April 11, 2026

SHE DUG THE LONG BALL:

April 11, 2026

The surprising feminist history of baseball’s biggest anthem (Chloe Veltman, 4/02/26, NPR: All Things Considered)

“Take Me Out” was not only catchy, “it also had very unusual lyrics,” Clermont said. At a time when women did not yet have the right to vote, but were playing in women’s leagues and filling the stands at occasional “Ladies Days,” “Take Me Out” celebrates a fictional young woman’s deep and abiding passion for baseball:

Katie Casey saw all the games.
Knew the players by their first names.
Told the umpire he was wrong.
All along, good and strong.

“She didn’t want to just go to the ballpark, sit in the bleachers and be silent or whatever,” Clermont said of the song’s hard-hitting protagonist. “She wanted to participate.”

Identitarianism

FA HATES ANTIFA:

April 11, 2026

The Real Antifa (Livia Gershon April 2, 2026, Jstor Daily)

Copsey and Merrill note that the term “antifa,” short for anti-fascist, comes from the 1930s German Antifaschistische Aktion. But, unlike that Communist Party-sponsored organization, Antifa groups in the U.S. today are autonomous, ad hoc groups that exist for the narrow purpose of confronting white supremacists and other fascists.

Copsey and Merrill focus particularly on Rose City Antifa (RCA), one of the more high-profile local groups. They note that its members are typically between 25 and 35 years old, mostly white, and split fairly evenly by gender, with LGBTQ+ people well represented. Becoming an RCA member is a six-month process designed to ensure that members share values and are willing and able to work together.

Copsey and Merrill find that, in practice, RCA and similar groups tend to view violence as a poor choice.
While RCA and other Antifa groups are often connected with larger webs of activists engaged in different kinds of action, they themselves are essentially a defensive force rather than one focused on winning elections, fomenting revolution, or any other forward-looking goals. Their tactics often involve putting their “bodies on the line” to stop fascists from promoting their ideology, rather than relying on political or legal action.

Conservative Thought

GUESTING:

April 11, 2026

Annotation Tuesday! Tom Wolfe and radical chic ( Elon Green, 5/13/14, Nieman Storyboard: Why’s This So Good)

Storyboard: How did you get the idea for “Radical Chic”?

Tom Wolfe: It was December of ’69, it must have been, that I learned about this party for the Black Panthers, in the following manner: I was at Harper’s magazine, waiting for my wife-to-be — who was the art director — to get a break so we could go to lunch. And I just started wandering around — everybody was at lunch — poking my nose into other people’s business. And I was in David Halberstam’s office. There, on his desk, was an invitation to this party. And I said, “My God! 895 Park Avenue! That’s one of the greatest Park Avenue buildings.” And I said, “Somehow I have got to go to this thing.” So I copied down the phone number that was on the invitation to call to respond, and took a chance on it being a committee of some kind — which, in fact, in must have been, because there was a security check outside the door to Leonard Bernstein’s apartment. I mean, they put some big desks out there, so you couldn’t get by. There was no way you could sneak by. And my name was on the list, so no problem! And I immediately introduced myself to Felicia Bernstein and to Leonard Bernstein. I didn’t know them. I told them that I was from New York magazine.

Identitarianism

WHAT THEY MEAN BY aNTI-wOKE:

April 11, 2026

The Heritage of American Terror (Charles M. Blow, October 8, 2025, Bitter Southerner)

Peter H. Wood, a history professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, says that what he finds striking is the “longevity” and “gestational period” of America’s appetite and tolerance for the forcible control of bodies — then Black, now brown — and “a lot of the things we’re seeing now resonate with that [pre-Civil War period.]”

Out of this period came the slave patrol, official local law enforcement, and slave catchers, bounty hunters often prowling the streets of cities in non-slave states or monitoring known routes to freedom.

The lust for control didn’t end with slavery. In a way, it was amplified. As Wood put it, during Reconstruction the Ku Klux Klan picked up on the tradition of slave patrols and night riders, “but they intensified it partly because they had lost control, you know, that the country had become woke.”

That battle against liberalism and multi-racialism, a form of wokeness, keeps resurfacing and has now done so again in the Trump era.

SHE DUG THE LONG BALL:

FA HATES ANTIFA:

GUESTING:

WHAT THEY MEAN BY aNTI-wOKE:

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BIOLOGY IS A STUBBORN THING:

MORALITY CAN NOT BE DERIVED RATIONALLY:

WHO’S YOUR DADDY?:

MAY AS WELL BE AT THE CROSSROADS WITH THEM: