Occupy Frommer’s THE HAWAIIAN HISTORY that plays through headsets on the buses that shuttle tourists between the shops, hotels, restaurants, and beaches on Oahu is predictably bland, defanged, and heavy with half-truths. During the winter of 2011, I wrote such toothless audio tours for a popula...
It was already hard to imagine George Ruth before Babe Ruth, Babe Ruth before the Babe, the Yankees, and even New York or the game of baseball before the Babe. He and the sport were now synonymous, the game’s history cleaved in two, the Dead Ball Era and the present. Ruth was also synonymous with...
The Channel THE ENGLISH CHANNEL is like no other body of water in the world. Only twenty-one miles across at its narrowest point between Cape Gris-Nez (Cape Gray Nose) and Dover, those twenty-one miles can be the most treacherous waters in the world. The reason is the tide, for were it not for t...
LeBron James? Michael Phelps? Please. Get that weak sauce out of here. It is Serena Williams. She runs women’s tennis like Kim Jong-un runs North Korea: ruthlessly, with spare moments of comedy, indolence, and the occasional appearance of a split personality. Here are the facts. Serena is the num...
The Gathering of the Clans The peculiar conditions of the major league races of the 1912 season, the great rivalry between the two leagues, the many unknown quantities entering into this conflict between two teams, one of which has had, and the other lacks, experience in World's Series contests, ...