Blair Kamin

2 months ago | wsj.com | Blair Kamin

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple in the leafy Chicago suburb of Oak Park shatters just about every convention of religious architecture. There’s no picturesque steeple. No easy-to-find, elaborately decorated front door. No long nave adorned with stained-glass windows. Monumental and monochromatic, the flat-roofed exterior of the Unitarian-Universalist church flaunts walls of exposed concrete.

Oct 22, 2024 | chicagotribune.com | Blair Kamin

As thousands of marathoners streamed through Chicago’s streets earlier this month, another endurance sport, the uber-striving triathlon, was celebrating its 50th anniversary in San Diego, routing racers in the path of its pioneers and past the sport’s Plymouth Rock. I was among more than 1,800 competitors in the Oct.

Oct 21, 2024 | yalealumnimagazine.org | Blair Kamin

"Just one thing I want you to know up front," I replied when the editors of this magazine asked if I'd come back to New Haven to review Yale's restored Art & Architecture Building. "As a student, I hated it." In the early 1980s, some two decades after the building's opening, it was easy to hate the Art & Architecture Building (or the A&A, as everyone called it).

Oct 1, 2024 | theatlantic.com | Blair Kamin

For the suffering New York Mets fans of the 1960s, any sign of progress was thrilling, especially after the team’s comically bad debut season, in 1962, when it set the modern-day Major League Baseball record for losses in a single season: 120. The optimistic cartoon on the cover of my treasured copy of the team’s 1967 yearbook seemed perfectly reasonable, within that context of relentless defeat. It pictured a pint-sized, pinstripe-uniformed Met climbing a stairway toward baseball heaven.

Oct 1, 2024 | flipboard.com | Blair Kamin

Utah Hockey Club embarrasses the Toronto Maple Leafs and other NHL teams with new concessions pricesUtah HC has taken drastic measures with concession prices in a bid to lure new fans to the Delta Center to discover NHL hockey and to become fans of …