I had a friend was a big baseball player ... back in high school

It's Free for All Friday!

It’s Free for ALL Friday! Each week I keep track of some of the off-the-path things I've found, and work extra-hard to make sure you never hit a paywall, using my own subscriptions, gift links, and other (legal) hocus-pocus.

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Photo by James Kern on Unsplash

Joe DePugh, Speedball Pitcher in Springsteen’s ‘Glory Days,’ Dies at 75

A gifted athlete, he gave a clumsy teenage Bruce Springsteen his first nickname, Saddie. Years later, the Boss returned the favor, memorializing him in a song.

Joe DePugh, the Little League teammate of Bruce Springsteen who inspired the rocker’s hit song “Glory Days,” a rousing, bittersweet anthem to their hardscrabble childhoods in Freehold, N.J., where time passed by “in the wink of a young girl’s eye,” died on Friday in West Palm Beach, Fla. He was 75.

The cause of death, in a hospice facility, was metastatic prostate cancer, his brother Paul DePugh said.

In the early 1960s, before Mr. Springsteen became the Boss, he was a clumsy baseball player whose athletic abilities were so sad that Joe, the team’s star pitcher, gave him the nickname Saddie.

In 1973, when they had been out of touch for years, these two boyhood friends bumped into each other at the Headliner, a roadside bar in Neptune, near the Jersey Shore. Mr. Springsteen was walking in; Mr. DePugh was walking out.

“We were 24 years old, and he was just hitting it big in the music industry,” Mr. DePugh told the Wilkes-Barre newspaper The Times Leader in 2011. “We went back in and started talking about grade school, the nuns we had, Little League and high school.”

The lyrics, in case I haven’t started an ear worm with the subject of today's newsletter alone:

I had a friend was a big baseball player back in high school

He could throw that speedball by you, make you look like a fool, boy

Saw him the other night at this roadside bar, I was walking in, he was walking out

We went back inside, sat down, had a few drinks, but all he kept talking about was Glory Days …

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The Out-of-Touch Adults' Guide to Kid Culture: Incels and the 80/20 Rule

The ‘Evie’ reader can work. She can be a mom. It’s her choice. It’s just not feminism.

The real 80/20 rule, also known as the Pareto Principle, is a saying that asserts 80% of outcomes come from 20% of all causes. You can use it to organize your to-do list, among other things. But to many young men, 80/20 means something very different.

The Netflix series Adolescence is currently the buzziest show on streaming, a harrowing exploration of the inner world of an angry young boy accused of murdering one of his classmates, a girl who spurned him.

One of the teenage characters mentions the “80/20 rule” as a way of explaining the incel/red pill culture central to the murder plot. Put simply, the 80/20 rule is an axiom that states 80% of women are attracted to only 20% of men, and understanding the pervasiveness of this belief is essential to understanding online misogyny.

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Cory Booker, Endurance Athlete

A reader asked yesterday why I hadn't covered Sen. Cory Booker's marathon, record-breaking 25-hour speech. It inspired a lot of people, but didn't actually slow down any Senate action. That said, it was quite a feat. Here's how he did it.

The idea of politics as a sport is a familiar analogy. For a little more than 25 hours from Monday to Tuesday evening, politics left behind the metaphor and became a grueling, perhaps even dangerous, ultramarathon. Senator Cory Booker’s record-breaking speech—an “oratorical marathon” and a “feat of political endurance,” according to reporters—was nearly an hour longer than Strom Thurmond’s 1957 attempt to filibuster the Civil Rights Act.

The impact of Booker’s effort remains to be seen, but to judge it through a strictly political lens is to miss a grittier athletic drama—and overlook how sports science might help a future senator extend “filibusterthon” endurance even further.

Still, Booker’s speech presented some unique physiological challenges—most notably that he couldn’t yield the floor to go to the bathroom. To forestall the call of nature, Booker stopped eating on Friday, and refrained from drinking on Sunday evening, a full 24 hours before he started speaking.

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One of Britain’s Most Dominant Sportsmen Has Stiff Joints and Works in Finance

Tom Dunbar ruled Eton Fives for decades before losing the title last year. He wants it back.

Perhaps the most dominant British athlete in recent history is 42 years old, has a sore knee and spends his days behind a desk in central London helping run a $1.5 billion finance company.

For nearly a quarter of a century, Tom Dunbar has ruled the game of Eton Fives. The sport, a form of handball which is largely the preserve of Britain’s top private schools, is played on a court modeled after the medieval chapel wall at Eton College. Think squash but played with your hands and with a gothic buttress jutting into the middle of the court.

In Britain there are around a hundred people who take this sport, played in pairs, very seriously. Dunbar has spent most of his adult life destroying them. He has won the game’s most prestigious tournament, the Kinnaird Cup, 19 times in the past 24 years. He and his playing partner once went 13 years without losing a match.

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Newly Declassified Documents Reveal the Untold Stories of the Red Scare, a Hunt for Communists in Postwar America

In his latest book, journalist and historian Clay Risen explores how the House Un-American Activities Committee and Senator Joseph McCarthy upended the nation.

In the anxious years after World War II ended in 1945, nuclear power reshuffled the global order, and fear of communist intrigue in the United States ignited a Red Scare that targeted government workers and Hollywood stars alike. As book bans, loyalty oaths and blacklists became the norm, the House Un-American Activities Committee and later Senator Joseph McCarthy barreled through stormy congressional hearings, eager to sweep up any suspected Soviet sympathizers who crept through American life.

“Hundreds of New York City teachers were fired, suspended or punished because in the 1930s they affiliated with something that was considered too far to the left, whether it was the Communist Party or not,” says historian and journalist Clay Risen. On a broader scale, thousands of innocent Americans would see their lives upended by the politically motivated witch hunt between roughly 1947 and 1954.

Risen’s new book, Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism and the Making of Modern America, draws on newly declassified documents to tell these overlooked stories and paint a lively portrait of the postwar era’s political climate. To mark the book’s release, Smithsonian magazine chatted with Risen about the roots of the Red Scare, the Hollywood blacklist and more. Read on for a condensed and edited version of the conversation.

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One of California's Wealthiest Cities Doesn't Want You to Know It Exists

Across TikTok, thousands of people have posted videos romanticizing things that are typically associated with millennial culture.

Just east of Los Angeles in the San Gabriel Valley, there is a city filled with millionaires and billionaires that does not exist. With a population under 1,000, it’s among the wealthiest places anywhere in California (and thus anywhere in America) and is home to some true financial titans. You’re just not likely to spot their house on Google Street View. You can’t shop there or stroll its (very few) manicured sidewalks, and there’s an ordinance in place to prevent anyone from simply walking up to a front door and knocking without permission.

So yes, Bradbury, California, exists — but it does not want you to know that.

This ultra-high-net-worth city that rolls up against the protected lands of Angeles National Forest in the San Gabriel Mountains sternly requests that people keep on driving by — just as they’ve been doing for the past 68 years. The city was founded in 1957 as Southern California suburban encroachment reached its doorstep in the decade after World War II.

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Zadie Smith on the Magic of Tracy Chapman: ‘She Didn’t Just Look Like Us – She Was Singing Our Songs’

Sometimes I just have to go back to my Gen X roots with this newsletter, and I feel like one common Gen X experience will have been discovering Tracy Chapman maybe back around 1988, hearing her everywhere, and then feeling good when she had a bit of a resurgence last year with Luke Combs's cover of "Fast Car."

On 11 June 1988, I was 12 and sitting with my family watching the Free Nelson Mandela Concert on TV. As a clan, we were old hands at trying to free Mandela, having done our fair share of marching and boycotting over the years, and this concert felt like the culmination of all that. There was a lot of excitement in the room: we squeezed on to the sofa and opened the windows wide. (If the wind’s blowing in the right direction, you can hear a Wembley audience roar from Willesden.)

Many world-famous musicians played that day. Most of them I don’t remember, but one I will never forget: Tracy Chapman. I think a lot of people feel that way, though when you rewatch the footage you realise what she was up against at the time. Nobody cheers as she takes the stage. In fact, the crowd seem hardly aware she’s arrived. People are chanting, chatting or just partying among themselves.

Drafted in as replacement for Stevie Wonder – who had last-minute technical issues – it must have taken a lot of courage for an unknown 24-year-old to play in front of 90,000 people, not to mention a worldwide television audience of 600 million. And on the first line of Fast Car, her voice does break, a little. For a moment, you spy the Harvard Square busker she’d so recently been, demoralised by all the commuters and the students rushing by ...

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