Howard Bryant, a senior writer at ESPN, has examined baseball’s tangled racial history in books such as Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston and The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron. Like these books, Rickey combines impressive journalistic legwork, clear narrative writing, and sensitive analysis of the unique burdens endured by Black athletes.
Telling the story of bald eagles in America is like telling the environmental history of our nation. Jack E. Davis tells it well in The Bald Eagle: The Improbable Journey of America’s Bird, skimping on no details.
Instead of isolating specific, idiosyncratic causes, we have to look at the larger framework. Because something about where U.S. society has landed is giving dark emotions more of a foothold. Resentment and despair are not new. Guns are not new. But shootings at this level and frequency are.
The memories I treasure tend to follow some sort of risk or effort; they feel earned. Like making a painting or a sweater or a wooden box, they rewarded and commemorated an investment of time, patience, sweat, courage, and attention.
Marketers are throwing themselves at us. Repeatedly. And because we drop newspaper subscriptions and fast-forward through commercials and prefer streaming to broadcast and block ads on our computers, marketing has become a flat-out wrestling match.
Decades ago, Hannah Arendt wrote of a “common world” that could only exist if “differences of position and the resulting variety of perspectives notwithstanding, everybody is always concerned with the same object.” Now the common world has exploded.
Wright has figured out how to build small, affordable homes he could be proud of. He calls them Usonian, because they capture the democratic spirit of the United States. They are simple—no paint, stucco, or wallpaper; no basement, attic, or garage.
The word “abstract” means to remove something; to condense; to lack a concrete, physical existence. Abstraction is supremely useful—but it should not wind up more highly valued than the world from which it abstracts.
I never thought much about the pragmatic value of the humanities either, to be honest. I just knew it was my world. When, with alacrity, I dropped out of a business certificate and picked up a philosophy major, it felt like a guilty hobby. An indulgence.
I was missing Walter Mosley, and I saw that “The Last Days” is now streaming—with Samuel L. Jackson, no less, as that ninety-one-year-old. No way was I going to disrespect Mosley, a consummate writer, by streaming before reading. I opened the book.