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Covering WNBA games in person is a strange experience. Enriching, for sure: It's cool to hear directly from players and coaches, to be able to pepper them with whatever questions I'd like. Recently, I was able to cobble their insights into an Olivia Miles profile that received, I suspect, fewer comments than this post will. Sometimes you luck into great color: It was funny, at Wednesday night's Fire-Sky game, to hear Portland head coach Alex Sarama directing his players to hunt Rachel Banham on "every single possession." (She was mercifully benched before they could do this.) The in-person experience is also disorienting. If my powers of observation feel heightened in some ways, they are certainly dulled in others. I've learned to appreciate all the work that goes into constructing the story of a game, work done for me by statisticians, broadcasters, beat writers, and online posters when I'm watching on TV. My eyes supply me no graphics, no tickers, no counters. If a player sits for an unusually long stretch, that doesn't always register to me. It might strike me that a team's offense has slowed down, but I might not clock that they haven't actually scored a field goal in six minutes. Turns out, I'm not very good at watching basketball on my own.  In the play-by-play data, the most controversial moment of the WNBA season, a play from Wednesday night's Mercury-Fever game, is dispassionately tagged as "MISS A. Boston 26' 3PT":

The parents of former NFL running back Doug Martin—who died eight months ago while in Oakland police custody—are suing the city of Oakland, five of its police officers, and an ambulance company in federal court. In the lawsuit filed earlier this week, Martin's parents say their son, who was 36 years old at the time, died from restraint asphyxia caused by police officers. This was compounded, the lawsuit says, by the paramedics failing to arrive until more than 15 minutes after the call for service. The lawsuit was filed Tuesday in federal court in Northern California, and was first reported by Jakob Rodgers of the East Bay Times. It makes eight claims, including wrongful death by negligence, assault and battery, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Martin died in the early hours of Oct. 18. At about 4:00 a.m., the retired running back experienced what his family in the lawsuit calls a "a mental health crisis," prompting his mother, Leslie, to call 911. But her son ran away to a neighbor's house, two doors down, where Oakland police found him in the basement. Police restrained Martin, per the lawsuit, placing him face down while "one or more officers pressed on his back." After some time passed, the officers turned Martin on his side. Martin appeared unconscious, the lawsuit says, but the officers thought he was either sleeping or pretending to sleep.

If you went back in time to New York in the early '90s, not a soul would believe you if you told them Jay-Z would end up where he is today. Well, maybe one person would: Jay himself. Jay-Z's relatively delayed breakthrough made him something of a late bloomer, even in an era when stars weren't minted as quickly and early as they are now. It took him a while to figure out how to be himself on wax. It was his big homie Jaz-O who put him on, and the two of them had a Das EFX, Fu-Schnickens fast-rapping style that was as technically impressive as it was uninteresting. The labels didn't know what to do with them. Those who heard them tended to think Jaz was cool, but that the light-skinned kid had something else they couldn't quite put into words. DJ Clark Kent was Jay's biggest cheerleader at that time, but without label interest, Jay figured he was better off prioritizing his life in the streets over the studio. Things continued that way until Clark introduced Jay to Harlem hustler Dame Dash. The pair clicked, and together with another street guy, Kareem "Biggs" Burke, they decided to pool their resources and start their own label, Roc-A-Fella. Their first project would be Jay-Z's proper debut, Reasonable Doubt, which turned 30 this week.

The Ernie Clement Voting Scandal shoved all the rest of the news this week into the street—the World Cup, the NBA draft, the NHL draft, the NBA trades, the NHL trades, the Mets firing their manager for the sin of managing the Mets, the latest sports media meltdown around but not quite about Caitlin Clark, all of it. Or maybe you didn't notice that Ernie Clement was the highest vote-getter among American League players for the upcoming All-Star Game in Philadelphia. It's quite possible that you didn't notice Ernie Clement at all. Maybe you're not noticing him right now. Such is the beauty of that arcane old baseball storytelling staple, the unworthy All-Star. Ernie Clement mentioned in proximity to Shohei Ohtani—quel scandale! Perhaps we should instead refresh your memories on who Clement is before we start. He is the starting second baseman for the Toronto Blue Jays, and he really is one of the best second basemen in the AL, due in no small part to the fact that every other AL second baseman is hitting exactly .251 with six homers and a .712 OPS. For the record, Clement is hitting .294, has seven homers, and his OPS is .753, which is way better. Last year Clement was Toronto's starting third baseman, except for the times when he was the starting shortstop. He had a record 30 hits in the postseason last year, one in which the Blue Jays came within a Moosehead cap of winning the World Series. Clement is 30 years old and, after a skittish start to a career that didn't really blossom until three years ago, has become a proper big-league contributor—a versatile and reliable presence, competent fielder, and perfectly fine hitter. Every team should have an Ernie Clement. Hell, a few already have—Cleveland waived him after the 2022 season, and Oakland released him outright in March of 2023.

Now that New York state and Erie County have spent $850 million in taxpayer dollars, the largest public contribution for any NFL facility in history, it's time for the next important step in the process of opening the Buffalo Bills' new stadium: kissing owner Terry Pegula's ass. While Pegula, for once in his life, did not say something incredibly fucking stupid at this week's ribbon-cutting ceremony, every other person in attendance seemed to bend over backward to make sure that no one watching realized how much he sucks. With the plastered-on smiles and manufactured passion of a Hallmark movie or a Viagra commercial, every speaker used their allotted time to tell the people that the fracking billionaire who owns the football team is deeply committed to the community of Buffalo and Western New York. Kathy Hochul, "the biggest Bills fan in politics" according to her introduction at the ceremony, marched up to the podium to announce Pegula's undying generosity and love for Buffalo. But I heard her awkward gasp masquerading as a "Let's go Buffalo!" chant, and I felt a part of my soul die in the process.

This post originally appeared on June 24 in the Oakland Review of Books, which is worth a subscription even if you don’t live in Oakland or read books. Carl must slay the naga princess! If he doesn’t, his best friend—the talking cat-wizard Princess Donut—will die instead. But Carl and his team have a plan. They track the princess to the god Khepri’s sanctum in the Vanquisher Club and slay the club’s guards with a MacGyver-demonology contraption. Inside the sanctum, though, Carl is surprised: The beetle-headed attendant supervising the insect banquet within is Khepri himself, god of Rebirth and the Sunrise, summoned as a trap by the devious princess. As a level-250 god, Khepri will slay Carl easily—disaster looms!

It takes a special kind of creep to stand out for sleaziness among NBA owners, objectively one of the worst demographics our species has ever established. Tom Dundon has been the official majority owner of the Portland Trail Blazers for less than three months, and already he is a standard-bearer. It's clear he doesn't mind being a villain. Having already downsized the organization with layoffs, pinched on travel accommodations, stiffed his team's two-way players, and cheaped out on playoff T-shirts, Dundon is now engaged in brinkmanship with the city of Portland over funding for arena renovations. Even that description is too generous: Dundon told an assembly of Portland businesspeople Wednesday night that he intends to pay a whopping zero dollars of his own money toward a $600 million project. The Blazers play in one of the league's older buildings. The arena opened in 1995 and was built using, in part, debt financing. Then-Blazers owner Paul Allen refused to back the debt with his own vast personal wealth; in a sort of grimly hilarious coincidence, given that Dundon made his fortune as a subprime lender, this subjected the project to shitty, expensive loan terms, an arrangement that kerploded after a decade and led to the arena being forfeited to its creditors at the bleak end of a 2004 bankruptcy. The building was operated by Portland Arena Management, an entity spun up by the lenders that now owned it, until Allen eventually re-purchased it, in 2007. In 2024, the arena was sold to the city of Portland for the startlingly low price of just $7 million. Perhaps it's cursed. In any case, the arena is now publicly owned, and the Blazers lease it from the city. The Blazers want the building upgraded, but their new owner, who considers printing and distributing T-shirts for a home playoff game to be an unreasonable extravagance, does not believe that this work should deprive him of any portion of his outrageous and ill-begotten private fortune. The way Dundon describes it, his team is already contributing enough to the pot. The city maintains a Spectator Venues & Visitor Activities Fund, which is funded in part by fees and taxes collected at city-owned venues, including on tickets to Blazers games. A portion of the city's burden of renovation costs would come from this fund. Voilà, says Dundon: Because the Blazers collect these fees and pass them through to the city, they are already paying their fair share. It's absurd and disingenuous on its face, but you really have to hear it in Dundon's own words to appreciate the leverage he is attempting to gain.

"I score in bunches, and then sometimes kinda just level out," Toronto Tempo guard Marina Mabrey said near the end of her press conference, after the Tempo's 125-97 win over the L.A. Sparks on Thursday. It was an accurate description of her own game, which is built on constant movement and a scalding but occasionally evanescent shooting touch. Last night, however, we finally got to see what would happen if Mabrey never reached the "kinda just level out" phase. What if a whole game was just one big scoring bunch? Well, in that case, Mabrey would walk away with 53 points and a share of the WNBA single-game scoring record. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5OHRTRpztE Save your tsking about stat-padding for the next gunner who goes for the record, because this is as pure as 53-point nights come. Mabrey went 17-of-28 from the floor, 9-of-18 from three-point range, and 10-of-12 from the free-throw line. And thanks to the quirks of the Tempo's home arena, she wasn't even aware that the record was in reach until she had 50 points.

Late in the morning of June 13, as most New York City sports fans were mapping out their plans for watching Game 5 of the NBA Finals, I was on the A train headed away from the Brooklyn neighborhood I've called home for 17 years. I was on my way to Aqueduct Racetrack, post time 1:10 p.m.  At the end of the month, after 132 years of equine action, Aqueduct will no longer run horses. The first race took place on Sept. 27, 1894, on a track operated by the Queens County Jockey Club, in a facility named for its locale, where water was delivered to New York City from the Hempstead Long Island Plain. At one point, Aqueduct was a place where people came to soak in the glitz and glamor of the Sport of Kings. When it finally closes its doors after the 5:44 p.m. post time on June 28, nobody but a dwindling crowd of regulars is likely to even notice. The story of Aqueduct's slow demise is not much different from any fading racetrack's. Off-track betting gave way to TV simulcasts, which gave way to legalized mobile sports gambling. There's just not much reason to come to a place like this, even for chronic gamblers or horse-racing obsessives. 

Imagine you are seated at a table. A guy sits across from you. He is vaguely humanoid, with a long torso and two arms raised in fist-like clubs. His full name is Edible Agent, but we will call him Eddie and use he/him pronouns. There's something about Eddie that makes you feel at ease. Maybe it's his fragrance, which reminds you of apple juice, of childhood. Maybe it's his two black eyes that gaze upon you without judgment. You decide to unburden yourself to him. You tell him that you've been making mistakes at work, and you are so afraid of your boss's criticism that you have developed stomach pain. "Fear will only bar the path you are meant to walk," Eddie tells you, wiggling his edible arms to show you he understands. You tell him that to cope with your stress, you've been drinking every day. "There is no solace for those who seek refuge in dependence," Eddie tells you, wiggling once again. When you tell him that you can find no other way to deal with this burden, Eddie tells you to confront the problem, to contemplate your next step forward. "Only by tempering oneself and holding fast to one's convictions can one overcome the burdens one bears," Eddie says, wiggling. This encounter changes you profoundly. Then comes the question: After all you have been through together, would you eat Eddie? For many participants in a study recently published in PLOS One, the answer was yes—but rather reluctantly. (Turn on subtitles to understand the conversation with edible Eddie.) https://youtu.be/0_hgrf0pi2Y?si=_gDxOGlOXUGyMvyL&t=15 Turn on subtitles to understand the conversation with edible Eddie.