Are You Sure Russell Westbrook Should Be MVP? Consider These Stats
An NBA season is not a triple-double-getting contest. Yesterday, Albert Burneko argued that the discussion about who deserves the NBA Most Valuable Player award has lately gone off track—that Russell Westbrook, averaging a triple-double for the Oklahoma City Thunder, has been so thoroughly and overw...
Don't Watch Donald Trump
I thought I was planning to watch Donald Trump speak last night, but then my older kid forgot to do his homework till the last minute before bedtime, and I started to get mad, and I paused and figured out I was really mad because I didn’t want to have to watch Donald Trump speak. ...
Neil Gorsuch Won't Fill The Vacancy On The Supreme Court
Last night, in a livestreamed quasi-game show at 8 p.m., President Donald Trump announced that he would be nominating Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. Who is Neil Gorsuch? The immediate coverage explained that he is “not a rank partisan” but a “judge’s judge”; that he has a “sterling legal pedigre...
How Did Jorge Posada Become A First-Ballot Hall Of Fame Washout?
Amid the arguing over this year’s Hall of Fame, one of the weirder potential results involves no argument at all. Unless there’s a dramatic and unexpected late break in the voting, Jorge Posada—who as of this afternoon appeared on 10 of 239 known ballots in the ballot tracker—is going to miss the fi...
If You Give A Trump A Hooker
If you give a Trump a hooker...
Mell Lazarus And <i>Momma</i> Got The Last Laugh
For nearly 35 years, Mell Lazarus knew exactly how the end would go for Momma. In 1982, when the cartoonist began dating Sally Mitchell, who would become his second wife, he confided to her that he had already decided what the final installment of his comic strip would be, and he told her the idea....
Gifts For A Life With Diminished Horizons
The line between holiday gifts and New Year’s resolutions is less clear than it might seem. Unless you and your gift recipients have fallen into the terrible trap of typecasting—Here’s one more item for you with a golf joke on it, Jolly Person Who Plays Golf!—presents are aspirational: Here’s someth...
Donald Trump Is The Leader America Was Promised
In the end, the warnings got the story all backwards. Beware, the political analysts said—Donald Trump may be an incompetent, bigoted buffoon, but after he loses, a cleverer, more subtle, more respectable Trump will come along....
John McCain Promises To Defy The Election Results
While Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is going off on paranoid rants about how the media and inner-city voters are trying to steal the election from him, his on-and-off supporter Senator John McCain has already moved on to the larger picture. Today, he pledged to ignore the result of th...
Donald Trump Beat The Press
On Saturday, as Republicans lined up to denounce Donald Trump and the pussy-grabbing candidate brooded in his tower, BuzzFeed’s editor-in-chief, Ben Smith, published a piece arguing that what was unfolding was not just a defeat for Trump’s image, but a victory for the established traditions of journ...
Accused Serial Groper Arnold Schwarzenegger Denounces Confessed Groper Donald Trump
Now joining the parade of prominent Republicans who have declared that, as of yesterday, Donald Trump became insupportable: former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. In a statement posted to Twitter, the muscleman and action-movie hero wrote: ...
Root For The Baltimore Orioles In The Playoffs
The Baltimore Orioles gave up their chance at a glorious regular season in fits and starts, but mostly in one four-day span from Sept. 19-22, when they hosted the first-place Boston Red Sox at Camden Yards for a four-game series in which they were swept, losing by scores of 5-2, 5-2, 5-1, and 5-3. W...
What Will White People Say About How Trump Does In The Debate?
With hours to go before tonight’s presidential debate, one great defining question hangs over American politics: Will Donald Trump’s performance tonight allow white people to keep pretending he can possibly be president?...
If You Want Donald Trump's Tax Returns, Start Asking Now And Don't Stop<em></em>
We are less than eight weeks away from Election Day, and Donald Trump, one of the two major-party presidential candidates, is refusing to release his tax returns. This is very frustrating and embarrassing for the press, which believes that a candidate’s financial situation is information that the pu...
The <i>New York Times</i> Doesn't Know What Aleppo Is, Either
Everyone agrees that Gary Johnson, who is pretending to be an actual candidate for the presidency under the banner of the Libertarian Party, humiliated himself this morning by not knowing what “Aleppo” was. The New York Times immediately read his embarrassing gaffe into the record. It wrote:...
Do You Know the Second Verse to "Jingle Bells, Batman Smells"?
Playground folk culture is oddly, comfortingly consistent. Small children laugh themselves stupid over the same dumb material, then grow up and move on while their dumb jokes and rhymes stay behind, to be discovered by new generations. So my four-year-old came back from baseball day camp singing an ...
Tim Duncan Was Big Fun
The first time I ever watched Tim Duncan play basketball, I had no idea who he was. I’d tuned in to an ACC telecast expecting to be paying attention to Randolph Childress and Scooter Banks for Wake Forest, but possession after possession this tall freshman kept materializing right in the middle of t...
How Did Barbaro Really Get Hurt?
As of today, it’s been a decade since Barbaro, the 2006 Kentucky Derby winner, answered the starting bell at the Preakness Stakes, moments before jockey Edgar Prado pulled him up with a broken hind leg. Eight months later, he would die of the complications from that injury....
Root for the Baltimore Orioles This Year. Or Don't. Suit Yourself.
This is part of an occasional series of slightly belated MLB season previews....
Nearly Perfect: The Indiana Pacers Were A Vanished Ideal
The Indiana Pacers were a pretty, pretty basketball team. Do people know that now? It all came back at once, watching the bleary video of them facing the Bulls on Boxing Day of 1995. The in-game graphics reminded viewers that the Pacers had won the Central Division the year before—Michael Jordan’s b...