One thing I never really covered in my book Ghosts: A Natural History was my early experiences with ouija boards. Really, it reads like the script of an as-yet unwritten horror movie: teenagers in an unsupervised … Read the article
From a distance, the corrugated overhang outside the hotel lobby looked like the folds of a paper fan, or like the charted performance of a volatile stock. On the … Read the article
Rue la Boétie Number 21. I’ve passed by it hundreds of times. My mother liked to show me the 1930s façade with its stone arches. I’d noticed various … Read the article
April 1, 1972 baseball owners and the Major League Baseball Players Association played the cruelest April Fool’s Day joke of all on fans. Only it wasn’t a joke. They stopped the … Read the article
The Franciscan fathers were the first to plant grapes for California wine. Father Junipero Serra wrote to his bosses in Baja California in the late 18th century and asked that they … Read the article
The prospect of slowing, interrupting or even stopping the disease seems daunting, but there might be a window of opportunity: How does the spread of the disease actually take place? Is … Read the article
Everyone knows that the New York Cosmos was the baddest, sexiest team in the old North American Soccer League, right? They had Pelé, Giorgio Chinaglia and Franz Beckenbauer. They were owned by Warner Communications, … Read the article
Every Tolkien fan remembers Lobelia Sackville-Baggins. Rapacious, uppity, with a formidable temper and a keen eye for desirable possessions, Lobelia is among the terrors of the Shire. Married to Bilbo Baggins’s cousin Otho, she covets Bilbo’s … Read the article
I run with the bulls in Pamplona, Spain, in the summertime with my adoptive brother Ari at the famous San Fermín fiesta. After I come home, I deliver eight or nine pairs of white pants … Read the article
Across the ring Joe Frazier was wearing trunks that seemed to have been cut from a farmer’s overalls. He was darkly tense, bobbing up … Read the article