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Hoopheads across the nation begin their annual vigil Wednesday in anticipation of receiving the thing they most crave in all the world—a new team to admire, love, fear, and hate simultaneously. And you can't really blame them for their baffled antipathies. Their favorite sport is both defined and repelled by dynastic teams and the silly little debates they shape, which are always on the menu as a kind of bland and ubiquitous comfort food, the sort of tastes-the-same-everywhere sludge you can eat and regret along any of the nation's highways. And these fans are starving for it; they haven't had that level of reliability in this sport in nearly a decade now. But they live in hope, and dread, that a new dynasty is upon us, this one governed by Wemby The First (and so far Only) and sure to run for 10 years, since that is the most common span of time employed in the sentence, "He's going to be unstoppable/the face of basketball for the next X years." This is the natural response of the basketball intelligentsia when confronted with something new and temporarily indomitable, and if it is generally doomed and dull it's also not totally wrong—any sufficiently good team will make it difficult to imagine any other team knocking them off. But for most of the last decade, that is just what has happened, followed by either the resentment that comes from being right or the dismissiveness of being wrong, because basketball fans work very hard to want the next big thing until it arrives and then to become sick of it shortly thereafter. Wemby is called an alien and that is the highest of compliments until it becomes a condemnation. Often this will happen in the same conversation. And so the new working theory is "Wemby has come to save us and then rule us as a cruel overlord." There are, to be fair, relatively fewer fears that the New York Knickerbockers, against whom Wemby either will or will not begin his reign of benign terror, will become a repeat champion. That's not really a knock on the Knicks so much as it's largely due to the fear that imagining the Knicks as a dynasty is to imagine their fan base into an army of vampires who shriek perpetually into the night seeking bare vulnerable necks, with the only wooden stake available to the nation as a whole being Tony Brothers.

I begin this internship having recently clawed my way back into society after escaping the grips of the common cold. The last week has been packed with a variety of riveting activities that range from staring up at my ceiling to staring straight ahead at my wall, broken up by the occasional times I dragged…

I wanted to spend the week before I started at Defector relaxing, reclined and pensive while reading books and watching movies that would inspire brilliant blogs I could pitch to Lauren and Brandy. I was in Southern California, where I grew up, visiting my parents before going to a wedding.   Relaxation is not what came…

No matter what brought you here—if you live with or without birds, if you have lain awake at night pondering the problem of your parrot's predilection for wanking it in the wee hours, or if you have no clue that or how a bird might whack off in the first place—I am here to tell you that yes, it is OK for birds to masturbate. In fact, it is not just OK; it is natural. As such, the birds in your life should be allowed to beat off as they please, without your permission and certainly without your hindrance. (No, a bird did not write this blog, but I certainly hope a bird would approve of it.) These are the conclusions of four researchers who want to set the record straight about bird masturbation, with a paper that led a great Guardian headline: "Masturbation among birds is ‘natural’ and should not be punished, say experts." Go off, experts! One of said experts speaks from personal experience. (She is not a bird.) Chloe Heys, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Lancashire in Preston, England, had a pet cockatiel named Billy, who masturbated up to 10 times a day during the breeding season. "She'd rescued Billy from a pretty nasty situation, and was worried his masturbation might be a sign of unhappiness," Tom Price, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Liverpool in England, told Audubon. "On the other hand, she thought he looked like he really enjoyed masturbating." Should Billy be masturbating? If so, how much? These questions served as the basis of the new paper out in Ecology and Evolution, which takes to task the unjustly invisibilized history of birds fapping it, in and out of captivity.

Three years after making the playoffs together and contesting a beautiful, ultimately futile first-round series against the defending champs, Mike Brown and De'Aaron Fox are going to the NBA Finals. All they had to do was flee Sacramento. As the San Antonio Spurs and New York Knicks gear up for what should be a thriller of a Finals, the world will dissect the two team's strengths and flaws, weigh what a title would mean to each franchise, and study their conference-winning compositions. It's that final bit that will raise the curious matter of how each team's marquee offseason addition—defined somewhat expansively, though the Spurs of February 2025 were more or less already in their offseason—was collaborating with the other's just 18 short months ago, on the sorriest-ass franchise in all of North American professional sports. If Fox and Brown were so important in helping, respectively, the Spurs and Knicks get over the hump, how could it all have gone so wrong in Sacramento? How should Sacramentans feel knowing that their once-proud, unceremoniously ditched team leaders found success the instant they left town? What does the twinned triumph of Fox and Brown suggest about the ways basketball and fandom function? The story is a simple one: Fox and Brown were not in a position to succeed in Sacramento. The pair covered up deep fissures in the Kings' roster, which, at the time of Brown's firing between Christmas and the New Year in late 2024, was a worse version of the already-flawed group that lost to the Golden State Warriors a season-and-a-half earlier. The team had zero good defenders, one wing player, a vacuous iteration of DeMar DeRozan, and a single functional big man, Domantas Sabonis, who himself could neither shoot the basketball nor block shots. The sporadic victories they came by were largely the product of Fox's individual genius, and though Brown organized the team decently well, its flaws were obvious and terminal. The Kings were playing yesterday's hoops. The contract extension they bent over backwards to get Sabonis to sign was an albatross the moment pen touched paper.

The crowd at Arena Monterrey belted "Cielito Lindo," and the mariachi band played the hero to the ring. The match was mask vs. mask, each luchador putting their identity on the line, and the fans were unanimous in their loyalty. They gave him more love than you'll see for any active wrestler in Mexico not named Mistico. Absorbing all the cheers and adulation from the crowd was ... a German guy named Marcel Barthel, better known as WWE bit player Ludwig Kaiser, who was portraying the masked man known as "El Grande Americano." https://www.youtube.com/live/JhRRxgaK_sI?si=LoYUfQv5jrLuLl12&t=5028 Let's go backward. There's a high-stakes wrestling war happening in Mexico, pitting longstanding tradition against WWE's corporate might. CMLL is the oldest promotion in the world, with regular shows at Arena Mexico that are a must-see for any tourist interested in the platonic ideal of lucha libre. They've had an especially strong run of late, with attendance figures that did not escape the notice of America's largest wrestling behemoth. In 2025, WWE bought CMLL's little-brother rival, AAA, and started supplying it with bigger-name talents.

The Rams just traded for Cleveland Browns superstar pass rusher Myles Garrett. But before you ooh and ahh at the prospect of the NFL’s reigning Defensive Player of the Year joining Sean McVay’s superteam-in-waiting, you should probably consider what Los Angeles gave up to acquire him. Cue a wince: According to multiple reports, the Rams are giving up Jared Verse, a 2027 first-round pick, a 2028 second-round pick, and a 2029 third-round pick. This is a move that harkens back to the 2021 offseason, when Los Angeles GM Les Snead—with the blessing of head coach McVay—traded QB Jared Goff plus two first-round picks to the Detroit Lions in exchange for QB Matthew Stafford. That trade, as you now know, resulted in the Rams winning a Super Bowl, with Snead basking in his win-now approach to team building by wearing a “Fuck Them Picks” T-shirt after the fact. This time around, with Stafford locked in for two more years, Snead decided to fuck them picks again, and to fuck Jared Verse for good measure. Snead and McVay hit the jackpot going against the grain five years ago, but the circumstances are different this time around. For one, when they traded for Stafford, they acquired a future Hall of Famer at the most important position in the sport. History also tells us that, in aggregate, giving away all of your draft picks is still really fucking stupid. Now, over the past few years, Snead was able to make up for the loss of those picks by grabbing the likes of Byron Young, Kobie Turner, Braden Fiske, Puka Nacua, and Verse with his remaining picks. Verse was the 2024 Defensive Rookie of the Year, Young rates as an even better pass rusher than Verse, and Nacua—despite being a world-class moron—is arguably the best wideout in football. Those draft picks by Snead are the reason that L.A. has remained in serious contention as Stafford has neared the end of his career.

It's almost time for the World Cup. Before the tournament, we'll be previewing each of the top 15 teams by FIFA rankings that made the tournament. Why the top 15? Because that's how many we needed to do in order for the USMNT to make the cut. You can read all of our previews here. The World Cup is too big and important to require its participants to seek any extra sources of motivation. You don't step onto the field of the planet's biggest sporting event with desires as petty as "proving the haters wrong" filling your head, because no hater can exceed the meaning of a World Cup. But if there is one team coming into this year's tournament that might be able to find some extra motivation elsewhere, it's Senegal.

Three drop shots, three aces—that's a sequence that I'll never forget. Nineteen-year-old Joao Fonseca wrapped up his upset of Novak Djokovic in scandalous style. Friday's third-round match at Roland-Garros had the gravity of a classic final: the shot-making, the comeback from two sets down, the nearly five-hour span, and especially the intergenerational warfare, as the youth brought revolutionary firepower to bear on a historically great elder. Djokovic will never see a clearer path to major title No. 25. He had been advancing through a wide-open draw devoid of the two junior nemeses who finally managed to wrench the sport out of his hands: Carlos Alcaraz, out with injury, and Jannik Sinner, downed by cramps in the second round. Instead Djokovic was taken down early by a colossal talent from an even younger cohort. His perfect 18-0 record when playing teenage opponents at the majors ended when Fonseca polished off a 4-6, 4-6, 6-3, 7-5, 7-5 victory. It was only the second time in Djokovic's career that he had lost a match from two sets up. Tennis arguably reveals an individual's composure under pressure with even higher fidelity than do team sports, because of the magic of shot selection. Every time a player sees the ball coming at him, only he can choose a reply. The bravery (or cowardice) of that choice will come to define him, both in that particular match and general reputation. Simply flip to "Zverev, Alexander" for the cautionary tale here. Fonseca was already known for his tendency to go big, and we'll never need more conclusive proof than his performance in the tensest moments of this match, played against a 39-year-old whose own mind has been tempered like steel over the last two decades, and who clearly delights in unraveling less experienced opponents.

Nick Bilton, the dumb, dull, and severely underqualified former tech journalist who is now running 60 Minutes at the behest of Bari Weiss, had his first meeting with his new colleagues on Monday. It ended with him more or less being chased out of the room. You can tell a lot about how much a boss is hated by his colleagues based on how quickly the details of a specific staff meeting leak to the press. In this case, news of Bilton eating shit made its way to various media reporters pretty much as it was happening, and it wasn't long before The New York Times and other outlets had obtained full audio recordings of the meeting. The results are in: Everyone at 60 Minutes already hates this goof's guts. The highlight of the meeting was a confrontation between Bilton and longtime 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley. Pelley is instantly recognizable as the guy from the show who has a square jaw and stentorian voice, which makes him the ideal person to mix it up with a twerp like Bilton. This is a gravitas mismatch on par with James Harden finding himself switched onto Jalen Brunson in isolation.