Defector
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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...
Why The Tour de France Route Is Different Every Single Year
As I spend the early part of the summer talking about the Tour de France with normal people (read: non-cycling fans), there's one thing that catches almost everyone off guard. I will outline the route and they'll say something like "What do you mean it starts in Barcelona?" as they adopt an expression that I imagine conveys skepticism about whether I know Barcelona is not in France, or that Louis XIV evacuated Catalonia following 1697's Peace of Ryswick. To those who haven't paid the closest a...
You’re Going To Have To Care About The AL’s Snooziest Teams
Why would you watch Germany face World Cup elimination in a penalty shootout when you could watch two teams slow-motion walking toward the top of their divisions in the American League? Of course, I’m talking about the Cleveland Guardians vs. Texas Rangers thumb-wrestling match. Now that's appointment television! In Monday's marquee game, Cleveland's Parker Messick faced off against the Rangers' bullpen, with the bulk of the innings thrown by Chris Paddack, debuting with his third team this...
A Clueless Soccer Guy’s Favorite World Cup Things
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 worst sports cities, Germany, deceptive cooking shows, and more. I'm back from vacation! I'm still technically at the beach, but there's no reason I can't knock out some work in the morning while everyone else in the family sleeps in. I'm always up at 7:00 a.m., whether I have the day off or...
What’s Going On With Brandon Aiyuk?
The drama between Brandon Aiyuk and the San Francisco 49ers has been brewing for nearly a year. Since suffering a torn ACL and MCL in his right knee during the 2024 season, Aiyuk and his current team have been in a dispute over his rehabilitation. Last year, Aiyuk declined to attend offseason rehab sessions at the team's facility, thus negating parts of his contract. The Niners placed Aiyuk on the reserve/left team list this past December, after he stopped showing up to the facility. Aiyuk,...
World Cup Recrimination Is The Best Recrimination
There are a million reasons why the World Cup is the greatest sporting event on Earth, and one of those reasons is that it's the rare setting in which soccer managers can be forced to eat some shit. American sports fans are spoiled by the traditional press conference. Yes, most press conferences are a waste of time and feature obsequious beat reporters lobbing easy questions at the coaches of the teams they cover, but there still exists in this country an impulse toward challenging a coach'...
A Brief History Of The World Cup Song
Dai dai. Ikou. Dale, allez, let's go. So says Shakira in the chorus of the 2026 official World Cup song "Dai Dai," in which she links up with Burna Boy to express the same sentiment in five different languages. Why find the universal in the specific when you can attempt to recreate the magic of your 2010 World Cup hit "Waka Waka" by finding the universal in the universal? “No one's getting tired, I know/‘Cause you got that fire, ayo,” indeed. One Italian sportswriter described the lyrics of "D...
Finding Friends, Legacy, And Leather Sluts At New Jersey’s Finest Holiday Inn
In 2011, a Princeton Borough police officer gave me a public urination ticket as I was on my way to go drinking. I went home with someone that night and forgot about the ticket in my crumpled pants pocket. Weeks later I paid it off in a panic, hours before my delinquency would have added me to a New Jersey sex offender registry. For no particular reason, I was reminded about that while watching a femme top squat over a girl lying across a storm drain in the courtyard of a Holiday Inn in centra...
One Of Dianna Russini’s Funny Little Stories Was A Big Fat Fib
A recent New York Times article about former NFL insider Dianna Russini resurfaced an anecdote that Russini had previously shared on a podcast earlier this year. The story went like this: Russini was pulled over for texting and driving, and attempted to talk her way out of the ticket by telling the cop that she had only been texting because she was trying to break the news that Sean McDermott had just been fired by the Buffalo Bills. When that didn't work, she asked the officer who his favorit...
Mr. Nagelsmann, Tear Down This Meat Wall!
For the first time in history, Germany has lost a penalty shootout at the World Cup. A highly anticipated potential round-of-16 matchup between Germany and France has been put on ice, and instead it is Paraguay that advanced on Monday, after a 1-1 draw turned into a 4-3 shootout victory for the South Americans. Paraguay followed the underdog script to perfection, scoring first and then frustrating, blocking, and clattering into the Germans around every corner, spoiling a dream matchup for the ...
Lions Cut Terrion Arnold After Judge Sets Bail In Criminal Case At $1 Million
Bail for NFL cornerback Terrion Arnold, who has been charged with four counts of kidnapping and four counts of armed robbery, was set Monday at $1 million. Just a few hours after the hearing ended, the Detroit Lions cut Arnold , a former first-round pick who was set to enter his third season in the league. At the court hearing, prosecutors in Hillsborough County, Fla., had asked a judge to hold Arnold in jail without bail, but chief judge Christopher C. Sabella denied their request. Sabella...
It’s Time To Daydream About LeBron On The Warriors
Don't panic: We're about to discuss Draymond Green, but not because of his taste for provocation or his general Draymond-hood. It's just a little item ahead of NBA free agency opening Tuesday afternoon, which means there may be less here than meets the eye, but just enough to meet the funny bone. Green will reportedly decline his $27 million player option for 2027, days after Golden State Warriors general manager Mike Dunleavy Jr. said the team was optimistic that he would return. OK, tha...
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