• I always think of William Zinsser...
• The singer Jackie Cain died ...
• The 70th anniversary of D-Day...
• Thanks to Hurricane Katrina ...
• So the French political pendulum ...
• Auschwitz was cold and gloomy ...
• The death of William Clay Ford ...
• So 12 Years a Slave wins ...
• I remember taking my young son ...
I always think of William Zinsser...
Epidaurus, Greece, 2014
when, in my news reading, I come across gobbledygook like this:
Fulmer became the fourth Tigers pitcher since 1913 to strike out 11 or more batters in one of his first five Major League appearances ...
In “On Writing Well,” his classic guide to nonfiction composition first published in 1976, Zinsser cautioned aspiring sports writers against overdosing readers on superfluous statistics. Such articles, he said, betray “a figure freak amok at his typewriter.”...
The singer Jackie Cain died ...
Chicago, 2007
last month at age 86, saddening us jazz aficionados. She and her pianist husband, Roy Kral, performing for more than a half-century as “Jackie & Roy,” offered original interpretations from such classic American songwriters as the Gershwins, Hoagy Carmichael, Frank Loesser, Cy Coleman, Alec Wilder and the curiously underrated Dave Frishberg. Usually backed up by a bassist, percussionist and vibraphonist, J&R electrified supper clubs and jazz houses across America from the...
Prisons are teeming ...
Miami, 2008
with inmates whose “crimes” have hurt no one and who are not in the least dangerous people. Why is anyone incarcerated for smoking or growing marijuana in his home? Or for engaging in consensual commercial sex (or, for that matter, private unconventional sex)? Or for playing poker? Legislators in ostensibly free societies have always felt a need to impose their personal morality on those who may hold different values (while hypocritically condemning the intolerance of foreign...
The 70th anniversary of D-Day...
Normandy, 2011
should remind us of America’s most recent war of necessity and the last war it has managed to win. Normandy is the one place in France that seems always kind to Americans. There is no shortage of monuments to the occurrences of 1944, perhaps reflecting recognition that America has amply paid back its debt to France for its help in 1776. In August we will mark the centennial anniversary of World War I. Anniversaries for World War III are still some years away, but they will...
Thanks to Hurricane Katrina ...
Tanzania, 1997
in 2005, New Orleans has become a model for public education. The city’s Recovery School District in New Orleans this week closed its five remaining traditional public schools, and will become the first all-charter school district in the United States. Charter schools are privately administered with public money. Competing for students with quality of education, they are not required to keep bad teachers, or bad students. The idea is to give parents of modest means...
So the French political pendulum ...
Paris, 2013
is swinging rightward again. In the recent municipal elections, disgruntled voters sent their Socialist president a message by electing rightist mayors in a surprising array of cities. “La Punition,” roared the headline in Libération over a photograph of a distraught President François Hollande – punishment once again for a leader's failure to provide voters with the painless affluence they were promised. So what else is new?
Now comes the rigeur. I wonder if we’ll...
Auschwitz was cold and gloomy ...
Auschwitz, 2013
on the day I visited last December. Chilling gusts of wind howled around the photo-familiar red brick barracks, and daylight faded to dusk not long after lunch. It was not cold enough or dark enough, however, to deter throngs of curious visitors. (“If you think this is bad, just come in the summer,” I was warned.) As I jostled with my fellow tourists through the somber hallways and down into a basement gas chamber, I wondered: How many visitors really comprehend the enormity...
The death of William Clay Ford ...
Football's Ford Field, as seen from baseball's adjacent Comerica Park, 2010.
at age 88 came as sad news. Although I didn’t know him, I considered Ford as a friend -- a symbol of my adolescent days in Detroit a half-century ago. That he was Henry Ford’s grandson did not impress me as much as the fact that he owned the Detroit Lions football franchise. In those days, the Lions played at Tiger Stadium – the city’s now-demolished baseball park that was clumsily reconfigured for football when...
So 12 Years a Slave wins ...
A living witness at Oak Alley Plantation in Vacherie, Lousiana, 2012
the Oscar for Best Picture. It would have won, no doubt, even without the votes from at least two judges who declined to watch the film. According to a report in the Los Angeles Times, these two members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences did not want to be upset by the movie’s violence, but they selected it anyway because of its “social relevance.”
One wonders about the contemporary social relevance...
I remember taking my young son ...
Marseille, 2012
to a Parisian park one day to toss a baseball back and forth in what we Americans call a game of catch. But a security guard quickly told us to desist, explaining that this game was not on the list of allowable activities. I took that to mean that every form of recreation was banned in this park unless explicitly approved. (Had the ball been of the soccer variety, we would have been left alone.) An article this week in The Economist reminded me of that day some 20 years...