In the forty-eight hours after Todd Akin, the current Republican Senate candidate from Missouri, made an international fool of himself by asserting, in response to an interviewer’s question about his opposition to abortion in the case of women who have become pregnant as a result of having been raped, that when the rape in question is a “legitimate rape the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down,” nearly every Republican of any importance on the national stage stepped forward to denounce him. Pundit types on the left were quick to determine that a plan was afoot. By denouncing Akin, they pointed out, the rest of the party was in reality only trying to make itself look comparatively moderate, comparatively sympathetic, comparatively not crazy, with regards to women’s health and reproductive rights, and in so doing perhaps win the votes of a potentially crucial bloc of undecided female voters in the upcoming presidential election (white female voters, I should say, as Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is currently polling at 0% among likely black voters of either sex). Unwittingly, it seemed, Akin had offered himself up as something of a sacrificial lamb and the rest of his party, hoping to curry favor from the electoral gods (the swing voters), did not hesitate to let the killing blade fall. The analysis is no doubt accurate, as was the observation of many of those same left leaning pundit types that the fatal flaw in the plan was that in denouncing him Akin’s fellow party members could not but call attention to the fact that to a man (and the occasional frightening woman) they all hold the same radical anti-abortion views Akin’s absurd anti-logic was intended to justify – that they are...

Photograph by Tom Flynn I was on my way home to Milwaukee for the weekend, somewhere in that brief stretch of no man’s land that separates the casino town of Dubuque, Iowa from the Wisconsin state line, when 2011 National League MVP Ryan Braun, whose appeal of a fifty game suspension for having tested positive last October for synthetic testosterone – a “Performance Enhancing Drug” banned under Major League Baseball’s Joint Drug Prevention and Treatment Program – had the day before been upheld by long-time baseball arbitrator Shyam Das, concluded his twenty-five minute press conference at the Milwaukee Brewers’ spring training facility in Phoenix, Arizona. Scanning the radio dial, I was able to follow reaction to what was perhaps the most direct and impassioned public denial ever issued by a baseball player accused of using PEDs – while standard procedure is to look toward the future from behind some sort of pseudo-legal smokescreen, Braun went so far as to say he would “bet [his] life” that the banned substance in question did not enter his body, either intentionally or otherwise – in two rather different forums: on the popular syndicated sports talk show the Jim Rome Show, guest hosted that morning by NFL network personality Andrew Siciliano, and on a local sports call-in show broadcast out of Madison, Wisconsin. Not surprisingly, reactions varied. Siciliano, addressing a national audience, scoffed – he literally produced a guttural, scoffing type sound from out of the back of his throat – at Braun’s all but unequivocal implication (though he was careful to stop short of outright accusation, noting that he knew what it felt like to be “wrongly accused” and did not want to subject someone else to such an injustice) that during the forty-four hours that his...

Bullfight posters are not hard to come by in Spain. Indeed, in any place in the country with touristic pretensions you can probably find a shop where they’ll inkjet your name on to some simulacrum of a traditional bullfight poster such that to the untrained eye it will look as though you yourself, alongside some José Tomás and Such-and-Such de la Frontera, were one of the three brave matadors who stared death in the eyes in Plaza de Toros de Madrid back in some timeless past and lived into the Disneyfied present to tell of it (what these posters in fact announce, of course, is that you or someone who cared enough about you to buy you a gift visited Spain). With its flick-of-the-wrist abstractions, and the bull about to enter the ring as though at the edge of some kind of black hole – with the blood-red text streaked, near the bottom, as though with blood – the image above, created by contemporary Majorcan artist Miquel Barceló, hardly resembles the iconic bullfight posters from which the aforementioned souvenirs take their folkloric cues. All the same, it is the most beautiful bullfighting poster I have ever seen, because the bullfight it was created to promote – on the 25th of September at the Plaza de Toros Monumental in Barcelona – was the last bullfight ever held in Catalonia. * I am no bullfighting expert. But having spent probably a quarter of my adult life in Spain, and a fair percentage of that time heading up groups of American high school students who naturally can’t go back home without having seen a Spanish bullfight, I’ve been to enough to know the basic script. Each bullfight features three matadors and six bulls, each of which gets...

Thanks to the high school students with whom I’ve shared the past six weeks as instructor of creative writing and residential adviser at a pre-college summer enrichment camp on the campus of Amherst College, and thanks more importantly to my willingness to let those students plug their iPods into the auxiliary socket and turn the volume to “max” when they are riding with me in one of the fleet of mini-vans we keep on hand for class activities, evening excursions, and other sundry errands, I have of late found myself taken by the effortlessly relentless flow of a young MC from Pittsburgh by the name of Mac Miller. Just nineteen years old, Mr. Miller has not yet been signed to a major label, nor has he released a full-length album. By and large, he has made his name by way of what are called “mixtapes,” short compilations advertised by word of mouth and given away at concerts and online for promotional purposes, in the hope of eventually securing that coveted major label deal. For now, the majority of Miller’s fans are even younger than he is. But if you do not fit into that category there’s at least half a chance that you’ve heard a few bars of his “Donald Trump.” The hit song’s lyrics, coasting atop a catchy Saturday Morning Cartoons meets Sunday morning church chorus beat, include “I just wanna ride, ride through the city in a Cutlass/Find a big butt bitch, somewhere get my nuts kissed,” “I ain’t picky but these girls be acting tricky/When the situation’s sticky and the liquor got them silly,” as well as Miller’s rather inscrutable pledge, and apparent origin of the song’s title, to “take over the world when I’m on my Donald Trump shit.” I...

I was a freshman in college when, after a season in the Chicago White Sox minor league system, Michael Jordan returned to professional basketball. A native Milwaukeean – and congenitally partial to the underdog – I had always hated Jordan, and in the years that followed, during which he would win three consecutive championships for the second time in his career, I would continue to hate him lustfully. But every time a Bulls game was televised in the weeks after his 1995 comeback, my best friend Jesse and I would get on our bikes and head over to Jesse’s Uncle TJ’s house, some eight or ten miles from campus, to watch. It takes a lot for a pair of college freshmen preoccupied with forty ouncers they can’t finish and girls they don’t have a chance with – kids whose universe is contained to a collection of dormitories on the shores of a small lake in the middle of southern Wisconsin – to bike ten miles, up hills and through traffic, into the world of houses and regular people with kids and jobs. But that’s how badly we wanted to see Jordan play. Not because we liked him, mind you, but because there would never be another basketball player like him, and we did not need the help of hindsight to know it. That brings us to LeBron James, the one who famously took his talents to South Beach this season, leaving behind the Cleveland Cavaliers team for which he’d played his entire NBA career and, in the process, a state’s worth of historically star-crossed sports fans who, calling themselves “witnesses” (at the encouragement of Nike, LeBron’s earliest and most steadfast sponsor), had supported him with a faith of which he turned out not to...