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.
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.
Can you imagine the founding fathers writing constitutional amendments to manage the United States budget? That’s the kind of thing that happens in California.
I always think of this angry crank who was notoriously near-sighted when it came to politics and economics whenever I find myself tempted to say anything substantive about economic theory. It’s too easy, in a way, to say things about a subject one has never studied.
By focusing on a political tangent and seeking out jurors who can form a consensus on that tangent these defense lawyers were dismissing (perhaps evading) the details of their cases in favor of a red herring…