Enjoying this newsletter every week? Share it with friends, and tell them to subscribe at www.nytimes.com/rory. Villa Park had seemed to shake when the goal went in, three minutes into injury time, fans leaping into one another’s arms, Aston Villa’s staff members running, in the daze that comes of delirium, up and down the touchline. […] More
Maybe you’ve noticed the red trucker hat that Kyle Shanahan, the head coach of the San Francisco 49ers, has been wearing on the sidelines. Twitter certainly has. “Kyle Shanahan’s hat might as well say ‘I Vape,’” one user tweeted in November. Another wrote that the retro snapback, with its mesh back, flat brim and tiny […] More
MIAMI — Narratives can push into the absurd in the N.F.L. playoffs, when many fans and journalists, no matter how passionate they claim to be, are often seeing teams for the first time that season. It’s a situation that leads to things like this Super Bowl being conveyed by some as a cut-and-dried case of […] More
PORTSMOUTH, England — The team bus for the Leyton Orient women’s soccer team can sometimes be stifling. More than a dozen players sit, shoulder-to-shoulder, for hours in tedium under fluorescent blue lights (and in fear of having to use the one bathroom). There is, at least, free tea. The team’s striker, Otesha Charles, a dual […] More
MIAMI — The San Francisco 49ers relied on the N.F.L.’s best tight end, its highest-paid fullback and a cadre of productive receivers to reach the Super Bowl. But while other teams might strive to get those players into the end zone by any means possible, San Francisco has adopted the opposite strategy. The 49ers rarely […] More
AUSTIN CONSIDINE Friends: I know what I’m doing Sunday. I know what you’re doing Sunday. As full-time culture journalists, to ignore the Super Bowl would be a gross dereliction of duty. That’s because the Super Bowl isn’t just a game. It’s the halftime show; it’s the ads; it’s the chips and guac. It is sport […] More
MIAMI — In 2017, the Kansas City Chiefs traded three draft picks to move up 17 spots and take Patrick Mahomes with the 10th pick of the N.F.L. draft, but as a rookie, he played in only one game, a throwaway appearance on the season’s final weekend. Mahomes’s workload did not portend the risky, bold […] More
Some time in 1998, riding high on critical acclaim for her performance alongside George Clooney in Steven Soderbergh’s sultry crime thriller “Out of Sight,” the rising actress Jennifer Lopez approached her manager with an unconventional idea: She wanted to make an album. Lopez recalled his response was not encouraging in a recent “CBS Sunday Morning” […] More
