Arthur Miller: American Witness By John Lahr (Yale University Press, 264 pages, $26) Art imitates life, and that is certainly true in the case of the playwright Arthur Miller (1915–2005), whose personal and professional life defined and added verisimilitude to…
As a skipper, I hate being told what to do while on board. The girls screamed that if I accelerated too hard the towels would fall overboard. The boys howled. I accelerated in order to narrowly miss an oil tanker….
Major League Baseball (MLB) should be experiencing a banner year in 2022, what with the worst of the pandemic behind us and nearly half of the teams entering September with a legitimate shot at the postseason. Despite that, attendance is…
As Louis C.K. put it, with only slight exaggeration, during a recent appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Hollywood movies these days are all about either superheroes or slaves. Instead of knocking themselves out trying to find first-rate original scripts that…
When I don’t know what to propose for the new school year, I always end up with the same resolution: to do sports. It’s a kind of punishment that we are all gluttons for, as if we were aspiring to…
Governments spend a lot of money on promoting tourism, but then they have beaches full of sand. It is unacceptable. There are beautiful coasts almost everywhere in the world. From far away, you see them shining, and you shoot beautiful…
In summer we come across verbs that do not exist during the rest of the year. One of them is “to inflate.” In winter it is not necessary to inflate anything. The fireplace, books, and the PlayStation come already inflated….
There is a classic scene in the 1991 hit movie City Slickers starring Billy Crystal, Daniel Stern, and Bruno Kirby. Two of the dude-ranch patrons (Stern and Kirby), out on a let’s-pretend cattle drive, are walking toward a campfire and…
As the corpse went past, the flies left the pizzeria in a cloud and rushed after it, but they came back a few minutes later. Somehow the corpse — a homeless man — was still on his feet, staggering down…
Everybody’s waiting for the other shoe to drop in the conference realignment chaos that is major college football. The first shoe was a doozy. It left a Godzilla-size footprint on the landscape. If it was a carbon footprint, it would…