This…Is…Picket Line Jeopardy!
Watching Jeopardy! is one of my daily rituals. But it still doesn’t sit right with me that Ken Jennings won the gig of exclusive host by crossing a picket line.
Recently a decades-old clip of Jennings making a vaguely populist gibe against corporate bosses made the rounds on social media, prompting a lot of “Based Ken” replies. Like a true Debbie Downer, I felt compelled to point out that “Nevertheless, the only reason he’s the sole host of Jeopardy is that he crossed the Writers Guild picket line when Mayim Bialik would not.”
Most of the responses I’ve received were intellectually lazy and dishonest. I’m not going to respond 299 characters at a time, so I’m firing up the old blog.
What most of the posts defending Jennings’ picket line crossing really boil down to is that people on the left hated Mayim Bialik. She’s a Zionist, vaccine skeptic with weird “mommy” politics. I’ll be honest. When she and Jennings split the hosting duties from 2021-2023, I kinda liked her infectious enthusiasm for the contestants and found his ESPN-style commentary about game play and betting (plus his obvious love for incessant tournaments of repeat contestants) to be slightly irksome. Continue reading “This…Is…Picket Line Jeopardy!”
Robert Richman, 1948-2025
At my grandma’s funeral, years ago, the priest said something that stuck with me. And I don’t usually go for this sort of thing. But he talked about the work, the drudgery, of raising kids: bedtimes, bathtimes, breakfast and out the door to school. And again and again. And, he said, we don’t consider it heroic because it’s just expected of a parent. But it is heroic.
My dad was a hero. He worked. A lot. For us. He worked a couple decades at a job he hated. He worked through late shifts, schedule changes, transfers and as much overtime as he could gobble up.
And he always had a second job on top of that. Some of them were cool. He worked at Bellerose Lanes bowling alley. That was fun for me. I wound up joining a youth league. Still have never scored a turkey. He was also an ice cream man! That was a special thrill. However old I was – 9? 11? – to be handling the cash and handing out the treats to the customers.
And, of course, he drove for car services while there was still money in it. When Uber destroyed that business, he finally retired for good from all work.
When I say he hated his job, I mean that he hated the bosses, the bureaucracy, the reassignments and shift changes. He loved issuing tickets. Many times I’d be driving with him and he’d notice, “That’s not a legal parking spot,” clearly itching for his ticket book.
“So Long, Dental Plan!” Unions, Labor Relations and Class Struggle…As Seen On TV
And now for something…not entirely, completely different. I’ve signed a contract with SUNY Press to deliver a collection of essays next year for publication in 2026.
Call for Proposals
Searching for Ludwig Lore
I’m back in FOIA hell.
Some time in the last decade, the FBI began methodically transferring the dead case files of dead Communists to the National Archives and Records Administration. This is a disaster for scholarship on American Communism. If the FBI retains a file, they quickly review it to redact the names of agents and spies and then email you a pdf at no cost to you. If NARA possesses the file, they put you in a ridiculously long queue to meticulously review the file. Years later they’ll tell you that you can get a pdf copy of the file for 80 cents a page (there are often hundreds if not thousands of pages). In the alternative, you can absurdly travel to College Park, MD to view the files on one of their computers and email it to yourself! I’m lucky that I began researching We Always Had a Union in 2006, but I regret that many of the names that I encountered during my research are in the dreaded “third tier of processing” with a decade-long backlog.