This is the typical day of a relatively typical soul in today's diversified world. I wake up to the sound of my Japanese clock radio, put on a T shirt sent me by an uncle in Nigeria and walk out into the street, past German cars, to my office. Around me are English-language students from Korea, Switzerland and Argentina -- all on this Spanish-named road in this Mediterranean-style town. On TV, I find, the news is in Mandarin; today's baseball ...

AS 19,300,000 U.S. Negroes seek equal employment rights, they are often met by an endlessly infuriating question: Are they really equal to whites in their abilities, or are they disqualified by some anthropological defect? The simplest, most frequent reply is to cite Negroes who have become famous. No one can argue about the extraordinary physical feats of baseball's Willie Mays, pro football's Jimmy Brown, Decathlon Champion Rafer Johnson and many other athletes. Similarly, the Negro has long held his share ...

A raft of sea otters are at play in a narrow estuary at Moss Landing, near Santa Cruz, Calif. There are 41 of them, says a guy in a baseball cap. He counted. They dive and surface and float around on their backs with their little paws poking up out of the water, munching sea urchins or thinking about munching sea urchins. The humans admiring them from the shore don't make them self-conscious. Otters are congenitally happy ...

THE WAR Wincing in the unaccustomed sun light, U.S. Marines of the 6,000-man Khe Sanh garrison tumbled out of their bunkers into the open air. Amid shell craters and the wreckage of destroyed Jeeps, helicopters and buildings, they washed grimy clothes and gamboled in makeshift showers. Three Marines dug out baseball gloves and began playing catch. Everywhere along the camp's perimeter, the roofs of bunkers blossomed with Marines, who were not, for a change, either running or ducking. In stead, ...

Margaret Dell is 96, but you'd need to check the birth date on her driver's license to believe it. Sporting a baseball cap with a Harley-Davidson logo on it, she is the designated driver for her seventysomething friends who no longer feel comfortable behind the wheel. Last winter a snowfall threatened to keep her from her appointed automotive rounds. She took a shovel and cleared a path to her car. Driving keeps Dell young. That and knitting. She constantly knits. ...

A gang film called The Warriors attracts off-screen rumblesStaring from the poster, they looked like a nightmare of what might be, that terrifying day when the street gangs take over the city, any city. Some of them wore leather vests over bare chests. Others had on Arab headdresses. A few, their faces painted harlequin colors, wore baseball uniforms and carried bats. Massed as far as the eye could see, all looked menacing, and the threat was underscored by the text above the picture: "These are the ...

Twenty-five years ago this month, Harvard said no. So did Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Columbia and Williams. I can still see my 18-year-old self standing by the mailbox in stunned disbelief, holding six white envelopes. Six anorexically thin white envelopes. The precise wording of the form letters has been lost to history, but I can still conjure up their face-saving phrases like "many strong candidates" and "very difficult decisions." Reading them one right after another, it seemed like an Ivy League ...

A week after Nintendo's Wii debuted in November, the Wall Street Journal reported that the gaming console was leaving some users as sore as the gym often does. Unlike traditional hand-held video games, where users sit on the couch exercising little more than their thumbs, the Wii features digital sensors that let users virtually play the game. In Wii Sports, a game that comes with the console, users mimic the ...

A People's History of Sports in the United States By Dave Zirin The New Press; 268 pp. The Gist: In A People's History of Sports in the United States Zirin sets out to deflate the misconception that sports are "only a game." He chafes at those who dismiss them as entertainment or cordon them off from weightier subject matters, arguing instead that sports are a valuable prism through which to examine American history. Like the work that was Zirin’s inspiration—Howard Zinn's ...

The White House refused to indicate Monday whether President Obama will issue a posthumous pardon for Jack Johnson, the African-American boxing champion convicted in 1913 for dating a white woman. The House of Representatives on July 29 unanimously passed a resolution urging Obama to grant a pardon; the Senate passed a similar measure by a voice vote on June 24. The push for a rare posthumous pardon has been spearheaded for years by Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, and Rep. Peter ...