Samer

How Can You Not Be Romantic About Women's Basketball?  | Defector Most “women’s sports novels” are really novels about girls. In them, girlhood is something mourned before it’s over. Like the games themselves, the books are set to ticking clocks. When the high schoo...

a new WNBA romance novel got me thinking about how romance fandom and WNBA fandom can both feel like expressions of optimism: defector.com/how-can-you-...

An Interview With A Tenant Who Doesn't Have Heat In Giannis Antetokounmpo's Building | Defector A tenant in a Brooklyn building owned by Milwaukee Bucks star Giannis Antetokounmpo has not had heat in his apartment since Feb. 23, when a blizzard dropped over 19 inches of snow on New York City. Be...

interviewed someone about what it's like to live in a building owned by a two-time MVP and also not have heat in the aftermath of a blizzard defector.com/an-interview...

Victor Wembanyama Sighting Confirmed In Brooklyn | Defector A couple months ago, some friends and I made plans to see the San Antonio Spurs when they were in town to play the Brooklyn Nets. Obviously, we weren’t going for the opportunity to see the Nets’ youth...

Here’s a dumb little blog about the experience of witnessing Wemby in person: defector.com/victor-wemba...

The Mournful Ballad Of Punch The Monkey | Defector When I first heard rumblings that the world had assembled a conclave to elect a new celebrity zoo animal, I felt preemptively wary, partly due to world events and partly because we still don’t know th...

I wrote about Punch the monkey and who, if anyone, is really to blame for the suffering of primates
defector.com/the-mournful...

Cherien Dabis Discusses The Challenges Of Writing, Filming, And Distributing A Palestinian Movie | Defector For Cherien Dabis, it all comes back to 1948. Her latest film All That’s Left of You takes place primarily across three different decades, with a brief visit to a fourth at the end, but for her, this ...

My interview with Cherien Dabis, on the challenges of writing, filming, and distributing a Palestinian movie: defector.com/all-thats-le...

Cardte Hicks Played Above The Rim And Ahead Of Her Time | Defector As Cardte Hicks leapt toward the hoop, the audience at the Albuquerque Civic Auditorium suddenly hushed. These were the final minutes of the Women’s Professional Basketball League’s All-Star Game on F...

Brilliant feature by @roughnotes.bsky.social about a forgotten era of women’s basketball, and one particularly fascinating player within it: defector.com/cardte-hicks...

What We Loved About Dan McQuade | Defector Today is Dan McQuade’s funeral. To celebrate our friend, we wanted to give the people he worked with a place to explain what they loved so much about him. If you would like to support Dan’s widow Jan,...

What we loved about Dan McQuade:

Dan McQuade, 1983–2026 | Defector Dan McQuade, our friend and colleague, died this week at the age of 43. He is survived by his wife and young son. At the end of 2024, Dan was diagnosed with neuroendocrine cancer. The news of his diag...

If you’ve seen a Defector sticker in the wild, credit Dan. Either he put it there or gave them to us. Dude once sent me video of one he put on a pole in Hawaii. He was so generous, kind, and enthusiastic about everything, even putting up stickers in shitty bar bathrooms. defector.com/dan-mcquade-...

Dan McQuade, 1983–2026 | Defector Dan McQuade, our friend and colleague, died this week at the age of 43. He is survived by his wife and young son. At the end of 2024, Dan was diagnosed with neuroendocrine cancer. The news of his…

Dan McQuade, 1983–2026: defector.com/dan-mcquade-...

Not disputing what Eric says here, but whenever Bill Melugin’s name comes up, I always think of that time in 2020 when he got duped by a cop who said a Starbucks worker put a tampon in his drink (it was a cleaning cloth that accidentally fell in)

Haven’t heard back about Diggs. He has worn a few different versions this season going by game photos.

NFL Sends Mixed Signals In Its Stance On Genocide | Defector After a 30-6 playoff win over the Pittsburgh Steelers, Houston Texans linebacker Azeez Al-Shaair appeared in an ESPN postgame interview and drew national attention for the message written on his eye b...

NFL sends mixed signals in its stance on genocide: defector.com/nfl-sends-mi...

Finally… news for MEN

Bari Weiss Is The Symptom | Defector Who says Bari Weiss doesn’t know how to run a newsroom? “My general view here,” the CBS News editor-in-chief wrote in a memo before shelving the now-infamous 60 Minutes report on El Salvador’s CECOT c...

There are Bari Weisses everywhere for those with the eyes to see defector.com/bari-weiss-i...

Yeah, I wrote that article too. What I actually said was that American police brutality was already horrific, but it has gotten worse in distinct ways over the past year. Then I gave pretty specific examples, one of them being ICE snatching up pro-Palestine students. Would suggest you read it again

Rolling Stone Makes The Absurd Claim That Women Are Not Allowed To Sing In Gaza | Defector This week, Rolling Stone published an article in which writer Marisa Fox interviewed hostages who were held in Gaza after Oct. 7, talking to them about how music helped them. The artists mentioned in ...

Rolling Stone makes the absurd claim that women are not allowed to sing in Gaza: defector.com/rolling-ston...

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Deadly Exchange The horrific impacts of border militarization and the practices of racist agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) on border communities, immigrants,...

There very much is deadlyexchange.org/immigration-...

ICE Is Modeling Its Brutality After The IDF | Defector Call it recency bias, personal interest, or perhaps just a general concern for society’s trajectory right now, but as I followed Wednesday’s news of an ICE agent killing 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good ...

Last year, ICE agents used Canary Mission to kidnap pro-Palestine students for deportation. Yesterday, they prevented medical aid from reaching Renee Nicole Good. American law enforcement was already in horrific shape; it’s getting even worse in distinct ways. defector.com/ice-is-model...

Time for some tortured prose. At 1 p.m. ET today, the Defector Twitch stream will present the nominees for the 2025 Shams Charania Award For Excellence In Divulging Of Information Through Syntax Comprehended By Many: www.twitch.tv/defectormedia

(art by @mattielubchansky.com)

The ADL Is Having A Mamdani Meltdown | Defector The focus of the Anti-Defamation League has become entirely warped. Support for Israel was always part of the organization’s goals, but typically that was nested within a broader declaration to fight ...

The ADL is having a Mamdani meltdown: defector.com/the-adl-is-h...

Let's Check In With People Who Threatened To Leave Zohran Mamdani's NYC | Defector When Zohran Mamdani upset Andrew Cuomo to win the New York City Democratic mayoral primary in June, it led to a lot of histrionics. The usual fear tactics against a young Muslim democratic socialist h...

Let’s check in with people who threatened to leave Zohran Mamdani’s NYC: defector.com/lets-check-i...

Fixed, thanks.

Good suggestion, it’s there now

Free Press Reporter Discovers That Being An Amoral Dickhead Can Cost You Friends | Defector It can be hard to maintain friendships as an adult. People move to new cities, start families, and experience all sorts of other life events that make it difficult to keep in touch. Sometimes, you…

Free Press reporter discovers that being an amoral dickhead can cost you friends: defector.com/free-press-r...

Treasury Department Has Plans To Mint Dollar Coin Featuring Donald Trump's Likeness | Defector The United States Department of the Treasury has developed, to the brink of production, a dollar coin that features the face and likeness of President Donald Trump, according to a source within the Tr...

a person at Treasury gave Defector a rundown of how this process—which appears to be against the law—was expedited in order to avoid public scrutiny

defector.com/treasury-dep...

This Is Who Charlie Kirk Was | Defector Certainly the dead tend to be thought of more fondly than they were in life. Still, it’s quite disorienting to watch American institutions obediently line up to display the utmost solemnity for a bigo...

This is who Charlie Kirk was: defector.com/this-is-who-...

When we started Defector, we set out to make a sustainable business out of providing people things to read during their workday. Thanks to the efforts of my colleagues and the support of our subscribers, we have achieved that goal. It didn’t even take that long to find ourselves standing on solid ground. Within a year, it was clear this was going to work—we would write blogs intended to entertain, inform, clarify and challenge, and people would pay us a few bucks a month to read them. The simplicity of all this has had something of a deprogramming effect on me. I got into this business during the hothouse days of the 2010s, when it was taken for granted that the true purpose of every media company was to achieve a nine-figure valuation. The collapse of that industry demanded a new way of thinking about what a media company can and should be, and my hope is that Defector has provided a useful example of just one way of doing things.

Five years of Defector: defector.com/five-years-o...

I’ve been browsing the grids everyone’s making and really enjoying it. This one looks like a captcha where you have to select all the nu-metal band members to prove you’re a human

TNT Sports Airs Guerrilla Marketing For Worker-Owned Website That Isn't Defector | Defector It wasn’t my intent to attend back-to-back Phillies-Mets games. Over the past month there had been two separate, developing conversations about how it’d be great to catch some baseball, and eventually...

Somehow, getting on TV was the least eventful part of my Mets experience last night: defector.com/tnt-sports-a...