Yearly Archives 2015

Up until last Thursday night, San Francisco Giants pitcher Ryan Vogelsong had never hit a home run in a major league career that began in 2000 and has included long stints in the minor leagues and in the Japanese professional league. Then in a game against the Colorado Rockies in Denver, Vogelsong launched a ball over the right field fence for the First Home Run of His Major League Career.

That is always a seminal, uniquely gratifying moment in the life of anyone who has ever dared to dream of being a big league ballplayer.

As he circled the bases and began to approach the dugout where his giddy teammates waited for him with high-fives and backslaps at the ready, Giants announcers Mike Krukow and Duane Keiper had the following exchange:

    Krukow: Do you think he’ll smile?
    Keiper: “No.”
    Krukow: “Not even with his first big league home run…Down two runs, he will not smile…

An...

You know what book I’d buy? A collection of interviews about people’s first or early jobs. There are such riches to be gleaned from our employment histories, all those tales of burger flipping and cashiering, sheep-shearing and babysitting.

My first sort-of-real job was as understudy for my brother’s paper route. He was three years older than me and once he landed the job, he appointed himself CEO. Then he hired me, his 9-year-old younger brother, to get up with him twice a week at 5 a.m. to deliver the Eagle Rock Sentinel up one side of the street while he did the other. We did this over a whole bunch of streets.

For this, he paid me the princely sum of one dollar each day, $8 a month. He made some $30 or so as CEO, so this was my early introduction to capitalism, which is sometimes used as a synonym for “hire someone else to do a gob of work while you keep most of the money.”

Many other wonderful...

I watch my 17-year-old as she goes about her home life, her smartphone cradled in her palm like an extra, permanent appendage while she eats, watches TV, sits chatting with her friend or responds (distractedly) to a conversational overture from me. She’s rarely not looking down at and acting upon it in some way, whether scanning Facebook, posting a quick shot of her cat on Instagram or Snapchat, or playing an inexhaustible supply of games adapted to tiny screens with all the engineering expertise Silicon Valley’s finest have been able to bring to bear on the matter.

I worry about how much has become passé in her world—books, magazines, phone conversations, street games, even email, voicemail, and undivided attention on a television show, which she never gives any of them, even though she claims she’s following every step of the action just fine, thank you.

Last week I suggested we go to the movies...

There were some truly extraordinary exchanges in the Republican Party debate earlier this month. To read the full transcript available here is to come to a deep “appreciation” for the circus-like atmosphere that characterizes so much of our politics in this media age.

And make no mistake, that circus is every bit as much (or more) a creation of the modern news industry, with its personality/ratings/polls-driven sensibility, as it is of the candidates. And the candidates have certainly taken notice—every one of them looked to have been schooled and rehearsed to death by their handlers in the fine arts of cliche-mongering, sound bite policy proposals, question-dodging and general fact-twisting bloviation.

That impression only grew for me in reading the debate transcript...

Back when I made my living as a journalist editing a weekly newspaper for which I wrote the editorials, I noticed something over time.

I got far and away my most laudatory feedback when I was the most certain of my position and conveyed as much in no uncertain terms. When I fired away with all guns blazing, rat-a-tat-bang with an occasional grenade of  humor, I would draw admiring comments from a cohort of readers who collectively said, via one expression or other, “You go, Boy! Take it to ‘em!”

And when the subjects deserved to be taken to, as in the stupidity and just plain heartlessness of so much of the AIDS-phobic anti-gay rhetoric of the time, it was easy—bringing a kind of smug satisfaction—to carpet-bomb the opposition and consider it a good day’s work.

However.

It bothered me a little that in cases where I wasn’t nearly as certain of my “position,” where there were at least valid cons...