2026-02-26 00:01:35
There's nothing quite like a returnee season of Survivor. Wednesday night's Season 50 premiere will begin the sixth season in the show's history featuring a cast entirely of returning players: 24 veterans of Survivor, split into three tribes of eight, will compete over 26 days for $1 million. From players competing in their second season—newer stars like Genevieve Mushaluk, Dee Valladares, and Q Burdette—to Cirie Fields and Ozzy Lusth, who are coming back for a record-tying fifth time, this cast is one with plenty of history and underlying drama. Season 50 promises to be a maximalist trek through Survivor lore. In the show's increasingly self-referential middle age, it could hardly be any other way: The season's subtitle is "In The Hands of The Fans," and fans voted on various elements of the game, such as whether tribes would start with rice or whether there would be final four fire-making, though crucially not on who would be playing.
We gathered Defector's jury—Luis Paez-Pumar, Kelsey McKinney, Alex Sujong Laughlin, Rachelle Hampton, Sabrina Imbler, and Normal Gossip producer Jae Towle Vieira—to preview these 24 players, explain their respective deals, and give our best guess on the question already animating a million fan debates: Can they win? The result is extremely thorough, so let's get right into it.
2026-02-25 23:33:23
Earlier this month I received an email that, for a moment, made my heart skip. The email came from someone named Elena Ferrante, at "[email protected]," and I feel no remorse leaking Elena's email here because, of course, whoever or whatever was emailing me is not the real Elena Ferrante. I realized this a few seconds after I received the email, in part because there is no world in which the real Elena Ferrante—the world-renowned pseudonymous author whose book, My Brilliant Friend, was voted the best book of the 21st century by The New York Times—would email someone like me. I felt embarrassed to be so deluded, regretting the one second of my life in which I imagined it possible that Elena Ferrante would have read my work and wanted to write me about it. But oh, what a glorious second it was!
Reading Elena's email to me was an uncanny experience. The email itself was coherent and seemingly kind, if you could ascribe kindness to this chimeric AI bot-cum-human scammer, which, of course, you cannot. The email disguised itself in the form of a message that would brighten any author's day if it came from a real person, let alone from one of the most famous and famously mysterious writers in the world. But it also contained specific phrases I recognized from published descriptions of my book, such as from my publisher's site, resulting in a feverish collage of words that collapsed upon closer viewing, not unlike the painting of Emperor Rudolf II composed entirely of vegetables.
2026-02-25 22:01:00
To be a U.S. Olympian is to represent the best that your country has to offer. That sounds extremely lofty when it's written out like that, but I think that's really how it works, ideally, if you're taking in the best possible message from NBC's explicitly patriotic broadcast. Even I can feel it, in my most big-hearted moments, particularly after I've watched the figure skating events: Alysa Liu's infectious joy, or Ilia Malinin's humility in heartbreak. America is filled with optimistic people who are great at a lot of different things, they make me believe. It gets me feeling good about a place that I call home, which is kind of hard to do nowadays.
Heading into the Olympics, male hockey players were enjoying an unprecedented streak of great PR. Heated Rivalry, the TV show that captivated North America with steamy gay hockey-player sex, is only the tip of the iceberg for the whole hockey romance phenomenon, which uses the NHL as inspiration for a fairy-tale world where its players are dreamy lovers with innocent souls. In the universe of Heated Rivalry, you could build a Cup-winning top line out of openly gay active pro hockey players, even though the NHL has never had one, and a certain amount of wishful thinking also propels the hetero-themed books I've read in this genre. In Mile High, for example, the league's most notorious bad boy (who plays for Chicago, of all places) is, beneath the rough exterior, a real sweetie of a boyfriend who just needs healthy support as he processes his parental trauma. And in Kiss and Don't Tell, a young woman facing car trouble has to spend the night in a remote cabin with five male players, but it turns out they act about as threatening to her as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
These books are very good at accomplishing what they set out to do, but it was a strange contrast to read them as someone whose only prior association with hockey players and sex was horrid stories of misogyny and assault. Hockey culture is rotten, but these stories offer a kind of escapist hope: What if it's not? What if the flesh-and-blood players on the ice are just like these boys on the page?
2026-02-25 04:13:20
Wuthering Heights is always a stranger book than you remember. This holds true whether you last read it in high school, or a month ago. There is always some weird detail, some brutality, some incomprehensible human interaction that you overlooked. Everyone remembers the ghost of Catherine Linton at the window, pleading to be let in, but do you also recall how our gentleman narrator “pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bed-clothes”? Catherine’s famous declaration about Heathcliff—“Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same”—sticks in the mind, of course, though years and Instagram quotes have a habit of turning it into an expression of romantic sympathy, instead of what it actually is: a description of the total obliteration of sovereign selfhood. You might have held on to a vague sense that there are a lot of dogs in this book, but do you remember that one of the dogs is named Skulker? Or that Skulker the dog has a son, named Throttler?
One of the things I hadn’t remembered was how little we are told about the environment around Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. This is particularly strange, given that I always think of it as a novel deeply concerned with setting. If you had asked me a week ago how much of the book is dedicated to long and detailed descriptions of the West Yorkshire countryside I would have answered “quite a lot,” and I would have been wrong. We get a bit about Penistone Craggs (“bare masses of stone, with hardly enough earth in their clefts to nourish a stunted tree”), some river sounds, a lot of fog, but not a whole lot else. We think about Wuthering Heights as a novel about place, but it is better described as a novel about not knowing your place. Foundlings rise, sons are brought low, servants are hilariously emboldened, and the path between one house and the other is sometimes obstructed. Lockwood, our narrator, is out of place—you get the sense that he was meant to appear in a comedy of manners but got lost along the way. The reader is often equally confounded, between the multiple Catherines and Lintons and general sense that everyone in this book is stark raving mad.
Wuthering Heights is always a stranger book than you remember because it actively resists your comprehension. It is, in fundamental ways, a book about things we do not and cannot know. This goes back to the inciting event—we are never told why Mr. Earnshaw brings an unnamed orphan back from Liverpool. We are never given a clue as to Heathcliff’s origins, or how he makes his fortune during his three-year absence.
2026-02-25 02:56:58
Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. Today, we're talking about rug spills, shitty Chinese takeout mainstays, college visits, and more.
Your letters:
Mike:
2026-02-25 02:04:52
My academic funding was running out and my patience with the delirious pace of start-up culture had run thin. You might say I got fired; I might reply that I was never really hired in the first place. But the point was, I needed to go back on the job hunt. So I logged into LinkedIn and started networking.
Going only by the strength of my notifications, the world was whipsawing back and forth between the thrill of revolutionary new discovery and the gloom of the imminent devastation of everything we hold dear. It was the best of times to look for a job; it was the worst of times to be a young professional. It was the age of unbounded wisdom at our fingertips; it was the age of foolishness subverting our best intentions. It was the epoch of belief in the arrival of a higher power; it was the epoch of incredulity at the credulous fascination with tawdry tricks. It was the season of the dawn of a new Light; it was the season of fall into a hitherto unknown Darkness. It was the spring of hope and change; it was the winter of despair and rapine. We had everything before us to discover, we had nothing before us to ever do again, we were all going direct to the Heaven of plenty, we were all going direct to the Hell of plunder. In short, the period was so much like Dickensian London that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
After a large number of applications and a small number of interviews, I found myself with a job offer at a large, relatively benign local company. And in the latter part of last year, I began a new career as an AI Scientist.
