Notes from the Ironbound

A lot of famous people died this week, and I feel like the passing of Ian Tyson got lost in the shuffle. A Canadian cowboy turned folk singe...

  For the first forty years of my life, a September Saturday meant college football. I will never care about a sports team again the way I c...

I have a long-standing theory that there is a 20 year nostalgia echo. In the 70s there were 50s movies like Grease and American Graffiti a...

Today's one of those quarantine days when I came a little untethered. I didn't have a regular school day, this was a day for writing...

Every year at my daughters' school they put on a big show of different musical skits directed by parent volunteers, and end the show ...

This time of year, as late fall fades into winter, has become very tough for me. Six Novembers ago my grandmother died, a person who had ...

While baseball may not hold the preeminent place in American culture that it once did, its metaphors still permeate the American vernacul...

I've been seeing things about the 75th anniversary of D-Day all day today, but it's left me nothing but conflicted and sad. It...

I am still on spring break, but unable to travel because my wife and kids are still in school. I have been recharging myself by taking a ...

This week I got the sad news that Prairie Books, a mainstay of my hometown of Hastings, Nebraska, would be closing . I had known this day...

This morning I got the sad news that my aunt Kathleen had died. She had been ailing for a couple of months. I last saw her at Christmas time...

I recently had the good fortune to hang out with two of my friends from graduate school. Like the middle-aged men that we are, we talked ...

This poster grabbed my imagination back in '84 [Editor's Note: I wrote this as a submission to an online film magazine asking f...

I’ve been away from the blog for the longest time in years, maybe ever. (I haven’t checked.) First off, I spent my writing energy on a piece...

We often tend to mistakenly think of the 1980s in ways that paint it as uniformly conforming to certain trends consistently throughout th...

While driving home last week from our trip to Virginia I decided to play DJ on my Spotify while in the passenger seat. I eventually settled ...

1995 was the year of Lawrence Phillips, in more ways than one This is the third installment of a four part series. You can read part on...