Hunter S. Thompson didn't care for sportswriters, and I can understand why. With a few exceptions, he said, sportswriters are "a kind of rude and brainless subculture of fascist drunks whose only real function is to publicize and sell whatever the sports editor sends them out to cover." In other, less vibrant words, sportswriters have a knack for sucking the humanity out of sports, in particular, football. They mute the collective heart-thud of the crowd, whose every happiness, at that moment, is tied to the fate of one lemon shaped ball.  They rarely mention the unique timbre produced by …

The last college football game I attended was in 2006, when UCLA played Stanford at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. It was a somewhat nominal game, which is probably how I wound up with free tickets. I have very few guiding principles in my life, but this is one of them: Never turn down anything free. This probably does a lot to explain why all of my umbrellas keep getting swallowed by piles of extra large t-shirts and small foam balls. Hmm. I went to the game with three exchange students I had just met: Ike and Haye were from Holland, and Annie was Norwegian. Despite being the only American in …

I've been reading the newspaper as long as I've been reading anything, if not longer. It started with the comics, which my dad would read with me every Sunday until I was too big to fit in his lap. It's continued to present day, where I am one of the four remaining subscribers to the print edition of the New York Times. As someone who forks over actual money every month to read the paper in print, you can bet I read it cover to cover, from Sunday Styles to Science. But there is one section that always remains neatly folded, free of the coffee stains and multiple botched efforts at folding and…