Amidst all the other news flying at us from our phones, computers, and TV screens (Where is Trump golfing this week? Is Chelsea Clinton gearing up to run for office? Is Mark Zuckerberg gearing up to run for office? Russiagate!), it’s easy to forget that Paul Ryan is probably the most conservative Speaker of the
Author: Jamie Moore
Richard Spencer could be described as “moderately infamous.” In the past year, he became fairly well-known among followers of politics as an intellectual leader of the alt-right movement; however, I doubt that many of my older relatives would be able to say with any certainty who he is. He and the movement he leads were
I didn’t write the column that should’ve come out two weeks ago because after the election, writing about a nonrelated football item seemed trivial, and trying to connect it to football seemed crass. While I have written a column for this week, I also want to purposefully minimize it—I don’t want to assign to it
Odds are, living in the US, you’ve seen a National Football League (NFL) game on TV at some point. It’s almost an eventuality, given the NFL’s complete dominance of the airwaves—in 2015, NFL games accounted for 46 of the top 50 most-watched television programs, and all of the top 25. Of those 46 games, 19
On Sunday, October 16, Colin Kaepernick started his first game of the season for the San Francisco 49ers. In a vacuum, there are a lot of interesting things going on here: he was a backup quarterback for a currently very bad team; he is being paid like a star player, due to a massive contract
Columns, More than a Game on More than a Game: The NFL’s Quarterback Problem, and Why It’s the League’s Own Fault
If you’ve spent some time this fall watching the National Football League, you’ve probably come to the conclusion, just by appearances alone, that the most important people in the NFL are quarterbacks. Congratulations: your eyes have not been deceiving you. They, more than any people on the field or sideline, are responsible for a greater
I’m writing this on a Thursday night, just after watching what was perhaps the worst NFL game I’ve ever seen—a steaming turd of a game, played between the Jacksonville Jaguars and the Tennessee Titans. The Jaguars won, 19-13, bringing them to 3-6 for the season, while the Titans fell to 2-8. If you don’t know
This week, Senators John McCain and Jeff Flake, both Arizona Republicans, released a major investigation into publicity spending by the US Department of Defense, specifically into the practice of “paid patriotism.” Paid patriotism refers to the DoD’s practice of awarding publicity contracts to major sports teams, ostensibly for recruiting purposes. Some of this money is
The Sunday before I wrote this column (it will likely be more than a week in the past by the time you read this), the New England Patriots played the Indianapolis Colts in a highly-anticipated night game. It was highly anticipated for a number of reasons: the Patriots were undefeated and had looked extremely dominant
A brief introduction: I’m excited to continue my tenure as—I’m pretty sure—the only sportswriter at the Observer this football season. You can find all my columns from last year here. Last year, I closed my final NFL column by saying, “It makes me sad that it’s the off-season now, when all the toxic cultural byproducts
The “American Fresh Brewhouse” at Assembly Row is anything but your standard mall bar and grill. It’s owned and operated by Somerville Brewing Company—a small craft brewer responsible for the “Slumbrew” brand of beer you might see in a local liquor store—but technically, it’s not even a bar. Brewery co-owner Caitlin Jewell describes it as
I had a band director in high school who liked to say that music was great when it effectively built up and released tension. If so, the Super Bowl game played between the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks on February 1st was something akin to the 1812 Overture. Between two of the game’s final