Increasingly, football fans are arguing that the game is bloated with too much down time. The officiating is clumsy.
— Mary Pilon
To drive a semi-truck, a driver needs a commercial driver's license. While formal training isn't required, most drivers enroll in a program to help prepare them for the written and practical exams in their states.
Generations of thinkers have made typewriters their frenemies, and long before there were Gmail inboxes, print correspondence stacked up, some hastily written and impulsive on the steel gadgets.
As a journalist and longtime photographer, I love Instagram and the connection it gives me to my friends and family as I journey afar or for me to view their lives from my perch back home.
My parents wielded disposal cameras and Polaroids with the best of them, occasionally begging for at least one decent photo of my brother and me at the state fair, in front of the Golden Gate bridge, or smiling half-heartedly next to a mascot.
Sports like sailing, rowing, and bobsled have long vexed spectators and television producers.
Long before social media made things like bib replication easier, banditing at major races was viewed as a brave act. Rebellious runners like John Tarrant gatecrashed races as a political statement, in protest of rules about amateurism that limited how much money athletes could earn in appearance fees and endorsements.
In the modern road-running era, digital photography has intersected with weekend-warrior culture, creating a golden age of social-media humblebragging. For some, the marathon course is sacred ground. For others, it's a personal movie set.
Something amazing happens when you tell people you write about sports for a living. You begin to feel like you're in a scene from 'Dawn of the Dead.' The way people change when talking about 'their team' can be nothing short of zombiefication.
In reporting, you will often be humbled by the courage others have in telling and trusting you with their tale, no two alike.
No one in my family was a journalist, and it didn't seem like a real job. Part of me still doesn't think it is.
I'm a realist about who really reads books and who acts like they read books.
As it turns out, just hanging out around athletes doesn't actually make one more fit.
At the turn of the twentieth century, board games were becoming increasingly commonplace in middle-class homes. In addition, more and more inventors were discovering that the games were not just a pastime but also a means of communication.
Money can be a reflection of our perceptions of power, self-esteem, personal history, fears, and happiness.
I've often wondered if the trade-off for growing up in the relative newness and freshness of the West Coast was befuddlement when it comes to historical preservation. We don't have many old things, and we don't really know what to do with the few that are around when our default response is to compost or field burn.
I was an ambidextrous child, and the symmetry of roller skating was a welcome respite from my awkwardness with physical activities that involved a ball or a racket.
While the U.S. government is unlikely to ever limit the number of football games, plenty of parents are refusing to let their children play the sport due to the risk of head injuries.
Trucking is the backbone of U.S. commerce. Consumers rely on the industry to move the parts for their cars, the food for their dinner tables, and, increasingly, the goods they order online.
Using a typewriter, at times, feels more like playing piano than jotting down notes, a percussive exercise in expressing thought that is both tortuous and rewarding.
The phenomena of taking photos and sharing them isn't new, but with Instagram being mobile, both have become cheaper and faster, producing the instant gratification of knowing how our shots look in our palms.
VR could, in theory, connect sports fans in different geographical locations so they could watch a game together. Instead of a group text or Twitter stream of commentary playing out across time zones when a team is playing, our avatars could inhabit virtual stands, side by side with the rest of our digital tribe.
Virtual reality has an exciting future and oodles of room to grow.
For professional athletes, the motives for cheating generally are more obvious: money, fame, and often a low likelihood of being caught. But why would a middle- or back-of-the-pack runner lie or cheat in a race that doesn't even matter?
With a smartphone in tow and a playlist humming, a runner may miss the crunch of leaves underfoot, the enthusiastic cheers of benevolent strangers, or even her own breath. And, for many runners, leaving the mobile device at home is the most liberating part of the sport.
Banning sports is a ludicrous proposition.
Journalism isn't about how smart you are. It's not about where you're from. It's not about who you know or how clever your questions are. And thank God for that. It's about your ability to embrace change and uncertainty. It's about being fearless personally and professionally.
Much like film, authors spend a fair amount of time alone in the creative process, tossing their work out into what can feel like an abyss, void of real people.
Endnotes, often confused with footnotes that live at the bottom of a page, is that lump of text at the end of the book, sometimes even relegated to a tiny font size. They're often forgotten but, in nonfiction, particularly history books, can offer a fascinating footprint into the author's research, a joyful, geeky abyss.
As a producer, it's not unusual to find yourself on the field, backstage, often with a camera crew and living with constant anxiety of accidentally ending up in the shot.
Competing in junior fencing requires lessons, equipment, and travel that may cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars a month, keeping talented athletes from wielding sabers or masks.
Many of my 20- and 30-something peers struggle with student loan debt and high rent, and more than once, I've erupted in laughter at the idea that I will collect any Social Security in my Betty White years.
Social media has created a digital latticework, but it has also, for some, created abusive commenters, silos, and validation rather than curiosity.
The fall of Rome seemed unthinkable to people at the time but inevitable to historians reflecting upon it with the benefit of context.
As the U.S. prison population has surged over the decades, the legal profession's distaste for former inmates has become more conspicuous. And it isn't only law. Medical schools often have committees to evaluate cases and mitigating factors but are generally reluctant to admit ex-inmates.
As the 19th century teetered into the 20th, the clank of typewriter keys went from solo to symphony. They were the weapon of choice for professional writers, the business elite, people with things to say and the need to say them quickly.
Even as Instagram defines our visual moment, we use the app's filters to travel backwards in time, to make our images resemble the Polaroids of yore by casting them literally in a different, more nostalgic light.
Ultimately, the joy of sports is social and psychological, both in the ballpark and around a television on Super Bowl Sunday.
Most major races, including the New York City Marathon, require runners to provide photo identification when picking up a bib. Most provide bibs only a few days before the race, shortening the window in which someone could copy a bib.
There are good reasons for not wanting to host the Olympics. The Games can be costly and, in spite of their patriotic overtones, can unintentionally expose a nation's weaknesses to the world.
When George Hirsch ran the New York City Marathon in 1976, the first year the course snaked through all five boroughs, the event was a lean affair. He and two thousand others dodged wayward bicycles and pedestrians on the streets, with little help from an anemic police presence.
Sports fandom transcends gender, race, language, political preference, socioeconomic status, or any other way you can think of slicing this planet.
I was a fly on the wall at Gawker Media during the heyday of this thing called blogging.
It's still thrilling, even if my work is something that people even pretend they're interested in on a first date or at a cocktail party.
The more I think about the Olympics, even from afar, its mere concept stuns me. I can't think of any other line of work where, every four years, people gather to be ranked one, two, and three, then are more or less told to evaporate until the next go-around.
Women's marathoning was not added as an Olympic medal event until 1984 due to unfounded and bizarre concerns among Olympic organizers about women's ability to run longer distances. It was finally added after much campaigning.
Some Americans, like those working in government or nonprofits, know the consequences of having their salaries public.
Because sports are a religion, it's difficult to imagine a world without the Olympics, and to be sure, they have given us many glorious moments.
Some communities are formed through schools, churches, workplaces. But much of how we learn about one another as a society comes from physically being together in places like skating rinks.
