As far as I know, only one team in professional sports history has finished 1st in offense, 1st in defense, and also missed the playoffs.
9. Bob Beamon's record-breaking long jump in the 1968 Olympics.
Hard to think of another sports achievement so outlierish that officials had to stop the game to figure out WTF just happened and the player, upon learning of the record, was so shocked that he suffered a seizure
8. Shohei Ohtani's 2021 season
People compare Ohtani to a modern Babe Ruth. But what Ohtani did was even stranger and more outlandish than anything Ruth accomplished in a single season.
7. Barry Bonds' 2001-2004 statistics
Yes, I know, he was on all of the steroids. But his intentional walk records—read to the bottom of this screenshot!—are still some of the most ludicrous things to ever happen in sports.
6. Cy Young’s wins and complete games records
Cy threw 749 complete games. No current pitcher has thrown 4+ since 2018. It would take a modern ace more years of peak performance to break Cy's CG record than the total number of years that baseball has existed.
5. Nolan Ryan
He played forever, struck out everybody, and walked everybody else.
4. Tiger Woods' 1997-2013 run
Tiger Woods is the only player in modern history to win all four majors in a row and the only player to win any major by 10 or more strokes. In fact, he did that twice: in the 1997 Masters and 2000 U.S. Open.
3. Babe Ruth's 1920s statistics don't make any sense.
In two different years, he hit more home runs than any other team. That’s just stupid.
2. Tied for second, we have Wilt Chamberlain's insane 1960s stats and Bill Russell's untouchable 1960s championship run.
Sorry for all the words. There are just ... a lot of totally untouchable records here.
1. This is it.
The most statistically impressive record in US sports history.
Wayne Gretzky—the NHL’s all-time leader in goals, assists, and points—has so many more assists than No. 2 that if he never scored a goal in his entire career, he’d still be all-time leader in points.
A Tom Brady stat for the road:
“The NFL record for career completions is 67.8%. Brady has made the conference championship 73.7% of starting seasons. Brady makes the conference championship at a higher rate than any QB completes passes.” @RealAlexBarth
America's biggest and richest cities are losing children at an alarming rate.
From 2020 to 2023, the number of kids under 5 declined by
- almost 20% in NYC
- about 15% in LA, SF, Chicago, and St Louis
- >10% in NoLA, Philly, Honolulu
This exodus is not merely the result of past COVID waves.
Even at the slower rate of out-migration since 2021, several counties—Manhattan, Brooklyn, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco—are on pace to lose 50% of their under-5 child population by the mid-2040s. Insane.
Progressives have a family problem.
It's not the "childless cat lady" problem that Vance etc want to talk about. It's an urban policy.
Progressives preside over counties that young families are leaving. And that's bad.
1. New Fed survey: 72% of Americans say their own finances are "doing at least okay" ... but just 22% say the national economy is good
2. In all 7 swing states, majority say (a) their state’s economy is good, and (b) the nat'l economy is bad
"Everything is terrible but I'm fine" has a lot of parts to it.
But one part of it is ppl have direct experience of their own life but draw impressions of the world from media, which is negative-biased and getting more negative over time.
The most fundamental bias in news is not left, right, pro-corporate, or anti-tech. It's a bad toward catastrophic frames. An analysis of 105,000 different variations of news stories generating 5.7 million clicks found that "for a headline of average length, each additional negative word increased the click-through rate by 2.3%"
2. Extreme opinions drive in-group sharing
On Twitter, 97% of political posts on Twitter come from 10% of the most active users, and 90% of political opinions are represented by less than 3% of tweets. Because these users are disproportionately extreme, it creates a situation where the moderate middle, which might be dominant in corporeal reality, is absent online.
One myth of religion in America is that, since secularism in the west is old, the great dechurching is an old phenomenon, too.
That's not quite right.
Church attendance was remarkably steady in the 20th century. This wave of religious un-affiliation is only 30 years old.
Ppl often say stuff like: Religion declined, and Americans tried to replace faith in god w/ crystals, or politics, or UFOs.
I'm interested in the time-use piece of this. Religious rituals declined, and Americans seem to have replaced them with ... sitting at home watching TV.
But rather than frame this achievement as a win for renters—or for the arg that housing prices respond to supply growth—WSJ frames it pretty clearly as bad news across the board.
Seems important to arguments about supply side growth and prices that Austin
(a) leads the nation is apartment construction as a share of supply, and
(b) rent prices have meaningfully declined
Yes, housing is a market, producers are a part of the market, and markets don't work longterm if prices just go down.
But, again, FRAMING. Downtown housing supply in rich, high-productive metros is a national problem. Solving that problem *necessarily* requires rents to soften.