Words matter. These are the best Mary Pilon Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
When most people think of Tae Kwon Do – which, in the United States, is not all that often – they think of sparring, a form of competition that both men and women perform at the Olympics.
A 401(k) is essentially a basket of mutual funds intended to help people save for retirement.
I remember, often, when you tell people you’re doing a book about board games, they think you’re totally nuts. And that might be warranted. But I feel like if we can’t get the story of Monopoly right… what hope is there for anything else?
If workplaces that enlist happiness consultants really care about worker satisfaction, why not offer better maternity and paternity policies? Daycare options? They could advise managers to stop calling workers to come in on weekends or expect them to answer emails late on weeknights.
No one in my family was a journalist, and it didn’t seem like a real job. Part of me still doesn’t think it is.
I was an ambidextrous child, and the symmetry of roller skating was a welcome respite from my awkwardness with physical activities that involved a ball or a racket.
Despite the laserlike focus it generates, ‘Tetris’ has no clear endpoint and no easily defined opponents. Unlike with most other video games, you’re playing only against yourself, without any concrete goals other than to keep on fitting blocks into other blocks.
Human beings have kicked around the concept of what individual happiness means for centuries, from the Bible to the ancient Greeks to the 1859 bestseller ‘Self-Help.’
For professional athletes, the motives for cheating generally are more obvious: money, fame, and often a low likelihood of being caught. But why would a middle- or back-of-the-pack runner lie or cheat in a race that doesn’t even matter?
If bingeing on bad emergency-room-themed television has taught me anything, it’s that crisis situations bring out the best and worst in people.
As the issue of youth fitness – from obesity to proper exercise regimens – takes on more resonance in schools and communities across the country, CrossFit Kids and other preschool fitness programs are raising questions about when and how children should start playing organized sports or hitting the gym.
As it turns out, just hanging out around athletes doesn’t actually make one more fit.
Virtual reality has an exciting future and oodles of room to grow.
I’m astonished at how quickly the Great Recession came and went.
Increasingly, football fans are arguing that the game is bloated with too much down time. The officiating is clumsy.
As a producer, it’s not unusual to find yourself on the field, backstage, often with a camera crew and living with constant anxiety of accidentally ending up in the shot.
Wall Street trading floors have long been seen as bastions of testosterone that rewarded, literally, those with sharp elbows who could throw a punch.
We spend millions on fitness each year, yet we seem to get fatter.
The more I think about the Olympics, even from afar, its mere concept stuns me. I can’t think of any other line of work where, every four years, people gather to be ranked one, two, and three, then are more or less told to evaporate until the next go-around.
Recognizing chronic sadness may encourage someone to reach out to a friend, family member, or counselor rather than concealing the distress.
Some Americans, like those working in government or nonprofits, know the consequences of having their salaries public.
Without federal assistance, most elderly Americans would be unable to afford long-term care – and most nursing homes would be unable to keep the doors open.
One of sports journalism’s great ironies is that covering an Olympics can be wildly unhealthy. NBC shows athletes in peak health performing on the ice and snow, but not the haggard reporters subsisting for three weeks on stadium starches, cheap beer, deadlines, and little sleep.
It’s still thrilling, even if my work is something that people even pretend they’re interested in on a first date or at a cocktail party.
By the middle of the century, retirement culture – exemplified by timeshares in Florida, the golf industry, and AARP membership – was booming. Americans, it turned out, were pretty good at figuring out how not to do anything in their twilight years.
Typically, if a politician makes immigration an issue, it’s because of the belief that immigrants are taking jobs from Americans.
The fall of Rome seemed unthinkable to people at the time but inevitable to historians reflecting upon it with the benefit of context.
As the U.S. prison population has surged over the decades, the legal profession’s distaste for former inmates has become more conspicuous. And it isn’t only law. Medical schools often have committees to evaluate cases and mitigating factors but are generally reluctant to admit ex-inmates.
Something amazing happens when you tell people you write about sports for a living. You begin to feel like you’re in a scene from ‘Dawn of the Dead.’ The way people change when talking about ‘their team’ can be nothing short of zombiefication.
Football, like boxing, will never go away, just occupy a different role in the American zeitgeist.
Long before social media made things like bib replication easier, banditing at major races was viewed as a brave act. Rebellious runners like John Tarrant gatecrashed races as a political statement, in protest of rules about amateurism that limited how much money athletes could earn in appearance fees and endorsements.
Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have sparked a booming industry of so-called influencers – people with large-scale followings who are paid considerable sums by large companies to tout their products or ideas.
Endnotes, often confused with footnotes that live at the bottom of a page, is that lump of text at the end of the book, sometimes even relegated to a tiny font size. They’re often forgotten but, in nonfiction, particularly history books, can offer a fascinating footprint into the author’s research, a joyful, geeky abyss.
Many of my 20- and 30-something peers struggle with student loan debt and high rent, and more than once, I’ve erupted in laughter at the idea that I will collect any Social Security in my Betty White years.
Women in finance bore the brunt of layoffs more than their male counterparts during the Great Recession in 2008 and were also more likely to have been in back office jobs that were replaced by computers.
To drive a semi-truck, a driver needs a commercial driver’s license. While formal training isn’t required, most drivers enroll in a program to help prepare them for the written and practical exams in their states.
Because sports are a religion, it’s difficult to imagine a world without the Olympics, and to be sure, they have given us many glorious moments.
Money can be a reflection of our perceptions of power, self-esteem, personal history, fears, and happiness.
Even as Instagram defines our visual moment, we use the app’s filters to travel backwards in time, to make our images resemble the Polaroids of yore by casting them literally in a different, more nostalgic light.
The fear among athletes and organizers is that sailing is becoming more associated with silver hair than silver trophies.
In a culture obsessed with happiness, Americans may not be allowing for acceptance that it’s OK to sometimes not be perky.
Ultimately, the joy of sports is social and psychological, both in the ballpark and around a television on Super Bowl Sunday.
Trucking is the backbone of U.S. commerce. Consumers rely on the industry to move the parts for their cars, the food for their dinner tables, and, increasingly, the goods they order online.
Historically, companies haven’t hesitated to end their relationships with professional athletes amid scandals.
Women’s combat sports have been on a good run in the United States. Claressa Shields won a gold medal in women’s boxing at the London Olympics in 2012, when it became a medal sport. American women won medals in taekwondo and judo as well.
