June 22, 2017
Minor League Season Begins—Again
People asked Ron Shelton, again and again, if he was going to write a sequel to Bull Durham. He couldn’t bring himself to do it, and I’m glad he didn’t. […]
July 25, 2016
Majestic Waste
Jay Z and Kanye West’s Watch the Throne (2011) album was a watershed moment in hip hop, specifically, and American culture broadly, though to say this is a bit redundant, […]
November 30, 2015
A Moveable Funeral
Sales of Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast spiked in the wake of the Paris terror attacks. The media has framed it as a book that captures the dream of Paris, […]
November 16, 2015
Crash Davis, Soul Man
Bull Durham (1988) begins with grainy black and white stills of Willie Mays, Pete Rose, Babe Ruth, a ball club of women in three quarter sleeves and skirts, a woman […]
August 31, 2013
Not Guilty–Of Course
Out of the hurricane of words published in the wake of the Zimmerman verdict, I found Robin D.G. Kelley’s essay, “The U.S. v. Trayvon Martin: How the System Worked,” to […]
March 11, 2013
The Economics of Literary Fame
This may be the nature of any widely sought desireable thing in limited supply, but in America, literary fame behaves like money. The most obvious similarity is that, like […]