Jordan is a rising sports nation. No, really. It is a country with lots of difficulties. Not much water, not much money, unstable/warlike neighbors all around them, refugees flooding the country every couple of years. But Jordan can play a few games, now. Some of it may be related to the 2010 election to the […]

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Architecture, another topic way outside my areas of expertise. But it doesn’t take deep understanding of the field to note the trends in Dubai, City of Skyscrapers. The newest has come on line, and whatever its official name (which is in flux), it certainly will be known as the “twisted tower”. Why that name?

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It was a couple of years ago now. I was covering a golf tournament, here in the UAE, and I was talking to the English mother of an Emirati golfer. The kid’s father, the woman’s husband, was an Emirati. We got to talking about languages, while watching her son play. And she said: “Arabic is […]

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As a Dodgers fan since Vin Scully was a young man and the club was still playing in the Coliseum, I have been paying attention from afar to the first week of Yasiel Puig. My appetite for information on him is whetted by his presence (since March) on my fantasy team … a guy I […]

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A bit of a fuss was raised this week over the revelations that the U.S. government can keep records of every phone call made by every U.S. citizen, as well as read their email and internet chats. The New York Times weighed in with an editorial critical of this broad federal power, and some people […]

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I do not pretend to understand this on any sort of molecular level, or even a studied-it-in-books level. But after 3.5 years here, it is plain that the dynamics of men and women in the UAE are … distant and complicated. It stems from a society that separates males from females from the first day […]

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The news broke today, via ESPN, that Major League Baseball is looking to punish around 20 players connected to a Miami-based performance-enhancing drugs scandal, including Ryan Braun and Alex Rodriguez. Good. If the evidence shows these players are complicit in PED use, suspend them. PEDs have to be run out of baseball, and it’s clear […]

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Perhaps you saw this story from a day or two ago. A Saudi prince celebrating his college graduation spent 15 million euros– about $20 million — to have chunks of Disneyland Paris all to himself over the course of three days. Well, to himself and about 60 friends. Lots of money in the Gulf. Some […]

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The origins of fandom are elusive. Perhaps the most common notion is a kid, hand in hand with his or her father, going to a ball game. It wasn’t quite like that for me in the mid-1960s. My father was not much of a sports fan and I wasn’t pointed at this or that team, […]

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The first time I was in the same building with Walter Zenga was in 1990, at the Stadio Olimpico in Rome. He was the starting goalkeeper for Italy, and they were facing Austria in the opening game of the World Cup. Zenga did not allow a goal, which was a fairly common outcome, for him, […]

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