Baseball: “Inning Eight: A Whole New Ballgame” (PBS; 1994)

The Mets don’t make an appearance in Ken Burns’s epic documentary Baseball until the eighth part, but they storm the scene like only they can, charting a wild ride in the 1960s from the cellar to the penthouse. Burns gives ample time to the ill-fated and slapstick-y Casey Stengel era, but the climax of the story is of course the arrival of ace Tom Seaver and the team’s world-shaking 1969 championship run. 

Doc & Darryl (ESPN; 2016)

For this entry in ESPN’s 30 for 30 series, Judd Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio staged a reunion between

Like a mixtape, a Steve Keene painting is meant to be passed hand to hand, with affection. He’s been giving them away, or selling them for a song, going on thirty years. Keene, an artist who estimates 300,000 works to his name, came up indie-rock adjacent, pals with Pavement. Like that band’s best albums, Keene’s art is poppy, bright, deliberately unkempt, slyly confrontational, and super “college.” His subjects include founding fathers, LPs, astronauts, and so much more, but who can keep up? He’s got theories about fast technique, and what it means to be so prolific and cheap, but he doesn’t

“THE MINDSET WAS PREDISPOSED TO BE NEGATIVE,” the writer Pete Davies said not long ago. We were discussing English attitudes in the run-up to the 1990 World Cup—Italia ’90—the subject of his elating travelogue, All Played Out, often described as the greatest book about soccer. The national game had been in a bad way—the playing style primitive, the supporters feral. An article by Brian Glanville, a prominent reporter, carried the headline “England Abroad: Shame and Mediocrity.” The general prognosis was that the team would be, in Davies’s word, “shit,” that “we’d be an embarrassment” both on

LAST FEBRUARY, with the NHL’s 2020–21 pandemic-shortened season just a month old, The Atlantic published an impertinent provocation: “Hockey Has a Gigantic-Goalie Problem.” The title was literal. Ken Dryden’s piece traced the sport’s arms race, as the refinement of the slap shot and the switch from wooden sticks to lighter composites turned pucks into lethal missiles. This required additional padding for the netkeeper, while the dimensions of his domain remained the same. Amid a worldwide health crisis, Dryden’s jeremiad made it sound like oversize equipment jeopardized the spirit of the game,