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The 2025 WNBA playoffs begin on Sunday. Here are some questions I’m asking about each team, paired by first-round matchup. If you, the person reading this, are not much of a reader, we also discussed a few of these questions on the most recent episode of Nothing But Respect.

Arizona-based outlet PHNX Sports has fired its lead Phoenix Suns reporter Gerald Bourguet after he posted tweets critical of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, in the aftermath of Kirk's fatal shooting on Wednesday. PHNX Sports released a statement on Thursday, but did not specifically name Bourguet: The opinions expressed by our employees do not represent the views of PHNX or ALLCITY Network. We take matters involving violence very seriously and are committed to ensuring that ALLCITY remains a safe place for our employees and community alike. We have addressed this matter with the individual and made the decision to part ways.

There’s a big prize fight this weekend. Well, as big a prize fight as can take place in 2025. Terence “Bud” Crawford and Saul “Canelo” Alvarez go at it Saturday night in Vegas with all the super middleweight belts at stake. Among the oodles of intriguing plot lines that make this matchup of two of the sweetest scientists of their generation worthy of a football stadium full of spectators and any fight fan's attention is one of boxing's most accepted adages ("Good big man beats good little man") being put to the test. Plus, there ain’t no tomato cans in this fight. Crawford, who turns 38 years old this month, has been fighting professionally since 2008. He comes in with a perfect 41-0 record, with 31 of those wins by knockout. He’s never even been knocked down. But because he’s refused to stray from his native Omaha, Neb., for a more media-friendly burg, Crawford got little mainstream acclaim until a July 2023 bout with then-undefeated and fabulously regarded Errol Spence for the undisputed welterweight crown. Crawford fights are routinely things of beauty, but on this night he turned in as great a big-fight performance as I’d ever seen from anybody. Both fighters weighed in at the 147-pound limit, but Spence never looked like he was in Crawford’s class. Crawford had vastly superior speed and power, and better defense and counterpunching abilities than Spence, his pre-supposed equal. Every punch Crawford threw landed with consequences. The precision and oomph of his jab was otherworldly. Crawford knocked Spence down three times, and was ahead on all scorecards by nine points by the time referee Harvey Dock humanely stopped the fight with 30 seconds left in the ninth round. (Watch the whole fascinatingly one-sided affair here.) Spence, previously considered one of the best pound-for-pound fighters on the planet, hasn’t fought since the beatdown.

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 bigot, whose career achievements were pushing for hatred and violence toward those he saw as inferior to him. Charlie Kirk, 31, was fatally shot at an event Wednesday at Utah Valley University. At the moment of his killing, which was captured on multiple videos, he was about to debate a student about mass shootings in the United States. Authorities announced on Friday that they had apprehended a suspect, although the motive is still unclear.

News broke earlier this week that Lakeeta Vaccaro, the estranged wife of Tyreek Hill, said in court records that the Miami Dolphins receiver physically abused her during their marriage. The outlet to break the story, TMZ, reported that it had obtained a new document in the former couple's ongoing divorce case, in which Vaccaro said there were "eight instances of domestic violence" during their marriage of about a year and a half, including Hill shoving her to the floor, spitting on her, and, per TMZ, others times "where she claims he got physical with her while she was pregnant." This, typically, would be followed by other news outlets getting copies of the court records and confirming these details with stories of their own. But if you’re wondering why the reporting on this seems to have petered out after TMZ's, there's one reason: Nobody else can get a copy of the document.

With Defector turning five this week, we have been presented an opportunity to do two of our favorite things: Execute a really stupid bit and allow Ray Ratto to roast us. We have taken advantage of that opportunity with this post, in which Defector staffers have been forced to pick a gift made of wood that costs no more than $20 (it's our Wood Anniversary) to give the site. Each selection has been judged, Taskmaster style, by Ratto. Thanks for indulging us.

Welcome to the Defector College Football Watch Guide, where Ray Ratto and Israel Daramola will tell you which of the weekend’s college football games are worth giving a crap about. Ray: Week 2 usually blows because of all the 62-7 and 77-3 scores that dot Mismatch Alley (did you know there was an East Texas A&M, and if so, what happened to you as a child?). But while the new College Football Playoff format rewards eight-touchdown wins, it does damned little to explain relative strengths and weaknesses, which is why Week 3 is ever so slightly more handy. There are a few games that can help cut down the seasonal thicket, thanks to the networks leaning into September schedule bombs that make people think that there are only two sports in America. This is not a happy development—entertainment fascism never is—but it’s what we have until the general strike that brings this nightmare to the necessary halt it must eventually endure. In other words, Texas A&M at Notre Dame, you hyenas. Live with it.

There were no real expectations when we launched Defector, five years and one day ago. Plenty of planning went into what we would do with the site and how it would work, and many hours of committee meetings have followed in that vein, but that it arrived on Sept. 10, 2020 was a reflection of the fact that we were ready to do it, and that—you may recall what September of 2020 was like—we were both eager to get to work and didn't really have that much else going on at the time. History has vindicated the decision to get on with it, but in recording this week's episode of The Distraction, the lack of foresight was jarring. Did we really not think, in all those hours of discussion, about how this anniversary falling right after Week 1 of the 2025 NFL season would impact our fifth-anniversary podcast?

Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music I’ve been fixated on recently. Last October, Young Thug's criminal racketeering trial concluded with the rapper striking a plea deal that got him released from prison. It brought a close to a contentious, high-profile case that could have seen him spend the rest of his life behind bars. Since then, Thug has been observing his probation terms while working on his hotly anticipated next album. A happy ending to a modern rap tragedy, right? Well, it certainly doesn't seem to feel that way for Thug, who is ... working through some complicated feelings.

If you are human, you might believe that teeth belong in the mouth. If you are a fish, you already know better. You know that teeth belong in the skin, too. These teeth are fittingly called dermal denticles: skin teeth. (Mouth teeth are just called teeth, a testament to how the teeth brand has historically hitched its horse to mouths.) But now a strange fish languidly glides to its place as the latest, greatest innovator in the teeth space, according to a new paper in PNAS. Meet the ratfish, which is also known (more elegantly) as a chimaera or (more mysteriously) as a ghost shark. As a blog of the people, we are calling it a ratfish. The spotted ratfish, Hydrolagus colliei, is a cartilaginous fish. It grows about two feet long and, despite one of its nicknames, is not a shark. Ratfish and other chimaeras diverged from sharks approximately 400 million years ago, and as such, they look a little strange. Karly Cohen, a marine biologist at the University of Washington Friday Harbor Laboratories and an author on the new paper, first saw a ratfish in the San Juan Islands in 2018. "I grew up on the East Coast and had never seen a fish that looked—or swam—like this," she wrote in an email. "Honestly, the first thing that caught my attention was the way they moved, almost like they were gliding on wings."