Willie Wood and the Making of the Modern Game: Michael Lewis on America’s first Super Bowl The game itself lives only in memory: no filmed record exists of the first Super Bowl. It was broadcast on two networks but both of them lost or erased the program. All that remains are the few highlights culled […]
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Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Death of the FCC Indecency Complaint
As society has reached a consensus that there’s no way to control everything children see, the number of indecency complaints has decreased significantly. When Miley Cyrus twerked at the Video Music Awards last summer, the FCC received only 161 complaints (of course, as a cable channel, MTV doesn’t answer to the commission anyway). The moment […]
Posted inNonfiction
Curses: A Tribute to Losing Teams and Easy Scapegoats
Barry Grass | The Normal School | Spring 2014 | 18 minutes (4,537 words) 1st Late in every February, Major League Baseball players report to Spring Training. Every year in Kansas City this is heralded by a gigantic special section in The Kansas City Star crammed full of positive reporting and hopeful predictions about the […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
When 772 Pitches Isn’t Enough
Via Travelreads: Chris Jones on the unique culture of Japanese baseball and 16-year-old pitching phenom Tomohiro Anraku, seen as “a real-life Sidd Finch, his story so impossible that he’s been spoken about only in whispers or exclamations”: “There has been talk in America that Anraku’s arm had been destroyed weeks earlier, in April, stripped of […]
Posted inNonfiction, Story
Curses: A Tribute to Losing Teams and Easy Scapegoats
Barry Grass | The Normal School | Spring 2014 | 18 minutes (4,537 words) 1st Late in every February, Major League Baseball players report to Spring Training. Every year in Kansas City this is heralded by a gigantic special section in The Kansas City Star crammed full of positive reporting and hopeful predictions about the […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Death Penalty Has a Face: A DA’s Personal Story
A former Texas district attorney considers the death penalty, examining his own experience with seeking it in court, and why he now believes “the time for the death penalty has passed”: “The decision to seek death is the district attorney’s call. No one controls his or her decision. But there also is no question, at […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Book of Coach
How late 49ers coach Bill Walsh wrote a 550-page book that became a bible for NFL coaches: “So it was no surprise that Walsh instantly regretted retiring. Believing that he left at least one Super Bowl on the table, Walsh was ‘melancholy and terrible,’ according to Craig. That the 1989 49ers were more dominant in […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Breaking Bread with Breitbart
Bill Ayers hosts a right-wing dinner party: “Right wing blogs erupted, with some writers tickled by Carlson’s sense of humor and others earnestly saluting his courage and daring in service to ‘the cause’ for his willingness to sit in close quarters with us—radical leftists and enemies of the state. But others took a grimmer view: […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Hazing Death of Florida A&M Drum Major Robert Champion
A college marching band’s hazing ritual claims the life of a star clarinet player: “The young man stood at the front of Bus C, his ribs rising and falling with each breath. Before him stood about 20 members of one of the best marching bands in the world, Florida A&M’s Marching 100, which had performed […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Most Amazing Bowling Story Ever
It’s still remembered as “That Night”–when bowler Bill Fong stunned the crowd at the Plano Super Bowl: “Most people think perfection in bowling is a 300 game, but it isn’t. Any reasonably good recreational bowler can get lucky one night and roll 12 consecutive strikes. If you count all the bowling alleys all over America, […]
