Current developments
Why Do Babe Ruth Movies Mostly Suck?
With less than three weeks to go until my novel concerning Babe Ruth debuts, The Babe Ruth Deception, I find myself wondering why Babe Ruth movies are so bad. In…
Read MoreBabeWatch: 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 MoreHamilton’s Pulitzer Prize: Listen to the Words
Now that he’s won the Pulitzer Prize for it, maybe we’ll pay attention to the words of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, the genre-smashing Broadway hit that costs a monthly car payment…
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 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…
Read MoreThe Enduring Lure of Richard Nixon
Coming up to the 41st anniversary of Richard Nixon’s resignation from the Presidency (August 9), we find that he’s still part of our national culture, like a barnacle that simply…
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