When I started this blog some 13 years ago, it was dedicated to the power dynamic in sports and culture to accompany my series of novels. But once President Donald J. Trump was elected in 2016, I began to write more about politics, which, the analytics suggest, has garnered me a larger audience.

Still, cultural writer that I’ve been for more than 46 years, I’ve never stopped writing about sports, which like politics, religion and the arts fall under the cultural umbrella. Indeed, sports — like the arts, my actual area of expertise — are often a metaphor for life, as we’ve seen in the strategic, come-from-behind New York Knickerbockers’ championship victory over the San Antonio Spurs, which not only captured the essence of workaday New York but said something profound about the nature of winning and losing and thus the Iran War.