There was a crowd on Government Center bigger than that for the Italy-France final back in 2006. Boston is one city where US participation in the WC isn’t that critical. We have plenty of immigrants, foreign students, and native-born soccer hipsters who love the sport regardless.

“the next Christian Pulisic is picking up a basketball”.

This doesn’t seem like a major issue. Simply srike the offending verse from the anthem, or replace it with a new explicitly progressive verse. After the war the Germans just got rid of the jingoistic first verse in their national anthem (the “Deutschland über alles” bit) and kept going. Emotionally people have an…

I don’t hate all Trump voters. But Kraft went beyond voting for the guy. He gave Trump a fucking ring. He didn’t give Obama or Bush a ring, but he gave that piece of dogshit a Superbowl ring. Right now I wish the Sullivans still owned the team.

Our owner took a giant steaming shit all over our glorious Superbowl victory by giving Trump a ring.

“The easiest way to RIP your inbox is to go on Patriots reddit and make a positive comment about Aaron Rodgers.”

I hadn’t intially read it carefully but I see your point. The whole time he is telling his wife “of course I can be just friends with all these attractive ambitious actresses I hang out with, honey, I am a sensitive guy who respects his mom!” while he is actually boning them. That does seem hard to defend as in any…

Yeah, “Amy Acker” popped unbidden into my mind as soon as I read his ex-wife’s piece.

Whedon also brought strong women writers on board- Buffy would not be the same show without Marti Noxon and Jane Espensen.

Springsteen? He is married to the woman he was having an affair with. How is having an affair with your young back-up singer when you are a famous rock star any different than being a TV director having an affair with an actress?

Cheating on your partner is not “anti-feminist”. Not everything that hurts an individual woman is anti-feminist. It is perfectly possible to be a feminist and lie to your partner, be an asshole, be bored in your relationship, etc.   Even patriarchal right-wing Catholics are likely to condemn Whedon’s breaking the…

Some lesbian feminists who have affairs do. And plenty of lesbain feminists have cheated on their partners. Cheaters will always look for ways to avoid shame and guilt. Feminism is a philosophy, and professing it doesn’t make you a paragon of virtue. By the same token, being an asshole or a hypocrite personally…

Vienna is certainly one of the best cities in the world for drinking on the street, but not so much because of the Schanigärten (which have equivalents in lots of cities, even in the US) but because you can always buy a cold beer and/or a bottle of schnaps from a Würstelstand (a sausage stand) day or night and drink…

Soccer in the US is still a sport of middle and upper middle class Americans who are more focused on their kids getting a nice college scholarship than a pro career. That is somewhat true of hockey in the US as well, and I would argue that despite generations of hockey players, the US still punches a bit under its…

The A’s play 81 games in Oakland every year. The Raiders play 8, plus 2 “exhibition games”. On top of that baseball games are fairly affordable, you can take your kids, and baseball is more fun in person than on TV. NFL games are expensive, the fans are assholes, and the game is designed for the TV viewer. It makes…

Your ideas are intriguing to me and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Texas should rejoin Mexico. It is a win/win both for the US and for Mexico.

I think it is worth considering that the US is simply far too big too function as a workable democracy. In an ideal world we would divide the US into 5 or 6 countries that might share a common defense treaty and a customs union, but otherwise would be independent.

You can sing along with “Fame.” And the ESB score was a rehash of the score of the original Star Wars.

Lukewarm take - “Star Wars” is a fantasy space opera, it is not sci-fi at all. At the time a lot of the hardcore sci-fi nerds hated it.