One of the great things about being old is that you need pay no attention to teen culture. Or to anything “the kids” are listening to. Or doing. Or wearing. That is, you don’t reject it … you ignore it. Blissfully. Until you can’t. Which is the case presented by a boy band named One […]

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The Grantland sports website has a story that pretty much cuts to the heart of the lockerroom “relationship” between athletes and media. Deconstructing a rude comment Russell Westbrook of the Oklahoma City Thunder made to a hometown newspaper columnist. The relationship between jocks and hacks was never good, not when I entered the profession in […]

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Most of us have a pretty good idea how easy it is to pass along germs in the workplace. Probably could have done without knowing just how easy it is. A news reporter at The National came up with the idea of testing various surfaces in the newsroom to see what sort of bacteria might […]

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Taking a page out of Marshawn Lynch’s playbook … So, what are your thoughts on guys who refuse to talk at the Super Bowl? Read what I wrote last year. What? Read what I wrote last year.

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Lorem ipsum is a famous dummy text. Random words, Latin-looking, that designers use in page mockups. (Not to get too wonky about it, but “studies show” that when designers are creating new looks, real text often distracts non-designers who are looking at a page. They begin reading real stories, instead of looking at how marvelous […]

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A business story. Ugh. But the business of the UAE is business. Commodities and services and tourism and all the rest of it. The National has a 12-page business section, broadsheet, and the biz crew has no trouble filling it. Something is always going on. The big biz news story for months now has been […]

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For the first time since 2007, we spent Thanksgiving Day at home, in California. The period of absence allowed us to get a sense of seven years of what probably was incremental change, perhaps not as obvious to those who experienced it year by year. For us, the on-the-ground experience of Thanksgiving jumped from 2007 […]

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As the pace of Baby Boomers leaving this dimension — a process that takes them, as newspapers a century ago might put it, “into the shadows” — I predict a sharp upswing in a very annoying post-mortem task. Getting rid of the dearly departed’s T-shirts. Boomers, or male Boomers, anyway, have been wearing T-shirts their […]

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Production journalists are creatures of habit. They know what will fit where. How many words with how many pictures. How to assemble four blocks, or five or six, to make a page. Fitting together shapes to complete a puzzle. And coding it up becomes a synaptic exercise. Just put your fingers on the keys, and […]

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Landon Donovan scored a record 57 goals for the U.S. national team. No one else is close, unless you consider Clint Dempsey, trailing by 18, to be close. And given that the U.S. does not play as many friendlies as it did, into the early years of this century, it is hard to imagine someone […]

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