A couple of Twitter friends recently told me about how, as a fun exercise, they identified the number one song on the Billboard charts on their birthday for every year they were alive. It sounded like a fun idea. And it was a fun idea until I remembered that I’m older than them it takes […]
Read moreBaseball is raking in cash, but there are storm clouds on the horizon
Over at NBC Sports I wrote about the massive disconnect that exists between the stuff that wins baseball games and the stuff that makes baseball teams money. At present, the business arrangements of the league mean that teams can stink on ice yet still rake in cash while winning doesn’t do that much for the […]
Read moreUNC’s Kenan Stadium on NPR’s “Only a Game”
In September I wrote about Kenan Memorial Stadium at UNC Chapel Hill and its namesake, William Rand Kenan Sr., who murdered scores of blacks in the 1898 Wilmington Massacre. This week I hosted NPR’s sports show, “Only a Game,” and produced a story about it.
Read moreThoughts on the Midterm Elections
The results of yesterday’s midterm election defy hot takes and easy narratives. On one level — in terms of just how overwhelmingly voters, in raw numbers, voted Democratic and/or anti-Republican — it was a Democratic wave of historic proportions. The sort of wave which puts to lie the common Republican and media talking point that […]
Read moreIt is happening here
For three years, Donald Trump has courted and enjoyed the support of the “alt-right,” which is a euphemism for white supremacists, anti-Semites and neo-Nazis. They played a very large role in his election, with their temporary, barely sanitized public image providing putatively respectable cover for base racism, anti-Semitism and fascism. After his election, torch-carrying neo-Nazis […]
Read moreFacebook: one of many reasons online media a flaming hole in the ground
An awful lot of journalists were fired between 2015-17 because their companies went with a “video strategy” influenced strongly by Facebook’s claimed video ad revenues and Facebook’s direct encouragement of their media partners to pivot to video and away from a written product. That didn’t pan out the way anyone expected, however. Video engagement was […]
Read more“Mutual economic gain is the keystone of The Union”
There’s a column at the National Review today which provides a good look into how blinkered and deluded conservatives are and how deeply buried in their ideology they have become. The premise is not a bad one: “We’re all in this together! What’s good for my brother is good for me! Shared prosperity makes life better […]
Read moreUNC to, effectively, rename its football stadium
Photo by William Yeung via Wikimedia Commons Two weeks ago I wrote a story about the history of the namesake for the University of North Carolina’s football stadium. The upshot: in 1898, William Rand Kenan Sr. — for whom Kenan Memorial Stadium is named — led a white supremacist paramilitary force which rode through Wilmington, […]
Read moreMore perjury from Brett Kavanaugh
Last week I wrote a rundown of some of the many, many lies Brett Kavanaugh told under oath during his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. An NBC News report from last night reveals that he may very well have told another one. A pretty damn serious one, in fact. The story surrounds the claims of […]
Read moreThe Lies of Brett Kavanaugh
As an attorney with 11 years of trial experience, I found Christine Ford’s testimony about her alleged attempted rape by Brett Kavanaugh to be convincing and compelling. Any lawyer with even half that experience would, if they were not being nakedly partisan, agree. Contrary to what random people on the Internet will tell you, this […]
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