While we want sports to be fair, sometimes what we observe “is a contest among wildly disparate groups of people, who approach the starting line with an uneven set of genetic endowments and natural advantages,” Malcolm Gladwell writes at the New Yorker in a penetrating examination of David Epstein’s book The Sport Gene. [David] Epstein tells the…

In a blog entry at Grantland, author Malcolm Gladwell uses the sale of the former New Jersey Nets, now the Brooklyn Nets, to show how basketball is a business. Developer Bruce Ratner sold the team to a wealthy Russian businessman after arranging to move it to Brooklyn, N.Y., so that he could reportedly claim a…

Malcolm Gladwell, author and New Yorker contributor, says that he has little recollection of 9/11. He is among a number of the magazine’s contributors who were asked to look back on how the day changed their work and their lives. 1. What were you thinking about, or working on, the day the attacks occurred? I slept…

Author Malcolm Gladwell, in a blog entry at Grantland, argues that some NBA owners receive more pleasure from ownership than economic returns, which explains their peculiar behavior during the lockout.  The Boston Red Sox signed their first black player in 1959, a utility infielder named “Pumpsie” Green. This was 12 years after the Brooklyn Dodgers…