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Progress in the NFL is not linear, past success doesn't guarantee future success, regression to the mean is normal and expected—all of the cliches in the world can't possibly rationalize whatever the hell is happening to Drake Maye and the New England Patriots so far this season. Currently sitting at 1-2 after Jacksonville laid down a 35-6 "old-fashioned ass whooping," as Pats safety Kevin Byard III put it, New England is finding life after a division title and a shock Super Bowl run to be, some

It's time to wrap up the month with a challenging themeless. Keep an eye out for tricky clues and fun wordplay. This puzzle was constructed by Zachary Edward-Brown, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Zach is a Chicagoan who enjoys playing soccer and basketball and rooting for the Bears. He's always open to collabs. Defector crosswords, launched in partnership with our friends at AVCX, run every Monday. If you’re interested in submitting a puzzle to us, you can read our guidelines HERE. The AVCX, an in

Pitchers are a kooky breed: superstitious, hypercompetitive, quite often a little bit nuts. It's a personality type that shares a lot with kickers and goalies in other sports. The common threads? First, they have an awful lot of downtime to spend in their own heads. Second, they are, to an extent, competing with themselves—out there all alone, with nothing but their own limitations to battle. Deprived of the warmth of human interaction, sometimes they go downright feral. Whatever works. It's wo

It is October-y enough to be October, even though October is still days away, which means it's time to find out how many of you weirdos can hold a grudge that isn't yours to hold. The Houston Astros, American League West champions at 81-81, are officially the worst team ever to make baseball's postseason after edging out two other teams that also would have been the worst teams ever to make baseball's postseason. Now you can all get all fever blistered all over again about Carlos Beltran's crime

Hello! Prepare to receive precious information. The information is arriving now. This week, the Defector staff will once again be convening in a top-secret and possibly flooded location to conduct our annual meetings and continue charting the future of the company. The only reason you need to know this is because we will be blogging…

The phrase "road playoff game" can have a variety of meanings depending on the circumstances, and the one that Paige Bueckers and her Dallas Wings teammates stepped into on Sunday night was about as daunting as they come. They had to enter Ballhalla, home to the WNBA's loudest fanbase, and take on the two-seeded Golden State Valkyries, owners of the league's most ferocious defense. No thanks. "Home playoff game" can have different meanings, too, as last year's Valkyries might tell you. Their su

When Amon-Ra St. Brown scored a second-quarter touchdown Sunday against the New York Jets, he did not simply drop the ball in the end zone and walk off the field without acknowledging any teammates, the crowd, or anyone else. But he should have. The NFL has fined him nearly $60,000 for four incidences of rampant fun-having (miming smoking) in the Lions' 41-31 Week 2 loss to the Buffalo Bills, so he should deprive the league of that amount of fun in the future. Childish? You betcha. Then again,

There is a possibility that Austin Romaine will be a fine professional football player, make boatloads of money more than whatever he is taking in as a linebacker at Texas Tech, and maybe get drafted by an NFL team that isn't awful. Maybe he'll be known as more than just The Guy Named After A Lettuce. But even if bad luck in the athlete business besets him and none of these things happen, he's still got Saturday, and if that isn't enough to get him free drinks in Lubbock for a decade, then sham

Stephen Curry has proven himself yet again to be an enemy of the proletariat and an implacable foe of the Third American Dream. This time, the cost to him and his burgeoning empire was a mere $20 million (give or take the odd day trip to Monte Carlo), the difference between what he could have made over the next two seasons, $136.7 million, and what he'll get. What a sap. Curry just re-upped with Golden State The Corporate Name, formerly GSW Sports LLC, for two more years plus a player option th

There will probably be some voters who give the National League MVP ballot a hard look and pore over all the possibilities, or just vote for Shohei Ohtani out of pure reflex. Which is fine enough as it goes. This is one of the quirks of democracy: Sometimes you have to let people be wrong for their own reasons, at least until we expand the vote to children above the age of birth, family pets, and animals who live in national parks. But it's far more likely that when those votes are counted, the

Who knew Ben Shelton could do all that? Certainly not the Defector writer who was slandering him in the early stages of the match as "John Isner with WiFi." The 23-year-old American revealed levels to his game heretofore unseen, over the course of a U.S. Open quarterfinal that technically began Tuesday night but was mostly played early Wednesday morning. Matched up against defending champion Carlos Alcaraz, Shelton hit the apex of his career at 3:33 a.m., when he wrapped up the deciding set tieb

At my university, you had to take an introductory fiction writing workshop before you were eligible to apply for the more advanced workshops. Admission to these big leagues was by no means guaranteed. The first time I got in, I experienced about a week of absolute elation followed by several months of intermittent terror and imposter syndrome. At the time, it all felt very high-stakes, which is perhaps why I was so profoundly distressed when I showed up on the first day and realized that 90 perc

Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday at Defector during the NFL season (except when the season starts on a Wednesday; kiss my ass, Goodell). Got something you wanna contribute? Email the Roo. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. I turn 50 a month from now. Hold your applause. About the only notable thing about hitting 50 is that I will no longer be eligible for a midlife crisis, seeing as how my life will official

The time has once again come to break the rules: Only If You Get Caught is back for Season 2. If you listened to the first season, welcome back; if you didn’t, you have six days to do so before the show returns on Sept. 15. You can listen to the trailer here. OIYGC is…

Welcome back to Minor Dilemmas, where a member of Defector's Parents Council will answer your questions on surviving family life. Have a question? Email us at minordilemmas@defector.com. This week, Justin answers a question about helping your child find a best friend.

It is difficult, and yet important, to practice holding multiple truths at once, such as: No animal is inherently bad, and also the Surinam toad is a toad of nightmares. The diversity of life on Earth should be celebrated, and also the Surinam toad's particular eccentricities are satanic. Every living thing is beautiful because it is alive, and also the body of theSurinam toad is an affront to beauty itself. The Surinam toad, which has the dissonantly cute scientific name Pipa pipa, is an aquat

Maybe you have heard of Roko's Basilisk. This is a thought experiment, for lack of a better term, popular among a certain set: hyper-rationalists, futurists, effective altruists. Tech-industry guys. You get the idea. The most exhausting humans who ever lived, that is to say. People who at present happen to command a critical share of the world economy. If you're not familiar with it, Roko's Basilisk, in broad terms, supposes that at some point in the future a sentient and omnipotent artificial

This is a September blog about the Colorado Rockies. Do you think it will be a positive one? Let's find out. Coming off a series loss at home to the Cardinals, the Rockies traveled to the Bronx this week for a three-game tilt with the New York Yankees. In the first of these encounters, on Tuesday, they faced off against Cy Young contender Cam Schlittler, who threw seven innings of one-run ball to lower his ERA to 2.01. Not looking good so far. Colorado countered with the rookie Gabriel Hughes,

In her 1980 essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Lesbian Existence,” Adrienne Rich lists over 60 examples of systematized female oppression. To name a few: the power of men to deny women their own sexuality or to force male sexuality upon them via rape, domestic violence, prostitution, chastity belts, incest; to command or exploit their labor via horizontal segregation in the workplace, pimping, and male control of abortion; to confine them physically or control their movement via rape as t

What’s this we have here? Why, it’s the first-ever episode of Defector’s brand-new NFL podcast, All Ball! Every week, the team of myself and elite indie blogger Arif Hasan break down every NFL matchup without ANY gambling or fantasy talk. We don’t even cite the Vegas point spreads, even though those lines possess a modicum of analytical value. All Vegas talk is verboten here, in favor of talking pure, hard BALL. https://art19.com/shows/the-distraction/episodes/6606c675-ab0a-4ea3-8ca3-4f940fd42