2025-09-17 05:13:42
The Washington Post has fired opinion columnist Karen Attiah due to social media posts she made after the fatal shooting of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, according to Attiah's own Substack as well as an email, from Washington Post human resources staff, obtained by the newsletter Status.
Attiah had worked with the Post's Opinions department for 11 years. From 2016 to 2021, she was editor of the Global Opinions section; at the time of her firing, she was a columnist. In the wake of Kirk's death in Utah and a school shooting in Colorado that same day, she wrote a number of posts on Bluesky about gun culture and political violence in America.
2025-09-17 03:19:34
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 sex, Tool, Jimmy Fallon, an abundance of Michaels, and more.
Your letters:
2025-09-17 00:17:30
Who says Tom Brady can't have it all? On top of the conflict of interest that comes with being both a part-owner of the Las Vegas Raiders and a Fox Sports commentator, and in between his duties as "guy who says fuck and denigrates Birmingham City, the soccer club he co-owns," Brady has now signed up to do some good old fashioned sportswashing. On Monday, Brady announced that he will return to the football field for the—ugh—Fanatics Flag Football Classic, a three-team tournament set to be held in March of 2026 in Saudi Arabia.
2025-09-16 23:51:19
Welcome back to Make It Nice, Defector's best interior design advice column. Today, we have a tricky living-room layout, an inexplicably round bathroom, and a starter guide on how to pick a backsplash tile.
David asks:
2025-09-16 23:11:01
Welcome to Margin of Error, a politics column from Tom Scocca, editor of the Indignity newsletter.
Monday, on social media, President Donald Trump announced that he had murdered three people—"three male terrorists killed in action" was how he put it. By "terrorists," the president meant nothing more than that he claimed the three people were smuggling drugs; by "in action," he meant that they were traveling in a boat in the Caribbean when a U.S. military aircraft hunted them down and killed them.
2025-09-16 22:36:36
Three years of painstaking roster-building by the Minnesota Vikings needed less than 24 hours to be blown apart. Go back to last week and Minnesota’s newly christened starting QB, J.J. McCarthy, appeared ready to fulfill his destiny as this franchise’s long-awaited savior after engineering a 21-point fourth-quarter explosion in a comeback win at Soldier Field. A few days later, his fiancée gave birth to their first child, a boy. A few days after that, he made his formal debut at the Vikings home stadium on Sunday Night Football against the Falcons. The crowd was poised to detonate. Some Vikings fans had been waiting decades for this moment. Here’s what they got instead:
