Culture

Cheers promised a city where everybody knows your name. Augustana sang about going where no one does. Both songs might be right.

Asimov, Trollope and Simenon wrote at astonishing rates. Their methods were less about genius than about showing up at the same hour every day.

The “Chuck Norris facts” were one of the internet’s first great memes. Norris played along on talk shows, until a book tried to cash in.

Arthur Wynne’s “word-cross” ran in the New York World on December 21, 1913. Within a decade it was a national obsession, and critics called it a menace.

Most years, Halloween lands on a weekday and kids pay for it. This year it fell on a Saturday. Some people want to make that permanent.

For sixteen days in February 2005, Christo and Jeanne-Claude lined 23 miles of Central Park paths with 7,503 saffron gates. It took them 26 years to get permission.

Television, the home of fiction, sells us “reality.” Sports, the home of real results, sells us “fantasy.” Both flips took over entertainment for the same reason.

The films cast the East India Trading Company as villain and mock lazy bosses. Real pirate crews, it turns out, ran on written contracts that look a lot like labor agreements.

A sideshow veteran teaches bar bets, card hustles and word traps. It is a fun half hour, and a useful lesson in how easily we are fooled.

Shaun Alexander, a 23-year-old Ben Roethlisberger, and Jerome Bettis’s homecoming. The Detroit Super Bowl had every storyline, and an argument that still has not ended.