2025-11-28 02:01:24
It is Thanksgiving all across these United States, but it wasn't until last weekend that I really felt it. I can read a calendar, and the season's usual logistic and chore requirements were all right there where I could see them, but knowing that a favorite holiday is coming and actually feeling it are different things. For Thanksgiving, which I love dearly, that realization manifests as a sort of exhausted gratitude, or maybe just grateful exhaustion. The way Thanksgiving season plays out, which is generally as a procession of low, short days stacking up across gray weeks dwindling fast into winter, punctuated by some emails from my mother with the subject line "Brussels Sprout," is familiar enough. But the experience of washing ashore on this little island in time in which all that stuff somehow feels good always seems to come out of nowhere, and always arrives as a relief.
2025-11-27 23:00:00
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! The website will be a little sleepy for the next few days, so feel free to kick your feet up and relax in this open thread. Snacks are in the fridge!
2025-11-27 21:59:33
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 while back, I got a request from the 13-year-old. The kid is already a burgeoning foodie. And even though foodie culture essentially died during the pandemic, I’m never gonna dissuade people, be they my kids or otherwise, from wanting to eat the good shit. We were having steak for dinner that night, and the boy wanted to up the stakes. So he asked me if I could make a green peppercorn sauce to go with the beef. I had never made this sauce. I wasn’t even sure we had the ingredients for it lying around. But kids don’t give a fuck about any of those roadblocks. When they want their green peppercorn steak sauce, they want it now.
2025-11-27 02:47:53
Welcome to the Defector College Football Watch Guide, where Israel Daramola and Ray Ratto will tell you which of the weekend’s college football games are worth giving a crap about.
Israel: We finally made it to the end of a knotty mess of a college football season. The road has been paved with the bodies of formerly high-paid coaches and transfer-portal casualties. But after all the hootin’ and hollerin’ we are here at Rivalry Week, where your record isn’t supposed to matter and everyone, audience and players alike, is weighed down by Thanksgiving dinner. The highlights of this weekend likely revolve around whether Ohio State could actually blow it again, or if Auburn has enough black magic to sabotage Alabama’s season once more for old time’s sake. But even the rivalries with lower stakes should be lots of fun; it’s fun to hate and fun to watch other haters inflict their hatred upon one another. At the Hater’s Ball, it’s hard not to have a good time.
2025-11-27 02:01:22
We learned in our reading yesterday that the Detroit Pistons are now a fully fledged power in the better-than-we-thought Eastern Conference, and well worth the notice both for what they've already accomplished and for the wonders that the exceedingly springy Jalen Duren works on his own.
It's a nice story told well, but also they are not the Oklahoma City Thunder. If they're much closer than most expected, the Pistons currently fall among the NBA's narrow tier of closest-but-not-that-close teams. The Thunder are threatening the most dangerous résumé in sports—that of the 2016 Golden State Warriors, the most mocked great team in NBA history.
2025-11-27 01:34:48
Zohran Mamdani is weeks away from becoming Mayor of New York City. As someone who does not live in the city but nevertheless has a lot of opinions about what goes on there, I want his administration to be a success. This is why I was so disappointed by some of the Mayor-Elect's recent conduct, which raises new questions about whether Mr. Mamdani is truly prepared to be a Mayor who represents all New Yorkers.
During his appearance on The Adam Friedland Show this week, Mr. Mamdani, a devout Arsenal fan, took some time out of explaining his policy agenda to remember some Arsenal guys:
