There was an interesting story earlier this NBA season about the successes of LeBron’s friends (maybe Pablo Torre wrote it?). And that’s a group of guys that is very very proud, justifiably so, that they proved wrong a lot of people who thought James made a mistake by handing his business over to his childhood friends…

Oh, it’s not more palatable. I can imagine that perhaps part of the original intent of these methods was to find a more “humane” way to do it, but in point of fact that effort was a failure. I think there are two drivers, aside from inertia, behind lethal injection and the other methods which were prominent in 20th…

Unlike the previous Lombardi column, I feel like the little nugget of “this is how I think differently” is a reasonable thing to point out. I can’t say anything about his actual evaluation of prospects, but “there’s an abstract value in the trade market to a ‘first round pick’ and almost every year, there aren’t 32…

Your feed is your feed, but Beck’s Morning Phase is one of the greatest albums of all ... no, I fucked this joke up.

I dunno about Bargaining, but for Acceptance, I’d like to nominate Steven Adams making the smallest movement possible to point at Westbrook when that reporter was trying to see if Westbrook would let Adams answer the question that Adams had been asked. And Adams was just like “That’s not how this works.”

It’s funny how you say the right thing, right there in the middle, in the process of making an argument for the wrong thing. The point of the law is for the state to step in and not let angry people slake their thirst for blood. Over the centuries the law and the thinking behind it have evolved to the point of…

I don’t think the feelings of the victim’s family should have any place in the matter. When prosecutors are eager for the death penalty they’re certainly fine ignoring the wishes of victim’s families who are opposed to it, which does happen. Using the very real trauma of the victim or the victim’s surviving loved ones…

No, see, they were taking it to the top seed in the East until Rondo got hurt, so they should probably run it back again and build on that next year. I want to see how long it takes before “actually the Bulls are a trash franchise with trash leadership and trash ownership” finally becomes the common perspective.

Bearing in mind that I have no interest in going to Comic-con, but I like some of the things at Comic-con a lot more than I do football ...

I like the whole Truehoop crew, but ESS got some pretty fascinating and big stories out over the past couple of years - about Steph and the shoe companies, about tension with Draymond Green after last year’s finals, etc.

Here’s a review of a book on the subject (which I haven’t read); here’s a Malcolm Gladwell piece (I know) which gets into it after a few paragraphs. It’s not quite so cut and dried as “we hate Jews, so sports,” but a desire for exclusion (especially, in the 20s, of Jews), evolving into a desire to promote the image of…

Yes. It’s REALLY WEIRD that the student-athlete model is so different than all the other ones.

I started trying to formulate a joke about how if collegiate bass fishing were NCAA sponsored the athletes wouldn’t be allowed to eat the fish they caught as that would be an improper benefit, but then I realized they probably just toss the fish back anyway and, from a little checking, it seems that way.

But don’t you know that every dollar helps, and look, some alumnus who made more money than you ever will because his rich dad staked him in a startup is offering to match your class donations in this round up to $100k? SO EXCITING.

I remember playing NBA Live with a buddy sitting on the floor of his dorm room when another kid showed up in the doorway and tossed SOMEthing over our heads to my friend’s roommate. In the next breath we realized it was pot, turned, and saw the dude holding a damn brick of it. I remember being astonished and kind of…

Nah, I think athletic activity should be promoted as part of being a whole person - thought of course it’s not for everybody - and as such would not object to university support for the old intramural soccer league here and there.

I’m typically against resurrecting the motives behind people who started doing something a long time ago as an attack on the different reasons people have for continuing to do a version of that same thing today, but I’m more than willing to weaponize “athletics became part of the admissions profile because Harvard and…

I’ve started cutting the calls REALLY short because some of the pitches - from well meaning current students just doing a job - start veering perilously close to “don’t you think you should give something back for everything you got out of the school” and those kids don’t deserve to have me scream “WHAT WAS MY FUCKING…

Superweird how the student-athlete model precludes any possibility of the student-athlete deriving any income from his athletic abilities, or notoriety, or in some cases any additional income at all, through any conceivable revenue stream. This is traditionally NOT the case with the student-musician, student-actor,…

At the moment, the only place I know is Tom Haberstroh’s Twitter. He’s got Westbrook shooting 25.9% against PB and 40.6% otherwise for the series.