Rex Ryan is 3-1 as the new head coach of the New York Jets, and the Jets might be as good as their record. The second part is what would be unusual. The Jets are never as good as their record, not till the season is over, when they turn out to have been the Read More
How good is the next name going to have to be, from baseball’s secret steroids-offender list? The returns on the leaks from the six-year-old document are already diminishing: Alex Rodriguez was boffo, scandal-perfect, exactly what everyone wanted to hear.
But that was the peak. The Manny Ramirez–David Ortiz combo? Ramirez was already serving a Read More
BEIJING—There was nothing on TV about the election when I got up on Nov. 5, just about the time that the polls were closing in Indiana. I had been looking forward to following the results of an election from the other side of the world–as with the NBA’s West Coast games, the important part would Read More
At brunch time on Aug. 9, less than a day into the Olympics, China was off to a bad start. This was before the murder, even. Outside the 24-hour dim sum restaurant, the air was filthy, as it had been, more often than not, for two weeks. The roadway in front—south of Ditan Park, the Read More
"Visitors to the Olympics," Charles McGrath writes in today’s New York Times, "…can be forgiven for thinking that China is a land of unnatural youthfulness where nobody is older than 30…..Older Chinese, and there are plenty in Beijing, are mostly out of sight."
Are they? As of today, the old people seemed Read More
At lunchtime on July 29, the New York Times masthead invited a group of reporters and editors up to a conference room in the paper’s executive hall on the 16th floor to eat roast beef and turkey sandwiches and talk about the paper’s massive investment in the Olympic Games.
How, they Read More
BEIJING—The last night of the old, normal life, July 19, was mild and beautiful. The air was clear, even though the Olympic rules would not take effect till the next day: the driving ban on half the city’s three million private cars, alternating daily between odd- and even-numbered license plates; the halt to construction digging Read More
BEIJING—“Of course, nobody wants to be Samantha,” Eva Shen said. It was a warm Saturday night on Houhai, the lakeside bar strip, and Ms. Shen, 40, had stepped outside the club she co-owns. Over the door, in glowing characters, was the Chinese name of the club, Yuwang Chengshi; above that, in larger letters, was its Read More
BEIJING—Down in the basement of Beijing’s celebrated National Stadium, outside the empty press-conference hall, I put my finger on a problem that had been troubling me for a month. I mean this literally. In front of me, plunging at an angle from the ceiling to the floor, was one of the immense, square-sided silvery columns Read More
BEIJING—One way to try to envision tens of thousands of dead might be to stand in the midst of tens of thousands of living people. I can’t say how many people were on Tiananmen Square on May 19, mourning the victims of the Sichuan earthquake. I’m usually not bad at crowd counts—cut out a section Read More
