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The Best Things We Read In 2018
Let’s get this out of the way up top: Yes, I agree, you wouldn’t think a cultural history of Oklahoma City would make for a compelling book. (I’ve had this conversation a lot this year.) But Sam Anderson’s Boom Town is the most engrossing piece of writing I’ve read all year. The book weaves together...

Merril Hoge Doesn't Want You To Use Your Brain
To clear up any confusion, let’s get this out of the way: Merril Hoge and Peter Cummings, who co-authored a book called Brainwashed: The Bad Science Behind CTE and The Plot to Destroy Football, are not CTE deniers. They do not dismiss the scientific notion that repetitive brain trauma is a high-ris...

Why An Ex-Jets Great Wants Nothing To Do With The Jets
Excerpted from Beyond Broadway Joe: The Super Bowl TEAM That Changed Football, now available from Dey Street Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers....

Oh Good, Time For Patriots Fans To Get Mad At ESPN Again
Those were good times, weren’t they? When that big ESPN report on a schism between Tom Brady and Bill Belichick, driven in part by Brady’s shady nutrition “guru” Alex Guerrero, dropped right before the playoffs and set off rounds of denials and non-denials and recriminations, and a whole lot of scre...

Roger Goodell Is Every Bit The Overcompensating Dipshit He Seems To Be
Excerpted from Big Game: The NFL In Dangerous Times, out today from Penguin Press....

This Children's Book Is Messed Up: <i>Caps For Sale</i>
Caps for Sale: A Tale of a Peddler, Some Monkeys and Their Monkey Business is a children’s classic that was published in 1940. Written and illustrated by Esphyr Slobodkina, it’s an adaptation of a folk tale about monkeys stealing hats, because humanity’s entertainment situation was DIRE before strea...

This Children's Book Is Messed Up: <i>The Story Of Babar</i>
The Babar I remember from childhood was a jolly elephant who goes on adventures. Somehow that’s all I took with me into adulthood from early readings of The Story of Babar by Jean de Brunhoff (and his wife Cécile, who first told their children the story at bedtime), a children’s classic that spurred...

You Can’t Bet On Rutgers To Win The National Title: The First Day Of Sports Gambling In New Jersey
I almost didn’t get to place a bet that ended up winning me $100....

Here's An Anecdote That Perfectly Encapsulates The Stupid Marriage Of Silicon Valley And The Rest Of Corporate America
Throughout Bad Blood, John Carreyrou’s excellent new book about fraudulent blood-testing company Theranos and its founder Elizabeth Holmes, the $9 billion company keeps running into the same problem: would-be investors or retailers want to see a demonstration of its technology. This is an issue for ...

How Pat Burrell Set The Home-Run Record... In A Sci-Fi Novel About Killer Prehistoric Sharks
Steve Alten grew up in Philadelphia. He went to schools—Penn State, Delaware, Temple—that Philly kids go to. And, though he lives in South Florida now, he’s still a huge Philadelphia sports fan....

Deadspin Interview: Ta-Nehisi Coates
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book We Were Eight Years In Power is eight previously published Atlantic essays each preceded by a new piece of writing that describes Coates’s intellectual, financial, and emotional state at the time of the piece, and musings on the Obama years. The eight new essays trace his...

The Best Things We Read In 2017
When we weren’t busy watching sports contests, we did some reading. Here are the best things we read this year....