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.
It’s hard not to note that this kind of attraction would never have taken root in the surfing-stubborn nineties, where conformity dictated that everyone at the beach rode three-finned shortboards.
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.
In short, a small group of radio station owners now controls most of the radio stations in the country, and they use computers to send out the playlist to every station in their group. This results in the peculiar scenario that anyone who’s driven across the country has discovered: each city has all the same radio stations as every other city and their playlists are incredibly predictable.
Yesterday, NPR revealed that coyotes have been discovered hiding out in our cities, with one researcher estimating that more than 2,000 coyotes live undiscovered in the city of Chicago in particular. I’ve lived in Chicago myself, and the city looms in memory as a mass of brick, asphalt, and concrete, so it’s nigh unfathomable to consider that coyotes were my neighbors.