Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Modern roller derby was invented 14 years ago. Now it has nearly 2000 leagues in 53 countries. The sport’s rapid growth says a lot about our fast-changing world. Roller derby has roots in the 1900s, but it is a twenty-first century sport in every way that matters. The first “roller derby” was held in Chicago…
Story highlights Serena Williams is engaged to Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian The tennis champ announced the news on Reddit The couple have been dating since 2015 A spokesperson for Ohanian confirmed that he popped the question while the two were vacationing in Rome. Williams first announced the news herself in a Reddit post on its…
The Russian Olympic Committee’s building in Moscow in 2015. Many of the athletes pictured in the building’s hallways have been implicated in this year’s doping scandal. Credit Pavel Golovkin/Associated Press MOSCOW — Russia is for the first time conceding that its officials carried out one of the biggest conspiracies in sports history: a far-reaching doping…
Illustration: Jim Cooke ESPN is doing a very bad job of pretending it isn’t deathly afraid of rapidly declining subscriber numbers. At the end of October, Nielsen released its monthly television subscriber numbers report, and it showed a loss of 621,000 subscribers for ESPN and similar losses for ESPN2 and ESPNU. Other networks, like Spike…
Screenshot credit: HBO HBO and Bill Simmons have agreed to cancel his TV show, Any Given Wednesday, before the conclusion of its first season, according to a press release the network just sent out. Any Given Wednesday, the weekly HBO talk show hosted by Bill Simmons, will finish its run on Wednesday, Nov. 9 and…
Last Tuesday, The Harvard Crimson exposed a document created by the 2012 Harvard men’s soccer team called a “scouting report,” which assessed and scored the incoming recruits for the women’s soccer team based on their perceived attractiveness. The women who are still playing for the team from that year decided to respond in an open…
storytext This week the NBA tipped off its new season with the biggest athlete in the world getting his third championship ring. On the same night, Major League Baseball had game 1 of the World Series between two teams that haven’t won a title in a combined 174 years. And the NFL’s big game of…
Image by Jim Cooke/Photo courtesy Jody Goldstein Jennifer Frey drank herself to death. Frey’s obituary in the Washington Post, her last full-time employer, merely gave “multiple organ failure” as the cause of her March 26 death. But alcohol killed her as surely as a bullet killed Lincoln. She died abusing a drug that kills millions…
When three young women were murdered midrun over a period of nine days this past summer, runners reacted with understandable shock, alarm, and concern. Nothing about the victims’ final miles should have been out of the ordinary: All three headed out in broad daylight. All three were on routes they’d traveled safely in the past….
“This is what’s happening: I’m going to hit this guy.” Listening to Tanya Smith talk about her longsword fighting strategy is like hearing a battle-scarred general talk tactics. But looking at her, it’s kind of hard to picture how she executes it. She’s five foot two and, in her own words, has “stubby little arms”…