2025-12-11 02:40:41
Aryna Sabalenka and Nick Kyrgios are participating in a Battle of the Sexes match this month in Dubai. Somehow, the sentence I'm about to write is even more dispiriting than the one that precedes it: Kyrgios and Sabalenka spent half an hour on Tuesday promoting this match on Piers Morgan's show.
2025-12-11 01:21:38
It's the most wonderful time of year, and we at Defector are proud to bring back our series discussing some of the most, uh, available holiday movies.
Sabrina Imbler: Thanks so much, Kelsey and Alex, for trudging through this “film” with me.
2025-12-11 00:54:28
Are we as sure as we think we are that Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua has filled his school's institutional diaper by carrying on about the Fighting Irish being excluded from the College Football Playoff? Or is this just college football fans, and mostly those from the lower right quadrant of the nation, shrieking in glee at said diaper and its owner?
We're not exactly sure, to be honest, although it says something about the tone of it all that the metaphorical diaper is a constant. Despite its ongoing consolidation into sprawling gigaconferences, college football has never been a more regional sport than it is now, and a large part of the nation that's still invested in the whole Ponzi scheme likes the fact that everyone involved is pantloading in a frantically public way. As big a deal as Notre Dame football is—and it is a big deal, if not quite as big a deal as it believes itself to be—this is more about the chance to giggle and gawk at an embarrassing public spectacle than it is anything to do with the game itself.
2025-12-11 00:20:38
How do you mend a broken three-chambered heart? This question tailed me as I wandered lost and lonely from the burrow of the frog I once loved most ardently. It is true she endeavored to devour me, rend me limb from spotted limb, and yet, in my eyes, she had been perfect. Mayhap, I mused, I was not destined for love in this life, at least not the romantic kind, that full-body luminescence conjured when two hearts meet, mingle, and meld. O, the ecstasy of amplexus, are we fated never to touch?
Enough! I can spare no more space in my heart for a vile temptress. Having escaped with everything but my dignity intact, I literally hopped with my proverbial tail betwixt my legs. I hankered for the comfort of home, that old familiar plastic cube in the laboratory, and knew thither I must go. These clinical strictures, which once felt suffocating, now offered me a sense of comfort, how wrapping yourself in a blanket is sometimes the closest you can come to being held.
2025-12-11 00:03:35
I’ve learned a few things about buying a house. I haven’t learned anything firsthand—because, you know, millennials, California, inflation, etc.—but I know that stuff is always breaking and that you can go crazy trying to calculate the long-term benefits of paying a little bit extra on your mortgage every month. I’ve also heard that you have to sign approximately one million documents, and that “no one” reads them.
Our friends-of-a-friend in today’s story must have heard the same thing, because they didn’t sweat the details when they were signing all those papers. When landscaping “requests” start to arrive from the sellers, our buddies have to take a crash course on tulip care, real estate law, and conflict navigation.
2025-12-10 23:37:41
My more rationally minded colleague Lauren has attempted to make sense of the Anaheim Ducks' first-place start, and to investigate whether they are actually a good team or not. This is fine, for those of you interested in things like "cause" and "effect" when it comes to results. But some of us have more of what I might call a medieval peasant mindset toward a sport that inherently features a whole lot of randomness, and it is becoming clearer with each victory that the Ducks are blessed by some power greater than "being good at hockey." Call it what you like—mojo, juju, puck luck, duck luck, the favor of the Canaanite goddess Astarte—the Ducks have it.
Consider Tuesday's 4-3 shootout victory in Pittsburgh, a showdown of semi-aquatic birds. The Penguins took 47 shots to Anaheim's 28, had five power plays to the Ducks' one, enjoyed 80 percent of the game's high-danger scoring chances, and generally broke the Deserve To Win O'Meter. Yet it was the Ducks who came away with two points—duck, duck, deuce?—for they enjoy the inscrutable blessings of fate and physics.
