The title is meaningless, at least for the next few years. — Yesterday, one the country’s leading cycling organizations, PeopleForBikes, released their annual City Ratings, a wholistic ranking of the cycling environment in every U.S. city. Founded in 1999, PeopleForBikes is a advocacy organization focused on pushing cities to build more safe, accessible bike infrastructure at both the local and national level…

If you’re trying to solve a budget crisis, you’re looking in the wrong place. — Unsurprisingly, the economic shockwaves of the coronavirus epidemic have started to be felt in the ivory tower. Across the country, state schools and private institutions alike are looking for ways to cut costs. …

By Matthew Futterman — Matthew Futterman, the deputy sports editor at the New York Times, has been covering sports every day for the past few decades. Thus it makes sense for someone like him to write this book, focusing on the ways that sport has changed over the past sixty years. …

By Jennifer Ring Jennifer Ring, now a professor emeritus at University of Nevada, Reno is a political scientist by training, and spent the first decades of her career analyzing traditional political philosophy, race, and identity politics. But in 2009, Ring gave us Stolen Bases: Why American Girls Don’t Play Baseball…

The problem is structural, not behavioral. — As Jane Jacobs famously wrote in her 1961 classic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, sidewalks are “the main public places of the city,” its “most vital organs.” They function as spaces for commerce or leisure; they are a key piece of the transportation puzzle; they are social…

Appropriation for public use can help fight the spread of coronavirus. — As more and more of the country finds itself under shelter-in-place orders, Americans seem to be gladly taking advantage of one of the few reasons they are permitted to leave their homes: exercise. Sidewalks and bike lanes are buzzing with activity as folks attempt to maintain some moderate level of…

And it looks like we’ve got a new clubhouse leader! — Thankfully, it seems that in this time of crisis the majority of professional sport franchises have been appropriately shamed into doing the bare minimum to ensure the human dignity of their employees. But make no mistake — it is social pressure, not any sort of moral conscience, that is driving…

A rapidly evolving — or rather, disintegrating — media landscape is driving writers to newsletters — “It’s mine. It’s entirely mine. So few things are entirely ours,” journalist Will Leitch told me of his weekly bulletin, called This Here Newsletter. Leitch made his name in sports and culture writing: He was the founding editor of Deadspin and still churns out regular columns for the likes of…

Short answer: probably, but it’s hard to prove! — In November 2015, Senators John McCain and Jeff Flake published a report titled, Tackling Paid Patriotism: A Joint Oversight Report. It detailed how the Department of Defense had signed marketing contracts with professional sports teams worth millions of dollars annually. These contracts gave the military the ability to perform public…