2025-11-25 01:07:35
If current trends continue, historians will look back on Nov. 2, 2025, with consternation and confusion. Entire careers of PhD candidates at major universities will be devoted to the mystery of this one day. There will be theses and dissertations, essays and thinkpieces, all searching for an answer to the confounding question: "How did J.J. McCarthy beat the Lions?"
In his comeback from a Week 2 ankle sprain that had forced the Vikings to turn to a broken-down Carson Wentz, the 10th pick in the 2024 draft quarterbacked Minnesota to a 27-24 road win over a tough division rival, lifting the team's record to 4-4. In the three weeks since, including Sunday's 23-6 steamrolling by the Packers, McCarthy has looked less and less like a viable NFL starter. And with the Vikings now all but guaranteed to miss the playoffs after a 14-3 campaign last year, each wrong step by McCarthy makes Minnesota's future less settled in 2026 and beyond.
2025-11-25 00:10:09
This week's puzzle was constructed by Evan Mulvihill and Rafael Musa, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Evan is a cruciverbalist living in San Francisco, Calif. His crosswords have been published by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times. He mainly creates fun, modern, highly homoseggsual themeless puzzles that attempt to cast a gimlet eye on the zeitgeist (but often fail). When he's not working as a pharmacist at San Francisco General Hospital, he enjoys attending gay ski weeks, "doing it live," and creating Spotify playlists with titles like "Extra Chill Vibes ✨ONLY✨." He publishes indie puzzles and crossword reviews on his blog, BossWords. Rafa lives in San Francisco with his cat Georgia.
Defector crosswords, launched in partnership with our friends at AVCX, run every Monday. If you’re interested in submitting a puzzle to us, you can read our guidelines HERE. Note that we're pausing open submissions until Dec. 1. The AVCX, an independent puzzles and games outlet, is running a subscription drive this fall: We'd love for you to subscribe, or to sample the good with a two-month free trial. With an AVCX subscription, you get access to weekly themed and themeless crosswords, minis, cryptics, and trivia, by email or in your favorite app. We have no corporate overlord, and we publish top-flight stuff only. We also pay our people fairly, always. Check us out.
2025-11-25 00:00:09
This article has been adapted from a piece published Nov. 16 on the author's Substack page.
Last week, after masked settlers torched a mosque in Salfit, set fire to Palestinian trucks in Huwara, and beat farmers bloody during what the U.N. calls the worst olive harvest for settler violence across the West Bank since it began keeping track in 2006, things finally got bad enough that Israeli authorities felt compelled to issue strongly worded statements.
2025-11-24 23:38:56
Sam Noakes walked to the ring in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on Saturday with a wholesome smile on his face and opera music blaring. I wondered why. He was on his way to fight Abdullah Mason to kick off the “Ring IV” main card, the latest attempt to drum up interest in Saudi tourism and whitewash the country’s image with some boxing fights. Mason is a prodigious 21-year-old with fast feet, faster hands, and a lust for knockouts. His only vulnerability is that this latter trait can lead him to abandon his very capable defense in his quest for blood. Plenty of his opponents can find his chin with a good shot—Yohan Vasquez even decked him twice in the first round of their 2024 bout—before Mason separates them from their consciousness. If Mason ever loses, it will probably be by getting knocked the fuck out himself, so you may want to follow his career.
Anyway, Mason hurt Noakes in what felt like every single round. In the third, their heads collided hard, opening a gash next to Noakes’s left eye. What was a happy, unmarked face 15 minutes earlier turned red, along with both fighters’ trunks and plenty of the ring apron. Mason put himself in the line of fire enough that Noakes hurt him too, though not as badly, and that gave him hope. In the eighth round, Mason landed a body shot with such force that everybody in the arena went briefly silent, exhaling along with an agonized Noakes. But every time it looked like Noakes would break, his body reasserted its strength and stayed up. He somehow made the final bell, losing by unanimous decision. Boxing fans will love him forever for the bravery of the performance alone. As he hugged Mason, Noakes smiled again and blood flowed into his open mouth.
2025-11-24 22:59:44
So let's investigate the blood-spattered scene of the crime, and by "crime" we mean the inevitable firing of Raiders offensive coordinator Chip Kelly, for which the word "crime" is probably misplaced.
We know the why, but what about the when? Did Pete Carroll decide to do it at halftime of the Raiders' latest failure against the equally failure-adept Cleveland Browns, when the Pirates With The Swords Through Their Heads were already losing 14-3 and quarterback Geno Smith had been sacked five times? Did it come after the first possession of the second half, when the only plays in Cleveland territory were two more sacks and a run for zero yards? Did it come immediately after the game ended, a 24-10 loss that was significantly grimmer than anyone could have imagined, even though the two teams entered the game with a combined record of 4-16?
2025-11-24 22:22:16
I've always wondered what it must feel like for injured players who are forced to sit at home and watch their crappy teams. Do they suffer as much as the rest of us? Do they get mad and pissed? Do they look out their window at the sunny day they could be enjoying and ask themselves, "What the hell am I doing with my life?"
New York Giants wide receiver Malik Nabers, currently laid up with a torn ACL, brought us an answer to those questions on Sunday: Yeah, kinda. Shortly after the Giants' 34-27 overtime loss to the Detroit Lions, Nabers posted and then deleted the following thoughts:
