After all, so much of sports news is indeed trivial, a genuine waste of time and space, and continually updated reckless speculation (most of it soon to be discarded). Of course, that’s a description of a lot of news, some of it wrongly reported. At least in sports, no one dies from rumors of a coming baseball trade that never happens.
And yet … the sports department was also something of a newspaper within a newspaper, with its own deadlines, stand-alone pages and version of standards. For instance, sports figures (like felons) weren’t referred to with the normal honorifics (Mr., Mrs. and Miss) as they were then in other sections of the paper, while a certain lack of rigor in the editing may actually have contributed to greater readability, individuality and humanity.
Dylan Longton really knows how to flip an egg. A 33-year-old line cook at an unassuming diner just outside Albany, New York, Longton can make an omelet do a backflip and land it smoothly right back into its pan cradle. And people love him for it. Not just people in Albany, or people in New York. People all around the world, sometimes more than a thousand at once, tune in on TikTok to watch Longton flip eggs, and reheat bacon and homefries on the grill.
Writer and professor Rachel DeWoskin’s second poetry collection, absolute animal, subtly exposes the thin line separating humans from other living things, those inarguable similarities to the earth and how they lead us to long for its connection. She has a way of questioning and erasing the distance we insist is there. We are, simply, bodies with much out of our control.
Reading this novel is like getting a prime seat at an exhibition match. The range on display is exhilarating. And it makes you wonder: What would happen if he played for keeps?
In his book One Two Three Four, Craig Brown detailed the ways that the Beatles fleetingly touched and altered millions of lives. In that account, one figure occasionally steps out of the shadows: Mal Evans, bouncer at the Cavern Club, driver and bodyguard as the band travelled first down the newly tarmac-ed M6 and then way beyond. Evans was both a trusted insider to those helter-skelter years and, in some ways, the ultimate Beatles groupie. In this exhaustively detailed account of his truncated life – Evans died aged 40 in 1976 in a volley of gunfire from the LAPD after he had apparently waved a Winchester rifle in their direction seeking his own destruction – he finally assumes the place to which all walk-on actors privately aspire: centre stage.