Tag: Deadspin

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in sports writing.

This week, we’re sharing stories from Sandra Sidi, Lena Solow, Aubrey Hirsch, Noelle Mateer, and Amanda Hess.

This week, we’re sharing stories from Drew Magary, Amy Wallace, Leif Reigstad, Pam Houston, and Ziya Tong.

This week, we’re sharing stories from Jonah Engel Bromwich, Ryan Goldberg, Meghan Daum, Alison Osius, and Joel Mowdy.

This week, we’re sharing stories from Jayson Greene, Theresa Breuer, Christa Parravani, Alexandra Kimball, and Casey Taylor.

After nearly a century of being denied the opportunity, women are riding bucking broncos in American rodeo once again, and regaining the respect they deserve.

From his earliest days in California, Arnold was a polarizing, impossible-to-ignore figure.

This week, we’re sharing stories from Nell Boeschenstein, Hannah Giorgis, David Davis, Chris Randle, and Kelly Conaboy.

At the Scripps Spelling Bee, no one asks for whom the bell tolls. It’s glaringly, if painfully obvious.

This week, we’re sharing stories from Jane Mayer and Ronan Farrow, Brooke Bobb, Dom Cosentino, Jia Tolentino, and Robert Silverman.

George Andrie’s daughter, Mary Brooks, is speaking out against the NFL’s slipshod settlement claims process.

Lance Armstrong ran a well-oiled cycling machine, and a well-oiled doping factory. Maybe those are the same thing.

Did taking melodonium actually do anything for Maria Sharapova? Caitlin Thompson decided to take some to find out.

This week, we’re featuring stories from Richard Beck, Rebecca Mead, Sarah Barker, Dylan Matthews, and Sarah Scoles.

The Barkley Marathon is five 20+ mile loops that runners must navigate in under 60 hours. Sarah Barker explores the event and the people who attempt this race-slash-ordeal.

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist. Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. * * *

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist. Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. * * *

As for the awe he inspires himself, Christgau’s devotees are smaller in number these days than in his Voice years, but they’re still extraordinarily dedicated, particularly among a small community who came together in the comments section of Expert Witness, the MSN blog he started after leaving the Voice. (He’s since moved on to the Medium site Cuepoint.) “The Witnesses are the greatest experience of my professional life,” Christgau says. “Most of them are very married kind of guys, but I’m so very married that it makes sense.”

At Deadspin, Drew Magary looks at America’s ‘Kid-Competition Complex’ and explains why it’s problematic: I have a 5-year-old son who hates losing. I don’t mean this as a compliment. He BLOWS at losing. He rigs pretty much any game in the backyard in his favor, and if you call him out on him, he gives […]

Shannon Proudfoot is a staff writer at Sportsnet magazine. Previously, she was a national writer with Postmedia News. “It might not constitute a genre, exactly, but my favorite sort of journalism dives into obscure subcultures with their own rules, etiquette, heroes and hacks. This story is one of my all-time favorites of that type. The […]

A first-person account of an Olympic career, a violent attack, and what happened next: My coach calls me up and says, ‘Listen, If you want to keep your scholarship’—by the way, he’s totally devious here —he said, ‘If you want your scholarship, all you have to do is show up for the meets. Don’t do […]

A sportswriter tries his hand at singing the national anthem at a baseball game: The anthem is designed to humble you. The anthem is designed to ruin your shit if you get too haughty, and that’s a good thing. In fact, it’s ready to challenge you from the very beginning: O say can you see […]

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 […]

What the writer learned from the premature birth of his third child: When the baby cried, I knew it wasn’t gonna die. They had just pulled my son out of my wife and whisked him over to one of those fancy hotel pans that you put newborns in, and there was a brief moment when […]

A writer tries to figure out if he’s any smarter than he was at age 17: Many times, I had to skip a question because I couldn’t figure out the answer, and then I got that paranoia that’s unique to someone taking a standardized test. I became fearful that I had failed to skip over […]

Twenty years ago, The Simpsons gave the Fox Network its first-ever prime-time ratings victory with an all-star baseball episode that beat out The Cosby Show and the Winter Olympics: Aside from the logistics of recording nine separate guest roles, plot lines had to be rewritten on the fly. Jose Canseco’s scene originally called for him […]

Excerpt from John Jeremiah Sullivan’s “Pulphead,” on his brother’s electrocution, and what it did to his brain:  On the morning of April 21, 1995, my elder brother, Worth (short for Ellsworth), put his mouth to a microphone in a garage in Lexington, Kentucky, and in the strict sense of having been ‘shocked to death,’ was […]

Hunter Thompson lobbied Jann Wenner, the publisher of Rolling Stone to hire George, who had been writing freelance music reviews. In a letter to George, Thompson wrote, “I want Wenner to have the experience of dealing with someone more demonstrably crazy than I am—so that he’ll understand that I am, in context, a very reasonable […]

Howie hemorrhaged information about Winfield and Steinbrenner, the mafia, prison, baseball, women, clothes, the weather, his parents, his health. He jumped from one tangent to another, many of them fascinating and relevant, some bizarre, others difficult to fathom. Like the time he told me Winfield held a gun to him. Or the time he said […]