Literature
Conrad's Romanticism
Lord Jim is not just a rollicking adventure story. Underneath the majestic prose of rich nautical fiction, the book is a philosophical parable about the merits and pitfalls of living a romantic life...
Jack T. Crawford
Nonfiction
Baseball Tranquility
Baseball is a contradictory game. It inspires fervent devotion in some and a shockingly potent vitriol in others. As I began immersing myself in the game, many people asked why? Why follow such an old, slow, boring sport? Perception makes all the difference.
Literature
The Shift of the Cultural Battlefield and its Heroes
Leopold Bloom is a man struggling with the burdens of his time, just as his Homeric parallel fought the challenges of his own. As society developed from pre-Hellenic Greece through to turn-of-the-century Dublin, the burdens facing men evolved dramatically...
Literature
A Goddess of Two Sorts
Because Stephen is both protagonist and self-insert for Joyce himself, he must be considered as both poet and warrior, Homer and Telemachus...
Nonfiction
Cave-Dweller Construction
There are two types of cave dweller. There are the sages, the Bodhisattvas and hermits. Great masters with a tendency to run for the hills and remain underneath them, forcing their pupils to spelunk for wisdom...
Nonfiction
The Journey North But Also West
Oh, Canada. The second stage of this northwestern adventure required voyaging first north then west then south in an inverted fish-hook of a journey ending on an island in another country altogether. Destination: Vancouver Island...
Nonfiction
A Letter from Lake 22
As the June sous-viding of the District of Columbia began in earnest, I seized a chance to flee the city-state for a cooler climate and set off with eyes unaccustomed to towering greenery. The destinations: lake country north of Seattle, then the southern coast of Vancouver Island.
Sports
A Deep Dive into HBPIP
How do you measure a pitcher’s impact on the game of baseball? There’s a million different stats, basic and advanced, that attempt to capture the complexities of pitching. But one of the most nuanced yet primal facets of the game remains relatively simple to calculate: the bean ball.