2026-04-16 03:33:15
It's a tough task to make anyone reading this blog to feel bad for the reigning Premier League champions, a team still solidly in contention for Champions League qualification for next season, and an organization that spent a fortune, perhaps badly, this past summer. (This task becomes infinitely tougher if you are yourself a fan of the presumptive next champions of the league.) But dammit, I'm going to try anyway, because the 2025-26 Liverpool season has been a complete disaster on and off the field, from before the season even started through Tuesday's double whammy of Champions League elimination at the hands of Paris Saint-Germain (3-0 on aggregate) and Hugo Ekitike's ruptured Achilles, which will keep the Frenchman out of the World Cup and most of next season as well.
Before I go further, I have to be clear that nothing that has happened to Liverpool during this season, not even Ekitike's horrible and horribly timed injury, compares to what happened right before. Diogo Jota's death on July 3 was one of the rare sports-related events that counts as tragic in the proper sense. The sadness of it has hung over the entire Liverpool season. In many ways, the players and staff are all still grieving, which has surely affected the results on the field. Even if Liverpool had gone on to have a totally normal season in terms of results, this campaign was always going to be remembered first and foremost for Diogo Jota.
2026-04-16 03:14:19
I don't remember the first time someone hit on me as a reporter. I believe this is because my brain has come to treat these events as unremarkable. For any woman in journalism, they pile up over the years. What I can recall are the worst examples. Like the guy my friends nicknamed Mr. Creepy.
We called him Mr. Creepy (I have changed his nickname somewhat to make it less identifying, but it did include the word "creepy") because he constantly asked me out for drinks. He could do this because he was one of the officials on my beat—covering several small cities for the Miami Herald, a typical job for an early-career reporter—and "asking a young reporter out for drinks over and over, no matter how many times she says no, even though you're married, and she can't choose not to be around you" wasn't against any city code. It did, however, run against the code of journalists: the very good and obvious rule that getting romantically involved with sources, or even appearing to, is off limits.
I don't recall saying anything to any of my supervisors at the time about it. Even if I had told someone, there was nothing the paper could do about it. They had no control over him. If anything, saying something would get me moved off my beat, possibly onto one I did not want, and potentially flagged as a complainer. Every other female reporter dealt with it, right? So I dealt with it too.
2026-04-16 01:39:26
Welcome back to Minor Dilemmas, where a member of Defector's Parents Council will answer your questions on surviving family life. Have a question? Email us at [email protected].
This week, Chris answers questions on how to prepare for outings with a baby or toddler.
2026-04-16 00:51:00
Pilot is one of those jobs with a rarefied air around it. I see the uniform, and I immediately think, That person knows and can do things that I cannot. If you've ever seen Catch Me If You Can, that power is a key plot point, as nobody questions con man Leonardo DiCaprio's authority as long as he looks like he can fly an airplane.
But pilots are people, too. They eat, and they sleep, and they follow sports just like us. Here's proof:
2026-04-15 23:56:52
I like to think of myself as quite the optimist, which explains a career-long, pan-sport fascination with prospects, prodigies, and up-and-comers of all sorts. The future of every sport is out there materializing, in the form of legions of children rising to displace and cast aside their elders. The passage of time guarantees this, though that certainty of outcome is not matched by certainty of identity. Oftentimes, the pressure on a young athlete of being touted as the Next Big Thing is enough to guarantee that ascension never happens, putting the press in the curious position of simultaneously lauding a prospects' accomplishments and cautioning the public against drawing subsequent conclusions.
Usually, anyway. Sometimes an athlete comes along with such undeniable talent and spark that any observer is forced to feel the inevitable gravity of a star being born. Which brings us to Paul Seixas, who is making it impossible to use the future tense.
When we last checked in on Seixas six weeks ago, he was posting an impressive slew of results in the shoulder seasons of the cycling calendar. It is nice to win the Faun-Ardeche Classic and a stage at the Volta Ao Algarve, but nobody is targeting those races; while performing well there and in the preceding autumn classics is impressive prospect stuff, it's not necessarily world-bestriding mega-talent stuff. In other words, checking in then was a hedge of sorts: a preliminary survey of Seixas's situation before he started contesting (and potentially losing) races that mattered. Though I hoped otherwise, I thought there would be little to report until July.
2026-04-15 23:32:13
I had already done the hard part that night: getting my kids to sleep. It was dark now, May 20, 2022, one of the last cool evenings before summer hit central Indiana. I told my wife I was going on a walk, put in my earbuds, and set out. Tomorrow was trash day, which meant dodging garbage cans and recycling bins. No one else was around. Three blocks from home, on a street lined with bungalows, I smelled smoke, the last breaths of a bonfire. I abandoned the sidewalk for the road; the smoke was still peppery. The podcaster said something about the NBA playoffs. Then, on the edge of my peripheral vision, I saw a big white blur.
Somehow I knew it was a dog. I began to backpedal, expecting a leash to restrain it, but it didn't. The dog launched itself into me. Suddenly I was rolling on the ground, kicking and swinging and screaming for help. I could feel the teeth clamped into my calf, the jaws tearing and grinding. The dog released and bit again.
We fought for I'm not sure how long. Eventually, I grabbed a recycling bin and used it to bludgeon the dog until it backed off, snapping and snarling.
