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Face times

September 8, 2026
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Deep in your brain, at the back of your skull, lie two small bits of matter, each about the size of a pencil eraser, buried roughly equally in each of the two hemispheres of your brain. Their job is to recognize faces. Called the fusiform face area, it is such a hard-working little department, it will sometimes see faces where there are none. 

Faces are so important for the survival of the species, that as soon as a newborn can focus — not even focus, but begin to do so — it can make out faces from other shapes, and by three days old, it can recognize its mother’s face. 

And through life, the human face remains one of the most engaging visual forms we know. And it is why it is the most frequent subject for art. It covers everything from family snapshots to emojis to political cartoons to the formal portrait. And the portrait has settled in to be one of the conventional genres of art, along with landscape, still life, nude, and abstraction. 

But not all images are the same, or made with the same intent. There are, by my calculation, four overarching categories of pictures of people. The family snaps are the most common. Most of us have a shoebox filled with old pictures, some going back as far as the late 19th century. 

Rowan Steele and family, Sandy Ridge, N.C. ca. 1890

Nowadays, most family pictures exchange the shoebox for the cellphone and cloud. But still, a ton of pictures, most of little significance to anyone but family. 

The second group are the more formal photos, like school pictures, wedding photos, or those grinning Olan Mills family shots, as stiff as plywood and just as expressive. Those, usually in Sunday best, with billboard smiles, is how you would prefer people to see you. 

Jennifer Lopez by Annie Leibovitz

Then, there are the celebrity portraits, by the likes of Annie Leibovitz or Harry Borden. These are made when an actor or author has some new project to sell, and they need a clever image for the cover of Rolling Stone magazine or Vanity Fair. Or the cover of a band’s new CD. In a sense, these are not pictures of people but rather portraits of brands. They are selling us something. 

I don’t want to demean these pictures. The photographers who make such images can be tremendously talented, and their work is often memorable. But they are not usually true portraits, but rather, a form of marketing. 

Carole Steele

Finally, there are the portraits I am writing about, images that attempt to capture something genuine about the sitter. To tell you something about the actual person. It is in their eyes; their ancient glittering eyes. 

I have been making such pictures for more than 50 years, beginning back in the 1970s, when I worked at a camera store in Greensboro, N.C. I photographed like a demon, making records of friends, family and colleagues. At our home, I had one wall of the dining room covered with something like 30 or 40 photographs, held to the wall with small bits of masking tape on their backs. Some of these may have simply been snapshots of friends, but most were attempts at capturing something real or genuine about those subjects. 

Judy Crawford; Ron Pierce; Carole Steele

What most of the images shared were their eyes. I usually tried to get my subjects to look directly into the camera, forcing the viewer to make eye contact and creating a psychological bond with the sitter. Judy Crawford had eyes that were pools of infinite sadness. As Cicero wrote, “The face is a picture of the mind with the eyes as its interpreter.” There is intelligence shining from some, caring and feeling in some, suspicion or cynicism in others. The eyes have it. 

I am now too long in the tooth to mount any more gallery shows, or attempt to publish a book, but I thought I might use this blog to present a sampling of the portraits I have made over the years. Indulge me. 

Aimee Groulx

One of the first portraits I still show is of artist Aimee Groulx, who ran the Groulx School of Art in Greensboro, N.C. Actually, his wife, Adele, ran it. Aimee was the kind of free spirit who could not likely run a bath, let alone a business. I taught at the school briefly. Aimee always dotted the “X” at the end of his name when signing anything. “To prevent forgeries,” he said. 

Hank Hackett

Henry Parrish Lippincott Hackett was born to a mainline Philadelphia Quaker family and was great grandnephew to artist Maxfield Parrish. He was one of my closest friends from college. He was a frequent toker, and once I worried he might be doing too much weed. He assured me he had cut way down. “Only four or five joints a day,” he said. Once, he came to our home, a little bleary, and sat on the floor and said with complete earnestness, “Y’know, I feel more like I do now than I did when I came in.” 

Kacey Lamb

Kacey Lamb always refused to be photographed. By anyone. Maybe she was shy, or maybe she just thought it made her seem more mysterious. One day, when her husband, Larry, was out of town, she took revenge for being left alone by letting me take her picture. “Only one,” she insisted. One click of the shutter, one negative. 

Judy Crawford; Judy with her friend, Minnie

Judy Bryson Crawford was one of the most beautiful beings ever, both outside and inside, and spoke with an engaging drawl from the Blue Ridge Mountains. I first met her in the early 1970s when she lived on Cedar Street in Greensboro, N.C. with Junie Norfleet and Dara Llewellyn. Together they were known as “The Girls,” and their house was a meeting place for many of the more creative-minded young people of the city. She later moved back to her home near Balsam, N.C., just under the shadow of Waterrock Knob.

In 2003, in Phoenix, working at my newspaper, I scrolled the Associated Press wires and accidentally came across her obituary. It was one of the saddest days of my life. She was 56. 

Alexander and Mary Lou Barker

When I was a freshman in college, a rangy young man knocked on my dorm door, hearing that I was listening to a Beethoven quartet on my portable phonograph. We shared a passion for classical music and became lifelong best friends. About once a year Sandro and I drove to the Outer Banks to camp, usually in the winter, when the beaches weren’t crowded. He later married another Guilford alum, Mary Lou Hinton, and eventually moved to the Maine coast. There, always athletically inclined, he took up crosscountry skiing and especially loved skiing uphill.

Sharon Vernon

Sharon Vernon was my unofficial wife for seven years in the 1970s. She had red hair that shone the sun like copper. We saved money for a year so that we could take the next year off work to hike the Appalachian Trail to Maine. We got as far as northern Virginia when she sat down beside the trail and announced, “I’m not taking another step.” We were worn out, and destination hiking can be more tedious than it promises, always looking for the next trail marker and the next lean-to to spend the night. Little time to soak in the glories of nature. So, instead, we spent the rest of the year traveling around the Northeast by car. 

I intended to spend the rest of my life with her, but she decided otherwise, and we split in 1978. I took the train across the country to Seattle. 

Doug Nufer; Linda Olson; Ken Baker

In Seattle, I moved into a house with “The World’s Most Obscene Man,” Doug Nufer, and two lesbian doctors known as Cam and Clink. The house sat across the street from the Woodland Park Zoo, where I wound up working. 

He was a Bucky, which meant he was a bicycle delivery guy, taking mostly legal papers from law firm to law firm, pedaling roughly 50 miles a day up and down the hills of the Emerald City. His Bucky handle was Banana. 

He had previously been writing porno novels (Sixty-Nine In-Laws was his magnum opus), but now writes avant-garde novels, including one that never uses any word more than once. Unreadable, but that never seemed the point. It is often that way with the avant-garde. 

Linda Olson was my girlfriend’s roommate and a deltiologist, or collector of vintage post cards. For years after I left Seattle, we would mail each other tacky post cards we found. Ken Baker was a zookeeper, one of many I got to know there. When zoo management sent out a memo requiring keepers to wash their hands after visiting the bathroom, he got miffed. “Do they even know what zookeepers do? I wash my hands before going.” 

Alice Gilliam; Bill Marshak; Colin Murray

Before I had a straight girlfriend in Seattle, I dated gay Alice, a Bucky like Doug, and we went out together often, and to symphony concerts. She had once been a violinist in a touring Christian orchestra. Marshak was a grad student in Chinese studies, and it was always fun to go to a Chinese restaurant with him and order off-menu, while he chatted with the waiter. Colin (pronounced like Colin Powell) was briefly a housemate and wanted to be a male model, asking me to make some audition shots for him. He never seemed to grasp the irony that his boyfriend’s name was Dick.

Robin Reid

Robin Reid was a zookeeper in the Childrens’ Zoo at Woodland Park. Her hair was blonder than the sun. I fell wildly crazy about her. She was bright and lively, and had been a professional swing dancer at a local hotel. I was hooked, but I found out months later that she was not. “It’s all just hormones,” she said. When she dumped me, I was heartsick and decided to move back East. 

Carole Steele

After a few years of sulking, I was invited by the ex-wife of an old friend to visit her in the North Carolina mountains. We soon married and lived together for 35 years, until her death nine years ago. There has been a hole in the universe since then. Carole was the warmest person I ever knew, and also the smartest. She did not think outside the box; for Carole, there was no box. Widely known to friends as “Queen of the Universe,” she prompted me to everything that made me better. 

Craig and Carole

Eventually, I found some work as adjunct faculty at the same school where my brother, Craig, taught, in Virginia Beach, Va. Carole became an art teacher with the Norfolk school system. I have boxes of 5X7 prints of demonstration prints I made during my six years teaching, many of them from portrait class. 

Craig Nilsen and his wife, Terry

Craig is my brother, and the human being I am closest to. He is an artist, painter and printmaker, and taught full-time at the same school. He got me my job. He is now retired in the Virginia mountains with his wife, Terry. Brothers, like sisters, can have an almost mystical bond that can’t be explained. Perhaps it is shared DNA, or shared experience. 

Anne Iott; Pam Lassiter; Eva Dixon; Steve Wolf

Anne Iott was department head at the school, and bent rules to hire me, and allowed me to teach more hours of class than was technically legal. Her support was enormous, and she arranged for me to begin writing art criticism of the local Norfolk daily newspaper. She and the art staff, including Craig, and painting teacher Steve Wolf, would often have potluck dinners together. Those gatherings could get boisterous. Steve was a body builder and could consume huge amounts of food at a sitting, and once got thrown out of an all-you-can-eat seafood restaurant. Pam Lassiter was ceramics teacher. Eva Dixon was briefly Craig’s amour. She told him she had always wanted to ride an elephant, and so he entered and won a contest when the Barnum and Bailey circus came to town, and gave her his seat on the beast for the parade. 

Charles Williams; and his sketch of Carole and me

Carole’s boss in the Norfolk school system was dating artist Charles Williams, and we became friends. I photographed him, trying to get as close as I could, framing just his face and eyes. He, in turn, made a quick sketch of Carole and me. 

Richard Avedon; Lee Friedlander; Bob Haozous; James Turrell

Carole’s boss moved to Arizona and offered Carole a job there, and so in 1987, we moved to Phoenix, where I got a job writing for The Arizona Republic, mostly as art critic. I have made fewer photographs since then, but I did make my own photos for most of my interviews. I talked to a lot of artists, famous and not. Lee Friedlander was as matter of fact as his pictures. Bob Haozous, son of famous Apache artist Allan Houser, seemed suspicious of whitey critic; James Turrell took me up to the top of the volcano he was modifying outside Flagstaff. I once spent 24 hours in one of his skyspaces to watch it change with the light. There were many others I met and interviewed. 

When I reviewed Richard Avedon’s retrospective at the Whitney in New York, he sent me a note of thanks.  “Not all the New York critics were so kind,” he wrote. And when he came to Phoenix in 1994 to photograph boxer Oscar de la Hoya for The New Yorker, we went out to lunch. Sitting across the table, enjoying the Salvadoran food, he said, “In a sense, I am writing my autobiography through other people’s faces.” 

I suppose that is my excuse for this blog entry. 

Mel Steele

Over the years, my style has changed. Less formal, more relaxed. I photographed my brother-in-law Mel Steele in the 1980s, when he was a motorcyle-racing, gun-shooting, goat-raising artist, whose work sold in the thousands as prints. He grew older; I grew older. His country-nostalgia rural scenes became serious abstract paintings — among my favorite in the world — and my goal of being the next Avedon or Penn dwindled down to trying just to be honest and real. Mel turns 87 in October. He has slowed down, no longer rides motorbikes, and I have slowed down, writing less and making fewer images. 

And the effect on my being part of an inseparable bond with Carole, led me to pay way more attention to the interactions between people, and the number of dual portraits increased. 

Carole and Julie Ross 

The interaction between people is the essential valence of existence. It breaks the dam of isolation and opens the world up. Carole broke me open. 

Carole and Ruth Haggerty

When Carole was a little girl, Ruth was her best friend, living across the street. They lost touch for most of their lives, but became reacquainted something like 60 years later. But you can see in their eyes the connection had never fully been lost. 

Curtis Beckman and Isabel Fierros

I saw that warmth and connection in our friends Curtis and Isabel. I believe, but can’t prove, that my own age, my own intense partnership with Carole, softened me, made me more open, aware of others and their richness and complexity. 

Rob Lehman and Hank Hackett; Ursula McLaughlin and her daughter, Mia

As I look back through this sampling of portraits over 50 years, I see that those pairs have always been there. Hank and Rob from the ’70s; Ursula and her daughter from the ’80s. 

John and Alice Nilsen

And when I revisited a photograph I made many decades ago of my parents, John and Alice, I recognized something I didn’t see when I first took the photo. It’s in their eyes.

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YouTube — MyTube

August 24, 2026
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In Genesis 18, when Jehovah was still on speaking terms with humans, He negotiated with Abraham over the fate of the city of Sodom. Jehovah had decided to destroy the place, and all its wicked inhabitants, but Abraham said, “Whoa, there,” and asked, but what if there are 50 righteous men in the city (women apparently didn’t count), will you destroy the righteous along with the wicked? Jehovah paused, perhaps stroking His whiskers. “OK, then, if there are 50 righteous men…” 

“But what if there are only 45?” asked Abe. Jehovah pondered. “What if only 30? Or only 10?” The Almighty allowed, most likely in a voice of pique, since He was not accustomed to pushback: “I will not destroy it for the sake of 10.” 

(Let the record show that in Genesis 19, Jehovah rained down His fire and brimstone anyway and flattened the cities of the plain, saving only Abraham’s brother, Lot, and Lot’s family. Not quite 10 of them.)

I thought about this haggling between the patriarch and his boss, and I realized that whole thing might apply to YouTube as well. What a sewer of AI slop, ignorant ranting, political bloviating, fanboy nonsense and religious sophistry. 

Should we destroy the whole shebang? But what if there are 50 sites that have value? What if only 45? Or 30, or 10? 

I have enjoyed YouTube for years, but I have to avoid almost everything offered by my new Almighty Deity: the Algorithm. Most of what It thinks I might find interesting is pointless, useless, misleading, stupid and downright wrong. 

But there are a few sites that I go to frequently, either because I learn things from them, or I like the presenter, or they are genuinely entertaining. I thought I’d discuss a few of them and recommend them to likeminded individuals, pace the Algorithm. 

THE GREEN BOYS

The brothers Green, elder John and younger Hank, can be said to have justified the existence of YouTube all by their lonesomes. They have contributed to the “reduction in world suck” more than most can have dreamed of. 

In 2007, they began posting videos on YouTube as “letters” back and forth, from one brother to the other, mostly twice a week, one from John, in Indiana, to Hank, in Montana, and another from Hank to John. That took off as the Vlog Brothers, and became not just a family news catch-up, but each brother talking about whatever interesting thing had caught their fancy. And they were a very thoughtful pair. 

John was an enormously successful author of Young Adult Fiction, and Hank was a budding science explainer. More than that, Hank shot out ideas like a Roman candle, and soon, they started up a host of other YouTube sites. They developed a devoted online following for their endeavors, informally called “nerdfighters.” 

Hank and John with the Nerdfighter hand gesture

Nerdfighteria was largely made up of young idealistic people, wanting to make and inhabit a better world. In the Brothers Green, they found two young men who could be non-ironic and sincere without ever becoming sentimental or mawkish (the concomitant sins of earnestness). 

They have since become an industry, pumping out scads of entertaining and educational content, and managing to do practical good in the world. 

Together, in 2012, they developed Crash Course, a series of educational videos, meant primarily for high school students, that explained episodes of world history, and concepts of biology. Crash Course was eventually picked up by PBS and expanded to series on English literature, U.S. history, chemistry, psychology, anatomy, physiology, astronomy, government and politics, economics, and philosophy. Each series used animation and cleverly written explanations and video to make the major points of the discipline clear and entertaining. Eventually, there were some 50 Crash Course series made. They are commonly used in classrooms across the world. 

Parallel to Crash Course came SciShow, a group of series more specifically aimed at science education. There was also The Brain Scoop, with Emily Graslie, which looked at the practical side of science and research; Sexplanations, with Lindsey Doe, about human sexuality; Crash Course Kids, for younger viewers; PBS Eons, a history of life on earth; The Art Assignment, with Sarah Urist Green (John’s museum curator wife); and my favorite, Journey to the Microcosmos, in which Hank Green narrates microphotographic video footage of protozoan life, one of the most hauntingly beautiful and hypnotic series on YouTube. 

(It should be mentioned that Hank Green has also performed and recorded five albums of his own music, written two science fiction novels, performed a stand-up comedy show, and created Focus Friend, an app designed to temporarily block other apps, to allow easily distracted people to focus on the task at hand — an app named “App of the Year” in 2025. He has also devised a series of fund-raising not-for-profit businesses, selling everything from designer socks to artisanal coffees. The man is a dynamo.)

Hank Green’s “Hanklerfish” logo — “Don’t Forget To Be Awesome”

The brothers set up a not-for-profit company, called Complexly, to oversee all their projects, including over 10,000 videos and has built a substantial audience on YouTube, with more than 32 million subscribers and 55 million views per month. It collaborates with institutions and organizations such as PBS, Arizona State University, the National Science Foundation, and The Poetry Foundation to expand its reach and, according to industry sources, as of July, 2026, Complexly employs 134 people. 

Meanwhile, directed by the brothers, Nerdfighteria has raised millions for philanthropic causes, including some $50 million toward the construction of the first maternity hospital in Sierra Leone, which opened earlier this year. That country had the highest infant mortality rate in the world, but that rate has now been halved. 

There are other fundraising and charitable organizations the Green boys have created, including the annual Project for Awesome event, that has, since 2010, raised more than $30 million for various charities, under its parent organization, The Foundation to Decrease World Suck. 

And there’s Pizzamas, a two week event each September when Nerdfighter merch is sold and the receipts given to various charities. (The insignia for Pizzamas is a shirt with the image of John with his ill-advised — and temporary — mustache.)

John also led a Nerdfighter campaign to persuade pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson to allow generic versions of the tuberculosis drug bedaquiline to be produced, for sale in countries with high TB rates, making it cheaper for poor countries. (He also wrote a best-selling book, Everything is Tuberculosis, about the history and epidemiology of the disease. A best-seller — did I mention that?)

When they started online, their target viewership was ages 13 to 30, but both brothers are now in their 40s, and perhaps their fans have aged along with them, but younger audiences have continued to sign on. Their attitude and vocabulary skews young, but I’m 78, and I’m hooked. 

I’ve only skirted the bounds of Nerdfighteria. There are also the podcasts, and the books (and the films made from John’s books). When I say they are an industry, I am not exaggerating. 

Journey to the Microcosmos

BUT WAIT — THERE’S MORE

There is no end to YouTube videos. Most are of limited interest, at least to me. But there are a bunch I regularly check out when they post new entries. These are not all of them, but a recommended sample.

DAVID HURWITZ

The Green brothers are frighteningly prolific, but David Hurwitz is no slouch, producing an average of three new videos every day. He is a classical music critic and editor of the online magazine Classics Today. 

His videos are uniformly produced, as he sits at his desk in front of shelves and shelves of CDs, occasionally interrupted by his cats, and he talks about classical music recordings, both historical and current. He is lively and engaged. I have thousands of CDs on my shelves, but his must number in the hundreds of thousands, and he seems to have instant recall for all of them. 

I find myself simpatico with most of his taste, although he has a few blind spots and undeserving enthusiasms. He can’t mention Lalo’s Symphonie Espagnole without making a retching noise, and it seems anything conductor Charles Mackerras records is perfection personified. And he will tell you, for every performance, whether the tam-tam has been featured properly. At times his uninflected enthusiasms remind me of the old radio host DeKoven. (How many are old enough to remember him?) 

Classical music may be a niche subject for most Americans, but for those of us who have been listening to our Beethoven and Bartok for 60 years, Hurwitz is a joy. I watch him daily on the iPad while eating my breakfast. 

MAP MEN

The Map Men is a British video channel and is either an educational channel that is comic, or a pair of comedians talking about geography. And it is very funny. I mean laugh-out-loud funny. 

In it Jay Foreman and Mark Cooper-Jones dress up in costumes, add animations, write songs, and generally act out their themes with one-liners, sight gags, puns, and the ear-worm theme song: “Map Men Map Men Map Map Map Men Men.” 

They take on such subjects as how many countries are there in the world (it is not an easy answer); why is north at the top of the maps; why the Netherlands is 17 percent fake; what makes a city versus a town in England. 

Many YouTube sites are sponsored, and their makers interrupt their bits to sell you Incogni or Skillshare, but Jay and Mark make their ads just as entertaining as their regular content, so you never are tempted to fast forward through them. 

Their most recent video is from March this year and talks about the first geological map of England and the madman who created it and published it in 1799. 

ROB WATTS

There are a host of language channels on YouTube. I tend to watch them all, but Robwords is probably my favorite. Rob Watts is described by his book publisher, Penguin, as creator of “the world’s most-followed channel for the dissemination on intriguing if vaguely pointless facts about the English language.” 

Born English, he now lives in Germany and is a newsreader for Deutsche Welle, but he makes this YouTube channel about etymology, alphabets, language culture, and the odd bits of speech and print. Watts is personable, good humored without entering into stand-up territory, and well researched. 

He also takes part in a second YT channel, Words Unravelled, with an American counterpart Jess Zafarris, but I can’t bear watching it, as they are both too awfully bubbly and giddy, and Jess has an annoying vocal fry. 

I also frequently watch Taylor Jones, whose Language Jones site sometimes gets too polemical for my bland taste, and Geoff Lindsey, at drgeofflindsey, which is more academic and often quite technical. But I learn a lot. 

J.J. McCULLOUGH

McCullough was originally a political columnist, a Canadian conservative, but way too outlandish for any stateside version of that. With his towering hair and his weaving and bouncy body language, his primary concern on his videos is popular culture, of which he is a voracious consumer and thoughtful analyst. 

His videos are fast, energetically edited, with lots of quick cuts to referenced material. Occasionally, he talks about Canadian politics, which are opaque to his southern neighbors, but mostly it is American pop culture — not just movies and TV, but toys, comics, advertising, packaging, fashion, architecture and design. He has wide interests and has insightful things to say. 

Some may find his vocal delivery annoying, as he pauses and speeds up in a kind of herky-jerky speech rhythm as his head bobs to and fro. But, he is just fun to watch. 

BEKAH HARDING

A Brush with Bekah is a YouTube channel where (usually) purple-haired Bekah explores rare, historically forgotten, often toxic, sometimes radioactive pigments, and finds sources for them, and makes her own paints from them. She also discusses art history, and sometimes just has a political rant she needs to get off her chest. 

One such is titled “I Hate Picasso and You Should Too.” But most run toward “Making paint from Bugs,” “The dark history of mummy brown,” and “Science is changing the color of dinosaurs.” 

Sometimes she shows up as blond, sometimes a redhead, most often when not purple, her hair is black. And she wears punk or emo eye makeup. But she is clearly very smart, her research is thorough, and she has taught me a lot, not just about color, but more importantly, about pigment. 

MYSTERY

Whoever is behind the Moviewise site wants to remain anonymous. I can’t find him anywhere. But he produces some of the best, most insightful videos about the technical side of movies that I’ve come across. His narrative accent sounds very like that of Ernie Kovacs, but he has been cagey about where his roots are. Perhaps his family was also Hungarian? I dunno. Perhaps they just share the same adenoids. 

But if you want to see clips explaining the secrets of cinematic blocking, or expressive lighting or camera movement, he will have them to show, and take you through them almost frame by frame. 

He says, “I defend that, regardless of artistic intent or personal interpretation or cultural influence, there are objective aspects in stories and visuals that make movies succeed or fail, and by examining shots and screenplays we can find out what they are.”

I wait, champing at the bit, for each new installment. This is not a site about the great humanistic side of film history, but about how those films were constructed. 

Geoff Lindsey videos

WHAT ELSE

What any one person watches is a microscopic mote of dust in the forgotten corner of the room, compared with what is proffered. According to Wikipedia, even in 2019, videos were being uploaded to the platform at an inconceivable rate — 500 hours every minute, and estimates of the total number on the platform range from 15 billion to 40 billion. 

And so much of that is unwatchable — I don’t mean you can’t find them if you look, but such bad quality you can’t bring yourself to do it. Bad sound, bad editing, bad camerawork. And add into that all the political huff and chuff, and all the misinformation, all the conspiracy theories, all the fanboy rot, and cat videos, you could be excused for giving up. 

So, we rely on the newest deity, the Algorithm, to choose for us. And there are some worthy spots that leak through. These have been some for me. 

Captain Steeeve

Dan McClellan deals with biblical matters in a scholarly way, and debunks quite a bit of blather. Retired commercial pilot Steve Scheibner talks about aviation on the Captain Steeeve site (somehow, although he is 15 years younger than me, he still sounds more like my father than anyone — including the dad jokes). 

Rick Beato

Rick Beato is mainly about pop music, but has genuinely intelligent things to say about the notes and their structure, and not just, as most pop music critics do, the lyrics. Simon Whistler hosts a variety of videos on various channels. He’s more script-reader than writer, and some people are put off by what seems like a streak of careerism in him, but there is a lot to learn from the videos he hosts. 

Tom Scott

And one of the oldest continuous contributors has to be Tom Scott, who has been posting informative videos on odd topics since 2004, and on YouTube since 2014. He has a ranging curiosity, and his videos look to find answers to questions of geography, history, science, language, technology. 

He has created more than 900 videos and has 6.5 million subscribers with over 1.7 views. In 2024, he decided he was exhausted and stopped making videos, but now, he’s back again and at it once more. His genial way and genuine engagement always make him worth watching. 

I’ve mentioned a few sites that I have enjoyed. They cover things I am interested in. But there are worthy sites for other interests, whether astronomy, railroads, antiques, literature, insects, pick-a-subject. But you have to plod through the weeds to find them. 

So, perhaps we won’t rain down fire and brimstone upon YouTube, but we are still better off avoiding the dreck. 

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Eye am a camera

August 16, 2026
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I made my living as a writer, spending my career primarily as an art critic and travel writer with The Arizona Republic in Phoenix. But it didn’t start out that way. Originally, I planned to be a photographer. I spent years working with my cameras and hoping to become the next Ansel Adams. 

Yosemite Falls

I got my first camera when I was about 12, a Brownie Hawkeye, which I took on family vacations. I got my first SLR in 1965 — a rather primitive Praktica, which I took to Europe with me. Only a few pictures remain from those early efforts, including this image of Kristiansand in Norway. I was 17. 

Kristiansand, Norway

College came next and I took very few photographs, but after graduation, I began a very serious addiction to acquiring ever newer and greater cameras, marching up through Nikons and Leicas, hoping for a Hasselblad, and eventually getting a 4X5 field camera with a Super Angulon lens (don’t worry if these names are Greek to you; they don’t mean anything anyway. They are hardly more than shibboleths for photo geeks.)

I got job in a camera store, and for the next several years, acquired a full darkroom setup, used my employee discounts to experiment with various films, chemicals and printing papers, until I became an accomplished darkroom technician. I got deep blacks and whites that never blanked out. 

Then, in the ’70s, I was hired as a photographer for the Carolina Peacemaker, a Black weekly newspaper in Greensboro, N.C. But when the editor quit, I got his job, and became factotum, writing editorials, a food column and I became “Dear Carol,” the advice columnist, along with taking photos. It did seem, at the time, a bit peculiar for a white guy to be the editor, but then, the other reporter was also white. (At the time, talented Black writers were being head-hunted for the previously all-white daily paper, bypassing the usual route to the African-American press). 

The writing came by default, but I still considered myself a photographer. And not a jobbing photojournalist, but one with my aim being art galleries and photo books. And all my personal work tended to be in traditional genres: portraits, landscapes, still lifes, nudes, architecture. For some reason, street photography never much interested me. 

In the mid-1980s, my wife and I moved to Virginia, where I spent six years teaching photography at a two-year college. Back then, we taught black-and-white photography. Color was left to jobbing professionals, and digital photography was unheard of. (It’s odd to remember, but back then color photography was not widely accepted as art. It was looked down on as fit only for glossy magazines, advertising, and Sunday lifestyle sections in newspapers. The medium was thought to lack permanence — dyes faded — and most museums didn’t collect color). The school built a darkroom with a dozen enlargers and all the sinks and equipment needed, and I had all the students I could handle. 

I loved teaching — or perhaps I just loved having an audience. But I continued with my own work, again, in all the usual genres. 

Because we were both teachers, we had summers free to travel, which gave me a chance to visit all 48 contiguous states, and most many times. I vacuumed up landscapes and have a collection of what must number into the tens of thousands of landscape photos. 

Judy Crawford; Hank Hackett; Pam Henry

I had always photographed friends and colleagues, and taught a yearly course in portrait photography. My models were formal rather than candid. I loved the work of Irving Penn and Richard Avedon, and it shows, I’m afraid. 

My method went against the trend. Most photographers preferred a longer lens for portraits, like and 85mm or 105mm lens. I felt that such a lens kept the photographer too far away from his subject. I wanted to insist on a kind of intimacy, that the subject should be kept a bit on edge and alert. So I taught using a wide-angle lens for portraits, and getting up close. 

Carole Steele

I also insisted that the subject look directly into the lens, giving the pictures both a confrontational aspect, and also a peek into the “window of the soul.” 

I have made a trove of nudes, too, both studio and outdoors. Over the years I have had a series of models. Only one person I asked declined the request. I believe I have avoided anything too exploitive and always, I hope, looked for the human being wearing the skin. 

Still lifes are often pictures of flowers in vases, and I confess to having taken a barge-load of such pictures. But the percentage of blossoms has dwindled over the years, and other things have taken the focus. 

And I tried many experiments, with chemicals and printing papers, seeing ways to make something like abstract art. 

Yet, even while teaching photography, I wrote out instructional sheets for my students, and tried to be at least a bit amusing in them. My four main rules for better photography were: “Get close; make sure your lens cap is off; hold the camera steady; get closer.” Just these rules will improve the beginner’s pictures by a proven 800 percent. 

All this takes me to the late 1980s, and a major change. My department head at the school saw the handouts I had written for my students, and decided I had some talent for putting words together. She knew the Norfolk newspaper was looking for a freelance art critic, and suggested I write some sample art reviews of local shows. I wrote one about a new Edward Hopper painting bought by the Chrysler Museum and The Virginian-Pilot printed it and signed me up. For a year or so, I wrote a review for each Sunday edition. The extra income helped. 

Truck stop in Texas

In the mid-’80s, my wife got a job offer in Arizona and we piled everything we owned into a Ryder truck and crossed the country, towing our car and keeping a cat in the cab the whole way. I applied for a job at The Arizona Republic, based on my experience with the Norfolk paper. To my great surprise, they hired me. I became a writer.

For the next 25 years, I functioned as an art critic, a travel writer, an editor, and, eventually a critic writing about classical music, ballet, architecture, theater, and movies. For many of the pieces I wrote, especially interviewing artists, I took my own pictures.

Artist Fritz Scholder and novelist Diana Gabaldon

The Republic was generous in sending me off on travel for stories, including a trip to South Africa, and I used my vacations as source for many of my other travel pieces. 

Paris

Such photographs were journalism (not that there’s anything wrong with that). But I never stopped making my own work. But there was a growing difference. The formality of my past work had loosened up. I was no longer concerned with the silly strictures that had been so important to the art photography movement from the ’50s through the ’80s, when cropping was thought a sin, the Zone System was the magic elixir, and documentary fidelity was a jealous god. It all began to seem quite beside the point. 

Curtis Beckman and Isabel Fierros; Mel Steele

My portraits became warmer, more human. 

Landscapes tended to shrink down into details. In fact, the whole change in my approach was less a concern with art and all its concern with composition and metaphor, and more a means of focusing my attention. Paying attention to the world became the aim. The image was merely the by-product. I mean, how many greens are there? Pointing a camera can make you notice such things. They are important. 

And so, I found myself “pecking,” in the word that Lee Friedlander uses. I would see some detail and try to make it work as a design. They were often random things in the house or car. 

The natural world was infinitely various, and seeing the bits that made up the whole drew my attention. 

There was texture, rhythm and physical presence in these minor, normally unnoticed micro-worlds. 

I also found the images worked better in groups, and so I began making sequences, mean to be seen almost as a visual story. Individual images became less the point, and relationships from one to the next took over. 

Jardin des Plantes, Paris; Judy’s garden, New Orleans

With my interest in natural details and vegetative profusion, I started a series of garden sequences, each group containing from 10 to 20 related images. I made series in friends’ back yards, public gardens, anywhere plants defined space. 

Doug’s garden, Seattle

I love gardens, but I love weeds, too, and trees. There just seems such a rich variety in nature. But, again, I wasn’t no longer thinking of the work as art, although I don’t know what else you could call it.

Title sign and opening at Tidewater Community College, Portsmouth, Va. 

At one point, I gathered about a hundred images, organized in 12 “books” and was invited to mount a show at my old Virginia school. 

To make these series more palpable, I began making a series of bound books, using the Blurb app, and have now assembled 14 volumes. They look good on my bookshelf, and I’ve given away many copies, but they are, after all, just vanity projects. But, boy, they do look good. 

When I was younger, I tried to make art; now, I don’t care about that: I concern myself with looking, paying attention, becoming immersed in the world I inhabit. Photography is just the means I have to focus my awareness. Being more aware is being more human. 

This freeing up of my intention also let me play around more. I bought a $1.98 Diana camera and took it to Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. 

I made a series of flower prints by scanning them on a flatbed scanner instead of using a camera.

Anne Iott

Playing with the options of Photoshop, I made a faux watercolor from a photo of my college department head. 

I woke up one day and noticed that sunlit trees outside my windows looked rather like images on a Japanese shoji screen. 

I used multiple images of crossed tree branches, overprinted them to make an abstract image, looking rather like a Jackson Pollock.

I found abstractions everywhere, including these micro-scratches in the silver paint of our old Buick, and looking rather like something from a Wilson cloud chamber, or perhaps a Cy Twombly. 

Snow melt on front stoop

The more I looked, the more I found, turned into patterns rather than things you might name. 

When I was a young man, I desired an audience. Having gallery shows or publishing books seemed to have a point. Now, I find I make images simply for myself. It has turned out true for my writing, as well. 

For a quarter of a century, I wrote for my reading audience. If no one read what I wrote, I wouldn’t have been paid for it. And it was gratifying, I admit, to be recognized in the supermarket, or to have Richard Avedon write to me after having read one of my reviews. But it has now been 14 years since I retired, and have written almost as much on this blog as I did then, and for no pay. I just cannot stop writing. And it is still pleasant to get comments from readers, but I write for myself, to clarify my thoughts, to express my feelings. Anything beyond is gravy. 

Rest stop on I-40, east of Asheville, N.C.

And it is the same with my camera. It is my response to the world. I make these images to interact with that world, to force my gaze, to pay attention. 

The most important lesson I ever got from college was from the professor who forced me to “engage with the text.” That simply re-uttering what he had said in class was not enough. I had to find my own way in the subject, bring something to it, rather than just memorize. Engage. Pay attention. It’s real, not just some hoop to jump through to get a degree. There is genuine reward, intellectually and emotionally, for involving your best self with what the cosmos has to offer. You will be more alive. 

Click on any image to enlarge

Becoming Southern

July 31, 2026
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Am I Southern? I have lived in the American South for most of my life. I am comfortable with most of the culture and folkways of the region. Both my marriages have been to Southern women and this is the place I choose to live. But I was not born here. Worse, I came from New Jersey. 

If there is anything more un-Southern than Bergen County, just off the George Washington Bridge, I would be hard pressed to name it. Even the wilds of Afghanistan has more in common with life in the South than I had growing up. That sense of tribal identity — of living in the hardscrabble land, of having kinship with the soil, the bona fides of regional identity — that is more Southern than life along the Turnpike. I don’t remember anyone I grew up with pounding their chests with pride saying “I’m from New Jersey.” No one cared. My family didn’t go back five generations there.  

It is true that the South has changed, become more cosmopolitan. Not everyone’s a farmer growing tobacco or sorghum. Interstate migration has diluted the percentage of homegrown folk, and cities such as Atlanta or Houston have radically altered the demographics. Even the accent and vocabulary have begun evening out. 

Yet, there is still that sense of Southernness. It may be less clannish than it used to be, but it is still layered in to the psyche of anyone who grew up here. 

I first arrived in 1966, entering college in central North Carolina. There was then still a strong backlash — even a mainstream backlash — against the Civil Rights movement. Jesse Helms spewed his racist venom on the radio waves, and was soon elected to the U.S. Senate. His campaign, against Democrat Nick Galifianakis, preyed on bigotry and that suspicious foreign-sounding name: “Vote for Jesse; he’s one of us.” The Klan was still in business. If schools were legally desegregated, most communities still had a Black side of town. 

No one now takes a second notice of a Black family sitting at the Red Lobster. I’m not claiming racism is over; it is not. But the norms have shifted. Black newscasters on TV or a Black state trooper are hardly noted. 

One thing I noticed as soon as I got here: There is and was a countervailing sense of manners that didn’t play out in the same way back in New Jersey. Some of it struck me as odd, initially, and even worse, some seemed absolutely hypocritical. I didn’t understand. 

I remember a perfect example of how this works in the South, and why I have come to understand the brilliance of it. Many years ago, my wife’s teenage cousins (“cousin” is a loosely-defined concept in the South) had bought some new tires for their car. When one of the tires had a blow-out, their father, a Yankee transplant from Massachusetts, drove to the tire-store and screamed at the man there, “You goddamn kid killer! Someone coulda died! — why’d you sell those rotten tires?” He demanded an apology and satisfaction. All he accomplished was to raise the hackles of the tire salesman. Ineffective strategy. Made sense in Boston, but not in North Carolina. Luckily, cooler heads intervened. 

Their Southern-born mom intervened and had a long conversation with the salesman, after first apologizing for her husband. “You have some really nice tires here.” “Thank you ma’am. We try.” “I know. But sometimes something slips through, and I know you would never, ever want to let that happen.” “Well, no, ma’am.” “I’m afraid, I don’t know why, but one of the new tires my daughter bought had a little blow-out. Brand-new, you understand.” “I’m very sorry to hear that.” “Well, I’d hate to inconvenience you, but I know you would want to make things right.” “Of course, ma’am.” I believe there was also a bit of discussion about the salesman’s son, who went to the same high school as the girls, and probably a bit, too, about whose aunt had known whose aunt and a recipe for a good coconut cake. Things resolved amicably and no one was further accused of anything nefarious. 

This is a culture, after all, where the gravest insult comes in the form of “Bless your heart.” 

  I know full well that since I wasn’t born here, I can never truly be Southern. And I also have been reminded constantly by my wives that I’m a Yankee. Even if they haven’t held it against me, the fact is always there. I grew up with bagels and saurkraut, not with biscuits and slaw. 

My ex-wife asks if it even matters if I’m Southern or not. Why should I care? “There’s no court you have to prove it to,” she says. “Yes there is,” I say. “There’s in-laws.”

As the years slid by, I have become increasingly acculturated, so that I now lift four fingers off the steering wheel in salute of drivers headed the other way. I talk slower than I used to (part of that, I admit, is age). I am no longer surprised by ham hocks in my beans (which, of course, I now call “pintos”), and I find myself saying “sir” and “ma’am” in a way that would have made my New Jersey relatives look at me like I was an alien. Up there, it was closer to “Hey, Mack…” 

I would say the transformation is roughly 80 percent complete. I still love pickled herring in sour cream, bagels with a schmear, and cannot yet bring myself to accept the local pizza. I have been ruined by the New Jersey version, perfection in every aspect. 

And when I open a tin of King Oscar kippers for a sandwich, Anne will call from the other room, “What is that stink?” And I cannot get used to sweet tea. Curls my tongue. I take mine unsweetened. 

I love Eastern North Carolina barbecue and hushpuppies. And I now understand that the dried-out Shake’n’Bake chicken I had growing up (more wood plank than comestible) has absolutely nothing to do with fried chicken. I grant your fried chicken balances my pizza. 

It has taken me longer to accept boiled greens, but I have gotten there. I had spinach growing up, but collards stewed with sidemeat until it turned to something akin to road tar — well, that took a little longer. And, to be fair, even most Southerners now let their turnip greens keep a resemblance to its original form as plant life. I now am able to add them to my plate sprinkled with some vinegar. 

One one side of the ledger, I’ve now fired rifles and pistols recreationally; I wait for pedestrians crossing the road in front of me (that was a hard one for me: where I came from efficiency was the rule — who could get out of the way faster, and it was usually the car); I automatically walk on the traffic side of the sidewalk when with my wife; I make small talk with the checkout staff at the grocery store (and I now call it a grocery store instead of a supermarket). 

On the other side of the ledger, I’m told I talk too fast; I have no interest in college football; I don’t listen to country music, and Anne tells me “you’re still unsound on black-eyed peas.” On my first trip to the barber, making small talk, he asked which church I attend. “I’m not a believer,” was the nicest way I could answer, and the subject changed. 

If there is something that draws a line I cannot cross, it is probably Robert E. Lee. My late wife, Carole, kept a portrait of Bobby Lee in the china cupboard. I was never allowed to say nary a  word ’gainst his sainthood, and in converse, she would bring the hammer of heaven down upon my head if I ever said anything temperate about Wm. Tecumseh Sherman. “Villain!!!” 

My vocabulary has shifted, too. Southern expressions fall out of my mouth without my even being aware of them. I say “Y’all” unconsciously, and even “all y’all.” I am fixin’ to do something. “Cattywampus” and “plumb” — as in “plumb outa Crisco” — I hardly note as I say them. “Reckon” is now in my regular speech, as is “poke,” as in where I lodge my vittles when I haul’em from the grocery store. I have been known to call my jeans “britches,” and my suspenders “galluses.” But that is more mountain talk than just Southern.

I asked Anne how I’ve changed over the years. “You’re not as obnoxious as you used to be,” she says. 

I have been well trained by a series of serious-minded women, among them wives, girlfriends and mothers-in-law. With an emphasis for the last on “law.” I know my place.

Having second thoughts

July 25, 2026
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I heard Allen Ginsberg say one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard. He had come to town to talk about a work he had collaborated on with Philip Glass, Hydrogen Jukebox. It was a powerful piece, which I first heard live, performed in Tucson. 

I have always loved Ginsberg’s poetry, from the first, when I read Howl in that tiny, squarish paperback published by City Lights Books. It is one of the great poems of the 20th century. I eventually collected his later books, including Kaddish, Planet News, Reality Sandwiches, although it was clear that not all his writing was up to the level of Howl. He was a very spotty writer, and the older he got, the less interesting the spots. 

He sat on the stage that evening, in Scottsdale, talking about his work and making a case for his then-motto: “First thought, best thought.” How the version an idea comes to you spontaneously will always be better than it will be if you fuss over it and refashion it. Revision always dilutes the inspiration, he said. “First thought, best thought.

As a writer myself, my first best thought was: “Bullshit.” The man has deluded himself with his own bunkum. Most writers will tell you, honestly, that the first draft is always improved by reshaping, clarifying, expansion or excision. Writing is rewriting. 

That doesn’t mean that the initial idea is worthless, but it needs refining, and especially, it needs to have the really dumb parts taken out. 

The proof of this comes from Ginsberg himself, to be seen in Harper Perennial’s 50th anniversary edition of Howl, the original draft facsimile. His best poem, considered such by almost anyone’s account, was heavily reworked and refined, honed to a sparkle. 

First thought: “I saw the best mind angel-headed hipsters damned./ What consciousness in oblivion, Joan?” Written in August, 1955. A week later, in the original draft of Howl, it became: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving mystical naked,/ who dragged themselves through the angry streets at dawn looking for a negro fix,/who poverty and tatters and fantastic minds sat up all night in lofts contemplating jazz”

Doesn’t have quite the inevitable ring and resonance of the published version: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,/ dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,/ Angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection/ to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night” 

That’s quite an upgrade, from “poverty and tatters” and “fantastic minds” to “starry dynamo in the machinery of night.” Prose to poetry. 

Do I think Ginsberg was a hypocrite for his espoused faith of “first thought, best thought”? I think less hypocrite and more that he was drinking his own Kool-Aid. He and his fellow writers — the Beat writers — became fascinated with Buddhism and stories of Zen spontaneity, of Haiku masters whipping up an instant 17 syllables of enigmatic profundity. Most likely, these tales of Basho and Buson are legends and myths, conjured years later. I rather imagine them counting syllables on their fingertips and honing the verse in their minds before committing them to their mouths. Careful craftsmanship. 

The Beat version of Buddhism, and the accouterments of Chinese and Japanese culture are a fantasy. In a way, it might be hinted, this was the Beat version of what Edward Said called “orientalism,” and the hypnotic attraction of exoticism. 

I remember visiting the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colo., to visit an old college buddy, who had joined the group. As we wandered through the campus, we passed a classroom, where Ginsberg was teaching. The students were chanting, along with the poet, a monotonous phrase in Tibetan — “Om mani padme hung” — over and over, so the noise coming through the open door sounded more like the insect buzz of a summer evening. 

This was part of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, which Ginsberg had co-founded. And I have no doubt that chanting the mantra may have helped some students focus their minds. I practice a form of meditation, myself, although I don’t call it that — mostly I call it sitting on the back patio looking at the trees and clouds and trying to think no thoughts at all. So, I am not making fun of them. I don’t doubt their sincerity. But I do worry that importing portions of an exotic culture, without having grown up immersed in it, may be charged with being a version of cultural tourism. Yellow robes do not a Buddhist make. 

But Ginsberg has enriched our trove of poetry. In addition to Howl, there is Kaddish (especially moving in the audio version with the poet reciting his own words), and shorter poems such as Kral Majales. You learn to separate the wheat from the chaff. 

I reread Howl periodically. It gives me great pleasure, the way certain poems do, for me, such as Wordsworth’s “Intimations Ode,” Whitman’s Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, Arnold’s Dover Beach, Conrad Aiken’s Tetélestai, or Dylan Thomas’ Fern Hill. Poems that dig deep and remain buried in the psyche. They refresh my sense of language and of being alive. 

It is also true, as with Ginsberg, that a good portion of Wordsworth is banal and prosaic, a boatload of Whitman is blather, most of Arnold’s poetry is forgettable, and, let’s face it, Aiken doesn’t make most anthologies of the best American verse. But each has been capable of magic, and I read these poems over and over, the way you listen to favorite tunes.

In his best work, Ginsberg fussed and reworked and licked the bear-whelp into something infinitely quotable and meaningful. If he had stuck to his first thought, no one would still be reading it. 

Naming names

July 15, 2026
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When Wolfgang Mozart was three, he was already picking out notes on a keyboard. His father recognized the potential earnings potential and trotted young Wolfie around as a prodigy, showing off to wealthy patrons for their gratuities. I’m no Mozart, and my talent was of an infinitely smaller order, but I remember when I was three and my father showed me off, too. 

At that tender age, I had learned to recognize all the cars that passed on the street in front of our house in Teaneck, N.J. I would sit on the front stoop and call out names as they drove by. That would have been in 1951, and the cars were quite distinct. There were Packards and DeSotos; there were Mercuries and Studebakers — each with their characteristic shapes, grills, ornaments and sizes. 

DeSoto

It was only a few years since the war ended, and many older cars remained on the road, like the LaSalles or the pre-war Fords. Our next door neighbor even had a car with a rumble seat. (They were comically called “mother-in-law seats,” although I can’t believe many could had clambered up to get in.)

1939 Plymouth with rumble seat

At three, I knew the Pontiac had three chrome stripes on its hood; the Buick had its portholes; the Ford had its bullet-grill; the Hudson seemed as broad as the river I thought it was named for. Many station wagons had wood paneling. I had them all down pat. 

1950 Ford station wagon

And on July 4 that year, when I was three-and-a-half years old, the family drove down the hill to watch the fireworks over the Hackensack River. There was a crowd gathered. The gravel parking lot was full, with people lining the banks of the river to catch the display. I sat on the hood of Dad’s black 1950 Chevrolet and not much liking the noise. Two of my uncles were there, too, with their families. And Dad decided to show me off. And so, with uncles in tow, and a few of their friends, too, we trooped up and down the lot with me announcing the names of every car we passed, all to the astonishment of the grown-ups. Hudsons, Studebakers, Packards, to say nothing of the Fords, Oldsmobiles, Buicks, and Nashes. I felt so proud showing off. I don’t know if Dad actually took wagers or not, but he clearly enjoyed bragging on his son. 

1950 Frazer

Through the 1960s, cars designs remained distinct, especially with the absurdly growing tail fins — or the Edsel, described as “a Ford sucking a lemon.” The also grew to be great barges of the road, rolling with wobbly suspensions (which you can’t help notice on old TV reruns when those leviathans turn corners). But cars have since been growing more generic. 

1950 Buick Special Deluxe Jumbo

Oddly, as I became a teenager, when most of my buddies were swooning over 400 horsepower behemoths and zero-to-sixty ratings, I had no real interest in car culture. I have always loved driving, but never much cared which car I was driving in. But something of that original car-naming from my preschool days survived. 

1950 Nash Airflyte

As I grew up and went to school, the habit of learning and naming classes of things continued. In the third grade, it was dinosaurs; in fourth grade, it was whales; fifth grade brought ships. On it went. Later, with birdwatching, or the naming of wildflowers. Most recently, I compiled a list of the names of British comedians I recognized on sight; it had 127 names on it. I guess you never get over it. It’s a form of acquisition, and all adds to the trove of knowledge and experience. A hunger for knowing. 

1950 Pontiac Chieftan

There is a streak that mainly boys seem have: learning and naming. I don’t remember schoolgirls having anything like the habit. Maybe they did and I just didn’t notice. To boys at that age, between the ages of maybe five and the advent of puberty, girls are, if not the enemy, at least utterly foreign. 

1949 Packard 23 Series club sedan

Many boys never outgrow this naming quirk. Often a concern with regalia properly sorted. When I was an art critic in Phoenix, the museum had an annual show of Cowboy Art, with lots of paintings of shoot-em-ups, horse wrangling; cow-punching and war parties. All kinds of Western movie tropes, but with the serious, almost solemn belief in “historical accuracy.” No one would picture a Montana cowboy riding the kind of saddle popular in Texas, or show a sheriff holding a gun in 1882 that wasn’t manufactured until 1893. They could be quite persnickety about such things. Women’s hair-dos, though, not so much care in that, but then, women didn’t much figure in their mythologies. When I wrote a review that made fun of such things, I wound up being hanged in effigy in a cartoon in Western Horseman magazine. 

1950 Ford Custom Club coupe

All this came back to me the other day as I sat at a red light and noticed the flood of cross traffic. I could see vehicle after vehicle pour across the intersection with monotonous sameness. There is no way I could tell anymore a Honda from a Kia.  

Three seemed to be only three kinds of vehicles, each sharing a sameness with others in its class: First, the SUVs, bigger than they need to be — the bullies of the highway; second, the small sedans — they used to be derided as “European jogging shoes” — that are faceless as store mannequins; and finally, the pickup trucks. This last may be more prominent in the South, where I live, but the cars crossing in front of me seemed about equally divided into these three. The only punctuation in this repetitive tune was the public transit bus. 

The only way to discover the difference was if you could see the logo on the trunk. What was once the personalities of their manufacturers have become mere brand names, no more different than yogurt brands or actual jogging shoes. 

1957 Nash Rambler Metropolitan

How different from when I was three or four and naming the cars (with a certain amount of joy in their esthetics, and pride in my ability to name them). They were very distinct designs. “We had faces then,” as Gloria Swanson says in Sunset Boulevard. (actually, I looked it up and misremembered. She actually said, “We didn’t need dialog; we had faces.” But same thing, right?) Car manufacturers used their special designs to sell the cars and create identity. Hence the broad Packard and the Studebaker, with its pooched “mouth.”  

1950 Studebaker Commander

I don’t know why there is such a paucity of interesting design among cars. When I was little, they really did have faces.

Around the block a few times

July 11, 2026
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I’m now 78 and I’ve done a few things in my life. Probably most people have. Things they can list that few others have managed. Places visited; people who have impacted their lives; adventures to recount to grandchildren. 

And so I think back to recount my own experiences, those particular to my own past. Maybe others have similar lists. This is mine. 

I’ve been charged by a bear, for instance. How many people can say that? I was hiking the Appalachian Trail in Smoky Mountain National Park with a few friends. By late afternoon, we reached a lean-to shelter and I walked out onto the path with my camera, when a black bear — maybe two or three years old — crossed the trail about 30 feet from me, spotted me, didn’t like what he saw and turned and charged at me. He was no more than five feet away when he veered off to my right and chugged off into the woods. I was stupid enough that while he came at me, instead of running back to the shelter, I took photos, so at least now, I have the evidence. If it’s a tad fuzzy, I’m sure you can understand. 

Certainly the bear makes my list. But I tried remembering other things that would make the list of things peculiar to my life, that few people are unlikely to have shared.

Almost no one now crosses the Atlantic on an ocean liner. I did, in 1966 aboard the MS Oslofjord from New York to Norway, when I accompanied my grandmother to the Old Country where she was born. I was a high-school student at the time, and I remember standing on the ship’s deck watching the Orkney Island lights at midnight, bright points on the black horizon as we sailed past. 

There’s a lot of travel in my past. I’ve crossed the U.S. twice by train. Once when I moved from North Carolina to Seattle, taking the Southern Crescent from Greensboro to New York, the Twentieth Century Limited from NY to Chicago and the Empire Builder from Chicago to Seattle. 

The Southern Crescent

I recall the dreamlike lights of Toledo factories as we passed after midnight; the 10-below zero air when I stretched my legs at the station in Minneapolis; the vast empty spaces between farmhouses in South Dakota; and the track-side elk watching the train pass by near Yakima, Wash. 

The second time was more luxurious: Working for the Phoenix newspaper, I was assigned to write a story about the then newly-launched Sunset Limited route from LA to Miami that passed through Phoenix, bringing the first rail service to the city in decades. 

The paper flew me to Los Angeles where I boarded, and flew me back from Miami when finished. In between, I had a sleeper compartment and ate my meals in the dining car, which Amtrak had fitted out initially with a first-class galley and real chefs. That didn’t last long after my trip, before cost-cutting turned steak into saran-wrapped bologna sandwiches. 

Mississippi at Cairo, Ill. 

One of my beats at the newspaper was as a travel writer and I got to choose many of my subjects. I have driven the length of the Mississippi River from its source at Lake Itasca in Minnesota to its end in the Gulf of Mexico. So, I’m one of the few people who have ever visited Cairo, Ill., which is a largely deserted town, at the tip of the state where the Ohio River pairs with the grandfather of all American waters. 

I have also driven the Pacific Coast Highway from Tijuana, Mexico to Vancouver, British Columbia. And as part of that trip, I got to stop off at Point Roberts, that tiny exclave of the U.S. that can only be reached overland by driving through parts of Canada. Virtually nobody visits there, because there is nothing to be seen or done, and the only reason to go there is to be able to say you had done so. 

Back before the wilder parts of the road were closed to traffic, I drove the length of Mulholland Drive and Highway, across the crest of the Santa Monica Mountains, from its beginning at the Hollywood Freeway over Cahuenga Pass, past all the film stars’ extravagant homes into the brushland wilderness, with its dirt roads, and finally down to the Pacific Coast Highway at Leo Carillo State Beach, some 55 miles later. 

I pitched a story to my editor about the Hundredth Meridian that traditionally divided the East of the country from the West — the line that separated the land that got more than 20 inches of rain per year, from that which got under that amount. I drove from Laredo, Texas to the Canadian border, writing stories the whole way. And when I got back, I conspired with a page designer to take over an entire Sunday travel section with my pieces — all without telling my editor. “If you had told me, I would never have permitted it,” she said. “But I’m glad you did it. I looks great.” Easier to ask forgiveness than permission.

Clearing storm, Mont St. Michel

I have been many places in my life. I’ve been to Mont Saint-Michel in France, that island abbey on the coast of Normandy, where the tides come in at such a speed that anyone walking on the mud flats at low tide is in danger of drowning. I’ve been to see the Bayeux Tapestry in its current home. I’ve listened to the organist at Notre Dame de Paris play a recital of Messiaen. 

Two views of gargoyle rainspout at Chartres Cathedral

I’ve climbed to the top of Chartres Cathedral, where I could look down at the gargoyle rainwater drains and see their channels and spouts. For that matter, I’ve visited most of the major gothic churches of northern France. 

I stood at night on the banks of the Rhine River in Dusseldorf, German, where the composer Robert Schumann had lived and written his deeply romantic Rhenish Symphony. The rushing current of the mile-wide river, catching moonlight in its waves, seemed the essence and power of  nature. 

Cape of Good Hope, South Africa

I had always had an interest in the remote and isolated places in the world, and I got to visit the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, which is as remote and isolated as you can pretty much get. While in that country, I also got to taste grilled mopane worms. Few Americans have managed that, or would care to. 

I’ve been to Hudson Bay in Canada, to Percé Rock on the Gaspe Peninsula, to Glacier Bay in Alaska, to the Yukon, and to the Cape Verde Islands (although that one hardly counts, since it was a layover on the flight to Africa; I didn’t get to see much; bragging rights only). 

I have been to all 48 contiguous states many times. I used to say “I’ve been everywhere, man, I’ve been everywhere.” And indeed, I can bore my wife when watching some film on TV and I recognize locations I’ve been. “I’ve been there,” I say. She gives me the side-eye. 

I’ve canoed with alligators in the Okefenokee Swamp. Driven through Death Valley in July in a car with no air-conditioning — nearly collapsed from dehydration and had to drink a full gallon of water to revive.  

Zabriskie Point, Death Valley, Calif. 

I have driven the length of the Blue Ridge Parkway I don’t know how many times, and the continuing Skyline Drive, also. There are notable roads, often over mountain peaks, such as the Going-to-the-Sun Road in Montana’s Glacier National Park, the Beartooth Highway from Montana into Wyoming (we drove in the summer, but it still snowed in flurries), the Tioga Road over the Sierra Nevada. Or the roads in the East like the Kancamagus Highway in New Hampshire, the Natchez Trace from Mississippi to Tennessee, and the Colonial Parkway that runs from Jamestown to Yorktown in Virginia. Many more with no special names.

Richard Avedon

I took photographer Richard Avedon out to lunch at my favorite  Salvadoran restaurant in Phoenix. I interviewed Duke Ellington’s son, Mercer, when he brought the band to play in Phoenix. I talked to him only about his own music (sure that he was tired of repeating all the chestnuts about his old man), and at the concert, he dedicated a performance of his  Blue Serge to me, saying the band hadn’t played it in 20 years, but they brought it out and spiffied it up just for me. I knew Frederick Sommer, the reclusive Surrealist photographer who lived in Prescott, Ariz., and visited his home several times, where we talked about things that would have made no sense to anyone listening in. 

I’ve fired guns a few times over the years, once when I was training to be a security guard (a low point in my career), and several times at black-powder gatherings. My wife had a flintlock carbine that I had the pleasure of firing. A lot of smoke and a loud, brusque “whoosh” rather than a cracking “bang,” and a .50 caliber ball blew out the barrel at the target. 

Yes, that’s me, ca. 1981

I worked at the zoo in Seattle, and most days, when the place closed for the public, I would accompany the bear keeper to the back alleys behind the exhibits and feed leftover food-stand hot dogs to the grizzly bears. We were behind the enclosure, about 20 feet above the bears. They would stand up, open their maws and we would toss the franks down their gullets. No swallowing, just straight down the chute to the stomach. 

Behind them was the back entrance to the tiger cage, with a small barred door to get in when the keeper needed to clean up. When a tiger came to the door, I saw what felt like the most enormous thing I had ever seen, its giant head, bigger than my imagination could hold, and when he “purred” the ground shook. I would rank that the single most impressive thing I’ve ever encountered. 

That zookeeper was my friend, and he once commented to me about the crowds, “You see all those kids, don’tcha just want to run them all over?” 

There were many more zoo stories, but most are not suitable for family reading. But more animals: I once had a six-foot boa constrictor wrapped around my neck. I visited the grave of Hopalong Cassidy’s horse, Topper, at the Los Angeles Pet Memorial Park in Calabasas, where you can also find Rudolph Valentino’s dog, Kaber, Petey, the ring-eyed dog from the “Our Gang” comedies, and Tarzan’s chimp Cheetah (real name Jiggs). 

I might also mention driving to Maine in 1963 to see the total eclipse of the sun, or having crossed the equator twice, and in Africa, seeing the Southern Cross and the constellation Orion in the night sky standing on his head, with his sword pointing straight up. 

Which reminds me of the night camping in the Outer Banks of North Carolina with my friend Sandro, and discovering that someone had forgotten to close and lock the door to the Hatteras lighthouse, and so we snuck in, climbed to the top, heard the roar, and watched the black surf below us catch the light. 

Or the time I climbed Roden Crater in Arizona with artist James Turrell, who was reshaping the extinct volcano to make an earthwork piece of art from the mountain. We were standing at the top as the sun set. “People talk of nightfall,” he said to me. “But they should call it nightrise, like sunrise.” Because, he pointed out, the night doesn’t descend, but rises, as a mass of dark sky climbs from the horizon in the east up into the sky, eating away the dusk. You can actually see the borderline as it rises, until all is dissolved in the general night. It is a startling effect that we don’t notice, because our horizons are generally blocked by trees or buildings. The phenomenon is a stunning revelation. I have looked for it — and seen it — many times since then. We walked down the mountain in the gathering dark. 

Anti-Ism-ism

June 30, 2026
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I have always avoided writing about politics in this blog. In fact, I wrote, many years ago, that I believed that “politics answers no question worth asking.” It cannot provide meaning in life; it cannot answer the big questions. It can attempt to ameliorate the problems it has itself caused, by trying to fix its mistakes, although every repair just causes newer problems. It can reduce suffering, although, in practice, it more often causes it. You nail a patch over a hole causing a leak in the boat, but the nails just cause more holes.

But the big issues of life are not addressed by politics, and especially not by party politics. Yet, we are stuck with it. We work within the system we have inherited, or sometimes, we attempt to overturn that system and build something better. The report card on those attempts is rather dismal. 

I have no faith in any system; every system is a simplification of the infinite complexity of what we assume to be reality. And worst of all, anything with an “ism” at the end of it. It will ignore much in order to make sense of the fraction that is left. While granting there will always be a system of one sort or another to organize the practical relations among peoples, no system encompasses the whole of experience. It is a scribbled shorthand. 

I am an old man now, but once was a young man committed to justice and reform. I came of age during the Vietnam War and spent angry hours protesting that war. I attended a Quaker college and became a convinced pacifist in the 1960s. Now, I am less sure of myself; more willing to accept that I don’t have answers. But that only leads me to believe no one else does, either. 

Meaning in life comes from many things. I find it in art, literature, music, but more importantly, in relationships, family, grandchildren. I find it in kindness and in helping others when I can. Being useful. I realize that others also find it in faith, or belonging to a group. We each have our ways. 

Our son, Lars, came for a visit, driving up from Austin, Texas, for a few days. We had intense conversations deep into the night, which only underlined the difference in generations that divides us. At 55, Lars remains a kind of embittered idealist, who imagines a better world, while ol’ stick-in-the-mud me just remembers the lines from Yeats, “And when they know what old books tell/ And that no better can be had,/ Know why an old man should be mad.” An attitude Lars ascribes to Boomer complacency. 

He talks of anarcho-syndicalism. As he explained his version of it, it  sounded to me very like Brook Farm. I remember how that went. I am suspicious of any kind of utopianism. 

I had my green days of idealism, too, when I thought my generation was going to fix all the problems that our elders had created. We were going to end war, end racism, end sexism and a glorious new age would be born. Everything that has transpired since then knocks the wind out of me, and I now have more modest hopes — not that we will perfect the world, but that a certain boring normality will descend, with all its faults, imprecisions and piecemeal improvements. 

While Lars believes in radical action, with perhaps rolling heads, I remind him that all the idealism of Robespierre left rather a horrifying lot of rolling heads — including his own — and if they got rid of a monarch, they merely wound up with Napoleon. Know why an old man should be mad. 

My generation’s idealism, after all, did help end the Vietnam war — without stopping recurrence in Iraq and now Iran — incrementally reduced racism — certainly not enough, but a smidgeon and even that now being lost — and it was women of my age who shouldered their way into chipping out  bits of patriarchal misogyny. Again, with a frightening recent recidivism. 

But I have to admit that a certain Boomer exhaustion may well contribute to what looks to the young as complacency. We leave the trenches to those who still have the energy and the working knees. 

We failed, our fathers’ generation failed before us, our children’s generation is already failing, and whoever takes over next can only fail in turn. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep trying, but should maintain a certain humility about what is actually possible. Hence my desire for something more normal than the current insanity, bigotry, and incompetence. And my fear that nothing better can be had. 

Hybrid car

June 21, 2026
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I am a centaur. Well, not technically — but I know what it feels like to be one. Sorta. 

A centaur is a familiar mythological creature, half man, half horse — although more like one-third man with two arms, and two-thirds horse with four legs (although there is a second version that is half man, with two arms and two human legs in the front, and the rear half of a horse abutted  to the backside). In either case, with six appendages, the beast might well be classified as an insect. 

Mythology is well populated with the hybrid offspring of human and animal, from the Minotaur through the sphinxes and down to the half-man, half goat satyrs. They all seem to be metaphors for the animal side of human nature. 

Like most Greek myths, there are multiple versions of the story, but in the most common form, Ixion lusted after Hera (Zeus’s wife), so the Big Guy formed a false image of Hera from a cloud, named Nephele, and Ixion had his way with the cloud, which subsequently gave birth to a son, named Kentauros (Κένταυρος or Centaurus), who, in turn mated with the Magnesian mares of Thessaly, who then engendered the race of horse-men called Centauridae, or centaurs. In his anger at Ixion (remember Ixion?Several generations back?) Zeus struck him with a thunderbolt and bound him to a burning, spinning wheel that careened through the heavens forever. The wheel is central here. 

Hence, the centaurs are the grandchildren of wheel-bound Ixion, which brings us  back to me as a centaur. It is often thought that the idea of the centaur was evolved from first seeing men riding horses — who knew they could do that? The man and horse must be the same being. Merger of Homo and Equus into a single being, one mind, one corpus. 

We don’t much ride horses anymore, at least not on city streets. We drive cars. And it is possible to merge with the machine just as it was thought to merge with beast. When I drive, the car and I become a single being. I am not just a person getting into a car, strapping on a seatbelt, plugging in an ignition key and revving up the engine. I become one with my automobile. It has been this way for me since I first got my driver license. 

As a sidenote, I have tried riding a horse. Did not go well. It was a docile animal, but it turns out that the round belly of the horse and the desire of my knees to remain straight conflicted painfully. Knees bend front to back, horses pull them sideways. The wrenching pain was somatic dissonance. I got back in my car. 

I’ve been a car person ever since I was two or three years old. We had a black 1950 Chevrolet, and in those years before children’s car seats, I rode in the back, standing on the seat so I could look out the window. I loved riding and watching the New Jersey scenery go by. 

My younger brother, on the other hand, has always had a different response to car travel. I rode with my nose pressed to the glass so I wouldn’t miss anything. He said that car travel, for him, was much like an elevator ride. You got in, waited till you got to your destination, and the door opened and you got out. Basically, it was lost time. 

From my earliest years, I was hooked on driving and riding in cars, but I never transferred that interest to the cars, themselves. 

When I became a teenager, cars were important to all the boys I knew. They swore by Motor Trend magazine, and looked forward each fall to the unveiling of the latest model cars, with their tail fins and chrome trim. Which new car could go from zero to sixty the fastest. In contrast, I didn’t much worry about racing through city streets. Zero to sixty was a meaningless metric. For me, they were a means of going. 

My first car was a powder-blue 1960 Ford Falcon station wagon, which had a mattress in the back and loosey-goosey steering, which led to my first car wreck. The second car was a red Chevy, twice the size of the Ford. For some reason, we kept a bunch of plastic grapes hanging in the rear side-window, and so we named the vehicle, Vanessa Redgrape. (The naming of cars, at a certain age, seems important. They all had names. My friend, Hank, had a green VW beetle he called Gigi, or “G.G.” for “Green Gonad.”)

I also owned a succession of Veedubs, which I loved, in part because I could always repair them with just a hammer and a screwdriver. They were simple. Cars have gotten so much more sophisticated technically, so that now, mechanics generally effect engine repair not by fixing, but by replacing. It was the age, back then, of hippies and Whole Earth Catalogs, and I pined to own a VW Minibus, and eventually I found one I could afford, and it promptly broke down on the way home from the car lot. I couldn’t afford to fix it. 

Many of us have had dogs we treasured, but they eventually die on us, and we sometimes find a replacement, but usually keep in our hearts the ones we loved most. Like the Navy blue Ford Falcon passed on to me when I was down on my luck by my friends Alexander and Mary Lou. It was falling apart, with no heater, no windshield wipers, and a rusted hole in the floor under the brake pedal that let me watch the asphalt pass by below my feet. It was the car I drove up the Blue Ridge to meet the woman who became my wife. It was snowing that day, and I had to drive with my window rolled down and my head stuck out like a locomotive engineer (or a happy dog) because I couldn’t see anything out the windshield. I loved that sorry car. 

Mostly, since then, I have had modest cars with generic names, various Datsuns, Hondas, or Toyotas. Although one very particular exception was the Chevy Citation that came into the family when I married Carole. Citations had a reputation as a break-down special. They were badly designed. But for some glitch in the universe, her car was the opposite of a lemon. Never had a whisper of a problem with it and drove it past 200,000 miles, then gave it to my brother, who continued with it for some time. 

In that car, Carole and I began our many peregrinating years. She was a teacher, and I was also, and so, we had our summers free. In 1981, we put 10,000 miles on the Citation as we drove across the U.S., up and down and back and forth. 

Each year after that, we chose a region and explored it in depth; by the third summer we had visited all 48 contiguous states, and most multiple times. 

When we lived in Phoenix, I’d drive a hundred miles south to watch an opera in Tucson and drive home the same night. I could not tote up the number of miles I’ve sat behind the wheel over my life, but I’m sure I could have gotten to the moon and back, if there had been motels along the way. 

And even now, when I am old and falling apart at the seems, so that even walking is a chore, with knees that need a serious relining, I have no trouble getting in the car and driving. I am most comfortable behind the wheel.

And it is because I have become a centaur. In a car, I am the ghost in the machine. We merge to become one single entity — a car-centaur. I extend my sense of self from bumper to bumper. Proprioception is the sense we have of our bodies and their shape and location in the world. I can feel where my feet end, where the top of my head is. I can twiddle my thumbs with my eyes closed. I have a clear sense of where my body extends. 

In the driver’s seat, that sense expands to encompass a larger whole: The car is as much a part of me as my knees or my fingertips. We have  become mechano-organic. My foot on the clutch and my hand on the gearshift is like breathing, natural and fluid. 

Byzantine gold cup; Indian Kinnara; Russian Polkan

Each culture and every epoch has its hybrid mythiforms, and there are horse-men from the Hindu Kinnara written about in the Mahabharata to the Russian Polkan and the troubadour centaurs of the Byzantine Middle Ages. It seems natural that we should adopt the modern in-car-nation. 

Baseball rant

May 18, 2026
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I am going to start this with a stipulation: I have never accepted the designated hitter. There, it’s out before I go on. 

I am a baseball watcher. I began in the early 1950s, when Vin Scully was a rookie announcer for the Brooklyn Dodgers. The Ol’ Redhead — Red Barber — was still in the booth before he defected to the hated Bronx enemy. I can still name the lineup for the team back then: Duke Snider, Carl Furillo, Gil Hodges, Junior Gilliam, Pee Wee Reese, Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Billy Cox; and pitchers Johnny Podres, Preacher Roe, Carl Erskine, Clem Labine. 

I was watching them on TV before I even went to kindergarten. So, yes, I am a codger now, and perhaps my take on the game can be discounted due to my fundamental inability to recognize the need to change a perfect game into something else. 

But what I notice is a game that used to be the perfect embodiment of talent playing against the odds of the universe stacked against it, being turned into a pantomime of a video game. The original was about humans and nature. No time limits. Every physical measurement at the perfect distance to make even the simplest ground-ball play a matter of microseconds: safe or out. Every ballpark a different shape and dimension. Sunlight, grass, dirt, wood, horsehide, fallibility. 

But now, a culture of regularity, precision and digital evidence have crept in. The game is asked to speed up, not bore us, not last too long, and the judgment of individuals is being required to measure up to computerized accuracy. This is, as far as I’m concerned, not baseball. 

The trend to “update” the game for modern tastes risks losing its soul: slow, deliberate, played out not in nine innings, but over an entire season, through streaks and dry spells, through injuries and yips.

Let’s start with the ballpark itself. The new ones no longer care where the sun shines. 

Once upon a time, ballparks were built so that the third-base foul line ran roughly north-south. That put north over the left-field wall, and as a result, put the afternoon sun where it could do the least harm. 

Fenway Park, Boston

This is why a left-handed pitcher is called a “southpaw.” His hurling arm hangs to the south slope of the mound. 

When Chase Field (then Bank One Ballpark) opened in 1998, however, it was designed so that its north-south axis runs directly from home plate through the pitcher’s mound and over the center-field fence, mathematically bisecting the angle of the foul lines. Any lefty the Diamonbacks fielded turned into an “eastpaw.” 

Chase Field, Phoenix

This may seem like a small deal to you, but it marks a major shift in our cultural inheritance. 

The majority of Americans used to live either on farms or in cities. Either way, they faced each day the essentials of life, milking cows or keeping warm in apartments. Our grandparents had a direct relationship with reality. Little came between them and the natural world. But today’s families are often suburban and don’t do anything with the land except mow it. 

And as for today’s children: What they know of the world comes to them edited, photographed, glitzed up and transformed. And they would rather see something on TV than in the flesh. Indeed, to many of our children, it isn’t real unless it appears on TV. We live increasingly in a secondhand world. 

The ballparks reflect this shift. When Fenway Park was built in 1912 in Boston, or Comiskey Park in Chicago in 1910, they were jimmied into existing city blocks. The idiosyncrasies that make them so beloved are capitulations to reality. 

But they still aligned to the cosmos. Their builders were aware of the path of the sun, the changes of seasons and the place of the ballparks in the landscape that surrounded them. It is why, even though the game grew up in the cities, we think of baseball as a pastoral game. 

But our once-analog world has gone digital: Now, instead of being aligned with the heavens, our ballparks are increasingly lined to an arbitrary “grid.” The experience of living on a planet has nothing to do with it. Ideas about things replace the things themselves, and those ideas are arbitrary: They have no reference but to themselves. The connections are sundered. The world is pulled apart into “bits” and they can be set next to each other in any calculated fashion. 

The change began in earnest in the 1960s. During that era, a spate of “cookie-cutter” stadiums were built — concrete doughnuts, like Busch Stadium in St. Louis, Three-Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh, Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia, and, what is probably the ugliest ballpark in history, Shea Stadium in New York. 

Most sat in suburbia, their diamonds oriented every which way, the rotating hubs of a parking lot wheel that ate up space like a shopping mall — and not coincidentally, often replaced dwindling farmland.

One of the last of these to be built — the “new” Comiskey Park in Chicago — was probably the most perverse. Built as a mirror image of the old park, the third base line now faces east. Talk about bad mojo! Our culture was confused, and so were our ballparks. 

We, as a culture, are losing touch with the world we inhabit. It isn’t just Chase Field: Coors Field in Denver and the Skydome in Toronto are all oriented straight north-south. But the grid is a poor substitute for the ecliptic. It is arbitrary, and therefore inimical to life. 

I remember once flying at night into Providence, R.I. The plane swung low on its final approach and the thousand burning lights of the city were spread out in the grid one expects of modern cities. But interspersed among the streets were city parks, each with its ball field. From the air, you could see them, scores of them across the city, all aligned the same way. Despite the regularity of the streets, they were all turned the same way like a field of sunflowers with their heads bobbing, face-in to the sun. Those fields took their ultimate command not from the city planner, but from nature. 

This same phenomenon can be seen in the old photographs of Yankee Stadium and the Polo Grounds. Separated by the Harlem River and surrounded by a chaos of roads, they lined up like twin observatories watching the same stars, their allegiance to something larger. That something larger is the key. 

For we all want to know our lives have value, that we belong to something bigger than our own tiny egos. It is the larger context that gives our lives meaning. 

Baseball is inherently human. Which is why I hate all the new rules being experimented with in recent years. The trend to “update” the game for modern tastes risks losing its soul: slow, deliberate, played out not in nine innings, but over an entire season, through streaks and dry spells, through injuries and yips.

I hate the changes. I hate them all. (Or almost all. I don’t really have a gripe about the pitch clock. I don’t like any clock in the ball field, but the game had gotten rather slow, with pitchers taking forever on the mound, wiping down the ball and picking up the rosin bag, causing one sportswriter to question whether they think they are being paid by the hour, and worse for the batter, who kept stepping out of the box after every pitch and readjusting his batting gloves. Throw the damn ball!) 

But shortening games by putting a free base runner on second to start the 10th inning in a tie game? Blasphemy. Part of the metaphysics of baseball is its embrace of eternity — that the game could theoretically go on for infinite innings. (The longest pro game happened in 1981 between the Pawtucket Red Sox and the Rochester Red Wings and lasted for 33 innings over two days. In the major leagues, the longest was 26 innings, in 1920 between Brooklyn and Boston and ended in a 1-1 tie when the game was called for darkness. There have been a handful of games longer than 20 innings.) This is as unacceptable as the designated hitter. 

I have a list of all the rules changes since 1950 and it prints out at 38 pages. Most of them are minor: clarifications or fixing typos. Some seem oddly fussy. In 2013, Amended Rule 1.15(a) declared the legal colors for fielders’ mitts must be no lighter that the current 14-Series of the  PANTONE® color set. (Pantone being a proprietary color naming system used in by variety of industries to insure color consistency in branding, logos and packaging). So, no white leather gloves.  

In 2007, the rules changed to allow an intentional walk with no pitches being thrown, with just a signal to the ump to award first base. Maybe it speeds up the game, minimally, but it also takes away an exciting possibility. The year before the new rule, Marlins star Miguel Cabrera was being thrown four balls. Rather than sit idly and watch pitches go by, he reached outside and swung at one, getting a hit and recording an RBI single. 

Cabrera isn’t the only player to turn the tides on an intentional walk. Detroit Tigers legend Ty Cobb once hit a two-run triple during an intentional walk attempt in 1907. More recently in 2016, Gary Sanchez hit a sacrifice fly on an intentional walk attempt against the Tampa Bay Rays.

The general run of important updates make the game less human and more like Fortnite. It was a game, and now is becoming a digital bureaucracy. 

I love the umpire, subject of hate and abuse, he is the final arbiter of each pitch and each out. Or was. The mistaken urge to make sure the call was “correct” has meant constant second-guessing the ump. “We have to make certain the call was correct.” Why? It is a game; a blown call is as much a part of the game as the misplayed bunt or the dropped fly ball. 

Don Denkinger calling Jorge Orta safe in the 1985 World Series. Rich Garcia not calling fan interference on Jeffrey Maier in the 1996 ALCS. Jim Joyce imperfectly calling Jason Donald safe in what would have been been the defining final out of Armando Galarraga’s otherwise perfect game in 2010. You can argue that these moments are more indelible as-is than if the calls had gone the other way.

And so, the video replay and the challenge. The influence of NFL football is the baneful influence, a sport where most of the TV time is given to video replays. The replay is as much part of football’s televised show as the original pass or off-tackle run. (I once timed a three-hour NFL game with a stopwatch, and the total time spent on the actual play, from ball snap to ref’s whistle each down, added up to only 15 minutes. The remaining two hours and 45 minutes is commentary, commercials and lots of endless replay and slo-mo.) There is something industrial, corporate and machine-like to football that is out of place in baseball. 

Which brings me to my chief gripe. The ABS challenge — automated balls and strikes calls. The strike zone has always been the custodial property of the home-plate umpire. Each ump was a bit different, and pitchers — and batters — knew that, and played accordingly. We watched Tommy Glavine stretch the strike zone further and further outside as a game went on, and umps gave him the call because of his consistency. Some umps had higher strike zones, others tended to call low pitches. But it was part of the game and the batters adjusted. That flexibility was an essential part of the game. 

But a pettifogging influence has taken over; a legalistic mindset that stops the natural flow of the game to bring tape measure and calipers to the rules. It gives batter, catcher or pitcher the chance to tap his cap and ask to overrule the ump. Balls barely edging the strike zone, or a quarter inch outside are caught by computer and used to prove the umpire human. 

The zone’s dimensions has been adjusted many times. In 1950, it was defined as running from armpits to the top of the knees. In 1963, It was changed to the top of the shoulders to the knees. In 1969, it reverted to armpit to knees; and in 1988, from middle point between the shoulders and the top of the uniform pants to the top of the knees. In 1996, it was stretched again to a point just below the kneecap. So, it has been a floating target, even beyond the umpire’s proclivities. 

But for the precision of the computerized strike zone, something more technocratic was needed, and so, in 2025 the zone was declared to be 53.5 percent of the batter’s height at the top and 27 percent at the bottom. To accommodate Jose Altuve at 5-feet-6 inches and Shohei Ohtani at 6-feet-4 inches, requires a strike zone that changes for every batter stepping to the plate. 

And so, ridiculous as this sounds, all position players in spring training camps had their heights measured standing up, without cleats by research technicians using biomechanical analysis. This information was loaded into the ABS computer database so that a different video box could be projected on home plate for each batter for the television broadcast. 

This could be quite confusing for pitchers, to say nothing of for umpires. 

“The hitter’s strike zone doesn’t change,” said Detroit right-hand pitcher Casey Mize. But, “I face nine different strike zones. The catcher sees nine different strike zones. The hitter just has his own.” 

And the strike zone no longer covers the entirety of home plate, but rather a microtome-thin slice across the middle, so that a sharp curve ball or slider that catches the front corner of the plate no longer counts as a strike, if challenged by the batter. 

We should remember that when we think to complain that the umpires are overturned and so must be poor umps. I’m surprised they are as consistent as they are. 

I still watch baseball almost every day, and I see things in each game that I’ve never see before. I just saw Shohei Ohtani hit a bouncer into the foul-pole net that almost turned into an inside-the-park home run, but then scored as a triple and a throwing error. The run counted anyway. I had never seen that happen before. 

Talent playing against the odds of the universe stacked against it. Human drama.