LATEST ADDITIONS

When I was a kid, I wanted to grow up to become a professional baseball player. I loved playing ball, and all of the adult men in my family seemed to respect it, too. When I wasn't playing ball, I'd be in my room, listening to the radio, and drawing up my own baseball cards. Collecting cards, too, was a wonderful hobby. The photographs on the fronts were nice, but I was more interested in the information on the backs. Even when UpperDeck came out with their glossy, action photos, Topps cards remained, in my mind, the absolute best. Topps cards listed all of the stats for every single season of a ballplayer's career, even going back at times to his minor league years. How can you beat that?

That's ECM, in case you didn't know. Geoff Dyer tells us how a label changed the way he listened to music.

Russell Baker's essay in the NYRB is ostensibly a review of two new books bemoaning the current state of journalism. The real pleasure, of course, is reading Russell Baker's take on the subject. Gosh, I miss him.

It's the compound that makes wine smell peppery. One scientist said, "If you can measure something, you can understand its behaviour and how to control it." Hmmm, that sounds oddly familiar.