“Once, when the pain came, I grabbed for a knife, my fist tight around it, contemplating digging out my right eye. I was twenty-one.”
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Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Why So Many Teams at the World Cup Have Players Who Share a Birthday
At BBC Magazine, an examination of the “birthday paradox” using the World Cup as an example. The birthday paradox goes like this: Mathematically, in any group of 23 people there is a 50% chance that two people will share a birthday. At the World Cup, there are 32 squads with 23 players on each team. […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
How Far We're Going to Save Youth Football
“You’re talking about putting accelerometers in equipment. Equipment specialists to outfit our children. Having independent observers of coaches on the sidelines at practices and games to monitor what’s going on. At what point are we kidding ourselves about youth football, that this is not a sensible proposition when you need this superstructure for every game […]
Posted inCollege, Nonfiction
How to Do Oral History the Right Way: Remembering the Baltimore Stallions, Our College Pick
Journalism, like everything else, has its trends. From celebrity guest editors to abundant Upworthian headlines, there’s a lot of replication in our business. So it was with low expectations that I began to read “Baltimore’s Forgotten Champions,” an oral history of a Canadian Football League team by a group of University of Maryland students. Most […]
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
Five Stories About Sports for People Who Hate Sports
OK, “hate” is too strong a word. But I fundamentally do not get sports. Playing them, yes, fine. But knowing players’ names, arguing that this one guy is better than that other guy, keeping a little Excel sheet of strikes and yards and rebounds in my head? Baffling. But that doesn’t mean, as it turns […]
Posted inGuest Pick, Nonfiction
Sasha Belenky on Jeanne Marie Laskas's 'The People V. Football'
Sasha Belenky is a senior editor at The Huffington Post. Whether it’s negotiating murder-for-hire with a fake hit man or visiting old stomping grounds with the vice president of the United States, if you’re in the car with Jeanne Marie Laskas, you’re pretty much guaranteed that the story will be good. I’ve found myself most […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Meet the Bagman
How to buy college football players, in the words of a man who delivers the money: The Bag Man excuses himself to make a call outside, on his “other phone,” to arrange delivery of $500 in cash to a visiting recruit. The player is rated No. 1 at his position nationally and on his way […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
A Parent’s Dilemma: Should You Let Your Kid Play Football?
Hruby talks to families and those involved with youth sports to find out what’s changed—and what hasn’t changed—since the revelations around concussions and CTE: Earlier that season, Parker had leveled another boy. He earned a personal foul. Monet remembered the moment, how proud she felt as her son skipped back to the sideline. Mommy! Mommy! […]
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction
Escape from Baghdad!: Saad Hossain’s New Satire of the Iraq War
In his debut, Saad Hossain brings a much-needed cynicism to our literature of the Iraq War. An absurdist protest novel in the vein of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 or Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Escape from Baghdad! relentlessly focuses the reader’s attention on the folly of war.
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Whistleblower’s Last Stand
How Joe Paterno’s former protégé became the star witness in the Jerry Sandusky trial: Long before the presentment became public, players, coaches and residents heard rumors — that McQueary saw Sandusky fondle the boy, or that they were engaged in horseplay. But suddenly the rumors were not only true, they had mushroomed into the biggest […]
