Elsewhere 
British football in the ’80s
To attend a match in that time was not the sanitised theme park that many Premier League clubs now aspire to. Fans who chose the terraces sometimes had to be prepared to stand for hours before games so as to make sure they got in. Access to toilet facilities were limited on big-match days, giving […]
Never happened
They weren’t goths or loners. The two teenagers who killed 13 people and themselves at suburban Denver’s Columbine High School 10 years ago next week weren’t in the “Trenchcoat Mafia,” disaffected videogamers who wore cowboy dusters. The killings ignited a national debate over bullying, but the record now shows Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold hadn’t […]
$20,000 rock star vacation
Something tells me the 19-year-old who spent $20,000 to hang out with a rock star for a week wasn’t exactly spending money he saved up delivering pizzas or working the register at Target. I wonder if the reporter even bothered to ask where he got the money. Or better yet, whether it was his mom […]
A senseless end to a rapid maturation
At 22, he was growing so fast. And now he is gone in an instant — the victim of some idiot on a Southern California street. The alleged perpetrator of the hit-and-run drunken-driving crime that killed Nick (Adenhart) coincidentally was 22, too. But that is a young fellow going nowhere. The opposite of Nick, a […]
A Kiwi pop primer
There was something magical going on long before Peter Jackson transformed the rugged wilderness of New Zealand into Middle Earth. In the early 1980s, Dunedin music impresario Roger Shepherd founded Flying Nun Records. The rest is history, although it’s history that is surprisingly little known in the U.S. Perhaps it’s time to change that. Because […]
MJ’s curveball, 15 years later
It was Tom Cruise doing dinner theater, Chris Rock performing at open-mike night and Justin Timberlake singing in the church choir. And yet it was none of those things, because when Michael Jordan announced in February 1994, just weeks before his 31st birthday, that he would attempt a career as a baseball player, it was […]
Howard the fail
Failure goes by many names. Waterloo. The Edsel. The ’62 Mets. Joey. These disasters can fairly be called upon to convey calamity on a large scale. But some reputations for failure are undeserved. Here’s one: Howard the Duck, a synonym for artistic and financial disaster since the premiere of a little-loved movie in late-summer 1986. […]
A community of the enslaved
You’re never going to get together with any of these people for coffee. They’re too busy, and you’re too busy, and the miles are too vast. You probably want to Friend them because you want to rake or shovel or eat alongside them. Instead you have to rake or shovel alongside the cantankerous guy who […]