Legacy can be inescapable, even under quarantine. Browse SyFy or E! or USA Network and you’ll learn about wizarding lineage, possibly through the same film on all three channels. Since it can’t air the Michael Jordan doc 24/7, ESPN might show a replay of an NBA final featuring basketball’s most famous family. Maybe you’ve cut the cord and are filling time with Star Wars on Disney+. That shit is all about legacy.
Read moreTag: name of the year (page 1 of 1)
Listen to Jan Six I. (Art by Rembrandt and Dennis Clark)
Stare long enough at a disparate set of data points and clusters emerge. If you’re an Ancient Mesopotamian, millions of scattered points of light in the sky become constellations. If you’re a bored, doodling mathematician named Stanislaw Ulam, cardinal numbers arrayed in a spiral reveal grouped patterns in the seemingly random occurrence of primes. Even if you’re a koala—hamstrung by a too-small brain, because you can’t muster the energy to sustain a larger one, because the only thing your body can digest for energy is literally toxic and will kill you if eat too much of it—pattern recognition helps you find your next meal.
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Graphic: Dennis Clark. View full-size bracket here.
Fifty years ago next month, word started leaking that Look magazine would publish two excerpts from Jim Bouton’s diary about the 1969 season, Ball Four. The leaker was the sportswriter who edited the book, Leonard Shecter. In the early ’60s, Bouton was a young, smart, offbeat pitcher with the New York Yankees who stood out in a locker room of jaded, old-school, future Hall of Famers like Whitey Ford, Yogi Berra, and Mickey Mantle. Shecter was the beat guy for the New York Post and one of a group of young sportswriters—Robert Lipsyte, George Vecsey, Phil Pepe, Larry Merchant, and others—who cared less about godding up the old stars than writing interesting stories.
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NOTY Fantasy draft board via @PhuHoang2099
According to a survey conducted by the Educational Theatre Association, the most-performed musical production in schools across the United States is The Addams Family. Perhaps you can picture them now: a cocksure senior in Gomez’s striped suit, a white-faced Morticia at his side. Or, if your high school’s theater director is a bit of an oddball, maybe something like Law and Order: Fairy Tale Unit, which also cracked the EdTA ranking.
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"Oh I'm sorry, I had you confused with Prof. Logic Halberd." (Illustration by Giri Nathan.)
It arrived like a beacon pushing through a heavy fog, or the first gray shoots of daylight at dawn’s very opening, or more specifically as a notification in my direct messages. Things have changed in ways no one ever wanted, structures and edifices slouched and then slid into rubble, streets are all ashes, and yet it is clear that there is another side of it all—that there is still a pulse, an understory waiting to break and burst forth. It can be easy to lose sight of this, and I had lost sight of it when the notification came. Of course there would be a Name Of The Year Bracket, and of course it would need a home. That we could make a home for the bracket here is fortuitous. That Drew and I might be able to resume our annual tradition of saying names like “Editrix St. Furt” or “Krokodilbert Van Der Peen” and then giggling like idiot 11-year-olds…it was something I’d forgotten I could dream about, until I saw the light.
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Graphics: Dennis Clark. View the full-size bracket here.
As a metaphor for our times, you could do worse than the story of Gimadiah Scrogum. In 2015, the Branson (Mo.) Tri-Lakes News reported, Scrogum was pulled over for driving a white Ford pickup without the headlights on. When the cop approached, Scrogum floored it. According to the police report,
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