Excerpted from Beyond Broadway Joe: The Super Bowl TEAM That Changed Football, now available from Dey Street Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

Those were good times, weren’t they? When that big ESPN report on a schism between Tom Brady and Bill Belichick, driven in part by Brady’s shady nutrition “guru” Alex Guerrero, dropped right before the playoffs and set off rounds of denials and non-denials and recriminations, and a whole lot of screaming from…

Excerpted from Big Game: The NFL In Dangerous Times, out today from Penguin Press.

Caps for Sale: A Tale of a Peddler, Some Monkeys and Their Monkey Business is a children’s classic that was published in 1940. Written and illustrated by Esphyr Slobodkina, it’s an adaptation of a folk tale about monkeys stealing hats, because humanity’s entertainment situation was DIRE before streaming video.

The Babar I remember from childhood was a jolly elephant who goes on adventures. Somehow that’s all I took with me into adulthood from early readings of The Story of Babar by Jean de Brunhoff (and his wife Cécile, who first told their children the story at bedtime), a children’s classic that spurred an immensely…

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…

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…

So you know a Drew Magary enthusiast, or someone who should be a Drew Magary enthusiast, and you’re wondering what sort of holiday present to get them? As someone who argues with Magary daily about everything, listen to me on this—I know what I’m talking about. Get them some Magary books!

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.