Blog
BabeWatch: Barnstorming Against Negro League Teams
Partly because he loved to play baseball, partly because he loved to spend money, Babe Ruth played lots of exhibition games in the offseason across the country and in the…
Read MoreTheater of the Near-Real: Cop Chases in L.A.
It’s completely weird. They can go on forever, the only time Southern California TV stations never break for commercials. The first one on Monday morning lasted more than two hours.…
Read MoreOf Charles Sumner, David Donald, and Used Bookstores
The serendipity of the used bookstore — its ability to provide unexpected pleasures — is gaining attention recently. Even the Washington Post (owned by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos) has noticed. …
Read MoreThe Time Justice Scalia Caught Me Out
The death last weekend of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia brought to mind the time when he turned over a stone in the legal rockpile only to reveal an awkward…
Read MorePutting on the Show: Eight Rules for Book Talks
One of the surprising parts of writing books, for me, has been the amount of performance involved — I mean performance: standing up and putting on a show. My experience…
Read MoreMaking President Clinton's Reading List
It’s not the best photo of me that’s ever been taken, but there are definite virtues to this one, particularly President Clinton’s savvy placement of the copy of Madison’s Gift that I…
Read MoreTriumph of the Book!
The recent press accounts have been heartening to devotees of the book — which had been disdained as the “printed book” or “hard-copy book,” or even the “dead tree book.”…
Read MoreEight Knockout Reads from 2015
Year’s end brings a geyser of lists of the year’s “best books.” I choose to modify this approach to report the best books that I read over the last year,…
Read MoreEven Woodrow Wilson? The "Purge Moment" Runs Amok
Over the summer of 2015, the argument over displaying the Confederate flag in public grounds galvanized public opinion. Many conservative Southern Republicans agreed that such displays contradict our basic principles…
Read MoreHarper Lee, Misogynist
After all the fuss about the release of Harper Lee’s second/first novel, Go Set A Watchman, I broke down and read it. My wife, after all, had purchased the book, so…
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