Outside the Beltway

Ezra Klein has put out a teaser of the project that he left WaPo to pursue.

The North Koreans are back to their old tricks.

Richard Petty and Dale Earnhardt have company.

NBA legend Bill Russell was arrested earlier this week for having a loaded .38 in his luggage.

The return of a really bad idea.

Long suffering fans of the Dallas Cowboys, including myself and Steven Taylor, have a love-hate relationship with owner-general manager Jerry Jones. cowb

Jason Collins is gay. Who the hell is Jason Collins, you might ask?

Prominent female athletes have been able to be openly gay for decades. Why can’t their male counterparts?

Another week, another innocent person killed by an NFL player.

Kobe Bryant is one of only five NBA players to score 30,000 points and the youngest to achieve the milestone.

Will winning a championship finally overshadown “The Decision” and erase the NBA’s best player’s reputation as a choke artist?

GQ has a great look back at the 1992 USA Olympic basketball team titled “The Dream Will Never Die: An Oral History of the Dream Team.”

Ilya Shapiro asks, “If luxury stadiums were hugely profitable, why would the savvy businessmen who own the teams let the politicians in on the windfall?”

The Oklahoma City Thunder is making their first trip to the Western Conference finals after ousting the Los Angeles Lakers in five games. Naturally, rioting and gunplay ensued.

Larry Bird has been named NBA Executive of the Year. Is there any basketball-related honor he hasn’t won?

The student-athlete fairytale is true. Except where you would reasonably expect it to be a lie.

There’s no perfect system for choosing a champion but we can do better than this.

New head-scratching revelations in the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case.

Bob Knight coached Mike Krzyzewski at West Point. Now, Coach K has broken his mentor’s record for all-time victories as a head coach.

Pete Gent, the former Dallas Cowboy and Michigan State player best known as the author of “North Dallas Forty,” has died at 69 from pulmonary illness.

Does America have a social contract? If so, is it broken?

Money isn’t the only benefit some receive for their work.

Two cases in the news today raise questions about the NFL commissioner’s power.

US News editor-in-chief Mort Zuckerman explains “Why the Jobs Situation Is Worse Than It Looks.”

Apparently, some people haven’t gotten over Lebron James taking his talents to South Beach.

NBA legend Shaquille O’Neal has announced his retirement after 19 years as a pro. On Twitter.

Now here’s a story you don’t see every day: The head coach of a major college basketball team leaving for a service academy.

Elias Isquith proclaims my Atlantic essay “How Perpetual War Became U.S. Ideology” to be “a total disaster.”

The Washington Wizards have gone back to the future with new uniforms that look remarkably like the old Washington Bullets unis.

Players from the Los Angeles Clippers chipped in to pay for the surgery of assistant coach Kim Hughes back in 2004. It’s been a secret until now.

Players have taken control of the NBA from the owners. That’s bad for fans. But probably a good thing.

The Beast has released its The 50 Most Loathsome Americans of 2010, which I gather is supposed to be amusing rather than taken seriously.

Geno Auriemma and his UConn Huskies should rightly be enormously proud of their accomplishments. But comparing them to John Wooden’s is embarrassing.

Michael Wilbon departs the Washington Post after more than 30 years to work full time at ESPN. Here are his last — and first — columns.

The NFL’s “especially mercenary” push to extract new stadia from cities–even where the stadium’s practically brand-new.

Did LeBron James pick Miami because of income taxes ? Probably not.

Cleveland Cavaliers owner reacted to his star player’s departure with a scathing open letter. Was it fair?