In October 2024, a few months before _Heated Rivalry_ was greenlit by studio producers in Canada, Amazon Prime Video announced that it was adapting the popular hockey romance book series _Off Campus_. Set at a fictional Ivy League school called “Briar University,” author Elle Kennedy's series follows four rakish men’s hockey players on the Briar U team as they meet the women who convince them to…
Everything about this World Cup is designed to make you hate it. If you live here and you’re a soccer fan, tickets to games are a ripoff, fan zones are built to give you heatstroke, and Fox Sports’ soccer coverage is an unbroken insult to human intelligence. If you’re a local who’s not really into soccer but wants to be part of the fun, you’ll need to work hard to discover pockets of the host…
Welcome back to Make It Nice, Defector’s best interior design advice column. Today we have a bathroom color dilemma, a backyard makeover, and someone wondering if they’re DIYing too close to the sun.
GB asks:
I own an older townhouse type of condo in the southeast. So, heat and humidity are a foundational concern for the topic I'm going to get into. I've lived here about 3 years, and the room…
The morning of her first-round match at Roland-Garros, Marta Kostyuk learned that a Russian missile attack had killed four people in her native Kyiv, Ukraine, dangerously near her parents' house. "Most of the morning I felt sick … if it was 100 meters closer, I probably wouldn’t have a mom and a sister today," Kostyuk said after her comfortable win against Russian-born Oksana Selekhmeteva.…
I was introduced to the work of Kane Parsons via my YouTube algorithm. His first Backrooms video, “The Backrooms (Found Footage)”, came up on my homepage the week he uploaded it in early 2022. I remember it well because the video—impressive on its own for being slick, professional, and, crucially, scary—quickly racked up views over the course of a few days. I wasn’t familiar with the Backrooms…
There are many ways to measure the success of an expansion team. Are they filling stadiums? Do local fans seem engaged? Do they have an identity on the field? And, of course: Are they any good?
It’s generally wise to keep expectations for new sides relatively low. Since 2021, only two of the NWSL’s six expansion teams have made the playoffs—San Diego Wave in 2022 and Bay FC in 2024—and the rest…
The specifics are a little difficult to pin down, but that’s true of most things surrounding novelist, filmmaker, and playwright Missouri Williams. Here are the facts I’ve been able to piece together: At some point in her young adulthood, Williams began to have seizures. In a 2025 interview with TriQuarterly, Williams said that the episodes began after she had moved to “a new city with a new…
The American military has always maintained a relatively strong grip on its public perception. Its most essential message—internally and externally, during peace time and active conflict, under presidents Republican and Democratic—is the necessity of its sprawling, expensive, and secretive imperial apparatus as a means of defending the nation and the very concept of freedom. It doesn’t hurt that…
LAVAL, QUEBEC — I wasn’t close enough to hear Laura Stacey’s screams last Thursday, but I saw her wife’s panic clear as day. “When one of my teammates gets caught, I get fired up,” Marie-Philip Poulin told LSTW last year. “But when it’s Laura, my heart drops. I want to react and it’s hard not to, but I can’t.”
That Poulin was reacting—bending over her wife who laid crumpled on the ice,…
“Autobiography,” the critic John Berger said, “begins with a sense of being alone. It’s an orphan form.” Berger wrote these words weeks after the death of his mother, but he was speaking generally, about the project of remembrance which so many artists take up over the course of their lives. That loneliness—that orphanhood—is a matter of separation, a gap between the self as subject and author.…
_“Grogu is dead. Grogu remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the…
Like the universe itself, the United States tax code is ever-expanding, and no one can claim to know its exact size. There are statutes enacted by Congress; implementing regulations issued by the Treasury Department; rules from the Internal Revenue Service explaining how other rules apply to specific circumstances; and a patchwork of court decisions that may or may not supersede everything else,…
Patrick Radden Keefe is interested in blockbuster stories. He once told _The New Yorker_ ’s _Critics at Large_ podcast that he wasn’t a fan of “true crime.” Instead, he often writes about fraud, gangsters, scammers, and high-powered lawyers. He’s the bad boy at the legacy magazine, the Anthony Bourdain of journalism, whom he coincidentally profiled in 2017, a year before his death. In another…
LAVAL, QUEBEC — The crowd at Place Bell for Game 1 was wound tight, like a guitar string on the brink of snapping. Our Montreal Victoire, who had never won more than one game in a playoff series, let alone a series itself, were set to face the Minnesota Frost, the only team who has ever won the Walter Cup, in the PWHL semifinals. It felt like everybody in the arena was holding their breath,…
It’s almost quaint to read now, but author Lauren Weisberger spent the majority of her 2003 press tour for the release of _The Devil Wears Prada_ trying to distance it from its obvious source material. “So much of the book is composed of stories from my friends,” she told _Publishers Weekly_ at the time. “A lot of my girlfriends ended up in publishing and in magazines, or doing fashion PR or…
In the summer of 2024, during the WNBA’s Olympic break, several Atlanta Dream players who weren’t competing in Paris had gathered for a midseason training camp of sorts. Anyone watching would have seen what looked like a typical 3-on-3 scrimmage. In reality, it was anything but. The Dream weren’t playing in any ordinary gym, but rather in what might be the world’s most advanced basketball…
If you asked philosophers what the most mysterious thing about the mind is, most of them would say: consciousness. It's just a _really weird_ thing. An exhaustive physical description of a brain state doesn't obviously tell us anything about why that state would be associated with the experience of tasting strawberry rather than the experience of sneezing. What is it about _that_ physical state…
When the bell rang to signal the 10th round of the Fabio Wardley-Daniel Dubois heavyweight fight for the WBO world title, a bloodied Wardley rose from his stool and walked off-balance to center ring, as if taking his first steps. The night began well for him: He fired an overhand right that sent Dubois clattering to the floor just 12 seconds in, then forced Dubois to take a knee in round three…
Gaza is the compass. These words—emblazoned on large banners at the 2025 People's Conference For Palestine in Detroit, and frequently invoked by comrades in the Palestinian Youth Movement at speeches and rallies—contain a truth with which so much of the world has yet to reckon, though it will sweep them along regardless.
In other words, Gaza is the place—and the event—in reference to which we…
_This story is brought to you by_ Ravenous_, a worker-owned food culture publication launching today! Together, they’re putting the bite back into food journalism with incisive reporting like this story you’re about to read, plus all the cultural criticism, silly blogs, and reporting you can eat—all without the influence of big-money investors or generative AI (yuck). If that sounds delicious to…
Jules Boykoff loves soccer. He loves the feeling of the ball at his feet, he loves the rush of cheering on the Portland Timbers at the fortress that is Providence Park, and he loves the knowing hum that goes around a stadium when a player delivers a little moment of sublimity that isn't flashy enough to make the highlight reel. "It's a collective recognition of the tiny acts of soccer…
Welcome back to Make It Nice, Defector's best interior design advice column. Today, we have two home office cleanup situations and a delightful bird-related request.
Selene asks:
I work from home at a computer job and am a hobbyist musician. My partner, who lives with me, has done a phenomenal job making the rest of our 2-bedroom look very cute, cozy, and personal. My office, however, still…
Converts can often seem like the only really religious people around. They tend to take their faith up, whatever it may be, with enthusiasm and vigor and, most importantly, without embarrassment; the cliché of the "zealotry of the convert" is well known even beyond the confines of institutional or traditional belief. No shrug of ambivalence for the initiate. But then, that's what makes them…
The novelist Walter Tevis described his 1963 sci-fi novel _The Man Who Fell to Earth_ , obliquely inspired by his struggles with alcoholism, as “disguised autobiography.” It had been optioned at least three times before attracting the attention of director Nicolas Roeg, who saw it as a more spiritual story of alienation. Roeg initially wanted the main character, an extraterrestrial inventor, to…
ROCKFORD, Ill. — Every April, more than 250 athletes representing over 50 schools descend on a third-tier city to play the National Collegiate Table Tennis Association (NCTTA) National Championships. This year, Nationals took place in Rockford's UW Health Sports Factory, a concrete hangar wedged between the Rock River and a lifeless train track. Inside, state-of-the-art cameras swiveled above…
Steve Javie can’t recall much from the actual game itself, but he’ll always remember what happened later that night.
It was Javie’s first NBA Finals game in 1995, always a huge deal for an up-and-coming referee. Several of his family members were in the crowd. Finals games back then started at 9:00 p.m. Eastern; Javie and his fellow refs didn’t leave the arena until the wee hours of the morning.…
What will it take to be fulfilled by life? Love, perhaps, or community, power, or professional success. At different points in my life I believed that having my work published would make me happy, or leaving the country, going back to school, getting a literary agent. I thought a new girlfriend might do it, or a new apartment. Some of these I achieved; some I’ve yet to; one or two, thankfully,…
Lily Yohannes plays soccer with an efficiency that would come off as mechanical if she didn't have the vision of an artist, resulting in some of the most beautiful dribbling sequences and long through balls that have ever graced a pitch. Indeed, the 18-year-old OL Lyonnes star is the USWNT's best midfield prospect in a decade.
Considering she shot into the elite echelons of soccer at such a…
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 man with a casual, even careless manner may not seem to have what it takes to see justice done, but being underestimated is essential to his process. If you’re thinking, “Yes, I already watched…
PHILADELPHIA — On the afternoon of April 9, 2026, partisans of the Alberta separatist movement—who rally for the landlocked province’s secession from the broader, united commonwealth of Canada, and the establishment of a self-sufficient petrostate bankrolled by its ample oil, gas and mineral reserves—scored a major endorsement.
“I officially RECOGNIZE the NEW INDEPENDENT NATION of ALBERTA,”…