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Saul “Canelo” Alvarez won another title over the weekend while making a ton of money and looking damn good in the ring. So why is it so easy to feel sorry for him?  The deserving Mexican legend got past a quick start from reigning WBC super middleweight champion Christian Mbilli, then pounded the essentially unknown underdog champ’s will to win out of him and took his belt via unanimous decision on Saturday in front of a disinterested crowd in a small arena in Riyadh. The start of the fight was

SAN FRANCISCO — Every championship is different, though they're all composed of the same emotional materials. A champion is supposed to have overcome circumstances, smelting the raw materials of loss and pain into a durable alloy of resolve. For fanbases, titles are redemptive, victory transmuting heartbreak into joy. The form can accommodate many particularities, but whatever the preceding heartbreak, a championship's message is always the same: It was all worth it. This template breaks down i

Everyone in Detroit has a responsibility to keep Haley Stevens away from the Gordie Howe Bridge today, because at the rate she's going, she'll burn that one, too. An outgoing House rep and failed Democratic candidate for Senate who lost to Abdul El-Sayed in a hotly contested Michigan primary earlier this year, Stevens has made the news cycle in the lead-up to Tuesday's general election all about her. While she initially absorbed her August primary defeat without entering into a gigantic public m

It's silly to pretend that some otherworldly deity is determining the fates of your favorite sports teams, but what else am I supposed to believe when Lamar Jackson, who had been sidelined with a vaguely described ankle sprain for three games, finally makes it back on the field against the Buffalo Bills on Sunday, only to immediately jam his thumb and leave after one play on offense? The Baltimore Ravens quarterback is most likely out for the rest of the season, as the injury to his throwing han

It's not particularly surprising to look at the top of the table in the Premier League and see Arsenal and Manchester City. Aside from Liverpool's 2024-25 title-winning campaign, those two sides have dominated the last half decade in England's top flight, and though City has a pending punishment that might shoot them down the pyramid, it's safe to say that these are the two best teams in the best league. Arsenal and City have another thing in common, though, besides their lofty spots on the tabl

This year, Kimi Antonelli got lucky. Antonelli drives the fastest car on the grid. He is young—very recently a teenager, even; he turned 20 in August—and that means when faced with an entirely new and controversial ruleset, he didn't have years of prior programming to overcome. Despite his youth, Antonelli has a good sense of narrative satisfaction. This Sunday, during the Mexican Grand Prix, he made sure to snag a podium place in the race where he became the youngest-ever Formula 1 driver to wi

There is a sign outside the NHL league offices in New York and Toronto (yep, there are two of them) stolen from construction sites that reads: "[Number Of] Days Since The Last Trade Demand." The current number is 3, and the latest is the strangest so far. It came from Tampa's notoriously taciturn star Nikita Kucherov, who had told his teammates on a team flight that he 1) would not re-sign with the Lightning next summer, 2) wants to be traded somewhere else, and 3) intends to keep playing for t

Our Monday crossword is the best, and don't get it twisted. This week's puzzle was constructed by Vik Shirvaikar, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Vik is a data scientist, weekend soccer referee, and long-suffering Cowboys fan from the Dallas area. 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. 

Elisabetta Palagi, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Pisa, had sent her team of research students to Ethiopia to study geladas, monkeys whose hearts appear to gleam out of their chests. But as her students watched the geladas munch on a grassy plateau alongside other grazing animals, they noticed a peculiar interaction between two other animals. A bull approached a male donkey and mounted him. This behavior did not seem to bother the donkey. The donkey did not kick him or otherwise

There are two recurring trans women named Carolina in Sloane Murphy's short story collection, Shut Up, I Love You, I'll Call You Tomorrow. One's nicknamed North, and the other's nicknamed South, but nobody can seem to keep track of which is which. "Most of the time she just responds when people call her South," one of the stories says about North, who's the elder of the two. "At least no one was calling her Old Carolina." This is just one of the details in Murphy's debut that reminded me of the

It's wise to never expect too much from a clash between two NFC South teams. They tend to be a form of stultifying anti-entertainment, and so Sunday's game between the Atlanta Falcons and Tampa Bay Buccaneers would normally be an easy skip. The NFC South has felt a little different this year, though, and not because any of its teams are playing particularly good football. What they have been doing is playing weird, entertaining football, and today the Bucs and Falcons played what might end up be

If one thing's been made clear through the last decade or so of national politics, it's that there are John Fettermans hiding in plain sight throughout the Democratic Party. The latest member to don the Mantle Of The Oaf is Haley Stevens, who lost her primary race for a Senate seat to Abdul El-Sayed this summer. Now, a few days before the general election, she has endorsed El-Sayed's Republican opponent, Mike Rogers. Stevens appeared Sunday morning with Rogers at a church service in Detroit. Wh

SAN FRANCISCO — What now? Any ideas? The Golden State Valkyries trailed the Atlanta Dream by six at halftime, and every point in this series felt like a hundred. The Valks will tell you theirs is an “egoless” team, one on which no one is above a scramble for a loose ball or a box-out. Zero All-WNBA players. Zero MVPs. The concept of “MV” wouldn’t even sit right with them. That spirit carried them far in the regular season, kept them fresh for the postseason, and made them nimble enough to handle

On Friday, the Hobart/Lawrence Police Department released a batch of records related to Packers running back Josh Jacobs's domestic violence arrest in May. The records reveal that while police were investigating the May incident, they were contacted by three other women who said Jacobs abused them in the past. One document describes a phone conversation a police investigator had with a woman, who said she felt compelled to contact police after learning about the details of Jacobs's May arrest.

Following this week's news of Patrick Stewart's death, the Defector staff convened to remember some of our favorite performances by him. The Simpsons Patrick Stewart is one of our most recognizable forces in pop culture: the kind of star who could be identified just by his profile, a rare feat of notoriety in any era. Every bit of him is iconic, but it’s his voice that truly makes him the performer he was. It's only right, then, that he became a memorable voice actor in animated work.

There are few joys in sports that can truly exceed a game in which both coaches are in danger of getting fired, and no place does that game better than England. There are no distractions that can cause the fevered punditocracy to avert its eyes from the desperate hope that one (or, in the most orgiastic case, both) gets smoked right after the game. This is possible because a dissatisfying draw can enrage both fan bases equally, in the way that Giants-Commanders sickened the souls of football fan

During the first quarter of Thursday's game between the equally winless Pelicans and Kings, Sacramento rookie Darius Acuff Jr. ran the length of the floor in transition and punched home a sweeping dunk past a late trail from Jeremiah Fears and a halfhearted contest from Trey Murphy III. It was an amazing play, which is why Acuff took a second to flex and mean-mug for the dozens of fans in New Orleans. It was also a live play, and as Acuff preened, the Pelicans ran back and Murphy got an easy dun

Welcome to the Defector College Football Watch Guide, where Israel Daramola and Ray Ratto will tell you which of the weekend’s college football games are worth giving a crap about. Ray: Saturday is Halloween, and the schedule is notably threadbare for showdown games; only two games this weekend are between nationally ranked teams, and a bunch more are showdowns involving 4-3 programs. So go ahead, dress up, go to a party, and absentmindedly house a bunch of Reese's peanut butter cups in your ho

Aldous Huxley likened the exorcism of the prioress Jeanne des Anges to “a rape in a public lavatory.” It was this horrific description that director Ken Russell shared with production designer Derek Jarman before they set out to tell that story. Russell wanted to capture the spirit of Huxley’s nonfiction book, The Devils of Loudun, about the 17th-century incident in which a convent of nuns claimed possession, exhibiting wild and lewd behavior, leading to the sorcery conviction and execution of t

Russia, which has been functionally banned from international hockey for more than four years, must be allowed to return to international events starting in December in Canada. That's the ruling today by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, the highest sport court in the land. But there's a whole lot still unsettled, including a looming shitshow at next year's World Championships. The International Ice Hockey Federation banned the Russian member association in February 2022, as did almost every