Saying Goodbye to Bill Buckner, and the Myths We Attached to Him
Even in the bad years, before the Boston Red Sox won the World Series, in 2004, and upended all the foundational bad-luck stories of the franchise, the smart take among Sox fans was that it wasn’t really Bill Buckner’s fault. Blame it—and the word “it” alone always sufficed—on a rogue’s gallery of pitchers (Roger Clemens…
Remembering Tony Horwitz, a Historian Who Reckoned Fearlessly with the Legacy of the Civil War
Tony Horwitz’s great-grandfather Isaac Moses Perski came to America from tsarist Russia in 1882, a penniless teen-ager, and one of the first things he bought in his new country was a book, an illustrated history of the Civil War. In 1965, he showed that book to his very little great-grandson. “Peering over his arm, I…
Facebook’s False Standards for Not Removing a Fake Nancy Pelosi Video
Last week, when a doctored video of the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, began circulating on Facebook, it seemed like it would only be a matter of time before it was removed. After all, just one day before, Facebook proudly announced that it had recently removed 2.2 billion fake accounts between January and March…
Ayşegül Savaş Reads “Canvas”
Listen with: iTunes WNYC Stitcher TuneIn Ayşegül Savaş reads her story from the June 3, 2019, issue of the magazine. Savaş is a Turkish writer who lives in Paris and teaches at the Sorbonne. Her first novel, “Walking on the Ceiling,” was published in April. Click Here:
Ann Reinking on Her Life as Bob Fosse’s Muse, Lover, and Friend
It’s an odd feeling to give someone a spoiler alert for her own life story, but I didn’t want to ruin “Fosse/Verdon” for Ann Reinking. As of last week, the veteran dancer had not caught up with the FX miniseries, starring Sam Rockwell as the louche director-choreographer Bob Fosse and Michelle Williams as the Broadway…
Additional Modern Families to Replace ABC’s “Modern Family”
The hit sitcom “Modern Family” is set to end next year. But fear not. There are any number of other modern families to observe, now that our long-running favorite is disbanding, including the following: A Guatemalan child is held at a border detention facility in Arizona; his parents are held at a border detention facility…
“See You Yesterday” and the Perils—and Promise—of Time-Travelling While Black
Loopholes, resurrected characters, plot resets, ever-branching arcs: time travel is an infinitely flexible conceit, limited only to its own pseudoscientific rules of causality. The new Netflix movie “See You Yesterday” makes an unusual contribution to the time-travel canon while highlighting one of its most prominent flaws: the racial privilege baked into these stories, or the…