Samer

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...

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...

Concerning: During Tuesday’s MLB broadcast, TNT Sports gave airtime to a Palestinian with radical views. Read more here: defector.com/tnt-sports-a...

CHANGEOVER is out 8/19/25

www.simonandschuster.com/books/Change...

Why Your Team Sucks 2025: New England Patriots | Defector Some people are fans of the New England Patriots. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the New England Patriots. This 2025 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all th...

Writing this was cathartic, in a way: defector.com/why-your-tea...

WNBA Players Want To Share In The League's "Hypergrowth" | Defector What money are WNBA players owed? The league’s biggest names got people asking this question Saturday night, when they all wore “Pay Us What You Owe Us” warmup T-shirts before the All-Star Game in Ind...

If the WNBA in fact provides no value to its owners and can't work as a business, why don't they just shut the league down?

This week, the Defector staff was mentally Bill. Catch up with all the posts here: defector.com/category/bil...

We Won A Grant | Defector Keen observers of the independent media space might be aware that we at Defector have done some informal consulting over the years to help other emerging worker-owned publications find their footing.…

Today, we’re happy to share that Press Forward, a coalition of funders committed to strengthening local newsrooms, has awarded our group a grant to build shared services for independent, worker-friendly local media organizations. defector.com/we-won-a-grant