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…
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…