About Defector

2024-11-21 04:32:25

Augusta Britt has had, by any reasonable accounting, an extraordinarily rich and interesting life, and seems like a vivid and fascinating person. By her mid-teens in the mid-1970s, she was a pistol-packing Arizona refugee from her own abusive family and any number of atrocious foster homes. She met the novelist Cormac McCarthy by a motel pool in 1976 when she was 16 (and he 42) and became, for the next few years, his secret lover as well as, for the next four decades, the pretty direct inspiration for many of his stories and characters.

When she was 17—and McCarthy, Britt would find out later, was still married to Annie DeLisle—the two ran off to Mexico believing (or fantasizing) that the FBI was after McCarthy on statutory rape and human trafficking charges; they returned to the U.S. shortly after her 18th birthday. In 1981, when she would have been 21 or thereabouts, she left McCarthy in Tennessee and returned to Arizona. They saw each other many times over the following decades and kept up a deep correspondence for the rest of his life, but never lived together again; he asked her to marry him two separate times but backed out of both proposals. Britt has spent time as a patient in a mental hospital; she has worked as a trauma nurse; she is richly thoughtful about her unique life; now, at 64, she still trains horses and shoots guns, and evidently taught McCarthy much of what he learned about both hobbies.

2024-11-21 03:37:55

Due to reporting from The Athletic's resident football pot-stirrer Dianna Russini and co-conspirator Zack Rosenblatt, we now realize that Aaron Rodgers is only partly to blame for the New York Jets being the latest iteration of the New York Jets—and yes, everyone knows what that means. Their recent reporting reveals that superannuated yet still overmatched owner Woody Johnson has also stamped his footprint right in the middle of the mudslide which led Tuesday to the firing of general manager Joe Douglas, only six weeks after he fired head coach Robert Saleh. What was already a typically Jetsy situation has only continued to get more Jetsy.

Now, the report could just be an act of reputational sanitation on Rodgers’s behalf, although that scale of clean-up job would require more than a double byline, plus we have no evidence that either author is particularly keen on Rodgers one way or another. According to Rosenblatt and Russini (we're switching billboard credits because we don't know who did more heavy lifting on this), Johnson broached the subject of benching Rodgers for backup quarterback Tyrod Taylor earlier this season, only to be talked off that particular comedic ledge by everyone else in the room. You may now talk among yourselves on the subject of whether Johnson might not be a genius, or just someone who has watched Rodgers closely this year. But frankly, everyone is ignoring the central fact, which is that no matter what the cast of characters shows, the Jets were the Jets and are the Jets, and because of Items 1 and 2, they shall always be the Jets. A benching or a firing or another firing or some future firing will not and cannot change that. The only thing for Jets employees to do at this point is to become ex-employees as quickly as possible. I mean, who on that payroll has got it better than Smilin' Bobby Saleh right now?

2024-11-21 02:38:45

In theory, you can’t step into the same river twice. Ideally you do a lot of growing and changing when you flounce off to college. That is especially true when you cross an ocean to go off to school. But sooner or later, the siren song of home becomes harder and harder to ignore. This is not without a number of risks: your parents, your old friends and confronting your old self. 

But when you run into your hometown crush and they look sexier than ever, all the usual psychochemical accouterments of said crush—paralysis, bewitchment, intoxication—sure make a strong case that you are awash in the same old waters after all. Good luck. 

2024-11-21 01:33:21

People hate Jake Paul. He is the walking personification of a Reddit board: a cocky, belligerent white boy who loves to troll as much as he loves to use mental health issues as marketing. His transition from YouTube provocateur to "serious" "boxer" has been built on the calculated decision to fight washed-up black athletes. It’s smart; boxing has always thrived when catering to the public imagination around race war. The desire to see Paul get knocked out by one of the faded avatars of black masculinity he sets himself against explains much of the draw of his fights. His savvy protection of that appeal explains why he only fights people he can comfortably beat with his young legs and just-about-competent skills.

When it was first announced that Paul planned to fight a 58-year-old Mike Tyson, the initial response was one of widespread incredulousness. Over time, people seemed to convince themselves that somehow a geriatric Tyson could be the one to finally put Jake Paul “in his place,” whatever that might mean. It always made sense why Paul would want to fight an old Mike Tyson. But what exactly was in it for Tyson? Money, surely, but that can’t be the only reason. This is a man in his late 50s, who’d been mostly retired since the early 2000s. The people who got suckered into caring about this fight didn't want to see that reality, transposing instead an image of the Mike Tyson of yore, maybe older and slower in some vague way, but still in possession of the exhilarating, terrifying power and violence that made him a legend. On some level, maybe Tyson wanted to see that too.

2024-11-21 01:10:32

The ice patches surrounding the Indigirka River and its tributaries in northeastern Russia serve as a graveyard for the Ice Age: mammoths, woolly rhinoceros, saiga, and bison that lived and died in the Last Glacial Period. Mammoth tusk collectors trawl the ice for tusks and other bones poking out from the melting permafrost, but occasionally they stumble on bodies that have been frozen for tens of thousands of years. In 2017 and 2018, tusk collectors found two mummified cave lion cubs, a species that has been extinct for thousands of years and likely resembled modern lions. In 2020, a tusk collector unearthed another, even rarer ancient kitten: a frozen saber-toothed cat cub, as Asher Elbein reported in The New York Times.

Despite their presence in our prehistorical imaginings—such as a starring role in the Ice Age franchise—the actual soft-tissue appearance of saber-toothed cats remained a mystery to scientists. So this new cub offers the first-ever glimpse at how the cats appeared in real life, about 35,000 to 37,000 years ago. The term saber-toothed cat refers to a plethora of cat-like species with elongated teeth, and the most famous—and perhaps most extravagantly toothed—belonged to the genus Smilodon. Scientists identified the new cub as Homotherium latidens, a species in another genus that contained the "scimitar-toothed cats," as these cats had curved canines that were smaller than Smilodon's. The researchers' paper describing the new kitten was recently published in Scientific Reports.

2024-11-21 00:51:48

Welcome back to The Not-So-Great Defector Bake Off, where Kelsey and Chris attempt to complete the technical challenges from the newest season of The Great British Bake Off in their own home kitchens, with the same time parameters as the professional-grade bakers competing on the show.

2024-11-20 22:00:22

Laura Helmuth was named editor-in-chief of Scientific American in March 2020, shortly before the magazine was set to celebrate its 175th year in print. Helmuth, who had previously directed health and science coverage at The Washington Post, told Poynter it was her dream job: "I love this magazine. It’s been around forever ... and I want to make it even more influential.”

Last week, after four-and-a-half years at the helm of the oldest continuously published magazine in the United States, Helmuth resigned. She made this decision shortly after a series of posts on Bluesky in which she called Trump voters "fucking fascists." Helmuth later deleted the posts, but screenshots wound their way to Twitter, where Elon Musk weighed in, leading to a wave of online harassment. It's unclear what exactly prompted Helmuth's resignation, but it's hard not to connect the dots. Helmuth did not respond to a request for comment.

2024-11-20 04:03:11

I'm not much for nicknames, though occasionally a moniker so good emerges that it becomes the only way I can think about a player. Atlanta's Australian ballhawk Dyson Daniels has earned such a nickname: the Great Barrier Thief. In his first season with the Hawks, the 21-year-old Daniels is starting for the first time and, as such, is having a breakout season. It's always fun when a young, promising player is given their first chance at a big role, because all that newfound responsibility is a much stronger test of their abilities; there's so much talent in the league right now that surely each team has several players who could do more if given more opportunity. Daniels has shown, through 13 games with the Hawks, that he is one of the best defensive playmakers in the NBA.

Daniels is currently leading the league with 3.4 steals per game; his 91 deflections are a whopping 34 more than second-placed De'Aaron Fox. Daniels is averaging 4.7 steals every 100 possessions, the highest such figure since Nate McMillan, the guy who coached the Hawks for some of last season, did it in 1993–94 for the Seattle Supersonics, who don't exist anymore. Daniels recently put together an unholy four-game streak of six or more steals per game, and he has recorded a steal in every single game except for Monday night's win against the Fox's Sacramento Kings.

2024-11-20 03:40:25

There's no reason why a sudden, unplanned team meeting has to be a bad thing. Maybe it's a good thing! Maybe your veteran teammate is calling the team meeting, immediately after the conclusion of a road game, because he wants to shower someone in much-deserved attention, or to announce that he just got a great deal on car insurance. You can't know until you have attended the meeting. Best not to burden yourself with anxiety. Best to go into the meeting expecting it to be happy and celebratory.

Kyle Lowry, veteran guard for the Philadelphia 76ers, did not recently get a great deal on car insurance, or if he did, that was not why he called Monday's meeting. The 76ers had just played listlessly and disjointedly and had their butts pretty thoroughly hacked off by the Miami Heat, their fourth consecutive loss, dropping their record to a league-worst 2–11. It was Lowry's impression that the team—which if healthy and united should very reasonably expect to make another playoff run—needed to clear the air and share "a call to action and urgency," as sources described it to ESPN's Shams Charania.

2024-11-20 02:12:05

Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. And buy Drew’s book, The Night The Lights Went Out, while you’re at it. Today, we're talking about Bluesky, farts, Sean Payton, and more.

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