39 posts tagged with defector.
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Why Can’t People Be Normal About Sydney Sweeney?
To be born beautiful is a gift, but to end up hot can be a curse. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, it is also true that you can look in the mirror and be the beholder of yourself. Beauty is something intriguing; “beauty is not a need but an ecstasy,” the poet Kahlil Gibran once wrote. “A heart enflamed and a soul enchanted.” This is not the same thing as being hot. [more inside]
GTFOOH with that fondue pot
Good people of MetaFilter, IT IS HERE. The 2023 Hater’s Guide To The Williams-Sonoma Catalog (Drew Magary, Defector). That’s it. That’s the $4,999 FPP.
"Of course, nostalgia is history without moral reckoning."
How Queer Pro Wrestlers Are Handling America’s Anti-LGBTQ+ Heel Turn
Pollo del Mar wants to be hated. As a bad guy (or heel) in the NWA—the National Wrestling Alliance, a professional wrestling company owned and operated by the Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan (no shit!)—it’s her job to get heat, i.e. the boos and jeers and chants that separate professional wrestling’s villains from its heroes. There’s just one problem: She’s a drag queen, and it’s made her too popular. (archive.today link)
Women’s Hockey’s Civil War Has Ended, Messily
For over a year, players in the Professional Women's Hockey Players' Association have been in negotiations with investment firms Billie Jean King Enterprises and the Mark Walter Group to launch a new women's hockey league. Thus, the part of their Thursday night announcement laying out plans for the new league to start play in January of 2024 wasn't a huge surprise. But the other part of the announcement was: The investment groups have also bought out the Premier Hockey Federation (formerly the National Women's Hockey League), consolidating the sport's player pool and essentially disbanding what had been the only pro women's hockey league in North America for the last four years. (archive.today link)
I Got My Ass Kicked By America’s Dirtiest Bike Race
Unbound is a 200-mile race on the dirt and gravel roads around the Flint Hills of Kansas, and is notorious for its extremely challenging course and weather conditions. Unbound is now the most prestigious bike race in America. It's the crown jewel of gravel racing, a sub-discipline of cycling that prides itself on being far more independent and inclusive than Euro-style road racing. If the modern pro peloton is so high-tech and ready for the limelight that it's got its own Drive to Survive-style docuseries on the way, gravel racing like Unbound is closer to the Tour's early days: Here's the course, you figure it out, see you at the finish line. (archive.today link)
Wanting more than "a bit of rainbow window dressing"
There’s an idealized version of a Pride Night in my head: one night a year where a ballpark truly becomes a place where straightness is the exception and not the norm. - No Straights at Pride Night Lauren Theisen, writing about Pride Night at baseball games, the nice things that we're painfully aware we can't have, for Defector. [more inside]
In American Indie Wrestling, Bodies Are Cheap And Healthcare Is Not
This is the gamble every wrestler makes: that someday he or she might be the one flat on their back watching the world collapse upon them. Everyone knows this. Everyone’s seen it. Nobody stops working. (archive.today link)
The Internet Isn’t Meant To Be So Small
It is worth remembering that the internet wasn't supposed to be like this. It wasn't supposed to be six boring men with too much money creating spaces that no one likes but everyone is forced to use because those men have driven every other form of online existence into the ground. From Kelsey McKinney, writing for Defector.
In Search Of Wikipedia’s Shrug Guy
The real triumph of the “Shrug” article, though, is its sole photo. It’s a man with a perplexing assortment of accessories: a tiara labeled “SCAMPER,” a neon wristband, a comically loose paisley tie. (archive.today link)
The NFL Is A Family
Laura Wagner of Defector explores NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell saying "football is a family" in a letter addressing Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin's nearly dying on the field last week. (Defector's paywall is down at the moment, but if it goes up, here's the archive today link)
'To have it come around during this special time of year is pure joy.'
It's a One Way Trip to Brown Town
The Internet’s Biggest Jack Antonoff Hater Explains Himself
Less than 12 hours after Taylor Swift’s 10th album, Midnights, dropped on Oct. 21, a 25-year-old New Zealander posted a video on Twitter in which he recorded himself correctly guessing, one by one, upon first listen, every song on the album produced by Jack Antonoff. “I’m able to instantly detect if Jack Antonoff worked on a song due to a visceral hatred of his production style,” Caleb Gamman captioned his clip, which currently has over 84,000 likes. (archive.ph link)
madeleine_basketball.avi
The Misremembered History Of The Internet’s Funniest Buzzer-Beater. Brian Feldman published an investigation into the origins of a classic viral video, identifying the kid knocked down by an errant full-court shot and talking to him years later. But then he kept digging—and ultimately revealed that memories, even when they're broadcast on national TV, can be faulty. [more inside]
The Trauma Of Homelessness Doesn’t End Under A Roof
Lori Teresa Yearwood interviews Salvador Chacon:
I asked Chacon if he is ever tempted to go back to the streets.
“All the time,” he said. “It was a lot easier for me on the streets—I knew how to cope better. Now I got this apartment and I’m stuck in my own mind.” [more inside]
The Money is in All the Wrong Places
What this means is that the door a writer could step through to make a career 50 or even 20 years ago, the one opening onto a life where someone who works hard and does well could buy a house on the strength of that work alone, has been slammed shut. Defector's Kelsey McKinney writing about the uproar directed at Sydney Sweeney's interview with the Hollywood Reporter on how difficult it is to make a living as an actor (or musician, or model) without wealth, connections, or both. (DefectorFilter) [more inside]
An area where the egg will not roll away
Without the presence of eggs, the average pigeon nest could pass as a coincidental aggregation of twigs or jumble of debris. To our human eyes, a pigeon nest looks objectively half-assed. It is a nest that seems to mock other nests. — Why Do Pigeon Nests Look So Shitty, Sabrina Imbler investigates for Defector
"Frogs flailing in air, in space"
Why is this tiny frog so awful at jumping? "The moment the pumpkin toadlet leaps into the air, anything seems possible. The tiny frog, which is about the size of a honeybee and the color of a cloudberry, has no problem launching itself high off the ground. But when the pumpkin toadlet begins to soar, something goes awry."
What The Hell Happened To The LA Marathon?
Adam "tweebiscuit" Conover decided to run the LA Marathon more or less on a whim. It sucked, even more than a marathon should.
Back to Normal Doesn't Work Because Normal Wasn't Working
It all feels like some terribly boring nightmare, this gentle constant frustration in the space where hope used to be.
Back to Normal Isn't Enough, from Kelsey McKinney, writing for Defector. [more inside]
I Will Create A Winning Basketball Program At The University Of Austin
"We begin with the simple home truths of winning basketball, albeit from a perspective grounded in a free-market and inquiry-forward approach to the game that rejects the cringing 'correctness' that holds back ostensibly enlightened CUSA programs like Rice and Florida Atlantic. My Meritocrats will talk on defense, but not about defense—by engaging opponents on more important questions, we will leverage our program’s discursive advantages. The goal is to be an exhausting and infuriating opponent, and I believe we will achieve this in year one." (From Defector, requires e-mail sign-up) [more inside]
How To Not Suck At Writing
In a follow-up to his previous piece on writing, Defector columnist Drew Magary discusses his techniques for improving at being a wordsmith. [more inside]
Courtney’s Story
"“‘Oh my God, please tell the truth,'” she recalled saying as Meyer spoke. “I was on my hands and knees, going, ‘Please tell the truth, Urban, please.'”
Urban Meyer would fail Courtney Smith that day, and he wasn’t alone. Defector’s conversations with Courtney and those who are close to her, as well as the examination of hundreds of pages of records from law enforcement, the courts, and Ohio State, reveal the many ways that people and institutions across Ohio acted to primarily protect themselves rather than Courtney."
CW:Abuse [more inside]
"Yes, I’m getting bored of ranking these."
A deep academic discussion of all 56 flags for the United States.
Wait. Wut?
Fine. Fight it out.
(Defector link. Free-ish. See below the fold.) [more inside]
“No child of mine is going to be a p*g!”
Maybe my love for Reacher is as simple as thrilling to vengeance
Brandy Jensen on her year with Jack Reacher: Around this time last year, as it became clear I would have to spend some significant time staying in my apartment, I told myself there could be an upside: I could finally get around to reading all the books I had been putting off for one reason or another. Some neglected American classics, the Victorian doorstoppers I skipped over in school in favor of different Victorian doorstoppers, the less famous Russians. I have not read any of those. What I have read is 24 books about an enormous drifter with comically large hands who is good at dispatching bad people. Related: How Jack Reacher author Lee Child improvises his way through writing.
something good will happen in the future that I want to be here for
"If we’re lucky, the cherry trees on the Tidal Basin bloom in April and maybe winter is over then. Maybe it’s not, because there are many kinds of winter: There is the darkness, and then there is the holidays, and then there is the brutal cold, and then there is the wet, lingering winter. We are still so far from spring." Defector's Kelsey McKinney on winter, resilience, and When The Cherries Run Out
Like, bro, it’s just not gonna happen.
Parliament even tweeted this out, when this whole thing was kicking off, they were like, “Well, it does enshrine the rights of the people in opposition to the king.” And I was like, “What the fuck are you talking about!” It does not! Like, even parliament is lying about what Magna Carta does, because they still want the story. The historiography of it is like, “Oh, yeah, the king can’t just come in here and walk all over you.” But the king 100 percent can come in here and walk all over you and there’s nothing you can do about it, and Magna Carta is not going to help. The king simply cannot go into 25 barons’ houses. You are not 25 barons! [more inside]
Sticking to Sports! Alaska edition
From our friends at Defector, the strange tale of the mayor of Anchorage.
You can get by with a charming and rakish state of informality
Now that the supermarket is no longer a festival of goodies but rather a militantly regimented prophylaxis hellscape, I dread going there. Now I try to avoid it. Now, when I do go, I try to plan and buy a week’s worth of groceries so that I won’t have to go back for a while. This doesn’t really work—it never works—for me, an incredibly disorganized person with cataclysmic ADHD Brain; this means that, once a week or so, I enter the late-afternoon pre-dinner period worrying because I accidentally forgot to perform some number of preparatory steps necessary to whatever insane dinner I’d wrongly thought I had the capacity to plan several days in advance. And this is when, reliably, I can open the refrigerator, peer around for a few seconds, and realize that for all my disorganization and chaos, I have the means to throw together a perfectly delicious frittata. [more inside]
A $90,000 Dome Home To Give Your Life Purpose
I have 72 saved searches on Zillow dot com. Some of these searches result in a daily email appearing in my inbox: a tight, cozy, completed list of the new houses that meet my search criteria. Sometimes I’ll get emails alerting me to every single house that arrives on the site as it appears, which is to say dozens of times per day. I have no idea how to change this, and I refuse to learn because the only hobby I’ve managed to maintain throughout this fire tornado of a year is scanning, with glazed eyes, through photos of dozens of houses I cannot afford and will not buy. I do this as a reward for completing the series of menial tasks and chores my life has become. [more inside]
Deadspin is dead. Long live Defector.
Today, (most of) the former staff of Deadspin launched Defector. As recounted previously on the blue, Deadspin imploded last fall after en masse resignations sparked by the site's new owners' (herb) mandate to "stick to sports." Now, most of the site's former employees have regrouped as the blogger-owned-and-operated Defector. The site will operate on a paid basis but is, for the moment, free to read. EIC Tom Ley explains how we got here. You can already read why your team sucks.
The hardest part is still the hard part
“If you’re going to take a moonshot, you may as well do it exactly the way you want to” After Quitting Deadspin in Protest, They’re Starting a New Site (SLNYT)
The defector who brought North-South Korean romance to life
He's either as smart as the devil himself or the luckiest bastard alive.
In 1985, KGB Colonel Vitaly Yurchenko defected to America. He told agents he had terminal stomach cancer and had decided to make the world right in the time he had left. Yurchenko told KGB secrets to the CIA and NSA, including important details about 55 to 60 KGB assets in America and two Soviet moles (Edward Lee Howard and Ronald Pelton) inside US intelligence. But three months in, he learned he didn't have terminal stomach cancer -- just a minor bowel disorder. So Vitaly Yurchenko changed his mind and escaped back to the Soviet Embassy. He told the media that the CIA had drugged and kidnapped him. “The agency had either been completely taken in by a brilliant Soviet intelligence officer, or allowed one of its top Soviet defectors to slip out of its hands.” (Via) [more inside]
An unexpected visitor at Hakodate...
Pyongyang Express
The Defector: Escape From North Korea, an interactive documentary. The Trailer. via. Flash required. [more inside]
"You can’t regret your fate, although I do regret my mother didn’t marry a carpenter."
Growing up, she was a beloved celebrity in her home country. Thousands of girls were named after her. So was a bestselling perfume. But Josef Stalin's "Little Sparrow," his only daughter, (born Svetlana Stalina) defected to the United States in 1967. Upon arriving in New York, she promptly held a press conference that surprised the world, denouncing her father's regime. Svetlana became a naturalized US citizen, moved to Taliesin West, married an American, changed her name to Lana Peters, then returned to the Soviet Union in 1984, declaring that she had not been free "for one single day" in the U.S., only to once again return to America in 1986. She lived out her remaining days in a small town in Wisconsin. Mrs. Peters passed away from colon cancer on November 22nd, at the age of 85. [more inside]
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