Mary Pilon

I've often wondered if the trade-off for growing up in the relative newness and freshness of the West Coast was befuddlement when it comes to historical preservation. We don't have many old things, and we don't really know what to do with the few that are around when our default response is to compost or field burn.

Historically, companies haven't hesitated to end their relationships with professional athletes amid scandals.

Sports fandom transcends gender, race, language, political preference, socioeconomic status, or any other way you can think of slicing this planet.

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.

Women's marathoning was not added as an Olympic medal event until 1984 due to unfounded and bizarre concerns among Olympic organizers about women's ability to run longer distances. It was finally added after much campaigning.

While most American labor unions have struggled for the past several decades, professional baseball players comprise one of the strongest packs of organized workers in the world.

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.

It's not uncommon for some Khmer boxers to fight with dangerous frequency, sometimes as often as weekly or bi-weekly, getting up to three hundred or more fights in a career, with the length of a career varying from fighter to fighter, some engaging in bouts far past their prime.

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.

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.

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.

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.