What sets baseball apart from other sports is the array of skills that every player needs: the speed, the power, the agility.
I love seeing what people are eating. It's a great way of looking at what is similar and what is different about people. It's sociology and anthropology and history rolled into one.
Europeans are far more anti-war than Americans. They've had more wars, and they really just don't believe in it any more. But Americans do.
Religion is a big problem in Israel and the Arab world, but again, the problem isn't religion but political leaders who want to use the religion.
A water route to Chinese trade replacing the long, arduous Silk Road was a great dream of the Renaissance.
The Negro League had some of the best players in history. Satchel Paige was probably one of the best pitchers in the history of baseball, and many believe catcher Josh Gibson was a better hitter than Babe Ruth.
Baseball players are not specialists; they all have to do it all. That is why I, and many aficionados, dislike the American League's practice of replacing the pitcher with a designated hitter. This creates two players who do not have to do it all.
Cheap fish has usually been caught in careless ways.
The inventors we remember didn't invent anything. They're the people who took somebody else's invention and made it commercially viable.
Adults have pretty much made up their minds - they like you to the extent that you confirm what they already believe.
Things that become important to economies become ritualized and become deified. Because I'm Jewish, I always thought it was interesting that in Judaism, salt seals a bargain, particularly the covenant with God. Some people, when they bless bread, they dip it in salt. Same thing exists in Islam.
Havana, for all its smells, sweat, crumbling walls, isolation, and difficult history, is the most romantic city in the world.
I have written a considerable amount - both fiction and nonfiction - about the Caribbean. My love for this part of the world is centered on a deep admiration for its people - a people who are both tough and romantic, dreamers and cynics, people who face a thousand defeats and are never defeated.
Commercial fishing is always so behind the curve of technology that they were building ships with wooden hulls and masts in the 1940s, though it also had a diesel engine, which probably was used most of the time.
What people eat is not well documented. Food writers prefer to focus on fashionable, expensive restaurants whose creative dishes reflect little of what most people are eating.
Americans are so egocentric.
The environmental movement does not always have to be about stopping things. It can be about fixing problems.
Environmentalists aren't nearly sensitive enough to the fact that they are messing around with struggling people and their livelihoods. They forget that the fishermen are the people with the most immediate vested interest in having a healthy sea.
Chroniclers of the role of paper in history are given to extravagant pronouncements: Architecture would not have been possible without paper. Without paper, there would have been no Renaissance. If there had been no paper, the Industrial Revolution would not have been possible. None of these statements is true.
The invention of gas and electric heaters has not meant the end of fireplaces. Printing did not end penmanship, television did not kill radio, movies did not kill theatre, and home videos did not kill movie theaters, although all these things were falsely predicted.
