Life Archives

Monday

February 17, 2025

Which GOAT really is the greatest?

Shohei Ohtani had a baseball season for the ages. The Dodgers’ sensational designated hitter hit fifty-four home runs and stole fifty-nine bases to become the founding member of baseball’s 50/50 club. Even before his Dodgers won the World Series and Ohtani won the National League’s MVP award, sportswriters were calling him the best player in baseball history. His heroics bring a key question into play: is Ohtani’s 2024 season one of the greatest performances in sports history? It’s up there for sure, but there are other contenders. Jesse Owens won four gold medals under Adolf Hitler’s nose at the Berlin Olympics in 1936.

Friday

January 24, 2025

Bill McMorris

Are we still doing phrasing?

Grandma McMorris seldom curses, so when she said, “never let a son of a bitch know he’s a son of a bitch,” I knew she was quoting her father, Pop Pop. My grandfather oozed apothegms, nuggets of wisdom that are now only found on refrigerator magnets, motivational posters and throw pillows: the Silent Generation’s forerunner to the meme. Mom was giving me work advice. It’s only been two months, but I no longer remember who the son of a bitch that I called a son of a bitch was, let alone why I called him that. The particulars vanished as soon as my mother spoke, the work crisis overtaken by a personal one. It was a barbecue, probably. Or perhaps a s’mores night at the firepit. A birthday party for one of her sisters? “Dad, when can I have a cigarette?

Cosmo Landesman

A tale of two parties

This is a tale of two London parties. They say something about London society, status, power, fame and fun — but I’m not sure what exactly. Party one was what I call a Power Party. It was full of famous faces from the upper echelons of British politics and media. I spotted chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves talking to the former Tory chancellor George Osborne and the former foreign secretary David Miliband. Party two was what I call a Pulchritude Party — a dazzling array of beautiful women and handsome men. There was a mix of young writers, journalists, lawyers, filmmakers and artists. It did not have the high social wattage of name recognition that the Power Party had — but it had beauty and youth on its side.

Bill Kauffman

With reference to

"You spend your life waiting for a moment that just don't come," sang Bruce Springsteen many moments ago. But sometimes it comes and catches you off guard. Perhaps once a decade you are gifted a sentence begging completion or a question inviting the perfect answer, and if you don’t spit out the mot juste you spend the rest of the day cursing on the staircase, pained by a bad case of l’esprit de l’escalier. (And that about exhausts my C-minus college French.) You never know when or wherefrom these pitches are coming. I doubt that even Oscar Wilde could hit much above .500 in this league. I’m probably closer to Cornel Wilde, but I have driven a few into the gaps. Let me explain. Last spring I was toting a garden-shop tray that my wife was filling with plants.

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

A symbol of hope for Europe

Considering the way history has been going for the past quarter of a century, it seems not merely Panglossian but naive and sentimental to the point of bad taste to find grounds for historical optimism now. Nevertheless, positive facts ought to be recognized as well as negative, and without embarrassment. The world appears to have entered upon a new era when the author of a leader in the London Sunday Telegraph is comfortable writing: “Europe has many things to its credit — and the reconstruction of Notre-Dame stands in notable contrast to our own inability even to decide what to do with the Houses of Parliament. But if we are to retain global relevance and restore economic dynamism, it seems increasingly clear that we have more to learn from America.

Adrian Brune

On the front line of the tennis magazine wars

The issue appeared without fanfare at the 2017 US Open giftshop: a bright-red background offset an Impressionist yet unmistakable painting of Yannick Noah hitting a forehand, dreadlocks flaring. And with that, publisher Caitlin Thompson and editor-in-chief Dave Shaftel — an unlikely journalism pair who had met bonding over the poor state of tennis media — announced the launch of Racquet magazine, a journal that would explore the lifestyle, culture, history and zeitgeist behind modern tennis. In his first editor’s letter, Shaftel more or less laid out his and Thompson’s grand plans. “We don’t think of the game as a country club sport lumped in with golf and healthy only in the suburbs,” Shaftel wrote.

Thursday

December 26, 2024

Bill McMorris

Road-tripping with Wittgenstein

North Carolina The ancients used the sun and moon to measure time, but modern man has a more exact instrument at his disposal: the odometer. It has ticked up a thousand-plus miles, a sure sign the 2024 holiday season has just ended. The children are all struggling in the backseat — against one another, their own bladders and the nylon straps the Car Seat Cartel has foisted upon them — and are thus unable to see the dash’s mileage ticker, as well as the incriminating orange “service reminder” messages your wife is pretending to ignore. When you read aloud the “Welcome to North Carolina” sign, your most intelligent child says, “Are we still in the United States?

Bill Kauffman

On embracing the winter years

Batavia, New York I sit in hospice at the bedside of my beloved Aunt Jane — who never let us use the honorific, as “Aunt” made the perennially youthful Jane feel old — and the jukebox in my mind plays its saddest song: “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?” by Fairport Convention. Jane, who is eighty-nine and till a few weeks ago looked twenty-five years younger, was my hip and happening aunt of the 1960s who lived in Buffalo and dated pro athletes and bopped along to WKBW’s Top 40. She taught my brother and me to write letters, which is why I still have an autographed photo of Minnesota Vikings kicker Fred Cox, and my brother has his signed picture of Rams quarterback Roman Gabriel.

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The new political era

It seems likely that on Election Day the country entered fully upon the new political era that commenced with the fateful presidential election of 2016. Donald Trump spent the last four years in the howling political wilderness, savagely set upon by every species of Big Beast — legal, financial and political — but from which he emerged as a survivor — physically, mentally and morally intact to achieve what is acknowledged to be the greatest political comeback in American history. Donald J. Trump is, without a doubt, the most remarkable American politician to hold office since 1945. Whether or not he is a genuinely great man as well is a question that only the next four years can answer.

Kartik Kumar

A week at the World Backgammon Championship

Most people will know that there are no rivers in Monaco. The one I found there is the metaphorical waterway used by poker player and professional pollster Nate Silver to describe an ecosystem of people and ideas focused on probabilistic thinking and calculated risk-taking. The term is derived from poker, where the last community card to be revealed in a game of “Texas Hold ’Em” is known as the River. Poker players paddle about in the river, but so do stock-market traders, venture capitalists and anyone else consistently taking calculated risks. A politician deciding how to respond to Covid or a foreign invasion is “in the river.” In the broadest sense, we all live in it as we make risky decisions in an uncertain world, tipping our hats to Heraclitus from time to time.

Thursday

November 21, 2024

Bill McMorris

The war against slovenliness

The church sitting catty-corner from the former sushi place was the tallest building in Rosslyn, Virginia, not so long ago. It bears the cross and flame logo the Methodists adopted in 1968, the same year a local lumber yard donated the plot in the heart of Southern Baptist territory. Locals affixed a Catholic nickname to the brutalist structure perched above a filling station, “Our Lady of Exxon.” The tongue of fire engulfing the cross is the same hue as the neon informing passersby that Regular Gas is $3.399 per gallon ($3.949 if you pay by card). Things have changed in what was once a sleepy outpost of Georgetown. The gas station is now a Sunoco, and the Arlington Temple United Methodist Church may be the most perfect symbol of the GOP that was.

Cosmo Landesman

Is it better to be posh or cool?

What in twenty-first-century Britain is it better to be: posh or cool? Of course the correct answer is: it’s best to be posh and cool. But posh people, on the whole, tend not to be cool and really cool people aren’t usually posh. But the tribes have a lot in common. They share a certain insouciance, which is a posh word for total indifference to the feelings and thoughts of other people. They are both anti-democratic and anti-meritocratic in spirit and practice. No matter how hard you try and how much money you have, you can’t join the posh or be cool. Like sex appeal, you’ve either got or you ain’t. Defining either group is not easy, but you know when you see it — or in the case of the posh, hear it.

Bill Kauffman

An ode to six-on-six

Once again, high-school gyms across America resound with the thump-thump of balls dribbled on hardwood floors, the clang of three-point bricks bouncing off steel rims and the rubber-soled roar of twenty sneaker-clad feet running up and down the court. Yes, basketball is back — and I curse the imagination-deprived standardizers who succeeded thirty years ago in banishing four additional feet from roundball courts in the Hawkeye State. Iowa, the historic hotbed of girls’ basketball, is hailed today for producing the superb Caitlin Clark, but for most of the twentieth century its hundreds of small-town bandbox gymnasiums were alive with the wonderfully idiosyncratic sporting variant known as six-on-six basketball.

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The climate ‘calamity’

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” George Santayana wrote in The Life of Reason, published in 1905. The philosopher’s aphorism, somewhat hackneyed after nearly a century and a quarter, and always true only in a limited way, assumes that men are capable of directing history to a certain end, while diverting it from other ones. Santayana was a very wise man and certainly no ideologue. Nevertheless, his maxim shares something with ideological thinking. Both assume that men are collectively aware of the realities of the present time and their possibilities, capable of determining where they wish their societies to go in future and in what shape or form, and then — with varying degrees of success — guiding them there.

The Spectator

The Spectator’s 2024 Holiday Gift Guide

Matt McDonald, managing editor As we grow older, the idea is that we become wiser. I’ve decided to buck that trend by making progressively dumber decisions that put me further from my goals of attaining professional success, home ownership, emotional stability and nirvana. The most recent of these is increasing the distances I’ve been running; I will be attempting a half-marathon back home on the south coast of England the week before Christmas, with a view to running my first marathon in Berlin next fall. It’s unclear why we as a species decided to adopt the practice of doing marathons a couple of millennia ago — the first man to do it did die at the end, after all.

Monday

October 21, 2024

Ryan Spaeder

The new worst team in baseball

To this day, the exact origin of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 is unknown. It may be easy to blame poor old Mrs. O’Leary, though the conspiracy-minded out there speculate that the blaze might have been a deliberately planned event orchestrated by powerful interests to reshape the city for profit and control. Whether or not these theories hold water, the fire offered a convenient opportunity to rebuild the city with stricter building codes and modern brick and steel structures that allowed the city’s elite to seize prime real estate, drive up property values and transform Chicago into a modern hub of wealth and innovation. It has taken all of 153 years, but the fire has crossed the South Branch of the Chicago River and reached West 35th Street.

Bill McMorris

Cacophony at the dinner table

Alexandria, Virginia Close your eyes. Picture an elementary school orchestra on a school bus. All instruments are plastic recorders. Now picture the school bus hurtling into a warehouse filled with barn owls. Open your eyes. Welcome to my dinner table. The priest assured us he wanted to experience family life at its fullest. No need for a special meal, he said (we will pretend that we eat duck every week). No need to clean (fat chance). Only a bachelor could think that freshly swept floors and expert cooking could detract from an authentic family meal in a house full of women. Aside from grace I do not think I have completed a sentence at the dinner table since 2017. There are too many riddles and recess incidents to discuss.

Cosmo Landesman

How to know when to let friends go

London When an old friend says to you, “we must meet up for lunch sometime,” you can be sure of one thing: you will never meet for lunch. Why? Because your friendship is over. The clue is in the word “sometime.” It’s a rain check that never gets cashed. It’s what friends say to each other when they feel obliged to see a friend they don’t really want to see — but they don’t want to dump either. We all have friends like these: I call them the Undead friends, when the friendship is neither fully alive nor totally dead. You don’t delete them from your contact list — just your social life. This will lead to the odd spasm of guilt but don’t worry; we all do it. And it gets done to us too. There are people you think of as your great friends.

Bill Kauffman

‘Democracy’ in New York State

Batavia, New York Election Day in New York just ain’t the same anymore, thanks to nepo numbskulls George W. Bush and Andrew Cuomo. Though I always vote for longshots and losers, radicals and reactionaries, I have such happy memories of early November Tuesdays. Mr. Milward, dressed as Uncle Sam, would tour the polling places of my hometown, benign and reassuring in a way that his model — the autocratic “I Want You!” martinet — was not. When I was a tyke, I trailed my mother as she cast a 1964 ballot for LBJ. The gray-haired election inspectors panicked — “There’s a child in the voting booth!” — but my violation of polling-place etiquette paled in comparison to Landslide Lyndon’s stolen US Senate election of 1948.

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The joy of politics

Laramie, Wyoming The Joy of Sex, by the appropriately named Alex Comfort, was a bestselling illustrated sex manual published in 1972 and released in a new edition in 2008. In 2024, anyone with sufficient imagination to describe and illustrate The Joy of Politics would beat out Elon Musk in the race to become the world’s first trillionaire. Politics — like sex — has always been with us, but the conception of politics as “joy” began, you may argue, with the adoption of the “Ode to Joy” that concludes Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony by the European Union as its official anthem in 1985.