Category: New American Studies

  • Jets’ Playoff Chances

    Consider the scenario of the Bengals beating the Steelers then losing to the Ravens. The Cincinnati-Pittsburgh tiebreaker at 9-7 will be decided by won-long percentage within the division. The Steelers are 2-2 now and would finish 3-3. The Bengals are 1-3 now and would finish 2-4. The Steelers would be #2 in their division.

  • Julian, California: The Museum of Reality

    Driving up and down the southern California coast between Los Angeles and the Mexican border, every town looked the same. Most everywhere in America it is like this. “Reality” has been reduced to a cloned instantiation from a formula: replicated instances of the same shopping malls, supermarkets, mega-stores, and chain restaurants everywhere you go.

  • Cactus League Baseball: San Francisco Giants vs. Oakland Athletics

    It was early March on planet Earth. In any of the other places where I have hung out during my apparently long yet in fact rather brief life so far as coder and Richard Daystrom wannabe – Frankfurt, Berlin, New York, Boston, Ithaca, Bologna, Zurich – it would be freezing cold in winter.

  • Today is a Sacred Day

    As a New York Jets fans, today is a sacred day. An inspiring day in my life was January 12, 1969. Super Bowl III. I was 12 years old. My brother and I watched the game on a small black-and-white TV. We saw the Jets, who were 19 point underdogs, beat the mighty Baltimore Colts.

  • My Hometown is Roslyn, Long Island, New York

    In 1980, I sat inside my hometown library in the “haute bourgeoise” town of Roslyn and read all the books they had about the student-worker near-revolution in May-June 1968 in France: books like Alain Touraine’s The Movement of May and Alfred Willener’s The Action-Image of Society.

  • Around the Town (a Sports Gambling story), part 1 of 4

    As they went inside Grand Central Station, Moe and Siggy saw hurried commuters moving with tunnel vision, not looking at the homeless. The bag ladies and street people would put a damper on one’s day. Past the panhandlers and cup rattlers, the squeegee people, and the Monte dealers, the determined nine-to-fivers kept moving.