Jeff MacGregor
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Articles by Jeff MacGregor
After the Concept of Peaceful Disobedience Was Established in America, It Traveled Around the World Before Taking Hold
“Force may subdue, but love gains”: The Quaker practice of conscientious objection evolved through Thoreau, Tolstoy and Gandhi before becoming the hallmark of the Civil Rights movement The 1955-56 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, was won by the simple act of refusal, led in part by Martin Luther King Jr., an American pastor convinced that love was the only answer to hate. His commitment to nonviolent protest became the standard for the rest of the century.
Audie Murphy Was an Idol of the Silver Screen. That Came After He Was the Most-Decorated American Hero of World War II
He single-handedly held off 250 German troops and six tanks, saving an entire company. And that was just the start of what he accomplished in his too-short life Every story about Audie Murphy is a story about America. On January 26, 1945, just outside Holtzwihr, in northeastern France, Army Second Lieutenant Audie Murphy climbed onto a burning tank destroyer and single-handedly held off six tanks and 250 attacking Germans.
How Tyrus Wong Spent 106 Years Making the World More Beautiful
The Chinese American artist left a breathtaking legacy that ranged from fine art to Disney movies to Christmas cards Tyrus Wong arrived in San Francisco from China in 1920 as a 10-year-old who loved calligraphy. By the end of the next decade, he was working for Disney, on his way to becoming one of America’s greatest immigrant success stories.
In His Garage, an Untrained Artist Created a Work of Sublime Divinity
How deep faith created one of the loveliest—and most curious—sacred objects in the Smithsonian collections For some 14 years he labored in solitude. Lovingly. Obsessively. Every night after work, in a rented garage on 7th Street NW in Washington, D.C., James Hampton, a World War II veteran and janitor for the General Services Administration with no artistic training, methodically built what he came to call The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly.
How John Coltrane's 'My Favorite Things' Changed American Music
Tracing a Lost Ancestry A Smithsonian magazine special report Looking back at the moment when one of our greatest jazzmen raised the stakes for everyone who came after They gathered one afternoon in late October of 1960, at the Atlantic Records studios in a nondescript building at 234 West 56th Street in New York: pianist McCoy Tyner, just 21, a prodigy from Philadelphia; Steve Davis, upright bass, 31, also from Philly; and Elvin Jones, at 33 a veteran drummer who had played with everyone...
How John Coltrane's "My Favorite Things" Changed American Music
They gathered one afternoon in late October of 1960, at the Atlantic Records studios in a nondescript building at 234 West 56th Street in New York: …
Will Netflix get into live sports? One prominent analyst predicts it will happen
It is one of those heady questions that has launched a thousand sports business conferences: What is the future of televised sports? With traditional television hemorrhaging households, the abysmal state of the advertising market, and the depressing drumbeat of media job layoffs, the answer to the question remains in constant flux.
Explore the World of Willa Cather in Her Nebraska Hometown
LINCOLN — A refreshed Nebraska Pardons Board meets for the first time Thursday, adding a first-year governor and attorney general to a three-person panel that returns the Secretary of State. The board, which has the state’s power to set aside criminal convictions and consequences, will consider the commutations of three criminal sentences, the pardons of 51 people and restoring the driver’s licenses of three people. But three state senators who worked this spring with Gov.
Explore the World of Willa Cather in Her Nebraska Hometown
Six miles outside Red Cloud, Nebraska, the blackness is absolute. Before sunrise the moonless stars sizzle and hum high above the prairie. Down here—stillness. Even the wind isn’t up yet. And it’s too dark to see your own boots. Then the light sneaks in, a single gray-scale brushstroke low on the horizon. The next deeper and richer than the last. In town, dawn silhouettes the rooflines and the chimneys across the street an hour before it casts a shadow.
How the Bell X-1 Ushered in the Supersonic Age
It was arguably the most important flight since Kitty Hawk, and the plane was a perfection of form and function. Thirty feet 9 inches long, 10 feet 8½ inches high and 28 feet from wingtip to straight-razor wingtip, the Bell X-1 looked exactly like what had inspired its designers: a .50 caliber bullet. Square-jawed, slender and handsome, with a reassuringly laconic West Virginia drawl, U.S. Air Force Capt. Chuck Yeager sat in the cockpit as the ur-pilot, the epitome of the Right Stuff.
Preview the New World War I Memorial
Light is everything,” says the sculptor. And, all at once, it is. You see light as if for the first time. Not as some condition of simple illumination, but as the maker of solids, the hand, the hammer and the chisel, the creator. You see it sifting down from the ceiling and sneaking through the glass doors, cascading from the two big windows up front, the long room filled with it in every angle and on every surface, the whole place swelling with daylight pouring through the glass bricks out back.
An Exclusive Preview of the New World War I Memorial Original
“Light is everything,” says the sculptor. And, all at once, it is. You see light as if for the first time. Not as some condition of simple illumination, but as the maker of solids, the hand, the hammer and the chisel, the creator. You see it sifting down from the ceiling and sneaking through the glass doors, cascading from the two big windows up front, the long room filled with it in every angle and on every surface, the whole place swelling with daylight pouring through the glass bricks out back.
The Rugged History of the Pickup Truck
An early example of stylish appeal: the 1940 Chevrolet half-ton. Getty Images By sales and acclamation, history and mythology, the pickup truck is the most popular vehicle in America and has been for decades. We’re told electric pickups will be the next big thing: The Tesla Cybertruck, the Ford F-150 Lightning and the GMC Hummer EV are online and on their way. But recall that GMC offered a full line of electric trucks—“operated by Edison current”—in 1913. These were designed by John M.
‘A million years of memory and history, biology and psychology’: The science behind what makes the dog-human bond so unique
In a minute or two, Winston will choose. And in that moment will be a million years of memory and history, biology and psychology and ten thousand generations of evolution. … Imagine a dog is given a choice between someone who shares and someone who doesn’t. Between a helper and a hinderer. The experiment leader requests a clipboard. The helper hands it over cheerfully. The hinderer refuses. Having watched a scene in which one researcher shares a resource and another does not, who will the dog choose?
The New Science of Our Ancient Bond With Dogs
This is a love story. First, though, Winston is too big. The laboratory drapery can conceal his long beautiful face or his long beautiful tail, but not both. The researchers need to keep him from seeing something they don’t want him to see until they’re ready for him to see it. So during today’s brief study Winston’s tail will from time to time fly like a wagging pennant from behind a miniature theater curtain. Winston is a longhaired German shepherd. Read Full Article »
The New Science of Our Ancient Bond With Dogs
By Jeff MacGregor Photographs by Daniel Dorsa This is a love story. First, though, Winston is too big. The laboratory drapery can conceal his long beautiful face or his long beautiful tail, but not both. The researchers need to keep him from seeing something they don’t want him to see until they’re ready for him to see it. So during today’s brief study Winston’s tail will from time to time fly like a wagging pennant from behind a miniature theater curtain. Winston is a longhaired German shepherd.
Can Scientists Stop the Plague of the Spotted Lanternfly?
Can Scientists Stop the Plague of the Spotted Lanternfly? (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File) Every day the nurseryman rises and prays and walks the rows of his trees. Redbud and sweetgum, chokecherry and crabapple, hornbeam and plum. Maple. Weeping willow. Poplar. Acer rubrum. Salix alba “Tristis.” Liriodendron tulipifera. Armstrong. Niobe. Little Volunteer. Read Full Article »
Can Scientists Stop the Plague of the Spotted Lanternfly?
Every day the nurseryman rises and prays and walks the rows of his trees. Redbud and sweetgum, chokecherry and crabapple, hornbeam and plum. Maple. Weeping willow. Poplar. Acer rubrum. Salix alba “Tristis.” Liriodendron tulipifera. Armstrong. Niobe. Little Volunteer. The names are an incantation. Here in the rows it’s peaceful, just enough shade to ease the heat. There’s birdsong and the breeze in the leaves and you can hear your footsteps one to the next to the next.
The Charlatan of the Ozarks Still Looms Over the Haunted Crescent Hotel
Photographs by Antone Dolezal & Lara Shipley; Text by Jeff MacGregor They found the bottles buried on the edge of the woods behind the hotel last spring. Specimen bottles mostly, each about the size of a jam jar give or take, many intact, some still filled with clear liquid yellowing to brown then molasses black, the wax and rubber seals of the glass stoppers cracked but somehow holding after 80 years in the ground; others pristine, as if they’d just been shipped from the lab.
Down to the Last Out
Like Proust's madeleine, the box scores at Retrosheet.org encompass little worlds; to sift through them stirs a baseball fan's memories. Anyone who keeps ticket stubs stashed in a dresser drawer or score books stacked in an attic can pass an afternoon this way, meandering through history to find that Cincinnati's Big Red Machine beat the Houston Astros on July 1, 1975, at Riverfront Stadium when Joe Morgan singled home Pete Rose in the bottom of the 15th.
Danny Thompson's Blazing Nitromethane-Fueled Pursuit of Racing Glory
In the middle of the course, over that flying mile, Mickey Thompson’s speed was about equal to the muzzle velocity of a bullet fired from a lightly loaded small-caliber pistol: 406.60 miles per hour. This was September 9, 1960, on the Bonneville Salt Flats. He became the fastest man in the world that day, the first American to go over 400 mph, the fastest racer ever on land. Unofficially, at least. Because to earn the world land speed record, the car has to make two passes.
The New Electoral Sex Symbol: Nascar Dad
FIRST race of the year, the 500 at Daytona, I'm standing next to Nascar dad for the anthem. Takes off his sunglasses, holds his hand over his heart. He's a big man, 40's, 6-foot-3, a gut-sprung 225, biker leather head to toe and a beard on him like ZZ Rasputin. Comes to the end of our national song, 250,000 people shouting and applauding, flags snapping everywhere, and a sound rumbles low up out of the ovation and comes down out of the sky and breaks out of the clouds like a thunderclap.
Detroit is bust, Detroit is an idea, Detroit memories
Jul 31, 2013 Jeff MacGregor Close Senior Writer for ESPN.com Has written for Sports Illustrated and The New York Times Author of the acclaimed book "Sunday Money" Detroit is bust. Broke. Detroit is an idea. Midcentury prosperity and work and the blue-collar counterweight to Hollywood and New York. * * * Detroit is bust, but the Pistons and the Tigers and the Lions and the Red Wings go on and on and on.
The Last of the Great American Hobos
There's a kind of late summer Midwestern sunset, maybe you’ve seen one, so beautiful and so strange it’s dislocating. From end to end the whole sky goes rose pink, and a giant sun hovers out there like a live coal over the corn. For a while, nothing moves. Not that sun, not the moon, not the stars. Time stops. It’s dusk in farm country, coming up on twilight, but there’s something of eternity in it.
What Makes the Flint Hills of Kansas a Sight to See
This might be the most beautiful place in America. Walk with me.
The Lionfish Have Invaded, But a Ragtag Army of Divers and Chefs Are Fighting Back
The lionfish is a maroon-and-white striped creature, but once it’s cleaned, restaurant chefs and home cooks like to grill, bake and fry its firm white flesh. Photo illustration by The Voorhes Friday We were somewhere around Pensacola Pass, on the edge of the Gulf of Mexico, when the over-the-counter drugs failed to take hold.
Separating the truths from the legends in the Joe Paterno story.
Jan 24, 2012Jeff MacGregorCloseSenior Writer for ESPN.com Has written for Sports Illustrated and The New York Times Author of the acclaimed book "Sunday Money"Students of the classics like Joe Paterno know mythology is cautionary. Greek or Roman, folk tale or epic poem, those old stories can be a warning.As I write this, the story of the late Mr. Paterno and how he fits into modern American mythology is being argued over everywhere. His past won't really be decided until far into the future.
Teen Idol Frankie Lymon’s Tragic Rise and Fall Tells the Truth About 1950s America
The mirage of the singer’s soaring success echoes the mirage of post-war tranquility at home That voice! Those apple cheeks! Arms wide, head back, he radiates joy, even in antique black and white. That beautiful soprano flying high, talent and presence and just enough ham to sell it all.
Teen Idol Frankie Lymon's Tragic Rise and Fall Tells the Truth About 1950s America
That voice! Those apple cheeks! Arms wide, head back, he radiates joy, even in antique black and white. That beautiful soprano flying high, talent and presence and just enough ham to sell it all. And it was a great story, too: Up from nothing! A shooting star! So when they found Frankie Lymon dead at the age of 25 one February morning in 1968, in the same apartment building where he’d grown up, it was the end of something and the beginning of something, but no one was quite sure what.
How Anthony Daniels Gives C-3PO an Unlikely Dash of Humanity
Did you hear that? They shut down the main reactors. We’ll be destroyed for sure. This is madness!” The first line spoken in the first Star Wars movie 40 years ago was delivered by a fussy android with a plummy pan-British accent. Since then, C-3PO—returning to the screen in The Last Jedi— has been bought, sold, blasted, dismantled, dismembered, imprisoned, exploded, rebuilt, rebooted and made an Ewok god. He is the expressionless and instantly recognizable gold-plated face of the franchise.
The Healing Power of Greek Tragedy
Make them wish they’d never come, the director says, almost absently. He means the audience. The actress nods. She makes a mark in her script next to the stage direction: And they go on rehearsing. The room is quiet. Late afternoon light angles across the floor.
Why 'Happy Days' - and the Fonz - Never Truly 'Jumped the Shark'
The Fonz was the epitome of ’50s chill on TV’s family-friendly “Happy Days.” And then he went over the top Thirty million TV viewers watched Fonzie water-ski while wearing his leather jacket. (ioulex) Smithsonian Magazine | Subscribe September 2017 On a bright blue sea beneath a bright blue sky he jumps. On his water skis and in his leather jacket he rises. He flies. Forty years later he’s flying still.
MacGregor: Oscar Pistorius and the hero business
Feb 19, 2013Jeff MacGregorCloseSenior Writer for ESPN.com Has written for Sports Illustrated and The New York Times Author of the acclaimed book "Sunday Money"A week for falling stars.The Oscar Pistorius murder charge was a hard punch in the stomach to anyone who still believes in heroes -- and another warning to those of us in the worldwide sports hero business.
MacGregor: Al Davis (and the AFL) was something different
Oct 9, 2011Jeff MacGregorCloseSenior Writer for ESPN.com Has written for Sports Illustrated and The New York Times Author of the acclaimed book "Sunday Money""Al Davis Passes" isn't a headline, it was his playbook.This is not biography. Neither is it history nor eulogy nor expert summing up of X's and O's.
FILM VIEW; The Hot Day Terry Southern, Cool and Fatalistic, Strode In
s we waited for Terry Southern to arrive to speak to a group of young writers at the Yale Summer Writing Program, we passed around the album "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" with its famous cover, a sort of yearbook of the 1960's counterculture. There, just back and to the left of Edgar Allan Poe, a little northwest of the big bass drum and the Beatles themselves, he stands in his Ray-Bans, forever solemnized as the proto-hipster, the apotheosis of writerly cool.
When a Jet-Powered Car Raced in the Indianapolis 500
The racecar tore up the track and dazzled fans at the legendary competition—and then vanished Fifty years ago, the future rolled onto the grid at the Indianapolis 500. That future was low and wide and electric red. It bulged and swooped, beautiful and muscular and fast even standing still. It ran with a whoosh rather than a roar, and it ran away with the race that year until the very moment it did not.
Get the Word of the Day - frenemy | Dictionary.com
Informal. a person or group that is friendly toward another because the relationship brings benefits, but harbors feelings of resentment or rivalry: Clearly, turning the competition into frenemies is good for your business.
How OK Go Has Revolutionized the Music Video
You aren’t sure what you’re seeing. They all look so polite. Four guys sitting up straight in their jetliner seats, wearing sweaters or tracksuits, bright colors against the gray-on-gray-on-gray interior, their hands resting lightly on their laptops. Friday-casual business trip? Vegas weekend? Nothing strange about it. But those opening chords. Bumpbump. And those electro-percussive drumbeats. Bumpbumpbump. And now that first laptop just floats away.
When Curious George Made a Daring Escape From the Nazis
Practical, unflappable, loving, forgiving, patient—the Man in the Yellow Hat is who we would all like to be. Curious George is who we are. Well-meaning and disastrous, impulsive and forgetful, selfish and ingenious and in constant need of forgiveness. He may be the most human character in postwar literature.
Remembering Munich 1972 and Connollystrasse 31
4:12 PM ETJeff MacGregorCloseSenior Writer for ESPN.com Has written for Sports Illustrated and The New York Times Author of the acclaimed book "Sunday Money"Sometimes after a day or a week or a year, you can make sense of a thing. Sometimes not. Forty years later, this is one of those -- a story just out of reach. Senseless. I'm old enough to remember what happened and how it felt to see it, but I don't. Not really. I imagine now it felt like falling.
Let Us Now Raze Famous Men
This isAmerica?" The German is perplexed. That the world-renowned Friars Clubcelebrates the world-class achievements of a world-famous American--in thiscase Don King--by repeatedly telling him that the world would be better offwithout him is a tricky idea to master in any language. What a world. The German is tall and slender, in his late 20s, lank blond hair capping themilk bottle of a long, pale face. The expression on that face is one of earnestcuriosity.
The Inside Story of Christo's Floating Piers
Christo Invites Public to Walk on Water —headline, The Art Newspaper, April 2015 “I thought, ‘I’m going to be 80 years old. I’d like to do something very hard.’” —Christo ********** The lake is impossible. The lake is a painting of a lake; the water a painting of water. Like floating on a second sky. Too blue. Too cool. Too deep. Impossible. The mountains, too. Too steep, too green with trees, too white with snow. Villages pour down the hills and run russet and ocher and brown to the water’s edge.
Heavyweight Champion of the Word In an era when America's great sportswriters were as big as the athletes they covered, W.C. Heinz may have been the best of the bunch
Maybe this is how it begins. The boy, eight years old, is asleep in his room, curled fast into the pillow, breathing softly. He looks fragile and small beneath the bedclothes, fine-boned, with a long, elegant face that seems determined and earnest even at rest. In the kitchen his mother has washed and dried and put away the dinner dishes. Standing at the sink in her patterned apron, a damp dish towel over one shoulder, she scours the last few imperfections from the white enamel roasting pan.
The New Yorker Editor Who Became a Comic Book Hero
Comic books? Educational? The very idea is comical to anyone familiar with the 1954 Senate subcommittee investigation that linked juvenile delinquency to horror and crime comics. The politicians dealt the industry a staggering blow that it overcame only after superheroes, plus corny teens like Archie and a rascal named Dennis, came to the rescue. Still, comics are seldom associated with literacy.
Meet Lin-Manuel Miranda, the Genius Behind "Hamilton," Broadway's Newest Hit
Back in June, down on Lafayette Street, Lin-Manuel Miranda stands on the lip of a stage, bent at the waist, rapping hard, spitting, sweating, pigtails flying, bouncing three rhymes in two couplets off the word “ceviche.” On a rare night out while Hamilton: An American Musical moves uptown, he’s—¿Cómo se dice?—freestyling. Freestyle Love Supreme is the comedy/improv rap troupe he’s been part of for years.
Less Than Murder When Jesse Boulerice laid out Andrew Long with a vicious high stick, was it just hockey, or something much worse?
Something terrible is about to happen. There, in the upper-left-hand corner of the screen. Behind the goal and a step to the left. The videotape is probably a copy of a copy of a copy, as grainy as a Navajo sand painting. A hockey game. The camera pans too fast, too slow, chasing knots of players back and forth across the ice. Medium wide-angle coverage, very likely shot from the press box, panning blue line to blue line, blue line to crease, blue line to blue line.
Taking Stock of 75 Years of McDonald's
In 1940, two brothers opened a drive-in restaurant in San Bernardino, California. It was a success. A few years later, Mac and Dick McDonald took a risk. They got rid of carhops, table service and silverware and cut the menu to the items folks ordered most: burgers, shakes, a slice of pie. And there at the foot of Route 66, where it spun out of the Mojave Desert, the nascent American car culture met an entirely new thing: fast food.
Out Of Sync Just one thing stands between Bill May and his dream of competing for an Olympic medal: He's not a woman
William Aaron May is a world-class athlete, a man perfectly engineered for his sport. He is broad through the shoulders and back, smooth-muscled, powerful, neither too short nor too tall. He is well-proportioned, machined to his sport's specifications: long and strong at the arms and legs for leverage, thick at the ribs for inhaling barrel-sized lungfuls of air. William Aaron May at 20 is focused, determined and intense. He practices every day--six, eight, 10 hours at a time.
Canadian chain halts sales of Confederate flag
SASKATOON — A Vancouver-based chain of stores that sells the Confederate flag says that “after much consideration,” it is halting the sale of the controversial banners until further notice. The decision, posted by The Flag Shop on its Twitter account, follows a statement by the chain’s president saying she doesn’t want to “react hastily” by pulling the flag from shelves.
The Ill-Fated History of the Jet Pack
First we tried feathers and wax. Then Leonardo specified linen and wood. No matter the mythology or the machinery, the dream has always been the same: We’re flying. Floating over fields and cities, unstuck, untroubled, cut loose from the dust. The same dream again and again since we came out of the caves, right through Daedalus and Icarus to Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. This Bell Aerospace rocket belt is the dream made real—albeit updated by science and science fiction. By the late 1950s, Wendell F.
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