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The Charge of the Padded Brigade: England in Australia
It’s been one of the strangest cricket series on record. Hurried, frenetic, foolish, haphazard, and, at times, unbecomingly immature. The cricket between England and Australia in this, the 2025-6 Ashes series, was a recreational coke line, a narcotics fix, a dopamine thrill. But was it even cricket? One thinks of those deathless lines from the […]
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Choose-Up Games from the Sandlots of Jamaica, Queens NY
Field of Dreams When I was about seven years old I used to play a “let’s pretend” baseball game in our backyard. I laid out 4 rags I’d gotten from the garage and placed them in a diamond form which represented the bases. The bases were about 20 feet apart. Then I looked at our […]
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Baseball Owners Blow Off Fans in Favor of Streaming Dollars
Major League Baseball adopted some significant rules changes this past season, the biggest by far being the introduction of a pitch clock—an electronic countdown limiting the time between pitches to 15 seconds with nobody on or 20 seconds with a runner on. The changes were aimed at speeding up the game and boosting attendance, and […]
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Is There Really Pay Equity at the US Open Tennis Tournament?
Imagine if you and others in your group are paid a flat rate, and the members of a different group are paid the same flat rate. The employer proclaims it is equal pay. But wait a minute! Your group works a 5-hour shift while the other group works a 3-hour shift for the same pay. […]
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Graceless at Lord’s: The Class Goons Strike Back
What are the English other than their excruciatingly worn class, kitted out with a code of manners revocable at an instant? A streak of traditional Englishness, as A. A. Gill wrote, stresses bullying. It made them great in the hope of making others small. A towering creature like Charles James Fox may well have added […]
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Why Doom-Scroll When So Much is Possible?
Roger Bannister on May 6, 1954 The first professional one-mile race was held in London on July 26, 1855. Charles Westhall won with a time of 4 minutes and 28 seconds. Over the next 90 years, the time was slowly but surely whittled down to 4:01.4 by Sweden’s Gunder Hagg on July 17, 1945. Nine […]
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