Some people can’t or won’t hear a word you say

March 8, 2025

Have you ever met or spoken with someone and quickly realized there wasn’t going to be an actual conversation? That doesn’t happen often for me, because I’m usually able to relate to all kinds of people, regardless of our differing backgrounds, life experiences or political feelings. But nowadays, the last item can create friction right from the start. The p-word — politics — seems to be where a lot of emails and phone calls can go off the rails. I bet you can see where this particular train is headed. A reader sent me a letter recently. Actually, it was more like a list ...

Are you ready for some backyard football?

March 1, 2025

What is something that disappeared from American life over the years and mostly went unnoticed? You’ve probably come across prompts like those if you spend any time at all on a social-media platform. My default answers are common sense, civility and shame. In other words, a lot of people now seem all too comfortable in letting it be known that they’re not so bright, not so nice and lack the self-awareness that should come naturally to all of us. There’s a column to be written about all of that, but something else far more important seems to have faded from the American ...

Losing weight the hard way is no fun

February 22, 2025

Legend has it that a man visited our newsroom one day years ago insisting that he had come up with the cure for cancer. As the story goes, the first person he encountered was a harried assistant sports editor. Upon hearing the man’s pitch, the sports guy responded: “Can you come back later? We’re on deadline right now.” Unfortunately, the man never returned and as far as anyone knows, the cure was never revealed to humanity. But at least the paper got out on time. That leads me to a discovery of my own — the cure for an admittedly lesser ailment, but one that many of us ...

Everyone just take a deep breath

February 1, 2025

Everyone else is doing it, so I feel like I should write something about President Donald Trump. Here goes, but first a disclaimer: People who like Trump might become triggered by what follows. People who don’t like Trump may also be triggered. As someone I used to work for once said, if everyone is mad, you’re probably on the right track. Or something like that. I know that hasn’t stopped some of the columnists who appear on our opinion pages. You probably know their names and have read their pieces. You probably know which of them think Trump has made a welcome return to ...

Thanks for everything, Big Chuck

January 28, 2025

When someone finally gets around to inventing a time machine, I know when and where I’m going. Others will want to take care of the big stuff — killing young Adolf Hitler, saving Abraham Lincoln, JFK, MLK and RFK and preventing 9/11 — so my time-travel goals are less ambitious, but they will be a bit self-serving. I’ll go back to 1970s northeastern Ohio and pretty much start doing over what I did then … with some lottery numbers in my pocket, of course. Another chance at Little League, backyard football, the Blizzard of ’78 and going fishing with my dad will be more ...

A stupid human trick caught on video

January 18, 2025

Somewhere on one of my social media accounts is perhaps the only video evidence that I once did something really stupid. I’m not giving away the platform because as I write this, just a few select people know that this short video exists. No, I didn’t have someone film me beating up a guy in the street after an NFL game because he had the audacity to wear another team’s jersey. I did not berate a woman in the stands at a game because she was rooting against my team. I also did not pull a Jeffrey Toobin during a Zoom call with colleagues. My stupid human trick happened on a ...