The New Republic

In the summer of 2008, Kansas City-based sportswriter Joe Posnanski was invited to discuss Moneyball at nearby Fort Leavenworth. At first, he was incredulous. "I had literally no idea what I was supposed to talk about," he told me. But Posnanski duly attended the seminar-style session, which featured several Army officers, including a colonel, at the facility's University of Foreign Military and Cultural Studies. "They were really working with the various people on all sorts of out-of-the-box thinking—that was the general theme," he said. READ MORE >>

Like the Hollywood Foreign Press Association or the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club, the White House Correspondents' Association typically enters the broader consciousness exactly one day of the year: when it holds its annual dinner. READ MORE >>

 *some of the job titles on this chart are not  current, which explains why several people show up in multiple places. READ MORE >>

LeBron James, who will make his ninth consecutive All-Star Game start on Sunday, is just 28 years old, which is all the more remarkable considering how many titles—not the National Basketball Association variety—he's held. READ MORE >>

Hospitals, as anyone who has ever watched network television knows, are as cliquey as high school cafeterias. The swaggering surgeons are the cool kids, often known as “blades” or “scalpel jocks.” To them, the internists are “fleas,” as in, the last things to leave a dying dog. READ MORE >>

Any time a new Pope is named, the Jewish community regards him with skepticism. After all, Catholic-Jewish relations—medieval, modern, and in-between—have not been particularly amicable. READ MORE >>

About a month ago, on a Saturday night, I sat alone in my apartment watching the inconsequential final minutes of a playoff game between the Minnesota Vikings and the Green Bay Packers. The Packers led 24-10 with fewer than four minutes left, and that score—reflecting a fluky touchdown by the Vikings on the prior possession—didn’t represent how clearly the Packers had dominated the game, and how certain they were to win. So why was I, a Washington Redskins fan, still watching? READ MORE >>

Kobe Bryant is suffering a midseason crisis. Back in October, with 16 years and five championships under his belt with the Los Angeles Lakers, Bryant had looked to his new super-team—stocked with the aging, future Hall of Fame guard Steve Nash and the veteran big men Dwight Howard and Pau Gasol—as his last, best chance to match or even surpass the six titles won by Michael Jordan, his idol and the rarely disputed Greatest of All Time. READ MORE >>

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Yesterday, an article appeared on The Atlantic’s website headlined, “David Miscavige Leads Scientology to Milestone Year.” At the top, clearly if not ostentatiously, it was marked, “Sponsor Content.” In prose borrowed from the second-best writer in your tenth grade English class, it described how Scientology chief Miscavige had opened an “unprecedented” 12 “ideal churches” around the world (though mainly in the United States) in 2012, with a photograph and a short paragraph devoted to each one. “This new breed of Church is ideal in location, design, quality of religious services and social betterment programs,” it explained. You can download a screengrab that Gawker grabbed here. The advertorial was the sort of thing that connoisseurs of Scientology agitprop would be used to. Here, for example, is Scientology’s official explanation of these so-called Ideal Orgs. It’s also the sort of thing readers of the Atlantic’s website would be used to: companies like Credit Suisse, Shell, and Mercedes-Benz have all purchased advertorials—“Custom Programs,” in Atlantic Media parlance. An Ad Age article about “custom advertising” reports that an IBM campaign with Atlantic Media received more than one million user interactions and likely cost as much as $200,000 for IBM. (An Atlantic Media spokesperson declined to comment on how much these advertorials cost, or how large a part of its digital advertising revenue they comprise.) Nor is Atlantic Media remarkable in this regard. State-run Chinese and Russian publications buy space in the Washington Post. BuzzFeed runs no banner ads, only branded content. You would probably be hard-pressed to find a major media outlet that wouldn’t publish an advertorial. What was different about this, apparently, is that this time, it was Scientology. And Scientology, we all know, is ridiculous, and worse. Right? READ MORE >>