Mark Titus's Blog

Sometimes in the afternoon, or in the evening if a shoot goes long, the stuntman and self-described truth-seeker Reuben Langdon will make a cup of something called Bulletproof coffee. The drink — developed by the Silicon Valley millionaire and biohacker Dave Asprey — consists of black coffee, two tablespoons of butter, and two tablespoons of MCT oil, which Langdon describes as a high-grade coconut oil “that does good things for your brain.” He used to get raw butter, but has since switched...

Corey Linsley has a theory about offensive lines. He stumbled onto it this fall, in his first few weeks as the Packers’ starting center. The rookie from Ohio State took over in late August, when likely starter JC Tretter went down with a bum knee. After a few practices, Linsley started to notice that his new line seemed familiar. Actually, it looked just like his old one.

The Packers, in many ways, fit the same mold as the Buckeyes. Right guard T.J. Lang is Andrew Norwell,14 the game-day motiv...

Welcome back to our 30 for 30 documentary short series.

Reggie Ho never dreamed of playing football in college. Growing up in Hawaii and of Chinese descent, he always imagined he’d be a doctor like his father. He enrolled at Notre Dame as a premed student and didn’t think much of playing football until he decided he needed a more well-rounded life. He was the placekicker on his high school football team and decided to walk on to Notre Dame’s. At 5-foot-5 and 135 pounds, Ho was one of the small...

When Green Bay Packers head coach Mike McCarthy began his first NFL job in 1993, as a Kansas City Chiefs offensive assistant working with quarterbacks, he immediately inherited a rather tricky assignment: coaching Joe Montana.

McCarthy had gone to K.C. to work with his mentor Paul Hackett, the Chiefs’ new offensive coordinator and a former assistant for Bill Walsh’s San Francisco 49ers. While working together at the University of Pittsburgh, Hackett and McCarthy had installed a version of Wals...

Even the ending was classic Rex Ryan. The man almost upset his own firing.

Sunday, December 28, just after 4 p.m. Pandemonium in the bowels of Miami’s Sun LifeStadium. New York Jets owner Woody Johnson, a Magoo-ish rich eccentric out of central casting who wears a goofy green tie to Sunday games and looks like he might play with toy trucks on all the days in between, is looking in vain for a safe route through the stadium tunnel.

Johnson looks miserable. He’s just hours away from sealing his fa...

While rain pelts downtown Oakland, Klay Thompson finds shelter inside the Golden State Warriors’ practice facility. The storm disrupts the entire Bay Area, triggering school closings and flash-flood warnings. Thompson, however, enjoys the inclement weather. It reminds him of growing up in Oregon. “I used to hoop all the time in the rain,” he says. “It never bothered me to go outside to shoot in my backyard all day.”

A banner representing the Warriors’ last championship—from nearly 40 years ago...

Aquote from last year’s bracket, appropriately titled “Who Won 2013?”

With every passing year, I’m closer and closer to trashing the “Who Won” bracket model in exchange for “Who Lost.” Or “What Ruined This Year for Me The Most, a Bracket of 1024.”

I’m no oracle, but there was definitely something in the air inDecember 2013, and that something was clearly trying to warn me about the following 12months. “Don’t go,” the sassy fog would say as it whisked past my ear. But I didn’t listen. In my mind...

Increasingly, I find myself processing each passing year not as a string of events but as a series of shifting moods. Instead of discrete milestones, I recall sensations: an intense rush of ecstasy, late-afternoon shock, a week of fatigue, a season of contented bliss. This year, the moods I remember with an unusual fondness — the ones that offered a reprieve from the rest of life, on and offline — were brought on by strangers playing music on the Internet.40

In 2014, we saw things w...

Sometimes you see something that feels like it was pulled straight from your imagination. It can almost feel invasive —like someone has aggregated all the things that interest you, that haunt you, that titillate you, that you celebrate or loathe about yourself and others, and put it onscreen. That was True Detective, for me. It had Camel Lights, drugs, and Lone Star; it had Wu-Tang Clan, Lucinda Williams, and Grinderman; it had undercover police work, criminal conspiracies, and the occult; it...

At the start of this year, Russia —a country that had recently banned gay “propaganda,” harassed and imprisoned political dissidents, and was run by a man who appealed to imperialist traditions and fear of foreigners —turned a seaside summer resort not far from a hotbed of separatist and terrorist activity into an impregnable military zone, and hosted the Olympic Games.

What We Saw

In 2014, we saw things we've never seen before — things we were never intended to see, things we didn't want to se...