Over at Vice Sports, Aaron Gordon has a fascinating piece up about intellectual property rights and tattoos. He opens with the case of the NBA2K video game series, which is currently being sued by a tattoo artist agency over the games’ digitally recreated tattoos, which appear on the virtual bodies of players such as Kobe Bryant and LeBron James. But copyright issues […]
Sports
Posted inNonfiction, Quote Posts, Quotes
I Was a Super Bowl Concession Worker
At Slate, Gabriel Thompson describes what it’s like to be a food-service worker at Levi’s Stadium at Super Bowl 50 — and explores the low-wage, part-time workforce of Silicon Valley.
Posted inEditor's Pick, Nonfiction, Quotes
I Was a Super Bowl Concession Worker
At Slate, Gabriel Thompson describes what it’s like to be a food-service worker at Levi’s Stadium at Super Bowl 50 — and explores the low-wage, part-time workforce of Silicon Valley.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
How Two Enemies Shaped the Future of College Sports
Byers, who became the executive director of the N.C.A.A. in 1951 — a position he held for the next 37 years — transformed a toothless association into a powerful force that mirrored his own personality: secretive, despotic, stubborn and ruthless. He helped turn the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament into the financial windfall we now know […]
Posted inUncategorized
How a Good Bookie Sets Odds
A good bookmaker will set up odds so they appear enticing to both sides of a bet: if Arsenal plays Stoke in the Premier League, the bookies want an equal amount of action on both clubs, the better to spread risk. (This isn’t how they make money, however. They do that by designing the odds so […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Company That Controls Elite Cheerleading
Texas—despite being America’s Cheer Capital—is one of thirty or so states that don’t recognize cheerleading as an official sport (other non-recognizers include the NCAA and the National Federation of State High School Associations, both of whom also decline to classify cheerleading as a sport). The lack of official recognition created a regulation vacuum of sorts, with no […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
A Black Woman’s Body on the Tennis Court: Claudia Rankine on Serena Williams
What does a victorious or defeated black woman’s body in a historically white space look like? Serena and her big sister Venus Williams brought to mind Zora Neale Hurston’s “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.” This appropriated line, stenciled on canvas by Glenn Ligon, who used plastic letter […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
‘Herr Blatter, Have You Ever Taken a Bribe?’
In a recent piece for the Washington Post, Michael E. Miller profiled Andrew Jennings— a doggedly obsessed, “curmudgeonly” investigative reporter who helped expose the FIFA scandal that brought down Sepp Blatter. According to Miller’s piece, if Blatter’s downfall can be traced to a single moment it was when Jennings grabbed the microphone at a Zurich press conference after […]
Posted inCollege
Life After Football: Our College Pick
Disappointment feels so much bigger when you’re young because you haven’t lived long enough to know that there’s always something else on the other side.