music clip of the day

like nobody else

Bob Dorough (1923-), “Devil May Care” (B. Dorough), live (studio performance), Newark, N.J., 2015

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lagniappe

random sights

yesterday, Oak Park, Ill.

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baseball: Chicago Cubs

Whether staring and suffering, or grinning and hugging and high-fiving, fans become generic in every World Series. But I remember Cubs fans differently from my sporadic visits to the sunlit Confines in those lean years. They loved their Cubs and yearned for better times, but cheered without irony for every good or great play by the visiting team. It was the game they loved above all.

We will see these youthful champions in the post-season for years to come, I believe. Their infield has a combined age of ninety-six—my own age, as it happens—as good a young bunch as I can recall. Bryant, the third baseman and coming National League M.V.P., goes six feet five and bats from a spread-legged crouch that expands magically into a sudden tall tree with the skyward bat at its top. He’s also swift. That sprint of his around the bases from first reminded you of a clip from the Olympics. The shortstop, Addison Russell, who is twenty-two, batted in six runs in Game 6. Báez, at second, patrols his environs with a feline muscularity. Twenty-seven-year-old Anthony Rizzo, the first baseman, bats left, and may prove to be the best of the quartet—with any luck, a future Hall of Famer whose best years await us.

—Roger Angell, New Yorker, 11/3/16