Brian Wolly is an associate web editor at Smithsonian Magazine. ••• 1. Tom Bissell’s Breakdown of L.A. Noire on Grantland When ESPN and Bill Simmons’ Grantland debuted in early June, the knives were out and its initial reaction was mixed at best. Like many, I approached the new project with simultaneous skepticism and optimism, but it […]
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Ben Cohen's Top Longreads of 2011
Ben Cohen writes about sports for The Wall Street Journal. In 2011, he also published a Kindle Single and wrote for Grantland, The Classical, Tablet, The Awl and Yahoo! Sports. You can follow him on Twitter at @bzcohen. *** I don’t know that I can pinpoint exactly what it was about these stories that compelled […]
Featured Longreader: Amy O’Leary, reporter for The New York Times. See her story picks from Feministe, National Affairs, ESPN, plus more on her #longreads page.
Featured Longreader: Peter Axtman, public relations associate. See his story picks from Gizmodo, ESPN, The Village Voice, plus more on his #longreads page.
The story of the Polgar sisters, chess whizzes who were trained by their father from an early age: When Susan was the age of many of her students, she dominated the New York Open chess competition. At 16 she crushed several adult opponents and landed on the front page of The New York Times. The […]
Forty years after Title IX, the number of female college athletes has soared, but the number of female college coaches has dropped. What happened? Some blame the dropoff on a shallow pool of female candidates, who often aren’t as eager to apply for jobs, let alone pack up and move, as men. But there are […]
The story of a mysterious sports writer, her business partners, and an alleged plot to co-opt an NBA fan’s Facebook page: Phillips kept up her correspondence with Ben, the 19-year-old college student and creator of the NBA Memes Facebook page. She said he could make up to as much as $1,000 per post as a […]
After retiring from the NFL, a large percentage football players find adjusting to real life a struggle: Terrell Owens hasn’t officially retired yet, and he already has blown the $80 million he earned during his career. Warren Sapp recently filed for bankruptcy. Former first-round picks Michael Bennett and William Joseph currently face federal charges of […]
The new Ohio State football coach made a promise to his family that he’d put them first. Will he keep it? Eighty or so people filed into the school cafeteria. Urban and his wife, Shelley, joined their daughter at the front table, watching as Gigi stood and spoke. She’d been nervous all day, and with […]
Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Wired, The Verge, Rolling Stone, ESPN The Magazine, VICE, fiction, plus a guest pick by Joanna Lin.
