A year earlier DeGaulle fled Paris, resigning rule to the feuding students and labor leaders that took the streets as their own. Across the United States there were bombings and marches, and a year later four American college students would be shot dead on a campus by armed guardsmen, protesting the Vietnam war. But instead…
Angela Carter died in 1992 without ever finishing the long-rumored sequel to her 1972 surrealist novel The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman. Short Relief will be running weekly excerpts from the scraps of that sequel found in her papers after her death. The following is from the end of the book, as our hero,…
You are hiking through the forest on a foggy morning in late winter. The path you are on is a steep, winding uphill, and you don’t exercise much, and you can feel the fog filling your lungs with each labored breath. Up ahead you can see a steep stairway beginning to take shape in the…
It’s very easy to create a national holiday. Not a federal bank holiday—that’s very hard—but an entry on the National Day Calendar. Here’s what you have to do: be a company, fill out an application explaining why your brand needs a national day, get approved by the selection committee, reap the glory of a media…
Snow Baseball By: Matt Ellis The colossal winter storm dubbed “Grayson” has been pummeling the East Coast for the past 24 hours or so. Yesterday I opened my door once to let my dogs out to do their thing, and both went right smack dab on the front porch like a couple of stupid animals….
The Language of Peace By: Nathan Bishop I met a man earlier this year. Let’s call him Greg. The past decade of Greg’s life had seen a series of spiraling traumas. His home was foreclosed on during the housing crisis of the past decade. The stress and despair of the incident led to divorce, which…
Traducido por José M. Hernández Lagunes El otro más grande héroe estadounidense Por: Patrick Dubuque Habiendo llegado a la adolescencia en el año 1990, puedo asegúrate que fue una época frenética. La Guerra Fría terminó y dos generaciones de estadounidenses, seguros de su lugar en un mundo de dos súper-poderes se encontraron sin ataduras. Pero…
The Other Greatest American Hero By: Patrick Dubuque As someone who stumbled into adolescence in the year 1990, I can assure you: it was a frantic time. The Cold War was over, and two generations of Americans confident in their place in a two-superpower world found themselves untethered. Instead we had a thousand points of…
1930s Tabletop Coin Games By: Matt Ellis It’s a banality by now that one could point to any number of consumer goods that mimicked the game of baseball throughout the twentieth century. Sure, there are any number of iterations of The Show over the past couple of years, and yes, sure, pinball and tabletop games…
Major League Baseball Idealized in Cake By: Mary Craig Baseball is great, but baseball is also very bad. And it’s this contradiction that draws us to the sport and drives us to madness with its presence in the summer and absence in the winter. Sometimes it’s so bad in the summer that we consider finally…
Away Flies The Boy By: Matt Ellis Popular discourse has a tendency, I think, to conceive of “media” as a particularly contemporary phenomenon. Sure, one could point to nineteenth-century newspapers and the emergence of photography, but when you hear the word what you think of is usually, like, some brain-dead millennial staring at his his…
Three Metaphors Outside Orlando, Florida By: Jason Wojciechowski By Monday at 8pm Eastern time, any player not on a 40-man roster would be available in the Rule 5 draft that will take place in a few weeks at the Winter Meetings. It was, therefore, a fast-and-furious day of additions and subtractions; you probably know intimately…
Notes Toward Mediation: A New Short Relief Series By: Matt Ellis I’ve long thought about the way sports are mediated to us. A few years ago I cobbled together a series about baseball and cinema over at Lookout Landing, and it was an absolute blast but also there was somewhat of a problem: anything I…
The Fairness Doctrine By: Emma Baccellieri There is this idea that sports are like life. This is tossed around most often, it seems, when it comes to conversation around the relative merits of kids playing sports: They’ll learn life lessons. Because sports are like life! Justice and honesty and responsibility and respect and winning and…
All Your Perfect Imperfections By: Emma Baccellieri It has now been exactly one week, give or take a few hours, since this play: Jose Lobaton beat the tag. He was safe. And then, upon further examination, he was discovered to have beat the tag but to have lifted his foot up off the base ever…
Keeping a journal as an imperfect link to the past, and a fan who will forever be trapped in it.