Author Bio & Stories

  • December 29, 2013
    Keep Your Helmet On: ESPN's Jacked Up, In Retrospect

    It seems like a million years ago that ESPN blithely celebrated the NFL's killshot tackles by giving them their own loud, hooting highlight show. It wasn't. In fact, it wasn't very long ago at all.

  • December 26, 2013
    The Best of All Games: John Rawls, Baseball Fan

    John Rawls, one of the greatest American philosophers, was also a pretty serious baseball fan. Still, there are some serious holes in his recently unearthed argument for baseball as "the best of all games." Also, though, there's some basic emotional truth about being a fan.

  • October 16, 2013
    Great Thinkers On The NFL, Part Two

    The second part in our occasional series finds Theodore Roosevelt opining on The Schiano Men, Thomas Nagel investigating responsibility and Tony Romo, and an actual Kierkegaard quote applied to the Jaguars, which enhances the depressing aspects of both, somehow.

  • September 26, 2013
    Selective Memory

    Mariano Rivera is at the end of a long and consistently dazzling career. We won't be able to remember as much of it as we might want to, but that's the way baseball -- and everything else -- works.

  • September 24, 2013
    Great Thinkers On The NFL

    Albert Camus on the Jaguars. Glenn Beck on the Jets and sort of on the debt ceiling. Doctor Seuss on LeGarrette Blount. The first in an occasional series in which great thinkers provide their takes on recent NFL action, because a great and complicated game deserves great and complicated analysis.

  • September 16, 2013
    The Pixel Paradox and the NFL Game Experience

    Fans pay serious money and deal with the routine indignities of overbearing stadium security to go to NFL games because they love football. But who is it, exactly, that has made NFL games the way they are, and ensured that the experience is dominated by gargantuan, electricity-chugging HD screens? You already know.

  • June 25, 2013
    No One Knows

    Aaron Hernandez is under suspicion for some very bad things. This doesn't look good, but given that none of us really knows a thing about Aaron Hernandez, it's tough to say any more about it than that.

  • May 21, 2013
    No Comment

    Commentators like Tim McCarver make us wonder why we even need color commentators. Commentators like Sir Ian Darke remind us why we do. In between is... well, a lot.

  • April 24, 2013
    Why We Watch: Brett Gardner, True Yankee

    There are a great many things about the Yankees that are not especially admirable. Brett Gardner's greatest virtue may be that he embodies none of those.

  • April 12, 2013
    Viva Azteca: Yakkin' About Soccer's Strangest, Scariest Stadium

    Estadio Azteca is one of the stranger, better and more terrifying places on earth to watch a soccer game. And maybe to watch anything, actually. Two Azteca veterans compare notes on one of soccer's holy, and wholly weird, sites.