Deadspin

He’s a so-so MMA fighter with political views that are moderate at best. But since he’s outspoken on the internet — most recently, about Hong Kong — he’s become one of China’s best-known dissidents.

Inside the rise of oyster shucking competitions in China, a phenomenon with its roots across the Atlantic Ocean that has found a niche within the country’s most westernized pockets.

“I can also tell you that it can be unpleasant to be the freakshow guy whose brain spontaneously detonated. You don’t want doctors looking at your CAT scans incredulously and being like, ‘Hoo boy! You really did a number on your noggin there!'”

Korean horse racing enthusiasts are buying promising young Amercian race horses and many of them are ending up in the slaughterhouse.

The story of Daniel “Gus” Gerard, a promising late 1970s basketball star whose love affair with cocaine and booze cost him not only his career, but his kids and his marriage. Why? He was really just a lanky kid with thick glasses who really wanted to belong.

For nearly a century, America’s major rodeos haven’t offered women’s bronc riding events. Daryl and Michelle McElroy, of The Texas Bronc Riders Association, are helping a group of talented riders change all that.

At Choke Hole—with its flesh overflow and swollen muscles, its ocean creatures and bodybuilder acrobats, its penguins and cockroaches, its green goblins and Silly String snot—the rest of the world’s body binaries, gender-presentation standards, and requirements for glamour go out the window.

What a story: A Californian living in Germany discovers a ferry wake you can surf on the Baltic Sea. He was even making a movie about it. The German surfers who’d already surfed that and other Baltic waves were offended by the American’s repackaging of German history. Maybe they were talking about two different kinds of truth.

A sprawling oral history of Gold’s Gym recounts bodybuilding’s transformation from a small, niche scene to a mainstream cultural phenomenon (thanks, in no small part, to one entrepreneurial Austrian immigrant).

Back in 2013, for Deadspin, Drew Magary attended the annual Scripps Spelling Bee, in which 11 million kids spell off across America in a bid to become the brainy few who land onstage for the final round, and learns how such a simple contest has been sullied by the need to keep the event exciting for ESPN’s television audience.