Marcus Joseph Ruslander (August 23, 1932 – March 30, 2023), better known as Mark Russell, was an American political satirist and comedian. A sample of his act.

An early blogger, an excellent newspaper and magazine journalist, an open supporter of Hillary Clinton in 2008, professor Jarvis saw that the owners and editors of newspapers were failing to take advantage of the digital revolution of the early 2000s.

Today Jarvis is a testy and relentless critic of the Internet he predicted was coming. In his latest book, the “Web We Weave,” he accuses it “of dividing us, spying on us, making us stupid, and addicting our children.”

But unlike so many in the media, he’s not a pessimist who blames the Internet for its excesses and infamous cultural and political sins. He blames the humans in media and government who have misused it and kept it from reaching its full potential.

As the synopsis of his book on Amazon says:

“The internet did not make us hate; we brought our bias, bigotry, and prejudice with us online. That’s why even well-intentioned regulation will fail to fix hate speech and misinformation and may instead imperil the freedom of speech the internet affords to all.

“Once we understand the internet for what it is—a human network—we can reclaim it from the nerds, pundits, and pols who are in charge now and turn our attention where it belongs: to fostering community, conversation, and creativity online.”

Jarvis remains an optimist about the digital revolution that has been turning so many corners of our world upside down.

He five previous books include, "The Gutenberg Parenthesis," and "Magazine." He cohosts the podcasts "This Week in Google" and "AI Inside" and blogs at Buzzmachine. Jarvis is the Tow Professor of Journalism Innovation Emeritus at CUNY's Newmark School of Journalism.

In his long career as a print journalist, Jarvis was creator and founding managing editor of Entertainment Weekly, TV critic for TV Guide and People, Sunday editor of the New York Daily News, a media columnist for The Guardian, and president and creative director of Advance.net.

Here’s his recent bio and picture:

Jeff Jarvis, 2009

I interviewed Jarvis in 2009, when newspapers were well into their death spiral and Jarvis was predicting big changes in the business of writing and delivering the news. Despite the financial plight of print, he was optimistic about the new ways of doing better journalism that he said the digital age would bring.

Q&A

In a previous life Jeff Jarvis was a big-city newspaper editor and TV critic who became the creator and founding editor of Entertainment Weekly magazine.

Today Jarvis is best known as the father of BuzzMachine.com, a smart, Internet-loving blog about the dramatic and often damaging affects the digital revolution and new technologies are having on "the old media."

Jarvis has been brutally critical of the newspaper industry for refusing to embrace and adapt its business and journalism models to the Web until it was too late to avoid the severe financial trouble it’s in today.

He recently wrote a book called "What Would Google Do?" (Collins Business) that explains how the business strategies and worldview Google employed to take over the digital world -- such as openness, collaboration and trusting and relying on its customers -- can benefit other industries and companies.

I talked by phone to Jarvis in April of 2009 from New York City.

Q: What does Google do and what’s so revolutionary about it?

A: The idea behind the book was not so much to write a book about Google as about the changes in our world -- and trying to figure them out by viewing them through the lens of Google’s success. I believe the changes in our world are huge and profound right now and we’re operating under different rules.

We can see that in Google, for example. Google did not grow to be, according to the Times of London, "the fastest growing company in the world" by trying to buy and own and control everything. Instead they created platforms and networks that enabled others to succeed.

Another example of a new rule is that we operated before in a scarcity economy -- where controlling a scarcity was your way to success: I control the press, you don’t. I get to say what goes on it. I get to charge you whatever I want to charge you -- nah, nah, nah, nah.

That’s not Google. Google operates under an abundant economy. They could have had a scarcity with search and charging as much as the market could bear to people who for search for pizza in New York. Instead they charge for performance and they were motivated to put ads everywhere across the Internet. That’s another example of a changed rule, so that indicates changes in the world in the Digital Age after the Industrial Age.

Google also shows the way to having a new relationship with the public, your customers. For one thing, Google trusts us. Google respects us. It thinks we’re smart. Unlike Yahoo -- which tried to catalogue the whole Web, which when you think about it now is pretty funny -- Google said, "No, the people who are using the Web know what’s good and what’s relevant. We’re going to make a system to listen to that and feed it back."

There are other examples too, but I think Google just sees the world differently because it is a different world and it learned how to exploit that.

Q: If there is one thing you could say to try to persuade someone that they need to read your book, what is it?

A: It’s that "My kid has to go to college."

Q: Besides that.

A: We’re going through something much bigger than a financial crisis and something much more fundamental than a recession or a depression. The world is changing in critical ways and you have to start to understand that and change your worldview and act around that. That’s what I try to bring you by understanding Google’s success in this new world.

Q: In a way the world is being turned upside down yet again by Google and that sort of bottoms-up, sharing, cooperative, linked world.

A: Right. Just look at the fact that Google releases betas of all their products. When they do that what they are really saying to the public is this product is unfinished, it’s imperfect, help us finish it." That’s not the way that companies worked -- or could work -- before.

If you spent years tooling your auto factory or hours writing your newspaper story, the myth was that it was perfect -- finished. But in the Internet, and especially in how Google’s used the Internet, releasing betas is a way to actually be humble and, more importantly, to be collaborative.

Q: And to tap the intelligence of the crowd and the whole world rather than just your in-house experts.

A: Right. To respect the intelligence of the crowd and then you want to try to tap it. I think those are both new.

Q: How has your book been received? I noticed that Publishers Weekly reviewed it and said you were kind of "acerbic" and "condescending" and that you had assembled a bunch of "rants." What’s your reaction to that?

A: I’m a blogger.

Q: You can’t help yourself?

A: I’ve got to write in a blogger’s voice. Everyone reacts to it differently, but the book was really written through and with the blog. I’ve been thinking through these ideas over the last two or three years. My readers helped me by arguing with me and correcting me and adding to what I had to say. In one case, the readers even basically wrote a chapter in the book. So it’s very much in a blog voice, and I suppose that might have irritated a couple persons.

Q: Newspapers haven’t taken kindly to your tack about the new media and what’s going to happen to newspapers.

A: Some haven’t, but I think that’s changing, too. Clearly, I respect journalism greatly. I’m teaching it. I did it for my whole career. I’m teaching it now. I believe in the future of journalism. I’m optimistic about the future of journalism. But more and more, I see newspapers trying -- at the very last minute before the gallows -- to throw their Hail Mary passes (sorry for the mixed metaphor there) and trying to save themselves now.

Meanwhile, they’ve squandered the last 20 years since the Web really was invented, 15 years since the release of the commercial browser and craigslist and 10 years since the birth of Google and blogs.

There has been plenty of time for newspapers to reinvent themselves for a world past paper -- and they didn’t. And now at the last minute they are trying to come up with desperation moves like charging for content, or cutting their content off from the world, or trying to get subsidies -- and it’s their fault.

But I believe strongly there will be a market demand for quality journalism and information and the market will find a way to meet that demand -- in some cases with newspapers that have transformed themselves and in some cases with new entities that replace newspapers.

Q: Do you worry about the future of good journalism from local papers and the electronic media? Is it going to disappear? Is it going to reinvent itself?

A: I don’t think it’s going to disappear. It’s going to reinvent itself and I think it can even improve itself and grow and become more targeted and deeper in the community. But it’s going to be very different. I think we bring a lot of assumptions to what journalism is.

Journalism came from newspapers and from full-time journalists. And journalism was stories and journalism came out once a day. There are a lot of inherent assumptions that are hard to get passed.

I realized recently that in my mind’s eye I naively was thinking there was going to be an orderly transition -- it’s like Jan. 20th in Washington, the print president would hand off to the digital president and off we’d go. And that’s not the case.

I realize now that newspapers -- especially newspapers that were monopolies and very powerful and very rich -- were not inclined to disrupt themselves. That’s why they have waited to the last minute for their Hail Mary passes and that’s why many of them are going to die.

Q: Will they be replaced?

A: They are going to be replaced. They’re not going to be replaced by some digital equivalent one-for-one. I think what we are going to have are ecosystems of news in communities. Some of it will come from some new form of a newsroom -- maybe not in a room, but a news organization. Some of it will come from former paid journalists like you who create new businesses. Some from bloggers who make what they do in journalism into a business. Some from public- and foundation-supported journalism at a small level.

What we spend now on investigative journalism is actually very small and it is conceivable to think that it could be supported by a ProPublica or a Huffington Post. I also think we’re going to have to demand more transparency of government data and actions to make it all searchable and linkable. And that becomes part of the ecosystem of journalism, with more eyeballs on what government does.

We’re going to add all this together. It’s an uncertain thing. It hasn’t been done. I run a project at the City University of New York and do business models for news just to try to flesh out these business models and figure out where we go. We have to start experimenting with this.

We have to start failing and learning and improving, but I believe we will come out the other end with a new structure of journalism in local communities.

Q: How do you describe your politics and have they changed or shifted in the last few years to be more friendly toward markets and maybe limited government.

A: Ah. Interesting. On my "About" page on my blog I try to be obnoxiously transparent. I (reveal) more than you’d ever want to know --. But I’m basically a liberal. I was a big supporter of Hillary Clinton.

After she lost, I ended up voting for Barack Obama. But I also started blogging after Sept. 11, because I was at the World Trade Center and that affected my politics, too. I was one of the early -- as were called -- "War Bloggers" and shifted from being an old ‘60s pacifist to a hawk.

The more interesting question you are asking is about the libertarian stripe. When the blogs came along, I asked myself whether they were essentially left or right. If we believe that mass media was essentially "left" -- of the people -- and cable TV and talk radio were both essentially kind of "right," at least as executed by Fox News on TV in terms of being able to rant on topics, what was the Internet?

In the early days of blogs there was a disproportionate number of libertarian bloggers. At first that made sense to me. I thought, "Oh, OK, the Web is about individual liberty, so maybe the Web is libertarian."

In the end I didn’t think that because I think really what the Web does is it enables people to coalesce together no matter what their beliefs and stripes. It cuts across party lines and national boundaries and demographic demarcations and it just enables people to join together. So I don’t think the Web is necessarily libertarian but it I think it teaches us a lot about individual liberty and about the freedom to organize ourselves.

Q: As a libertarian, I like everything you say about where this great restructuring is taking us. As I’ve written down here -- "It’s going to be free and open and transparent and market-driven and it trusts the individual to do the right thing for himself and society." Am I projecting too much?

A: I think that’s all true. But I think that we also have to see after the so-called financial crisis that there is also danger we have to watch out for. I do believe in markets. It actually comes first and foremost when you trust in the taste and intelligence of the people.

If you don’t essentially trust the people, then you don’t believe in democracy or free markets or reform religion or education in journalism, because if the people are all dolts why give them any power or authority?

I learned -- believe it or not, as a TV critic -- an essential faith in the taste and intelligence of the people. So I do believe in generally leaving the markets alone and letting us -- the people -- do what we see best and trust that we are smart as a crowd.

However, witness the banks. Witness the lack of regulation in CBOs (collateralized bond obligations) and such. It did go wacky. I think the answer to that is not more regulation. I think the answer to that, in the Internet view, is more transparency.

We have to have a default of transparency in government and business and journalism that we haven’t had. I’ll have some faith in that and hope that that can fix us. But purely unbridled, unwatched markets -- as we’ve seen lately -- have their flaws.

Q: Also as a libertarian, I know that government always will want to take control of new developments in technology or even prevent the changes they bring. Do you worry about government’s future actions?

A: Yeah -- the same as I guess I’ll worry about anyone in power. That sounds ridiculous; I don’t want to say that, either, because I think that we go overboard on this: Going after Microsoft in its day, going after Google now because they’ve become too big. We love success, we hate success; we love size; we hate size. I think that’s dangerous too.

I do believe in the notion of checks and balances. I don’t think government was doing enough to watch out for us. It certainly could turn around and do too much, but we need checks. The ability of the Internet, though, is to enable us -- the people -- to perform checks. The more that this data is out there, the more we can keep our eyes on it.

Q: It sounds like the structural changes you are describing in the news media is the latest chapter of what Joseph Schumpeter called the "gales of creative destruction of capitalism." It’s cruel but it’s pretty necessary -- and in a relatively free-market economy like ours, it is inevitable -- that change and innovation come along and destroy the old guys and create new winners and losers. Do you see this as a healthy process that we should cheer and embrace or something that is to be feared?

A: Change is inevitable. It is immutable. And the only sane response to it is to seek it out and embrace it and exploit it. That can be painful to those who resist change or who are incapable of changing. But it is inevitable and it is especially inevitable now.

I go back to this notion that it is more than a financial crisis and more fundamental than a recession or a depression. There’s a brilliant economist in London called Umair Haque who calls it right now "a great compression" -- that is to say, perceived value is meeting real value.

I think we are moving from the Industrial Age to what comes next. As we look at newspapers, if newspapers are a canary in the coalmine in this process of change, we see that they refused to change. They tried to protect their past, which is no strategy for the future. And so a lot of them are going to die. We see the same resistance to change in the auto industry and in retail. I think we’ll see the same thing come to advertising and universities and all through society.

I don’t want to belittle the pain that it can cause to people who lose their jobs and don’t have the training to do what’s next. That’s all true, but you can’t really forestall change. My fear in the current bailing out the economy, is that we are bailing out the past rather than the future. We’re bailing out industries that are clearly failing and are bound to fail, when we should be investing instead in innovation, education and infrastructure for the future.

I was talking about this at marketing conference and someone in the audience said what you’re describing is "dialectical materialism" -- and in a sense we are. In a sense we are saying there is an inevitable change. The question is, "Is it just change for change because people messed up and things are changing? Or is it indeed an evolution?"

I think it’s not the evolution that Marx predicted -- It didn’t come from government diktat, it came from technology. I think the Internet and technology are leading us to the next evolutionary phase in the economy and society. I think we have no choice but to run to the change. That’s why I wrote the book in the end, because I think that Google in its DNA understood the world was changing and saw it in new ways to take advantage of that -- and so must we all.

Pittsburgh Trib

Saturday, Aug. 24, 2002

George F. Will can’t hit a slider, can’t make the throw from deep short and, as readers of his syndicated newspaper columns know, bats only from the right side.

But in addition to his superstar conservative political commentary and writing, Will has become arguably the country’s most visible — and virtually unconditional — lover of baseball.

Will is no bleacher bum in a bow tie. He’s written columns about the joys and woes of baseball. He’s also written best-sellers like “Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball” and “Bunts: Curt Flood, Camden Yards, Pete Rose and Other Reflections on Baseball.”

And he even served on a recent commission formed by Major League Baseball to come up with ways to modernize its have-and-have-not economics and make the game more competitive.

Many believe baseball is not merely in a deep slump, but has been fatally ruined by everything from TV to greed to steroids. Not Will.

The man who jokes that rooting for the hapless Chicago Cubs as a kid made him “gloomy, pessimistic, morose and conservative” still believes the national pastime is worthy of America’s love and respect.

With baseball’s strike date looming this Friday, I talked to Will by phone on Wednesday from his office in Washington, D.C.:

Q: Is Major League Baseball about to commit suicide or is this going to be a more like a self-administered mercy killing?

A: Well, if baseball goes on strike, it will be irreparably injured. Baseball is not yet all the way back from the ‘94 strike. If you take out the factors of the new ballparks and a couple new teams, it is clearly behind where it was in ‘94.

Q: Attendance-wise.

A: Yes. Attendance is down 5.7 percent this year, in part because ticket prices are up 38 percent since ‘98, which is in part because of payroll inflation.

Q: At its best, what is baseball?

A: At its best, it’s not only a beautiful game, extraordinary difficult to play — as everyone in America knows because every American is a failed baseball player — it is a connection with the American past unique among all sports.

There’s a reference to the game of “base,” as it was called, in the diary of a soldier at Valley Forge. So we’re in our third century of playing baseball — which is, of course, part of the problem. I don’t know if you read my recent column on this.

Q: About the archaic economics of baseball?

A: That’s right. In fact, baseball has an economics system that was in place before the invention of television or radio or the internal combustion engine or flight. It was in place in the 1870s, when the National League was formed, in which all revenues were treated as local, whereas, in fact, what you’re selling is a national product, not a local product.

Q: Has baseball outlived its value to a modern society?

A: No. There’s a tremendous appetite for baseball. Look at the attendance. In 1951, in perhaps the most famous baseball game ever played, played in New York City, the nation’s largest city, featuring two New York teams, at the end of a stupendous pennant race, at the end of a play-off, Bobby Thompson hit the home run in front of about 25,000 empty seats.

Back then for a team to draw a million in a season was considered extraordinary. After a while, 2 million was considered extraordinary. Today 3 million is quite common.

Q: Baseball has done a better job of marketing and selling itself in the last 50 years. But what about the game itself — what is it at its worst?

A: I don’t understand what you’re getting at.

Q: The actual game itself, as we watch it today. Maybe too many home runs, no pitching, maybe it’s watered-down talent … .

A: I don’t think it’s watered down at all. In fact, I think it’s played better than ever before. Look, until 19-whatever-it-was through the ‘50s we had 16 major league teams. Until 1947, all the players came from American white men. Then we discovered African-Americans.

Today, in a population of 280 million in this country, we draw upon not only that — black and white Americans — but we also draw upon the enormous reservoir of talent in Latin America, and Japan and Korea.

We have about 16 countries represented in the big leagues today.

It is a sign of the health of the game, a sign of the astonishing talent pool, that three of the most common surnames in baseball today, three of the top five, are Rodriguez, Martinez and Perez.

Q: Do you think young kids are still attracted to baseball the way they used to be?

A: Not as much as they used to be, because, again, baseball used to have the undivided attention of this country between April and October — between spring training and when Pitt played Penn State.

Now there are about seven weeks between the last NBA championship game and the first NFL pre-season game, so the competition for the sports dollar, for the attention of the sports fan, for space on the sports pages, for time on sports talk radio, is intense.

Q: Do you accept the premise that baseball has been ruined?

A: Certainly not. Good heavens no. Ruined• Seventy million North Americans are going to pay to go to baseball games this year. That’s not chopped liver. That is more people than will attend all the NFL, NBA and NHL games combined this year.

Q: What is most wrong with baseball and what is the George Will solution?

A: What is most wrong with it is the absence of competitive balance under this archaic economic system that produces revenue disparities between the richest teams and poorest teams of a degree that are not tolerated in the NBA or the NFL.

The solution to this is suggested by the blue-ribbon commission report, of which I was one of four authors, submitted to baseball in July 2000. The members were me, Rick Levin the president of Yale, Paul Volker and former Sen. George Mitchell.

Our two principal recommendations, which became elements of the owners’ collective bargaining proposal, were, first, sharing 50 percent of local revenues and, second, a luxury tax — what we called “a competitive balance tax” — on the top portion of the biggest payrolls.

That would be a disincentive to spend too much and the revenues from that tax would be distributed to the poorer teams. And that is what we are arguing about today.

Q: So it’s going to take what amounts to good old-fashioned share-the-wealth socialism almost to save America’s game?

A: Of course, but it’s not socialism. When you have 30 shoe companies competing with one another, it is perfectly reasonable when these 30 independent entities compete with one another for a few to be driven out of business and a few to become very dominant.

But 30 major league teams are not 30 independent entities competing with one another. They are part of a single entity that exists to equalize conditions — the leagues — so that there can be 15 competitive games a day.

Q: You seem to have a special fondness for the Pirates. Why is that?

A: I grew up in central Illinois but both my parents were from western Pennsylvania. Both went to Thiel College. My grandfather when he died was a Lutheran minister in Donora. And it was on a trip to visit him when I was nine in 1950 that I saw my first major league game, and I saw it in Forbes Field.

Q: What a beautiful old place that was, eh?

A: It sure was.

Q: Is it true that you owned a stake in the Pirates?

A: It is not true. I never owned a portion of any team. I was on the board of directors of the Padres and the Orioles. I did actually own one share of the Cubs a long time ago, when shares were outstanding.

Q: Who is your favorite baseball player and why?

A: Ernie Banks. He was the only serious player the Cubs had when I was growing up.

Q: I saw something on the History Channel the other day that showed clips of Roberto Clemente in the 1971 World Series against Baltimore, when he was 37 years old and hitting triples and throwing guys out at third on the fly from right field. Did you ever see Clemente play?

A: Oh sure. Absolutely.

Q: When I saw those clips it reminded me how much I used to like baseball and why I don’t like it now. There seemed to be something about the way Clemente played and ran, and he obviously loved the game. Maybe it was because he weighed 190 pounds instead of 240. I don’t know what it was.

A: Well, I’ll tell you. You go to see Alex Rodriguez or Alphonso Soriano. Clemente was a stupendously good ballplayer. Rodriguez is even better. There’s a lot of talent out there now.

Q: So what’s going to happen on Aug. 30 — strike or no strike?

A: Well, I think they’re clearly in the realm of splittable differences. They should be able to get a deal.

Andrew Zimbalist, sports economist

Pittsburgh Trib

Saturday, March 15, 2003

Overpaid players. Greedy owners. Poverty stricken teams without hope. Dumb marketing. Aging fans. Publicly subsidized stadiums. Shrinking Little League participation.

Baseball is not the national pastime it used to be. But Andrew Zimbalist, the noted sports economist and author of “May the Best Team Win,” says America’s signature game is not dead yet.

His new book about baseball’s economics and the public policy that has created it says the source of baseball’s problems is its monopoly status and its presumed (government-given) antitrust exemption. Lack of competition, he says, has bred arrogance, laxity and inefficiency among baseball’s leaders and has put baseball on the disabled list of major league sports.

I recently talked by telephone with the Smith College economics professor, whose book goes on sale Opening Day, March 31:

Q: If you were a doctor, how would describe the health of Major League Baseball.

A: Oh, that’s a tough question. I think baseball has a number of things that are right with it and a number of things that are wrong with it. I think because of its central position in our culture and in our history, it’s cut a lot of slack to make mistakes.

The fans have been very resilient and willing to forgive, not perhaps as much as they were before the ‘94-’95 strike, but nonetheless, still very forgiving. So baseball gets away with all sorts of inefficiencies and abuses that other industries can’t get away with.

Of course, one of the other things that makes that possible is that baseball is a monopoly. It doesn’t have competition from another top-level baseball league, so fans have no other place to go.

So I’m not sure I’d say baseball has a 101-degree fever. It certainly does not have a terminal illness. Baseball is limping along and will continue to limp along until it gets its ducks lined up properly.

Q: What specifically happens because baseball is a monopoly•

A: Baseball has not had any competition since 1914 and 1915, with the Federal League, and 1922, when it got an antitrust exemption. They don’t have economic competition from a rival league, Number 1. Number 2, they are not regulated and Number 3, unlike the other professional sports leagues, they have a presumed antitrust exemption, which means they’re not even subject to judicial review, to checks and balances, if you will.

Q: In what ways does that shape baseball?

A: You see all sorts of direct manifestations of the problem. One of them is the whole stadium game that gets played out. A few hours ago I was talking to a reporter in Washington, D.C. Here you have the eighth-largest media market in the country and the nation’s capital without a baseball team for 30 years. That would be absolutely inconceivable if you had competition in the industry.

If Burger King and McDonald’s see a viable street corner, they both rush to get there before the other one. You end up with two hamburger joints. If you had a competitive league against Major League Baseball, Major League Baseball would rush to take advantage of the wonderful market that Washington offers.

Instead, you get the opposite phenomenon, where -- because there is an artificial restriction on the number of franchises -- you get cities competing against each other to get a baseball team. You get these massive public subsidies in order to lure baseball to the city, and what they end up in essence doing is subsidizing extraordinarily wealthy individuals, be they owners or executives or baseball players, who get the lion’s share of revenue that’s generated at a ballpark that’s usually financed out of sales taxes, which fall disproportionately on lower income groups.

All that flows from the economic power and monopoly status that baseball has.

Q: The NFL has figured out how to make sure Green Bay wins a Super Bowl every once in a while. All baseball has to do is look at football. What’s wrong with baseball’s leadership?

A: Basically, it’s had that simplistic approach. They look at football and say there’s revenue sharing in football, let’s do revenue sharing. They think it’s magically going to convert themselves into the NFL.

But the problem is that they did revenue sharing the wrong way. They didn’t design it properly. And they really don’t have as much revenue sharing as the NFL. But look, the NFL has had revenue sharing since its inception in 1920. It’s been built into the system, so whenever any owner bought an NFL team, they were buying into a structure that had revenue sharing, and their expectations were never anything different.

But if John Henry pays $720 million for the Red Sox and its assets in 2002, and all of a sudden you say, “OK boys, we’re going to have an NFL here, and everybody gets roughly the same,” then Henry gets expropriated. And he’s not going to put up with that.

Q: It sounds like you’re saying baseball is unfixable.

A: No, I’m not saying that. I think what you have to do is set your sights to gradually improve it over time. The first step here is that you’ve got to move each time in the right direction ... . If you don’t have the discipline of the marketplace, it’s going to be more difficult. If you’re not subject to judicial review, then you get away with more stuff, and that becomes part of the culture of how the industry conducts itself.

Let me add one other thing: The obvious way you solve the problem of the New York Yankees, or however you want to characterize competitive imbalance, is by putting another team or two in New York. That would happen if you had competition.

Q: Is this lack of competition the cause -- or the explanation, at least -- of how all these cities have been basically extorted into building new ballparks for teams?

A: Yes, it is.

Q: So what has to be done from a public policy point-of-view to bring about this competition?

A: There are three options. Option No. 1 is to have a law that forces divestiture in the industry. Now you don’t want to create 11 baseball leagues, but you might want to create two.

Option 2 is regulation. I’m not saying it should happen in any particular way, but the federal government might say 50 percent of all games have to be shown on over-the-air television, for example.

And the third option, and this is a much milder, less heavy-handed thing, is you say that baseball, like the other sports and the rest of the U.S. economy, is subject to the country’s antitrust laws.

Q: Is Pittsburgh in better or worse shape than the average small-market team?

A: Oh, I don’t know. I’d have to study it. Certainly, Pittsburgh is not in good shape. Part of that equation has to do not with just the size and the income of the city and the conditions of the new stadium and the lease and so forth. It also has to do with the management of the team.

Clearly there are other small-market teams, such as the Oakland A’s or the Minnesota Twins -- which, by the way, aren’t really small markets -- that have had low revenues in the past and don’t have new stadiums, but they’ve been well-managed. So there’s a big, subjective element here. A well-managed team in Pittsburgh under the current system ought to be able to generate a profit.

Chicago

July 4th weekend in Chicago was relatively peaceful this year.

In most years past, the national media have gone crazy publicizing the Fourth of July body count from the perpetual gang wars on its mean streets.

This year all those 250th-birthday celebrations around the USA apparently eclipsed the annual July 4th murder news report from Chicago — which turned out to fewest homicides in six years.

It should be news — good news — that only 7 people were murdered and 29 were shot and wounded in Chicago over the July 4th weekend. That’s down from 11 in 2025.

Unfortunately, the number of people shot and killed in the city so far this year is 200, up 10 percent from last year.

A good way -- a fun way, if that’s not too cynical for you -- to keep careful and 'humorous' statistical track of Chicago’s homicide numbers and its violence trends is this website https://heyjackass.com.

More stats from HeyJackass!

Shitshow of the Year

For many years, this weekend was a lock for the most violent of the year. When the wheels came off on that mostly peaceful weekend in late May 2020, it was demoted to just another lead-filled weekend of silly decisions, with an extra day or two thrown in to pad the stats. UPDATE: Mother Nature has proven to be the undisputed queen of “Community Violence Interrupters”, and she isn’t in on the grift.

Past years:

2025 weekend tally: 11 killed, 42 wounded
2024 weekend tally: 23 killed, 86 wounded
2023 weekend tally: 13 killed, 65 wounded
2022 weekend tally: 15 killed, 65 wounded
2021 weekend tally: 23 killed, 90 wounded
2020 weekend tally: 21 killed, 71 wounded
2019 weekend tally: 7 killed, 69 wounded
2018 weekend tally: 10 killed, 42 wounded
2017 weekend tally: 15 killed, 89 wounded
2016 weekend tally: 6 killed, 62 wounded
2015 weekend tally: 11 killed, 55 wounded

Average July 4 weekend tally: 14 killed, 67 wounded

Steve Sailer

Steve Sailer, who often writes about numbery things like homicide rates or IQ scores among different ethnic groups — and who often gets in trouble for it from — wrote this about the welcome decline of homicides for 2025 .…

Steve Sailer

Finally: 2025 Homicide Statistics

The Centers for Disease Control collect cause-of-death statistics, including homicides. The CDC’s demographic data tends to come from funeral directors asking a few standard questions of the family, so they are less dubious than the FBI’s murder statistics collected from cops, because nobody ever gets mad at funeral directors over homicide stats. (The CDC only tracks victims of killings, while the FBI tries to make sense of local law enforcement’s data on perpetrators of murder as well as victims…

Read more

5 days ago · 33 likes · 43 comments · Steve Sailer

I posted this comment:

Sorry, Steve, but rates per 100,000 people and ratios between races -- which all the crime experts and the CDC like to use -- are meaningless to us regular people. It’s great news that we’ve seen homicides rates fall precipitously and there were only 14,000 deaths in the US in 2025. But the elephant in the national newsroom we’re still not allowed to point out is that the drop is largely because young black males in cities like Chicago and Memphis have stopped slaughtering each other so often. Here are some hard homicide numbers, roughly: Of the roughly 16k-17k homicides we’ve averaged in the USA each year over the last 30 years, nearly 60 percent of the murdered each year have been black people. Roughly 70 percent of the black murder victims were young black males between 13 and 34 years old and their killers were the same demographic. Nationally, that comes out to close to 5,000 dead young black men every year. Times 30 years -- 150,000 dead. It’s a terribly tragic body count we never hear in the media or politics for obvious reasons. In Chicago, which gets the most media publicity, especially on July 4 weekends, about 550 people have been murdered on average year after year since the 1980s. The toll of dead young black men, every year, in Chicago has been at least 300. Every year. The crazy and irreverent but handy website HeyJacksass! keeps daily tabs on Chicago violence.

https://heyjackass.com

If the national media cared, or had the balls, decades ago they’d have sent film crews to pan the black sections of Chicago cemeteries where, since 1996, roughly 10,000 dead young Chicago black males have been buried. If national black and white politicians and cultural/sports figures really cared, or if they had balls, they’d have been screaming for a national crusade to reduce the black-on-black killings for decades. I’ve been doing my amateur best to bring the scale of the American Slaughter to the attention of some folks in the news media for a few years, but no one seems to care much -- including the experts. https://clips.substack.com/p/who-cares-about-150000-dead-young?r=5mhtq&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=webSome facts from my pal Grok: “On average, roughly 4,000–5,000 young Black males (ages ~13–34) have been murdered per year in the USA over the last 30 years (roughly 1996–2025). bjs.ojp.gov This is an estimate based on CDC mortality data, FBI Uniform Crime Reports, and analyses from BJS and the Violence Policy Center. Exact figures vary by year due to fluctuations, but the group has consistently accounted for a highly disproportionate share of U.S. homicide victims.

These are my previous posting about the American Slaughter for the last few years.

2025, The July 4 edition

The good news is that homicides are falling pretty quickly these days in the bloody USA.

As of July 4th, even in Chicago — the nation’s most publicized homicide-ridden city — murders were down significantly.

According to the great web site HeyJackass!, the Windy City’s homicide total for the July 4th weekend — always a favorite top-of-the news item for the national media — was 11 dead.

That sounds terrible and tragic, and it is. But last year 23 of Chicago’s 2.6 million souls were killed and 86 were wounded over the Fourth. The 10-year average is 14 and 69.

Murders are in overall decline in Chicago.

So far this year — as of August 21 — there have been 271 homicides of all kinds, about 100 fewer than last year at this date. 225 of the dead were “shot and killed,” which means 46 other human beings were killed with knives, fists, clubs or whatever.

The rest of the summer of 2025 still could see insurrections and street riots in the usual cities, thanks to reactions to the Trump administration’s strict, hyper-active deportation policy.

But so far this year homicides are way down in Chicago and in most cities, which is obviously a good thing and has been a welcome trend since the spike of murders during covid lockdowns. (Pittsburgh/Allegheny County is part of that trend: Through July 7, there were 32 homicides in Allegheny County. During the same span there were 53 in 2024, 55 in 2023 and 64 in 2022.)

Data analyst Jeff Asher recently compiled some 2024 numbers from the 30 most murderous U.S. cities — and this year their homicides are cumulatively down 21.5 percent:

As Asher says, “There are undoubtedly many factors contributing to the multi-year decline in crime we are experiencing, and it will be a while before the impact of these factors in reducing crime is truly understood.”

Chicago, Chicago, that murdering town

Chicago, aka the murder capital of the United States, has always been the national media’s poster child for deadly weekend shooting sprees and urban drug gang violence.

HeyJackass! keeps a close running tab on Chicago’s violence. Here’s part of its irreverent homepage from July 10.

During every July 4th weekend, except maybe this one, we’d hear the national media blare the shocking statistics. In 2024 it was:

By  Sun-Times Wire

19 killed, 86 wounded in shootings during extended Fourth of July weekend in Chicago — Updated Jul 6, 2024, 11:48pm EDT

This July 4th was not so bad: “Only” 11 dead and 42 wounded.

Chicago gets most of the bad homicide publicity, but it doesn’t have the highest murder rate per 100,000 people in the country. Smaller St. Louis (69) Baltimore (51) and New Orleans (40) are the top three.

Chicago is a distant No. 10 with 24 murders per 100,000 people — but murder “rates” are cold, dry numbers fit only for sociologists.

In 2023 there were 632 human beings murdered in Chicago, down 15% from 2022. In 2024, according to HeyJackass!, the number of people killed fell to 609 (with 2,444 wounded).

That’s an improvement, sadly, but Chicago’s falling murder count is just a footnote in an ongoing bloody American tragedy.

Since 1995, Chicago has been a permanent killing field for young black men. Every year at least 300 young black men have been shot, stabbed and beaten to death by other young black men.

That 300 murder-per-year figure is a conservative estimate, given that Chicago has averaged over 500 homicides a year for 30 years and roughly 80 percent of those killed were black.

Yet it still adds up to nearly 10,000 young black men killed by their peers since 1995.

That’s a shocking number. But Chicago’s murders make up only a fraction of the “American Slaughter,” the country’s annual and un-publicized slaughter that has ended the lives of 150,000 young black men across the country since 1995.

The homicide gap that is not news

In 2022, according to Statista, there were 19,196 homicides in the U.S. The total number of black victims was 10,470. Though whites outnumber blacks in the population by about 5-1, the number of white homicides that year was 7,704.

The glaring black-white homicide gap in the U.S. is decades old and it occurs every year. July 4th shooting sprees and multiple gangland murders on weekends get mentioned in the news all the time — like sports scores.

But no one important or influential in the media or elsewhere has seemed very interested in digging into or publicizing the specific details of black homicides or providing any national or historical perspective.

If they did, they’d find that the racially unbalanced homicide statistics for the whole country are a macro version of Chicago’s.

They’d also learn that each year since 1995 roughly 5,000 black men under 34 have been killed in America by other young black men, usually with handguns. That means the running toll of murdered young black men since Bill Clinton was in office is a staggering 150,000.

It’s a figure so shocking — and never pointed out in the national media — that it’s hardly believable. It’s 50,000 more Americans than were killed in Vietnam and Korea combined.

So where are the Million Man marches for those 150,000 slain young black men? Where are the cries and outrage of national black -- and white -- leaders?

Where are Obama and Oprah and LeBron and Kamala and all the famous politicians and pundits and moral preachers of every color and political party who supposedly care about important racial issues?

What could possibly be more important to the country than trying to end a bloody 30 years war on young black men by other young black men?

Young people of all colors commit a disproportionate number of crimes — and the most murders. But the country’s annual murder toll goes up and down for all kinds of social and economic reasons. So does the murder rate per 100,000 people — an abstract crime statistic thrown around by the media that means nothing to the average American.

But to make things clear and simple, let’s skip the murder-rate stats and just count all the dead people.

Let’s say there are 20,000 murders in the USA in an average year. That comes to roughly 54 murders per day. About 60 percent of those homicide victims — roughly 32 a day — are black Americans. Mostly they are males under age 34.

In 2023, the country’s final homicide toll, though down compared to the previous two covid years, included roughly 10,000 blacks of all ages. Again, based on the numbers, at least 5,000 of the victims was a black male under 34 who was killed by a black male under 34.

Reducing this perpetual urban slaughter should have been the chief concern of black leaders and the legacy news media for decades. It’s hardly a secret to the black community.

A group called the Gifford Law Center for the Prevention of Gun Violence knows what’s going on. It says that “For decades, gun violence has taken a disproportionate and grueling toll on Black communities—leading to tens of thousands of gun deaths and hundreds of thousands of gun injuries.”

The report says, “Homicide has been the leading cause of death for Black men ages 15 to 44 for more than half a century” and that “for young Black men, gun homicides are the leading cause of death and more than outstrip the next leading causes of death combined.^”

These numbers and the disproportionate homicide rate for blacks are confirmed by bipartisan Brady United, the country’s oldest and most active gun violence prevention organization.

Responsible for the getting the Brady Background Checks law passed in 1994 that requires that all handgun purchases from federally licensed firearm dealers be registered, it focuses on the easy availability of guns and believes that:

To address the rapid increases in firearm homicide mortality among Black Americans, we must first address the racist laws and institutions that perpetuate inequality. Although white people in the U.S. are more likely to die by firearm suicide compared to Black people, the rate increase of firearm suicide among Black Americans is growing at a much faster pace than among white Americans.

Despite groups like these, national black leaders apparently do not realize the scope of the national slaughter of young black men or, more likely, don’t want to discuss it. And the major news media are equally AWOL.

Journalists have either been too clueless to have noticed the deaths of 150,000 young black men or too chicken to ask national and local black leaders why the black culture is so violent and what they are doing to fix it.

As in previous years, in 2025 no black leaders, movie stars, politicians or important media figures will jump in front of the cameras and declare a national crisis or call for a national crusade to slow the mass killing of their sons.

They’ll do what they’ve always done — call for more gun control or blame poverty or racism or slavery or bad cops or food stamp cuts for the murders of tens of thousands of young black men.

Meanwhile, the American Slaughter will continue to be what it has been for more than 30 years — the bloody elephant in the American newsroom that people can’t see or are afraid to say anything about.

‘American Slaughter’ — the Pittsburgh edition

January 3, 2025

Pittsburgh

1993 was an especially bloody year for the City of Pittsburgh and surrounding Allegheny County.

As Post-Gazette crime reporter Mike Fuoco reported in his annual year-end roundup of local homicides 31 years ago, 118 men and women were murdered in a city/county population of about 1.3 million. It was the highest number since 1917.

As usual, and as Fuoco pointed out early in his article, those Pittsburghers who were killed in 1993 were disproportionately young, black and male and virtually all of them were killed by other young black males who used handguns.

Homicide-wise, not much has changed in Pittsburgh in three decades — except for the steady shrinking of the city’s population and the names of this year’s list of dead young black men.

The city of Pittsburgh and its surrounding suburbs and rusted out steel towns are well-known for having low crime and murder rates. Like most cities, in 2023 and 2024 the city of Pittsburgh’s homicides fell.

In 2023, according to the Post-Gazette’s year-end unofficial wrap-up of city and county homicide statistics, there were 100 homicide victims. There were 52 in the city (pop. 303,000) and 48 were in the rest of Allegheny County (pop., about 900,000).

The city’s 52 homicides in 2023 were significantly lower than the 71 murders it had in 2022, a year when national violence rates were still spiking as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns in 2020 and 2021.

For 2024, the city’s preliminary numbers show a further drop in homicides — 41 compared to 52 in 2023. But in 2024 Allegheny County’s unofficial death toll jumped to 67 homicides, up from 48 in 2023.

In other words, the city-county total for 2024 went up to 108 homicides, eight more than 2023. Reports of shootings in the city were down in 2024, if that hard-to-count criterion is considered a sign of progress.

The number of blacks murdered in the city, which is 37 percent black, and all of Allegheny County (13 percent black) each year is relatively low.

But in terms of who is murdered and who does the killing in Pittsburgh, it is the same old, tragic and insufficiently publicized or lamented story that is repeated in dozens of larger cities across the USA.

In 2023, as has been the case in Pittsburgh for decades, about 82 percent of all the murder victims in the city and the county were black. A few were women and 32 of the 41 black victims were under age 34. Eight were under age 17.

As of late December 2024, the breakdown of murder victims for the year was roughly the same. As the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported, black men made up 30 of the city’s 41 homicide victims — 73 percent. Four of the victims were children under 18 and 11 other young people were shot and wounded.

Each January the media in Pittsburgh toss out the cold numbers for the previous year and often note that most murder victims are young black men. But they have not kept a running total of the shocking slaughter that’s been occurring outside their newsrooms for decades.

Since 1995, roughly 50 black males between 14 and 34 have been murdered every year in the city of Pittsburgh and surrounding Allegheny County. Over three decades, that adds up to about 1,500 dead young black men and teens. For the 2014 to 2024 total, see this map.

Grok Agrees …

On July 11 I asked Grok this question:

In the last 30 years how many young black males under 34 have been murdered in the USA. Who committed the killings and have any major black leaders or journalism outfits made it their mission to publicize the killings and call for a crusade to slow them down.

Here is its answer, which I’m sort of disappointed and proud to say is a instant rehash of my own postings on X and maybe this Substack item.

https://x.com/i/grok/share/ujFD1G4y7IBNTgVqT8m0dALTi

I made a mistake — first of my career, I think — by linking Michael Kelly with Tabitha of MTV. At least that’s what the highly annoyed Kelly told me on the phone when he called to ask for a retraction or correction.

Tabitha Soren married the great journalist Michael Lewis, not Michael Kelly, in 1997.

In 2003 Kelly, then an editor-at-large at the Atlantic Monthly became the first American journalist to die in the Iraq War when the military Humvee he was traveling in while embedded with the U.S. Army lost control and rolled into a canal after coming under Iraqi fire.

Not sure if this is an upper or downer in this age of newspaper decline, but anyone who ever worked for a paper -- especially anyone older than 50 or 70 -- should watch this 1928 silent movie called "The Power of the Press."

Starring Douglas Fairbanks Jr. -- who was 19 and incredibly contemporary looking -- as a cub reporter for the Times, it was directed by future genius Frank Capra.

Though a drama, it is a virtual documentary about how daily newspapering used to be when it had real political power and when it took about 100 workers to put out an edition.

The editor/reporter/columnist news room culture was captured perfectly by Capra.

His directing is incredibly modern -- and flawless. He didn't need dialogue to tell the story. The reporter is the hero, gets the girl and there's even a car chase. Just like real newspaper life....

By the way, when I started at the LA Times in 1979, before the offices were redesigned into their orderly beige cubicles, the View/Calendar section was almost as much of a dump as it is portrayed (realistically) in this movie.

In 1989, when I traveled back in time to Pittsburgh, the Post-Gazette offices were equally squalid, crowded and noisy. And, just like in 1928 when reporters had to share typewriters, at the PG we sat at long tables and had to share 'tubes' (primitive computers).

More from Tinseltown

Another near-documentary about the newspaper power and excesses of tabloid journalism is the 1931 talkie ‘Five Star Final.’ It stars Edward G. Robinson, who plays an archetypal angry editor of a sleazy rotten daily paper that any cub reporter in newspaper history would recognize.

Another ‘Press’ movie

In 1943, as part of Hollywood’s attempt to help the war effort with a little propaganda, it made a talkie about the misuse of the power of the press to betray the USA during World War II. (The 'the' was dropped from the 1928 silent title and it was called "Power of the Press.')

Full of patriotic messages, it features the assassination of a publisher of a major paper who planned to drop his isolationist stance and urge the USA to enter World War II.

It contains eternally timely topics like news coverage being too negative and not balanced. It calls isolationist opinions 'treason' and even includes the term 'fake news.'

It’s more than a little contrived, but we won WWII, so it has a happy ending.

1986

"Columbo" the TV show may have died and gone to syndication heaven, but Columbo, the slightly off-center but lovable homicide detective, is alive and well in the person of Peter Falk.

Falk no longer runs around in a rumpled raincoat constructing cases against rich and powerful murderers. But after just a few minutes in his new office on the Burbank Studios lot, it becomes clear where the deceptively casual Lt. Columbo inherited his endearing eccentricities.

Falk, 57, is surrounded by a gallery of photographs — his two daughters, himself, his hero Ted Williams in full swing -- and half a dozen black-and-white sketches of his own making.

Friendly and shoe-less, he slouches back in his swivel chair, feet on his desk top, flicking his cigarette in the general direction of the stand-up ash tray next to him.

Later, hunched over his desk, he doodles as his gravelly, familiar voice with its East Coast pool-room accent starts, stops and sometimes approaches inaudibility.

He's a regular guy who seems more eager to talk baseball than acting, but is still willing to spin plenty of stories about himself.

He began his adult life as a cook with the U.S. Merchant Marine (the childhood tumor that cost him his right eye didn't stop him from being a good amateur athlete, but it did keep him out of the Marines). He kicked around at several colleges, including Syracuse University, where he picked up a masters in Public Administration.

Before that he attended Manhattan's very liberal New School of Social Research, a fact which helped keep him out of the CIA when he applied for work there in 1953.

His 1946 vacation to Yugoslavia during his college years and his inadvertent membership in what was considered a "pink" Merchant Marine union, he points out with glee, made him such a hopeless CIA candidate that his interviewer laughed him out of the office.

Falk began acting full-time in 1955, after quitting his job as an efficiency expert for the State of Connecticut. In 1956 his off-Broadway work as the bartender in “The Iceman Cometh" brought him some attention and eventually led to steady work as a heavy in TV and films.

By 1961 the son of a department store owner in Ossining, N.Y., had been nominated for two best-supporting Oscars (as a vicious killer in "Murder, Inc." in 1960 and as a Brooklyn hood in "Pocketful of Miracles in 1961). He also had won an Emmy for his portrayal of a truck driver in a TV play called “The Price of Tomatoes."

Since then, his credits have ranged from "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad World" (1963) and the Neil Simon comedies "Murder by Death" (1976) and "The Cheap Detective (1978) to "Husbands" (1970) and “A Woman Under the Influence" (1974), a pair of small-budget but powerful films done with his longtime friend, actor/director John Cassavetes.

In 1972 Falk won a Tony for Simon's "Prisoner of Second Avenue." He hasn't done any TV acting since the immensely popular “Columbo” went off the air in 1977 — after 40 episodes and three more Emmys over five years — but he's been kept busy in movies.

His latest is "Big Trouble," a screwball comedy directed by Cassavetes and co-starring another of Falk's Hollywood cronies, Alan Arkin, with whom he last teamed in 1979 in “The In-Laws."

In "Big Trouble, which opens this month, Falk plays an amiable but quite insane con-man who lures Arkin, an unwitting, hard-working insurance salesman, into a crazy scheme to defraud his own company. It's a typically wacky role for a short and stocky man whose likeable and very human characters always seem to have a great deal of the real Peter Falk shining through.

Q: How's life been treating you since your "Columbo" days? Do you miss being the center of all that attention?

FALK: I'm trying to find some way to say this ... Fame is a terrific thing. It has its advantages. But I don't think most people realize how quick it grows old. What you have to say about fame, if you're talking about its relationship to happiness, is that it's overrated.

You ask what do you miss about Columbo. What you got a kick out of? It's great to be on the cover of Time magazine. But what you get a kick out of was when you looked at the dailies and saw that character do something that tickled you, and you enjoyed it so. The way you played the scene and the whole damn thing worked. What you miss is the frustrations when they didn't work the way you wanted them to, and the delight when they did work. It's great when people ask for your autograph, but it's a poor second to doing something that tickles you.

Q: Did you ever seek fame or dream of being famous?

FALK: I never dreamed of it. Just the opposite. No. I grew up in Ossining, N.Y.. and I put in my time on the street corner. I put in my time in the pool room, and I liked sports. I would have been embarrassed to tell any of my friends that I had any idea of being an actor.

My conception of being an actor was very naive and very romantic. I thought actors were some rare species. I thought they were artists, and I thought artists were Europeans. They came from Europe, 'cause I never saw any where I came from.

When I eventually got up enough courage to become one, I thought that Heaven on Earth was not being the star — that was out of the question. Heaven on Earth was being admitted to the Actors Studio. If I ever got admitted to the Actors Studio, that's the end of the line -- that was …

Q: Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio?

FALK: Yeah. That was in New York City. That was just the place where actors used to go to rehearse among themselves. In those days, that was the big thing. You never got paid for it. Nobody except for a few people. If I had a dream, my dream was that I would be able to make a living on the stage, in New York, as an actor. That I would be a working actor who got paid for acting. And I would have some credibility with other actors. I didn't become one until I was 26 years old. I mean, I didn't announce to myself that I wanted to be an actor.

Q: It's been reported that you started out wanting to be a politician. Was that just because there was nothing else to do?

FALK: No. When I was in school they kept making me president of the class, so I thought, "You'll be a politician.”

Q: Where did you go right? When did you change your plans?

FALK: I think I realized, once I matured, that I wasn't cut out to go out and kiss babies.

Q: You didn't have any burning desire to get elected Governor of New York?

FALK: No. The desire to be a politician left me very quickly.

Q: Are you politically oriented now?

FALK: Yes. I'm interested in politics. We all have to be. But it's unfortunate, the amount of cynicism that's connected to politics. I think it's bad for the country. I think a lot of the cynicism might be justified, but it would be a healthier country, particularly in terms of big offices, if we could be tough on these guys, but on important things. Frequently we get caught up in being tough on them in unimportant ways. It makes it tough for people to go into politics. There's a real danger that good people are staying away. It's just too rough.

I think we oscillate from one extreme to another, so that the feeling that one man, whoever is President, is responsible for all the good, is responsible for all the evil, is very hard for me to believe.

I think the politicians are totally lucky, totally lucky. Something happens that's actually out of their control — oil prices go up and everything is thrown out of whack. Oil prices go down, they get lucky. They make it sound like they did it. I think the country is too complex. These are short term things. In two years, it can go bad again. So I can't get that worked up about those things.

Q: Why did you choose acting?

FALK: There must have been some thing in me that drew me to it, because wherever I was, I'd end up acting. I'd always go in through the back door ... in high school ... and at Syracuse University.

Then when I was in New York at the New School of Social Research, there was a place called the Dramatic Workshop, very well known. It was run by Erwin Piscator, a German Expressionist director who left Germany in the '30s. And I was majoring in whatever the hell I was majoring in -- I don't remember. History?

Whatever it was, I was just stalling you know? But I knew one thing — the less work I could do the better I liked it. And I saw you could get credit for being in a play. The guy said, ‘Oh no, you gotta have these prerequisites, you gotta take fencing or something.’ I said, ‘I don't want to do that — could I read for the play?

So I read for the play and they give me the lead. And this guy offers me a scholarship to go become a drama major. And I remember sitting in Louie's Tavern, laughing my rear off ... this guy is asking me to be an actor. He thinks I'm one of these dopes. He thinks that I don't know this is amateur night here, what we're doing.

You can't make a living as an actor. What am I going to do, starve in a garret in Greenwich Village? Not for me. I was above it all.

Secretly, I was so thrilled. But I was so frightened, so intimidated that I would never admit it. So, I told him no. And that was only out of fear, fear of failure. I really wanted to do it.

I went to a lot of different colleges and I'd always end up doing a play. When I finally got a job where people were paying me — I was going 9 to 5 in Hartford, Conn., as a government efficiency expert — I couldn't even find the office. I was no efficiency expert.

But they had a little theater over there and now I gravitate over there. My life used to begin at night, when I'd go to that little theater and act. So, no matter where I was, l ended up onstage acting.

But I could never confront it, face it and say that that's what I wanted to do. Because I thought to be an actor you had... what did you ask me?

Q: How you ended up being an actor — I think you answered it: You don't know. You just ended up being one.

FALK: Oh, oh, oh. Why I ended up being an actor. Jim Backus said if I wasn't an actor I'd be a box boy in Food Giant.

Q: Food Giant? That must be a New York grocery store?

FALK: Don't they have Food Giants out here?

Q: As an actor, you seem to have gotten pretty good reviews. Have you ever been really blasted by critics?

FALK: I don't remember bad reviews in television, but I got bad reviews in theater and in movies. The first review I ever got on the stage was in 1956 by the leading critic in the country at that time, Walter Kerr, in my first play in New York — the New World Premiere of Molière's "Don Juan." It had never been done before in this country -- and if that production has anything to do with it, it never will be done again.

I opened that show and Walter Kerr opened his review on me — it's burned into my memory: ‘Peter Falk got the evening off to a wonderfully paralyzed start with 10 minutes of totally unaccented exposition.’

That play was my introduction to method acting. The director was trying to get rid of that artificial presentation of acting where you come out ... Ahh, incidentally, George Segal ended up in that production. I remember his blue pastel knickers and the buckles on his shoes. And I remember my buckles. It was fun.

Q: How did you end up in Hollywood?

While I was still in New York, I did a Hollywood picture, a Twentieth Century-Fox picture with Mai Britt and Stuart Whitman as the stars, but they came to New York because it was about New York gangsters -- "Murder, Inc." (1960).

I had never been to Hollywood before. I rarely got above 14th Street. Off-Broadway was down in the Village, and that's where we lived. I hadn't been in a movie. "Murder, Inc." came to New York and I got the part, and then I got nominated for an Academy Award.

Q: Did that Oscar nomination have a big effect on your career?

FALK: That was the turning point in terms of recognition outside the small group of people in New York City. As a result, Frank Capra cast me in "Pocketful of Miracles" (1961). That was the first picture I ever made out here. Glenn Ford. Bette Davis. That was Ann-Margret's first movie.

Then I got nominated for it. So, I said, ‘Geez, how long has this been going on? All you have to do is get in a picture and you get nominated. There's nothing to this.’

Q: So in your first two movies you were nominated for Oscars?

FALK: And in the same two years I was nominated for an Emmy for “The Price of Tomatoes” on the “Dick Powell Theater."

Q: Do you enjoy being an actor?

FALK: Yes.

Q: Which do you prefer doing ... TV, film or stage?

FALK: Film.

Q: We've heard that when you first moved out here to Hollywood, you thought filming — with all the lights and paraphernalia, etc. — was very artificial?

FALK: Right. But I feel the reverse now. I believe you can be more subtle on film, more real on film. Playing in a big theater, I’m more aware of the artificiality.

Q: Which of your roles are you most proud of?

FALK: I would say "Columbo." I thought I was good in "Under the Influence.” I liked my work in “The In-Laws."

Q: You've done a lot of movie work with your friends Alan Arkin, who was in "The In-Laws," and John Cassavetes, who's directing your new movie, "Big Trouble." Is it more fun shooting movies with your pals?

FALK: Yeah, it's nice working with guys you like, guys you get along with, guys you respect. But that's no guarantee that things won't go bad. But l am comfortable with Alan and I do enjoy him and respect him a lot.

Q: Are there any movie roles you wish you hadn't taken?

FALK: I thought I was lousy in "Luv."

Q: Just looking back on it, or for any particular reason?

FALK: No. I thought it was lousy when I was doing it.

Q: Was it the wrong part?

FALK: Well, a lot of it was probably my fault. Some of it was the script.

Q: Let's talk about "Columbo." What made it such a success, so special? Was it just you, or was it the concept?

FALK: I think it was the character of Columbo, primarily. I don't think you could separate it out — the character, the story, the fact that it was a mystery. But I think the hub of it starts with the character. That's the heart of it, the soul of it.

Q: Newsweek called Columbo a "lovable, low-key guy." Lovable, eccentric — was that what it was?

FALK: Ahhh, well, what was it?

People like somebody they can identify with. A man or person not above them, but among them. Ahhh, so, I think they identified with the common aspects of Columbo. I mean, he's like everybody — he's one of us.

But at the same time, people have always been attracted to heroes — people who are bigger than life, exceptional. In some ways, Columbo was both.

Elaine May said he was an ass-backward Sherlock Holmes. Holmes was smart, but he was an aristocrat. Columbo was just like everyone who walks the streets.

On the other hand, there's something exceptional about his mind. That had something to do with it: his lack of pretension — people like somebody who's not affected, they like somebody who's human.

By human — what do I mean by human? He's got a sense of humor, about himself. He's interested in what human people are interested in -- ‘What did you pay for that pair of shoes?’

His wife is on his mind. Guns make too much noise -- ‘I don't want to go to target practice. There's too much damn noise there.’ It's a human thing. You get a new raincoat in that one episode, it's a human thing to feel uncomfortable in something new. It's stiff.

He nails a guy who's got a lot of dough, is handsome, is on top of the world, because a guy reached too far, greedy — he regrets that. He regrets that the guy had to go that route. It's a human thing.

Also, the clues were good, the murders were clever, and the twists at the end were delicious and unexpected and convincing.

Q: You had good writers?

FALK: We didn't cheat. We didn't make a lot of shows — only six or eight a year.

Q: Where's the raincoat?

FALK: The raincoat's in my house. It was my raincoat. 

Jimmy Stewart

When you look up the word "actor" in the dictionary, Jimmy Stewart's name isn't there. But maybe it should be.

Few actors in history have been so beloved by the movie-going public, or so honored by their peers, as the tall, slightly gawky, drawling country-boy type from Indiana, Pennsylvania.

Stewart, 79, no longer is acting, but his films are enjoying something of a renaissance, thanks to the explosion of the home-video industry. Uncut and uninterrupted by TV commercials, many of the best of his 80-plus movies are being seen for the first time by a whole new audience.

His 1940 Oscar-winning performance in “The Philadelphia Story” is available on tape. So are his Oscar-nominated roles in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” “It's a Wonderful Life” and “Anatomy of a Murder,” as well as “Rope,” “Vertigo” and “Rear Window,” three movies he made with Alfred Hitchcock in the 1950s.

Although he rose to star status rather quickly, Stewart was never a stage-struck kid. He fooled around with magic and the accordion as a boy, and belonged to the theatrically oriented Triangle Club while at Princeton, but he graduated in 1932 with a B.S. in architecture.

He was headed for a rendezvous with a masters in architecture when a classmate, Joshua Logan, persuaded him to spend that summer with his acting company, the University Players, in Falmouth, Massachusetts.

There, Stewart met his lifelong pal, Henry Fonda, and caught the acting bug that would eventually land him in Holly wood via the stages of Broadway. His first (three-minute) part in New York earned him $45 a week, a decent sum during the depths of the Depression.

In 1935, with his roommate Fonda already signed to a Hollywood studio contract, Stewart left New York City to sign with MGM. Five years and 24 movies later, he was a Hollywood star-making $12,000 a week.

Stewart's Hollywood career was interrupted nine months before Pearl Harbor, when he enlisted as a private in the Army Air Corps. He won his pilot's wings and flew 20 missions over Germany in a B-24 before being given a desk job.

Here’s a Life magazine spread on the homecoming of Col. Stewart, war hero.

By the time he retired from the Air Force Reserve in 1968, he was a brigadier general, the highest military rank ever attained by an entertainer.

After the war, Stewart's roles took on a more masculine bent. He played everything from grisly cowboys and detectives to aviator Charles Lindberg and Harvey's rabbit-hallucinating Elwood P. Dowd, a role he's played on stage, in film and on TV.

One of the first stars to break with the studio system, he was also one of the first actors to elect to work for a percentage of his movies' profits, a decision that proved profitable when he appeared in several box-office hits made by leading directors like Hitchcock.

In all, Stewart was nominated for five best-actor Oscars, winning one. In 1985, he was presented with an honorary Oscar for his more than 50 years of work in Hollywood.

Long active with the Boy Scouts and other community organizations, Stewart's conservative politics are well known. He's a subscriber to William F. Buckley Jr.'s National Review, but says his politics are rooted in traditional values that come from the influence of his Scottish-Irish father and from his small-town upbringing.

Still quite active today, Stewart hits his Beverly Hills office each morning at eight to work and answer his mail (holding steady at about 200 letters per week), and swims in his pool daily. He takes his dogs on long walks each evening with Gloria, his wife of 37 years and the mother of their twin daughters, Judy and Kelly.

When he's not chasing one of his four grandchildren around the sprawling, landscaped grounds of his Beverly Hills mansion on Roxbury Drive, he's probably traveling somewhere to collect yet another award, like the Medal of Freedom the highest honor possible for a U.S. civilian, that his old buddy President Reagan gave him last year.

Jimmy Stewart

Q: It seems that quite a few of your movies are available on videocassettes these days. What do you think of the home-video revolution?

STEWART: I think it's a good idea, because the quality of videos is so good. They've really taken the time and effort to make the color good — it's like making a new print of the movie. And, of course, you can ask people over to see an old movie, and it doesn't have to be at two in the morning.

Home video is going to be a very important thing in getting more people back to the movies. It's all right, inviting people into your living room. But I think people'll do what they used to do — make an event out of going to the movie theater with family and friends. Movies are going to be around for a long time.

Q: Have you seen many movies lately?

STEWART: Not very many. But I went to one that really brought things back to me. We went with some friends down to the Cinerama Dome (in Hollywood) to see “Out of Africa.” You tend to forget about that great wide screen. “Out of Africa” was ideal for the big screen.

Q: Aren't the “Out of Africas” pretty rare today?

STEWART: I know what you mean. I think there's going to be a big change. The movies are like the Westerns. Westerns have had their ups and downs, too. The violence — people are getting tired of cars going off bridges and crashing into the water. If you've seen four or five of those, you've had enough of them. The sex — God knows, people aren't going to get tired of it, but it can be presented in a way that leaves a little more to the imagination.

Q: The cast of “The Philadelphia Story” (1940) — Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant and you — was great. And the movie was so witty and intelligent. Did it have any mass appeal?

STEWART: I think so. Fox said it did very well. That was a very exciting time for me. I had never worked with Katharine Hepburn before. I was lucky to get the part —and I had no idea I was going to get the Academy Award.

As a matter of fact, I was making a picture, and I wasn't going to go to the awards ceremonies, but someone called me on the phone and said you'd better get down to the Ambassador Hotel. I didn't know what the hell was happening.

Q: That was 1940, and you'd just done 24 movies in about five years. Did you have any feeling that you were being overworked?

STEWART: No. That was the ideal way to make movies. I admired the big studio system and the moguls who ran it. This was the ideal way to make movies. . . . Henry Fonda felt the same way. It was the idea of learning your craft while working at it.

You went to work six days a week —lessons, exercises, weightlifting. You took screen tests. You had little parts in big pictures and big parts in little pictures — that's when they were doing B pictures all the time.

It wasn't a question of, "Read this script and see if you like it." It was, "Here's a script and you start next Monday — and you're in the first scene, so be prepared."

Q: You had no choice of roles?

STEWART: Absolutely no choice.

That's the way it was for all the people at MGM. One time I got loaned out to Universal Studios, and the price they paid was that MGM got to use their back lot for four or five days.

They'd send you out on the road for a picture you weren't even in. I remember they said to go up to San Francisco and come out before the movie, tell them who you are and tell them a couple of jokes.

Well, I went to Morey Amsterdam and he gave me three jokes. In those days — and I'd forgotten about it — there were shows at ten in the morning. And at ten the place wasn't packed. It was a bad time for those jokes. Awful. And they didn't seem to get any better, either. I was there for three days.

Q: Was Hollywood in the '30s as crazy and glamorous as they say it was?

STEWART: Whatever glamorous means, I've never known -- but there was glamor. It was established by the studios — they were responsible for the glamor.

And all the wild things that were going on… in MGM's case, it had a public relations outfit that made up half of the wild things. But it was an exciting place. The work was exciting. As I said, you'd work six days a week, and then everybody from all the studios would go to the Trocadero — which is torn down now -- on the Strip.

Everybody'd go for a good time. They'd have different bands, and all the comics got up and tried to outdo each other. I remember one time a lady with a little girl — brown-eyed and wearing bobby sox -- asked if her daughter could sing. They put it up to the audience, and we said OK. She got up and sang for an hour — it was Judy Garland.

Q: Who were your pals in those days?

STEWART: Bob Young, Walter Pidgeon, Spencer Tracy. I was in my first picture with Tracy, and he was wonderful to me. Considerate. A great fellow to learn from.

Q: Of all those women you worked with — Hepburn, Kelly, Dietrich, Lombard, Rogers — do you have a favorite?

A: I really don't have a favorite. In a way, Grace Kelly, but it's very hard.

Q: You've called the Western the true movie form. Why?

STEWART: The Western is the basic movie form because the Western is a visual form, and that's what movies are. John Ford always said -- and he'd say it when we were all talkin' in a scene — "Cut. Everybody's talkin' too much." One time I heard him say, "If you can't tell your story visually on the screen without relying on the spoken word, you're not using the medium properly.”

Q: Yet “The Philadelphia Story” was all dialogue.

STEWART: It was from a play. And if you think back over the years, the number of pictures that have been successfully taken from plays... there are damn few. One of the reasons for this is that on the stage the spoken word is the whole thing. Everything else is background.

In the late '40s, studios would use the Lux Radio Theatre to boost a movie. They sent the script of “Winchester '73” to the Lux people, and they sent it back. They said, "We can't use this script -- nobody says anything. We don't know how to fill in all visuals."

Q: In those days, were you big enough to say, "I want that picture"? And could you get it?

STEWART: I plugged harder for the of role of Charles Lindbergh in “The Spirit of Louis” than I did for any picture. I tried everything. My former agent, Leland Hayward, was producing and Billy Wilder was directing it.

And they said, "You can't play it. You're too old." And I said, "I know I'm old, but you know they have a makeup department. They'll put a blond wig on me. And I'm just as skinny as he was." And they said, "You're too old."

There was a young actor named John Kerr who was around for a while, and they wanted him. But he read the script, and he didn't like Lindbergh for political reasons. That's the way I got the part.

Q: As a pilot, playing Lindbergh must have been a special treat.

STEWART: He was my hero. I worked at my Dad's hardware store when I wasn't in school, and for Lindbergh's flight I made a world out of beaverboard. Over here was the Woolworth Building and over here was the Eiffel Tower, and I made a model of the Spirit of St. Louis and hung it up.

My dad let me keep the lights on, and the Indiana Evening Gazette was across the street, and I'd go over there and find out where Lindbergh was and I'd move the airplane. People kept coming all night.

Q: You had it in the window of the store - which is where you put your Oscar for 20 years, too?

STEWART: He put it there. I didn't.

Q: Are you a product of a small town?

STEWART: I think so. I give the credit to my father, mostly, but my mother too. She was the only one he'd listen to. He had certain values — family, community friendship, church and loyalty — that I got from him.

The idea of community meant so much to him. He sang in the choir of the Presbyterian church and was involved in city council. When he was 40, during World War I — when America first got into it — he just disappeared. He didn't tell my mother, nobody. Three days later be came back an officer. He was in France until the end of the war.

Q: You did basically the same thing, enlisting in World War II, right?

STEWART: Sure. I was in my 30s, and at the studios everyone was saying I was too old, and they could fix it if I was drafted. But my Dad would have come out and shot me.

Q: You've been called a "super patriot." Did you have any problems with your career because you were a political conservative?

STEWART: No. I was raised like that and sort of followed after my father and never gave it a thought. The idea of being anything but a conservative — I never considered it.

Q: You and Henry Fonda were roommates on Broadway and longtime buddies. But politically you were diametrically opposed.

STEWART: Oh, yeah. We would argue our heads off for the first six or eight months we knew each other. But finally we got together — I think we were both drunk — and we said, "Look, we just yell at each other all the time. This is no fun. You shut up about politics and I'll shut up about politics, and we'll never mention it again.”

And we never did. When some thing came up and we were together, we'd just leave the room.

Q: Was there any burning passion or desire to be something else besides acting — weren't you going to be an architect?

A: I wasn't a good student. Here's where my father came in again. He said “be an engineer.” So my freshman year at Princeton I took some engineering courses, but at the end of the year a couple of professors came up and said you'd better get out of this.

I had to go to summer school between my freshman and sophomore years or I'd have been out on my ass. During that summer school someone told me about a mathematics class called 'descriptive geometery,’ which sounds terrible, but it’s not as bad as algebra. I took that during summer school and was able to get into architecture.

Q: Did you enjoy it?

A: Yes, very much. It was a creative type of thing. Joe (Jose) Ferrar was there at the same time I was. Josh Logan, the great director, was in the class ahead of me and he really was responsible for me getting into acting.

I got a scholarship to get my master's degree in architecture and that's what I was going to do. I think all the time my father was letting me get this education he didn't care what kind of education it was. All he wanted to do was have me come back and take his place — in the hardware store. That was it. He never said that, but I always thought it.

I was on my way to commencement up in front of Nassau Hall — and I can remember exactly where it was — and Josh Logan came up to me and said, 'You're coming back to grad school. In the summer we have a place up in Massachusetts called ‘Falmouth’ and we have an outfit called the ‘University Players,' which I'd heard of from three or four other Princeton guys.

And he said, 'Why don't you come up and spend the summer. It's a nice place at the seashore, and I think you'll enjoy it.' And after that summer, I made up my mind to be an actor. If he hadn't asked me to go up there ...

Q: Your famous speech pattern -- your drawl — where did it come from?

STEWART: I swear I don't know. Maybe it came from Indiana, maybe I was born with it.

Q: Did they ever try to get you out of it?

STEWART: No. But I knew about it and got to be very conscious of it. For instance, sometimes I'd do a scene with Hitchcock and he'd look up and say, "Jim" -- he always called me Jim — "this scene is timed."

It was something I had to be able to control. In things like the filibuster in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” you couldn't "hmmm" and "ha." You'd really be in trouble.

Q: What was it like working with Hitchcock? Was there a lot of tension on the set?

STEWART: There have been books written about that and people saying that he was so terrible with women and that there was an evil-type thing — which is absolutely ridiculous.

He kept an excitement on the set. How he did it, I don't know. But nothing seemed to upset him. I remember “Rear Window” at Paramount, when there was just one set.

In one shot he wanted me in focus in the foreground and across the courtyard, too. Now you're dealing with depth of field here, and you have to have more light. So they had all the lights at Paramount on us and even borrowed some from Columbia and MGM.

Finally, just as they told Hitch they had enough lights, the lights tripped the sprinkler for the fire system. It started to rain — and I mean really rain. And he said, "See if you can get someone to turn off the rain, and while you're at it, someone might get me an umbrella"

And he sat under this umbrella until they got the sprinklers turned off. Nothing threw him.

Q: You're so revered now as an actor, but did the critics ever blast you?

STEWART: Oh, sure. I've gotten terrible reviews. You know, you just remember the bad ones. I was in a play at the Shubert Theater in New York, a leading role with a new actress from Austria. The New York Times said: "Jimmy Stewart wanders through the play like a befuddled tourist on the Danube." I've remembered it all my life.

Q: Of all the awards you've won, which is the most treasured?

STEWART: They mean a great deal, and I'm proud of them. I've great respect for the Academy Awards. It's really a pat on the back from your fellow actors. They voted for it.

Q: Is there anything you dreamed of doing but never got the chance to do?

STEWART: No. Gloria and I traveled a lot. We've been to Africa and Brazil... It's been a wonderful life. My family is getting along fine. I have four grandchildren coming tomorrow. This place will be jumping. You think that dog's barking now. 

Meanwhile….

A biopic called ‘Jimmy’ will be released in November in honor of Stewart’s birthday. It stars KJ Apa (“Riverdale”). Here’s the trailer.

Thomas Woods is a college history professor with a surprise hit on his hands.

His upbeat look at our past, “The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History,” has become a best-seller by putting a decidedly different spin on the liberal “facts” and myths we learned from our school textbooks.

Thanks to its catchy title, breezy style and “old-fashioned conservative” point of view, the guide has been on The New York Times’ best-seller list for five weeks. It’s receiving high praise from the likes of Pat Buchanan, who recently called Woods the most original thinker of 2004.

Woods teaches history at the State University of New York. I talked to him Tuesday by telephone from his Long Island home:

Q: Is this just a conservative version of history compared to the “liberal” mainstream version we’ve grown up with?

A: That’s the way The New York Times has interpreted it, but I think that’s not a fair assessment, because then my book is no more valuable than the typical left-wing book. Then my book is just another piece of propaganda.

To the contrary, my book is simply telling the truth. I’ve got citations all over the place. I’ve got 10 pages of bibliography. This is not a piece of propaganda. It’s trying to correct the record, frankly.

Q: What specifically is so different about your version of history?

A: Number one, the book, unlike the typical American history textbook, has a real sympathy for the free market economy and does not make the free market the scapegoat for every ill in America.

To the contrary, it shows how central market economics has been to American prosperity. It doesn’t go after businessmen as the source of all evil and portray government as the repository of people who are just disinterested crusaders for justice, for example.

Secondly, it’s sort of Jeffersonian. It has sympathy for the idea of local self- governance. Unlike the typical treatment of American history, it does not portray the centralization in Washington as an unambiguously progressive development — that the more power gets centralized, the better the country is. ...

Finally, it also covers things that just sometimes aren’t covered at all. For example, I have a chapter called “Yes, Communist sympathizers really existed.”

I talk about the ‘20s and ‘30s, when you had a lot of prominent people in the American left, seriously, with a straight face, suggesting that the Soviet Union could be a great model for America.

That’s really embarrassing today, so you don’t really read anything about that in a typical textbook, but I think that’s an important moment in history that should be recorded.

Q: What’s the worst thing that students learn when they are taught U.S. history?

A: The story of the Great Depression that you learn in school is that the free market caused the Depression and the government solved it. That’s the way the left thinks about the economy in general — that the economy does this and then we need government to step in.

That is just about as wrong as wrong can be, but it goes to show you that historians have certain presidents they like — and you can tell the presidents they like because they are always the presidents that centralize power and increase the power of the federal government.

When you read a textbook’s take on Franklin Roosevelt, you could almost hear the pompoms in the background. There isn’t even a pretense of objectivity.

Q: Who is your favorite president?

A: My favorite is probably Martin Van Buren (1837-1841). No one’s even heard of him, but my friend Jeff Hummel wrote an article arguing that he was actually the greatest American president.

Here was a guy when the economy was bad (who) resisted the temptation to expand government power in response. He said, “Look, this is going to repair itself. That’s the way the economy works.” He was a small-government president at a time when all the pressures were there to be a big-government president.

Q: What is a book that the establishment or liberal historians don’t want us to read, and why should we read it?

A: I would say it would be Thomas Sowell’s “Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?”

It’s about 140 pages, but it pretty much overturns just about every piece of propaganda you’ve ever heard with regard to black and white income differences and whether they are caused by racism.

Sowell is hated by the establishment because he dares to be black and conservative at the same time, which is absolutely not allowed.

I’ve assigned this book year after year to my students. I cannot get over how much myth-busting he has included in such a short book. It was a model for my own book. You put this book down and you say to yourself, “How was I ever duped by any of this stuff?”

Q: Can you define your politics and how they affect your book’s political incorrectness?

A: I’m the sort of conservative you would have read in National Review in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Conservatism today is kind of disappointing to me, because it doesn’t seem to have the old commitment to limited government and some of the principles that I believed in.

I understand that John Kerry was a bad guy, but that doesn’t mean George Bush is the second coming of Christ.

For heaven’s sake, he’s expanded government faster than anyone since LBJ, and if we have any principles, we have to be willing to say that, even about Republicans.

I think of myself as basically an old-fashioned conservative, and the way that affects the book is that I take that kind of perspective on every aspect of American history.

A lot of conservatives today would cheer a lot of aspects of American history that I don’t cheer. They would cheer, for example, the 14th Amendment as a wonderful advance for justice protecting people’s rights.

But I actually think the 14th Amendment is the beginning of the end of the Old Republic, because, again, it centralized power in Washington.

When I asked Google to search for ‘Lou Dobbs and Steigerwald’ to see if it could find a Q&A I did in the mid 2000s with the now-dead former Fox Business/Cable star, this is what I got:

“AI Overview” (from Google):

“Lou Dobbs, the veteran cable news journalist and conservative commentator, and Bill Steigerwald, a veteran journalist and author, are connected through the history of the Civil Rights movement. Steigerwald is the author of the 2017 nonfiction book titled “30 Days a Black Man”, which details a historic 1948 undercover journalistic mission into the Jim Crow South.

“The subject of Steigerwald’s book, Pulitzer Prize-winning Pittsburgh journalist Ray Sprigle, successfully lived as a Black man for 30 days to expose the realities of American apartheid.

“The critical guide and driver who escorted Sprigle through the South’s parallel Black society was John Wesley Dobbs, who was Lou Dobbs’ grandfather.

“While Steigerwald has worked as a longtime journalist and author in the Pittsburgh and West Virginia regions, his historical research on this 1948 undercover assignment shed significant light on Lou Dobbs’ grandfather’s role in one of the most vital journalistic exposés of the pre-Civil Rights era.”

Both were Republicans, but I can’t see the resemblance.

It took about a dozen years, but the humorless gang of scholars who contributed essays to the 2024 book Steinbeck’s Uneasy America: Rereading Travels With Charley finally got around to defending their hero from my well-proven charges that he repeatedly abused his dramatic license and committed serial untruths in what was marketed, reviewed and taught for half a century as an honest work of nonfiction.

In the process, the essayists frequently misrepresented or misunderstood what I wrote in my 2012 expose/road book Dogging Steinbeck.

So, in the spirit of a still-spirited retired op-ed newspaper columnist, I wrote this new final chapter for DS to defend myself — and get the last word.

26 – Epilogue

Revenge of the Scholars

July, 2026

In late 2024 the University of Alabama Press published Steinbeck’s Uneasy America: Rereading Travels with Charley, a collection of deeply academic and worshipful essays written by 14 top Steinbeck scholars.

Though the scholars and their editors will never admit it, their book was a much belated response to the public shaming I gave them in the New York Times and other media places in 2011 for collectively failing – for half a century – to question the veracity of Travels with Charley.

Scholars apparently don’t like to be shamed in the NYT for their lazy “scholaring” – especially by unknown outsiders without the proper academic credentials. In Steinbeck’s Uneasy America, they ganged up and got their revenge. It’s now my duty and pleasure to defend myself from their often ignorant and petty attacks.

****

My name pops up only about a dozen times in various essays. I’m identified only as a journalist – a generic newspaper reporter with no credentials and no past who serves as a handy pinata for the essayists, most of whom obviously never read much of this book.

Not one bothered to point out that I was formerly a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist and history book author who worked 30 years at the Los Angeles Times and two Pittsburgh daily papers. No essayist gave me even token credit for discovering dozens of things on the road and in libraries that Steinbeck scholars did not know about Steinbeck’s actual trip or the people he met.

And if anyone gave me props for being the guy who forced Charley’s publisher to change the book’s introduction in 2012 to warn readers they were about to read a work of fiction, not nonfiction, I didn’t spot it in the academic fog.

Only one essayist, Professor Susan Shillinglaw, praised me for doing the basic research in 2010 that the scholars had never done in five decades – going to the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City and reading the original draft of Charley to see how it differed from the published book.

In Steinbeck’s Uneasy America I was usually brought on stage for a few seconds and mocked as being the old-school journalist who was hung up on facts and “facticity.” I was the naive truth-seeker who didn’t understand that we are living in a post-truth age where nonfiction and fiction books are virtually interchangeable, where truth is always unknowable.

In their essays the scholars worked overtime thinking up literary explanations and excuses for Steinbeck’s fictionalizing and lying. They detected subtle double and triple meanings hidden in Charley’s text. They spotted metaphors, symbols and obscure literary references no civilians could ever see.

Unfortunately, they were so busy extolling and excusing Steinbeck’s “multi-layered” writing they never got around to critiquing him and his publisher Viking Press for their most glaring ethical shortcoming – deliberately misleading millions of unwitting readers for 50 years by marketing and selling Charley as a true and honest account of his trip.

But let’s be fair and balanced. To the scholars, their hero hadn’t committed a form of literary fraud with his serial fictionalizing and outright lies. He was a great novelist who was quietly inventing a newish genre called “autofiction” that allows an author to invent and embellish and dramatize the real world he pretends to depict.

The scholars’ top hitman, and top embarrassment, was a Western Carolina University English professor named Brian Railsback. He spent his first nine pages praising Steinbeck’s career-long quest for “unblemished truth” in his great novels and explaining why Steinbeck knew he’d never find it in our subjective universe.

Though that is a fair summary of what I wrote in the parts of Dogging Steinbeck he obviously didn’t read, Railsback then devoted almost two pages to cherry-picking short, out-of-context quotes from my book. For instance, when I wrote in my introduction that “My book is subjective as hell. But it’s entirely nonfiction,” I thought I was making a little joke that any college professor, especially an English one, would get.

But not Railsback. He said I was starting my expedition by committing “a fatal Steinbeckian error -- a series of preconceptions.” I have no idea what he was talking about, but since he has a Ph.D. in something, I’ll take his word for it.

Railsback, who clearly has trouble detecting jokes, hyperbole or sarcasm, obviously never read much of this book. Otherwise, he would not have written so many inaccurate or unfair things about why I decided to follow Steinbeck’s Charley route or what I actually wrote.

For example, he inferred – based on what I don’t know – that I preferred traveling in comfort on interstates. Plus, he said that I “somehow missed how Steinbeck wanted to work, moving slowly on the backroads, keen to see and hear what was going on around him.”

First of all, I retraced Steinbeck’s exact 1960 route as faithfully as possible in 2010 and at the same desperate pace. Interstates barely existed in 1960. I drove the same two-lane highways he drove exactly 50 years ahead of me – and when he was alone he drove like Mario Andretti. Railsback should be ashamed by how little he still knows about Steinbeck’s actual trip and why it was nothing like the Travels with Charley Myth he still believes. Perhaps he should read a few more paragraphs of this book.

Railsback also clearly has no idea what a libertarian is. He wrote, referring to me, that “he is a fan of William F. Buckley Jr. and Barry Goldwater.” Yeah, as I clearly wrote, I was. In 1964. So was “Goldwater Girl” Hillary Clinton. When we both were 17. But not now, which would have been clear to someone who read my book and knew anything about politics.

Among Railsback’s other political misstatements – and wild guesses –- was that I was fired up to take down Steinbeck because he was “a New Deal Democrat who knew and admired the likes of FDR, Adlai Stevenson, and LBJ.” That was another sloppy misrepresentation. It was also taken completely out context – context like this, which he must not have read a few paragraphs later:

By today’s definitions, Steinbeck was a ball of political contradictions. He was a highly partisan FDR big-government Democrat who went ape for Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s and became a White House-sleepover friend of LBJ and frequent weekend guest at Camp David. Like most of his New Deal generation, he had a naïve trust in the federal government to solve massive social and economic problems.

But Steinbeck was never close to being the true-believing commie or socialist both his rightwing enemies and leftwing friends liked to claim he was. He was what we call today “a Cold War liberal.” He supported labor unions, the civil rights movement and LBJ’s war on poverty. He was also a staunch anti-communist who believed in containing the Soviet Union and what then was so impolitely called “Red China.”

He was a sincere patriot, which, along with becoming too chummy with LBJ, may have blinded him to the folly of Vietnam and the fallacy of the Domino Theory. He was a loud public hawk on Vietnam in its early stages but became a quiet dove when he realized the war was unwinnable. Intolerant of anti-war protesters, whom he thought were stupid and cowardly, he despised hippies and the ‘60s youth culture….

Despite our differences, I had grown to like the grouchy, contradictory guy. Underneath his New Yorker magazine limousine liberalism, he hid an admirable libertarian streak. He wrote fine paeans to individualism, understood the importance of private property rights and hated bureaucrats and government bullying. Plus, he didn’t moralize about things like prostitution. He treated prostitutes kindly in his books and thought they provided a service to the community, which of course they do.

Railsback made other mistakes. He falsely insinuated that I was disappointed at the end of my trip and that I had set out on my travels intending to shock the Steinbeck community. He also believed I was serious when I said I expected to get an honorary degree for my discoveries (another missed joke).

Meanwhile, if the other scholars who wrote and edited Steinbeck’s Uneasy America had taken the time to read or at least skim this book, they also might have realized that it’s much more than a 270-page attack on Steinbeck’s fictionalizing.

It is the definitive record, so far, of Steinbeck’s actual Charley road trip. Along with a lot of 1960s history and my personal drive-by commentary, it contains a running discussion of the complex interplay of fact, fiction, subjectivity and truth in works of nonfiction.

My Charley trip was real drive-by journalism. It was a serious book project, not a lark or an excuse to drive around the country by myself for six weeks. I’ve repeatedly made it clear that I was having great fun chasing Steinbeck’s ghost – and, yes, factchecking him. Along the way, I’ve made scores of cheap jokes, many at my own expense.

I was tough on Steinbeck and his flawed book, but I was fair. I mocked him or criticized him when he deserved it, but I also said many nice things about him, his great descriptive writing and even his partisan politics.

Sorry if I sounded angry and “hectoring” to the scholars, who as a class are better at detecting hidden metaphors than spotting jokes or sarcasm. But after racking up a couple million words under my byline, I still write with the edge and wise-ass tone of a newspaper op-ed page columnist, not an English professor.

That’s why most good journalists like David Cay Johnston and worldly people like Paul Theroux and Brian Lamb of C-SPAN appreciated or plugged my book, even though few of them agreed with my libertarian political spin.

****

Finally, nowhere in Steinbeck’s Uneasy America’s collection of mostly dull, inside-Steinbeck essays is there anything like the balanced criticism I was given in 2021 by Steinbeck scholar emeritus Robert DeMott.

Professor DeMott, who I’ve only ‘‘met” via a series of cordial emails about my book going back to about 2014, is as fair-minded as anyone could hope. He was commissioned by the editors of Steinbeck Review to review Chasing Steinbeck’s Ghost: The Timeline for John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley Road Trip, my brief guidebook to Steinbeck’s actual journey.

In the SR’s fall 2021 issue, DeMott took the opportunity to address the impact and importance of this book. (Steinbeck Review’s editors, despite several requests by me since 2013, have yet to deem Dogging Steinbeck worthy of a serious and fair-minded review.)

Here is some of what Professor DeMott wrote:

Steigerwald had a brilliant idea in following Steinbeck’s trail and in trying to connect the popular literary text with the physical waypoints of the author’s journey. Having tried unsuccessfully for years on my annual Montana fly fishing trip to locate the place Steinbeck claimed to have spent the night in​ or near Livingston (the exact spot remains a mystery to Steigerwald as well),​ I applaud his overall pluck, endurance, sleuthing efforts, and the dogged​ detective work involved in tracing the elder writer’s route.

Credit should be​ given where credit belongs, for Steigerwald’s was an endeavor no one else​ thought to undertake, and in the process he located (and photographed) many of the physical places that Steinbeck visited on his extended U.S. drive-about, among them Eleanor Brace’s spectacular house in Deer Isle, Maine, the​ Westgate Motel in Beach, North Dakota, and wife Elaine’s former brother-​in-law’s cattle ranch near Clarendon, Texas.

Without Steigerwald’s sleuthing,​ who would have known of these venues? Further, we might never have discovered how many of the events, places, and persons Steinbeck might have​ made up after the fact without Steigerwald’s determined snooping.​

But Dogging Steinbeck has become one of our most maligned Steinbeck-​related books in recent years, a lightning rod for all manner of personal, political, and lit-crit dustups, and has been a book many informed readers have loved to hate. The reason, I think, is the author’s self-important hectoring tone, his finger-wagging criticism, his beleaguered sense of being duped, and his libertarian refusal to bow to any kind of elitist pretensions.

Instead of providing a biographical and literary context for understanding Steinbeck’s wildly popular but frequently flawed and clunky book, Steigerwald, a sort of Sean Hannity of culture reporters, leaped to the offensive. He has the bulldog tenacity, bristling ego, single-minded purpose, and occasional mean streak that makes such commentators formidable opponents. His presence cannot be denied and refuses to go away, which of course has put many well-meaning commentators on the defensive.

I thought of suing DeMott for calling me “a sort of Sean Hannity of culture reporters” – joke!, professors. Joke! But I forgave him and thanked him in an email for his fine and fair review – and for his wisdom.

I just wish that when DeMott wrote the foreword for Steinbeck’s Uneasy America in 2025 he had repeated some of those nice things he had said earlier in Steinbeck Review about my lasting contribution to Steinbeck scholarship. Or at least had mentioned my name.

-- Bill Steigerwald, July 2026

One of the many highlights of my long and enjoyable and modestly subversive career as a libertarian newspaperman was to have met and/or interviewed the great economist Thomas Sowell a few times.

Sowell, who will turned 96 on June 30, 2026, was the subject of Jason Riley’s biography Maverick four years ago and featured in this fine video. He was later interviewed by Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institution about his newest project: a website titled ‘Facts Against Rhetoric,’ a powerful resource dedicated to empirical thinking and intellectual clarity.

I first met Sowell in Los Angeles in 1982 when the free-market economist and conservative social critic came in personally to thank and shake the hand of a black copywriter I worked with at the LA Times. Stan Williford had shocked Sowell by favorably reviewing his book Ethnic America: A History in the liberal LAT.

In the 1990s, after I moved back home to Pittsburgh, I met Sowell again when I worked at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. I ambushed him (see interview below) with a bunch of questions about inner-city public schools and crime at St. Vincent College near Pittsburgh after he gave a talk sponsored by the school's free-market economics department.

I cornered the Hoover Institution senior fellow on his way to the punch bowl and interrogated him so aggressively that he justifiably became a little annoyed. My intentions were honorable.

As a subversive libertarian journalist, I wanted to get Sowell and his ideas in the Post-Gazette’s liberal opinion pages. I did, though the paper’s editor, a liberal Democrat, accused me of asking “tendentious” questions.

Following the ambush interview are transcripts of the two long phone Q&As I did with Sowell in the 2000s for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. I worked as an editor/op-ed columnist at the conservative/libertarian paper, which was heavily subsidized with the pocket change of conservative billionaire Richard Scaife.

A bonus: Sowell’s 1984 interview with Tony Brown, who asks him about his great book, “The Economics and Politics of Race.”

Thomas Sowell tells Pittsburghers how to brake the inner-city slide

The former Marxist-turned-economist minces no words with Bill Steigerwald

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

April 18, 1993

It wasn't much of a post-lecture reception for keynote speaker Thomas Sowell. He never even made it to the punch and cookies.

Thirty minutes after his lecture in St. Vincent College's Kennedy Hall Wednesday night, the Hoover Institution economist/author and columnist was still surrounded by a dozen people near the entrance to the King Ludvig Gallery.

Some who came to hear Sowell knew him as one of the Founding Fathers of the Black Conservatives. Others as the former Marxist intellectual from Harlem who converted to free-market conservatism and was Ronald Reagan's first choice for secretary of Education in 1980.

Most were hip to Sowell's biting attacks on educators, politicians, the media and the welfare state. They didn't need to read his new 400-page assault on the educational establishment, "Inside American Education," which he charges has overtaxed us, betrayed us, lied to us and misused our children for its own bogus social, psychological and pedagogical experiments.

Sowell, 62, used to be despised by traditional black political leaders. Now they ignore his attacks on what he says is their foolish reliance on government programs and their mistaken faith in the efficacy of affirmative action. Of the 500 who came to hear him, fewer than 10 were black. But Sowell is used to being a minority among minorities.

Afterwards, in the King Ludvig Gallery, when it became obvious that Sowell was weakening and his unsatiable interrogators were not, we stepped in and let him have it with a volley of questions.

***

Q: The city of Pittsburgh is now getting inner-city problems, like gangs and drive-by shootings. Is there anything Pittsburgh can do while it still has the chance?

Sowell: Better law enforcement and don't listen to psychologists.

Q: Cops on the street? More patrols?

A: Yeah. We can't accept the idea that there's something inevitable about vast amounts of crime in a ghetto area. I grew up in Harlem, and where I grew up I used to walk the whole length of a block, about 12 blocks long. I didn't weigh 100 pounds soaking wet. And I did that regularly at midnight.

Q: But the culture has changed.

Sowell: That's why I say you need to have more law enforcement and not listen to sociologists and psychologists, because that's part of the changed culture — the notion that there's all kinds of wonderful things you can do to get at the root causes of crime.

Well, all the things that are supposed to be the root causes of crime were much worse in the 1940s than they are today. We were poorer. There was more Discrimination. You name it. And there was a lot less crime. So those things are really excuses.

Q: What about young black kids with no fathers in inner cities? Those kinds of conditions ...

Sowell: I don't think one's family situation justifies crime.

Q: Are there any solutions? Any tradeoffs?

Sowell: You can go through a lot of things there. A gang lifestyle becomes possible in a welfare state. Try to become a gang member if you've got to go out there and feed yourself.

Q: What impediments are there to kids in inner cities getting decent jobs?

Sowell: Bad education is one. But it's also true that the chance of anything serious happening to you as a result of following crime is a lot less now than they were then.

There was a time when you committed a serious crime, you were going to get a serious punishment. Now there are all kinds of people out there who come up with all kinds of reasons why you should be rehabilitated, in halfway houses and so on, and it's just a different ballgame. The people who pay the biggest price for this are those who themselves live in the ghettos.

Q: Pittsburgh still has a large middle class inside its city limits. Some of them now hear gunfire every night from drive-by shootings.

Sowell: They're going to move to the suburbs.

Q: Is that inevitable?

Sowell: No. If you're going to have serious law enforcement, you're going to have a serious effect on crime.

Q: Pittsburgh's public schools spend close to $10,000 per student and . . .

Sowell: I don't care how much they spend. Spending that money on the kids has nothing to do with anything. There's no correlation. There are places which spend much less than other places. I'm told New Hampshire is number one in the nation and has one of the lowest per pupil expenditures in the country.

Q: So if we're stuck with bad public schools, and the people who are stuck in bad public schools are primarily poor kids in inner cities . . .

Sowell: Unfortunately, there are bad public schools everywhere.

Q: What's the most important thing a big-city public school system could do to improve education?

Sowell: Eliminate tenure and allow parents to make a choice.

Q: Just within the school system or in and out of the school system?

Sowell: As much as you can get. If you can have it go public and private, fine. But if it's only public, fine. Have the parents make a choice among public schools. Right now they're a captive audience no matter how bad the schools are, they have to go there. And in the low-income areas, that's the dumping ground for teachers who run into problems in middle-class areas.

Q: Do you ever wish you had taken up Mr. Reagan's offer to become Secretary of Education?

Sowell: No. I don't think I could have ever accomplished anything to be worth the aggravation.

Q: Is it possible to do anything to improve education from the top down, or is it a bottom-up process?

Sowell: Oh, there's lots of things and laws and so forth ... But listen, I've talked enough.

2003

Thomas Sowell: An Intellectual Treasure

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

Thomas Sowell, one of America's greatest intellectual treasures, is generally referred to as a "black conservative," but he is a revered hero in both libertarian and conservative camps.

A free-market economist, philosopher, social critic, syndicated columnist and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Sowell has written more than 25 scholarly, logical, usually provocative and often groundbreaking books on economics, politics, race, immigration, education, culture, the justice system, the U.S. Constitution and Marxism.

Sowell's latest book, "Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One” applies the principles of economics (without the jargon) to such real-world problems as housing, medical care, discrimination and the economic development of nations. I talked to him by telephone on Thursday from San Francisco:

Q: What's the biggest difference between the way a politician thinks and the way an economist thinks?

A: Well, the politician thinks in terms of what would get him elected in the next election. The classic definition, or my favorite definition of economics, is "the study of the allocation of scarce resources which have alternative uses," which may sound pretty dry. But whether those resources are used efficiently or inefficiently determines whether people are rich, prosperous or poor.

The Soviet Union, for example, had some of the most abundant resources, and quite possibly the most abundant resources of any country in the world. And yet the standard of living in the Soviet Union was not only far below that of the United States, it was lower than that of countries which have virtually no natural resources, such as Japan or Switzerland.

The difference is that what resources the Japanese buy — and they have to buy most of them — they use far more efficiently than the Soviets did.

Q: Who are your favorite economists, or the economists you look up to?

A: Well, of course, Milton Friedman. And the book "Applied Economics" is dedicated to Arthur Smithies, who had this wonderful way of questioning in class, as I say in the subtitle, to get us to "think beyond stage one," because so many policies that sound good, when you only look at the immediate effect, look totally different when you begin to look at the repercussions of those polices.

Rent control is a classic example. When you put in rent control, the tenants have lower rents, the tenants are happy. Fine. In no time, you discover that, 1), nobody is building any more housing, and, 2), the landlords are not maintaining the existing housing as well as they did before, because now there is a housing shortage and they don't have to. And so the housing stock begins to decline, and no comparable amount of new housing is built to replace it. And so now you get a progressively worsening housing shortage.

At some point, the politicians become aware that nobody is building any housing. In some places they say, "All right, we will maintain rent control for low-cost housing, but if you want to build luxury housing, we won't put in rent control." Fine. But resources have been shifted from building ordinary housing to luxury housing.

This has happened in cities across the United States and in countries in Europe and elsewhere. The ultimate consequence is that the people who wanted to produce affordable housing are making it impossible to build affordable housing and shifting resources to building housing that the vast majority of people can't afford at all.

Q: Who are your favorite politicians?

A: Oh, gee. George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.

Q: What's the biggest difference between the way politicians and economists think and act when it comes to health care?

A: The politicians look at it in terms of saying and doing "What will get me elected." What that means is that if you give people the impression that they are getting something either free or at a bargain, they are more likely to vote for you.

Economists, unfortunately, are handicapped because they know there is no such thing as a free lunch. They also know the difference between lowering costs and merely lowering prices. You can lower prices with a law, but that doesn't lower the cost by one penny. It still costs just as much to produce the medicines, educate the doctors and build the hospitals.

So you end up with costs being shuffled around. But they don't go away just because they're shuffled around. The HMOs try to put more of the costs on Medicare and vice versa, so you get this game being played, which doesn't lower anybody's costs.

Q: You say in the book that it's important to have a sense of humor when you're trying to learn about economic policies. What do you mean by that?

A: Well, so many of the policies are so badly mistaken. They not only don't solve the problem, they usually make the problem far worse than to begin with. So you can get quite angry just studying economic policies, even more so than economic theory.

The first thing to remember is that you will have the last word when Election Day comes around, and the time to get angry is in voting booth.

Q: Someone wanted me to ask you if $500 billion budgets matter in the long run?

A: (laughs) There was a time when the entire gross national product of the United States was about $500 billion. It would have mattered a lot then. When the gross national product is in the trillions, it matters less. I'm sure that if I had one-tenth the debts that, say, Donald Trump has, I would be ruined. But that doesn't mean Donald Trump is ruined.

Q: Of all your books, is there any one you'd recommend to someone that would explain who you are?

A: If there is any one book of mine I would most like most people to read, it would be "Basic Economics," because it does just take you from square one right on through everything, from price controls to international trade, stocks and bonds, whatever.

Q: Do you think the level of economic literacy has been going up or down among the general public?

A: I have no idea. I suspect that it is so low it would be hard to measure. In fact, that was the whole reason for my writing these two books — to do what little I can, because there is no great incentive for an economist to write at this level. It certainly won't help his career, but when you're an old man, you can do all kinds of things you couldn't do when you were young.

Q: I would suggest that after working in the media for 30 years, one of your key target audiences would be my fellow journalists.

A: If I were rich, I would send every one of them a copy of "Basic Economics."

2008

Economic Facts and Fallacies

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

Economist and syndicated columnist Thomas Sowell says he has lost track of how many books he’s written on economics, history, social policy, ethnicity and the history of ideas.

His latest, “Economic Facts and Fallacies,” adds to his admirable record of using plain language to pass along some of the dismal science’s often ignored, often twisted truths and basic principles to everyday readers.

Professor Sowell, 77, is the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution on the campus of Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif. I talked to him by telephone on Thursday:

Q: Do you have any wisdom to share with us about what the politicians should or shouldn’t be doing about our current economic troubles?

A: Well, they’re two fundamentally different questions. The first is, "Is there something that the government could do that might make things better?" The second is, "Is there anything the government is likely to do that will make things better?" The second question is much easier to answer: The answer is “No.”

Q: From what they’ve done so far, are you encouraged or frightened?

A: I think I’m stoically braced for whatever disaster they create.

Q: Are the subprime credit crisis and the stock market’s swoon and the dollar’s drop in value symptoms of a deeper, larger, broader problem?

A: Well, no, they are simply the problems that they are. The government has brought on the housing problem, partly by these very low interest rates, which encouraged many people to go way out on a limb. They’ve brought it on by highly restrictive building policies, which have caused housing prices to skyrocket artificially.

And they’ve brought it on by the Community Reinvestment Act, which presumes that politicians are better able to tell investors where to put their money than the investors themselves are. When you put all that together, you get something like what you have.

Q: Why did you write this latest book and who is it written for?

A: It’s written, first of all, for the general public. It’s not written specifically for economists. Most economists know most of these things -- well, they know most of the principles; they don’t know most of the facts.

It’s not meant to be a breakthrough on the frontiers of analytical knowledge. But it is meant to show how so many things that look one way are in fact diametrically the opposite when you take a closer look at them -- and especially if you look at them systematically instead of just in terms of what rhetoric sets off your emotions, which is what seems to be going on in both parties these days.

Q: What’s an example of a fallacy from your book?

A: One is the income gap between rich and poor. It’s maddening to me to keep hearing how the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, and so on. The fundamental difference is the difference between talking about abstract statistical categories and talking about flesh-and-blood human beings.

Since the book came out, for example, there’s been a study released by the Treasury Department based on income tax returns. There, they are talking about following the same human beings over a span of years, which is wholly different from following income brackets over a span of years, because in all the brackets more than half the people change in the course of a decade. So what happens to a bracket is an abstract question; what happens to the flesh-and-blood human beings is different.

For example, for the flesh-and-blood people who were in the bottom 20 percent of taxpayers in income in 1996, their average increase of income over the next decade was 91 percent -- so they almost doubled their incomes.

Meanwhile, for the people in the top 1 percent -- presumably the rich who are getting richer -- their average income declined 26 percent. That's diametrically the opposite from what we’re hearing from nearly every newspaper and practically every political platform.

But of course it’s also true that if you look at the income tax brackets, the distance of the top bracket from the lowest bracket has increased. One reason is that the very lowest bracket is zero, so it can’t go any lower.

So as you pay people more and more money and as the economy grows and skills become more sophisticated, obviously the ratio from the top and the bottom is going to increase.

Q: Where do these fallacies come from?

A: Oh, God, there are so many of them. As I say in the first chapter of the book, I can only give a sample of the fallacies. What I try to do is show how utterly plausible some of these things sound the first time you hear them, and it’s only when you look just a little bit below the surface that the whole thing collapses like a house of cards.

For instance, I list several beliefs -- "except for the rich, the incomes of Americans have stagnated;" "the middle class is growing smaller;" "over the years, the poor have been getting poorer;" "corporate executives are overpaid at the expense of stockholders and consumers;" and so on.

I point out that you can find statistics that seem to support every one of those propositions, but you can also find other statistics -- and sometimes the same statistics looked at differently -- which cause the whole argument to collapse like a house of cards.

Q: Is it the politicians who are pushing these fallacies as a way to gain votes? If there weren’t those politicians, would these fallacies disappear?

A: No, because you have ideologues and they create essentially the atmosphere in which the politicians operate. And given the atmosphere, the politicians will seize upon whatever will get them votes at the time. But they don’t create the atmosphere.

Q: Is there a fallacy bouncing around in the presidential races that has caught your eye? On immigration, for instance?

A: There’s no chapter on that in the book. But I think there’s the notion that you can talk about immigrants in the abstract, when in fact there is no such thing as an immigrant in the abstract.

Immigrants from some countries have ten times as high a proportion of their people be college educated as immigrants from other countries. There are immigrants from some countries that have made enormous contributions to the United States, not the least of which were the majority of leading atomic scientists who created the atomic bomb and brought World War II to an end. They were imports, as it were.

But there are other people who are brought in who have brought in diseases which never were known before. They brought in attitudes which were not the attitudes of citizens. In fact, they were the attitudes of people who were hostile.

I’m amazed when they talk about the guest-worker program in Europe. No one even asks, “What has happened with guest-worker programs in Europe?” What has happened is that they’ve brought in people who hate their guts. This is why you have terrorism in London and Madrid and riots in Paris and other French cities by people who have absolutely no desire to assimilate and who in fact hate the very ideas of the country in which they live.

This is not in this book, but it will be in the next edition of “Applied Economics”: There is the second-generation phenomenon. You have people who move in from some poor country -- the Middle East, Mexico, whatever. Those people may be very glad to be in the United States or Britain or wherever they may be. But then they have children. And their children have never seen those other places; they’ve never lived that poorer life. All they know is that the population around them is a hell of a lot more prosperous than they are. And there are all sorts of ideologues and hustlers ready to tell them that it’s society’s fault that they don’t have what other people have. This then gives you the people who hate the country in which they live.

Q: Have your ideas about immigration changed in any way? It seemed to me that 25 years ago you liked immigration and immigrants and you saw the whole process as benefiting the host countries and everyone who arrived.

A: I do think the immigrants I wrote about were a positive influence on the countries to which they moved. But again, the problem is you can’t talk about immigrants in general. They love to say things like, “They thought the Irish and the Jews were unassimilable but look at them now, etc.” Well, the circumstances of the Irish and the Jews were radically different from the circumstances of the people who are coming here from Central America.

First of all, the times were different. First of all, the Irish, the Jews and blacks as well, who were moving out of the South, had leaders and organizations that were doing their damnedest to get them assimilated to the norms and the society to which they were moving. Today, you have just the direct opposite. You not only have groups within in these societies that are trying to keep them unassimilable and full of resentment.

But you also have people from outside the group, including politicians but also ideologues and intellectuals, who say one culture is as good as another and why should we expect them to assimilate to our culture. Well, that’s wonderful. You should try to go to China and live without speaking Chinese.

Q: What fallacy does the most damage to our whole society or economy?

A: I guess the single fallacy from which so many other fallacies derive is what I call in this book “the zero-sum fallacy" -- that is, the idea that what one person gains, someone else loses….

A classic example is rent control. When you put in rent control, the tenants gain in the short run; the landlords lose in the short run; the builders lose in the short run. But of course the builders lose the least, because the same material and skills that are used in building apartment buildings are used in building office buildings and warehouses and all kinds of other structures; they lose very little. But when the supply of housing dries up, then the tenants are really in a bad way. So places that have rent control almost invariably have housing shortages.

I start off in the first chapter, in fact, by quoting some lady who was in Egypt back in the 1960s when they put in rent control. She said people stopped investing in apartment buildings. Huge shortages in rentals and apartments forced many Egyptians to work in horrible conditions, with several families sharing one small apartment. So they really pay the price much more so than the landlords or the builders.

Q: I didn’t think Egypt has rent control problems like New York City.

A: Saigon -- Ho Chi Minh City -- Hanoi. A leader in Vietnam said, “Americans couldn’t destroy Hanoi by bombing but we’ve destroyed it with rent control.” The zero-sum fallacy is the biggest in its scope. At Stanford, for example, they’ve issued an order that the professors at the medical school are no longer allowed to accept any kind of gifts from pharmaceutical companies, including the free samples of medicines they give out, which doctors pass along to their patients.

Well, this assumes that if it helps the pharmaceutical company, it helps them at the expense of the patient. It never occurs to them that there wouldn’t be any transaction between the pharmaceutical companies and the patients unless both of them gained something from it.

In my case, I happened to have a medication given to me as a free sample by a doctor -- thank God, not at Stanford -- which has really made my whole life livable. These people pay no price for being wrong -- that’s the problem with third-party decision making. It can be as wrong as two left feet and it costs them nothing.

Q: How does a basic knowledge of economics help someone see through these fallacies?

A: That really is what they would have to read the book to find out. The point is, you can demonstrate time and time again that the things that sound plausible just on the surface -- if you do give them just a little bit of systematic thought -- can suddenly change.

One of the chapters is on male-female economic differences. I must say, when I was doing the research on this I was shocked to discover that there is a very significant income difference between young male doctors and young female doctors.

I forget what the number is, but it’s not 1 or 2 percent. It was only when I dug into it that I discovered that young male doctors worked 500 hours a year more than young female doctors. Well, you know, if you work 500 hours more a year, you'd expect to get paid more!

Q: Is there any rule of thumb people could use to determine if they were being confronted with an economic fallacy?

A: Are you telling me that I should tell people they don’t really need to buy my book? (laughs) ... There are only eight chapters in my book. But after you’ve been through them you’ll be able to derive certain principles which you will suddenly realize apply to all kinds of other things that are not discussed in the book.

There are three questions that I think would destroy the left if people could ask them:

"What are the facts?"

"What are the consequences of what you are going to do?"

And "What is the trade-off?”

People talk as if you can just save the people whose homes are at risk, and that’s it. Well, if that was the case, why not save them? But at what price? We could ratify the Kyoto Treaty, but the question is "At what price and what benefits would there be to offset that price?" That’s the question that the politicians and the ideologues don’t want to ask. They don’t want to compare. They don’t want to weigh one thing against the other.

Hitting it off with Tommy Lasorda

Under Dodger Stadium

Spring, 1986

“I get these fucking invitations to weddings,” Tommy Lasorda was saying, his bare feet propped on his desk in his office deep beneath the sunny stands of Dodger Stadium. “I don’t know who these fucking people are.”

The celebrity Dodgers manager — dressed only in his white cotton underwear and opening his mail prior to a Saturday night game against the Giants — wasn’t complaining.

Throwing f-bombs was just the way the jolly goodwill ambassador of baseball and former TV lasagna salesman talked when he wasn’t appearing on “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson show or attending black-tie dinner dances with the Reagans at the White House.

It was early in the 1986 season — one of the worst in Lasorda’s 21-year managing career. The Mets were going to win their second World Series. The Dodgers’ Fernando Valenzuela was the NL’s top pitcher, but LA was going to finish sixth in the NL West, 16 games under .500.

Lasorda, who died Jan. 7, 2021, at age 93, was already a cinch for the Baseball Hall of Fame — as a coach, not a player. Before taking over the Dodgers in 1977, he spent 11 years as a minor league pitcher, four as a scout, eight as a minor-league manager and four years as a Dodgers coach. As a major leaguer he was a total bust — a pitiful 0-4 in two years with the Dodgers and Kansas City.

But in his first nine years as manager he had already guided the Dodgers to three league championships and three World Series, including a 1981 series victory over the Yankees. By the time a heart attack would force him to retire in 1996, his teams would win two World Series, four NL pennants and eight division titles. He waltzed into the Hall of Fame in 1997.

I had access to Lasorda’s famous bunker for two weekend games because I was doing a freelance piece on him for an airline magazine. For all his bluster, Lasorda couldn’t have been nicer or more welcoming. He treated me like he had known me all my life, called me “Billy” and made no effort to dial down his hyper persona or clean up his foul language because a strange journalist with a tape recorder had invaded his inner sanctum.

Lined with pictures of the Blessed Mother, big league politicians and Hollywood superstars, Lasorda’s office used to crawl before game time with his big-time pals. Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope, Carson and other rich-and-famous LA folk would regularly drop by to partake of the free booze, beer and food LA’s trendiest restaurants were always sending over.

But all that celebrity fun stuff had abruptly ended earlier that week when the new party-killing MLB Commissioner, Peter Ueberroth, put baseball’s locker rooms and clubhouses off-limits to celebrities, cronies and various other riff-raff.

Only the working press was allowed to enjoy Lasorda’s entertaining stream of baseball stories, playful ragging and spectacularly crude but somehow endearing vocabulary.

The baseball public at large was spared knowledge of Lasorda’s X-rated tongue, but every major league city sports writer in baseball knew all about it. Many of them had dubbed their own copy of what was commonly known as “The Kingman Tape.”

One of several Lasorda tirades bootlegged around baseball, the Kingman audio contained Tommy’s hilarious 30-second rant in response to an innocent but stupid post-game question asked by a radio station sports reporter in 1978.

The reporter had asked Lasorda if he thought Dave Kingman – the Chicago Cub slugger who had just tortured the Dodgers by hitting three home runs and driving in eight runs — had a good day. An angry string of obscenities followed.

Absent the celebrities, the episode of the “Tommy Lasorda Pre-Game Show” I saw was fairly typical. Coaches and players like Steve Sax and Fernando Valenzuela wandered in and out. Lasorda spoke to them in English or Spanish. Dodger play-by-play man Vin Scully and former L.A. Raiders star running back Marcus Allen dropped by. The Republican governor of California, George Deukmejian, called to talk baseball.

As two bored baseball beat writers slouched on the couch watching the Atlanta Braves game on the big screen TV, Lasorda sat behind his desk reading his mail aloud and keeping an eye on the game. Peering over the top of his reading glasses, he joked and argued baseball. When Dale Murphy missed an inside fastball in the Atlanta game, he sniped, “He can’t hit that fucking ball inside.”

While Lasorda was telling everyone that Murphy was real prick as a person until manager Chuck Tanner straightened him out, someone came in and handed him a sheaf of computer paper.

“We get more fucking papers, a computer, all these fucking averages. These are yesterday’s. People want to know if we ever had a computer in the dugout. Yeah, we tried it, a couple years ago. We’d feed it all the information we could get and whenever we got in a jam it would say, ‘Fire the manager.’ It kept coming out with the same answer — ‘Fire the manager’ — so we got rid of that fucking computer.”

You’d never know from Lasorda’s nonstop cheery babble that the Dodgers were struggling through their first home stand. Or that the season had started with slugger Pedro Guerrero lost for three months with a crippling injury. Or that the day before Lasorda had arrived at 2:30 p.m. for a 7 p.m. game and had not left Dodger Stadium until 12:15 in the morning.

When the clubhouse boy appeared at the door carrying a clean pair of mid-thigh-length athletic underwear, Lasorda — still talking — half stood behind his desk, yanked down his underpants and threw them to the boy as the boy threw a fresh pair to him.

Catching the pants, pulling them on and sitting down again without a flash of rounded 58-year-old flesh or self-consciousness, Lasorda said he got a hundred letters a week from Dodgers fans. They ask for autographs or invite him to come to their weddings or their kids’ bar mitzvahs and baptisms. He rarely shows up, but he responds to each letter in some fashion, even licking the envelopes himself.

The first afternoon I was there Lasorda read a letter out loud from a fan asking if he would call his dad, who was a loyal Dodgers fan and was dying of cancer. Lasorda immediately dialed up the hospital, but the line was busy. Then he read a letter from a devout Dodgers fan in LA who invited him to his wedding.

Lasorda checked the schedule and saw the Dodgers were going to be in Montreal that day. “I’ll have to write and tell him I’d love to be there, but I can’t. I’m going to say, ‘Why the hell didn’t you check the schedule, if you’re such a Dodger fan?’ I said that to the president one time.”

“Which president?” a sports writer said.

“Calvin Coolidge, you cocksucker,” Lasorda said with a hearty laugh before proceeding to spin a long story about how President Reagan had checked the Dodgers schedule first before inviting him and his wife Jo to a State Department dinner-dance in Washington.

All of which apparently reminded Lasorda of another story. “You will not believe this fucking story,” he began. 

“I get a letter with an invitation to a wedding from a couple in Florida. They live in Pensacola and they said they were coming out here to Los Angeles to get married in Irvine and they’d like me to come to the wedding. I tell them I can’t make it because I have to go to Vegas to speak.

“So I get up in the morning and I go to the Orange County Airport, the John Wayne Airport, to fly to San Francisco and people are asking for my autograph. So this young couple comes up and asks me for my autograph. So we fly to San Francisco and as we’re waiting for our luggage at the airport the couple tells me they just got married.

“I said, ‘Where are you going?’ and they said, ‘We’re going down to a hotel and we’re going to spend a couple days here.’ I said, ‘Why don’t you ride with me? I’m going to town and it won’t cost you anything?

“All the sudden they start telling me about just getting married and I go, ‘Wait a minute. Did you get married in Irvine? Near Newport Beach?”

“They said, ‘Yeah.’

“I said, ‘I got an invitation to your wedding.’

“Then the guy goes to his wife, ‘That’s right. I remember when your mother said that because we love the Dodgers so much she’s going to invite Tommy Lasorda to our wedding.’

“And I’m in the fucking cab with those people! That’s the same fucking couple!” Lasorda yells, banging his desktop, “that the mother writes to invite me to the fucking wedding in Newport Beach! They didn’t know that the mother had sent me the invitation. Can you believe they’re going to go home and say that I was in the fucking cab with them?’

“What are the fucking odds on that? It’s unbelievable. But there’s always unbelievable stories.

“Like that time when Frank Pulli is umpiring behind the plate. Do you know how (Dodgers pitcher) Jerry Reuss likes to fuck around? So Reuss took a baseball and he wrote on it, ‘Dear Frank, God bless you. Your friend, Tommy Lasorda’ and he gives it to the ball boy – you know, the kid who usually brings new balls up to the fucking umpire. This is the eighth inning.

“In the fucking top of the ninth we don’t hear anything from Frank Pulli, so we figure the fucker didn’t see the ball. Now the fucking game is over and I forgot about it.

“So we come in and (Dodgers relief pitcher) Tom Niedenfuer walks over and says, ‘You won’t believe what I saw.’

“I said, ‘What?’

“ ‘In the fucking ninth, I had a fucking ball and I looked down and I found writing on it.’

“I said, ‘No kidding. What did it say?’

“ ‘Dear Frank, God bless you. Your friend, Tommy Lasorda.’ ”

“I said, ‘Then the umpire didn’t see it. What happened?’

“Niedenfuer said, ‘The guy fouled the fucking ball off.’

“So I said, ‘End of the fucking story,’ right?

“I go upstairs and meet my wife and she said, ‘You won’t believe what happened.’

“ ‘What?’ ”

“ ‘A foul ball hit right next to me.’ I said, ‘Oh, is that right? What the fuck do I give a shit about a foul ball?’

“She said, ‘The guy behind me catches the foul ball and it’s got writing on it.’

“I said, “Oh God! Here comes that fucking ball again! What did it say?’

“ ‘It said, ‘Dear Frank. God bless you. Your friend, Tommy Lasorda.’

“I said, ‘So that’s where that fucking ball wound up!’

“She says, ‘You won’t believe the name of the guy that caught the fucking ball.’

“I said, ‘What?’

“ ‘Frank!!’

“Frank caught the fucking ball! Now what are the fucking odds of that? It’s fucking unbelievable!!”

“You think you’d say, ‘Well, the fucking guy makes up a story like that.’ But it’s just as unbelievable as that couple being in the fucking cab with me in San Francisco.”

“We’re supposed to believe that?” a sports writer asked.

“That’s as true as God made apples,” Lasorda assured him.

*********

As game time neared the newspaper guys drifted away. I was left alone in the office with Lasorda. He was no longer ripping open his mail and stuffing autographed photos of himself or his star players into mailing envelopes.

The Tommy Lasorda Pregame Show was over. He was subdued, almost serious. As he answered my questions he began pulling-on parts of his beloved Dodger Blue uniform — the one he said he hoped to die in.

“I always had a dream of being the manager of the Dodgers,” he said. “The Dodgers have been great to me. Mr. (Walter) O’Malley gave me my start in baseball. I’d never go anywhere else as long as they want me to stay around here.”

He credited his success to his players and coaches -- “the greatest staff any man could ask for” — and the full support of team owners and management. Lasorda said he never regretted a single day of the 37 years he had already spent in the Dodgers organization.

“You’re looking at the happiest most grateful man in the world. When I tell everyone how much I love the Dodgers, a lot of people think I’m full of baloney. But they don’t realize how true it is and how much I mean it. I work for the greatest organization in the world, without a doubt.”

He said he enjoyed every aspect of his job and to anyone observing him for more than 10 minutes it was obvious he was telling the truth.

For instance, before the game on Saturday the Dodgers PR person stuck his head in the office and asked him to speak to a high school baseball team from Connecticut that was out on the West Coast for a tournament. Lasorda gladly obliged.

Stepping into the hallway just outside the Dodgers locker room, he dazzled the young ballplayers and their equally awestruck coaches with a mini-version of the pep talk/stand-up routine he’d delivered at hundreds of baseball clinics around the country.

Contented players, Lasorda told them, play better. That’s why he tried to create a family-like attitude and an atmosphere on his teams where everyone pulls together. “I tell my players that individualism wins trophies and teamwork wins championships.”

He urged sluggers to be happy bunters if that was what their coach ordered. “If you all execute the fundamentals and play unselfishly, you’ll be tough to beat. Just remember one thing,” he said in closing, “when things get tough, rely on the Italians.”

Lasorda not only left each of those kids with a memory of a lifetime, he left them laughing.

Laughter, he firmly believed, was “food for the soul” and all the pregame frivolity and boyish good fun that swirled around him in his office was no accident. “I like to build a family-type team because if you’re part of the family you’ll try to be happy, to be together, to love each other. I like to see the guys enjoy each other before the game.”

So when does he pull out the whip? “If I thought they were neglecting their jobs, it doesn’t matter if they’re having fun or not, I tell them about it. When it’s time to get between those two white lines, it’s a different story.”

The most important function of a manager, he said, is to “extract every ounce of ability out of each player. And everybody in the country, from the president on down, sometime or another in their life needs to be motivated. Needs to be convinced that they can do better than they’re actually doing. A lot of times a lot of us feel we’re doing our best, but in reality we aren’t.

“People say to me, ‘You you mean to tell me you’ve got to motivate a guy making $800,000 and $1 million a year?’ I say, ‘Absolutely. Everybody. Everybody.’ ”

A player once asked Lasorda if he was accusing him of not trying hard enough. “I said, ‘Buster, let me tell you something: I can get truck drivers and mailmen to try. You don’t win championships with triers. You win with doers.”

Lasorda said he didn’t like to compare eras. Today’s players got more money, but he didn’t think they were spoiled. And he hated to list his favorite players, because it was like trying to choose which fingers he liked best. Anyway, he said, there would be 20 or 30 of them.

Lasorda loved his players like sons. When he first became a manager in the minors he had more in mind than developing future stars for the Dodgers. His ultimate goal was to assure the parents of his players that their son was playing for a man who was just as concerned with how they acted off the baseball field as with how they performed on it.

“I made them go to their churches. I made them write home to their parents. I really got close to these guys — I loved them. I met their parents. Knew their families. And I said to myself, ‘I don’t think I could ever be that close to a ballplayer again, because these guys played for me in the minors.’ ”

Little did he realize, he said, that there was going to come along the Mike Scioscias and the Steve Saxes and the Fernando Valenzuelas and the Greg Brocks and … Lasorda named virtually every player on his current roster.

Pulling on his Dodgers socks, Lasorda said major league baseball players have more of an impact on the youth of our country than anybody. He said his players – all pro athletes – should spend more time convincing youngsters to get a good education and teaching them about the evils of drugs.

“We want the people to have their sons look up to us, to say, “Hey, I’d love to be like Mike Scioscia. We don’t want them to be like Steve Howe, who got involved in illegal drugs. We don’t want kids to idolize those guys.”

I asked him if Babe Ruth’s drinking set a bad example for kids.

“Babe Ruth did no harm to anybody. Babe Ruth never broke a law. Babe Ruth went to visit kids in hospitals. Babe Ruth did everything he could to make a youngster happy. He never showed a disturbance amongst the public. Whenever he was among kids, did the kids love him? He couldn’t have been rude to them — he must have been a tremendous role model for kids. He was to me.”

Some illegal drugs are not harmful, I said, letting my hard-core libertarianism show.

“If they’re using drugs it certainly isn’t going to help them. It does absolutely no good to you. Does it make you a better hitter? Does it make you run faster? Does it make you better looking? Does it make you smarter? Then what the hell would they take ‘em for then?”

For recreational purposes? I dared.

“It’s against the law,” Lasorda said, stepping into his Dodgers pants and getting a little hot under his Dodgers T-shirt. “Why don’t they go out and steal cars for recreation? Both are against the law. Number 2, it’s a proven fact that it’s harmful to your body.”

So is booze, I said.

“But booze isn’t against the law…. To me, anyone who drinks and becomes an alcoholic, anybody who gets involved in illegal drugs, is weak. Medical people try to pass it off as being a sickness. I don’t believe it is a sickness. A sickness is when you’ve got cancer, leukemia, a bad heart.

“If you put all the wine my father drank in his life together, it’d flow over Niagara Falls for three weeks. But he worked every day. He had a family and was responsible. If my father drank and denied his family food, then he’s weak. But my father never did that. He never allowed a material thing to control him.”

What about the baseball media? I asked him if he ever got annoyed with them for harping on a controversy like the situation in the last game of the 1985 championship playoffs when Jack Clark of the Cardinals hit a home run to beat the Dodgers.

The Dodgers had a 5-4 lead with two outs and runners on second and third in the ninth inning, when Lasorda chose to pitch to Clark rather than have him walked intentionally to get to a less dangerous batter. But Clark hit a three-run home run, the Dodgers lost the playoffs and Lasorda was knocked around by the baseball press all winter long.

“Let me tell you something,” Lasorda said. “We are part of the great game of baseball and the great thing about the game is that everybody can second-guess.

“Don Shula is one of the greatest coaches who ever lived in football. He got beat by the New England Patriots in the playoffs. Do you read anything about how he had his cornerman in the wrong spot? That he played the wrong type of defense? Somebody says they play ‘a nickel defense, a dollar defense.’ Who knows?

“But everybody at one time or another has played baseball and they’re all able to second-guess. They can second-guess me about Clark. You know what I tell them after they said I should’ve walked him? ‘After he hit the home run my wife knows I should’ve walked him, and she don’t know one damn thing about the game of baseball. You’re no different than she is.’ ”

Niedenfuer was supposed to pitch Clark carefully with first base open but he didn’t, I said. It was his fault, but you got the blame.

“I want them to blame me. I didn’t blame Niedenfuer or the catcher. I put the blame on myself. I would rather them blame me than my players.

“Let me ask you,” Lasorda said, his hot temper showing for the only time in two days. “Do you think the Dodgers would send (LA Times sportswriter) Gordon Eades out to look at a prospect where he’s got $100,000 to spend?

“Do you think the Dodgers would ask a sportswriter to go down in the fucking minor leagues and check out a ballplayer down there to see whether they should bring him up or not?

“So how the fuck could he criticize me, who I’ve been in this fucking game a long fucking time? He can second-guess because anybody else can. Who in the fuck … Hey, I know what the fuck I should’ve done after it happens. Who the fuck don’t know that? Anybody who’s got any brains at all knows what you should’ve done after it happened.

“So that’s what makes our game so great, because people can do that. They don’t do that in football or basketball. That’s why it’s the greatest game in the world. That’s the thing you have to accept as a manager.

“But you know one thing? My bosses know what I do. The only people I really care about and who I want to believe I’m a good manager are (Dodgers executives) Fred Claire, Peter O’Malley, Al Campanis and my players.

“Did they have to tell Richard Burton he was a good actor? Check his bank account.”

The obvious spin I somehow got away with on this newsy feature from June 26, 1996, would have made a $10-million-a year Pirates left-hander proud. It was part of a large multi-part Page 1 package the Post-Gazette did on the proposed location of what five years later would become PNC Park. The PG, like all the other local print and electronic news media, was a big fan of the proposed replacement for Three Rivers Stadium, the hideous multi-use beast built in 1970 that was a lousy venue for both football and baseball. Subsidizing profit-making pro sports teams by building them new stadia with taxpayer money was at its peak in the late 1990s. As boosters without principles who believed the economic nonsense that sports stadiums helped the local economy, the local media in virtually every major league city were all for it. Not me, though.

The doomed North Side residents booed the city’s plans

The 150th anniversary of the Battle of the Little Bighorn (often called "Custer's Last Stand") will be commemorated in Crow Agency, Montana, this weekend (June 25–28).

As AI wokefully, but accurately describes it, the commemoration is an event that 'brings together the National Park Service and Native communities to observe the 1876 victory of Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors.'

Whatever it's called, what happened on that grassy hilltop in 1876 was an American tragedy.

In 2010 I retraced the 10,000-mile road trip around the USA John Steinbeck took in 1960 and turned into his multi-flawed and dishonest 'nonfiction' book 'Travels with Charley.’

Steinbeck stopped at the Custer Battlefield in 1960 as he and his dog Charley raced across Montana on his way to Seattle, so so stopped there exactly fifty years later.

I’ll always be glad I did.

This is the chapter from my book 'Dogging Steinbeck' -- a work of 'true nonfiction' I like to call it -- that describes my first visit to a haunting, powerful and bloody place everyone should experience once in their life.

Brave Ghosts

The Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, as the site of Custer’s Last Stand is officially called, was a lovely place for a massacre. In every direction the rolling brown land was big and the blue sky even bigger. The only sound was the stiff steady wind that rippled the dry grass and starched the American flag flying high above the Custer Memorial Cemetery.

Everything – the parking lot, the visitors center and the cemetery and its ring of protective trees – looked up at Last Stand Hill, where a stone monument, a low black iron fence and 41 white gravestones stuck out of the thin grass. Talk about ghosts. If they exist anywhere, they exist on the silent windswept hilltop where Gen. Armstrong Custer and 40 of his men died on June 25, 1876.

Getting myself to the site of Custer’s Last Stand had been a pleasant cruise through tall cornfields and short hayfields, but for the local wildlife one stretch of State Route 47 was a killing field. In a minute I saw a dead coyote, a dead skunk, two dead raccoons and a dead something else. Whatever hit them – including one of the trucks overloaded with lumpy sugar beets like the ones they left sprinkled on the road – was probably doing 75 like me. Not far from breakfast in Hardin I passed one of the favorite ambiguous road signs of my trip – “Slow Down When Dusty.”

On a bright sunny Friday morning only 10 cars were in the Custer Battlefield parking lot. Steinbeck would have been annoyed to see the “No dogs off leash” sign. When he and Charley took their side trip to “pay our respects to General Custer and Sitting Bull," as he put it, they both were able to wander indiscriminately over the battlefield. Park ranger/historian Gerald Jasmer told me that except for some landscaping and the stone or gravel pathways laid out through the grassy slopes, no dramatic changes had been made to the site since Steinbeck’s time. The most significant difference since 1960 is how much more we know about what really went on during the battle itself.

Fifty years ago, most of what Steinbeck and everyone else in the country knew about Custer’s Last Stand came from Hollywood, where history and facts go to be tortured on the bloody altar of bad drama. But Jasmer said a lucky break occurred in 1983 when a wildfire burned off the battlefield’s grass and gave forensic archeologists access to thousands of artifacts – mainly spent cartridges and human remains – strewn over the slopes during the fighting. The legend of a heroic last stand by Custer and his soldiers, built up first by 19th century newspapers Back East and then Hollywood, was spoiled by facts and cold science. A more realistic, more likely scenario is that in the face of certain death the horse soldiers scattered and died in a state of panic and fear.

Steinbeck would have heard the white-man’s politically incorrect version of what happened at the Little Big Horn. Visitors today get a more fair-and-balanced account of a military "engagement" – now there's a great euphemism – in which 260 men from the U.S. Army's 7th Calvary and 100 Lakota-Cheyenne warriors slaughtered each other in an unnecessary battle in an unimportant place. There’s also an Indian Memorial in memory of the tribes who died “defending their way of life at the Battle of the Little Big Horn.”

In a letter to his wife Steinbeck called Custer a “dumb bastard,” which he was. But in Travels with Charley he writes that when he went to the battlefield site he "removed my hat in memory of brave men." If that’s what he did, it was a classy thing to do at a beautiful, almost spiritual monument to unimaginable human bravery, savagery and stupidity.

A miracle of survival

Sunday, Aug. 18, 2002

Long ago, its twin steeples and stained-glass windows looked out over a poor but bustling city neighborhood.

For decades, its priests and nuns tended to the religious, social and cultural needs of a crowded parish of immigrants who had come to Pittsburgh to work in the humming factories and mills.

And for more than 50 years, its tight compound of buildings — church, parish house, grade school and a hotel for single working girls — was a fortress of faith, hope and charity for Catholics living in the Lower Hill District’s rich collection of row houses, cheap apartments and crowded slums.

But that was another century, when Epiphany parish was young and part of a seamless, smoky sprawl of humanity and manufacturing that stretched from the Point to the quiet pastures of Oakland.

Today, Epiphany Catholic Church stands conspicuously alone at the corner of Centre Avenue and Washington Place.

Its earthy red bricks — not to mention its cross-topped spires and medieval-style architecture — are out of place and time in the sparse skyline of gleaming metallic buildings like Chatham Center and Mellon Arena.

The church has been stranded in its purgatory of asphalt, concrete and traffic since the late 1950s, when the Lower Hill was obliterated to build the Civic Arena during urban renewal. Now another major redevelopment project threatens to transform Epiphany’s neighborhood.

The project is a new $270 million hockey rink for the Pittsburgh Penguins. The arena and attendant retail development, which would replace Mellon Arena, has been proposed for the site of the now-shuttered St. Francis Central Hospital, Epiphany’s neighbor.

The footprint of the new arena comes dangerously close to Epiphany property. But both the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh and the Sports & Exhibition Authority, the city-county agency that would oversee the proposed project, say the Penguins’ new home would pose no threat to the 100-year-old church.

In fact, based on preliminary redevelopment plans for the Lower Hill that include new housing, Epiphany’s barren parish could start filling up again with the kind of urban life forms it once had by the thousands — people.

It’s a miracle Epiphany church has survived to see its 100th birthday, a milestone the parish marks at noon today with a Mass celebrated by Bishop Donald Wuerl. A banquet for current parishioners and former parish priests and nuns will follow in the church’s basement parish hall.

Fifty years ago, Epiphany looked like a goner. To make way for the Civic Arena and a culture-and-arts mecca that never materialized, the city demolished more than 1,300 structures, displaced nearly 10,000 people and clear-cut 95 acres of Epiphany’s immediate neighborhood.

By 1961, Epiphany’s four brick buildings were the only ones left. The Lower Hill and the rainbow of nationalities and ethnic groups living there were history.

So was most of Epiphany’s congregation of about 2,000 big families, most of them Irish. The number fell quickly to 350, which is how many families there are now.

The congregation today includes residents of Crawford Square and the Washington Plaza apartments. But according to its pastor, the Rev. James Garvey, its core flock is composed of office workers, older people who once lived in the parish but now live in the suburbs, university students and the homeless.

Epiphany parish has changed radically. Yet Garvey says his church — like any other Catholic church — is still an important part of its community. It’s just a different community.

A NEIGHBORHOOD CORNERSTONE

Epiphany Church was born out of necessity in the early 1900s, when steel baron Henry Clay Frick bought St. Paul Cathedral at Grant Street and Fifth Avenue, Downtown, and erected the Frick Building on the site.

While a new cathedral was being built in the then-boondocks of Oakland, the Church of the Epiphany was established in 1902 to serve Catholics who lived or worked Downtown.

Epiphany’s first services were held in what is now the church’s basement parish hall. But by 1910, the new church and the other parish buildings were finished.

Designed in a Romanesque-meets-Byzantine architectural style, the church had high arches, deep vaults and lofty naves. Outside, perched high above the front doors, were the statues of Jesus, St. Peter and St. Paul that had graced the first St. Paul Cathedral.

Inside, under a 60-foot central dome, the church’s signature stained-glass windows told the story of the Epiphany — the event in which Jesus is said to have been revealed to the gentiles as Christ by the Magi who came to visit him at his birth.

The total cost of the church was $386,016 — about $7.3 million in today’s money. But all of today’s money and much more couldn’t duplicate the Old World workmanship and artistry that went into Epiphany.

Nor could it still buy the white Italian marble of its altars and altar steps. Or its priceless Venetian enamel mosaic of the Epiphany above the main altar. Or its European-cast bronze crucifixes and Communion-rail doors.

Thanks to its founding pastor, the Rev. Lawrence O’Connell, Epiphany quickly became the center of its neighborhood’s social and cultural life. The parish grade school, staffed by the Sisters of Mercy until it closed in 1973, enrolled as many as 1,175 students at its peak in 1918.

Across the street, O’Connell built the Lyceum, which was lost during urban renewal. Plays and operas were put on in the Lyceum, and famous lecturers visited from around the nation. During the day, its gym kept parish toughs like Harry Grebb and future world heavyweight contender Billy Conn off the streets and taught them how to box.

In 1913, when O’Connell built the St. Regis Home-Hotel for Business Girls, a residence for young single women who had moved to the city, the Epiphany compound that still stands today was complete.

The resourceful O’Connell, who died in 1959, served 54 years as pastor and became a prominent figure in the city’s charitable circles. He founded Camp O’Connell for needy kids in 1937 and also was responsible for one of Epiphany’s most famous contributions to the city — the “Printers Mass.”

It started in 1903, when seven daily newspapers published Downtown. The papers’ printers and typographers, who on weekends worked from Friday straight on to early Sunday morning, asked O’Connell if Epiphany could schedule a Mass for them at 2:30 a.m. Sunday, so they could attend immediately after work.

This was the era when Masses where supposed to be celebrated only from dawn to noon on Sunday — except for Christmas midnight Mass. But O’Connell got special authorization from Pope Leo XIII, and the Printers Mass was born.

At its peak, it attracted nearly 1,500 newspapermen. The Printers Mass, which lasted until 1991, eventually also became popular with the late-night crowd and students at nearby Duquesne University.

Through the 1960s, as its original congregation evaporated further, Epiphany concentrated on renovating its buildings and doing worshipper-friendly things like adding Masses during workdays. By the 1970s, it had assumed its current identity as a “Downtown parish.”

AN EVOLVING MISSION

Epiphany’s pastors have always had a knack for catering to the heavenly and earthly needs of their unique flock. A century ago, that meant teaching English to freshly arrived immigrant families or running a Catholic grade school for their children.

Today, it means renting office space to social agencies, like Dress for Success, Pittsburgh, which helps women make the transition from welfare to work, and scheduling convenient morning, noon and evening Masses during the week for Downtown office workers.

Sunday services average about 100 worshippers, said Garvey, who has been pastor for about a year. Noon Mass draws the most people during the week — usually 65 or 70. On a holy day, when an 11:15 a.m. Mass is added, as many as 800 attend.

On a recent hot and miserably humid Monday, however, as Epiphany’s cavernous interior is bathed in a dim gold and caramel-brown glow, only 15 people show up for 5:15 p.m. Mass.

On the streets outside, busses hiss and trucks groan in rush-hour traffic. In the distance, a police siren wails. But inside the church, which can hold 1,000 comfortably, the silence is broken only by the gentle whir of several ineffective electric fans.

At 5:15, with sunlight struggling to penetrate the stained-glass windows, Garvey enters the sanctuary wearing his vestments. His altar “boy” is an older man in denim shorts, a T-shirt, white socks and black shoes.

Also assisting is Ken Scherer, a retired Duquesne Light public relations executive who volunteers for just about every job at Epiphany that doesn’t require the sacrament of holy orders. Scherer reads from the Book of Jeremiah, passes around the collection basket and helps Garvey distribute Communion.

One of the 15 attending Mass is Dave Kutcher, 54, of Brighton Heights, an active volunteer at Epiphany who works Downtown for the Department of Veteran Affairs. After the service, he describes himself as a staunch Catholic who visits Epiphany every afternoon to view the Eucharist, which is displayed on a side altar from noon to 5:30 p.m. It’s something few Catholic churches do, Kutcher said.

Also at the Mass are four Wilt siblings from Mt. Washington — John, Connie, Paul and Christine, who are marking the 25th anniversary of the death of their mother, Genevieve. They chose Epiphany because the Mass is convenient to their work schedules.

Four days later, Friday’s noon Mass draws about 40 people, not counting the homeless man who is working the front door asking for lunch money.

But what was bringing scores of people like mail-truck driver Don Bowman, of Pine Township, to Epiphany’s door is what goes on in the church basement every Friday from noon to 6:30 p.m. — the parish fish fry.

About 200 customers come each Friday, said Scherer, who serves as cashier. Things like meatball sandwiches, pirogies and sometimes ribs are on the menu. But the No. 1 seller by far is the $5.50 fried Atlantic cod sandwich.

The fish fry is the 4-year-old brainchild of the Rev. Dan Sweeney, the previous pastor. It’s been a great success, Scherer said. The profits are paying for enlarging and remodeling the basement parish hall, which had sat unused for 35 years.

Usually, it is Mellon Arena workers like Hank Orosz, of Shaler, and Frank Falce, of Brookline, who form the fish fry’s regular customer base. But business booms when daytime events at the arena deposit thousands of potential customers at the doorstep.

In March, when an NCAA regional college basketball tournament visited the arena, Scherer said, the church sold 1,200 pounds of cod — the most ever. Even scalpers came over.

THE NEXT HUNDRED YEARS

According to preliminary redevelopment plans for the Lower Hill, new homes may sprout again on the site of Mellon Arena, which would be demolished.

Closely watching the outcome of this 50-year cycle of destruction and creation, Epiphany’s pastor has hopes the Lower Hill will be reborn as a residential neighborhood.

Until then, Garvey said, Epiphany will continue to do the same thing it’s been doing for 100 years — “to preach the gospel and celebrate the sacraments for the people of God.”

Meanwhile, he said, the church is in the middle of a $1 million fund-raising drive to continue its many restoration and renovation projects. It is in no mortal danger from a new Penguins arena.

Greg Yesko, spokesman for the Sports & Exhibition Authority, said Epiphany’s property “is not at risk.” And the Rev. Ron Lengwin, spokesman for the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh, is equally emphatic.

“It is our intention for that parish to remain there,” Lengwin said.

He cannot guarantee that Epiphany church would be there 100 years from now — no one could, he said. But “it was there before the arena,” he added, “and we expect it to be there for a long time.”