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Alex Kirshner @alexkirshner.com · 03/10/2026

Dissent is not tolerated on Bluesky. Discussion is strictly limited to the wokist orthodoxy of the far left flank of the Democratic Party

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Alex Kirshner @alexkirshner.com · 02/10/2026

The set design here with the ray of sunshine poking in is one of the nastiest things I've ever seen in sports media. I don't even work in cinematography and I can see what they're doing

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Alex Kirshner @alexkirshner.com · 01/10/2026

I have finally cracked vertical video this year. Basically I'm a fellow kid

I'm saying IT'S TOO HOT in front of a pic of the sun

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Alex Kirshner @alexkirshner.com · 28/09/2026

Oregon Raiola = Nebraska Raiola, stylistically, but there are two big changes:

some key ways, Oregon Raiola was identical to Nebraska Raiola. His average target Saturday was 7.6 yards beyond the line of scrimmage (compared with 7.3 at Nebraska, per TruMedia). He threw 29.2 percent of his passes to players at or behind the line (29.9 percent at Nebraska). His average time to throw was 2.70 seconds (2.69 at Nebraska). We’ve seen this broad style before.

The differences, however, were clear:

• Raiola faced pressure on 24 percent of his dropbacks, compared with 29.7 percent at Nebraska (and 31.6 percent in power conference games there).

• When he was pressured at Nebraska, he took a sack on 24.9 percent of those plays. On Saturday, he was pressured on six of his 25 dropbacks and didn’t take a sack.

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Alex Kirshner @alexkirshner.com · 26/09/2026

You have to fire everybody and just not worry about a roster exodus. The QB you were so excited to retain just did this

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Alex Kirshner @alexkirshner.com · 25/09/2026

I have been contributing to Slate for almost six years, and that is not even 1/5 of the publication's lifespan. Appreciate @joshuablevin.bsky.social for sharing this note on a 2021 story. Never wrong just early slate.com/culture/2021...

This story was recommended by longtime Slatester Josh Levin as part of our 30th anniversary celebration at Slate: Back in 2021, when I was editing Slate’s sports coverage, I assigned Alex Kirshner a piece on Caitlin Clark, then a freshman at the University of Iowa. Alex’s story, headlined “The Most Exciting Player in College Basketball,” was a fantastic introduction to an athlete who’s since become one of the most talked-about people in American culture … and absolutely no one read it. We were maybe a little early, but all of you were definitely late!

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Alex Kirshner @alexkirshner.com · 25/09/2026

I think if you are the president and your presence is this annoying for tens of thousands of people, you should just play more golf for your leisure. Less disruptive to society www.splitzoneduo.com/p/trump-visi...

It is deeply inconvenient when the president attends a sporting event, and I do mean any president. I’ve been to Army-Navy with Biden and Trump, and it really is quite something.

Whenever you go to a game with the president, they basically freeze all the gates for a period of time when he’s getting in, so nobody can get in or out. There’s obviously enhanced security that you can see and some you can’t.

There was a national championship game, I believe, between Georgia and Alabama in 2017, where he went, and the choke points were really bad. That also has something to do with getting in and out of Mercedes-Benz Stadium overall.

For a place like Neyland Stadium, it’s going to be wild because the ingress and egress are different there. It’s an older stadium backed up against the river versus a modern pro stadium dumped in a massive parking lot. If you’re headed there this weekend, good luck.

Also, I understand the myriad of criticisms of Trump for [insert reason], but I fear I must admit: if I were the president, I would definitely go to as many sporting events as he does.

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Alex Kirshner @alexkirshner.com · 24/09/2026

What happens if we "lose" the AI race to China? Well!

What of a “loss,” though? I asked Kreps what the most well-founded fear was in the event that Chinese models became dominant. Would China gate them off from Americans, seizing a productivity advantage for itself? Would Americans use them en masse, creating a data privacy problem? Would the Chinese models, tuned to accommodate the party line, turn us all into frothing communists?

“I think it’s all of the above, honestly,” she said.

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Alex Kirshner @alexkirshner.com · 23/09/2026

We call this the Bezos-Bluesky Alliance

So, Amazon is blocking Muse from shopping on its platform, similar to how it was already fighting another A.I. business, Perplexity, over its shopping tool. One of the biggest companies in the world has spent hundreds of billions of dollars trying to own a corner of A.I., and now that it has released the fruit of that labor, one of the other biggest companies in the world says it’s a no go. (Meta has had more luck with other e-commerce platforms, like Expedia, which it announced a deal with on Tuesday.) The stakes are enormous for Meta, which has not made a product that normal people care about since Facebook and has not acquired any since WhatsApp in 2014. There is no more obvious implementation of a tool like Muse than online shopping, and the king of American e-commerce is just saying no. The stakes are less big but still huge for Amazon, which reported nearly $70 billion in ad revenue last year.

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Alex Kirshner @alexkirshner.com · 22/09/2026

You know what time it is @splitzoneduo.com subscribers. Out here again with @rodger.bsky.social discussing the absolute mess of athletic administration in Fayetteville, Arkansas www.splitzoneduo.com/p/team-of-th...

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Alex Kirshner @alexkirshner.com · 19/09/2026

Figured I'd just explain the nitty gritty of what NC State did wrong on this play as they were trying to take an intentional safety to close out a win over Vanderbilt. I now the Xs and Os are a little thick for some of you, so I am here to answer questions if you have them

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Alex Kirshner @alexkirshner.com · 19/09/2026

I didn't think this shot of the tailgate scene outside Arkansas' stadium today was real but I verified it with a local

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Alex Kirshner @alexkirshner.com · 18/09/2026

Kim Mulkey is really unlike any other person in sports

This offseason, Kim Mulkey signed Anna Minaeva, a player from Moscow, while LSU had a player on the roster, Kate Koval, who is not just Ukrainian but the daughter of a ranking member of the Ukrainian military. Whoops!

To make matters even worse, Mulkey said Minaeva and Koval could be “ambassadors” for friendship. It’s clear that women’s basketball is an ascendant sport, but it’s not quite to the level where it will win the hearts and minds of bitter enemies à la the documentary Rocky IV. This story continues Kim’s track record of being weird when it comes to Russia. (You will recall the time she offered barely tepid support for the greatest player she ever coached while said player was locked up as a bargaining chip in a Russian prison.)

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Alex Kirshner @alexkirshner.com · 14/09/2026

Also in this column: -LeVar Woods is already paying off for Michigan State -Arkansas very well could go 1-11 -Austin Simmons!

Since Drinkwitz’s arrival, the Tigers have ranked 14th in the SEC in expected points added per dropback on throws 20 yards or more down the field, while attempting them the eighth most frequently. So I was pretty intrigued to see Simmons strut onto the field in Lawrence and nail three separate deep balls to fellow Ole Miss transfer Cayden Lee. Two of them were down the sideline (one on a wheel route!), and the other one was a touchdown on this post route:

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Alex Kirshner @alexkirshner.com · 14/09/2026

It's my honor to write an occasional CFB numbers column for @theathletic.com this season. I hope to bring you a deeper analytical angle on the games www.nytimes.com/athletic/759...

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Alex Kirshner @alexkirshner.com · 13/09/2026

If you are part of the Be Normal About Arch Manning Police Force, you have to be normal about this too (acknowledge it's an all-time finish for any QB/offense)

Drive chart showing 15 x 91 yards, 13 x 72 yards, 12 x 73 yards for three touchdowns

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Alex Kirshner @alexkirshner.com · 12/09/2026

Fellow coaches, let me show you what Boston College was doing here from an X's and O's perspective

don't really wanna explain a terrible meme but it's a wide open receiver with arrows pointing at him saying "ball" and "guy"

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Alex Kirshner @alexkirshner.com · 09/09/2026

Crux of the matter: I think there's a good chance there was supposed to be time on the clock at the end of the play, but also we'll *never* know for sure and the call on the field was game over and we'll also prob never know if protocol was followed, in part bc it's unclear what protocol *was* lol

The MAC’s argument is that “established replay protocol clearly requires” the Big Ten to rely on the “program feed” clock, which comes out of NBC’s production truck. (This is the clock you see on TV.) The MAC says the Big Ten used a clock “embedded” in its replay system. It’s likely that they’re different displays of the same clock—but with a tech glitch somewhere that caused them to fall out of sync. Different people are not starting and stopping the game manually.

Whatever the case, we may never get this settled. According to an official I talked with on Tuesday and this good story in the Athletic, officials were already supposed to use the TV clock in moments of conflict, because it’s not good for trust when millions of people are told they saw something that did not match the governance of the game. But none of this was codified in writing until Tuesday, when the NCAA released updated rules of the road explaining when to follow each clock presentation. This newly written policy would prohibit what the MAC says the Big Ten did on Saturday night, but the Big Ten said it stood by its work and would have no further comment. The NCAA football rulebook is thick, but it turns out that the refereeing community had not explored every possible crevice of a football game. I don’t blame anyone for this, as I had also not considered that “the clock” was not a singular source of truth.

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Alex Kirshner @alexkirshner.com · 07/09/2026

If you become my 5,000th hardworking follower, I will make a video about the most embarrassing loss in the history of your rival program or any other team you select instagram.com/akirshner

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Alex Kirshner @alexkirshner.com · 07/09/2026

Been having fun growing my account on Instagram

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Alex Kirshner @alexkirshner.com · 06/09/2026

I had Michigan as a fringe playoff team but obviously have to back off that after their OL got whipped in this way. The successful Hail Mary had to be rushed because six offensive lineman could barely delay four Western Michigan rushers. Screenshot representative of their performance all evening

Michigan's yellow jerseys failing to block WMU's white ones on the hail mary

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Alex Kirshner @alexkirshner.com · 06/09/2026

Here's where I am on the WMU-Michigan thing after gathering info. It's still a huge mess, but a more interesting mess with more possible parties to blame than you previously thought

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Alex Kirshner @alexkirshner.com · 04/09/2026

Look at my Big Ten front seven bro

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Alex Kirshner @alexkirshner.com · 04/09/2026

You don't want to be playing UMass in the first game of Week 1 and have multiple photos like this already on the wires

Umass player holding up his finger to shush the crowd or something

Umass QB holding up his finger as he runs with the ball

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Alex Kirshner @alexkirshner.com · 01/09/2026

My perfectly calibrated, exactly correct take on AI stock biz is that you are welcome to say people are being hysterical in either direction but you should police that in BOTH directions if you're going to do one. I know this sounds like a dumb guy's idea of a smart guy's take, but it's important

Anthropic will have to get to its own market projection without owning a declining microblogging platform, and until its documents are public, we won't know how the company justifies it. The Journal has offered a preview, saying the company is "looking at the full scope of work that could be completed with Al models." Anthropic will also have to figure out how to sell A.I. without burning cash. (Anthropic's description of its current profitability will be very interesting.) But these guys are capturing a ridiculous volume of cash: an annualized rate of $47 billion as of May, which isn't the same as money in the bank but could also undersell things if the company has grown. I think that if you are still insisting that every A.l. business will go up on smoke, it's time for an update. You are wishcasting rather than looking at the world as it is.
Hardened priors go both ways, though. Anthropic is a real business that needs to justify extraordinary and frankly outrageous valuations and infrastructure spending to keep the party going. Projecting a market of (approximately) infinity dollars is one way to do that. Reuters noted that the big projection would
"anchor the growth story behind its planned IPO," a story the rest of us aren't obligated to tell.

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Alex Kirshner @alexkirshner.com · 29/08/2026

For All Mankind, Silo, Severance

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Alex Kirshner @alexkirshner.com · 26/08/2026

Shoutout @iamhectordiaz.com for helping lead this and also @tysonw.bsky.social, a human designer, for the whole brand kit, which looks sweet

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Alex Kirshner @alexkirshner.com · 22/08/2026

The @splitzoneduo.com SEC preview arrives Monday. Until that time I welcome you to guess who this quarterback is, based on where he threw the ball last year. (Data is via Hudl IQ)

A QB heat map showing a lot of action behind the line of scrimmage and on the short right part of the field, and almost nothing over the middle

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Alex Kirshner @alexkirshner.com · 18/08/2026

This is not healthy and I do not think it's just me

Earlier this month, Pangram flagged a small passage from a draft I had submitted to an editor at one of the other publications where I freelance. I forget if the story came up as 5 percent A.I.-assisted, 9 percent, or whatever. But I remember rewriting several sentences of my own work in the hopes of satisfying this new integrity god. I was worried that my editor, a cool guy who’s known me for years, might be on edge about this sort of thing. What if he put it through Pangram and wondered if he’d gotten me all wrong? That wouldn’t be good for business. I ran out of free credits before I could get the story up to a “100% Human” designation, then attached it to an email and pressed Send. I sent the editor a six-text blast explaining myself, as if I were getting ready for my own criminal trial. We were all good, he said.

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Alex Kirshner @alexkirshner.com · 15/08/2026

Kansas has already distinguished itself by getting two coaches on the list, somehow neither being Charlie Weis. Turner Gill was not wildly familiar to me so doing this one was like unwrapping a Christmas present

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Alex Kirshner @alexkirshner.com · 15/08/2026

If one you becomes my 4,000th hardworking follower (with down-home values) on IG and demonstrates screenshot proof, you can tell me your college football team's worst coach ever and if I haven't already I'll make a video about him instagram.com/akirshner

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Alex Kirshner @alexkirshner.com · 31/07/2026

This is the criminal act at the center of the fracas

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Alex Kirshner @alexkirshner.com · 23/07/2026

New @splitzoneduo.com episode out for the subscribers. It's the 25-year anniversary of a college football season that demands a proper historical dive. Great week to subscribe! www.splitzoneduo.com/p/2001-colle...

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Alex Kirshner @alexkirshner.com · 21/07/2026

Made the CFB Podcaster's Mac n Cheese for my squad today www.splitzoneduo.com/p/mac-and-ch...

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Alex Kirshner @alexkirshner.com · 20/07/2026

The college sports bill in the Senate is on the rocks because senators from Big Ten and SEC states are under pressure from school presidents and ADs to transform it or kill it. This was pretty obvious to us on @splitzoneduo.com at the beginning of June but I guess not to Ted Cruz, for unclear rsns

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Alex Kirshner @alexkirshner.com · 19/07/2026

Come on man www.fotmob.com/matches/arge...

Argentina have become the first side on record (from 1966) not to have a shot in the opening 70 minutes of a World Cup final. The previous longest wait in a final was France against Argentina in 2022 (68th min). They have failed to get Messi into the game at all thus far, and he has just 22 touches.

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Alex Kirshner @alexkirshner.com · 16/07/2026

I hated to write this because there was no honest way to do it without being mean. Will Ferrell's new golf show on Netflix is just terrible. Moratorium time on golf TV shows. No more! @slate.com slate.com/culture/2026...

Early on in The Hawk, Netflix’s new sports comedy set in the world of professional golf, Will Ferrell’s and Molly Shannon’s characters share a moment. Ferrell, one of the century’s most renowned comics, plays Lonnie “the Hawk” Hawkins, a washed-up PGA Tour pro trying to get back on top. Shannon, an Emmy-nominated, SAG Award–winning powerhouse, plays Ferrell’s estranged wife, Stacy.

“You haven’t been on the tour in seven years, you dickless cunt,” Stacy tells Ferrell’s character.

“By definition, a cunt is dickless,” Lonnie counters.

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Alex Kirshner @alexkirshner.com · 14/07/2026

I covered this pretty explicitly

“I gather that everyone here is 100% certain Graham Platner is a Nazi antisemite,” the left-wing journalist Ryan Grim wrote on Bluesky in early March. “I also gather you all are trapped in an epistemic chamber sealed tighter than the one around Fox News.” To be fair to Grim, Maine primary voters were with Platner, too, backing him by a wide enough margin that his main opponent, Gov. Janet Mills, quit before the July primary. But in the end, it turned out that Platner’s haters who had decamped to Bluesky had the right read on him—not that he couldn’t win votes because of the tattoo or extramarital sexts, but that a guy with these résumé marks was full of shit when he claimed more stories weren’t coming.

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Alex Kirshner @alexkirshner.com · 04/07/2026

The only qualifying hitter patriot to carry exactly a .250 batting average into today's games

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Alex Kirshner @alexkirshner.com · 01/07/2026

Here's Cade Cavalli striking out Willson Contreras and screaming "sit down boy!" at him. Really nice and a great week for it. Does Manfred 1) do the obvious thing or 2) do nothing because he doesn't want a Turning Point spokesman to do a viral tweet about how he won't watch baseball anymore

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Alex Kirshner @alexkirshner.com · 30/06/2026

Nick Saban had a big contract at Alabama, but the most appropriate thing would've just been to give him a percentage cut of tuition for every enrolling student between 2010 and 2023 who had a bio remotely like this www.nytimes.com/2026/06/26/s...

Cook, 30, is a public relations manager for Burberry Beauty at Coty. She is from Oyster Bay, N.Y., and graduated from the University of Alabama with a bachelor’s degree in communication and information sciences.

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Alex Kirshner @alexkirshner.com · 25/06/2026

I don't think this guy is a psyop but I think for both nefarious political reasons and understandable reasons of despair, people are desperate to make the category error of swapping in "pretty places and good tourism" for whatever else they want their country to be

This year’s social media tourism boom around the World Cup has been a different, bottom-up sort of thing. Its leaders are people who have loved their trips, seen the ability to get lots of followers by selling patriotism back to Americans, or a bit of both. There is no question that some of this lovefest is the result of algorithmic opportunism, but there’s also no question that it works. Freddy is definitely riding a tail wind from being on Elon Musk’s personal social media platform, which he has designed to be friendly to Trumpism and the Republican Party. You can get a lot of retweets by referring to the “land of the free” with bald eagle and American flag emojis as you drive over the bridge from Canada. But I doubt Freddy has appealed only to Americans working a partisan angle cloaked in patriotism. The thing about America is that it is an extremely cool country with countless cool places. How many people have either forgotten that or found themselves in the market for a little reassurance from a faceless German? Some, at least!
We can learn something, then, from Freddy’s success. It’s that for various reasons, a lot of Americans are lusting after proof that America is good. Whether you are rolling around like a pig in slop at this political moment or devastated about it, you can find a reason to be jazzed about the German guy discovering joy in every little corner of the country. This is what Walmart, the publicists for the nation’s hottest rising country act, and many politicians have noticed too. There is currency right now in reminding Americans of something that I thought was pretty obvious to even the most doomerist segments of the U.S.: Not everything is bad. Like almost anywhere in the world, a tourist can have a fun time on vacation here.

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Alex Kirshner @alexkirshner.com · 22/06/2026

My grocery store's nectarines this month

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