Welcome to Margin of Error, a politics column from Tom Scocca, editor of the Indignity newsletter. As a voter in the New York City mayoral race, I keep thinking about the rats and the garbage cans. The story of the election, as generally framed, is that Andrew Cuomo has come down to New York from the suburbs … Read more
As a general rule, you do not want to know what sportswriters are eating. Assume that it’s happening at strange times and in strange ways. Some of this is due to the specific pressures of the job; some of it is just because sportswriters are strange. Sportswriters, on balance, are probably not as strange about … Read more
Tony Mansolino has been put in a tough position. It is his job today to engineer a turnaround for the most disappointing team in baseball. The Baltimore Orioles fired manager Brandon Hyde Saturday morning, after the team played sloppily and stranded a billion baserunners in a loss Friday night, their fourth in a row and … Read more
My life has always included cats. Even before owning a cat, I played with all the cats at the pet store inside the local mall and relentlessly begged my parents for one, who finally gave in somewhere in the early 1990s and let me adopt an orange tabby. As a young woman in my early … Read more
Perhaps it is time to coordinate an emergency delivery of some rudimentary lessons about human biology to the sportswriters of America. It was less than a month ago that The Athletic’s Fred Katz mistook the basic act of “hearing things” for echolocation, and now we are confronted with ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne forgetting how eyeballs work. … Read more
These playoff have had everything, from unlikely comebacks to huge upsets to bloody feuds to preternatural feats of athleticism. You can keep all that. We true connoisseurs of professional sports controversies have been craving a rulebook kerfuffle, and in Sunday’s Stars home win over the Jets, we finally got one. This is why they play … Read more
It didn’t matter that the Oilers jumped out to a 2–0 lead in Game 3. It didn’t matter that Stuart Skinner, forced back into action after Calvin Pickard’s injury, allowed fewer goals than he did in his two catastrophic starts against the Kings. And it didn’t matter that, with the score 3–2 Vegas in the … Read more
I was still reeling in the aftermath of our dog Chop’s sudden and horrible heart-failure death, stunned and breathless with grief, feeling very much the way you do after taking a hard blow to the head, when all at once our Bea became a ghost of herself. She was old, and had been thinning in … Read more
I found myself holding a baby the other day. It wasn’t my baby, because I’m old and snipped. The baby in question belonged to my best friend, Howard. Howard is my age but got married late and is having his first child. Howard’s wife, Yesenia, is closer in age to him than to Jordon Hudson, … Read more
Reliable sources tell me that you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover. Until you actually read the thing, though, it’s the only data you have to go on. So here’s what I first noticed about Abundance, Ezra Klein’s and Derek Thompson’s zeitgeisty manifesto touting a construction-oriented liberalism: the wildlife. At risk of … Read more