Of all the melancholy aspects of newspapers shrinking, or failing, or shutting down, it is the abandonment of a newsroom that makes me most wistful. Today is the final day in the original home of The National, the first English-language newspaper in Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates. We spent six years there […]

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This seems quaint. Print journalists are making a case to management that a planned layoff of dozens of veteran copy editors … is a very bad idea. It seems like such an Aughties thing, this push back. From 2007, 2008, 2009 — the opening years of the Great Newsroom Layoffs. Of late, in an industry […]

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We like to think weather can never be severe, here in the Languedoc, in the south of France. That mindset took a hit tonight. A strong storm blew through the area, and five mature plane trees were snapped like matchsticks by powerful winds in the nearest “big” town to us. Some local anglophones were talking […]

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This depresses me — the notion of legal betting on sports in most, if not all, U.S. states. It could happen, perhaps as soon as next year. The Supreme Court this week decided to hear the state of New Jersey’s appeal on legalized sports gambling — which Jersey, always a leader in taste and good […]

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No, it’s not just your imagination. Many of the 1.6 million residents of Barcelona can be a bit abrupt. A bit impatient. A bit aggrieved. Those conditions can be the product of decades and decades under the thumb (in their telling) of the Spanish capital, Madrid. More recently, it has been about the inundation, over […]

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Forgive me if I have been slow to acknowledge this. Twenty-nine years since the Los Angeles Dodgers’ most recent championship … since the last time the club played in a World Series, actually … well, the club’s history-scarred fans cannot be expected to immediately climb back on the Big Blue bandwagon. The Dodgers are moving […]

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I first traveled to Barcelona in the summer of 1992 to help cover the Summer Olympics for Gannett News Service. I was very impressed with the place. It had charm. It had class. It organized a very fine Olympics. It seemed like a city people would want to see, if they knew about it. And […]

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It always is a bit embarrassing, while traveling, to walk into someone else’s important holiday … and know little or nothing about it. A pre-Easter parade in San Blas, Mexico, in 2005. Bastille Day, which we didn’t see coming in Normandy three decades ago … and then tried to make amends by marching at the […]

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It was the biggest week in U.S. national soccer history. The 2009 Confederations Cup in South Africa. In this order: (And we are not messing with you here; this actually happened.) U.S. 3, Egypt 0 U.S. 2, Spain 0 (!) U.S. 2, Brazil 0 — at halftime of the championship match. It ended Brazil 3, […]

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The draft. Whichever you want to talk about … is very much an American thing. The rest of the world, you collect players in a youth system and watch them develop. You keep a few, loan some others, release the rest. Especially the case in world soccer. In the U.S. however, talent is typically distributed […]

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