When William Tell, a Swiss archer living in the early 14th century, skillfully sniped an arrow off his son’s head with a crossbow, he was neither showing off his marksmanship nor soaked to the gills with booze. He did it on order from a sadistic overlord, as a punishment for sedition. The same can’t be said of Tell’s copycats: Over the centuries, many a boastful, sloshed sharpshooter h...
At the 1853 World’s Fair in New York, some exhibits attracted larger crowds than others. Elisha Otis’s demonstration of a new elevator safety device—which involved Otis standing atop a suspended elevator platform above the exhibition hall while an assistant severed the suspension cable with an ax—was more popular than, say, the Philadelphia window salesman who presented his latest twea...
According to a popular fan theory, John Lennon was in bed watching Monday Night Football when Howard Cosell broke in to announce that Lennon had been shot. Rather than come out and deny the reports (as Paul McCartney had done when his death rumors swirled in 1969), Lennon embraced them as an opportunity for privacy and quietly welcomed his fate.
Kids today, they just don’t reminisce about baseball the way they used to. In my day, you walked to school wearing nothing but vague, sentimental longing for baseball’s golden age—both ways! Ah, nostalgia was so much purer then, and simpler. Don’t you just miss that old-time baseball nostalgia?
Case in point: Derek Jeter. This past season, the media machine known as Major Leag...
In September 1994, a rock musical about young artists living under the shadow of AIDS, based partly on Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème, was seen for the first time in a limited three-week workshop production at the New York Theatre Workshop. It was, to put it bluntly, a mess, with entangled story lines, vacant characters and a plot that seemed oddly more preoccupied (at least at this early...
