2025-11-21 04:03:11
My wife and I have been planning a trip for around five years. The idea was that it would be a big one for our 10th anniversary; we celebrated our 16th in August. There were deferrals due to family tragedies, work-related upheavals, a global pandemic, and more work-related upheavals, and there have been other small trips mixed in, but there has always been planning, albeit at the lowest possible simmer. A bubble slowly rises to the surface; a spreadsheet is updated to no obvious end; a Friday night conversation turns, inevitably, to whether it might be nice to go to Greece, or someplace like that. For various reasons, my relationship with the fun, big, enriching kind of travel is almost entirely abstract.
2025-11-21 03:28:01
The economist and former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers was one of many high-status figures hitting up sex offender Jeffrey Epstein for advice, as revealed in a dump of Epstein's emails last week by the House Oversight Committee. That correspondence has finally caught up to Summers, who has spent this week stepping down from his numerous posts in academia and industry.
According to Harvard University's student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, emails show that Summers sought Epstein's counsel while pursuing a relationship with a woman for whom Summers was an "economics mentor." In their correspondence on this topic, which dates from November 2018 to July 2019, Epstein describes himself as a "wing man." The two banter about the probability that Summers will have sex with the woman, Chinese economist Keyu Jin, and referred to her with a racist pseudonym. From the Crimson:
2025-11-21 02:55:05
Elyse Myers is famous for being normal—32-year-old brunette, married with two kids, lives in Nebraska kind of normal. Her press often refers to her as “The Internet’s Best Friend.” In her four years in the spotlight, her content has evolved from straight-to-cam self-narratives into the kinds of things all influencers post now: cooking videos, clips of her singing, real-time reactions to the new Taylor Swift album, get-ready-with-mes, and vulnerable posts about body-positivity. For this, she has gained a massive following: 7 million on TikTok and 4 million on Instagram. In all likelihood, someone in your life knows who she is and cares to some degree about her.
In the type of videos Myers became famous for, she talks directly to a camera that sits propped on a surface in front of her. She tells short stories: vignettes from her past where something silly, difficult or awkward happened, usually just under the three-minute time limit TikTok prefers. Her signature style is to start with a question that you might pose on a first date or at a company bonding off-site: What’s the strangest job you’ve ever had? What’s the worst date you’ve ever been on? What’s something you should be embarrassed about that you aren’t?
2025-11-21 02:19:35
The Anaheim Ducks are a Defector-certified Fun Team, despite our firmly entrenched traditionalist bias against the idea of two hockey franchises in the Los Angeles market. The Ducks have spent the last seven years in complete irrelevancy after crashing out of a solid but hardware-free era. Over their time in the toilet, they've stocked up on young talents who, so far this year, have piled up more goals than anyone in the league but Colorado. Their record isn't quite as good as it looked a couple weeks ago, but 13-6-1 is still very strong for a team that went 35-37-10 last year. A first-place team doesn't stay in first place without some scoring from unlikely places, and on Wednesday night the Ducks fought through a tough game against the Bruins and emerged victorious, 4-3, because they received goals from the oddest quartet of scorers I've seen all season.
First, let me tell you who the good Ducks are. Leo Carlsson, 20 years old, is looking like their 1C of the future and currently sits tied for fifth in the NHL in points. Cutter Gauthier, a 21-year-old whom Anaheim snagged from an unhappy situation in Philly, plays aggressive hockey and paces the team in goals. And then there's 34-year-old Chris Kreider, king of the power play, who's experiencing a resurgence after being discarded by the Rangers.
2025-11-21 02:02:33
Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday at Defector during the NFL season. Today we are turning the column over to esteemed guest and past Defector contributor Sarah York.
They handed me the keys to Drew’s Jamboroo, so I get to bitch and moan about something that’s driving me insane about being a sports fan right now: I can’t stand sports betting, and how quickly seemingly every man in mainstream sports media became such an insufferable loser about it, and how their incessant shilling for this shit has ushered in a crisis that I’m afraid we have no way of mitigating.
2025-11-20 23:21:26
When seeking optimism, one wouldn't typically look to a backup goaltender for the Calgary Flames. The Wet Logs are bringing up the league's rear, and they've contractually and metaphorically hitched their wagon firmly to Dustin Wolf for the next eight seasons. A No. 2 netminder is not going to get much playing time, and what time he does get will statistically involve giving up a lot more goals than ones viewed from 200 feet away.
Devin Cooley, of all goaltenders out there, probably needs optimism more than most. The 28-year-old's road to the NHL was long and winding and filled with crappy teams, bouncing around the minor-league affiliates of the Predators, Sabres, and Sharks before getting the call-up for all of six games in San Jose in 2023–24. Without optimism, a guy with that career path probably still isn't playing professional hockey.
