Longreads

In late February I am in my basement, which is really a very nice part of my house that is not done justice by the word basement. For the purposes of this story, let’s call it the Parnassus…

Yesterday, ESPN.com posted an article from ESPN the Magazine’s Jorge Arangure Jr. about how Carlos Ruiz went from being a total unknown second-baseman to one of the premier catchers in…

When an athlete-turned-humanitarian and an energy executive tried to buy gold in Kenya, they found themselves mired in Congo's dangerous world of conflict minerals -- and totally outmatched. Former…

No one would accuse Jaroslav Flegr of being a conformist. A self-described “sloppy dresser,” the 63-year-old Czech scientist has the contemplative air of someone habitually lost in…

ARLINGTON, Texas - His friends in this city between Dallas and Fort Worth, a hybrid of North Texas' boom-and-bust history, talk often of Hunter Pence's assets, a Boy Scout litany of humility,…

If the rule is written somewhere, no one has ever read it. Nonetheless, no one disputes it: when a ball goes into the stands at a professional baseball game, it belongs to the fan who gets it. When the ball is the one that was hit to break a record, the fan has won the lottery. The prize can be as high as 3 million dollars (see the ball Mark McGwire hit to break Roger Maris’ single season home run record). The ball that Derek Jeter hit out of the park July 9 for his 3000th hit would have fetched a more modest but still decent sum on the open market—upwards of $200,000 is the estimate of Derek Jeter’s personal memorabilia mule.