“There is nothing either good or bad,” said Hamlet, “but thinking makes it so.” I suppose the same could be said of importance: “There is nothing either important or ...

With the World Cup starting this Sunday, I realized that after decades of complaining, I’ve finally made my peace with soccer. Like many Americans, I always felt that the ...

During the late ’50s I was on the European tennis circuit and was ranked among the lowest. I was No. 3 in Greece but back then Greece was hardly a tennis power, unlike today ...

With the NBA Finals coming up, retired black basketball stars are complaining about how racist the NBA is. On his ESPN show, Jalen Rose denounced the U.S. Olympic basketball team ...

Sometimes I think of football (soccer), though I have no interest in it. This is because it obtrudes itself on me and is of great cultural significance. I once worked it out that ...

In ancient Greece glorious athletes competed naked, but in Tokyo they would have been forced to run the unhealthy marathon with a face mask. That would have been a rudeness of ...

I recently unfairly baited the great baseball statistics thinker Bill James into responding at vast length to one of my snarky tweets, which got me thinking about what we could ...

Can a white man box a black man without making everything racial? Absolutely. It’s the black boxers who can’t seem to help themselves. On Saturday night in Las Vegas, two ...

We supposedly live in a secular and irreligious age. Man, however, is a religious creature prone to worship. This is never more apparent than when a figure from popular culture ...

America has numerous problems in education, crime, and housing that might be helped by applying lessons that could be learned from big data analytics. Unfortunately, each of these ...

We’re supposed to be excited that the American women’s soccer team recently won the World Cup. But just as very few people who aren’t Canadian care about Canada, very few ...

Why has the American national women’s soccer team won its version of the World Cup four times, while our national men’s team hasn’t made it past the quarterfinals since ...

I happened to be in Paris when the final of the women’s World Cup (soccer) was played. Our little local restaurant, owned and run by Berbers, had a screen that relayed it, more ...