Review of Macho Row: The 1993 Phillies and Baseball\u27s Unwritten Code

This is a review of William C. Kashatus\u27s Macho Row: The 1993 Phillies and Baseball\u27s Unwritten Code, an account of the misfit bunch that almost returned World Series glory to the City of Brotherly Love

When Basketball was Jewish

Philosopher-novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, writing in Jewish Jocks: An Unorthodox Hall of Fame, describes Barney Tiny Sedran, born Bernard Sedransky on the Lower East Side of New York, as a quintessential Jewish basketball player: manically energetic, compulsively alert, upending expectations, and compensating for short—really short—comings (17). Sedransky was the shortest player ever inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame, she writes, who excelled at a time when Jews ruled basketball — and lest you think those last three words are a misprint, let me repeat: Jews ruled basketball (17). Indeed, in the modern era it is easy to forget who the great boxers and basketball players were, for these city sports have changed, just like the neighborhoods that stimulated their growth. Previous books have explored the topic of Jewish exceptionalism in sport from a broad historical-sociological perspective. Peter Levine\u27s Ellis Island to Ebbets Field: Sport and the American Jewish Experience (1993) chronicles how sport helped transform Jewish immigrants into citizens in full. Allen Bodner\u27s When Boxing Was a Jewish Sport (1997) focuses on boxing\u27s golden era in the 1920s and 1930s, when Jewish fighters vied for ring dominance against Italian- and Irish-American opponents. Each of these writers provide a specific historic context for their subjects. The header of Goldstein\u27s essay, for instance, contains the title, the subject, and dates: Tiny Baller, Barney Sedran, (1891-1964) (17). [excerpt

Cocaine + Surfing: Reviewed by Jack Ryan, Gettysburg College

If you seek a conclusive answer to the question that seems to anchor Chas Smith\u27s Cocaine + Surfing: A Sordid History of Surfing\u27s Greatest Love Affair, Did surfing and cocaine start together in Peru and never leave each other\u27s embrace?, you will be disappointed. In his preface, Smith discusses the death of Andy Irons, the three-time world surfing champion from Hawaii who died November 2, 2010, alone in a Dallas hotel room of cardiac arrest brought on by cocaine abuse. Irons was thirty-two years old. According to Smith, no one in the cosseted surfing world was surprised: Drugs and surfing, especially cocaine, felt synonymous with professional surfing those eight-odd years ago (15). Chapter 1, ironically titled The Call to Adventure!, places Smith, our first-person narrator, on a hero\u27s journey. [excerpt

World Cup Watching

This essay describes Jack\u27s experience dealing with World Cup fever in Bath, England, during the 2010 World Cup. It\u27s Jack\u27s outsider\u27s perspective on the impact of world cup competition while he taught in the Advanced Studies in England Program

Review of Masters of the Games

A review of Joseph Epstein\u27s Masters of the Games, a collection of essays, profiles, short stories, and opinion pieces about sports

Jack Ryan, Vice Provost

In this first edition of Next Page, Vice Provost Jack Ryan shares with us his reading habits, book recommendations, and which returning television show will likely soak up a solid eight hours of his reading time

On the Performance of Multi-Instrument Solar Flare Observations During Solar Cycle 24

The current fleet of space-based solar observatories offers us a wealth of opportunities to study solar flares over a range of wavelengths. Significant advances in our understanding of flare physics often come from coordinated observations between multiple instruments. Consequently, considerable efforts have been, and continue to be made to coordinate observations among instruments (e.g. through the Max Millennium Program of Solar Flare Research). However, there has been no study to date that quantifies how many flares have been observed by combinations of various instruments. Here we describe a technique that retrospectively searches archival databases for flares jointly observed by RHESSI, SDO/EVE (MEGS-A and -B), Hinode/(EIS, SOT, and XRT), and IRIS. Out of the 6953 flares of GOES magnitude C1 or greater that we consider over the 6.5 years after the launch of SDO, 40 have been observed by six or more instruments simultaneously. Using each instrument's individual rate of success in observing flares, we show that the numbers of flares co-observed by three or more instruments are higher than the number expected under the assumption that the instruments operated independently of one another. In particular, the number of flares observed by larger numbers of instruments is much higher than expected. Our study illustrates that these missions often acted in cooperation, or at least had aligned goals. We also provide details on an interactive widget now available in SSWIDL that allows a user to search for flaring events that have been observed by a chosen set of instruments. This provides access to a broader range of events in order to answer specific science questions. The difficulty in scheduling coordinated observations for solar-flare research is discussed with respect to instruments projected to begin operations during Solar Cycle 25, such as DKIST, Solar Orbiter, and Parker Solar Probe.Comment: 26 pages, 7 figures, 3 tables. Accepted for publication in Solar Physic