In celebration of Defector’s fifth birthday, a bunch of staffers have selected their favorite Defector blogs. If you’re only just now becoming familiar with the site, consider this something like a non-exhaustive syllabus that will get you up to speed. If you’ve been reading for a while, feel free to share your own selection in the comments.
At The Turtle Club In The Shadow Of 9/11, by Brian Feldman
In my heart of hearts, I believe the best use of everybody’s time on the internet is to treat very stupid things very seriously. This piece raises that to the second power: It takes an urban legend that was already about seriousness within stupidity, and applies investigative rigor to find the satisfying, definitive truth. A perfect capital-B Blog. – Barry Petchesky
My White Whale Is The Story Of An MLB Veteran Paying His Teammates To Get Vaccinated, by Kalyn Kahler
Our insane pal Kalyn Kahler wrote some of my favorite Defector blogs when she worked here, like her feature on how NFL teams scout referees and her investigation into nepotism in NFL coaching. But I will always treasure Kalyn’s lone foray into baseblogging: her dogged quest to confirm a rumor she heard about an MLB star who paid his teammates to get vaccinated. It’s got gossip, uncooperative PR guys, and a Ritz-Carlton stakeout. The fact that we flew Kalyn to [REDACTED CITY] so she could sniff around [REDACTED TEAM]’s Triple-A affiliate for leads makes me very proud to work here. – Maitreyi Anantharaman
After The Sacred Landslide, by David Roth
There are hundreds of blogs on Defector since “After the Sacred Landslide” by David Roth that have looked at something awful in this world, called it awful, and contextualized why it was awful. But because “After the Sacred Landslide” was one of the first that I remember to do this kind of pointing, it stays with me. Though it is a miserable beat, Roth’s ability to write about how Donald Trump does things, without falling into the smarmy bullshit so many politics writers get mired in, will always amaze me. I come back to this piece over and over again for inspiration, and to remember that there’s always value in just describing the bad shit that’s happening, as it’s happening. – Kelsey McKinney
Nobody Wants Serena Williams To Lose, by Giri Nathan
For a big retrospective like this, it’s tempting to pick an article that looks the most like capital-R Reporting—a big feature with a sweeping intro, pretty art, and a bunch of interviews. We’ve certainly done those, but my favorite genre of reported Defector blog is “Go to a place, then share what it was like to be there.” Given access to one of the most highly anticipated American tennis matches ever, Giri let us all tag along as he hopped from seat to seat in Arthur Ashe Stadium while Serena Williams played in the second round of her final U.S. Open.
This blog has tension, beauty, and hilarity, showcasing Giri’s eye for memorable detail and his expert ability to tell the story of a tennis match. The stadium crowd’s noise “feels like a pool cue going through my right ear and out the left.” Serena serves as “her skirt kicks up and the 400 embedded diamonds in her outfit catch the floodlights.” There’s a man in the crowd “whose stubble is flinging Heineken residue onto my right knee.” And after all these glorious images and similes, he wrote an X-ray of a paragraph on one particular point that could have stood up if it were published just on its own.
Giri went on to do a longer, zoomed-out look at Serena’s career a few days later, and that piece is brilliant, too. But after five years of Defector, I still have such a soft spot for morning-after blogging that can concisely illuminate the moments of an event that most stood out to the writer. All the eyes of the tennis world were on Serena as she fought her way to victory, but none of us saw it quite like Giri did. – Lauren Theisen
Bearing Witness To Gaza’s Grief Shouldn’t Feel Like A Radical Act, by Samer Kalaf
I have been in awe of all of Samer’s consistently excellent coverage of genocide in Gaza—blogs that are succinct yet grounded in broad swaths of history, uncompromising yet accessible, and unprecedented in the media landscape for stating plainly Israel’s moral atrocity. So I wanted to highlight this particular blog as an exemplar of all of these qualities. The headline names the quandary that many of us in the U.S. are feeling as we try to square the endless footage of dead and dying people in Gaza with the sadistic goals of the U.S. government and, by extension, the mainstream media. Samer writes with a moral clarity that is totally absent in major publications outside of an occasional missive in the opinion section. He has no easy answers for what we as digital witnesses and bystanders can do differently in our attempts to offer solidarity, because there are no easy answers. But the questions he asks are not just necessary but deeply human, as we continue to bear witness to the endless and ongoing bloodshed. This blog, and all our blogs on Gaza, make me so proud to work for Defector—that we are a publication that will state the obvious when no one else will, and that we are a publication firmly on the side of life. – Sabrina Imbler
Flaco Never Escaped, by Barry Petchesky
The highest praise I can direct toward this blog, concerning the life and death of folk hero Flaco the owl, is that it’s both deeply sad—it made me cry on first reading, and then again this week—and, simultaneously, exhilarating. The former comes from its subject matter and the understated but earnest grief in Barry’s writing. The latter comes from the blog’s clear-eyed honesty, from the author’s determination to say something true and important about both Flaco and the world Flaco inhabited, and from his having cleared that bar so cleanly, without straining for pathos or burdening the dead owl with more meaning or story than he could bear. It’s a feat of seeing, I think: of getting out of one’s own way and perceiving a story’s natural shape and boundaries. That’s hard and can’t be faked, and Barry is a master of it (don’t tell him I said that). Its result is something like an act of grace: that a life, any life, even an owl’s life, would get a rich and thoughtful appreciation at its end. That makes me happy. – Albert Burneko
Samer Recognized A Fart Online, by Defector Staff
I’m not sure what my actual all-time favorite Defector blog is. I’m honestly not even sure how to think about this. According to our CMS backend, Defector has published more than 12,000 blogs. When people talk about not being able to conceive of the vastness of space, that’s how I feel about the number 12,000. Am I supposed to have a mental catalogue of 12,000 blogs? This is bullshit.
Anyway, a blog that comes to mind when I think of blogs that I have enjoyed a lot is “Samer Recognized A Fart Online.” It was a great day at Defector, because we were all laughing very hard, and then there was a blog, and we all laughed very hard all over again. Yes, choosing this blog gets me out of the uncomfortable task of rewarding this prestige to any single individual, although I think Barry came up with the headline and obviously Samer deserves a lot of admiration for having recognized the fart online. And I think pretty often about Giri’s proposed headline: “It’s Unimpressive That I Recognized An Online Fart As I Would The Voice Of My Grandmother.”
I’m glad we get to do shit like this. I also feel an overpowering, almost knee-wobbling awareness of my own good fortune, that I get to hang around these freaks and benefit from their powers of fart-recognition and also fart-recognition-blog-headline-creation. It’s inspiring, if not exactly something to discuss at back-to-school night. – Chris Thompson
The Ghosts Of New Atheism Still Haunt Us, by Erik Baker
Last year, Tom reached out to ask if I wanted to guest-edit the site for a week while everyone was at a staff retreat. I said yes immediately, because I had been jealous of the stuff Defector was doing for years, and I really needed the money. I got to publish an essay on the underexamined legacy of New Atheism that I had been wanting to run for ages. I had a great time. But I had a deep suspicion that at the end of that week, I was going to feel terribly sad that I couldn’t show up again on Monday to keep working at Defector. I was right, and I did, but luckily that feeling didn’t last for too long. – Brandy Jensen
What Kind Of Future Does De-Extinction Promise?, by Sabrina Imbler
Some of this is just me playing to type, but there’s a mournful quality to a lot of my favorite Defector stories. Not just mournful meaning “sad,” but in the way that mourning actually is and feels: a sense of understanding something big, strange, and unsettling, over time. For me, writing one of these posts starts with something like that: some bit of online uncanniness, free-market vandalism or governmental horror, and then the work of doing it more or less amounts to figuring out what any of it might mean. I can’t speak to Sabs’ process on this remarkable story about the venture-backed attempt to turn “de-extinction” into both a reality and a business, but beyond the typically forceful writing and humane perspective that animates so many of their blogs, what I found so thrilling and sad about it is how legible that work is in the story itself. The way it acknowledges what is thrilling and odious about the work, and how it contextualizes this otherwise dopey technology in ways that the business cretins behind it refuse to do—of course it’s mournful, because it is about a very fraught future, but it is also bracing for how clearly it reasons through and reckons with everything that extinction implies. – David Roth
The Universe Came To Us, by Barry Petchesky
Every time our own Barry Petchesky publishes something he’s written about outer space, I get excited. That’s because Barry is quietly one of the best space writers working today. “The Universe Came To Us” is perhaps the foremost example of that. The peg here was that the first image taken by the Webb Telescope had been released to the public. From that bit of news, Barry was able to recount the history of the universe and where we, as mere humans, fit into the story of it. The best science writing makes the technical details accessible to laypeople while, at the same time, marveling at the wonder of it. Carl Sagan remains the defining example of this. But Barry’s pretty fucking good at it, too. He’s one of the poets we need to be sending out there when the chance arises. – Drew Magary
When The Cherries Run Out, by Kelsey McKinney
I won’t apologize for my bias, because I love this website, but I think that Defector did a lot of great writing during the pandemic. It was, and still is in many ways, a hard time, and during hard times, I turn to other people’s thoughts to make the hard times more palatable.
Kelsey’s cherries blog is one such piece of writing that I think about and return to quite often. What starts as a lovely hobby blog—”I love cherries, and I have found a way to have cherries all the time!”—turns into something deeper, sadder, and also more hopeful. I think Kelsey is particularly skilled at this type of writing, and I leave the cherries blog every time feeling refreshed and optimistic, because the cherries always return. I don’t even like cherries that much! But as a fellow winter struggler, I can always relate to the feeling of arriving at the warmth of spring, whether it’s for cherries or going outdoors without throwing on layer upon layer. I’m sure I will re-read the cherries blog deep into the January frosts, when the world feels so cruel and unforgiving, if only to remind myself, as Kelsey did in 2021, that the winter will end, and the cherries will be there to welcome us back. – Luis Paez-Pumar
Find A Job You Enjoy, And You’ll Never Have A Day Off In Your Life, by Maitreyi Anantharaman
It’s difficult to pick just one piece of writing from the past five years of Defector. (Without looking at the other entries, I’m guessing at least a few mentioned that difficulty. Or maybe they smartly edited that part out, and I look like a fool here.) There are a bunch of Defector blogs from all over the masthead that I revisit from time to time, not just because they’re excellent but because I like to reexamine and draw lessons from their arguments and particular turns of phrase. One of them is a 2024 essay from Maitreyi that includes Studs Terkel, Georgia Cloepfil’s book The Striker and the Clock, and why so few athletes quit while they’re on top. It’s not quite a book review, not quite a personal essay—frankly, it’s kind of tough to categorize, but that might be why it’s an ideal example of what Defector can accomplish on any given day. – Samer Kalaf
A Comprehensive And Maddening History Of Color Star, Would-Be Titans Of Just About Anything, by Chris Thompson
To me, the best thing a blog can provide is possibility. Every day brings a homepage that requires new stories, a staff tasked with providing those stories, and readers who are ready to go along for the ride. There are times when this equation can yield some truly incredible and unexpected results. One day, a couple of Defector staffers wake up and find themselves mildly amused by an odd sponsorship deal. The next thing you know, we’re on a three-year journey that ends with one of those staffers very nearly losing his mind while producing a deeply reported feature about the dimmest corner of the free market. – Tom Ley
As You Know, Jeff, Every Time I Stare Into The Abyss It Stares Back At Me, by Felix Kent
I have never read a piece that has managed to capture how it feels to engage with something actively hostile toward your existence so evocatively and empathically—or, for that matter, maybe capture any feeling so evocatively and empathically. Formally, this blog refuses to gesture toward dominant internet discourse about the ethics of consuming problematic media—this maybe matters disproportionately to me, as someone who grew up on that kind of discourse—or fall into the trap of self-aggrandizing universality. At the same time, it’s a disservice to describe this essay, which is so precise and sharply observed, as something it isn’t. A summary will not do it justice, but here’s what I can say: Phrases in here have shaped my vocabulary and what I consider to be tangible: “the jagged edges of [a] fucked-up worldview,” “someone else’s existence.” I still remember how I feel when I read the last few paragraphs for the first time. And that’s all without getting into the absurdly good headline. I have shared and read this again and again, and I will think of it every single time I reach out, once again, to touch the hot stove. – Kathryn Xu
Dave McKenna Insists They Have Ham Trucks In France, by Albert Burneko
I picked this one because it checks off many of the boxes that the great and serious Defector posts cited here by my less self-absorbed colleagues do, plus more. Such as:
- No other site would publish a piece like this.
- This thing had more laugh lines than anything from anywhere else I can remember reading.
- The raw transcript showed how dang smart and fun the people I get to work with are, even as they’re ripping me a new one and then another new one for going “back to me” yet again. This is a workplace??
- The Defector commentariat came off as the clever and nice community we all dreamed it could be when we started this place.
- Finally, this piece’s publication made a difference: We now get the No. 1 hit for anybody googling “ham truck.” – Dave McKenna
Only John Madden Could Have Lived John Madden’s Life, by Ray Ratto
One of the oldest quotes in journalism remains G.K. Chesterton’s: “Journalism largely consists [of] saying ‘Lord Jones Dead’ to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.” It is as succinct a summary as possible of what one aspect of the job is: taking a full human life and somehow, on deadline, turning it into sparkling copy that conveys the whole sum of a person—their hopes, dreams, accomplishments, and failures—while somehow not dragging on about things. It goes without saying that Ray Ratto is a master of this craft, and nothing illustrates this more clearly than his obituary of a man far more famous than any Lord Jones ever was. In fact, it might be harder to distill a public figure’s whole being into one piece of copy. Only Ray could have done justice to a life as large as John Madden’s. And he did. And he hit his deadline. – Diana Moskovitz
I Loved How Much Ugly Baby Hated Me, by Giri Nathan
In my memory—and this may be wrong—we found out that the restaurant Ugly Baby was closing, and Giri went away into his mind palace and emerged with this fucking masterpiece. These two sentences, in particular, haunt me all these months later as a triumph of syntax: “On top was all the texture: crisped rice, long dried chilis, huge tufts of basil, shingles of crisp duck skin, tottering piles of cucumber, stacks of long beans. Alternate the freshness of the green stuff with the ferocity of the meat and chili underneath; mix in some bites of white rice and sips of a Thai iced tea for the sweet temporary succor of condensed milk; enjoy the ego death.” What the hell!! – Alex Sujong Laughlin
Jimmy Carter Was The Iron Man Of Hospice, by Dave McKenna
I like to think Defector is a place where you can read writing that would be unlikely to be published anywhere else on the internet. I will go a little further with this one: I am confident that this is a post that could not have even been conceived by any other person alive. Only our Dave McKenna could have imagined, pitched, re-pitched after rejection, and tastefully executed this post. What began as incessant and grimly amusing Slack commentary culminated, one year later, in a beautiful tribute to both Jimmy Carter and hospice. In terms of his control over tone, Dave is here operating at the absolute most exhilarating and perilous levels, like Hendrix about to light his guitar aflame. I’m still amazed he pulled it off. – Giri Nathan
Rafael Nadal Found Process In Pain, by Giri Nathan
Defector has published an astonishing number of good stories, a fount of quality work whose volume elicits a mixture of awe and almost fearful respect. Trying to pick my favorite is like staring at a rushing waterfall, contracting a slight sense of vertigo as I consider that while our output is staggering, each individual story washes away out over the cliff and down into the pool below. Running the website is an active process, is my point. That’s also a point raised in my favorite Defector blog, by Giri Nathan. Giri is an agile sentence-by-sentence writer—evident here and in his recent Changeover, which you should all read—and in this story he fashions Rafael Nadal’s later career into a chisel and chips away at the hulking subject matter. I don’t want to cheapen it through description, though I will say that I found it tremendously moving. – Patrick Redford
Are You Team Fiery Sun Death Or Team Lifeless Husk?, by Becky Ferreira
This is such a bullshit category because it requires us to do several things at once, including pick our favorite child. It has been the position of this squalid little corner of the site that there is almost nothing that we don’t inherently enjoy. To pick one of the 82,948,311 pieces of joy we have emitted seems a monumentally foolish task, a hell of mental busy work that only grows more frustrating with every new idea that bursts through the white noise of our skulls. When it isn’t imaginary DIY, it’s real DIY. When it isn’t cutting-edge science, it’s cutting-edge sociology. When it isn’t non-hectoring self-help, it’s very hectoring anti-self help. There is reasoned and high-level debate on behalf of a bold idea, and rational and well-considered rebuttal. When it isn’t XXL, it’s XXXL. The agony of choice is everywhere.
Well, screw the agony of choice. Too many options become no options at all, and eventually you have to come to the one thing we can all agree upon: the mother of all binary choices. True, it’s not Phillies vs. Mets, but it’s as close as we deserve.
Everything produced in-house over these five years has been magnificent on its face and in its way, and if forced at gunpoint to stay in-house, we might just cop out and say Boat, if only for its crystalline simplicity. But for the record, we are Team Fiery Sun Death. If you gotta go, go crispy. – Ray Ratto