A year earlier DeGaulle fled Paris, resigning rule to the feuding students and labor leaders that took the streets as their own. Across the United States there were bombings and marches, and a year later four American college students would be shot dead on a campus by armed guardsmen, protesting the Vietnam war. But instead…
Angela Carter died in 1992 without ever finishing the long-rumored sequel to her 1972 surrealist novel The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman. Short Relief will be running weekly excerpts from the scraps of that sequel found in her papers after her death. The following is from the end of the book, as our hero,…
Derek Jeter does not like the donger machine. I have a suggestion for Derek Jeter. Derek Jeter can eat a six-foot bucket of—no? I’m being told no. Here’s what you do, since you want to be rid of it so bad. You put the thing on the bed of a large truck. Military-size truck, probably,…
The Man Who Could Walk Out of the Sea By: Kate Preusser When the sun came up on Puerto Rico on New Year’s Day, 1972, it rose on the citizens of the island already awake, lining the island beaches. They carried transistor radios and lights and babies, and they carried something much heavier, heavy the…
The Los Angeles Dodgers Launch Event By: Matt Sussman Words can’t possibly express the innovation that Dodgers president Andrew Friedman unveiled at their much-anticipated launch event, so below is an audio transcript of his presentation. CLICK TO PLAY Pride and Joy By: James Fegan My father’s favorite baseball player of all time was Emil Brown….
Traducido por José M. Hernández Lagunes El otro más grande héroe estadounidense Por: Patrick Dubuque Habiendo llegado a la adolescencia en el año 1990, puedo asegúrate que fue una época frenética. La Guerra Fría terminó y dos generaciones de estadounidenses, seguros de su lugar en un mundo de dos súper-poderes se encontraron sin ataduras. Pero…
The Other Greatest American Hero By: Patrick Dubuque As someone who stumbled into adolescence in the year 1990, I can assure you: it was a frantic time. The Cold War was over, and two generations of Americans confident in their place in a two-superpower world found themselves untethered. Instead we had a thousand points of…
Right now, the world could use some of Charlie Brown’s optimism.
No One Knows Such Things By: Jason Wojciechowski John Fante’s Ask the Dust is a semi-autobiographical novel about a Depression-era Los Angeles-via-Colorado novelist named Arturo Bandini. He lives in an odd Bunker Hill apartment building, makes horrifying racist comments to a Latina waitress with whom he is infatuated (verbal pigtail-tugging), seems never to write but…
Three Metaphors Outside Orlando, Florida By: Jason Wojciechowski By Monday at 8pm Eastern time, any player not on a 40-man roster would be available in the Rule 5 draft that will take place in a few weeks at the Winter Meetings. It was, therefore, a fast-and-furious day of additions and subtractions; you probably know intimately…
Gotta Know, Gotta Know! By: Emma Baccellieri I recently finished reading a Chinese science-fiction trilogy called Remembrance of Earth’s Past, which features an alien species with no need for any sort of spoken or written communication: The contents of their minds are simply there for everyone around them, able to be processed and understood. The…
The Fairness Doctrine By: Emma Baccellieri There is this idea that sports are like life. This is tossed around most often, it seems, when it comes to conversation around the relative merits of kids playing sports: They’ll learn life lessons. Because sports are like life! Justice and honesty and responsibility and respect and winning and…
An Unflattering Glimpse into the Mind of a Baseball Writer By: Patrick Dubuque LEFT BRAIN: Okay, that’s annual comment no. 23. A third of the way done, and a full two days before the deadline. Good job, right brain. RIGHT BRAIN: Whatever, all we wrote about were prospects. I didn’t even get to make fun…
Mourn, laugh at some dumb stuff, then mourn some more.
An invective against bobbleheads, a sample of in-game audio, and a question of what, in baseball, is billable.
The game as it connects major league ballplayer and four-year-old, fantasy and reality, and an old man and his spare room.