THE MERCY RULE
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Hearing the Spurs
As I age, my ear is retuning itself; I can finally hear something other than “ugh” watching the San Antonio Spurs play, which is cool, except how it parallels suddenly finding a 'Rod Stewart Sings the Standards' record soulful and great. Full story
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Leave Derrick Rose Alone
Derrick Rose, who won an MVP award in 2011 then wrecked his ACL and has been out for a year, has spent the last week getting kicked around by tough-guy sportswriters outraged that he's not back on the floor in his Chicago Bulls' series against the Miami Heat. He refuses to engage… Full story
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The Last Kings of Sacramento
On Monday, the Maloofs will find out which of two potential buyers will pay them for the privilege of taking over the Kings, one of the NBA's worst franchises. So let's say goodbye, finally, to this family of avaricious, spray-tanned ghouls. Full story
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Why Sports Help
There is nothing out there on the internet, nothing useful to learn about the Boston bombings, only more of the guilty inertia that leads us to put this shit on in the background in the first place. There’s nothing here for us, at the moment. So I’m going to a baseball game tonig… Full story
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Building a Better NFL Draft
The NFL draft takes three days and involves some of the dumber shout-machines on American television applying the same five adjectives to various muscular men over and over. It is very bad. But it can be better, if only because it can't be worse. Full story
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Horrible Bosses
Rutgers men's basketball coach Mike Rice abused his players. He called them nasty names, hit them, threw balls at their heads, and was a generally awful human being. Now he's fired, and for good reason, but that he was more or less allowed to do these things to teenagers is part Full story
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The Little Gulfy That Could
If there's a reason to cheer for FGCU—beyond the fact that they're fun as hell to watch—it's for the way they refuse and defuse and otherwise dunk right in the face of all that familiar college hoops sanctimony, simply by being the goofy, grimy Florida-ass thing that they are… Full story
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Bill Walton, the Tallest Troll
During his time in the announcer's booth, Bill Walton has demonstrated both a deep understanding of basketball and a sharp, sometimes vicious, sense of sarcasm. The worse the basketball gets, the better Walton gets at projecting his disdain for it. Full story
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Meet the Satire Called the Mets
Mets fans are not notably smarter or dumber, more or less entitled, or even sadder than the fans of any other flailing team. But thanks to their owners, the Wilpon family, the team's narrative is less a standard Shitty Owner Ruins Team story and more like a strange, sprawling sat… Full story
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Neon Waters Run Deep
adidas's new college basketball uniforms are just a dumb thing to look at and crack some jokes about. But the only compensation the athletes wearing them get is the enjoyment of the enhanced comfort provided by the breakthrough wicking polymers. Full story
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That's So Jordan
Michael Jordan is the greatest basketball player ever, and that being more or less beyond dispute does not make it something basketball fans are less excited to talk about. But in the decade since his last NBA game, talking about His Airness has become a different and stranger th… Full story
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National Shouting Day
National Signing Day, the least telegenic televised "event" of all time, is a giddy beef auction presided over by the psychotic golf dads who coach high-level college football covered as if it were a moon landing. Full story
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Why Breitbart Sports Will Fail, I Hope
It’s only fitting that after a career spent treating politics like a long football game between Black Nazi Communists and the Founding Fathers, Andrew Breitbart has posthumously lent his name to a sports-news website. Full story
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The Lakers' Unreality Show
There’s a certain ugly thrill in watching these Lakers fail, but it’s not a lot of fun—it’s tough to take much joy from watching all these great players playing so poorly and unhappily, even with the leavening knowledge that their ill-tempered awfulness is probably preventing Jac… Full story
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Hall of Lame
Like talk-radio types, Baseball Hall of Fame voters are blithely holding others to impossible standards in the most self-righteous way possible, and define “getting tough” as “accusing people you barely know of being cheaters instead of dealing with a complex issue.” The differen… Full story
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Taken
There’s no reason why anyone should talk about or listen to other people talking about sports for hours and hours every day. There is not necessarily that much to say about men running and catching balls under the best of circumstances, and necessarily not that much to say in mos… Full story
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The Pelicans’ Grief
Team names work best when they’re both goofy and ambitious. The very words Utah Jazz conjure someone pouring a quart of milk into a clarinet; the idea of a Sacramento King mostly just gives you the image of a winking Guy Fieri sitting on a pepperoni throne wearing a crown made of… Full story
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Someone's Super Bowl
This is how we wind up with something like Saturday's SEC Championship Game, which is an orgy of crass bloat and khaki-clad excess to some, something much more important than the Super Bowl to a great many others, and objectively a good deal stranger a thing than we're supposed t… Full story
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Miami Blues
In some ways, the Miami Marlins are Florida—overleveraged, overbuilt, and cruising blithely towards foreclosure while being ruled by a clownish, childish, tone-deaf, permanent cadre of special-needs elites. Less metaphorically, they’re a fucking bummer. Full story
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Chris Berman Will Decide Our Nation's Fate
Sports and politics will collide in an ugly mess tonight, when Monday Night Football airs the pre-recorded interviews Mitt Romney and Barack Obama have just now done with ESPN's Chris Berman—a man who has the coloration and analytical savvy of a yam that has been soaked in Dewar'… Full story
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Champions and Winners
The two teams playing in the World Series are not, objectively and subjectively and quite predictably, the two best teams in baseball. They are the most momentum-fortified, or the luckiest, teams in baseball at the moment, and one of them—at the moment, it looks like the San Fran… Full story
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Alex Rodriguez, All-American
In all circumstances and in every way he comes off alien and affluence-perverted and so perversely and simultaneously self-regarding and oblivious that only the word "Miami" seems capable of summing it all up. His soul is upholstered in teal leather; his whole life is an overly a… Full story
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Adopting October
Who do you root for if you don't have a team in the postseason? While there are no wrong answers to this question (except for "the Yankees"), if you're not cheering for the Oakland Athletics, you're probably a jerk. Full story
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The Jets Are America's Team
The Cowboys aren't America's Team, though they're called that. The Jets, mediocre and unprepared like us, get that honor. That the team's owner wants a Mitt Romney win more than a Super Bowl is sad icing on the despair cake. Full story
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Picking at Scabs
The scab refs look, in short, like scabs—unqualified people hired to do a job they don't really know how to do at the behest of a management group which doesn't especially value that job, or at least less so than they value the chump change saved by not paying those who actually… Full story
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Welcome to College Football
College football is, in many ways, less a sport than a bumpy mass of public discourse and stomach-aches and public spending and almost religion. The talent and competition is not as consistent as the NFL, but there are moments of awesome, or at least of very good. Full story
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Unlimited Juice
The last week or so has been a bad one for athletes who take drugs. These are not the rare and random wild-card athletes who get nailed for "drugs of abuse," these are athletes who, for reasons that usually come down to making more money playing sports, get in trouble for taking Full story
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Fs All Around
If the internet were a person, that person would be unbearable. He—and it would be a he—would, for one thing, be masturbating furiously, constantly. He would give you fake car-insurance rates, and, if you happened to meet him in the last two weeks, he would be complaining about h… Full story
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The Olympics Are Weird
The Olympics are an expensive, relentlessly over-branded jarring event choreographed by idiots. They're also weird and awesome. Full story
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The Worst Idea in Sports
Most television networks would not take time out of their own broadcasting schedules to air formal-dress jerk-off awards, for obvious reasons. But if the network in question was an all-sports network trying to figure out what to do with a weekday night during the Major League Bas… Full story
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To Live and Ugh in LA
If Steve Nash could spend nearly a decade in the psychotic sun-baked methscape of Phoenix, he surely can do it with a clean conscience in a city that's actually pretty nice. Full story
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Welcome to the NBA Draft
The NBA Draft is here, and with it an opportunity to project upon a host of gangly young giants the irrational aspirations of a nation of basketball fans. Full story
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Taking the Heat
The Heat are now the best team in the NBA, but that doesn't mitigate the fact that, even by the usual standards for the NBA's sour and over-determined dynasty aspirants, these guys are kind of dickish. Full story
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Welcome to the NBA Finals
Who will be the champions of The Year the Season Started at Christmas Because the Buttsteak Owner of the Suns Wanted to Prove Some Dim Point About Unions or Whatever? Full story
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The Oklahoma Problem
Oklahoma is pretty terrible at being a state, but their basketball team is fantastic. Full story
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Welcome to the NBA Playoffs
If you are just now joining the Playoffs, you may be frustrated to learn that they're nearly over. Don't worry, you were actually very wise to skip the part of the postseason that involved the Hawks. Full story
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Contemporary Magic
There's something remarkable about the fact that acerbic gnome and mock-turtleneck aficionado Stan Van Gundy is the most recognizably human player in the chain of events that cost him his job. Full story
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Exit Sandman
Mariano Rivera, one of the few players baseball fans can agree upon, ripped up his knee shagging flies during batting practice. Full story
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People Actually Watch the Draft?
Three days of interviews with neckless general studies majors from Southeast Conference schools makes for pretty excruciating TV. It's only natural for you to wonder why anyone would watch that. Full story
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Ron Artest Is the Player Fox Loves to Hate
As an athlete and human being who everyone pays attention to, Artest is interesting. But as a political magnet for the daddish anger of a certain type of NBA fan, he's excruciating. Full story
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A Confederacy of Assholes
Getting outraged about Bobby Petrino is easy, and kind of fun. Full story
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Welcome to Baseball
Still not sure if you’re a fan or a non-fan? Here are some questions you may have about baseball, and some answers that will help you figure out whether America's favorite pastime is for you. Full story
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My Beautiful Dork Twisted Fantasy
I'm done apologizing for playing fantasy baseball. Full story
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The Black Comedy of Tim Tebow
The most important thing to remember, as Tim Tebow's career makes its official transition into farce, is that it was already, and always, a joke. Full story
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The Good Kind of Bad
March Madness is not the sort of thing that can be reasoned with, or through. You fall into it, like a David Lynch movie, or a conversation, or a bad habit. Full story
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The Old College Try
The NCAA Tournament is often terrible basketball, but even bad basketball is better than anything else when it is played by emotional teenagers from the boonies, chasing a futile dream. Full story
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All-Star Weakened
For All-Star Weekend, the NBA will wrap all the good stuff—the awesome basketball stuff—in lucrative, sponsored artificiality, so that no one would ever possibly care about it. Full story
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The Linsanity Defense
It's a favorite trope among certain types of sportswriters to compare various NBA basketball players to one pickup game archetype or another. Full story
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Meet the Super Bowl’s Sociopaths
In the interest of helping you enjoy the football-related portion of Super Bowl Sunday more, here is what you need to know about the two teams involved. Full story
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My NBA Hipsterism Problem, And Ours
Considering its fan base is comprised of eight-year-old kids, the NBA is not the semi-secret thing that the hipsters would seek out, stake out, overrate, and claim as their own. Full story
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Leave Tim Tebow Alone!
It is better to let Tebow be the thoroughly outmatched quarterback he is than to turn him into a humped-to-death abstraction. Not even someone with his baffling passing mechanics deserves that. Full story
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The NCAA Is a Donut Burger
To a cosmopolite elite like me, big-time college football looks like a transparently un-consumable Paula Deen donut burger. For others it is delicious enough to justify the diabetes-sweats it brings. Full story
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Sorry, You’re Going To Beef ‘O’ Brady’s
The bowl system might not be good, but its reflection of the status quo's broad, braying rottenness is pretty much perfect. Full story
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David Stern Blocks Trades Like a Boss
Periodically, someone pops off with an NBA-related slavery metaphor, and everyone gets pissy. A more effective metaphor is that NBA players, like you and me, work for shitty bosses. Full story
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Donald Sterling, Human Cold Sore
Donald Sterling is a real estate billionaire of a notably porny bent who looks like a Milk Dud that has had Botox, and who was born without the capacity for shame. Full story
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Commercials Are Fucking Terrifying
The average NFL commercial break is television's crowning insult to the notion of our shared humanity. Full story
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The No Basketball Association
If fuming about some bullshit abstraction is what gets you through your commute, then by all means fume. But please, please do not buy a NBA basketball team. Full story
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Monday Night Sack O’ Garbage
Monday Night Football's ass-backwards posturing is too much like America for comfort--it's basically the House of Representatives with better production value and more violence. Full story
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Anger in Management
Resplendent on a Danzigian throne of skulls, shaking his head at all he surveys, there is Tony La Russa--one of the greatest managers and most nasty humans in baseball history. Full story
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Young, Dumb, and Full of Jesus
To a sizable percentage of football fans, the fun-but-flawed incurious quarterback Tim Tebow comes about as close to a Warrior Prophet as the game has ever seen. Full story
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All Hail Quetzalcoatl
We goofed on late Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis because he looked like the Crypt Keeper in a white sweat suit. And because the serpentine bastard seemed to truly love his sport. Full story
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Do the Collapse
We have only so many hours on Earth, and only so many reasons to spend some of those watching sports. Full story
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Our Heros Are Ball-Throwing Hamsteaks
The NFL is powered by a dozen different types of violence and monetized by beer commercials in which men choose macro-brewed fart soda over attractive women. But it's also hugely sentimental. Full story
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Exploiting Amateurs
The average college sports fan knows that the NCAA is in the process of reconfiguring itself, moving from regional-ish athletic conferences towards sprawling mega-conferences in search of better television deals and more money. Full story
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Every Day Is 9/11 in the NFL
It's generally a good idea not to pay too much attention to things that pro sports commissioners say for the same reason you shouldn't listen to whatever on-message platitudes come out of politicians' mouths on the state-fair circuit. Full story
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There's No Lockout in Streetball
Summer leagues in hoop capitals like New York, Washington DC, and Los Angeles have always attracted top players in the NBA's off-season, but this year's summer leagues have been especially star-stacked. Full story
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Just Another Yacht-Sex Scandal
Shapiro has indubitably earned himself a lifetime achievement award in the field of Starfucky Football-Booster Creepery by paying for all those players to live in what was basically a never-ending Rick Ross video. Full story
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The Inhuman Element
When Alex Rodriguez got into trouble earlier this month for purportedly playing in some illegal high-stakes poker games it was barely a story. Full story
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Too Stupid to Say Out Loud
It’s tempting to blame all of baseball’s problems on San Francisco Giants closer Brian Wilson, the chuckling, inescapable tryhard who seems to have mistaken the drain-circling Charlie Sheen for some sort of meth-toothed prophet. Full story
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Gambling Is Not a Sport
The question of what is or isn't a sport is always kind of awful, something best debated by terrible guys in terrible bars over the soggy din of the Steve Miller Band and the room-temp dregs of a pitcher of ass-seltzery macro-brew. Full story
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The NFL's Final Offer
Football has never been embraced by anyone outside of the USA, and it’s easy to see why. A good football game can be fun to watch, but football is also loud and backwards and discussed with a Barcalounger-tough-guy militarism that is unmistakably, unattractively American. Full story
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Where They Keep the Money
It's possible that there are some doofuses out there who can look at a Chris Paul crossover or an Adrian Peterson cutback or an Albert Pujols anything and see nothing but a constellation of dollar signs in action. Full story
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Don't Save the All-Star Game
There are things that only sports fans care about. Hot wings and Adam Sandler movies come to mind, as do all-star games. Full story
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My Week with Hungary's Far Right
Hungarian nationalists throw beer at people and blame Jews and Gypsies for all their problems.
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The Worst Restaurant in the World
A night at the Jack in the Box of the Damned.
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Here Comes the White-Power Safety Patrol
The White Student Union advocates for “persons of European heritage”—aka “white people.”
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Did a Murderer Just Give Himself Away on Yelp?
It seems like he might have done.
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I'm Hunting Down the Fat Fetishist Who Has My Stolen Laptop
He likes big ladies and lives in a maisonette.
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How Are We Supposed to Know What the Government Does?
It's pretty terrifying how little we know.
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I Tested out Three Cambodian Spiritual Practices
And learned that Cambodian ghosts apparently don't believe in Jesus.
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Tao Lin's iPhone Photos of Taipei: Taipei Signs
Tao shows us some of his favorite signs around Taipei.
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VICE News: This Is What Winning Looks Like
A documentary about the ineptitude and corruption of the Afghan security forces.
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VICE News: Triple Hate - Part 1
A documentary about Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Memphis City Council, the Klan, and the Crips.
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Some Guys on Reddit Claim Quitting Porn is Good for your Complexion
I took the 30 day challenge
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Fightland Show: Pakistan - Part 2
Bashir Ahmad continues his tour of Pakistani martial arts.
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Jodorowsky's 'Dune' Would Have Been More Insane Than You Can Even Imagine
Salvador Dali was going to play the Emperor.
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My Week with Hungary's Far Right
Hungarian nationalists throw beer at people and blame Jews and Gypsies for all their problems.
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The Worst Restaurant in the World
A night at the Jack in the Box of the Damned.
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Oxford Has Put Heavy Metal, Mesopotamians, and Noh Theater Together at Last
In a play entitled 'Ashurbanipal: The Last Great King of Assyria.'
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Tao Lin's iPhone Photos of Taipei: Taipei Signs
Tao shows us some of his favorite signs around Taipei.
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Noisey: Guitar Moves - Blake Mills
Malibu native Blake Mills was already making waves at the tender age of 19.
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VICE News: Triple Hate - Part 1
A documentary about Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Memphis City Council, the Klan, and the Crips.
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Did I Discover YelaWolf?
This. CD. It looked like… I really can’t even explain the levels of wrong this thing was.
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Here Comes the White-Power Safety Patrol
The White Student Union advocates for “persons of European heritage”—aka “white people.”
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Did a Murderer Just Give Himself Away on Yelp?
It seems like he might have done.
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I'm Hunting Down the Fat Fetishist Who Has My Stolen Laptop
He likes big ladies and lives in a maisonette.
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Las Vegas Needs to Get Creative with Its Homeless Problem
Here are some ideas.
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VICE News: Teenage Riot - São Paulo
The fight for a free pass on public transportation in São Paulo is not only for students anymore.
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Rob Ford, the World's Greatest Mayor, Smokes Crack
What's the big deal? Everyone finds themselves in this position once in a while.
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VICE News: Triple Hate - Trailer
A doc about Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Memphis City Council, the Klan, and the Crips.
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Art Talk: Matt Mignanelli
A chat about his work, life, and strong American work ethic.
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The Mercy Rule: Hearing the Spurs
They're not too boring; you're too young.
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Pigeon Racing Is a Dying Sport in Canada
We hung out with one of Toronto's finest pigeon racers to find out why anyone would want to pigeon race.
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Suck on the Monolith
Ken Baumann's first novel is, in short, fucked.
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VICE News: This Is What Winning Looks Like
A documentary about the ineptitude and corruption of the Afghan security forces.
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A Few Impressions: 'Gatsby'
In the end, Luhrmann made it work, and that’s all that matters.
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Why Don’t Dudes Like My Crotchless Panties?
Crotchless panties make me hornier than a nude Jake Johnson offering me a burrito.
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The Cute Show: Capybara Bathhouse!
We met a herd of capybara who love to take dips in the park's hot springs.
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Austerity's Drug of Choice
Greece's infamous new drug, sisa, is meth mixed with filler ingredients like battery acid.
Thought and Memory
New Fiction by Ed Park 
Malaysian Neo-Nazis
Fighting for a Pure Malay Race 
The Strongest Dwarf in New Jersey
Remembering My Tormentor 
Gay Men and Their Misogyny Problem
It's Not Cute Anymore 
Snooping Around Nicolas Cage's House
So Many Bummers 
Saudi Arabia's Feminist Revolution
It's Not Happening 
