Tag Archives: magazines

American Sports and Were All Balls Made from Pigskins

It’s been a while since we posted something on sports, despite the clamoring of our many readers. When I meet people on the street, in the diner, on the subway, or in a hansom cab, they often recognize me from the blog, and after soliciting my investment in their creative livelihood or some sure deal they’ve hit upon, they ask me when Lars or I will compose another fun feature about the fascinating world of sports.

Eager readers, today’s your day. On this very screen, I intend to answer your burning queries on the topic of Amercian sports. Who’s Connor Bedard, you ask? What’s jazz got to do with Utah? Is Ty Cobb really the most hated man in baseball? Please. Let’s take up the serious questions, shall we?

What’s the oldest organized sport made in America? That would be Lacrosse, which Iroquois were seen playing by French missionaries in the 1600s. Players would pass a deer-skinned ball with sticks, some of which had deer-gut for netting. This game may be almost a thousand years old. It was organized as a sport in the 17th century.

Asking for the oldest organized sport puts certain parameters on the question. If we backed off the idea of organization and asked what the oldest sport made in America is, that would be surfing. Though Captain James Cook first brought the idea of wave riding to the English-speaking world in 1778 when he saw Tahitian surfers, Polynesians had been surfing for centuries then. With Hawaii’s annexation in 1898 and statehood in 1959, Hawaii’s history is grafted into America’s history, making surfing a old American sport. (Is that a stretch? I don’t know. Let’s move on.)

Football has roots in the Roman Empire, which should be enough of an explanation for why men would be thinking about it daily, but what we call football in the States was refined in England and civilized by American patriots. Football has been a word to describe kicking around a bloated pig’s bladder since the 14th century. The first college football game was between Princeton and Rutgers in November 1869. They first played on Rutgers’s field in New Brunswick, New Jersey and the game was a lot like soccer. A few days later, they played at Princeton by Princeton’s rules. That set a trend until 1876 when Walter Camp, a Yale man, would begin to revise the game into one we would recognize today.

The word pigskin was used to name leather made from a pig’s hide by 1855, according to records, and was slang for “a saddle.” By 1894, it became slang for “a football” too.

To close out, let me point you to Ted Kluck’s article on Sports Illustrated closing its doors for good.

It’s been years since I’ve received Sports Illustrated, and I kind of put it away, emotionally, when I started writing for its competitor, ESPN the Magazine, in the early 2000s. Both magazines really haven’t been any good for a decade, with most of SI’s online “stories” reading like long tweets. 

Photo by Rob Worsnop/Flickr

A Few Words on the End of Time, Inc.

Meredith, the publisher behind Southern Living, Better Homes & Gardens, People, SI, Real Simple, and a host of other lifestyle magazines, has purchased Time, Inc. for a few Manhattan dinners shy of $3 billion. The NY Times has an oral history, and I think we might have had an awful time working there, not that I would have ever been hired to begin with. (via Prufrock News)

Albert Kim: “It was very clear that the internet was going to be a huge part of the future of media. But for most of the time I was there, people treated it as a nuisance. It was a problem to be solved, not an opportunity.”

Bethany McLean: “I remember sitting next to Jeff Bewkes, the CEO of Time Warner, at an internal Time Inc. event that was celebrating journalists. And he asked what I had done before Fortune, and I said, ‘Oh, I worked at Goldman.’ And he looked at me like, why would I leave that to do this? And I thought, Uh-oh, it’s over.”

Discovering Early American Serials

Early American Serialized Novels is a project dedicated to publishing novels serialized in US newspapers and magazines from the 1780s to the 1820s. The project grows out of a graduate seminar on early American literature and the digital humanities at Idaho State University.

I have a heart for early America, though perhaps not enough patience, so an ongoing project like this appeals to me. They have seven stories now. The hosts explain the context in which these tales first appeared.

Novel installments were often printed without predetermined knowledge of how many weeks or months would be devoted to the story, thus requiring authors to adapt accordingly. In addition, readers were never assured that the novels would reach a resolution and therefore became accustomed to complex, dissonant texts in which narrative suspension was a defining feature.

(via Prufrock News)

Now 75: Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine

Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine celebrates its seventy-fifth anniversary this year. Bill Morris offers his thoughts on the magazine and an exhibition of it in the Butler Library at Columbia University.

In a land where most magazines have the lifespan of a fruit fly, how is it possible for one magazine to survive — and thrive — for 75 years? Janet Hutchings has a theory: “The great power that Frederic Dannay gave this magazine was its variety and its reach.”

For the first time in American publishing, the magazine published any good mystery it could: “hard-boiled stories, classic English mysteries, noirs, suspense, cozy mysteries, the work of literary writers.” It broke down barriers to what was acceptable to publish. “Now, writers of every stripe gleefully plunder one or more genres, stitching together scraps or horror, pulp, crime, fantasy, ghost stories, mysteries, westerns.”

Books & Culture: “Hurry Up, Please. It’s Time.”

If you don’t like it you can get on with it, I said.
Others can pick and choose if you can’t.

The strong Christian review magazine Books & Culture has announced it will close the bar and usher everyone out the door over the coming months. The next issue will be the final printed issue, and they will continue to publish online for 2017.

Alan Jacobs shares his thoughts, saying many people esteemed B&C.

“Alex Star, a former editor of the New York Times Magazine and now an editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, once told me that he read every issue in full. Cullen Murphy, former editor of the Atlantic, told me that John Wilson is the best editor in the business.”

Many years ago, B&C editor John Wilson wrote for the NY Times about evangelicals as they are depicted in literature. “Charmless, ignorant, homophobic and either brazenly hypocritical or obnoxiously sincere, they quote Scripture unctuously and have bad sex.” (Get an excerpt through the link above or read the whole essay here.)

But B&C is closing, and I ask myself what shall I do now? What shall I do? I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street
With my hair down, so.

What shall we do to-morrow?

Grocers: Stop Selling Immoral Magazines

Do we view ourselves as political beings? Would we say our minds are bound by cultural cords? I don’t think most of us would describe ourselves in these ways. We think of ourselves as independently minded and capable of standing on our own, but if we allow our attention to be directed by the popular press, we are training ourselves in groupthink and tweaking our moral compasses.

Not long ago, the media was celebrating the suicide of a terminally ill woman. They repeated uncritically the ridiculous arguments for suicide being a matter of dignity and honor. How long will it be before they celebrate someone making public arguments about the right to suicide without illness? “Ask not for whom the bell tolls,” he’ll say, “so I wanted to die on my own terms.” Doesn’t the press already support this the line of thought?

This week, they have celebrated another vein of self-destruction, and I’m troubled by the many people have said it’s none of their business. It is your business. It’s just as harmful as celebrating suicide. We are not islands. When others buy and sell vanity in the marketplace, we can’t just ignore it or many more will be hurt by it.

Take the idea that some people don’t believe they should live without disability. Does the press celebrate this yet? Is any form of identity up for grabs?

I think we need to reject the popular press at large. Many individuals already have, but I want to encourage select business leaders to take this up.

Grocers who are willing to sell the regular line of magazines everyone else sells should reconsider what I assume are practical reasons for selling what they would not want their families to read. It doesn’t matter if all the publications are bundled together by the vendor. Insist on being allowed to sell only what you want to sell. Make noise about wanting a choice in the titles you offer, and don’t surrender to the bad logic that says someone is going to sell it, so it might as well be you. A vendor can’t force you to make immoral choices. By refusing to offer pop culture and other immoral magazines, you help others avoid buying them. You encourage them to think independently, as they already believe they do.

It feels like a throwback idea from the ’80s, but is it not still a fair idea?