The Winter Olympics figure skating competition wrapped up this week with a controversy so predictable you could’ve written the headline before the music started. Team USA’s Madison Chock and Evan Bates — three-time world champions, flawless performance, everything on the line — finished with silver. France’s Laurence Fournier Beaudry and…
Category: Sports
Culture
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Super Bowl Monday Is the New National Holiday We Won’t Admit Exists
The Super Bowl ended last night around 10:30 p.m. Eastern. By 6 a.m. this morning, an estimated 26.2 million Americans had already decided not to show up to work. Another 5 million? Arriving late with lukewarm gas station coffee and no apologies. Super Bowl Monday isn’t a federal holiday —…
Culture
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Squatting Through the Centuries: The Enduring Appeal of Catalonia’s Cheeky Christmas Custom
Well, the big day is over for this year, but there are still some residual Christmas stories. Here is one that I was reading, a perfectly normal Christmas sports feature — new house, young superstar, proud little brother — when the sentence took a hard left turn into folklore madness….
Humor
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The Daredevil Who Rode a Unicycle While Carrying Seven Bowling Balls
There’s a certain personality you meet in the wide-open states — the ones with too much sky, too much quiet, and way too much room for ideas that should’ve died on the launchpad. You find them in Wyoming, Montana, the Dakotas, Washington, Oregon. Folks who grew up around space, real…
Family
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The Thanksgiving Lions Game That Broke My Family in 1980
Listen To The Article Thanksgiving is already the busiest, most patience-testing travel week of the year. Airports are bursting, freeways are clogged, and somewhere out there a poor TSA agent is explaining — again — that gravy counts as a liquid. Chaos everywhere. But nothing, and I mean nothing, compares…
Media
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Two Weekends Without ESPN and I’m Done – How YouTube TV Lost My Household
The Great Saturday Letdown It started quietly. The kind of quiet that hits you when you flip on the TV Saturday morning expecting the College Gameday Crew, and the marching chaos of college football—and instead, you get an nothing. Channels wiped off off the platform like they never existed. At…
Culture
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Loyola’s Soul – How Sister Jean Became the Heart of March Madness
The news hit like the final buzzer of a long, glorious game: Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt, Loyola Chicago’s beloved team chaplain, passed away at 106. For anyone who watched the Ramblers’ Cinderella run to the 2018 Final Four, Sister Jean wasn’t just a mascot or a lucky charm. She was…