John Madden retired abruptly from coaching in 1979, five months after receiver Darryl Stingley suffered a paralyzing injury against his Raiders. The tragedy would never leave him. He had no intention of entering broadcasting. Yet, within a decade—BAM!—he had become the most recognizable voice in football and a driving force behind America’s most powerful sports league.

Veteran sports journalist Scott Howard-Cooper reveals how Madden recast himself at exactly the right moment. Television was transforming sports, and the NFL needed a translator to turn complex strategy into entertainment. Madden didn’t just analyze football; he redefined how it was watched and loved—from the telestrator and pregame film study to Thanksgiving football.

But BAM! goes beyond the booth, tracing Madden’s personal life, unguarded moments, unexpected turns, and his influence through advertising, network wars, labor battles, concussion debates, and the Madden NFL video game—which reshaped gaming and brought football to new generations. Yet, Madden could never entirely escape what the game demanded from the men who played it.

BAM!: John Madden, the NFL Explosion, and the Video Game that Changed Sports (Diversion Books, 2026) is the story of how one rumpled, affable man became a defining figure in football’s greatest boom—and its reckoning —and why the NFL cannot stop invoking his name.

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With his riveting chronicle of the New York Mets baseball team, AM Gittlitz is emerging as a rising star in the field of popular social history. Writing with what the Wall Street Journal calls “the lunatic panache of a utopian manifesto,” Gittlitz weaves together the genealogies of American’s Pastime and the complex histories of race, class, ethnicity, and politics in the nation’s largest city. In this conversation, he recounts the many occasions when the tortuous trajectory of the Mets (and its precursors) collides with the major events of the metropolis and the nation. Civil rights workers, labor organizers, urban master-builders, corrupt politicians, and titans of finance and industry all make cameo appearances in his fascinating account, alongside legendary players from Jackie Robinson to Cleon Jones, Tom Seaver, and Francisco Lindor.

Read the book, Metropolitans: New York Baseball, Class Struggle, and the People's Team, and read the transcript of the interview here.

AM Gittlitz is an organizer and writer living in Ridgewood Queens. He is the author of I Want to Believe: Posadism, UFOs, and Apocalypse Communism and co-host of The Wreckage podcast.

A former journalist and editor, Stephen Hubbell directs the Seven Cities Fellowship Program, part of the Ideas Workshop at the Open Society Foundations.

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Why we crave enjoyment from news, how our news use divides us, and what we can do to create better news and more informed citizens. TikTok. Short-form reels. Late-night TV monologues. Podcasts. The way news is delivered has changed dramatically and so has the way we consume it. Now, we no longer look to the news just to learn and be informed; we expect enjoyment as well. In Enjoyment Is Breaking News: How We Became Less Informed and More Divided (and How to Fix It) (MIT Press, 2026), Jennifer Hoewe (Purdue University) explains how and why this shift toward news enjoyment occurred and what we can do to address the information crisis we now face. Evidence shows that enjoyment-driven decisions are leaving us less informed—despite what we might expect—because they lead us to ignore other news that matters. This book explains why we don’t always select the best sources of news, how we respond to the news sources we do select, and how that information impacts our political knowledge and decisions.

Hoewe also offers solutions for how to improve news creation and news use moving forward. Specifically, she shows how news consumers can escape their “self-righteous” consumption cycles; how news and social media companies can play a role in curbing our automatic amplification of enjoyable news; and how we can all do better when it comes to the information we seek and share.

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