My piece for Monkey See on The Art of Making Money: The Story of a Master Counterfeiter, and the frustrations of being a currency nerd.   The short version: it’s a good book; I spend …

Reader Amalie is putting together a collection of plays and one-acts for performances affiliated with the Berkeley, CA Public Library — including a few of the Famous Ghost Monologues.   (Mary Charles McCormack, Mary Katherine …

The hilarious cover art and dryly blunt title got my hopes up — in vain, alas.   The writing is not awful, but Shelley Klein can’t decide if she’s going to report these cases straight, …

Typhus, the Brooklyn Dodgers of Flatbush, lesser Kennedys, seminal animé (say that five times fast), Argentine nutbars, and cod on the Cape — plus the N Cereal AA and the fall contest.These stories and more, …

Today the bat was still there.Someone had neatly laid a strip of toilet paper over it.It was dead, its position unchanged.I left it there and did not use the sink, not out of disgust or …

A few administrative notes before Lobster Roll Tour 2009 commences on Saturday…
As you may have deduced from the previous sentence, I’m going on vacation for a couple of weeks.   I may have internet access; …

I’d fooled myself into thinking I was a key part of the team, and that if there were cuts to be made they would come from the bottom. It’s like that old line about being …

I like Keith Hernandez, but as a TV commentator, he has weaknesses. Leaving aside the “what’s that betty doing in the dugout” incident, Hernandez tends to dwell more than I’d like on the kind of …

American Icon: The Fall of Roger Clemens and the Rise of Steroids in America’s Pastime is the work of four writers (Teri Thompson, Nathaniel Vinton, Michael O’Keeffe, and Christian Red), and you can kind of …

It starts out well.Author Rudy Marzano cuts straight to correcting misconceptions and debunking myths about the Dodgers and their fans, and the tone has a very faint sour top note — a whiff of simultaneous …