My favorite moment from this year’s World Gymnastics Championships was the second after Skye Blakely hit the final pose in her floor routine. For a second, she was all smiles, sass, and confidence, ra...

In 1971, the great rock critic Lester Bangs tried to imagine a time when the music of the recent past would seem alien. Projecting himself into the old age he would never reach, he pictured his future...

Pat McAfee ended his daily ESPN show on Wednesday by finally addressing the role he played in ruining a college student’s reputation. To nobody’s surprise, he was extremely annoying about it. Back in ...

From the moment you begin Robert Coover’s 1968 novel The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. J. Henry Waugh, Prop., you are in a rarified space. What kind of title is that for a novel, so long and un...

L.A. Material is an independent news organization aimed at filling some holes in the Los Angeles news landscape and making that fascinating, fragmented city more legible. You can learn more, and subsc...

In July of 2022, Joyce Carol Oates tweeted that her literary agent friend told her editors are no longer interested in reading first novels by young white male writers, “no matter how good.” She was s...

As a culture, we have a few familiar stories about talent. There’s the all-consuming kind, often first displayed in childhood, that makes people unsuited for the demands of everyday life. There are th...

The story begins with a man fixated on the idea of a German shepherd, which was first bred for its wolf-like appearance and obedience as a worker. He is less invested in the dog as an animal as he is ...

On a hot summer day in August 1972, actor-turned-documentarian William Greaves orchestrated a cocktail party at Duke Ellington’s home. He invited the surviving architects of the Harlem Renaissance and...

During his 14-year MLB career, Mark Teixeira’s average Wins Above Replacement (WAR) was a respectable 4.4. As a political candidate, Teixeira’s WAR—yes, there’s a platform that measures this sort of t...

It’s nearly impossible to relay a single fact about former Cincinnati Reds owner Marge Schott that does not stop an unfamiliar recipient dead in their tracks. For example: This is just a small samplin...

This week, one of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s most malevolent plots was finally brought to a halt when police in Guinea-Bissau raided the offices of Danish researchers who intended to carry out a hepatiti...

As a general rule, something has to go extremely wrong for an NFL kicker to drive a week of discourse. When Steelers kicker Jeff Reed trashed a Sheetz bathroom and berated its graveyard-shift employee...

This past Friday, Christine Brennan asked to speak with an editor at Defector. The USA Today columnist’s request was somewhat expected, since Giri Nathan had written about her in an article published ...

This is the time of year to be grateful for not having things stuck in our asses, and to think of those less fortunate than us. So spare a thought for those Americans who misjudged the capacity of the...

This is a message for this year’s Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader candidates only: It’s time to download Signal and start a union. I watched that Netflix docuseries America’s Sweethearts and I can’t stop t...

Sponge got their guitars stolen on Tuesday. I know this because the band’s publicist, Leo Lavoro, is going above and beyond his job description by trying to get them back. My email address must still ...

Brian Evenson’s first book, a story collection titled Altmann’s Tongue, came out in 1994. It was not widely reviewed. The few notices the book did receive in the media ranged from the curious, to the ...

Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music and musical topics I’ve been fixated on recently. What could compel someone to spend four hours on a YouTube essay mostly about the rapper...