American Life

Ah, the indignities of age. Over the past year I’ve suffered significant hearing loss. “Huh?” has become my favorite word and I’ve developed a strange new respect for the loonies who hear voices. Aspiring to stoicism, I informed Lucine, my wife, “When I hit 60 I figured that I was entering a stage in which the physical setbacks, some quite unexpected, would mount. So I told myself that I could either whine about it or I could accept all this with grace and good humor.” Lucine didn’t miss a beat. “Then why have you chosen to whine?” Thanks, dear! I mean no disrespect to the late Freddie Mercury when I

A brilliant meteor blazed through the Summer Triangle early in the show, eliciting oohs and aahs and apolitical cheers

Technically we are moving south, though I doubt we qualify as snowbirds

Despite the multitudinous sins committed against the game and its culture, I’m once again giving it the old college try

The first spade hit the dirt on July 4, 1817, near the appositely named Rome, New York

The folksinger’s lifeboat capsized far too soon

Homestand is the most anti-MLB but pro-sandlot and hick-circuit baseball book ever published

I went on a weeklong comets-and-asteroids-destroy-our-world binge

Like so many intrusions upon our liberties, it was introduced to America by war

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 don’t know where the time has gone

The wonderfully idiosyncratic sporting variant achieved extraordinary popularity in rural Iowa

The fringes of fame, the outer purlieus of power, are always much more interesting than the epicenter

‘My forty-five-year-old self is inhabiting my nine-year-old body’

When I go on an early 1970s jag — revisiting the golden age of American cinema — I can never bring myself to rewatch Five Easy Pieces

The writer has made a literary reputation on his fluid narratives of late eighteenth and nineteenth-century Southern history

Is it possible to love a science, or any branch of knowledge, despite one’s abysmal ignorance thereof?

That’s all he played, one single game, and it took him almost a century to get credit for it