Following the success of his book My Part of the Day, first published in 1981, Peter Byrne's second collection of stories, From the Press Box, provides fitting testimony to the most successful era in the history of Irish sport. From Gaelic Games and rugby to football and athletics, this book straddles the broad spectrum of sport as Byrne renews acquaintances with many of the personalities and places he got to know in a long career in search of the big story. A treasure trove of memories, recalled in a style to recreate the marvel of the moment, will ensure endless hours of enjoyment for both dedicated sports lovers and those who have monitored the outstanding achievements of Irish men and women from afar.

Interviews eighteen of the writers who dominated sports reporting in the interwar period, including Dan Daniel, Paul Gallico, Red Smith, Marshall Hunt, and John Kieran

Jim Street learned early in his career that fairness and accuracy were two of the most important words of his profession. From the beginning to the end of his forty-year career as a sportswriter covering major league baseball and professional football on the West Coast, Street strived to listen to both sides of each story and print the truth. Street chronicles his intriguing sportswriting career beginning in high school when he discovered his passion for writing while covering beats for the local newspaper, the Butte Valley Star. As he moves through his career, Street details his experiences working alongside iconic athletes and coaches that included O.J. Simpson, Randy Johnson, Joe Montana, Bill Walsh, John Madden, and Ichiro Suzuki while sharing fascinating insight into what it was like to cover the Oakland Athletics famed Mustache Gang in 1972 featuring future Hall of Fame legends Catfish Hunter, Reggie Jackson, and Rollie Fingers, several World Series and All-Star games, the first World Baseball Classic, two Super Bowls, four Rose Bowls, the Kentucky Derby, and the mens and womens US Open golf tournaments. Life from the Press Box shares memories from the forty-year career of a former MLB.com beat reporter and long-time baseball writer who played a significant role during a bygone era.

Press Box Revolution is a journey through the evolution of reporting in New York and around the nation by a reporter who has witnessed every second of it in the past three decades. Rich Coutinho, a New York-based reporter who has covered numerous major sporting events, will escort readers into corners of the press box and locker room they have never seen and discusses what the business will look like down the road. Coutinho gives an insider’s view of the evolving technology in the business, the growth of women in sports creating much needed diversity in the reporting landscape, the emergence of sports talk radio and the Internet, as well as the personalities on the New York sports scene that make it so challenging to cover. Press Box Revolution lifts the curtain on all the myths about how sports is reported and it will help fans realistically evaluate the information they read and hear that is labeled “Breaking News” or “Insider Report.” It is a must-read for all well-informed fans and aspiring sports journalists.

Annotation Foreword Jules Tygiel Acknowledgments 1. The Daily Worker Starts a Sports Section 2. Growing Up in Brooklyn 3. A Communist in the Press Box? 4. "Jim Crow Must Go!" (Part 1): The Daily Worker's Campaign to Break the Color Line in Organized Baseball 5. "Jim Crow Must Go!" (Part 2): And the Walls Came (Slowly) Tumbling Down 6. The Impact of Baseball's Integration 7. The Ballplayers and the Communist 8. Boxing: The Brutal "Sport" and the Class Angle 9. Hoop Dreams#151and Scandals Postscript Bibliography Index.

North Korea's institutional politics defy traditional political models, making the country's actions seem surprising or confusing when, in fact, they often conform to the regime's own logic. Drawing on recent materials, such as North Korean speeches, commentaries, and articles, Patrick McEachern, a specialist on North Korean affairs, reveals how the state's political institutions debate policy and inform and execute strategic-level decisions. Many scholars dismiss Kim Jong-Il's regime as a "one-man dictatorship," calling him the "last totalitarian leader," but McEachern identifies three major institutions that help maintain regime continuity: the cabinet, the military, and the party. These groups hold different institutional policy platforms and debate high-level policy options both before and after Kim and his senior leadership make their final call. This method of rule may challenge expectations, but North Korea does not follow a classically totalitarian, personalistic, or corporatist model. Rather than being monolithic, McEachern argues, the regime, emerging from the crises of the 1990s, rules differently today than it did under Kim's father, Kim Il Sung. The son is less powerful and pits institutions against one another in a strategy of divide and rule. His leadership is fundamentally different: it is "post-totalitarian." Authority may be centralized, but power remains diffuse. McEachern maps this process in great detail, supplying vital perspective on North Korea's reactive policy choices, which continue to bewilder the West.

An innovative investigation of the inner workings of Spotify that traces the transformation of audio files into streamed experience. Spotify provides a streaming service that has been welcomed as disrupting the world of music. Yet such disruption always comes at a price. Spotify Teardown contests the tired claim that digital culture thrives on disruption. Borrowing the notion of “teardown” from reverse-engineering processes, in this book a team of five researchers have playfully disassembled Spotify's product and the way it is commonly understood. Spotify has been hailed as the solution to illicit downloading, but it began as a partly illicit enterprise that grew out of the Swedish file-sharing community. Spotify was originally praised as an innovative digital platform but increasingly resembles a media company in need of regulation, raising questions about the ways in which such cultural content as songs, books, and films are now typically made available online. Spotify Teardown combines interviews, participant observations, and other analyses of Spotify's “front end” with experimental, covert investigations of its “back end.” The authors engaged in a series of interventions, which include establishing a record label for research purposes, intercepting network traffic with packet sniffers, and web-scraping corporate materials. The authors' innovative digital methods earned them a stern letter from Spotify accusing them of violating its terms of use; the company later threatened their research funding. Thus, the book itself became an intervention into the ethics and legal frameworks of corporate behavior.

Now fully revised and updated for 2023! Chronicling the Brewers from the Suds Series of 1982 to the MVP season of Christian Yelich in 2018, and from Bambi's Bombers of the late '70s to Harvey's Wallbangers of the early '80s, Bill Schroeder, a longtime Brewers color commentator and former Brewers catcher, provides insight into the Brewers inner sanctum as only he can. Read about what goes on in the equipment and training rooms, how batting practice can be chaotic, what it's like to travel with the team, and off-the-wall anecdotes, like the time Steve Sparks injured his shoulder trying to rip a phone book in half after listening to a motivational speaker.