Defector
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The Crossword, Aug. 31: Prepare For Trouble, And Make It Double (Themeless)
We're ending the month with a challenging themeless puzzle. Keep an eye out for tricky clues and fun wordplay. This week's puzzle was constructed by Greg Snitkin and Glenn Davis, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Greg is a dad with three small kids and a hedge fund controller from South Orange, N.J. He's been in a fantasy football league with Glenn since 2013 and spanks him every year. Glenn is a reformed sports blogger now working in the non-profit space. He and his wife live in New Jersey with t...
Daejon Love Will Go Down As A Scammer For The Ages
Last week, the U.S. Department of Justice announced the arrests of two men in Portland, Ore. A 35-year-old man named Daejon Love and an 18-year-old man named Taylor Jamie Chan were charged with wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Those charges stem from Love and Chan running an alleged scam operation that involved defrauding various women through Love (unconvincingly) pretending to be a wide receiver for the San Francisco 49ers. Prosecutors say Love and Chan stole a total of $1....
Dolly Parton Prepared Us For The End
I was an adult when I encountered Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” for the first time. I grew up thinking Whitney Houston’s 1992 cover was the original; I can’t say exactly when my ignorance was rectified, but Twitter was almost certainly where. There was a type of tweet that would, and maybe still does, reliably go viral about the origins of the song, usually referring either to the fact that Parton wrote it and “Jolene” in the same day, or to the fact that she did all that only to be ...
Don’t Forget The Nails
Most people think of the tits. That’s understandable, given they would enter a room some not-insignificant amount of time before the rest of her. But there was also the hair, often high enough to occupy a distinct micro-climate, or the rhinestones, which reflected enough light to obscure everything save the tits and the hair. Saying Dolly Parton had a signature look is a bit like saying water has a signature wetness. What she had was a constitutive way of being. What she had was a relation...
Dolly, Josephine, And Me
Like all people not gravely deficient of soul, I teared up a little when I heard Dolly Parton died. I am by nature something of a patch of soft pavement—easily impressed upon—and so there’s not much surprising here. What was odd came a bit later when, attending to the funerary rites proper to these exhaustingly online days, I scrolled through one performance after another . There was an inner tumult, an upwelling excess. Soon enough I wasn’t merely damp-eyed; I was choked up; I snuffled; I was...
It’s No Longer Reds Week
Bang! Reds Week is over. Thank you for joining us. I hope you had at least half as much fun reading this week's collection blogs as we did writing them. You can catch up on anything you missed here. Normal business resumes on Monday. Onward.
Aristides Aquino Thumped While The Thumping Was Good
Over the past decade, the Cincinnati Reds have done roughly as little as a baseball team can do in a very distinctive way. It has been effective only at producing memorable outlier seasons in otherwise unremarkable careers. The generic, create-a-player image of a Contemporary Reds Guy has become much easier to summon than a memory of a Reds team that played winning baseball. This almost certainly works better for people like me—people who will calm themselves, on a crowded train platform or in...
There Is Only One Lesson Of Red Vienna
Two things are true about me: I hate rich people and I love architecture. These days that presents a terrible contradiction, because only the extremely rich are able to finance the perpetuation of architectural production, whether in the form of new and interesting houses or in the financing of skyscrapers and grand, expensive public-facing private projects like museums or concert halls. Meanwhile places like schools or libraries are cash poor , public resources like parks or housing are priva...
Why Does The Red-Lipped Batfish Look Like That?
Everyone knows now that the deep sea has a monopoly on strange fish. There is the uncanny inflation of the gulper eel , the peeled-grape eyes of the barreleye , and the eternal frown of the sea toad . These spooky fish's great and insurmountable distance from us might offer some reassurance that we are not likely to encounter them in the wild, at least not while either of us is alive. But the world's weirdest-looking fish, at least in my estimation, does not live in the deep sea. The red-lippe...
I’m A Redhead, So Hit Me With Your Best Shot (Of Lidocaine)
Redheads feel your pain. And then some. I got this tidbit, the wackiest medical trivia of my life, a couple years ago from a doctor at Johns Hopkins. I was there real shortly after another doc told me in scary tones that a weird bump could be something awful and had to be dealt with post-haste. Spoiler alert: Turned out fine. Sometimes a bump is just a bump. But before removing it, the specialist asked a question unlike any I’d ever gotten from a doctor. See, I must’ve flinched more than...
Why Your Team Sucks 2026: San Francisco 49ers
Some people are fans of the San Francisco 49ers. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the San Francisco 49ers. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here . Your team: San Francisco 49ers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXtMFDcAprg
We Caught These Teams Playing Imaginary Football Redhanded
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. Israel: College football is back! Sort of! Week 0 exists in a strange reality all its own. It is not preseason, as its games are real and important, and yet the vast majority of teams will not be playing during it. Week 0 is therefore an imaginary weekend of real football, but if any sport values the power of i...
The Cozy-Looking Sweaters In ‘Reds,’ Ranked
My Grandma Powell was a knitter. She’s still alive, but she’s too old now to knit. Before there were YouTube tutorials, or YouTube, or the internet, she taught herself how to do it. She spent years knitting sweaters, scarves, mittens, and toques (Canadian for "beanie") for herself, her husband, and her four children. By the time my cousins and I came along starting in the ’70s, she was extremely fast. My younger cousin and I got matching sweaters. We also got sweaters with matching leg warmers...
Who Needs Life On Mars When It Has Glacial Spiders?
Is there life on Mars? That's the wrong question. Every time scientists from NASA, the European Space Agency, or any other terrestrial organization bring news back from Mars of fresh discoveries in the hunt to find evidence of life on the fourth planet, I find myself mildly annoyed that the general populace's focus is trained exclusively on the quest to find the tiniest microresidue of exobiota. That's a narrow angle, one that crops out everything in the background that makes the quest poss...
Let’s Make Some Romesco, Not Only Because It’s Red, But Because It Rules
When I learned that Defector would be running Reds Week for its random annual late-summer theme week, I had one thought: Man, I really wish I had another week of time off to spend. Every year, Tom Ley announces the theme of theme week, and people start kicking around story ideas, and I think to myself, OK, next year, no matter what, I have to remember to leave myself one full week of time off, so that I can skip theme week. And then I blow it. Blowing it is part of the tradition. Anyway, here ...
I Went To A Reds Game And The Sky Was Red
A few different times when I was in my teens, my dad, my younger brother and I would go on a sports-themed road trip. This particular one 12 years ago took us from our home in suburban Detroit to baseball games in Cincinnati, Louisville, and finally St. Louis. I have good memories of this trip: watching on TV as Germany obliterated Brazil in the World Cup; seeing Matt Adams (I could tell it was Matt Adams) hit what I thought was a triple in Busch Stadium from way, way up in the Gateway Arch (t...
Before ‘Red Dead Redemption,’ There Was ‘Red Dead Revolver’
There's a mission about halfway through Red Dead Revolver that I have not forgotten, even in the 22 years since I first played Rockstar's original Western. It's called "The Traitor." In a flashback, the player takes over the villainous General Javier Diego of the Mexican Army, as he attempts to take control of a bridge at the border between Mexico and the United States. Your goal in the mission is simple: Stay alive long enough to wipe out the U.S. Army soldiers and cannon artillery. There's n...
Possible Red Card: The Beatles Movie Wigs
Four movies about The Beatles are currently in production. There will be one movie for each Beatle, and director Sam Mendes has said that the four movies will be the "first binge-able theatrical experience." No one has explained exactly what this means yet. Will all four be released to theaters at the exact same time in April 2028? On consecutive days? Weeks? It's unclear. But we do have some sense of what these movies will look like. Last week, a picture from the set went viral. In it, Har...
“The Red-Headed League” Is A Sherlock Holmes Mystery That Can Laugh At Itself
I was a Mystery Kid, and every Mystery Kid knows how that goes. Only stories of remarkable children—Nancy Drew, Frank and Joe Hardy, Encyclopedia Brown—could enliven my unremarkable life. Recently I was marveling to my parents that so many Encyclopedia Brown stories had stayed with me, more than two decades after I read them. At least, little fragments had. In my memory, the premises had faded, so that all that remained was this potpourri of solutions you’d find in the back of the book: that...
13 Short Blogs About The Cincinnati Reds
The origin story of the Reds goes like this: In 1869, just after local boy and war hero Ulysses S. Grant was inaugurated as president, the Cincinnati Red Stockings became the very first entirely professional baseball team. They were later a charter member of the National League, essentially creating baseball as we know it today. That tradition was respected for decades; in fact, for many years, there was a tradition that baseball’s Opening Day would feature only one game, and it would be hoste...
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 ...
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...
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