Everyone loves maps, don’t they? OK, not quite everyone. We discovered, in six-plus years of living in the UAE, that Emiratis often own no maps and do not know how to read them. No, really. They will describe movements by landmarks. I digress. We came across this batch of French maps, informational stuff, and they […]

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Leicester City FC can secure an astonishing Premier League championship this weekend, with a victory at Manchester United. And if not then, by winning one of its final two matches. English media have been doing celebratory Leicester stories (like this one and this one and this one), and even the New York Times has discovered […]

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Well, this is the sort of nightmare scenario for NFL teams who inevitably say: “We did our homework.” Not talking about the Los Angeles Rams here. They needed a quarterback and they took Jared Goff of Cal with the first pick in the draft — the safer (and perhaps duller) choice between Goff and the […]

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It was the ultimate career fantasy for a certain fraction of American journalists. At some time in their careers they wanted to live in Paris and work for the International Herald Tribune. They had read it during their travels in Europe and it became a sort of newspaper of record for their vacations, fondly remembered […]

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How Clippers is this? Ten hours after learning yesterday that Stephen Curry, leading man of the Golden State Warriors, will be out for two weeks, setting up the possibility of the Clippers being able to beat a weakened Warriors team in the second round of the NBA playoffs … … Chris Paul suffers a broken […]

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  France appears to be a world-leader in caves. It has world-famous caves (Lascaux, and the Paleolithic paintings), it has deep caves, it has gigantic caves, it has long caves. It has lists of caves that do not appear to be remotely complete. It has so many caves that some of them close to population […]

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As an American living across the pond, having a secondary news source to, say, the New York Times, is pretty much essential. If for no other reason than to keep track of the English Premier League — which may be the one sports competition we covered in Abu Dhabi that I will remain interested in, […]

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France has lots of exotic landscapes. People from outside the country tend to think of the mostly flat region, around Paris, when they think of France geography. Because that is what they have seen. Or maybe the hilly fields of Normandy. But a sprawling mass of land in the center of the country, known as […]

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Many baseball people like to say “the triple is the most exciting play in the game.” I prefer the triple play. Seven hundred and three triple plays have been recorded in the history of the game, going back to 1876, and the 703rd was turned tonight in Chicago by the White Sox against the Texas […]

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One of the reasons I did not play Little League baseball, besides being too shy to join a team of kids I did not know, was the possibility of being hit by a pitch. I knew how hard a baseball was. I remember my 9- or 10-year-old self tossing one, squeezing it in my hand […]

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