Defector

An Antitrust Expert Makes The Comprehensive Case Against The Protect College Sports Act - Defector

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 la…

Cristiano Ronaldo Has Lost His Damn Mind - Defector

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 Wor…

LeBron James Is Commuting In A Fanatics Helicopter - Defector

LeBron James wasn’t pretending. He really is taking daily helicopter rides from his home in New York City to the offices of his new employer, the Philadelphia 76ers. Since the start of October, the LeBron James Express (call sign N6FN) has made 18 trips betwe…

White Sox Touched By God, Or Perhaps Merely Joyful Exuberance - Defector

At the start of Game 2 of their ALDS matchup Monday, Chicago White Sox starter-turned-reliever-turned-opener Anthony Kay faced the Cleveland Guardians offense and posed a powerful question. What would be more powerful: a papal blessing or Guardiansball, an of…

Igor Shesterkin Caught His White Whale And Scored A Goalie Goal - Defector

The thing about all goalie goals is that they rock. There are roughly 175 feet and six prideful skaters between the promised land and any netminder bold enough to even attempt to reach it. There have been but 21 goalie goals, scored by 18 different goalies, i…

It’s Already Code Orange For The Philadelphia Flyers - Defector

Hockey season has begun, and all teams are equal in the eyes of the creator. Hope springs triumphant for 32 collectives each striving as one, and the Stanley Cup lies shining before them, ready to be seized. In rebuttal, there’s this, from The Athletic’s Kevi…

Toward A Proper Definition Of “Overrated” - Defector

The YouTube title of this week’s All Ball episode is “Jalen Hurts Is OVERRATED.” This sort of headline is known as “clickbait,” or “ragebait.” But what if I told you that Arif Hasan and I spent time in this episode striving toward a more nuanced version of “o…

Talking To Emily St. John Mandel About Revision, Timeline Corruption, And Living Without A Floor - Defector

The first line of Emily St. John Mandel’s new novel Exit Party sets the tone of the whole book. She writes, “In the first spring after the collapse of the United States, the blossoming of the jacaranda trees felt to Ari like grace.” We have been dropped into …

Barry Melrose Brought Hockey Home - Defector

Go ahead and listen to this. (For the real perverts, use this one; you just know you’re about to stay up until 1:00 a.m. for a particularly shitty Sharks–Mighty Ducks game.) What does it evoke? What do you think of? More specifically, who do you think of? You…

The Rams Play In Australia In Two Days And They Haven’t Left Yet - Defector

Before the NFL season kicks off this weekend, it will kick off Wednesday night with a primetime game between the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks. And then on Thursday night it will kick off again, with a game between the San Francisco 49ers and Los …

‘It Ends’ Is The Gen Z Horror Movie Of The Year - Defector

Earlier this year, Curry Barker and Kane Parsons became young Hollywood phenoms in quick succession. An actor and sketch comedian, the 26-year-old Barker wrote, edited, and directed Obsession, which is the story of a meek romantic who uses a magical novelty t…

After Imprisoning The Angels In The Toilet For Decades, Arte Moreno Is Cashing Out - defector.com

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…

There's A New Space Telescope On Its Way To Help Answer The Biggest Question In The Universe - Defector

On Aug. 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 equili…

Philly Is The Star Of The Philadelphia Cycling Classic - Defector

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 …

Who Needs Life On Mars When It Has Glacial Spiders? - Defector

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 fin…