n case you have been living in cave with your fingers in your ears, 12 year NBA veteran Jason Collins became the first openly active gay man in sports.

Millions of Americans willfully suffer under the illusion that religious faith brings health, wealth and- I kid you not- Super Bowl victories. A recent study by the Public Religion Research Institute found that one-third of the United States believes that God plays a role in determining which team wins the Super Bowl.

Qatar sits like an oasis of hypertrophic capitalism amid a landscape barren in all respects except for its oil reserves. The emirate sustains itself by pumping out vast fossil fuel resources while importing human ones, in the form of legions of migrant workers from Bangladesh, Nepal and other Global South countries.

Labor activists say this fierce imbalance between the elite and the laboring underclass is headed for catastrophe as the country prepares to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup.

Look, I have no idea whether Manti Te’o is gay. Only he can answer that question. But the football player’s fake dead girlfriend hoax story isn’t going away, and the number of plausible reasons for this fantastic charade occurring are dwindling.

Yet another social conservative hiding behind Jesus’ robes to ennoble meanness and bigotry.

The world’s greatest games are about to begin in London. But outside the sporting spectacle this summer, few will notice where the real cheating is going on: in Asian factories that churn out plush mascots and other Olympiad gear, corporations have freely exploited lax labor regulations. As the Olympics approach, activists are racing to push the brands behind the games to play by the rules of fair trade and human rights.

Trying to avoid an instant replay of London’s age of imperialism, the Play Fair 2012 campaign aims for accountability and transparency in the corporations scoring massive profits from cheap labor in the global south.

There’s a deep undercurrent here that people don’t really want to talk about. But it’s there. The lives of children are entrusted to the all-American tradition of athletics, and the controls on keeping predators out of that tradition are obviously lax.

The latest Major League Baseball teams to participate in the It Gets Better Project (the award-winning grassroots video effort started by Dan Savage) designed to give hope to struggling LGBT youth are the Tampa Bay Rays and the Philadelphia Phillies.

Rarely do lies simply go out in the world and stand on their own. To have staying power, they require a complex network of ancillary lies and human enablers (sometimes knowing, sometime unwitting) who create a web of falsehood. These tangled webs can drain families’ bank accounts, get people killed, cause great institutions to fall, even help crash an economy.

As both a liberal and a sports fanatic, I jumped at the chance to host today’s salon with Dave Zirin to talk about his new book “Bad Sports: How Owners Are Ruining the Games We Love.” Dave’s book is a very smart, witty and hard-hitting look at how jerkbag sports owners have transformed their stadiums from blue-collar and middle-class entertainment venues into massive profit-making behemoths tailored more toward corporate America than Joe Six Pack. Average families have found themselves priced out of going to games, since owners have cordoned off entire sections of ballparks for luxury boxes and club seats. And to make matters worse, these same owners have grown ever-more-fond of shaking down taxpayers for cash to build their multiplexes despite the fact that many of these taxpayers will never be able to afford to attend a game. This heinous practice is particularly glaring in Washington, DC where the city forked over hundreds of millions of dollars to build a new ballpark for the perpetually terrible Washington Nationals, despite the fact that the city at the time was planning to shut down a whopping 24 public schools.