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Following this week's news of Patrick Stewart's death, the Defector staff convened to remember some of our favorite performances by him. The Simpsons Patrick Stewart is one of our most recognizable forces in pop culture: the kind of star who could be identified just by his profile, a rare feat of notoriety in any era. Every bit of him is iconic, but it’s his voice that truly makes him the performer he was. It's only right, then, that he became a memorable voice actor in animated work.

There are few joys in sports that can truly exceed a game in which both coaches are in danger of getting fired, and no place does that game better than England. There are no distractions that can cause the fevered punditocracy to avert its eyes from the desperate hope that one (or, in the most orgiastic case, both) gets smoked right after the game. This is possible because a dissatisfying draw can enrage both fan bases equally, in the way that Giants-Commanders sickened the souls of football fans on this side of the ditch three weeks ago. But there is one scenario that trumps even that, and Americans will have it tomorrow morning at the breakfast hour: Manchester United at Chelsea. Two big clubs that are underachieving in their own specific ways, will face each other at 8:30 a.m. ET, and in deepest zombie hours on the West Coast. What makes it genuinely special for everyone is that no institution on earth, in any pursuit, does boss-in-trouble quite like Manchester United. Carrick got the full car wash a week ago after successive three-goal losses to Como (4-1) in the Champions League and Bournemouth (3-0) in the Prem. This extended a stretch of winless results that go back to United's Champions League win over Sabah of Azerbaijan, a newbie team that, on the European stage, qualifies not as minnows but something more on the order of plankton. The first loss was in Italy, in a very cool stadium that overlooks Lake Como, and which by definition is the coolest stadium in Europe because of it. The second was at home before—get this—an appreciative crowd that applauded Carrick when the team went for the postgame salute to the fans. They turned unanimously loud, profane, and ugly as soon as Carrick left the field.

During the first quarter of Thursday's game between the equally winless Pelicans and Kings, Sacramento rookie Darius Acuff Jr. ran the length of the floor in transition and punched home a sweeping dunk past a late trail from Jeremiah Fears and a halfhearted contest from Trey Murphy III. It was an amazing play, which is why Acuff took a second to flex and mean-mug for the dozens of fans in New Orleans. It was also a live play, and as Acuff preened, the Pelicans ran back and Murphy got an easy dunk, after Acuff's absence forced Domantas Sabonis to abandon the paint. This sequence serves as a useful Rorschach test for the Acuff observer: Do you see Acuff's smooth athleticism, and his ability to produce not only tough but beautiful buckets? Or do you see an undersized guard whose lack of interest in the floor game is matched only by his inability to affect it? Both are totally valid reads of the most (and only) fascinating player on the worst team in basketball, although I think partisans of both positions would agree that Acuff's first five NBA games have been remarkable. Nobody in the league has attempted or missed more shots. No rookie has ever attempted as many shots in their first few games. Acuff sits snugly wedged between Steph Curry and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander on the usage leaderboard, with the sixth-highest rate in the NBA. It's both fantastic theater and an irresistible new front in the Real Hooper Wars; the Kings, in the meantime, are so bad that the question of any of it mattering will be entirely theoretical for a while. This leaves us all free to enjoy Acuff's game and use it as a plank from which to mount arguments about how basketball should work.

Welcome to the Defector College Football Watch Guide, where Israel Daramola and Ray Ratto will tell you which of the weekend’s college football games are worth giving a crap about. Ray: Saturday is Halloween, and the schedule is notably threadbare for showdown games; only two games this weekend are between nationally ranked teams, and a bunch more are showdowns involving 4-3 programs. So go ahead, dress up, go to a party, and absentmindedly house a bunch of Reese's peanut butter cups in your host's rec room while pretending not to watch Washington-Nebraska. There's no need to let the costume be the most embarrassing part of your day. As for the games: if you insist. Kentucky has the best record in the SEC for the first since ... uhh, ever? (Since 1977, actually.) The Wildcats' schedule down the stretch is unkind, but head coach Will Stein no doubt sent an aide to blow up a copy of the conference standings for display all over the campus, maybe covering all the basketball flyers. This is not likely to remain so, but a moment is still a moment.

Aldous Huxley likened the exorcism of the prioress Jeanne des Anges to “a rape in a public lavatory.” It was this horrific description that director Ken Russell shared with production designer Derek Jarman before they set out to tell that story. Russell wanted to capture the spirit of Huxley’s nonfiction book, The Devils of Loudun, about the 17th-century incident in which a convent of nuns claimed possession, exhibiting wild and lewd behavior, leading to the sorcery conviction and execution of the priest Urbain Grandier. For that 1971 adaptation, The Devils, Jarman took the assignment quite literally. Large, white tiles cover every inch of Loudun’s Ursuline convent in the film, from floor to wall to arched ceiling. Tiles, and iron bars. It’s a gorgeous set, photographed by cinematographer David Watkin in anamorphic widescreen grandeur, and immerses the audience in the suffocated, cloistered lives of the nuns. Its starkness is at once mesmerizing and maddening. It is the perfect place for a case of possession—or many—and a likely site for clinically staged abuse. This wasn’t the first time I’d seen the scene in question, which is somehow more and less disturbing than Huxley’s six words suggests. I first watched The Devils some 15 or 20 years ago, on a pirated copy. It was a film whose reputation preceded it, and I was a young guy, barely out of high school, titillated by its scandalous history. Even before it was originally released, The Devils was heavily cut to appease British censors. It was cut further still for its American release. Though it earned respectable sums at the U.K. box office, the lavish Warner Bros. production received a critical thrashing—Roger Ebert’s sarcastic review is a classic in the genre of getting it completely backward—and essentially buried thereafter, popping up on a couple of VHS releases in the ’80s, but never on DVD or Blu-ray. In the early 2000s, British film critic Mark Kermode rediscovered the censored footage, helping Russell put together a director’s cut that screened only once, off a DigiBeta tape.  The copy I’d watched years ago was an earlier cut, likely the original theatrical version minus the most controversial scenes, but all that history had me primed for an outrageous film, and an outrageous film is very much what I got. Sister Jeanne’s exorcism—set in that white, tiled lavatory of a convent, molested by priests wielding giant syringes to perform forced enemas—was sensational, as was the rest of the film’s high-toned lunacy. Rampant nudity, violence, actors gesticulating wildly, saying things like, “They say they can stand up to the Church, but they can't stand up to this bitch.” A movie for sickos. I loved it, naturally, but I don’t think I took it very seriously.

Russia, which has been functionally banned from international hockey for more than four years, must be allowed to return to international events starting in December in Canada. That's the ruling today by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, the highest sport court in the land. But there's a whole lot still unsettled, including a looming shitshow at next year's World Championships. The International Ice Hockey Federation banned the Russian member association in February 2022, as did almost every other sport's Olympic federation following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. That war is still ongoing, but in July of this year the IOC lifted its blanket ban on Russian Olympic committees, and said that its recommendations to individual sport federations no longer apply. Ukraine is currently appealing that decision. (This is tricky business, and I'm glad it's not up to me to decide. Should individual athletes be punished for their government's actions? Or is a ban of Russia's prestigious hockey program more accurately a punishment of the country as a whole? But then, why Russia and not some other war-starting, international law-ignoring countries I could name and/or live in?)

Judge Chadwick Dotson works out of the Charlotte Immigration Court, where he was appointed this past March. For a person to accept an appointment to the immigration court system—from the Trump administration, in the post-Minneapolis world—they have to be the person that you are imagining right now. In most ways, Dotson is exactly that. Prior to accepting this appointment—to a powerful position in one of the cruelest arms of the most blatantly criminal federal government in American history—Dotson was being sued as director of the Virginia Department of Corrections, where he was appointed by former Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin. Before that, he was chairman of the Virginia Parole Board, also under Youngkin, where he ran an ostentatiously blunt and unyielding parole operation. All along, when he isn't doling out excessive punishment or denying asylum seekers, this immigration judge is something of a regular sports blogger. Dotson writes columns about the Cincinnati Reds, his favorite baseball team, for Cincinnati Magazine, under the byline Chad Dotson. On Oct. 6, a little over a week after the Reds wrapped up a disappointing 75-87 campaign, Dotson pondered whether it was time for fans to step away from the team. It was the 15th article that Dotson published for the magazine that season. He has co-written a book about the MLB team, and also has a Substack newsletter called The Riverfront, where he covers the Reds and other Cincinnati sports teams. (The Riverfront occasionally dabbles in movie coverage; in his year-end list for 2023, Dotson listed Killers of the Flower Moon and The Zone of Interest among his favorite films.) On April 22, Dotson was enjoying a surprising start from the Reds, who at the time were 16–8 and riding high atop the NL Central. "There is still room for improvement in this lineup. This team could get even better," he wrote. "In the meantime, I’m having fun." You can predict some of Dotson's performance as an immigration judge through his performance in his previous professional roles. When he is given the choice between more or less punishment, he opts for more. As director of the Virginia Department of Corrections, Dotson acted on an advisory opinion written by then-Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares, who argued that the state could expand exclusions from sentence credits, beyond the written law, to prisoners who would otherwise benefit from those credits. That decision delayed the release of approximately 8,000 prisoners; Prison Legal News estimated that 560 of those prisoners had already been told that they were within a month of release. When the Virginia Supreme Court subsequently shot down Miyares's advisory opinion, Dotson's Department of Corrections delayed releasing the prisoners for another three months. A group of 53 state prisoners eventually filed a class-action lawsuit against Dotson and his predecessor, and won $1.6 million in a 2025 settlement. From the PLN article:

ATLANTA — Five games into the Finals, it felt odd that we’d yet to watch the game where one team makes everything. The Atlanta Dream and Golden State Valkyries do both take great pride in their defenses, and their offenses do each have certain limitations. Golden State’s heavy diet of threes, for instance, leaves them prone to variance. But that means, you know, that the shooting numbers should vary—not be resolutely bad for two weeks. After Game 2, when the sludge of Game 1 appeared to carry over and the Dream tied the series, a reporter asked Valkyries head coach Natalie Nakase why she thought it had been such a struggle for these teams to score. Nakase didn’t take the question too seriously. “What’s our identity?” she said, panning the room, the impatient teacher in front of her class. “What? You guys should know this.” Two of the league’s top defenses, sure. Even so, the numbers were really bad. The reporter pressed Nakase again.

Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday at Defector during the NFL season. Got something you wanna contribute? Email the Roo. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. In case you missed it a week ago, The Athletic published this extremely detailed report from Jourdan Rodrigue and Mike Sando on how NFL game-day communications work. I encourage you to read the entire thing in full, because it includes a lot of sweet tea, including stories about head coaches angrily firing their assistants over the headset (then changing their minds the next day) and, dearer to my heart, one assistant coach staying on the channel while he had to take a frantic piss. My kindred spirit. As with all things NFL, these communication systems are coordinated with near-military fuss. The graphic design in the story includes multiple ornate diagrams that outline how all of this shit works. We see how dozens of coaches on the sideline are talking with one another, on the field and up in the booth, during a game. We also see all of the tech crew workers behind the bench, wearing different-colored hats to signify which of them are in charge of keeping the radio channels private, which ones service the Microsoft tablets that players love to angrily smash on the ground, and such and such. All of these people are connected by a series of invisible lines so tangled, it looks like an old-timey phone switchboard when laid out on paper.

My favorite moment from this year's World Gymnastics Championships was the second after Skye Blakely hit the final pose in her floor routine. For a second, she was all smiles, sass, and confidence, radiating exactly the energy her sport's judges want to see. Then the music ended, Blakely's muscles released, and the 21-year-old from Texas looked like she might cry. The performance was done and Blakely could once again be exactly who she was: a young woman who had just done something very difficult. That routine capped Blakely's first all-around gold medal, which was one of four medals Blakely brought home this week from the Netherlands—her gold joined a Team USA silver, as well as individual bronzes for herself on uneven bars and vault. A pair of Americans—Claire Pease and Reese Esponda—took individual gold and silver on the floor, respectively, in Rotterdam, while Pease also won silver on vault. On the men's side, Fred Richard won gold on the men's floor, making him the country's first gold medalist on that exercise since Paul Hamm in 2003. In other words, even if Simone Biles doesn't come back for the 2028 Olympic Games, women's gymnastics seems to be in good shape. In fact, Blakely's win meant the United States went a whopping one year without being home to the reigning women's all-around champion, as Biles had previously won the title in 2023 (at Worlds) and 2024 (the Paris Olympics). Even that requires an asterisk because at last year's Worlds, American Leanne Wong took home the all-around silver.