The New Republic

The Memphis Grizzlies entered this NBA season as a good basketball team living in the worst of all possible worlds. Coming off two consecutive playoff runs, they were bound to compile a record sufficiently strong to fail to qualify for a lottery-high draft pick, yet not improved or even different enough to be likely to emerge from the super-competitive Western Conference to play for the championship. READ MORE >>

If you made a word cloud of profiles about Cheryl Mills in the Beltway press—and there have been several—“loyalty” would loom very large. That loyalty specifically extends to two people: Bill and Hillary Clinton, both of whom she has worked for. “She is incredibly loyal to the president,” an anonymous White House aide told the Washington Post in 1999. READ MORE >>

There is a lot of low-hanging fruit in Time’s new cover story on narcissistic millennials, currently available to subscribers only (as if millennials pay for online content!). It was written by Joel Stein, famously described by Time editor Rick Stengel as “a god to people in their twenties and thirties”—only now Stein is 41, and he has come not to praise but to bury twenty- and thirtysomethings. READ MORE >>

Ever since last week’s revelation that U.S. officials believe President Bashar al-Assad’s regime has used chemical weapon, there has been more talk than ever of the United States’ potentially escalating its involvement in Syria’s civil war. READ MORE >>

Late Monday night, the New York Times posted a story that has set off voluminous chatter in the New York political class. A year ago, HarperCollins announced it planned to bring out a biography of Gov. Andrew Cuomo by Fredric U. READ MORE >>

Upon hearing that Jason Collins, the journeyman National Basketball Association center, just became the first active male major-league athlete to announce publicly that he is gay, the mind involuntarily compares him to a previous sports trailblazer. When he donned a Brooklyn Dodgers uniform in 1947 (as chronicled in 42, the feature film that has grossed more than $55 million in its first three weeks), Jackie Robinson became the first black man to play Major League Baseball or any other professional sport. READ MORE >>

In November 2011, Politico's most prominent blogger, Ben Smith, declared the advent of the "the post-blog blog." "The dusty old form of the personal political blog has required some updating. Twitter has replaced any individual blog as the place the political conversation plays out," he wrote. READ MORE >>

Tonight, the NFL Draft begins—in case you hadn’t heard. The cover of the most recent ESPN The Magazine is dedicated to it, and Sports Illustrated likely would have fronted it, too, had the Boston Marathon bombings not taken precedence. READ MORE >>

In the same way that, as poet Philip Larkin put it, “Sexual intercourse began in 1963,” Robert Lipsyte invented cynicism about the world of sports. Which is to say: He didn’t literally, but he may as well have. READ MORE >>

I had not been following yesterday's manhunt in detail, so when last night I learned, from a friend who was being a more diligent Twitter fiend than I, that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was in a boat, and then that he was surrounded, and then that we had caught him, it seemed to me merely like nice symmetry. What had begun a little after noon on Monday, with the fatal explosions at the Boston Marathon, concluded around sundown on Friday. Nice when things work out like that. READ MORE >>