This tendency probably occurs more in baseball than in other sports, because baseball supports a stats-obsessed fanbase who participate in levels of erudition and nerdery that only the most astute academics can compete with. This statistical chicanery produces a sporting culture where the highest level of achievement is admission into the sacred “Hall of Fame,” where a player’s whole statistical body of work is canonized and stamped with a mark of superiority.
It’s hard to imagine that anyone outside of organized crime or banking would see check cashing as a legitimate business model. Nevertheless, their lobbying efforts have secured them protection from the new bureau designed to save consumers from businesses like theirs.
Last month was the 25th anniversary of Don DeLillo’s White Noise. Eight years ago, I was teaching the book in one of my classes and thinking about reality television, still a relatively new field at the time, and I wrote the following essay.
The La Jolla Children’s Pool is a coastal landmark that in many ways is representative of other San Diego landmarks: it’s located on a gorgeously scenic spot and as such it generates more controversy than most other public policy issues in San Diego.
Earlier this year I began to notice clumps of adults sleeping on the sidewalks of downtown San Diego and that’s when I discovered that sleeping on the city’s sidewalks had recently been decriminalized.
As for the second idea, that plastics are so valuable that we should recycle them, this connection is truly a difficult stretch of intuition. A valuable thing is meant to be kept around for years and eventually sold on eBay to someone who will pay too much in shipping to receive it.