Tony's Playpen
There was three feet of snow in Denver when the ARS transporter departed from the team headquarters on First Street. Three days later,...
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May 5, 20238 min read
McLaren on the Verge: The 1967 Canadian Grand Prix
NINETEEN SIXTY-SIX was a disastereous year for McLaren Cars. The money they had spent developing the Ford Indy engine for their...
May 2, 20236 min read
Taffy Revels in the Rain--The 1961 British Grand Prix
The sky over northeast England matched Phil Hill's mood perfectly--dark and foreboding. Two days earlier, Hill had departed Reims in a...
May 1, 20233 min read
Book Review—The Making of a Quagmire
When I was in college as in the early-1970s, the the heroes of the Journalism Department were Vietnam reporters Neil Sheehan, Malcolm...
Apr 17, 20233 min read
The Silver Fox
It was a pivotal moment in Pop Music. Charlie Rich was in Memphis auditioning for Sam Phillips, the owner of Sun Records who’d...
Apr 17, 20235 min read
The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll
Sun Records was little more than a storefront studio in a bad part of Memphis, Tennessee. Yet, it was here the first rock-n-roll record...
Apr 14, 20237 min read
Domes: Easy When You Know How
In the second century A.D., Roman emperor Hadrian commissioned the building of a temple to commemorate the gods of all the planets. Mind...
Apr 14, 20232 min read
Amazon Review—The Pantheon—Father of Domes
The Pantheon is brilliant in its simplicity, a combining of the circle and square, with man as part of the equation. “The Pantheon:...
Apr 13, 20235 min read
Brunelleschi's Dome -- a Monument to Optimism
It was some contest, and it was some prize. The contest was finding a way to stand an egg on its end. The prize was designing what...
Apr 6, 20234 min read
You want a confederate monument? My body is a confederate monument.
By Caroline Randall Williams NEW YORK TIMES, June 26, 2020 If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy, if they...
Mar 30, 20238 min read
Book Review: The 1619 Project
His name was Thomas Dartmouth Rice, a New York entertainer who performed under the stage name of T. D. Rice. In 1828, Rice had been a...
Mar 24, 20233 min read
Book Review—The Hundred-Year Marathon—"China’s Dream is America’s Nightmare"
In some ways this book is as fantastical as “The Travels of Marco Polo.” It’s a disturbing account of the Chinese Communist Party’s...
Mar 20, 20237 min read
In Search of the America Dream
The book is entitled, "The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone And How We Can Prosper Together", by Heather McGhee. What the book does...
Mar 20, 20236 min read
Book Review: "Caste: The Origins of our Discontents" by Isabel Wilkerson
It seems we live in a caste society. This is the message of "Caste: The Origins of our Discontents" by Isabel Wilkerson, a Pulitzer...
Mar 18, 20235 min read
Book review: Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, by Thomas E. Ricks
Thomas E. Ricks, a Pulitzer Price winning war correspondent, focuses his considerable reporting skill on the American Civil Rights...
Feb 27, 202310 min read
Book Review: Ben Hogan -- An American Life
I first learned about Ben Hogan watching the Golf Channel. Oh, I'd heard his name before but other than that, I knew next to nothing...
Feb 24, 202322 min read
Washington in New York, chs 8 & 9
CHAPTER 8: A QUESTION OF BALANCE Oliver Ellsworth: now there’s a Founding Father you rarely hear about. Ellsworth was not a pamphleteer...
Feb 21, 20233 min read
Civil Rights on trial—New York Times v. Sullivan
Can a Supreme Court decision change the social fabric of the United States? That’s among the issues addressed in NEW YORK TIMES v....
Feb 2, 20232 min read
Salt--the rock we eat
Too much salt can kill you. Not enough can kill you, too. Until recent times, when modern geology literally unearthed the earth’s...
Jan 24, 20232 min read
The Music of a Gentle Man
Perhaps it was the success of “Carmen.” Overnight, Spanish music was all the rage of Europe, particularly in Paris. Everyone was...
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