Monday 4/20/26 I'm not going to say too much here. The side-by-side comparison of the two textual examples speaks for itself. You will know this. I know this. Everyone in publishing would know this. What follows is the start of a story--something that's theoretically meant to draw the reader in--called "Plaster" from a December 2024 issue of The New Yorker , put forward by fiction editor Deborah Treisman, approved by editor in chief David Remnick, written by David Szalay. Pl

Monday 4/20/26 Lamenting what he perceived to be his failures as an artist in a letter that turned out to be one from the end of his life, F. Scott Fitzgerald maintained that his best work nonetheless possessed a sort of epic grandeur. I apply this appellation to the music the Grateful Dead made in 1972, especially the autumn of that year and the shows with a "Dark Star." As time is the thematic crux of Nick Drake's art, light is the thematic crux of the Grateful Dead's. Cont

Monday 4/20/26 Letter. Things are horrible here. I'm in a bad place. I'm not going to say too much right now because 1. I don't want to frighten you and 2. I don't want to open up and then perhaps see nothing in following. I just want to say what I just said. Right now, I'm looking at getting things in order. Getting some stuff to my sister. The place I'm in right now...I feel like it's the end. But again, I just want to say these things. It's a little different than me sayin

Sunday 4/19/26 The number of people who evaluate a player--and this is a surefire sign it's NFL draft time--by their highlights and nothing else--speaks volumes about our world. They are highlights. They mean little. The nature of a highlight is a cherry-picked point of favorablity. Sports are game in, game out. At-bat to at-bat. Shift to shift. Down to down. Possession to possession. Not highlight to highlight. We lose sight of the "game" nature of sport. It's not how well y

Sunday 4/19/26 From 1984-1986--that's three seasons for those scoring at home--Red Sox pitcher Dennis "Oil Can" Boyd--also called "The Can"--had 33 complete games. The Can, whom I wrote about for the Globe, was...okay. He was good in 1985, then thought he should have been an All-Star in 1986 and went ballistic when he wasn't named to the squad. He was by no means a great pitcher in these years when he was at his best (he did have something of a surprising comeback season in 1

Saturday 4/18/26 Dave Portnoy looks like toilet paper that didn't go down with the flush and is later discovered to still be there. He is also the morality version of this. Sedge is a great grass. If you grow in a marsh, you seem on the right side of things to me. No wonder Keats included some in "La Belle Dame sans Merci." When the sedge starts to wither, you know things are getting real. I like my dental floss old school and without promises on the package about how gentle

Thursday 4/16/26 The Clippers are done and the Warriors play on--for now. The Clippers had that big turnaround and then it all just comes to an end in two-and-a-half hours! The play-in "round"--are we counting this as a round?--makes for some good sports theater. I suppose I was rooting for the Warriors because of Curry and Kerr--I like to watch the former and I think it's good for the game and the country for the latter to have a platform--but I still feel like the Clippers

Thursday 4/16/26 Dear (), It is your friend Colin again in Boston where he is proud of you. Well, you did it. What you needed to do. And not everyone does that. Actually, many don’t. I hope you are giving yourself credit. One last little bit of advice from me. Or a thought. As you may perhaps know, I run many stairs. Let’s just say it—I am a mighty Zulu warrior when it comes to stairs (and a few other things). And yes, that is the official term. But even though I

Wednesday 4/15/26 From a letter. Seems relevant. ...I'm finally starting to proof these journal entries. As I go through each recent publishing one, I'm going to send them to you. My efforts on that score are redoubling. I space it out too much and I can't do that given what these people are and if I ever want to get out of this worse-than hell. I'm too kind, too disinclined to make war, or fight in a war, but I need to be the wolf who goes out killing every day and comes bac

Wednesday 4/15/26 Lorin Stein probably didn't rape anyone yesterday. New York Times Book Review editor Sadie Stein probably didn't countenance Lorin Stein raping anyone yesterday. (Though she definitely readied some AI-generated "writing" by the "right kind" of person for Sunday's paper along with Gregory Cowles.) Everything in life is about percentages, right? We watch a baseball game and we learn that one team has a 23% chance of winning that game on that day as the game s

Wednesday 4/15/26 Kids should be shown The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) in school. Adults should be shown A Canterbury Tale (1944) in life. The former is an invaluable lesson in historical perspective; the latter ought to be considered required viewing for the soul. I've long believed that one of the least understood challenges a person can face in this country is that of the solider returned from war. You go from those situations to perhaps being treated as if you're gar

Tuesday 4/14/26 Tonight's the final night of the of the Bruins' regular season. All of the playoff spots are spoken for, so there won't be any drama on that score over the last few days here. The Flyers won in a shootout last night, clinching the final berth. I had hoped the Capitals would have squeaked in because I'd rather see Ovechkin in the playoffs than Philly but that's no big deal. I also tend to root for the less likely or unlikely thing to happen when it isn't one of

Monday 4/13/26 Gordie Howe played in 1947. Ray Bourque played in 2001. Gordie Howe and Ray Bourque played against each other. Willie Mays won two MVPs, Hank Aaron won one. They are two of the half dozen best baseball players of all-time by any definition. It probably seems like they should have more. At most, Mays could have won three. The season in contention is 1962, when Maury Wills won. I also would have gone with Wills. Aaron ought to have had the one. His best year was

Sunday 4/12/26 What a men's hockey program the University of Denver has. It's as impressive a men's four-major-sports program as any in college sports. Another national title last night. Three in five years. College hockey program as machine, but the good kind of machine. They either win it or they're right there. Max Plante won the Hobey Baker award. He's twenty. Macklin Celebrini is still nineteen. Puts what he's doing this year in even more perspective. If I had to guess,

Saturday 4/11/26 The Beatles weren't that influential. This isn't a criticism. The Grateful Dead also weren't very influential. Nor was the Duke Ellington Orchestra. The Beatles were influential in the sense that within their era, bands followed the trends that the Beatles amplified. But in terms of shaping how bands got their sounds or wrote their songs? The Beatles didn't have much to do with that then, and even less in the decades since. What were you going to do? Try to w

Saturday 4/11/26 Doing okay of late stair-wise. Not too great but nothing to feel bad about either. Ran 6000 stairs Monday at City Hall, then five circuits of stairs inside the Bunker Hill Monument on both Wednesday and Thursday. Been doing at least 100 push-ups a day. Yesterday was the first warm day in a while. I was able to wear a T-shirt and shorts to Charlestown so I did ten circuits. Not having on the extra clothes makes a nice difference. It's like taking the doughnut

Thursday 4/9/26 Peppermint Patty would be the member of the Peanuts gang most likely to follow the Grateful Dead on tour. She'd do it for the community more so than the music, which she'd like but not think too much about. Take it as it is, in the moment. Linus would be the member of the Peanuts gang most likely to think hard about "Ripple." One of the many great ideas in Peanuts is the one in which you go to someone's yard and there's a stand where you sit and you tell your

Wednesday 4/8/26 Often I'll read baseball history discussions between people from many years ago. It can be interesting to see how the change in how certain players are viewed. People presently tend to get more wrong, because they use en vogue analytics as an end all be all, especially because they don't know the game that well and they're adverse to thinking. Whereas, the en vogue analytic provides what's tantamount to a number on the Instagram dashboard, and that's what alm

Wednesday 4/8/26 The Red Sox won last night to improve--that verb feels ironic here--to 3-8, mostly because Garrett Crochet had the start. They continued to make mental errors, though, and Alex Cora was once again asleep at the managerial wheel. Trevor Story, of all people, provided the big hit. Prior to last night's game, he had an OPS+ of 0, which I can't recall having seen before. I'm waiting for his first walk of the year and wondering how much longer he can go without ma

Wednesday 4/8/26 Most people are horrible people. It's almost impossible--because it takes too much character, and most humans possess little to no character--to have money, power, fame, and not be worse than someone would be without those things. I'm unchangeable in these regards, but as these pages make plain, I'm not like anyone else. I answer to different things. And I also want different things. People will try to get away with whatever they're allowed to get away with.

Monday 4/6/26 The Red Sox lost another yesterday to fall to 2-7. Ranger Suarez was poor again. I'm seeing a guy who doesn't have much. His pitches are waiting to be crushed if they aren't right where they need to be. The only reason the Sox were ever in the game--and had a rare lead at that--is because Walker Buehler was doing his best to take care of his old friends in the Red Sox' dugout. The Sox stand at five games out. They're already in real trouble. You might have a dis

Sunday 4/5/26 To a friend's daughter but relevant to all, I think. Dear (), It is your friend Colin in Boston again. I was thinking about you this morning because it’s Easter. I like Easter because it’s the holiday that reminds us we can rise again. That’s not a religion thing or a God thing. It’s a person thing. The thing about rising up is that it’s not something we should stop doing. Rising doesn’t mean, “Oh, I’m here now, time to take a load off, that’s done.” You

Sunday 4/5/26 The Red Sox dropped another one yesterday after winning their home opener the day before. so their record now stands at 2-6. The biggest issue is the offense. The pitching has been okay-ish overall. Sonny Gray went six on Friday, surrendering two earned runs, but that's misleading, as the hometown scorer apparently decided to hold those woeful error totals right where they are for the Sox defenders and ask the pitchers to pay the price for a bit. Rafaela dropped

Thursday 4/2/26 As it says. *** Yesterday's paragraph actually changed some. The two versions side by side make for an interesting comparison in the choices in which one would be able to note, "Oh, I see why he did that, wow," when such a thing would not have been envisionable upon seeing the earlier example. The new version features in yesterday's Granta prose off, but, again, I still need to go over the entry and will send it along here after I do. I'm working fairly hard