I’m back from my first visit to New York, the city of my birth, since before the pandemic. I wasn’t out of Penn Station more than a couple of minutes before learning that life in Manhattan has changed. For one thing, you can’t go a block without a whiff of…

Have you seen the video of the new Beatle song “Now and Then?” Aided by technology Peter Jackson developed while making the Get Back movie and recent leaps in artificial intelligence, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr worked from a scratchy cassette tape of a few rudimentary bars recorded by John…

Dean Phillips is running for US president in 2024. Who now? You wouldn’t know by reading the New York Times, which ran a two-minute story on his announcement, or the Washington Post, which did little better by posting a thousand-word article well below the virtual fold. …

So simplistic a worldview is Manichaeism that the Roman Catholic church declared it heretical, even though the movement’s founder, Mani (216–267 AD), swore himself a faithful apostle of Jesus. But Manichaeism refused to die 1600 years ago. …

For a few years The Fabulous Wife and I detoxed from work by watching six o’clock reruns of Big Bang Theory. The lead character, Sheldon Cooper, is a theoretical physicist devoid of social skills — but confident that because he understands how the universe works, he can master the intricacies…

Analytics is the name given to the empirical study of baseball performance. The grizzled ex-players who once monopolized the game’s conventional wisdom ignored analytics when it emerged in the Eighties. They mocked it in the Nineties — who were these nerds to tell them how to run a ballclub? They…

Last week The Fabulous Wife and I saw our second modern opera of the year, after Kaija Saariaho’s Adriana Mater in June. Evidently this is the shape dementia is taking for us. But we had three excuses for going: the opera was The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs by Mason Bates…

About a year after publication of my book The Giants and the Dodgers: Four Cities, Two Teams, One Rivalry, a local TV news station requested an interview. Throughout my writing career I hated publicity and never did TV. But for some reason, this time I thought what the hell and…

One of my college professors (Martin Schain) used to rail against what he called the myth of representivity, the assumption that one individual speaks for an entire population. He used Martin Luther King, Jr. as an example. During the 1960s civil rights movement, when the mass media needed someone to…