How to Write a Popular Baseball History Book

By Steven P. Gietschier

Make no mistake. Our Team is a wonderful book in this sense. It is easy to read. It tells an interesting story built on thorough research in newspapers and secondary sources, skillful organization, pleasant writing, and narrative drive. Epplin gives each of his four main characters equal attention in an account carefully woven out of the cloth of several seasons. For the baseball fan, either serious or casual, even if one’s favorite team is not the Indians, this book can provide several hours of pleasure.

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The War in Spain Recalled in the Main as Heroic and Inhumane

By Paul Buhle

Much of The Lincoln Brigade involves actual warfare, action scenes that have little to do with the heroism of Boy Commandos but a lot to do with the grimness of EC war comics. Blood flows. Victories are followed by defeats, and by the end of the comic, we approach the present with old men’s memories.

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Politics and the English Language’s Failures

By Jeannette Cooperman

The words we speak influence how we see the world both figuratively and literally, psycholinguists tell us. Certain words even trigger involuntary eye movements.

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In Case These Are the Endtimes

By Jeannette Cooperman

The endtimes is just one more stage in deep time.The phrase is all over the place these days, and it is well chosen. Deep time is mysterious; it implies the sort of reflection one does in a hammock on a lazy Sunday.

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Why We Love to Kill Wolves

By Jeannette Cooperman

Wolf hunters rationalize the bloodlust as pragmatic, saying they are protecting their livestock or avenging their slaughter. The facts seldom bear this out. Instead, the electric thrill of the hunt comes from the archetype of the wolf as sworn enemy, sinister and sometimes supernatural.

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Loyalty Tests

By Jeannette Cooperman

You cannot use biased humans to design a bias-free system. You cannot feed vast databases filled with biased or distorted information into a computer program and expect a clean and pure result. And you cannot hand off the responsibility of judging human nature to a nonhuman entity. Why do we keep trying?

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Village Gossip, Daily Paper, Metaverse

By Jeannette Cooperman

      Usually I need coffee, pastry, and an uninterrupted hour to properly read one of L.M. Sacasas’s essays in The Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology, culture, and morality. They are dense, brilliant, and provocative, and they refuse to be skimmed. But recently Sacasas…

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Thank You, Lt. Uhura, for Your Starship Service

By Clifford Thompson

Nichelle Nichols, aka "Star Trek"'s Lieutenant Nyota Uhura, represented a miracle. In a decade that saw Black people beaten, jailed, and killed for wanting to vote, when laws effectively recognizing husbands as their wives’ bosses were still on the books in some states, what reason was there to think a Black woman would show up on TV as the equal of her White male colleagues? And yet there she was. There she is, always.

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Affinities Only Now Visible

By Jeannette Cooperman

Paging slowly, almost reverently, I felt more than the curiosity “Affinities” does such a good job of provoking. I felt, to my surprise, peaceful. We have all been asking the same questions, living with the same flaws and troubles and joys, for centuries.

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Janet Malcolm and Emmanuel Carrère Debate Journalism and Murder

By Jeannette Cooperman

Enter the famously cocky French journalist and author Emmanuel Carrère. He is not stupid, though he can be full of himself, and he always notices what is going on. He pushes back in an essay called “The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm.”

Uncategorized | Dispatches

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