The Reagan Renaissance will no doubt be helped by Max Boot’s thorough, engaging, and balanced new biography, Reagan: His Life and Legend. Although the book is 736 pages, it rarely drags and while the author admires his subject, he is not blind to Reagan’s faults.
In The Sports Revolution, Columbia University history professor Frank Andre Guridy intervenes in this conversation by demonstrating that “Texas was central to the nation’s expanding political, economic, and emotional investment in sport.”
The proliferation of pickleball has clashed with its racquet elder, tennis. The contrast between the two can be felt from the global to the local, where Facebook rants, city council meetings, and passionate letters to the editor serve as sites of tension.
No editor would let a resurrected Tom Wolfe write the way he once did. But it was that breathless spew, uncensored though artful, that let him reach us. Now we only get that much animation from rogue or ranting podcasters and columnists, and it comes soaked in instantly recognizable political bias.
Crises come in specific forms, which might determine needs for an apocalypse house. Will you need a well or stream, and seclusion? Or a bus to a workplace and mutual aid groups? How comfortable do you hope to be? What will you do for leisure?
With the current spate of Canadian-led booing of the U.S. national anthem at professional hockey games, answered by American-led booing of the Canadian national anthem, these strains converge into parallel lines of history. One has already been written in the War of 1812, while the future of Trump’s 25 percent tariffs on Canadian goods and threats of annexation as “our 51st state” is anyone’s guess.
Zombie strips, they are called, drawn long after the original artist has died, and going through the motions for syndication. Bill Watterson, adored for his art and admired for his integrity against corporate newspapers and marketing, criticized this phenomenon. It is said Charles Schultz left instructions not to allow it to happen to his strip.
What we need desperately from pop music and rap artists, and what is in short supply now, is not rivalry for its own sake and spectacle, but a sense that our favorite songs of the future might have something immediate to say beyond the context of two individual artists.
The brief promotional materials said it had something to do with Chekhov’s “Three Sisters.” I had hopes it would be live theater and that maybe Krymov would appear, if only remotely—he seems to have a new play in New York to promote—or that a scholar of theater or Slavic studies might be there to explain what was going on.
I have taken a vow of silence about the new presidential administration, but I wanted to record this memory for others who might want to think about the distance we have come in forty years and what it might mean.