ICE agent kills woman, DHS tells obvious, insane lies about it: defector.com/ice-agent-ki...

And they’ll say they can’t be held accountable because when they pulled the trigger they were afraid for their lives. Their lives which they spent serving an ideology of fear, a machine of fear, a holistic regime of fear. A culture-spanning engine of the ugliest and most dishonest fears there are.

You're not ready for the name of the energy transition specialist at Heat Pump Association UK

used to be cowards and dullards would fall back on saying 2 things can be true. but today I’ve seen people pushing 3 things… 4… Nick Kristof listed 5 simultaneously true things. we are experiencing an 8-blade razor epistemological situation here.

i am losing my mind over this listing that staged a condemned philly trap house with AI

finally reading The Fort Bragg Cartel and muttering “damn that’s crazy” every few pages

Against "slop" defector.com/against-slop

Won’t do a big thread of what I wrote this year because there’s not that much of it, but I am quite proud of this one

read the blog that is too hot for the prudes at bluesky

bluesky I am going to need you to grow the fuck up

The point in every Rian Johnson movie when one of his characters inevitably says something about "libtards" or "cucks" or "substack."

Good morning! For @defector.com, I wrote about what @rachelreidwrites.bsky.social's "Game Changers" books, and the resulting TV show, have meant to me as a lifelong hockey fan with an increasingly... complicated... relationship to the men's pro game.

Extremely funny to call the pope “holier-than-thou”

Oh come ON www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

🚨JOB ALERT🚨 Enjoy writing clever headlines and assigning one-of-a-kind stories? Have an eye for detail and a knack for turning rough copy into sparkling prose? We're looking for another editor to join our small but elite team covering New York City news and culture: hellgatenyc.com/hell-gate-is...

"I find that LLMs produce sentences that are smooth, glib, poreless, smiling, somewhat like a beluga whale. But every busted sentence written by a human is busted in its own way. Each of these sentences is unwittingly an act of resistance against the onrushing techno-homogenization of language."

Now seems like a swell time to point out that Frontline just released this excellent 11-minute mini-documentary about what happened inside CECOT.

Per NY Times’s Michael Grynbaum on X, this is Sharyn Alfonsi’s email to her “60 Minutes” colleagues in full:

Heated Rivalry managed to get me fully on board with the fantasy version of hockey players despite having grown up around actual hockey players. remarkable accomplishment

I made pancakes but they were just okay, so then I was sitting there, eating pancakes, thinking “you know what would hit right now? really good pancakes”

I read American Canto and I think it’s wonderful. haha jk

I read American Canto and I think it’s wonderful. haha jk

As the broader cultural and technological forces have insulated stars and squeezed criticism to the periphery — in sports, entertainment, music, etc. — it’s great to have a place like @defector.com that, while nominally a sports site, can be a home for all of it defector.com/maggie-nelso...

Maggie Nelson sputters and stalls in 'The Slicks' defector.com/maggie-nelso...

babe come look. they liquid death-ified retinol

The extreme, ideologically-driven, fast, furious, economically reckless decisions being made by New School president & provost are NOT the simple consequence of economic need. they're a malicious disaster and must be stopped... an assault on critical thought.

directions on this new dry shampoo telling me to “apply an appropriate amount of product.” okay great. I do have a follow-up question though

just a lovely piece of writing imo

The duality of Defector

what a joy to read @jackhanson.bsky.social on @tricialockwood.bsky.social

The first live Twitch stream I have ever tuned into, in my life

some significant part of this is just catch-all fear for “this is not the child I ordered” I think

cannot begin to tell you how happy I am to have stumbled upon the Paris building shared by metal music fans and the union for metal workers, what a delight

Heated Rivalry… finally some real CHEMISTRY on tv!!!

"Chat, are we cooked?" Zoomer fighter pilot Jayden 'The Grim Rizzler' Jones asks his TikTok live audience as the Gettysburg achieves target lock on him with an SM-2 missile.

“I've always been intrigued by how the philosophical gets treated in the quotidian, the everydayness of things,” Hartley said. “Just trying to shine a light on the everyday, the mundane course of our lives, that there has to be a place for philosophy.”

Fine: I wrote about Train Dreams defector.com/train-dreams...

“Bentley’s film aims to enfold you within the profundity of common experience, only to crush you beneath a redwood-scale slab of kitsch.” @robrubsam.bsky.social on Train Dreams

hey so that sounds like total shit. really fucking awful. bleak. soul and society destroying. world eating levels of bad.

this is the best review of the worst production of the musical i have, for whatever reason, staked my academic career to. thank you @sabs.bsky.social for nailing it!!! defector.com/chess-the-mu...

I do now desperately need to experience this for myself

I reviewed Chess, the musical about chess defector.com/chess-the-mu...

I wrote about the dirty, demeaning, absolutely booming business of turning something like a shitty bigoted college essay into a shitty public career as a bigot, and also estimated how old Marine Todd would be today. defector.com/the-conserva...

this is an accurate enough rap sheet but it still clings to the myth that biden's crimes stemmed from a botched effort to exert "leverage" over israel—rather than accepting the obvious reality, which is that biden was simply a willing and active participant in genocide

publisher ignoring my request for a review copy of American Canto… okay fair enough lol

a lot of people debating the merits of that dogshit essay meanwhile the girl’s mom is retweeting demands to ban all trans people from teaching at any level. it’s forest for the trees shit

the yawning gulf between idea and execution you must confront every time you buy a salad in a bag

one of the problems I have with Democrats (and other critics) labeling these "war crimes" is that it accepts the underlying claim that the people being murdered are enemy combatants. They're not! it's just murder!

An illuminating conversation with the man who was Willem Dafoe's stunt penis: defector.com/willem-dafoe...