The New Republic

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 >>

When the Boston Red Sox snapped the “Curse of the Bambino” by winning the World Series in 2004, their first since 1918, I remarked to a friend that the worst thing about it would be the inevitable New Yorker essay by Roger Angell, a longtime, vocal Red Sox fan. READ MORE >>

The devil is in the details, and the infernal detail that stood out in the early reports from the deadly explosions at the finish line of today's Boston Marathon is that they occurred at 2:50 P.M. That was nearly five hours after the first wave of runners, including the top-ranked men, were scheduled to begin the race (in fact, the top-ranked women began even earlier). READ MORE >>

On Tuesday night the Chicago White Sox, of the American League, were down three runs in the top of the ninth inning when closer Rafael Soriano, of the National League's Washington Nationals, gave up a two-run homer with two outs, bringing the tying run to the plate. That batter flew out, ending the game. READ MORE >>

Last Thursday, a few young writers who help edit and contribute to Dissent tweeted pictures from a strike in Harlem, part of a citywide effort to get fast-food franchises to pay employees $15 an hour. READ MORE >>

Paul Ryan works in a man cave in the Longworth House Office Building. It is bedecked with the paraphernalia of the football teams he loves, the Wisconsin Badgers and the Green Bay Packers. Last year, I visited the lair of the Republican Party’s philosopher prince to ask about his own personal philosopher, a 35-year-old named Yuval Levin. READ MORE >>

When you picked your bracket for this month’s NCAA basketball tournament, you picked it with an eye to win—after all, you had $5 riding on it in the office pool, part of the estimated $12 billion that goes into March Madness betting each year. So you probably did your research and went mostly with the favorites, like Duke and Indiana. In other words, you picked chalk. “There Will Be Chalk,” predicted Basketball Prospectus when last year’s bracket was set. (It was right: Top-ranked Kentucky won.) READ MORE >>

“I asked Roger, ‘Why’d you agree to let me do the book?’” Zev Chafets told me yesterday. We were speeding up Central Park West in a News Corp.–provided town car. “And he said, ‘Because you have a kind face.’ I laughed.” The 60-something Chafets, whose goateed face actually is somewhat kind, laughed again now, and continued. “He said, ‘I also checked you out.’ And what he checked out, obviously, was that I am not a guy who has a hard-on for people like Roger Ailes.” READ MORE >>

Two years ago, at the fifth annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, the backdrop in the main panel room featured a single image, repeated like wallpaper: Kobe Bryant putting up a fadeaway shot as the Houston Rockets' Shane Battier conspicuously sticks his hand in his face. To the roughly 1500 attendees, it was a loaded image—a picture backed by a thousand words. READ MORE >>