Ghost towns fascinate us. The notion of a place, sinking into decrepitude but still clearly recognizable as a town or city, produces a sort of magnetic force upon tourists and others with a little extra time on their schedule. Which explains as well as anything how it was we happened to go out of our […]

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It’s been that kind of season for the Leicester City soccer team, a club that has never done much of anything but now leads the English Premier League by five points with nine matches to play. Leicester (pronounced “LESter” by the English, despite all those other letters) looked a cinch to be relegated a year […]

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When I left Southern California for Abu Dhabi, in October of 2009, UCLA’s basketball program wasn’t John Wooden-esque, but it was solid. Respectable. The Bruins had made the NCAA tournament 19 of the previous 21 seasons, and added their 11th national championship during that span. Wooden had won 10 championships in 12 seasons, ending in […]

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I enjoy watching the chase for party nominations for president of the United States. I have found this fascinating since I was a child; I remember watching the 1964 Republican Convention that nominated Barry Goldwater instead of Nelson Rockefeller. I also am a baseball fan, and was well ahead of Goldwater. It strikes me that […]

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In the past few weeks, three former co-workers have reached out with worries/concerns/bad news about the status of their newspaper jobs, and I suppose the surprise here is … that it doesn’t happen more often. Two were asking for any insight or advice I might have about remaining employed in an industry that appears to […]

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This part of the Languedoc is green, rolling and quiet. A big city is one with 5,000 people. Most have 2,000 or fewer. In many of the small towns scattered among the vineyards a visitor cannot expect to find a restaurant or even a bakery. But every town with even a dozen buildings will have […]

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Short of a general nuclear exchange, it is hard to imagine mankind contriving a way to kill 300,000 young men in the course of one battle. Germany and France managed to do that in the World War I Battle of Verdun which began 100 years ago, in February 2016, and dragged on till December of […]

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Perhaps that is a low estimate. What I did not know about the things growing within a couple hundred yards of where we live, here in the south of France … well, it might have been more like a thousand things. This came to us on something of an accidental journey. In the previous week, […]

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This is an interesting concept. A writer who is perhaps Australian, now in New York, who appears to have done mostly business writing over the past few years … has attempted to explain the Golden State Warriors guard Stephen Curry to readers of The Guardian, one of Britain’s quality newspapers. The piece has some nice […]

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I am a semi-serious Arsenal fan, over these past six years, and the club drives me crazy. I can only wonder how it feels for those who have been cheering on — and wincing at — the club since said fans were in diapers. Arsenal, would-be contenders for the Premier League championship nobody seems to […]

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