lol

Closing the year with the most important one: @dwil.bsky.social went to Louisville to talk to the engineer who made the Pop-Tarts Bowl trophy

"Get the principals on camera" is such a telling phrase here, because it tells us that for Weiss there's no world in which the victims of these horrific actions can actually be seen as the subjects of the story: They're background noise, and the people who matter are the ones sending them.

Chris Almeida (@chrisalmeida.bsky.social) on cricket’s colonial past in India, and the ball-tampering scandal that pushed it to the fore: www.thebeliever.net/an-avoidable...

Interested in outlaw country, weed brownies, feuding with billionaires, the early NBA, playing Gin Rummy on a weekday afternoon, and what it feels like to die? I went to Maui to profile Don Nelson for The Believer! @thebeliever.net www.thebeliever.net/island-time/

I wrote a story about cricket for @thebeliever.net

Mike Elko hates talking about The Past at Texas A&M. But that’s why he’s here, the ultimate overachiever imposing his will on one of college football’s biggest underachievers. Just don’t tell him about this story. www.espn.com/college-foot...

Our society only seems to promote people who think the point of art is to hold a finished product, rather than the process of creation. I'm ashamed to admit how much it bothers me that you can be so obviously ignorant and still be taken seriously.

Gotta send the One O’Clock Band to the CFP

They are a product of the ecosystem that incentivizes and rewards this stuff, especially among a specific demographic and class. The people elevating them today aren’t “weird.” They are the people in charge of making decisions at the most mainstream outlets. Because the incentives remain.

The new Rizz King

“It’s frankly embarrassing that executives would make baseless claims about a fact-checker.” www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...

When I was just starting out, I asked a boss of mine what I could do better. He said "You're trying to be the writer you'll be in ten years," which was a nice way of telling me to stop overwriting. What if, instead, he'd said: "Nothing. Here's a giant raise to write about national politics."

i’d be more comfortable with the olivia nuzzi coverage if every story was headlined something like “seduced by a guy who eats roadkill: the story of an extremely stupid lady”

I will not apologize for putting band stories on espn dot com

The buzzer went off again

I am so grateful for every week I get to work in this terrible profession and I also feel constant heartburn about what a mess it is. Strong statement from the News Guild on the absurd firings at Conde: www.nyguild.org/post/stateme...

Wrote a little cricket essay for the next issue of @thebeliever.net. Sub so you don't miss it!

Condé Nast's actions are in direct violation of our contracts and of labor law. Solidarity with our unjustly fired colleagues across the company. This is not over.

I was one of the four people who got canned. In the interim, you can subscribe to my newsletter, Straight From The Hut. No paywall, but feel free to choose the pay to support model. I'm not going anywhere — the show goes on, and I'll be back on MSNBC Saturday night. straightfromthehut.substack.com

Literally quoting Mario Cuomo

I knew that Mamdani had it; he had the people and did the work, and has been the clearest and most lucid in rejecting the untenable current state of things. But the vile, bigoted shit against him was so constant, and I am conditioned to that working better than I want. This feels like an exorcism.

The last month of the anti-Mamdani campaign was an absolutely shameful undertaking, an attempt to rip the city and Democratic coalition apart and I'm very happy to see it failed.

need 50 of these

Son of an old-school East Texas ball coach who was raised the Lobo Way, the tall tales of Haynes King explain his rise to being the toughest sumbitch out there. Story with the great @adavidhalejoint.bsky.social www.espn.com/college-foot...

Even by the standards of a Chotiner'ing, this was brutal to read.

this would piss me off so much if I was the brain surgeon www.bbc.com/news/videos/...

heartbroken to learn the pope sympathizes with the poor. how can i continue to believe in god

The problem of tech people not understanding why normal people do things is longstanding, but in this case: people who read long business stories do it *because* they want the stuff the company might not want to tell you. The audience for anything else is just the subject’s friends and employees

Woof. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

The contrarian got the job by convincing the third-richest man in the world, a key supporter of the sitting president, that she shared his worldview

This is simply not true and has never been true! People—pretty understandably—hate being told they’re wrong, or full of shit, or being harmed or ostracized for their words and actions. There’s nothing new or partisan or principled about this, it’s just contested social mores.

The Park Slope Dad Band has been playing for at least three hours at the block party on my street. I dig it but it is a little on the nose that they've now played "Creep" twice.

I am aware that a lot of super rich people have a majority of their cash in assets that aren’t liquid, but in terms of a super rich guy with cash in your pocket and in the bank that u can just use, I just don’t understand what you do if you make more than, say, five million dollars a year

An ode to the last Iron Skillet, which gave us real spite, a Game of the Century, Dan Jenkins, suffered through lean years and was just getting good! (And whose trophy secretly broke and was replaced by a Lodge skillet from a hardware store right before the 2018 game.) www.espn.com/college-foot...

Oh, you know the ones.

people pretend that debate signals and defends a commitment to high minded politics. what it elevates instead is performative dishonesty as a basic mode of politics www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

This will probably look silly in 10 years but it’s hard to imagine what it would look like for two people to be better than this at tennis

Apropos of nothing, I wrote about the historic endurance of Browns fans. #DawgPound www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/...

ah yes "shit-kicking anti-establishment" is what i think of when someone gets bought by the son of one of the world's richest men bsky.app/profile/jayr...

Don’t threaten me with a good time

What will it mean for culture when the live television band, something that has been an American institution for 70 years, goes extinct?

Wrote a story for @newyorker.com on house bands and why live music is cool

In the 80s, a fact checker found that an unedited issue of The New Yorker contained 1,000 errors. (This figure itself wouldn’t survive a fact-check, but never mind.) Zach Helfand delves into the history of the vaunted department.

Nobody knows whether or not Arch Manning will live up to the hype this season. "He ain't even pissed a drop yet," Grandpa Archie told @dwil.bsky.social. But: people are still stealing his photo off the wall of an Austin burger joint. Everybody's already watching.

Watching fiction spread about a great American city where countless people live normal lives feeling safe every day isn't new, but the military occupation of the city on those grounds is a fresh take on it

Contains: The secret of what happened to Eric Dickerson’s gold Trans Am