Ted Mann

A few days ago, before the blaze began, the National Weather Service in Los Angeles warned us to “be prepared for strong winds and fire danger.” In preparation, LA Fire Department Chief Kristin Crowley has pre-deployed firepersons and emergency vehicles across the city, at the ready by 8 AM; it is … Continue Reading

The 66 Star — “Radiating the Light of Truth on Hansen’s disease” — was the patient publication of the national leprosarium in Carville, Louisiana, known as United States Public Health Service Marine Hospital 66. The 66 Star ceased publication in 1934 after its founder and publisher, “Stanley … Continue Reading

Wallace Creek runs through Echo Hill Ranch, which has been property of the Friedman family for over half a century now. A hundred years before that, the land belonged to “Bigfoot” Wallace, a legendary pioneer and Indian fighter who rode with Colonel Jack Hays and his Texas Rangers. “How’d he get … Continue Reading

Sporting folk know there are two principal modes of handicapping horses, the mathematical and the mystical.  When numbers fall silent, as they will with Chihuahua-bred maiden two-year-olds, for example, gamblers say that a horse with no recorded past has no form. A handicapper must have the … Continue Reading

Let us ponder the 1980s, geopolitically, economically, and thermodynamically. Ronald Reagan had called the Soviet Union the “Evil Empire” in 1983, though it was an empire so decayed, we would later discover, it barely appeared scary enough to justify another year’s increase to the defense budget. … Continue Reading

Sammy was in his late sixties and he worked the door at Gleason's Gym, which was on 30th Street in Manhattan. That was in the mid 1970s, before the home of great boxing champions like Jake LaMotta, Muhammad Ali, and Roberto Durán migrated to Brooklyn to begin its third life in a new borough, on … Continue Reading

Times Square in the 1970s was in some sense the heart of Grub Street, “the world of literary hacks, or mediocre, needy writers who write for hire.” The New York Times, which lent its name to what was then the world capital of cheap porno theater seediness, was the voice of Grub Street, grown rich, … Continue Reading

My first job, where I was expected to do a man’s work, was in an isolated logging camp, on the far west coast of Canada’s Vancouver Island. There the constant wind and perpetual rain produced giant trees, the oldest of them 1,000 years old, Sitka spruce and Douglas fir topping 300 feet tall and 30 … Continue Reading