When I first moved to New York back in 1999, I started dating a beautiful girl from Staten Island, the daughter of two wealthy lawyers, a brilliant scholar with a bright future in law ahead of herself.

She was funny, whip-smart, good looking and rich. I felt like I had hit a home run. But one day while we were walking down 7th Avenue past the flagship OTB (Off-Track-Betting) parlor, where the Winner’s Circle Restaurant was, we saw a man exiting the place with a little boy, maybe 6 or 7 years old, holding his hand.

“Morning again in America.” Silicon Valley takes on Big Brother at the Super Bowl. A celluloid poet of teen angst captures the Zeitgeist. The best basketball rivalry of all time resumes, and gets even better. And four music icons dominate the Billboard charts just as a newfangled small plastic disc encoded with digital data hits the music marketplace.