“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 …
My long-developing article on CCTV in the UK and the growing surveillance state there has at long last been published by The Washington Monthly. One of the great pleasures of visiting London in January was meeting so many interesting people and hearing so many thoughtful ideas about my subject, and one of the pains of …
After Cliff Lee and Chase Utley got the World Series off to a memorable start for the Phillies on Wednesday, the Yankees evened things up with a crisp, methodical 3-1 victory last night. Like Game One, the game was well-pitched on both sides, and just as C.C. Sabathia was a smidge worse than Lee, the …
I loved the article in The New York Times the other day about the new ideas about the Battle of Agincourt, the mythic victory that the English under Henry V enjoyed over the French on St. Crispin’s Day, Oct. 25, in 1415, and that gave rise to Shakespeare‘s stirring “Band of Brothers” speech. “They devastated …