“Provided that a character is smart enough and manipulative enough,” reads a post on tvtropes.org, “they can get the people around them to do just about anything. Sometimes this can be accomplished by the power of charisma, but other times it needs to be perpetrated through an elaborate scheme. This scheme takes into account everything …
A baseball season is a novel. At its heart is a cast of characters–guys with hopes, goals, ambitions, problems, flaws, things to prove. The characters individually create a character that is a team, and over the course of the season, as the individuals succeed and fail and as the team succeeds and fail, dramas are …
I have always admired the sculptures of Augustus Saint Gaudens, and whether it was going to Rangers-Flyers games at Madison Square Garden where I saw Diana, or my interest in the Civil War which led me to Boston to see the monument to Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, or my early public …
Congratulations to Hank Rosenfeld, my friend and former colleague from Spy, who collaborated on The Wicked Wit of the West, which is a memoir-cum-biography of the great Hollywood screenwriter Irving Brecher, the author of two Marx Brothers movies (At the Circus and Go West), Meet Me in St. Louis, and Bye Bye Birdie!, and who …
Let us now praise Johnny Damon, the ballplayer’s ballplayer, the crucial man in last night’s 7-4 Yankee win. In the first, he doubled and scored; in the fifth, he doubled and drove in a run; and in the ninth, he won the game. With two out in a 4-4 game that the Phillies had just …
Mailer, Buckley, Hunter Thompson–with so many of the literary lions of the era having passed away, it’s always welcome when one of the survivors speaks. Gore Vidal has an interview on theatlantic.com, and it’s pure enjoyment. Not profound, but cranky, perverse, unkind, witty, charming; rather like listening to a very indiscreet grand signeur. Below, an …
Last night was a tale of two ballgames. After three innings, Cole Hamels was working on a no-hitter and Andy Pettitte had given up three runs and looked like the Bad Andy from years ago who occasionally showed up in a big game and exploded. But then Andy found his groove, A-Rod homered, Nick Swisher …