Rachelle Hampton

In Defector’s 2025 annual report, our business guy Jasper Wang wrote, “When we started the company, a big chunk of our staffers were in their 20s, bestowing large portions of our editorial output with the imprimatur of youth, but it turns out that every 28-year-old becomes 33 five years later, like clockwork. While we’ve frequently…

Claude Monet's painting The Path through the Irises is hard to ignore. First of all, there's the sheer size of it—the canvas stretches six and a half feet high and over five feet across.

This is Defector Music Club, where a number of our writers get together to dish about an album. In honor of Reds Week, we’re discussing Taylor Swift’s 2012 pop-rock hit Red. Patrick Redford: I can’t be the only one whose strongest and first thought about Red is that there’s a sound at the end of…

I was an adult when I encountered Dolly Parton's “I Will Always Love You” for the first time. I grew up thinking Whitney Houston's 1992 cover was the original; I can't say exactly when my ignorance was rectified but Twitter was almost certainly where. There was a type of tweet that would, and maybe still does, reliably go viral about the origins of the song, usually referring either to the fact that Parton wrote it and “Jolene” in the same day or to the fact that she did all that only to be outsung, and in some quarters, almost entirely eclipsed by Houston's cover. I know that I saw a variation on that tweet a couple of times before I actually sought out Parton's original recording. I remember finding it a bit boring.