Albert Burneko
Defector
Contact Albert
Discover and connect with journalists and influencers around the world, save time on email research, monitor the news, and more.
| Recent: |
|
| Past: |
|
Past articles by Albert:
How To Stay Out Of The Right-Wing Outrage Machine
On Monday, at around 10:30 a.m., Slate courts and law reporter Mark Joseph Stern tweeted a link to a document concerning an upcoming Supreme Court case. In a reply to his tweet, another journalist asked him about how he found it. A very bleakly familiar type of hell broke loose. → Read More
Point/Counterpoint: Rush Limbaugh
Rush Limbaugh, the legendary broadcaster whose popular and long-running radio talk show helped define American conservatism, passed away on Wednesday morning at the age of 70. His body of work and his influence are large and complex, so Defector presents two perspectives on his life and legacy. POINT: Rush Limbaugh Was A Vile Motherfucker, By […] → Read More
Be On Time For Things
Here’s a blockquote that made me want to rip my own head off and then wield it as a weapon: Like, I personally do not want to be at the airport more than half an hour before we’re supposed to be in the air. You will point to the time that I missed the flight, […] → Read More
Kobe Bryant Was No More Complicated Than Anyone Else
He made himself a myth; that myth subsumed the reality of a man who was credibly accused of sexual assault. → Read More
The Golden State Warriors Are the Biggest Herbs in the NBA
One of the greatest teams in NBA history now sucks incredible ass. → Read More
Darren Rovell Squeals At The Sky About The Sanctity Of Endorsements
So California’s Fair Pay to Play Act, a bill permitting athletes at the state’s colleges and universities to seek endorsement deals and make money off the use of their names and likenesses without losing their eligibility or scholarships, became law yesterday. People have concerns! → Read More
The Deadspin 100: NBA Players, Ranked
It’s that time of year again, hoops fans! The NFL season is in full swing, baseball’s playoffs start next week, and the NBA regular season won’t tip off for another month. You know what that means: It’s time to rank the top 100 active NBA players! → Read More
Frog-March This Revolting Gymnastics Robot Directly Into The Fires Of Mount Doom
Here is the most disgusting video I’ve watched on the internet in a long time: → Read More
It's Not Your Responsibility To Make This Easy For Them
A thing you get familiar with, if you ever write critically about the Democratic Party or about its establishment politicians from any perspective located to their left, is people giving you grief for having failed to support the team. “This is why the Democrats will [lose again in 2020/never win/never stay in power],” various angry people say. “We can’t stop devouring our own.” They are a… → Read More
Joe Biden Is A Doddering Old Mummy With A Skull Full Of Dumpster Juice
Joe Biden’s politics are bad and he is a bad candidate. Ordinarily that might be the most important measure of a guy running for national office: That his positions, both as stated and as demonstrated by his decades in national government, amount to a tepid, grey, nutrient-free broth of long-discredited Third Way boomer bullshit; that, in the context of, well, all this, the horror of 2019 and… → Read More
Team USA Embarrasses Itself At FIBA World Cup, Jerry Colangelo Follows Suit
Team USA lost its second straight FIBA World Cup game this morning in China, falling 94-89 to Serbia in a fifth-place consolation game, after yesterday’s embarrassing loss to France eliminated the American team from championship contention. Now the team cannot finish higher than seventh place in the tournament. That will be the worst tournament finish by Team USA in its history. → Read More
Cleveland Browns Ban Wrong Guy From Stadium For Beer-Pouring Incident
Pour one out for poor Eric Smith, whom the Cleveland Browns banned for life from their stadium for dumping beer on visiting Tennessee Titans players this past Sunday—even though he was nowhere near the stadium at the time. Just be careful not to get any on anybody, or the Browns will have some random sucker’s legs broken for it. → Read More
Maybe You Just Like Watching Baseball Games
FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver’s math blog, published an article by Travis Sawchik yesterday under the headline “Do We Even Need Minor League Baseball?” In the piece, Sawchik argues that advancements in technology and data analysis have made both the discernment of genuine major-league baseball talent and the off-field development of baseball skills easier and more efficient than ever. As a… → Read More
David Brooks Explores The Reaches Of Pure Mind
Our old pal Alex Pareene has it right, of course: The New York Times, despite its pose as the one universal press outlet of humankind, ultimately is for a very narrowly defined class of East Coast rich people. → Read More
Please Enjoy This Brief Video Of Devin Booker Being A Pickup Weenie
In general, it’s fine to have informal house rules in a pickup basketball game. “Guard your man” is a good one, for example: Few things are more annoying or more ruinous to the flow of play than the lazy sack of crap who sags 20 feet off his man, substituting the aggregate strategic soundness of letting an amateur take open three-pointers in place of the risk of getting roasted off the dribble.… → Read More
Which Flavor Of White Claw Hard Seltzer Is Best (At Football)?
This past weekend, I stopped by the little beer-and-wine store near my local supermarket and picked up a 12-can variety pack of White Claw–brand fruit-flavored “hard seltzer.” At the checkout counter, I had two options: A hip-looking 20-something dude with a beard and some kind of bunlike thing going on with his hair, and, farther away at another cash register, a more or less equally hip-looking… → Read More
Horny Times Columnist Would Like To Know Who's Down To Fuck
I have not been a regular reader of the Times’s Ross Douthat since the 2016 presidential campaign, and I was not a regular reader of his before that. Unlike David Brooks and Bret Stephens, the other fussy right-wing cheese heaps who pretend to dislike Donald Trump for the Times, I do not have a standing body of jokes at the ready to use against him. → Read More
Pour One Out For The Sad Fucker Who Flunked His Being-Zion Williamson's-Agent Exam
Reader, I will be honest with you: My eyes turned to little wads of chalk and I lapsed into a coma for 50,000 lifetimes of the earth while trying to read this ESPN.com feature about the twists of hotshot rookie Zion Williamson’s path to a sneaker endorsement deal. All I remember about it is the unbearably tragic subplot concerning one James “Chubby” Wells, the hapless doofus who was all set to… → Read More
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood Is A Fun Movie About Making Shit Up
In 1992, when I would have been 11 years old or so, I went with my family to the theater to see the movie Radio Flyer, starring Elijah Wood and the annoying dinosaur enthusiast kid from Jurassic Park (Joseph Mazzello) as brothers in an abusive household in... probably the late 1950s or early 1960s? This was a late and particularly bad entry in the bad post-Stand By Me/Wonder Years genre of shows… → Read More
The NBA's Supermax Is Doing What It Was Supposed To
The provisions of a collective bargaining agreement can be tricky things. After all, by definition they’re negotiated and agreed upon by parties with different and largely opposed interests, who will want different and often directly conflicting things out of them. The purpose or intent of any given one of them can differ wildly depending on where you’re standing and to whom you’re talking. So… → Read More