Sisi is a Volvo Ocean 65 racing sailboat. She is fast as hell and built for sickos. She is not a comfortable luxury yacht, I assure you. Sisi is a frightening, angry, 72-foot, 12-ton sea monster.  Sis...

Welcome back to Minor Dilemmas, where a member of Defector’s Parents Council will answer your questions on surviving family life. Have a question? Email us at minordilemmas@defector.com. This week, Gi...

YouTube video by The Daily Show

Following this week’s news that the brilliant writer Annie Dillard has died at age 81, some Defector staffers wrote about what her work and example have meant to them. Much is made of Dillard’s genius...

The quality of the average tennis broadcast has skyrocketed in recent years. Analysts assume far more curiosity and intelligence on the viewer’s part than I can ever remember, and they’re no longer li...

It’s being shouted from all corners: The U.S. Open has become an overcrowded, overpriced circus awash in influencers, aspirational influencers, corporate stooges, drunken buffoons, brand activations, ...

Stefanos Tsitsipas finds his form at the US Open.

FLUSHING, N.Y. — One set into the first-round match, I wondered when the Gael Monfils show would begin. Tuesday was his 40th birthday, and this could be his last-ever match at a Slam—didn’t he want to...

Arthur Ashe Stadium might be the worst viewing experience in all of major sports.

As Lauren Theisen pointed out last month, the ongoing, abstracted debate about trans inclusion in sports uses almost no proper nouns and lots of hypotheticals. Back in the late 1970s, there was a very...

Stan Wawrinka gets a wild card into the US Open.

Stan Wawrinka gets a wild card into the US Open.

A couple of blocks from my office is a steep hill. Sometimes at lunch I go out into the sun and walk up the hill. The hill is very California: asphalt so newly laid that it looks AI generated; a handf...

If in the future my daughter develops some kind of Pavlovian response to the musical stylings of Pat McAfee, I’ll blame the editors who “assigned” this review. But this outcome is unlikely. I almost w...

Take capelin, a small silvery fish in the smelt family. Now add salt. Then throw those two ingredients in 110 vats, each of them about 10 feet tall, and let them sit in a defunct factory for over two ...

If you needed a one-person vehicle to explain all that has changed about pro basketball in the 21st century, Russell Westbrook might be your best option for such an exercise.

It’s hard to imagine now—like imagining an era when man did not know the sun was huge, hot, and bright—but there was a time when we did not yet understand Russell Westbrook as a basketball player. Slo...

It’s hard to imagine now—like imagining an era when man did not know the sun was huge, hot, and bright—but there was a time when we did not yet understand Russell Westbrook as a basketball player. Slo...