Barry Petchesky

Tom Brady’s post-playing career transition to “Weird Rich Guy” appears nearly complete. He announced on Tuesday that he had his old dead dog cloned. Lua, a pit bull mix, died in 2023. Brady’s new dog Junie, he revealed, is an exact genetic clone of Lua, whose DNA was preserved before her death. Like all normal…

Big boys mashing taters: It’s what we all want to see. That’s why we’re proud to bring you a special playoff edition of Big Boy Watch, highlighting the beefers, hulks, and galoots from around the league. Philadelphia’s burly lads aren’t bashing, and it’s causing a civic crisis. Milwaukee-Chicago is a fairly boring series because of—as…

It’s become clear that Charlie Kirk is worth more to Trumpworld dead than he ever was alive. His fatal shooting last week in Utah has been used as a cudgel in an attempted purge of wrong-thinking liberals and leftists, anyone who dare not treat a hateful YouTuber’s death with a supposed civility that Kirk himself…

Tom Ley is making me write this. He doesn’t give direct orders often, but as it is Defector’s birthday, and a lot of staffers are traveling in order to be at tonight’s big birthday shindig, we’re a little light on the blog budget today. So he told me to blog my beloved Yankees getting the…

It’s not AI winter just yet, though there is a distinct chill in the air. Meta is shaking up and downsizing its artificial intelligence division. A new report out of MIT finds that 95 percent of companies’ generative AI programs have failed to earn any profit whatsoever. Tech stocks tanked Tuesday, regarding broader fears that […]

As summer marches on sweatily, and languid thoughts turn to relief, I am put in mind of the solution to all of our temperature-related troubles: the waterslide that kills you. Please send me down this slide immediately. I am of course speaking of the Fly Over slide at the Duinrell amusement park in the Netherlands, […]

The Space Shuttle drips romance. Representing nearly a half-century of human spaceflight—from its conception in 1968, even before the Moon landing, until its retirement in 2011—its design and even its name capture a hope that space travel would one day be commonplace. That before long, the first step to heading to the Moon or Mars […]

The Los Angeles Kings entered free agency with one mission: to build a team better than the Oilers, who’ve eliminated them in the first round in each of the last four postseasons. Enter new GM Ken Holland, who in his post–Red Wings career has a pathological fetish for signing veterans and depth guys and then…

It seemed like a small thing at the time. Before last Saturday’s game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Francisco Giants at Dodger Stadium, the singer Nezza performed “The Star-Spangled Banner” in Spanish, even after being told not to by team representatives, in a symbolic protest against the jackbooted deportation raids being carried out […]

Pope Leo XIV celebrated his weekly general audience in St. Peter’s Square this morning, so you might assume he donned a White Sox ballcap at the request of one of his parishioners. I think it much more likely he just wears this around all the time, even to formal events where it’s entirely inappropriate. Have […]