In Chicago, where for much of the last decade the best basketball team in the country has played, the silence is particularly painful. The last time games were played here, the Bulls, led by Michael Jordan, were contesting for their sixth N.B.A. championship, and playing against a favored team, the Utah Jazz. It was an indelible series, the memory of which serves as this year’s only fare—and it is melancholy fare—for basketball junkies everywhere.

In his new book, Rick Reilly writes at length about ferret legging, a bloody endurance competition wherein the athlete stuffs a ferret down his pants. In 1987, Outside's Donald Katz wrote the first, and still the best, ferret-legging account. Here it is.

If tl;dr is dying & longform is winning (http://bit.ly/aTDy7f), I'd welcome more articles interesting/attractive as this http://es.pn/9crCtm

Psychologist Anders Ericsson and other researchers in the field of ‘expertise studies’ have, in recent years, introduced a plethora of new information about how people develop advanced skills that is beginning to change our view of human potential and its limits. This is an opportunity to move the public conversation beyond clichés such as innate talent, giftedness and nature versus nurture, instead moving towards a more nuanced discussion of how human skills actually develop, ultimately helping people to maximise their potential.

Every so often, Deadspin posts superb longform journalism. Like this: The Legend Of Black Superman, Billy Ray Bates http://bit.ly/buo91R

Last season, in a bid to draw some attention to Battier’s defense, the Rockets’ public-relations department would send a staff member to the opponent’s locker room to ask leading questions of whichever superstar Battier had just hamstrung: “Why did you have so much trouble tonight?” “Did he do something to disrupt your game?” According to Battier: “They usually say they had an off night. They think of me as some chump.”

"David’s victory over Goliath, in the Biblical account, is held to be an anomaly. It was not. Davids win all the time. The political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases."

Account of Marion Jones's imprisonment and subsequent involvment in basketball.

"The end of the goal poacher and the rebirth of the libero are two trends we are likely to see during the next 10 years."

"Armenia excels at chess. Its top player now has a shot at becoming world champion. How did this tiny country become a giant at the game?"

The always-excellent Jonathan Wilson on the development of tactics, and their symmetry - or lack of it: "England's lack of a natural left-winger is often seen to be their weakness, but Fabio Capello has turned it into an advantage."

"What happens when all of a man's intelligence and athleticism is focused on placing a fuzzy yellow ball where his opponent is not? An obsessive inquiry (with footnotes), into the physics and metaphysics of tennis."