newyorker.com
Paul, who gained renown as a YouTube celebrity and has only ten fights to his professional credit, was born in 1997, the same year that an over-the-hill-seeming Tyson was disqualified from a title bout for chomping on Evander Holyfield’s ears. Who, aghast at that spectacle, could have imagined the bizarro world that would follow? Not long ago, Tyson dined at Mar-a-Lago with his old friend Donald, a ringside fixture turned President and potential felon. “Beautiful,” Tyson recalled, of the experie…
about 1 month ago
newyorker.com
Finkel is now an author in his own right, whose books include “Jocks in Chief,” which ranks the American Presidents in order of athleticism (Gerald Ford first, Andrew Johnson last), and a forthcoming biography of the wrestler Macho Man. He also issues weekly reading recommendations for “sophisticated meatheads,” as he calls them, through his newsletter, “Books & Biceps.” (Robert Kurson is a subscriber.) He lives in Palm Beach County, Florida, with his wife and two kids, and he benches as much as…
5 months ago
newyorker.com
Newtown Creek, to be clear, is a Superfund site, owing to leaky Greenpoint refineries that have added some thirty million gallons of oil to the untreated sewage that streams in whenever it rains with any force. Black mayonnaise is the connoisseur’s name for its sedimentary ooze. Pity the blue crabs. Beckwith was in the bow. Her friend Amy Gartrell was in the stern. A man who had just met them both sat amidships and pointed at a plastic bottle drifting northwest in the current, headed back to the…
8 months ago
newyorker.com
Neal Moore, a canoeist who set off from Oregon, closes in on the Statue of Liberty after twenty-two months, twenty-two rivers, and one capsizing incident—a journey inspired by the disappearance of his fellow-canoeist, Dick Conant.
over 2 years ago
newyorker.com
Like many amateur Egyptologists, Larsen, who was a woodworker before founding Mississippi’s best-selling weekly, the Columbus Packet, has his own construction theories, nurtured over hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of reading and tinkering, and he has gone so far as to fashion a homemade device that he thinks could have done the job, by enabling lifting rather than dragging. It resembles a mashup of a giant wooden rowing machine and a catapult, and uses technology that he believes is depict…
over 2 years ago
newyorker.com
For years, courtside paparazzi have been stalking the Amateur Athletic Union circuit, where nearly all the best teen-age players can be found, in order to capitalize on a trade in mixtapes that began on urban playgrounds in the days of videocassettes. But the rise of social media, and a corresponding shift in our viewing habits, has turned this practice into a tech-driven business opportunity. Overtime, which aims to become the predominant sports network for Generation Z—the post-millennials, th…
almost 5 years ago
newyorker.com
The man responsible for elevating the “sideshow,” as he calls it, to viral prominence, and the creator of the video mentioned above, is a forty-four-year-old advertising executive from the Minneapolis suburb of White Bear Lake named John King. In 2005, while writing bits for a short-lived sports variety program called “The Show to Be Named Later,” which aired in the Twin Cities after “Saturday Night Live,” he conceived the idea of ranking the state’s teen heroes not by goals and assists but by “…
about 5 years ago
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A boy who saw “In Search of Greatness” recently was inspired to replicate the Gretzky method while watching a Premier League soccer game between West Ham and Tottenham. He used an orange marker. His father took a picture of the end result and sent it to Gabe Polsky, the film’s director, who in turn forwarded the flow chart to some other sports fans. One replied, “Proves . . . you wanna be on the field.” The drawing is charming but also a tangled mass of lines that covers nearly every inch of the…
over 5 years ago
newyorker.com
The entry fee for the initial ten-team Rotisserie League, in 1980, was two hundred and fifty dollars, and the winner, at season’s end, would collect half of the over-all pot. Okrent feared that this might make them gamblers—personae non gratae—in the eyes of the sport’s custodians. He was planning to write a book, later published as “Nine Innings,” that would be a micro-examination of a single baseball game, between the Milwaukee Brewers and the Baltimore Orioles. The project required extensive…
about 9 years ago
newyorker.com
Daniel Garodnick, a councilman from Manhattan’s East Side, has introduced a bill to eliminate any potential contradictions in City Hall clock management.
over 10 years ago
newyorker.com
In the annals of outer-borough deviance, the Vito Lopez story is neither as awful as that of Hiram Monserrate, nor as weird as that of Anthony Weiner. It …
over 11 years ago
newyorker.com
The hockey playoffs are often mocked, by hockey doubters, for their seeming endlessness (hockey in June?) and for their relative lack of exclusivity. More than half of the teams qualify, after all, raising the question of what the preceding six months of regular-season games (also endless-seeming) were really for. Often, these doubters are basketball fans—most hockey doubters are basketball fans—and so I’m tempted to say, “Look in the mirror, pal.” The N.B.A. playoffs are similarly extended, and…
almost 12 years ago
newyorker.com
An edited version of Pinkwater’s passage, we now know, was included in a test of comprehension in this year’s New York State reading exam, and students were asked if the animals in the story had eaten the pineapple in the end because they were (a) hungry, (b) excited, (c) annoyed, or (d) amused—by the fact that they had duped themselves into considering the possibility that a foodstuff could outrun a mammal, let alone self-locomote at all.
“If a pineapple were funnier, I would have written a pin…
about 12 years ago
newyorker.com
They are now the Miami Marlins, as a result of a deal that Loria and Samson struck with Miami-Dade County politicians. The politicians got their city’s name attached to the unloved local baseball team; and the Marlins got about five hundred million dollars to help pay for their new ballpark, in Little Havana, on the site of the former Orange Bowl. The deal may have cost the former Miami mayor Carlos Alvarez his job—he lost a recall election spurred by a Tea Party billionaire—and the Securities a…
about 12 years ago
newyorker.com
“They,” in this case, were the Mission Viejo Diablos, representing a public school from south of Anaheim, California, with an enrollment of nearly three thousand and a tradition of football dominance. Mark Sanchez, the New York Jets’ quarterback, graduated from Mission Viejo in 2005, having lost only once in his two years on the varsity. Sanchez, by now on the cover of GQ, and giving back, had reportedly donated twenty thousand dollars to help his alma mater undertake the cross-country trip to B…
over 12 years ago
newyorker.com
Ramirez’s departure had a secondary consequence: the outfielder Johnny Damon, another aging rebound candidate, could rest his legs and concentrate on batting, as a designated hitter. And that had a tertiary upshot: an opportunity for sustained playing time, in the outfield, for Sam Fuld, who was one of five players the Rays received in the Garza trade, and not by a long stretch the most coveted. Fuld was twenty-nine years old and a diabetic. He stood five feet nine in spikes and owned the dubiou…
almost 13 years ago
newyorker.com
We’re talking, of course, about Barry Bonds, the home-run king and seven-time National League Most Valuable Player, and presumed druggie. The fact that many readers may have blanched at my unqualified appraisal above is central to understanding his predicament. In the best-selling book “Game of Shadows,” Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams suggest that Bonds was stung by all the joyful attention showered upon Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa during the record-chasing summer of 1998, and set about re…
about 13 years ago
newyorker.com
Few institutions seem to subject themselves to there-goes-the-neighborhood-style lamentations quite as regularly as Yale, with its legions of Old Blue curmudgeons, post-structuralist radicals, and earnest young strivers. As of late last week, the video—which was produced by current students and recent graduates, under the auspices of the admissions office—had been viewed more than three hundred and fifty thousand times on the university’s YouTube channel, although it was unclear how many viewers…
over 14 years ago
newyorker.com
Pakenham, who is fifty-nine, does not own a car. (When riding shotgun, he sometimes reaches over and kills the ignition at stoplights.) His friends call him the Verdant Vigilante, and few documents depict the uneasy intersection of civic activism and ordinary city life as well as the Excel spreadsheet he maintains, recording his “encounters” on the street. Pakenham likes keeping statistics. He has, for instance, a seventy-eight-per-cent success rate in asking motorists to cease idling. His targe…
about 15 years ago
newyorker.com
Orlov moved to the United States when he was twelve, and returned to the Soviet Union for the first time in 1989, shortly after his uncle, a political prisoner under the Andropov regime, was released. During his second trip back, in 1990, the country was suffering from a fuel shortage, and he financed a road trip to the medieval towns of Pskov and Novgorod with a trunk full of vodka, trading half-litre bottles for ten litres of gasoline from black-marketeers along the way. (This was just after G…
over 15 years ago
newyorker.com
With his rap career on hold, Woolard turned to acting, and was cast, from among ten thousand applicants, as the lead in “Notorious,” a bio-pic about the late rapper Notorious B.I.G., which opens next month. Not long ago, on the movie set, in Washington Heights, Woolard removed cotton balls from his mouth and rubbed his right cheek, which had just been slapped a dozen times by Angela Bassett. “She’s for real,” he said. “Can’t be faking that. It could affect sales.” Bassett plays Voletta Wallace,…
over 15 years ago
