Author Archive

Unabated to the QB, Week 11: In Defense of Ricky Williams

Over at Deadspin, Will Leitch recently made a list of people who had had a particularly bad decade, or as Leitch put it, “reputations that were devastated by the last 10 years.” This list included Ricky Williams.
That list no longer has any credibility.
Sure, when Ricky Williams graduated from Texas in 1998, he was college football’s [...]

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Zeitoun and the Art of the Soft Sell

Note to all potential readers of Zeitoun: It is located in the Biography section at Barnes & Noble, not, as one who has read Dave Eggers’ other more-or-less-based-on-real-life-if-slightly-fictionalized works might suspect, in the Fiction/Literature section. Furthermore, remember that, in the Biography section, it is alphabetized by subject and not author; this is because people don’t [...]

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The Worst College Football Season Ever

Perhaps we all should have seen this coming from the start. I found myself unusually excited for this college football season (likely due to the misery surrounding the Mets’ baseball season) and, for the first time ever, actually tuned in to the season-opening Thursday night game between South Carolina and North Carolina State. It was [...]

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Unabated to the QB, Week 10: What was Bill Belichick Thinking?

“I recognized no equals. I always considered myself more intelligent than everyone else, as I’ve told you, but also more sensitive and more skillful, a crack shot, an incomparable driver, a better lover.”

—Albert Camus, The Fall

Truth be told, I didn’t watch the Sunday Night game between the Patriots and Colts; I had “better [...]

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The Eternal Husband and Dostoevskian Simplicity

The Eternal Husband is the kind of novel I imagine Fyodor Dostoevsky came up with in a weekend. It could even work as a one-act play with its three basic steps: Take a wife who cheats on her husband, kill her off (before the start of the novel of course), and put the husband in [...]

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Mere Anachrony: The Simpsons Season One

“Sometimes I think we’re the worst family in town.”
“Maybe we should move to a bigger community.”
“Dad, the sad truth is all families are like this.”
This short conversation among Homer, Marge, and Lisa Simpson is, in so much as the longest-running comedy series in television history has one, The Simpsons’ thesis statement. In fact, the episode [...]

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It’s College Basketball Season!

As we draw toward the unexciting close of what can only be described as a woeful college football season, it’s high time we shifted our sights to the only flawless sport left in America: college basketball. Oh sure, the naysayers point out a deterioration in the quality of play, the untenability [...]

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On To-Do Lists

Recently, Slate’s John Dickerson solicited readers’ advice in how to most effectively and efficiently follow a to-do list. I did not send in my own counsel regarding to-do lists, reproduced below.
1. Every night, write down everything that you can conceivably accomplish the next day in a large, ringed notebook kept on your nightstand. Included on [...]

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The Top 173 Things in History: #111. Armistice Day

I will admit that I am liable to overstate things in these History posts: calling the Hyksos the inventors of war, hypothesizing that Sweden was a Charles XII compromise away from becoming the secondary European power of the 18th century, and outright stating that November 9, 1989 was the best day of David Hasselhoff’s life.
Here’s [...]

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Unabated to the QB, Week 9: The Halftime Report

Every time it seems to me that I’ve grasped the deep meaning of the world, it is its simplicity that always overwhelms me…. Everything simple is beyond us. What is blue, and how do we think “blue”?
—Albert Camus

Three seasons ago, the NFL peaked in terms of its own scheduling. Every team had enjoyed its [...]

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