football
Hey, America: You Could Rule Rugby, If Only You Tried
For proof, look no further than Carlin Isles, the sport's fastest man
About half an hour into Saturday’s opening match of the Six Nations rugby championship, with Ireland beating Wales by 20 points to nil, the Welsh backs finally got the ball. READ MORE >>
Gambling with NFL Fandom
I decided to bet on the sport I love. I lost, even when I won.
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 >>
The sabermetrics revolution in baseball has been around long enough to warrant a bestselling book and a Hollywood film with several Oscar nominations. Advanced statistics in football, however, haven’t even come close to a Moneyball moment. They haven’t overturned the conventional wisdom or precipitated a titanic struggle with management over how to evaluate players. It’s possible they never will. But football statistics might still be nearing a tipping point, and they’d have very different consequences than sabermetrics. READ MORE >>
Barack Obama Is Not Pleased
The president on his enemies, the media, and the future of football
Barack Obama's pre-presidential manifesto, The Audacity of Hope, has only one extended riff on gun control—not a homily on behalf of the cause or even a meditation on the deep divisions opened by the debate, but a story of crummy luck. READ MORE >>
Ooops!
Hedging America
How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities By John Cassidy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 390 pp., $28 READ MORE >>
Mike and the Mad Dog
The Retro Man
Crimetown USA
There was a certain tidiness to the killings in Youngstown. Usually they happened late at night when there were no witnesses or police and only the lights from the steel furnaces still burned. Sometimes neighbors would hear the short, sharp sound of gunfire and then nothing, a silence you can't describe unless you've heard it, which if you're lucky you haven't. READ MORE >>
