An opportunity afforded respectable Americans once every four years to be racist Anglophiles.

Blogging at Deadspin, editor/soccermeister David Hirshey, a sportswriter in a previous life, picks England, Argentina, Brazil and Italy for the finals. No surprises—though he gets off a couple good (rim)shots: While it’s difficult to take a team seriously that is…

The Jason Grimsley news, though upsetting to me as an Orioles fan, is a further reminded that Barry Bonds is being singled out, that perform-enhancing substances are widespread in the game of baseball. Maybe not everyone’s using it, but just…

Chris Matthews’ line on Zarqawi’s death yesterday—”he’s dead as Julius Caesar”—was ten times as poetic as President Bush’s: “Zarqawi has met his end.” And Bush’s writers had more advance warning than Matthews’s. I gather the line comes from Malone on…

I spent a couple days in New York city this week, including an obligatory meeting with a pseudo-friend. If you don’t live in New York, you might not know what a pseudofriend is. New York is full of them. These…

Best ad so far is Adidas’s Jose + 10 ad, all in Spanish, featuring a kid playing sandlot soccer with a bunch of stars… blogged here from Singapore.

Arthur Sulzberger Jr. urged SUNY New Paltz grads to stick to their guns and have courage. Here is a simple test of the Times courage. Stephen Walt and Kaavya Viswanathan are both Harvard authors who published the most significant writing…

I notice that rightwingers are upset about Arthur M. Sulzberger Jr.’s first commencement speech, a couple weeks back at New Paltz. In which he embraced liberal values. No! I thought he made a pretty good point: When I graduated from…

Breathtaking is the only word for the splendid coverage that reporter Liel Liebovitz has been doing in The Jewish Week on the idea wars over Israel in the U.S. and U.K. Liebovitz doesn’t seem to agree wholly with Israel’s critics….

Salamander