Steve Alten grew up in Philadelphia. He went to schools—Penn State, Delaware, Temple—that Philly kids go to. And, though he lives in South Florida now, he’s still a huge Philadelphia sports fan.
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book We Were Eight Years In Power is eight previously published Atlantic essays each preceded by a new piece of writing that describes Coates’s intellectual, financial, and emotional state at the time of the piece, and musings on the Obama years. The eight new essays trace his journey from what…
When we weren’t busy watching sports contests, we did some reading. Here are the best things we read this year.
It’s not hard to fracture the internet with a movie adaptation of a popular bad book. They’re made into movies all the time. They read like screenplays because they skip complex language that defies being replaced with pictures, and producers can’t resist a baked-in audience, which creates a baked-in counter-audience…
Last year the good folks at Penguin sent me out on a book tour to promote The Hike, and now they’re sending me back out on the road once more to whore out the paperback for cheapskates.
Jerry is really personable. I mean, you’ve got to like Jerry Jones. If you’re around him, you’ve got to like him, unless you hate the Dallas Cowboys, which some people do. But as a person, he’s likeable. He’s fun to be around. His whole family is working with the team. They are a great family. I’m partial to family,…
Functionally and historically, the sabermetric revolution in baseball is over. Analytics is not some outsider’s method of attacking institutional baseball; it’s how institutional baseball does business. Every single major-league team receives immense amounts of data from MLB about their players’ batting, pitching,…
You may know Scott Adams as the white guy who draws Dilbert and also loves Donald Trump and has lots of, uh, interesting beliefs on various political topics. In fact, Scott Adams’ legacy is much grander.
The following is an excerpt from Dueling with Kings: High Stakes, Killer Sharks, and the Get-Rich Promise of Daily Fantasy Sports, Daniel Barbarisi’s book about a year spent attempting to become an elite daily fantasy player. The book is out now.
Hey man, we don’t want this weak shit! Give us The Winds Of Winter! Let’s see some pages!
Perhaps you imagine that enlightened lawmaking will bring our nation’s rampant inequality problem under control. History tells us the prognosis may be much, much more grim. We spoke to the author of one of the scariest books we have ever read.
Self-professed pages-haver George R.R. Martin recently responded to a comment on his blog about whether The Winds Of Winter, the long-awaited followup to 2011's A Dance With Dragons, will actually come out this year. The penultimate book in the Song Of Ice And Fire series, the source material for HBO’s hit show about…
data, see big data
This excerpt from Gunslinger: The Remarkable, Improbable, Iconic Life of Brett Favre by Jeff Pearlman is reprinted with the permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Buy it here.
The following is excerpted from Norm Macdonald’s new book Based On A True Story: A Memoir. It is out now from Spiegel & Grau, and it is very, very funny.
Last we heard from friend of the program and A Song Of Ice And Fire author George R.R. Martin, he insisted to Deadspin that he had pages. There have been occasional page dumps in the intervening months, but these are old pages, and there is precious little evidence that GRRM is hard at work on crafting The Winds Of…
According to a new Pew Research Center study, 73% of American adults say they have read a book in the past year. Okay. What book was it?
The splashiest piece of sportswriting in my lifetime might be David Foster Wallace’s 2006 profile of Roger Federer, printed in the New York Times’s short-lived Play magazine. A wrinkled copy of it lived under my old Xbox console for years, so that I knew exactly where to revisit it. At the time, the essay felt…
Famed no-pages-haver George R.R. Martin went to Balticon last weekend, revealed Brienne of Tarth’s secret lineage, and read some pages, which, despite their fresh unveiling, are old. He’s been slowly letting out advance chapters from The Winds Of Winter, the sixth volume in his A Song Of Ice And Fire saga, over the…