On March 10th, the day before Tom Hanks announced that he had tested positive for , I drove my three-year-old daughter to her day care in Berkeley, California. The drive took us up College Avenue, where white-haired professors huddled at sidewalk café tables; we passed the fraternity houses where students gathered on the lawns. Just a few blocks from my daughter’s school, there’s a coffee shop with a clientele split equally between students and senior citizens. I sat there until noon, working on my laptop, before moving to one of the food courts frequented by international students from...…On March 10th, the day before Tom Hanks announced that he had tested positive for , I drove my three-year-old daughter to her day care in Berkeley, California. The drive took us up College Avenue, where white-haired professors huddled at sidewalk café tables; we passed the fraternity houses where students gathered on the lawns. Just a few blocks from my daughter’s school, there’s a coffee shop with a clientele split equally between students and senior citizens. I sat there until noon, working on my laptop, before moving to one of the food courts frequented by international students from...WW…

AdvertisementSubmit a letter:Email usReviewed:by Robert Scoop JacksonHaymarket, 203 pp., $36.95; $16.95 (paper)Sports metaphors, as a rule, are silly and rarely accurate. Football is not really like war, regardless of what its legion of ex-players and commentators will tell you. Baseball does not provide a window into America—the gentle tension between laconic, quasi-agrarian pacing and the game’s values of grit and meditative cunning feels nostalgic to the point of absurdity now. There was a time when every salaried sportswriter would anthropomorphize every three-year-old filly into Joan...…AdvertisementSubmit a letter:Email usReviewed:by Robert Scoop JacksonHaymarket, 203 pp., $36.95; $16.95 (paper)Sports metaphors, as a rule, are silly and rarely accurate. Football is not really like war, regardless of what its legion of ex-players and commentators will tell you. Baseball does not provide a window into America—the gentle tension between laconic, quasi-agrarian pacing and the game’s values of grit and meditative cunning feels nostalgic to the point of absurdity now. There was a time when every salaried sportswriter would anthropomorphize every three-year-old filly into Joan...WW…

In 1995, Noel Ignatiev, a recent graduate of the doctoral program in history at Harvard, published his dissertation with Routledge, an academic press. Many such books appear, then disappear, subsumed into the endless paper shuffling of the academic credentialling process. But Ignatiev was not a typical graduate student, and his book, “,” was not meant to stay within the academy. A fifty-four-year-old Marxist radical, Ignatiev had come to the academy after two decades of work in steel mills and factories. The provocative argument at the center of his book—that whiteness was not a biological...…In 1995, Noel Ignatiev, a recent graduate of the doctoral program in history at Harvard, published his dissertation with Routledge, an academic press. Many such books appear, then disappear, subsumed into the endless paper shuffling of the academic credentialling process. But Ignatiev was not a typical graduate student, and his book, “,” was not meant to stay within the academy. A fifty-four-year-old Marxist radical, Ignatiev had come to the academy after two decades of work in steel mills and factories. The provocative argument at the center of his book—that whiteness was not a biological...WW…