Defector Media

Soccer is not usually the sort of sport that causes its players to lose their voices. And yet there was Harry Kane, minutes after his 10-man England squad escaped The Azteca with a 3-2 win over Mexico, nearly unable to complete his post-match interview due to the hoarseness of his voice. It was an unusual thing to see, but befitting of the game Kane had just played, which was so strange, so dramatic, that it was easy to imagine most everyone who watched or played in it being left speechless. To

Perhaps I can at least thank Max Verstappen for the clarity. Before he ran his Red Bull car into the wall on the 49th of the Silverstone Circuit's 52 laps, the British Grand Prix was shaping up to be too exciting to be coherent. It got off to an uncharacteristically slow start, yes, to the point where I wrote "first half shocking processional for silverstone" in my notes and was prepared to place some blame on the sprint format for the ongoing viewership woes. But shortly after, as though the ra

The USMNT was the talk of the soccer world in the aftermath of its triumph over Bosnia and Herzegovina last Wednesday. Most of the conversation was about the latest amazing U.S. performance in a tournament full of them, and the growing consensus that the Americans should be considered overwhelming favorites to go ahead and win the World Cup. However, a sizable portion of the discussion also centered on the referee's scandalous decision to show U.S. striker Folarin Balogun a totally unfair red ca

Expectation is everything. Considering the public transit price-gouging SNAFUs in New York New Jersey and Foxboro that dogged World Cup transit public relations prior to the event, some heat was taken off cities historically hostile to the concept of "public" and "transit," such as Los Angeles. Together, all three cities compose the "Doable But Miserable" tier of Aaron Gordon's breakdown of World Cup stadium transit access, which also elaborates on how the new Los Angeles stadium and its surroun

BARCELONA — "Every swarm needs a face," declares the post announcing Visma-Lease a Bike's new bee mascot, "and every face needs a name." Confusing proclamations aside—the defining characteristic of a swarm is its facelessness—the opening stage of the 2026 Tour de France was one for the insects. As if to bless Visma for their honeycomb jerseys out of an oblique entomic solidarity, the swarm of cicadas nestled in the scrubby pines atop Montjuïc thrummed Jonas Vingegaard to victory on Saturday's St

Darren Aronofsky's AI production studio Primordial Soup was announced in May of 2025 during Google's annual developer conference. The launch was meant to burnish the pioneering reputations of both entities simultaneously: Google released a new version of its text-to-video model Veo and an AI video tool called Flow, while Aronofsky, like a worrying number of other filmmakers, sought to forge a new and daring path into unknown technological territory by partnering with one of the world's biggest t

Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music and musical topics I’ve been fixated on recently. It can be hard to remember amidst the downfall of everything, but 250 years of America is a major milestone. America, more of a grand experiment than a nation, a fantastical idea suggesting a very modern notion that the point of a country is the pursuit of the unachievable, starting with happiness. A nation that aspires toward its utopian principles but at heart is just as much about

Perhaps it is too fucking hot where you are to do anything outside this weekend. Perhaps you prefer to be locked inside watching World Cup matches while eating popsicles. While you do that, feel free to hang out here and chat in the open thread.

There's a bit of symmetry in the new Netflix documentary The Final Set, a chronicle of the epic, tumultuous rivalry and friendship between Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert. Long removed from their legendary careers, both women were diagnosed with cancer in recent years: ovarian for Evert, breast and throat for Navratilova. After beating back the disease, they each go in for a scan. Just before sliding into the tubular machine, Evert hesitates, then removes her cap for comfort, revealing her c

Now that we've covered two of the most interesting fellas who will be riding the 2026 Tour de France, and the theory of why they'll be riding this particular route, it's time to talk about the route itself. This year's Tour, starting on July 4, will span 3,321 kilometers of Spain and France while flirting with the Swiss and German borders. The route's 54,450 meters of vertical gain make it the third-most demanding Tour of the last 20 years, though that's deceptive, since a lot of that gain is di

The concept of "1966" is purely theoretical for almost anyone who wasn't alive then, 60 years of human history separating us from that singular point in time. Sure, the point of history as a field is to educate us about what was happening in, say, 1966, but I barely remember what it felt like to live through most of the years I've been around for, let alone those that came so long before. However, there is one subset of people who might soon get a taste of what 1966 was like, and that is fans of

When Bryson DeChambeau tees off  at the U.S. Open this afternoon, he will be doing so with the future bearing down on him. The LIV Golf Tour is about to lose its funding from the Saudi Public Investment Fund, which means that DeChambeau, Jon Rahm, and the rest of the former PGA greats who defected to LIV will soon have a decision to make: Do they come crawling back to the PGA, or find new day jobs? DeChambeau’s options may be more limited than Rahm’s or Brooks Koepka’s, who has already begun hi

In the era of looksmaxxing, plastic surgery, Botox, and Ozempic, it's impossible to escape the tyranny of good looks. Are beauty standards fascist? Is losing weight about giving in or being healthy? The endless overdetermined debates about the ethics of aesthetics continues to haunt us. Even as we chase Kant's sublime through facial symmetry, we struggle to justify and categorize the various forms of body modification and whether or not they are feminist. In her debut novel New Skin, Sarah Wang

Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music and musical topics I’ve been fixated on recently. In between spending the last month listening to every single song with "New York" in its title or chorus, I found time to keep up with the latest big album releases. We're only about halfway through but already this has been a damn good year for music: a good mix of quality releases from stars, stalwarts, and new names entering the ring. The new Olivia Rodrigo might be the best thing

Beneath soaring ceilings, in a small darkly painted gallery off the main hall of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, two immense sunflower paintings hang side by side. The paintings are bigger than I expected them to be, big enough that when I watch people pose between them, their faces are the size of only one of the flowers. These paintings are sisters, not twins. Exhibited for the first time together, both show a vase of sunflowers painted by Vincent van Gogh. But they are subtly, uncomfortably d

In late 2020, months after the murder of George Floyd, our colleague Justin Ellis moved back to his hometown of Minneapolis to begin work on a book about black life in the city, where promises of racial harmony have gone unkept to generations of black residents. The city's good, neighborly intentions are alluded to in that classic phrase, Minnesota nice. "But good intentions find a way to devastate Black lives all the same," Justin writes. His brilliant new book, The Cruelty of Nice Folks: Why M

Portugal began its World Cup with a goal befitting a real contender. In the sixth minute, the Portuguese pinned the Democratic Republic of Congo in their own box, fired a dangerous cross from the right side that skittered across the face of goal before being cleared, recycled the ball to the left side, and then pumped in another cross that was met by the head of late-arriving midfielder João Neves. It was 1-0, and Portugal looked ready to fly. Too bad Cristiano Ronaldo would spend the rest of th

So that settles it, then: Iberia's Team is Andorra. And the Andorrans didn't even know they were an option. This is what happens when Spain can't get past Cape Verde and then, maybe even more shockingly, Portugal gets stymied by the Democratic Republic of Congo. That is to say: Two of the heaviest favorites in this World Cup, each one of the most historically dominant teams in international soccer history, take nothing but shame from dropping points to a team that has never been in any World Cu

Have you heard the whispers? Jonas Vingegaard just went nuts in Italy, auguring a strong run at a third Tour de France crown and convincing some corners of the peloton that he's got the legs to ride into yellow. Isaac del Toro dominated the Dauphine, giving faint hope to those who would like to see him stage a coup against his team leader. Prodigal French son Paul Seixas has thus far only been slowed by the limits of his own bike handling, putting together a stunning full debut season when he's

It's impossible to think about Lionel Messi's sixth and presumably final World Cup without those thoughts immediately acquiring the sepia tint of romanticism. On the cusp of his 39th year, 20 years to the day since his simultaneous introduction and eruption onto the world stage, Messi returns to the site of both his greatest heartbreaks and most definitive triumphs. He's here for a last dance, an epilogue to what has already been one of the greatest stories sports has ever told, a send-off less