Last week, Naomi Osaka, the current #2 tennis player on the WTA tour, announced that she would not be engaging with the press at all during this year’s French Open. When she followed through after her first round win, the tournament fined her $15,000 and said that the penalty will escalate with each match, possibly…
Black Lightning recently ended its four season run on The CW. I watched faithfully from the very first episode (which makes it pleasantly shocking that it lasted four seasons). This has gotten me a bit reflective, about the show itself, but also about storytelling and things like that. Please excuse a little self-indulgence, but I…
It’s all UConn’s fault. I would pop in to watch a Celtics game now and then to see how my boy Kemba, the Greatest Hero of the Big East, was doing. But there were these other guys on the team. One of them looked a little like Kemba, but even as I watched Kemba, I…
I used to say that I didn’t like seafood. Sure, I’d eat fish sticks and shrimp, but anything seafood related that I would eat had to be pulverized and breaded to the point where it was barely recognizable. A friend introduced me to the wonders of real seafood recently- crab legs dipped in butter sauce,…
Dear Mark, These are trying times for so many people. The scourge of [insert social ill which inspired most recent mass shooting] continues to leave deep scars on the soul of our nation. As the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King once said, [insert quote relevant to most recent mass shooting]. Here at Every Nonprofit Ever™,…
To whom it may concern, Like most Americans, my health is important to me. Also like most Americans, I am not wealthy. Put these two things together and that makes health insurance important to me. If anything serious happened, I could not pay for treatment without insurance. What’s worse, I wouldn’t even be able to…
I discovered Esperanza Spalding in 2005. I was at a show celebrating George Wein (founder of the Newport Jazz Festival among many other things). Herbie Hancock played, and Spalding was the bassist in his band. They sounded great. I was an instant fan. I still remember when Herbie introduced the band, when he got to…
Libertarianism has had a prominent position in America for my whole life. It goes by many names: free-market capitalism, classical liberalism, neoliberalism, monetarism, freedom, limited government, supply-side economics, and on and on. People who use these labels may protest that they are not all the same thing (I’ll address that in a little bit), but…
“That’s the future mayor of Hartford right there.” That’s how my friend introduces me whenever we meet someone new together. I know that part of it is an acknowledgement of how much he appreciates what I think about politics and government, and I’m humbled by his compliment. But I also know that there’s not-very-subtle subtext…
There are approximately 7.85 billion people in the world. I care about dozens of them. Maybe over a hundred, but certainly less than 500. Which means there are approximately 7.85 billion people in the world that I simply don’t care about. It sounds a little strange, cold even, to say it like that, but it’s…
