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Sports
August 30, 2007
What's OK to Say?
For sports columnists, the line between edgy and offensive seems to move all the time. It can cost you part of your livelihood if you point out—as Pittsburgh Post-Gazette journalist Paul Zeise did on KDKA-TV's Sports Showdown—that "It's really a sad day in this country when somehow … Michael Vick would have been better off raping a woman if you look at the outcry of what happened." For that supposed offense, he had to issue an apology and will no longer be invited back on the show.
Media
August 22, 2007
Extra, Extra, Read All About It! (In My Upcoming Book)
Bill Simmons is not Bob Woodward. In fact, one could argue that they are journalistic opposites. Nevertheless, the two apparently share a common penchant for hoarding book-related material.
Varsity Letters
August 22, 2007
September 5: Varsity Letters Reading Series
New York's Varsity Letters sports reading series returns on Wednesday, September 5 at 8 p.m. At this free monthly event at a Lower East Side bar, hosted by Gelf, Frank Deford, Scott Price, and Neal Thompson will read from and talk about their work, and take questions. In their new books, Deford spins the tale of a baseball superstar accused of rape, Price chronicles his year observing how games are played far from US playing fields, and Thompson describes the struggles of a championship New Orleans high-school football team in the wake of Katrina.
Media
August 21, 2007
CNN Lite
People who don't have time to read in-depth news stories often turn to CNN.com to get a lighter and briefer summary of the goings-on of the day. But the CNN folks seem to think that skimming through a couple hundred words about a subject may itself be too much: They've started to provide bullet-point summaries at the top of their stories.
Media
August 21, 2007
Getting Third-Railed
In February, William Safire of the New York Times used his On Language column to look into the origin of the oft-used warning that a particular issue is "the third rail of American politics." He found that the phrase—first coined by Kirk O'Donnell, an aide to former Speaker of the House Tip O'Neil—has been in existence for only 25 years. For most of that time, the "third rail" only referred to Social Security. Lately though, every political stance beyond kissing babies seems to be cursed.
Media
August 15, 2007
Lies, Damned Lies, and ...
One hundred years ago, Mark Twain mentioned the now-famous phrase "Lies, damn Lies, and statistics" in Chapters from My Autobiography. He attributes the phrase to former British Prime Minister Benjamin Disreali, but several folks can lay claim to starting what has become an extremely well-used aphorism. While the field of statistics still gets its fair share of abuse, nowadays the best way to question the validity of something is to precede it with "Lies, damned lies"—particularly if you're writing for a UK newspaper.
Media
August 13, 2007
Getting the Call Up
"Hello! And welcome to Boston," Ken Tremendous writes to Beantown's newest stars in the most recent issue of Sports Illustrated. "Allow me to congratulate you on the six straight championships your teams are about to win." With that, Tremendous makes the leap from anonymous writer ranting on the stripped-down media-criticism blog FireJoeMorgan.com to anonymous writer ranting in the pages of a national magazine. So how did a blogger for a niche site dedicated to ridding the world of a Sabermetricsphobic announcer end up getting the same amount of real estate in SI as Rick Reilly?
Media
August 13, 2007
Second Acts, Take Two
Of the many straw men that journalists routinely knock down, the flimsiest may be a vague F. Scott Fitzgerald quotation. "There are no second acts in American lives," he supposedly wrote, much to the glee of scribes seeking to show how their comeback kid du jour has bucked that supposed trend. But as Frank Hayes pointed out in a letter to Romenesko, using this quotation as a lead for such stories is not only cliché at this point, it's also likely wrong.
Sports
August 9, 2007
Witnessing 756
When Barry Bonds hit No. 756 on Tuesday, I was about 10 rows away. I didn't join in the pile for the ball—I didn't want to spill the beer that I had just spent 30 minutes obtaining—but several people much farther away than me did. The homer was a bit of a line drive and seemed to bounce a couple times once it reached the packed stands; long after Mr. Mets jersey was shepherded away by police, people were walking by holding their hands and bitching about their rotten luck.
Science
August 7, 2007
What Games Can Humans Still Win?
Two weeks ago, a Canadian team of computer scientists announced in a paper that they had created a computer program that has solved the game of checkers. It took nearly 20 years and 50 computers to sort through the approximately 500 billion billion different checkers positions necessary to solve the game, making it the most complicated game that computers have completely figured out. (It should be noted that a "solved" game often means that the program can never lose—a perfectly-played opposing match would lead to a draw). Which raises the question: Are there any games left that humans can still win?
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