Articles by David Roth
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The Mercy Rule
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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The Mercy Rule
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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The Mercy Rule
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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The Mercy Rule
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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The Mercy Rule
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 Mercy Rule
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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The Mercy Rule
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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The Mercy Rule
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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The Mercy Rule
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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The Mercy Rule
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
The Mare
A New Story by Mary Gaitskill 
Toppling a Delicate World
Being Gay and South Asian In America 
There's No Sex in Prison Showers
We Usually Wore Our Underwear 
Try Not to Destroy Your Life
The First Time I Took Molly 
A Teacher and Her Student
Marilynne Robinson on Staying Out of Trouble 
"Whitey" Isn't Very Popular in Boston
Interviews with Some of His Old Friends 
