A movie theater owned by Shaquille O'Neal canceled a screening of a documentary about Mumia Abu-Jamal. Dave Zirin is not happy about it. What's going on here?
In 1994, Heath Shuler was among the top quarterback prospects in the world, and bound for Washington with great expectations. In the years since, Washington has undone Shuler more than once, first as a Redskins quarterback and then as a North Carolina congressman.
Michael Brendan Dougherty has written about politics for a long time. Long enough that he's now decided he'd rather get up at 4am every day to write about baseball.
The Tri-City Herald, in Southeastern Washington, put together a strange and magical and entirely unique high school football preview section this year. Not only are newspapers not dead, they're photographing high school football players as if they were Presidential candidates.
The Basketball Fan in Chief has spoken: Barack Obama's campaign is the Miami Heat, Mitt Romney's is Jeremy Lin. As basketball metaphors go, this is something of a deep cut. But is it really the comparison that Obama wants to make? And, more to the point, what does it even mean?
Inside a stuffy, ramshackle warehouse on the northern outskirts of Yemen’s capital, a dozen male gymnasts line up at the end of a tattered vaulting runway. They are hoping to be able to "jump big" as they do in their dreams. But obstacles, both inside and outside of the gym may prevent them from jumping to their biggest dream of all: a return to international competition.
It is the poet's job to provoke us to think, and feel, in new ways. It is the spammer's job to embed hyperlinks to bootleg headphones and running shoes in chunks of garbage prose. Here is where the two meet, on the battlefield of politics and prose. Or whatever.
John Rocker was once, if briefly, a very effective Major League pitcher. A decade or so later, he has reinvented himself as a part-time right-wing polemicist and full-time human example of the paralyzing, toxic effects of dumb fame.
Mark Judge's paean to Bryce Harper, 19-year-old baseball prodigy and "conservative hero," has been kicked around the internet since it made its falling-down-the-stairs-and-then-catching-on-fire debut on the Daily Caller last Friday. It's absolutely as bad as you've heard, but not necessarily for the reason you might expect.
Fandom requires a certain amount of surrender to contingency, given that we're not the ones playing the game. But, in his column advocating a politically motivated approach to picking a favorite in the NBA Finals, Dave Zirin takes engagement a step too far.
