The heaviest snow Durham had in eighteen years fell a couple of weeks ago. It briefly quieted the city’s limbic system, which has been upheaved by development for a few years now, and lately with a frenetic intensity: Durham is a riot of cranes, excavations, ugly construction, overpriced restaurants, and the destitute flung into the…
In a bid to court a new, untapped fanbase, MLB has announced the following calendar of giveaways designed to appeal to lovers of modern art. “I mean, we’re about to lose out to soccer for the third-most popular sport in America, so we have to do…something?” said a visibly exhausted Tessa Stokes-Brinkley, who was brought…
photo © Dale Zanine-USA TODAY Sports HARTFORD, CT — Aidan Jackson, first baseman for the Hartford Yard Goats, got on base at a prodigious clip in 2017–and that’s been a problem. The 25-year-old, drafted out of Georgetown in the ninth round of the 2014 draft, was considered by experts as a token senior sign, but…
Over the holidays, I acquired a nail polish with the tongue-in-cheek moniker of “Sparkling Garbage,” the mossy green of Oscar the Grouch studded with glitter equal in iridescence to a fish belly bobbing atop the East River. The color perfectly matches the name, which in turn perfectly matches my overall 2017 ethos. Inspired, I turned…
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 Language of Peace By: Nathan Bishop I met a man earlier this year. Let’s call him Greg. The past decade of Greg’s life had seen a series of spiraling traumas. His home was foreclosed on during the housing crisis of the past decade. The stress and despair of the incident led to divorce, which…
The Victorian Lady’s Guide to Baseball Players By: Kate Preusser Back before ladies could use the internet to quickly google remedies for earaches or how to whiten yellowed piano keys or where to procure Icelandic moss for a blancmange, slim volumes like Things a Woman Wants to Know (1901) or Good Things Made, Said, and…
Power Outages and Midnight Suns By: Kate Preusser I recently lost power, and due to the prelapsarian nature of the underground power lines in my neighborhood–a chain of failure difficult to detect by city engineers–the outage stretched from 12 hours to 24 to 36 to 48, consuming first my weekend, then biting into my week….
Moving, and Moving On By: Emma Baccellieri My parents, like many couples, made some life changes as their youngest child prepared to leave for college. They’d been talking about downsizing for a while, but they ultimately figured that they weren’t interested in half-measures here; rather than simply picking a smaller house, my father decided to…
Time is a Serpent Eating Its Own Tail By: Emma Baccellieri Participating in baseball’s Hall of Fame season requires establishing a friendly relationship with baseball’s history—watching players from the past, putting them in context by reading about the past, calibrating standards by analyzing elections of the past. The whole thing is predicated on looking back….
Yannigan of the Year By: Emma Baccellieri The term “rookie” is said to have come from “recruit,” with the sounds chopped up and tossed around more than a century ago to form a more casual word. It’s not limited to baseball, of course; it supposedly started in the military and spread then to baseball and…
Hunter Pence and the Good Death By: Kate Preusser © D. Ross Cameron-USA TODAY Sports I learned a lot from reading Caitlyn Doughty’s Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, but my primary takeaway was this: Americans are bad at death. In her book, Doughty details various cultural practices and rituals around earthly departure, and continually circles…
On Being a Team Player By: Kate Preusser Sometimes at work we are asked to assume duties that are not part of our jobs, but need to be performed due to emergency or incompetence or being swept up in a coup attempt in a tiny island nation. And so we, the loyal workers, smile and…
Inevitable doom inevitably doomed the Astros in Game 4.
No Kidding By: Kate Preusser It started out as a joke, but she was going to hold him to it. She’d won the room, after all, and that had to mean something. They’d made the rule early on, shortly after moving into the house on Fairfield Drive―such a genteel, generic-sounding address, so unlike the street…
George Springer Breaks By: Patrick Dubuque Saturday night, during Game 2 of the ALCS, Todd Frazier drove in the penultimate run on a batted ball that refused to come back to earth. It’s a good hit, off a good pitch: a breaking ball that Verlander has buried at the knees, off the outside corner, the…