It’s like stealing cotton candy from a child.

This is Throwbacks, a newsletter by me, Michael Weinreb, about sports, history, culture, and politics—and how they all bleed together.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, the question remains: How do we play on when nothing feels normal?

Forty years ago, Montana’s career appeared to be over. Mahomes might be about to remind us how this story works.

How a phantom second in a college football game led the powers that be to assure us not to trust our own eyes.

How a phantom second in a college football game led the powers that be to assure us not to trust our own eyes.

This is Throwbacks, a newsletter by me, Michael Weinreb, about sports, history, culture, and politics—and how they all bleed together.

Three generations of quarterbacks have taught us that greatness isn't always about living up to expectations.

Who among today’s athletes has the potential to transcend the divisions of the modern era?

College football, college life, and the strange consequences of growing up in a world where no one seems to be in charge.

Johnny Unitas, the Minnesota Vikings, and the lost art of uncertainty.

Butch and Sundance, Mike Krukow and Duane Kuiper, and the rare beauty of a friendship that changes everything.

As franchises become flippable investment properties, the people who own them seem increasingly detached from what made them valuable in the first place.

For years now, Google has been tweaking its search formula to prop up AI and bury actual links. Now it’s rounding into its final form—and changing the internet forever.

A eulogy for the Embrace Debate era, and (hopefully) for the culture it built.

Three decades after 1994, the sport still can't figure out how to embrace the collective good.

Baseball, football, and the increasingly ambiguous hinge point between them.

Every previous chapter of his career made narrative sense. Philadelphia doesn't.

A dumb, delightful promotion is a reminder that baseball should still surprise us.

How baseball's most unlikely folk hero became the blueprint for the modern hitter.

On the joy of watching professionals play like children.

Richard Nixon, red cards, and the oldest trick in the political playbook.

The intervention by the U.S. president was a bizarre twist in a story that will reverberate throughout this summer and beyond

Dazed and Confused isn't just the best comedy of the 1990s. It also might be the best sports movie.

One of the best days in modern soccer history showed that sports are fundamentally human.

Why the World Cup doesn't care what Rick Rubin thinks.

FIFA calls them hydration breaks. Fox calls them inventory. The rest of the world recognizes them for what they are.

Haaland is the door. The rest of soccer's glorious goofiness is on the other side of it.

A handful of Giants pitchers turned Pride Night into a protest of the city's values. Burke's story is the rebuttal.

A handful of Giants pitchers turned Pride Night into a protest of the city's values. Burke's story is the rebuttal.

The Brendan Sorsby ruling didn't create this mess. It just confirmed no one's in charge.

The sport finally found a home here. It just never belonged to us.

For fifty years, the NFL and 60 Minutes defined the American Sunday. One of them is being destroyed from within.

All but one of the 280 former students who sued the school through five lawsuits for failing to protect them from a man accused of being a sexual predator have signed on to the agreement.

Sure, the Knicks are in the Finals. But what if the suffering itself was the reward?

Why the dumbest trend in sports is also its most hopeful.

Some ideas are too subversive to clone.

What did baseball lose when 100 m.p.h. became pedestrian?

An ode to the agate page, and to the website that rebuilt it.