2025-12-05 04:41:14
It is a strangely nice thing that putting up a post containing the link to that week's episode of The Distraction has become part of my Thanksgiving observance. Most of it still amounts to going up and down the stairs of my parents' home, and doing hours of oafish expediting and cooking in their kitchen while everyone in my family yells "What?" at each other from different rooms. But we've been doing this long enough that the collision between the undisputed king of Thursday holidays and our podcast, which comes out on Thursdays, barely even registers as jarring anymore. It wasn't until this week, after all that cooking and eating and a hard-won 10 hours of sleep, when the podcast really felt as if it was getting back to normal. We talked about climate change, the NBA, and fantasy sandwiches.
2025-12-05 03:21:30
Warner Bros. Discovery is for sale. The family that just made Bari Weiss one of the most powerful people in American journalism is doing everything it can to buy it.
The entertainment conglomerate, formed three years ago when Warner Media spun off from AT&T and merged with Discovery, Inc., announced plans this past summer to split back into two separate companies. Its functional studio and streaming arm, the source of the publicly traded company's value as a security, would thus be unshackled from its network TV business, which still generates a ton of cash but is a declining in value (as evinced by WBD's $9 billion write-down of its TV properties). The new TV company would also be a place for WBD to park its $38 billion debt load. WBD followed Comcast's lead in the matter, and at the time of the announcement claimed it would complete the process by mid-2026.
2025-12-05 03:00:40
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. The first movie in our lineup is Jingle Bell Heist, a Netflix movie about the magic of robbing the rich and experimental stem cell therapy. This week, we are joined by a very special guest: Leigh McKenna.
Leigh McKenna: Hi, Sabrina. This is Leigh. We are here.
2025-12-05 01:30:32
Big holiday news: If you buy an annual gift subscription to Defector or Normal Gossip before the end of December 2025, we’ll comp you a gift subscription to your choice of a participating site on the Lede platform. You can enjoy this second subscription yourself, or you can turn around and re-gift it. Five of…
2025-12-05 01:18:28
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.
A few weeks ago, I called my best friend Howard to chat on the phone. Howard and his wife just had their first kid, so I was checking in on the new parents, and on my spiritual nephew. I was gonna ask all of the usual questions. Is the baby sleeping well? Is the baby eating? Have you wanted to punch the baby yet because it wouldn’t stop screaming? But I never got a chance to go through my little rundown, because I’d called my man at the wrong time of day.
2025-12-04 23:49:17
Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music I’ve been fixated on recently.
After working in music journalism for over 10 years, if there's one thing I've come away feeling, it's a true hatred for making lists. The very process of having to pick 10 or 20 or 50 or 100 of the best songs or albums or whatever and make it sound definitive is annoying in itself. When you add the inevitable consternation from the readership, then it becomes even more untenable. There's not one list I've ever made where I didn't immediately regret something about it: Either I left something off I shouldn't have, ranked something higher than I would've even a month later, or ignored something fun because it didn't seem serious enough for the prestige implied by these lists. The idea that any reader would treat a list as definitive, rather than just the collected opinions of people who listen to so much shit that they've lost their grip a little, actually baffles me. But here we are, at the end of the calendar, trying to lazily fill the weeks before the last two big holidays of the year with lists and recommendations.
