There’s no (real) sport on. But that doesn’t mean no stories...

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There’s no (real) sport on. But that doesn’t mean no stories...

Peter FitzSimons Columnist and author October 25, 2025 — 5.00am

Around the turn of last century, just after the impoverished and sick Oscar Wilde had been released from prison in France for engaging in the “love that dare not speak its name,” the great man received a cable from a journalist in London, asking, “How are you?”

Our man Oscar wanly replied, “Lately, a verb has been lacking in my life.”

Six decades later, in a famous story from American journalism in the early 1960s, an editor in Chicago sends a cable to his reporter on the ground in Alabama covering the first faint stirrings of the civil rights movement: “Any news?”

A cable comes back within the hour: “Not a new.”