2025-11-25 05:33:22
All was well with the Philadelphia Eagles in the first half of Sunday's game. The defense looked dominant again. The offense, which had struggled in low-scoring wins the past two weeks, was churning again. The Dallas Cowboys’ first drive of the game ended on downs. Another stalled with a lost fumble. In the first half, Jalen Hurts was 12-of-17 with two TD runs and a touchdown pass to A.J. Brown. Philly led at halftime, 21-7. The broadcast showed Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, and he looked miserable. Every Eagles fan was having a good time.
Well, the second half changed things. The defense gave up more and more yards on each drive. The Cowboys got back into the game, then snatched it at the end. Brandon Aubrey’s 42-yard field goal as time expired gave the Cowboys a shocking 24-21 win over the Eagles. Dallas won, despite turning over the ball twice and going 0-for-2 on fourth down. The Cowboys hadn’t won back-to-back games all year; they hadn’t beaten a team with a winning record. Now they have. This Cowboys victory had Dallas Morning News columnist Tim Cowlishaw referencing Winston Churchill in his postgame story.
2025-11-25 03:58:27
Apparently someone at MLB headquarters turned the stove on and accidentally left it going. On Sunday, ESPN's Jeff Passan reported that the Texas Rangers and New York Mets were finalizing a straight-up player swap of Marcus Semien for Brandon Nimmo. Semien will be taking his defensive talents to New York City, and Nimmo will be taking his whole sprinting-to-first-base-on-a-walk deal to the AL West.
This trade is also of the unc-for-unc variety, and carries the contract implications that come with such maneuvers. Semien is 35 years old and owed $72 million over the next three years; Nimmo will turn 33 the day before the Rangers' first game of 2026, and is owed $101.25 million over the next five years, which carries marginally less average annual value than Semien. Here is another characteristic of this sort of trade with older players: Name recognition aside, unless the players involved are bonafide All-Stars, the margins tend toward minutiae. As the Rangers are laden with expensive contracts, four-ish million dollars a year can play a factor in a trade between a defensively valuable second baseman and a slightly younger and a slightly more offensively productive corner outfielder. Personally—and this is just my opinion—I would take the older infielder who does not have the habit of sprinting to first base on a walk.
2025-11-25 01:07:35
If current trends continue, historians will look back on Nov. 2, 2025, with consternation and confusion. Entire careers of PhD candidates at major universities will be devoted to the mystery of this one day. There will be theses and dissertations, essays and thinkpieces, all searching for an answer to the confounding question: "How did J.J. McCarthy beat the Lions?"
In his comeback from a Week 2 ankle sprain that had forced the Vikings to turn to a broken-down Carson Wentz, the 10th pick in the 2024 draft quarterbacked Minnesota to a 27-24 road win over a tough division rival, lifting the team's record to 4-4. In the three weeks since, including Sunday's 23-6 steamrolling by the Packers, McCarthy has looked less and less like a viable NFL starter. And with the Vikings now all but guaranteed to miss the playoffs after a 14-3 campaign last year, each wrong step by McCarthy makes Minnesota's future less settled in 2026 and beyond.
2025-11-25 00:10:09
This week's puzzle was constructed by Evan Mulvihill and Rafael Musa, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Evan is a cruciverbalist living in San Francisco, Calif. His crosswords have been published by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times. He mainly creates fun, modern, highly homoseggsual themeless puzzles that attempt to cast a gimlet eye on the zeitgeist (but often fail). When he's not working as a pharmacist at San Francisco General Hospital, he enjoys attending gay ski weeks, "doing it live," and creating Spotify playlists with titles like "Extra Chill Vibes ✨ONLY✨." He publishes indie puzzles and crossword reviews on his blog, BossWords. Rafa lives in San Francisco with his cat Georgia.
Defector crosswords, launched in partnership with our friends at AVCX, run every Monday. If you’re interested in submitting a puzzle to us, you can read our guidelines HERE. Note that we're pausing open submissions until Dec. 1. The AVCX, an independent puzzles and games outlet, is running a subscription drive this fall: We'd love for you to subscribe, or to sample the good with a two-month free trial. With an AVCX subscription, you get access to weekly themed and themeless crosswords, minis, cryptics, and trivia, by email or in your favorite app. We have no corporate overlord, and we publish top-flight stuff only. We also pay our people fairly, always. Check us out.
2025-11-25 00:00:09
This article has been adapted from a piece published Nov. 16 on the author's Substack page.
Last week, after masked settlers torched a mosque in Salfit, set fire to Palestinian trucks in Huwara, and beat farmers bloody during what the U.N. calls the worst olive harvest for settler violence across the West Bank since it began keeping track in 2006, things finally got bad enough that Israeli authorities felt compelled to issue strongly worded statements.
2025-11-24 23:38:56
Sam Noakes walked to the ring in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on Saturday with a wholesome smile on his face and opera music blaring. I wondered why. He was on his way to fight Abdullah Mason to kick off the “Ring IV” main card, the latest attempt to drum up interest in Saudi tourism and whitewash the country’s image with some boxing fights. Mason is a prodigious 21-year-old with fast feet, faster hands, and a lust for knockouts. His only vulnerability is that this latter trait can lead him to abandon his very capable defense in his quest for blood. Plenty of his opponents can find his chin with a good shot—Yohan Vasquez even decked him twice in the first round of their 2024 bout—before Mason separates them from their consciousness. If Mason ever loses, it will probably be by getting knocked the fuck out himself, so you may want to follow his career.
Anyway, Mason hurt Noakes in what felt like every single round. In the third, their heads collided hard, opening a gash next to Noakes’s left eye. What was a happy, unmarked face 15 minutes earlier turned red, along with both fighters’ trunks and plenty of the ring apron. Mason put himself in the line of fire enough that Noakes hurt him too, though not as badly, and that gave him hope. In the eighth round, Mason landed a body shot with such force that everybody in the arena went briefly silent, exhaling along with an agonized Noakes. But every time it looked like Noakes would break, his body reasserted its strength and stayed up. He somehow made the final bell, losing by unanimous decision. Boxing fans will love him forever for the bravery of the performance alone. As he hugged Mason, Noakes smiled again and blood flowed into his open mouth.
