golf recently sent out a mass email to mark the conclusion of its 2026 season. I imagine this was a somewhat slapdash operation given that the outfit, recently dumped by the Saudi Public Investment Fund, had to lop off the final event on its schedule, the team championship, which was scheduled for the final weekend of August, in Plymouth, Mich. Instead, the player championship and the team championship were both settled in Indianapolis , with stripped down entertainment offerings and drast...
After Imprisoning The Angels In The Toilet For Decades, Arte Moreno Is Cashing Out
To sum up the quarter-century of Los Angeles Angels baseball under owner Arte Moreno requires someone who knows him and them better than we do, so let's go to Anaheim Mayor Ashleigh Aitken, who responded to Moreno's abrupt decision to sell the team on Tuesday thusly : “I feel like it’s my birthday.” And there's your Angels postgame show for today. Our final score again: Yankees 7, Angels 3. We'll see you tomorrow, and please drive home safely.
There’s A New Space Telescope On Its Way To Help Answer The Biggest Question In The Universe
On August 30, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope successfully launched from Florida and will spend the next three months heading to its new home: a Sun-Earth Lagrange point, a million miles from Earth, where the gravity of the two larger bodies are in equilibrium. It's a comfy place to be for a space telescope; Roman can say hi to her old classmate Webb, who got there four years ago and has been sending back brilliant images and doing good science. Roman's a strange bird by NASA standard...
Why Your Team Sucks 2026: Los Angeles Rams
Some pathetic, frontrunning dorks are fans of the Rams. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Rams. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here . Your team: Los Angeles Rams. Your 2025 record: 12-5. Heh. Haha. MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!
You Can Magically Ban One Sports Injury Forever. What Do You Pick?
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 iPhone complaints, America’s infrastructure tragedy, changing clothes at the airport, and more. Your letters: Monte:
The Chicago Cubs Would Like Your Attention
The Chicago Cubs have maintained an awfully low profile for a team that 1) wins often, and by a lot of runs, 2) homers more than anyone, and 3) has an increasingly sure-thing MVP patrolling center now that Shohei Ohtani is slumping through his ouchy season. The Cubs hit nine homers on Monday night in a full 17-3 clocking of the Milwaukee Brewers, the team with the best record in baseball, and it landed as quietly as something that inherently loud could land. That feat has been eclipsed only on...
CBS News Now Performing Oafish Racism On Behalf Of Bari Weiss
It did not take a lot of special insight to suspect that recently installed CBS News boss Bari Weiss played some role in the production of a story the outlet ran on Monday, headlined "Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed's deleted tweets on Sept. 11 attacks invite scrutiny of past remarks." If you know even a little bit about Weiss, you know that such a story combines two of her favorite things: talking about people's old tweets and blatant Islamophobia. That suspicion was confirmed Monday nigh...
Bill Simmons Is De-Apexing
It's been an eventful year for Ringer founder and podcast host Bill Simmons. He ended 2025 and began 2026 at a peak in popularity, thanks to his performance on a podcast titled "Bill’s 50 Most Rewatchable Movies of the 21st Century," which earned him the kind of crossover appeal he's rarely enjoyed. Just before that, he signed a deal to have to have several Ringer podcasts licensed to Netflix. Then he got to tell the world about how the Jaylen Brown trade happened during his colonoscopy. For t...
An Interview With A Biographer Of Renée Richards, An Actual Trans Pro Athlete
As Lauren Theisen pointed out last month, the ongoing, abstracted debate about trans inclusion in sports uses almost no proper nouns and lots of hypotheticals. Back in the late 1970s, there was a very real, very human example of a trans athlete playing at the highest level of a mainstream sport. Renée Richards competed in professional tennis, and her fascinating life is explored meticulously in Julie Kliegman's new biography, Finding Renée Richard s . The book is an invaluable intervention in ...
Philly Is The Star Of The Philadelphia Cycling Classic
PHILADELPHIA — The Benjamin Franklin Parkway was designed in 1917 by French architect Jacques Gréber in the European style of boulevard, specifically inspired by the Champs-Élysées, which means it is a thematically apt and suitably picturesque locale for the end of a cycling race and a horrible—I mean absolutely dogshit , for all involved parties—road. On Aug. 30, the first Philadelphia Cycling Classic in a decade, by simple virtue of being a cycling race that necessitated mass closure of road...
Holy God Damn, Colton Cowser
They don't give style points in baseball, but if you were scoring Orioles-Rockies, you'd want to break out a second, third, maybe even a fourth color of pen to decorate the box with Colton Cowser's ninth-inning catch to save the game for Baltimore. Maybe some tempera as well. You can't make that "F8" pretty enough. All home-run robberies are special, but they come in flavors. On most, the fielder is totally vertical—having had time to settle on the track for a towering fly ball, and lofting...
What Do Booksellers Make Of “The End Of Reading”?
If you haven’t yet encountered the cover story for the August issue of The Atlantic , I have some bad news to share: " The End of Reading Is Here ." It’s an intentionally provocative headline for a slightly less provocative story; while it may portend doom, Rose Horowitch’s piece makes a smaller claim than its headline. She speaks more of a “decline of reading,” and, in a nod to Marshall McLuhan, argues that the U.S. is “postliterate.” Certainly there are crises well-covered within the piece t...
NFL Puts Three Players On Paid Leave
Three NFL players were placed on the commissioner's exempt list this past weekend: Seattle Seahawks cornerback Terrion Arnold, Denver Broncos outside linebacker Jonathon Cooper , and Green Bay Packers running back Josh Jacobs . All three will be unable to play while they are on the list, but they still get their game checks. It's the NFL's version of paid leave. All three have been charged in criminal court. For Cooper and Jacobs, the charges are in cases that include allegations of intimat...
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