Maybe you have heard of Roko’s Basilisk. This is a thought experiment, for lack of a better term, popular among a certain set: hyper-rationalists, futurists, effective altruists. Tech-industry guys. Y...

San Francisco Giants pitching prospect brings a notable nickname and "burning desire to beat you," according to his former coach.

Nobody has seen Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell in public in a while. Is that because the 84-year-old former majority leader is dead? Well now, that is an interesting question. What is death? A man w...

Things come out of Donald Trump’s mouth, then just keep on coming out of it. If he says something once, he will say it again, primarily to reinforce how powerfully and unprecedentedly successful he wa...

Beneath soaring ceilings, in a small, darkly painted gallery off the main hall of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, two immense sunflower paintings hang side by side. The paintings are bigger than I exp...

If everyone in the United States weren’t living downstream from its consequences, it would be a pretty good tragic flaw that Donald Trump wants more than anything to be seen as a brilliant man who has...

The Defector basketball chat was captivated by a sequence of artfully stage-lit photos in Game 1 of the Knicks-Sixers playoff series at Madison Square Garden. They were the work of Nathaniel S. Butler...

It’s Los Angeles in the 1970s. Cars are as long as boats. Beachside tacos are practically free. The sun glares through chunky brown fog, but does nothing to prevent assorted bad acts from happening. A...

The President of the United States, Donald Trump, is a deranged old pervert whose brain, long since sodden and pitted from a lifetime of indulgence and Diet Coke, is foaming out of his ears. Over the ...

It was a lovely day above the Moon. The Artemis astronauts did some science, took lots of pictures, didn’t die or get replaced by bodysnatchers, and perhaps most importantly, made me bawl a couple of ...

For as reassuring as it may be to know you have a world-spanning team of geniuses overseeing your well-being, the Artemis crew has to get a little annoyed by mission control sometimes, right? They’re ...

You could almost feel for Anna, the tedious nitwit described in the opening paragraphs of “The Young Women Leaving the New Right,” a New York magazine feature by the writer Sam Adler-Bell. Tormented b...

Israel and the United States launched a joint attack on Iran Saturday morning, bombing several cities in the country. As a result, Iran Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed, his death conf...

If you walked down Colorado Boulevard in the Eagle Rock neighborhood of Los Angeles at some point in the past three years, you might have noticed a modest, pueblo-style beige building with “PHOTO” pai...

To the uninitiated, luge itself might seem a silly sport, given that the average person might guess it mostly consists of holding onto a sled real tight as it goes fast down the ice. Of course, this o...

To ski jump is to momentarily become a god. The track is narrow and slick, and the athletes plummet down the sloped hill at almost 60 mph. They leave the track and take up, up, up into the sky, where ...

Dan McQuade, our friend and colleague, died this week at the age of 43. He is survived by his wife and young son. At the end of 2024, Dan was diagnosed with neuroendocrine cancer. The news of his diag...

On Saturday in Minneapolis, federal agents surrounded 37-year-old Veterans Affairs intensive care nurse Alex Jeffrey Pretti, who’d been filming them in the street with his phone camera as they conduct...

We're all disposable to Trump, but as the people of Minnesota have shown, we can't wait for someone else to stop his ethnic cleansing campaign.

In the winter of 1977, Sports Illustrated reporter Ray Kennedy ventured into the Riverside Table Tennis club at 96th and Broadway. It was a dingy joint with leaky pipes, below street level, beneath a ...