All right, here's my wild story of the birth of my daughter, Ava. My wife started going into labor on Friday, so we spent that night at a hospital in Upper Manhattan. I slept little that night and then not at all the next day. Finally, on Saturday night I dozed on a couch. I was awoken at four in the morning today (Sunday) to active labor. I got on my feet, threw on my clothes, and then was thrust in the middle of the action. Whether because of exhaustion, lack of food, or having just gotten up, I don't remember anything else. I fainted.

All right, here's the wild story of the birth of my daughter, Ava. My wife started going into labor on Friday, so we spent that night at a hospital in Upper Manhattan. I slept little that night and then not at all the next day. Finally, on Saturday night I dozed on a couch. I was awoken at four in the morning today (Sunday) to active labor. I got on my feet, threw on my clothes, and then was thrust in the middle of the action. Whether because of exhaustion, lack of food, or having just gotten up, I don't remember anything else. I fainted.

Here's my Bobby Knight story, this will be a longish thread. Two years ago, I did an event with the Negro League Baseball Museum in Kansas City. The moderator told me afterward that Bobby Knight once had come to the museum and mentioned that he was a huge Cleveland Indians fan. So I got Knight's address, mailed him a copy of "Our Team," and included my contact info. One week later, my phone rang. It was an Indiana number. I picked up and heard an unmistakable voice: "Luke, this is Coach Knight."

In his new WTF interview, Rick Rubin tells a story where Bob Dylan, George Harrison, and Tom Petty are writing a Traveling Wilburys' song together. Harrison leaves for a minute, and Dylan leans over to Petty and whispers, completely seriously, "You know, he was in the Beatles." The entire interview is worth listening to. Rubin can be cagey, but there are some great stories. wtfpod.com/podcast/episod…

All right, my book on baseball goes on sale in two days, so let's do a quick thread on some of my favorite baseball strips in "Peanuts." I've always been partial to the baseball strips from the late 1950s to the early 1960s, when the pain of losing felt most acute to Charlie Brown, less leavened by sight gags or quick quips.

Here's the news I've been hiding all week: the great @nprscottsimon interviewed me on Weekend Edition about my book "Our Team." npr.org/2021/03/27/979… As always, preorder a copy of the book here. It goes on sale on Tuesday. us.macmillan.com/books/97812503…

It's been a year since the pandemic started, so let's do a "Peanuts" thread on the character who most fully embodies this strange time: Spike. Spike is Snoopy's rail-thin brother who lives along among the cacti in Needles, California, a town that Charles Schulz spent some unhappy time as a child.

Surprisingly, given how directly he dealt with other holidays, Charles Schulz did few Fourth of July strips, and no TV specials. Perhaps his own sense of patriotism was the cause. Here's a telling letter he sent in 1970. Everyone who's seen "A Charlie Brown Christmas" or read the Peanuts strip in depth knows how important religion was to Schulz. But he did *not* care for current trends of equating Christianity with Americanism, which has only gotten worse. Here's an interview snippet.

Let's do a mini-Mother's Day thread: When Charles Schulz got drafted in WWII, his mother was dying of cancer. He never saw her again. Mother's Day in Peanuts is often a sad occasion, none more so than this autobiographical strip. 2) In the 70s and 80s, it was often Woodstock who was looking for his mother on this day. In keeping with the sadness of this day in Peanuts, he not only never found her, but often ended up heartbroken.

There was an entire category of Snoopy on Jeopardy today and none of the contestants knew who Joe Cool was. FYI: If you're wondering what the best Joe Cool strip was, it's this one.

It's Charles Schulz's birthday, and at the risk of turning my Twitter into nothing but Peanuts' strips, I want to touch briefly on how extraordinary it was at the time for the main character to talk so openly about depression. Charlie Brown began speaking freely about his depression just a few years into the strip, roughly the late 50s and early 60s. It was a theme that ran particularly strong up until the mid 70s.

Charles Schulz had a specific tradition every Veterans Day--he'd draw a strip about Snoopy, usually decked out in a non-WWI Flying Ace uniform, going over to cartoonist Bill Mauldin's house for some root beers. Mauldin was a cartooning sensation during WWII, but by the time I was growing up, I'd never even heard of him. I think Schulz knew that--look at this one, where Linus basically acts as an interpreter for the audience.