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Hey Look, We Redesigned Our Website
Well, well, well, would you look at that. We have a fancy new website. This redesign is the result of a lot of hard work by our esteemed partners at Lede, and they have provided us with a homepage that is much more customizable. We now have the ability to highlight specific stories, coverage areas,…
Is Mercedes Conspiring Against Its Own Driver? (No.)
And let the conspiracy theories begin. George Russell had spent the past three race weekends painstakingly narrowing the gap to his wunderkind Mercedes teammate in the Drivers' Championship standings. Luck, for once, fell in his favor. And then on Sunday at the Belgian Grand Prix, Russell yet again had a hellish day. With luck a tired nemesis, it fell upon spectators to find another cosmic horror to blame. Such as: Mercedes boss Toto Wolff. Here are some factual observations. Russell, who s...
Where Am I Supposed To Look When I Look At Baseball?
One Defector intern explains baseball to another . Sohini : When I used to call it boring, my dad used to tell me that baseball is a game of immense strategy. I didn’t doubt him, exactly, but it did carry the vibe of “Dad saying stuff to fit in with other dads.” I never took the time to familiarize myself with that strategy, and have instead treated the handful of baseball games I’ve been to as loud, fun, kitschy bars. So when it came time to fact-check a baseball blog in the process of obt...
How Cops Consolidated So Much Power Over Local Governments
Even before his historic election as New York City’s mayor in November 2025, democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani had reportedly begun searching for “common ground” with the city’s rank-and-file police officers. He publicly apologized for prior statements describing the department as “racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety,” and for an earlier endorsement of defunding the police. He also signaled his “openness” to keeping Eric Adams’s NYPD commissioner Jessica Tisch—a plan which h...
The Crossword, July 20: No Half Measures
Count your blessings: There's a new Monday crossword. This week's puzzle was constructed by Brian Callahan and Geoffrey Schorkopf , and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. This is Brian and Geoffrey’s second collaboration at Defector. The player at 11-Down in their first puzzle went from one of Brian’s teams to one of Geoffrey’s teams this past offseason. Geoffrey is quite pleased. Brian isn’t. Defector crosswords, launched in partnership with our friends at AVCX , run every Monday. If you’re intere...
Jonas Vingegaard Felled Yet Again By The Cruelty Of His Sport
ÉVIAN-LES-BAINS, France — Exactly 84 minutes after Jonas Vingegaard spiked his right collarbone into a curb and limped into an ambulance and out of the Tour de France, the assembled press watched him gingerly wince his way down the steps of the Visma bus and into a waiting team car. A scrambled pack-job followed. A soigneur could barely hold the pile of backpacks and duffel bags he was carrying off the bus. A team doctor stood by, holding two large red and yellow first-aid kits, adopting the t...
A Hater’s Coda To The World Cup
It seems somehow right and proper that the final game of the World Cup was such a screeching drag, if only to remind us that the chief byproduct of a global anything is for most of the participants and supporters to grouse about how it ended. I mean, Spain had a great time, to be sure, as it got to not only write but prove all its best narratives , but every tournament has one winner and a thousand envious and angry losers. When you frame it that way, the vision of the Turnip-in-Chief and his ...
Looking Good, Sir!
The World Cup kicked ass, as it almost always does, but Sunday's final between Spain and Argentina was a well-timed reminder that the game is not always as beautiful as it has been over the last month. And in the immediate aftermath we were served up another reminder, that no matter how capable the World Cup is of redeeming itself through what happens on the field, shameless venality is never far away. For example, it might plant its hideous form squarely in frame for the post-championship pho...
Spain Won As Only Spain Can
It sure looks like Spain has found the formula for winning World Cup finals. All it takes is a truly hideous game, marked by defensive intensity and borderline tackles, and a late goal from a Barcelona player. In the Wario to the 2010 final, Spain beat 10-man Argentina 1-0 thanks to Ferran Torres's emphatic 106th minute winner. But that's not why Spain won the World Cup. Spain won because it played the exact same game it played every knockout match on its way to a second World Cup title: de...
All 10 Goals In That Bonkers Third-Place Match, Ranked
There's probably no reason for the World Cup third-place match to exist. Unlike the Olympics, when a coveted bronze medal is at stake, third place at the World Cup doesn't offer much to teams. By and large, these matches tend to involve mentally checked-out players mainly concerned with avoiding an injury so that they can fully relax once they get to the beaches and/or yachts they will spend the next several weeks sitting on, where they will nurse the pain from the semifinal loss and rest up a...
Quinn Simmons Lets The Bike Speak For Him, For Better And Worse
MULHOUSE, France — Stage 12 of the 2026 Tour de France was supposed to be boring. Maybe it would have been were it not for Quinn Simmons, who did what he does best and made the peloton quake with a thumping attack. The American champion seized the initiative with 35 kilometers left, splintering the bunch and dragging a dozen strong riders with him, turning what would have otherwise been a dull procession into a thrilling finale. Very few riders are strong enough to cleave a charging peloton li...
ICE Brings The Occupation Home
On Monday, in the city of Biddeford, Maine, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in an SUV rammed the passenger side of a civilian vehicle and, after the vehicle stopped, approached it with their guns drawn. The driver reportedly was 26-year-old Colombian national Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, who was not the target of the warrant the ICE officers were supposed to be executing that day, and who had his three-year-old daughter in the car with him. Within moments, one or more o...
James Dolan Sues Wired Magazine For Writing A Story About His Shitty Ways
James Dolan keeps pooping on his own parade . The Knicks owner should still be basking in the warmth of his beloved NBA team’s first championship in 53 years, like the rest of New York. Instead, he’s suing journalists. Dolan’s corporation, MSG Entertainment, filed a defamation lawsuit Thursday in New York Supreme Court against Wired magazine, for a story published last week titled " Madison Square Garden Kept a List of Gay Celebrities. " The piece went into detail about the owner's feti...
Buster Posey Sucks, But Don’t Take My Word For It
There was a very awkward moment in the July 16 episode of The Executive Show on KNBR in San Francisco. The hosts, Brian Murphy and Markus Boucher, were talking with Giants executive Buster Posey, making his first appearance on the show since May 21. According to SFGate , that May interview was "testy," and Posey subsequently bailed on the episode scheduled for June 25, possibly due to hurt feelings but also possibly because he was too busy making a huge mess of the team's stupid Pride Night me...
Homosexually Humping Corpse-Eating Beetles Here For A Good Time, Not A Long Time
The burying beetle Nicrophorus vespilloides is famously good at parenting. In the leaf litter of forests around the United Kingdom, the beetles scurry around in search of the small carcasses of mice and birds. Once the beetles find a suitable corpse, they get to work . First they strip the carcass of its fur or feathers and disembowel it. Then they smear it with brownish-red antimicrobial fluid. Finally, they roll the flesh into a ball and bury it in the sand. Once under the soil, the corpse i...
What’s The Worst Movie You’ve Ever Watched In A Theater?
Here's how we got on this: Billy was in soccer chat speculating on how soccer might have turned out differently if Lionel Messi had "accidentally" drowned baby Lamine Yamal in that bathtub . He then posted the poster for 2004's The Butterfly Effect to illustrate the concept of the butterfly effect. Luis piped up to say that The Butterfly Effect may have been the worst movie he's even seen in a theater. Now we're all sharing our worsts. Giri Nathan The only movie I've ever walked out of w...
The World Cup Is About Great Players And Nothing Else
Like every previous edition, this World Cup has been great at producing stories. The most uplifting was the one about the shrinking gap between soccer's established powers and the rest of the world, as told by the group-stage success of the African teams, and most memorably by Cape Verde . You also had the tactical story of the tournament, in how the teams with the most fluid and attractive attacking play achieved it by eschewing the sport's dominant strategic meta—the spread-'em-wide-and-pin-...
A Rob Deer Mystery, With Justin Halpern
It is the policy of Defector that co-owners who are on vacation should, when on vacation, try their best to be on vacation. There are complicating factors to this simple-sounding rule—it is both easy and tempting to pop into Slack during lulls or just out of habit, and that is only made more so by the years of damage or just slippage related to the idea of what are and aren't working hours—but it is a good policy. I say this as someone who wrote a decently long story for the site during my rec...
The Bucks Are Paying So Much For Gary Trent Jr. That The NBA Is Worried
The Milwaukee Bucks are going to have a hilarious roster next season. Tyler Herro! Myles Turner! Kevin Porter Jr.! Caris LeVert! Kyle fuckin' Kuzma! To assemble this Jaywalkers' Row of contributors, while also affording all of the non-corporeal essence of Damian Lillard that can be purchased with $22 million, takes some serious finagling. So much finagling, apparently, that it draws the concerned attention of the league's front office: According to a report from ESPN's Shams Charania, the Buck...
It’s Time To Look At Photos Of Sad England Fans
Yes, posting a bunch of high-quality photos of fans taken right after their team lost a big game is a bit like shooting cod in a barrel, but I think you'll agree that there is something about crestfallen England fans that makes them particularly striking. I mean, just look at the before and after of the poor lad at the top of this post. Is that not the agony of being a sports fan, perfectly distilled into two images? This is what getting your soul snatched by Lionel Messi, after 30 minutes ...
I Have Discovered The Final Frontier In Baseball Tinkering
Baseball is a game of centimeters, and every carefully placed hair on a pitcher's head is the difference between a Cy Young season and an ERA higher than your jersey number. Take Toronto's Dylan Cease. At the All-Star Game, Cease explained that during spring training, he began turning his head toward third base mid-delivery in order to avoid rotating too quickly on his pitches. This is a small alteration, yet he has lowered his ERA to 2.56 from last year's 4.55. After hearing Cease describe...
A Chaotic Day In The Life Of The Photographers At The Tour de France
CHALON-SUR-SAÔNE, France — Roughly 15 minutes after driving past the start line, Harry Talbot decides it's time to pull over next to a field of droopy sunflowers. He scouted the route of Stage 11 of the Tour de France kilometer by kilometer earlier this year on Google Street View to identify potential spots where he and his fellow photographers could set up their shots, and we'd arrived at the first of the day. To my eye, the sunflower field is perfect. To Talbot , Zac Williams , and Max Fr...
The Yzerplan Failed, So It’s Time For Plan Z In Detroit
When Steve Yzerman took over as Red Wings general manager in 2019, the state of Michigan embraced him as the man who would return their hockey team to glory, or at least clean up the mess Ken Holland left behind. Some of that was nostalgia for the time he was the Wings' captain, helping them hoist three Stanley Cups. But it was based on something more tangible, too: Yzerman was coming from Tampa, and the Lightning's team-building in the 2010s was of the finest caliber. For his entire hockey ca...
PEN America’s “Silent Moratorium” Prompts Very Loud Criticism
PEN America president Dinaw Mengestu resigned from his position this past Thursday after the troubled free-expression organization published a report reaffirming its opposition to cultural boycotts. The report, titled "A Silent Moratorium," recounts anecdotes from editors, agents, and writers who describe "rising isolation and exclusion" faced by Israeli and Jewish authors. Mengestu saw the report as dangerously and falsely categorizing the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS) movement—which s...
Who’s Afraid Of A Scammer Anthem?
Welcome to Listening Habits , a column where I share the music and musical topics I’ve been fixated on recently. The rap song of the summer is undoubtedly Yung Miami's "Spend Dat." Produced by J. White Did It, the gloriously maximalist strip-club banger celebrates the joys of spending illegally acquired funds. It is a perfect summer rap record, and is also the perfect pop song for our moment of grift and speculative bubbles. We've all come to understand that the economy is an Oz with no ...
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