Tom Ley

Name A 28-Year-Old | Defector Here is the challenge before you: Name a famous person who is 28 years old. Go ahead. No cheating, no looking it up. Off the dome. Pure, uncut 28-year-old naming. I bet you can’t do it.  Zendaya? 29. ...

probably the most fun i've had reading something online in weeks

defector.com/name-a-28-ye...

Bartender accidentally made two extra cocktails and gave them to us for free

Somehow, comedy is no longer legal again.

Obviously this is all horrible but it’s pretty funny that everyone on the right keeps being like “Our vengeance will be swift and unyielding” and “The cry of the Valkyrie calls us to war” and then they just go and get Jimmy Kimmel fired.

The Official Charity Of The Savannah Bananas Has A Hard Time Explaining How Its Money Is Spent | Defector Bananas Foster describes itself as “the official non-profit of Banana Ball,” the barnstorming baseball league that hosts the Savannah Bananas. Its mission, per executive director Jolie Chabala, is…

The official charity of the Savannah Bananas has a hard time explaining how its money is spent: defector.com/the-official...

[EMPATHY] - You should say something. This is important.

1. “My heart goes out to his family”

2. [Drama - Easy 8] Blow everyone’s minds with an epic and inspiring quote

FAIL

“Rest easy brother, we have the watch, I’ll see you in Valhalla”

Crazy week for indelible images. “Shots fired” TikTok guy… “was dead on impact” TV news girl… Clay Travis sobbing on air after reading an email from a listener whose 20-year-old son is too sad to come out of his room…

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...

Ben Johnson trying to get Caleb Williams to make the first read and throw a normal ball

Subscribe, dammit!

Calling this one Middle Infielders That I Was Oddly Fixated On For A Time

Defector Is Celebrating Its Fifth Birthday By Giving You A Big Fat Discount | Defector Defector turns five next month. At last week’s offsite meetings, we celebrated that accomplishment and talked seriously about the 10-year mark—how we’re going to get there, and what we want Defector t...

We're celebrating our upcoming fifth birthday with a big sale! I think the site has been particularly good this week, so take a look at Defector.com and then smash that damn subscribe button. defector.com/defector-is-...

Notes From The D.C. Clampdown | Defector My minivan got broken into the other day. It was parked on a D.C. street around the corner from my house. I left it unlocked, so no window was smashed to get in. As far as I can tell nothing was…

Notes from the D.C. clampdown: defector.com/notes-from-t...

The Free Press Reports Gaza’s Starving Children Have Pre-Existing Condition Of Being Bombed By Israel | Defector Musab Al-Debs has lost 75 percent of his body weight. The 14-year-old reportedly weighed 40 kilograms (88 pounds) before he was injured in an airstrike; now he weighs no more than 10 kilograms. In pho...

The Free Piss has graduated from stupid vanity project to make fun of to genuinely evil institution: defector.com/the-free-pre...

Taylor Swift Turned Me Straight | Defector I finally get Midnights. I don’t just mean, “Oh, I thought this album was whatever when I first heard it, and now I really love it,” though I do mean that a little bit. I mean I get it get it. Like, I...

this @laurentheisen.bsky.social essay made me tear tf up on the way to the Clara Barton rest stop in New Jersey
defector.com/taylor-swift...

Very cool blog

Tyranny Is Managed Into Existence | Defector One of the things that a visit to the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg gets across very effectively is that a policy of monstrous repression was built on details—the details of paperwork and procedures and regulations, a parody of rational administration built around deranged and evil goals. Early on, a wall carries a list of the […]

Tyranny is managed into existence: defector.com/tyranny-is-m...

Taylor Swift Turned Me Straight | Defector I finally get Midnights. I don’t just mean, “Oh, I thought this album was whatever when I first heard it, and now I really love it,” though I do mean that a little bit. I mean I get it get it. Like, I...

this felt like one of the most vulnerable things I've written, and I'm so grateful for the reaction to it defector.com/taylor-swift...

You're Invited To Defector's Fifth Birthday Party And Also Some Baseball Games | Defector Defector started publishing blogs on September 10, 2020. We are somehow mere weeks away from our fifth anniversary. To celebrate, Defector is throwing a birthday party at Union Pool in Williamsburg on...

Come and party with us, Danny defector.com/youre-invite...

'Built In Birmingham' Can't Save Tom Brady From Himself Tom Brady may be incredibly famous, obscenely successful, and (formerly?) outrageously handsome, but he has never been cool. This is a plain fact, one that Patriots fans like myself overlooked during…

Tom Brady may be incredibly famous, obscenely successful, and (formerly?) outrageously handsome, but he has never been cool. defector.com/built-in-bir...

Sweating Through The Existential Angst Of A Las Vegas Table Tennis Tournament | Defector LAS VEGAS — From July 3-13, World Table Tennis staged a Grand Smash tournament in Las Vegas for the first time. Like the Grand Slams of tennis, the Grand Smashes sit atop WTT’s tournament hierarchy, a...

E.Y. Zhao had a strange, sweaty time at a big international table tennis tournament in Las Vegas, and came back with this great story: defector.com/sweating-thr...

Sweating Through The Existential Angst Of A Las Vegas Table Tennis Tournament | Defector LAS VEGAS — From July 3-13, World Table Tennis staged a Grand Smash tournament in Las Vegas for the first time. Like the Grand Slams of tennis, the Grand Smashes sit atop WTT’s tournament hierarchy,…

Sweating through the existential angst of a Las Vegas table tennis tournament: defector.com/sweating-thr...

SHANE GILLIS: Hey can you pass the salt?

ME: Sure—

GILLIS: [weirdly smirking] ope, haha, careful

ME: What?

GILLIS: I got kinda out there with that one, huh? Don't worry, you don't have to laugh

ME: I don't—

GILLIS: [doing a weird self-effacing chuckle] I'll win you back with the next one

[receives the John Wick is excommunicado text message] Time to find this motherfucker and walk towards him very slowly in a straight line

Why Do Fascists Dream Of Alligators? | Defector In June, Florida’s attorney general James Uthmeier extolled the benefits of the concentration camp they were rushing to build in the wetlands of the Big Cypress Nature Reserve, west of Miami and just ...

really good essay on how the figure of the alligator has always loomed large in the imagination of American racists, from @asherelbein.bsky.social

Christine Brennan's Caitlin Clark Book Is More About Gripes Than Greatness | Defector Before one copy showed up on a bookstore shelf, Christine Brennan’s new book had women’s basketball abuzz. The longtime sports columnist began reporting On Her Game: Caitlin Clark and the Revolution i...

all I'm saying is that books should be well-written and teach me something new. defector.com/christine-br...

Why Do Fascists Dream Of Alligators? | Defector In June, Florida’s attorney general James Uthmeier extolled the benefits of the concentration camp they were rushing to build in the wetlands of the Big Cypress Nature Reserve, west of Miami and just ...

Back in @defector.com today! I wrote about the "Alligator Alcatraz," the vicious folklore of "gator bait," and the cultural history of white supremacists trying to recruit alligators as enforcers of racial terror

Nobody Wants To Talk About John Fetterman And Buzz Bissinger's Pricey Memoir Project | Defector In January 2024, Semafor media reporter Max Tani published a small scoop: Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman and writer Buzz Bissinger (most famous for authoring Friday Night Lights) were working tog...

defector.com/nobody-wants...

The Plight Of The White Male Novelist | Defector In July of 2022, Joyce Carol Oates tweeted that her literary agent friend told her editors are no longer interested in reading first novels by young white male writers, “no matter how good.” She was s...

defector.com/the-plight-o...

Hurdler Wins 400-Meter Race Despite His Dick And Balls Falling Out Several Times | Defector Eagle-eyed trackheads following the Ostrava Golden Spike in Czechia might have noticed American hurdler Chris Robinson, an NCAA champion at Alabama, winning the 400 meters with some unorthodox form. M...

defector.com/hurdler-wins...