Gradually over the last decade, Reddit went from merely embarrassing but occasionally amusing, to actively harmful, to—mainly by accident—essential. As the platform that swallowed niche message...

The journalists who took part in a staff rebellion last year are starting Defector Media, a company with a podcast and a website dedicated to sports and culture.

Defector is an employee-owned sports and culture website brought to you by the former staffers of Deadspin.

Defector is an employee-owned sports and culture website brought to you by the former staffers of Deadspin.

The Baylor women’s basketball team lost 69-67 in Monday night’s Elite Eight contest against Connecticut, and if you watch enough replays of Baylor’s final possession, you might become convinced that...

Tesla, a future case study for securities law classes across America, had to stop delivering Cybertrucks this past weekend. No, not because the hundred-thousand–dollar medium-duty pickup, which is...

Today is the 100th day since the launch of Defector, which means that it’s time to settle a grudge that began over a year ago. Well, well, well. Well, WELL, well, well, well, well. Jason Calacanis....

Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers, who was recently revealed to be unvaccinated against COVID-19 despite previously telling reporters that he had been "immunized" against the virus, went on...

This is what the Defector staff enjoyed listening to in 2020. Kvelertak, Splid It’s hard to pin down Kvelertak, a six-piece from Stavanger, Norway. That place is best known on the music scene for two...

Lemieux vs. Tkachuk is two second-generation NHL shit-stirrers picking up where their dads left off.

Oh my goodness, would you look at that. The Unnamed Temporary Sports Blog has once again been switched on. You've got questions, we've got answers. What is the Unnamed Temporary Sports Blog? It is...

Vice was a good website. On Thursday it was killed by its private equity owners, in a characteristically cruel and sudden maneuver: Staff reportedly received an “anonymous tip” that Fortress Invest...

Pretending that sports can take place in a vacuum would have been profoundly dishonest.

Are you a freelancer who would like to pitch a story to Defector? That’s great news, because we are a website who would like to publish some work created by freelancers, and not screw them along the...

I went to hip hop’s 50th birthday party, and all I got was a collection of insipid lists. And a new Sprite commercial. To be fair, there were also the usual puff pieces. The New York Times detailed...

The Times believes there’s an ideal number of trans people who should be alive in the world, and we’re dangerously close to exceeding it.

I always knew I was different, though. None of the other kids around me had handcuffs and pepper spray constantly at their side. They didn't wear blue and gold, with a peaked hat, every single day. I...

This morning, the Seattle Times posted a job listing for a beat writer to cover the NHL’s Seattle Kraken. But the curious thing was that the paper had just filled that position in July of 2021 with...

As rumors of a sale brew, the frattish sports site’s well-documented resistance to solidarity seems increasingly bankrupt.

According to the New York Times, toasted disappointment and third-party presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has placed Jets quarterback and needy crybaby Aaron Rodgers atop his shortlist of...

Hell isn't being bad. Hell is 8-8. Hell is drafting 17th. Hell is never being on primetime. Hell is wasting A.J. Green’s career. Hell is apathy. Hell is Marvin Lewis.

The pre-election polling did nothing to reassure me. Sure, there were useful lessons to take from the results of 2016, and coming into this election, plenty of voters were demoralized after four...

Although the Houston Astros were two games under .500 as they slunk into the 2020 postseason, they were the most dubious example of an underdog in recent memory. Still, they tried to act as scrappy...

Today is Black Friday, which means that you may very well be sitting in your home thinking, “Oh, crud, I need to buy some Christmas gifts!” Perhaps you have previously gone about solving this problem...

Each day is an opportunity to learn something new. Erika Nardini, the CEO of Barstool Sports, recently discovered the concept of the male gaze, and she wanted to pass it on to her audience. “One of...

Business Insider published a new report, in which three more women, ranging in age from 18 to mid-20s, said Portnoy, now 44, filmed them during sex without asking. One of these women said Portnoy was...

Can you believe it? Defector turns three years old this week, which means I’m back to once again answer any questions you might have about how things are going around here. Please don’t be rude like...

This week, the New York Attorney General’s office released a tranche of transcripts and exhibits they produced during the course of their investigation into the many sexual harassment and groping...

You go into any Super Bowl pregame ceremony knowing that you’re going to have to choke down a near-lethal dose of patriotism and military propaganda before being allowed to finally watch some damn...

It's the most wonderful time of the year

Donald Trump was golfing when news networks around the country finally, blessedly, called the 2020 presidential election for Joe Biden. That’s great news for all of us, because it means we get to...

Oh my goodness, you’re here! Welcome, welcome! Come on in. Duff that snow off your boots. And for God’s sake, take off that pesky mask already! Karen and I just quarantined for six days in St. Barts!...

I have undertaken this dreadful quest because Scott "ScottyMarkets" Martin went on some Fox Business show to complain about President Joe Brandon's reckless pro-inflation governance. He used a...

The United States women’s national team just played and won their first tournament since the retirement of legendary midfielder Carli Lloyd, who has the second-most caps and third-most goals in team...

Our idiot president now has COVID-19. He apparently first showed symptoms of illness earlier in the week, took a moment to mock Joe Biden for mask-wearing at the presidential debate on Tuesday, spent...

The fact is, I know how I got so smart, and I know how you can, too. The real answer to “How did you get so smart?” is simply this: I wanted to. And you can, too! 

Perhaps this morning you woke with those familiar butterflies in your stomach. If you love space, spaceflight, space exploration, and all it represents—technologically, spiritually, symbolically—ev...

Then Wirecutter Union went on strike for five days, and got big pay raises. The point here is not to bag on the Wirecutter Union's willingness to negotiate before striking—the threshold for persuad...

As one Athletic staff member told Defector succinctly, "This makes no sense."

As the biggest entertainment story in decades unfolds, the trades’ practices are being exposed, with reporting that alternates between being useless to outwardly harmful. 

This World Cup has made longtime dreams for women’s soccer a reality. The 32-team tournament has had upsets galore, signaling growth among teams who have historically suffered from underinvestment...

Longtime Cincinnati Reds television broadcaster Thom Brennaman officially resigned his position Friday evening, notifying WCPO via a statement that he and his family “have decided that I am going to...

The juicy stuff is the unfollowing. What a fucking baby Bill Simmons is! Ringer employees say Mr. Simmons showed signs of trying to marginalize the union dating back to when it was formed last year....

Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday at Defector during the NFL season. Got something you wanna contribute? Email the Roo. And buy Drew’s book, The Night The...

AEW’s All Out pay-per-view, which aired on Sunday night, delivered on all of the hype: it had huge debuts, great storytelling, and the in-ring return of CM Punk. And yet it peaked not with a show-s...

If Donald Trump won it was always going to be because a critical number of Americans, scattered just so across an electoral geography explicitly rigged to give them minority power over everyone else,...

Trevor Bauer is scuffling in Japan, which sucks for him and only him.

'The Master of Disguise' and its connection to the September 11th attacks have become the stuff of legend.

John Madden—the wildly successful football coach turned wildly successful TV broadcaster turned wildly successful video game impresario—didn’t need to be famous. He just needed to be left alone to do...

When you ask fans of the game what Blaseball is, they answer in one of two ways: either they tell you that it is a computer game, a sports fandom simulator with a community and rules and stakes, or...

If you believe what excitable Fox Sports NFL insider Jay Glazer reported before Bucs-Saints, Sunday was the last game of Drew Brees's career. It would've only been his last game at the Superdome, but...

Farhan Zaidi, the San Francisco Giants’ baseball overlord, worked hard this week to explain all the things he and the team did to close the Shohei Ohtani deal that wasn’t, but mostly he left a...

We’ve outfitted this house for Christmas with provisions and accoutrements from the Williams-Sonoma catalog. It’s the perfect mercantile resource for people like you and me who tipped generously all...

If the proliferation of highly effective COVID-19 vaccines has done one thing for us, aside from providing life-saving protection against a deadly virus, it’s to reveal exactly what sorts of dickwe...

Some people are fans of the Washington Football Team. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Washington Football Team. This 2020 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group....

It’s not because of his pro-Trump politics.

For the past seven months, something truly remarkable has been happening in one of the darkest corners of sports media. Jason Whitlock, a sour dumb guy who has failed at basically every job he’s ever...

PHILADELPHIA — Rudy Giuliani was speaking in the back lot of a landscaping company in an industrial zone of the Holmesburg section of the city, under a hazardous materials sign. Things were not going...

Defector is an employee-owned sports and culture website brought to you by the former staffers of Deadspin.

The University of Georgia, which along with the rest of the SEC is located in one of America’s most infected and infectious states and along with the SEC is planning to play a mostly full football...

Well well well well WELL! Amazon is a union company. Amazon warehouse workers at the company’s JFK8 facility on Staten Island made history today, voting in favor of the Amazon Labor Union. With 2654...

More than any particular condition of the NDA, what invalidates the product review of a reviewer who has signed the NDA is what that act represents: a negotiated agreement, between a journalist and...

It’s not necessarily newsy or valuable to note that Elon Musk had a dumb idea online, but it’s important to note what, exactly, is dumb about the following idea, from very dumb idiot Elon Musk: The...

As first reported by Semafor’s Maxwell Tani, Condé Nast announced yesterday that it is moving Pitchfork’s editorial operations under the GQ brand banner. In a note to employees announcing the move,...

Welcome to Defector, an employee-owned sports and culture website brought to you by the former staffers of Deadspin. Let me tell you who we are, and how we got here.

“Their CEO does exist,” a Sixers spokesperson insisted.

Giving the police a bigger boot won’t make them any more careful about who they step on.