Pickleball has become the fastest-growing sport in America. Ilana Long, author of Pickleballers, a debut romantic comedy set in Seattle, noted that as many as 50 million individuals are expected to play the sport in 2024.
The game, which Long calls multigenerational, serves as the backdrop for a story about a young woman who, on the rebound of a breakup, finds solace and redemption on the pickleball court.
Long, who said the sport gave her life during the pandemic, says she's met folks on the pickleball court she'd never have run into otherwise.
The pickleballer in Long's book is a newbie to the sport looking to recover from life’s swings and misses. Meg Bloomberg is in a pickle: What to do now that boyfriend Vance has left?
She finds hope on the ferry between Seattle and Bainbridge Island. That's where she meets Ethan Fine. The relationship gets off to an inauspicious start when his seatbelt locks up in her car. But Meg rises to the occasion to cut him loose.
"Maybe this was the new Meg Bloomberg. Bouncing on a strange man's lap, wielding a knife, and talking like a crustacean in a Disney movie," noted Long.
Fine, described as "a charismatic environmental consultant," is a resident of Bainbridge Island. Things look promising until Meg discovers that Ethan is sabotaging her home court. She decides the match is over. Or is it?



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About Ilana Long
Ilana Long first heard about pickleball when her sporty friend confessed that she was addicted to a game that was “like ping-pong but standing on the table.” Shortly after, Long joined the pickleball craze despite her utter lack of hand-eye… More about Ilana Long

Whenever the Jurassic Park/World franchise launches another movie entry, the national media runs to quote “a dinosaur guy” for a professional analysis. One of the guys they call is David Hone, a zoologist at Queen Mary University in London and the author of How Fast Did T.rex Run? and the Tyrannosaur Chronicles.

Hone’s latest book, Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior (Princeton University Press), seeks to provide answers as to how dinosaurs may have moved, fed, grew, and reproduced.

Deducing dinosaur behavior isn’t easy when all you’ve got to go on are a few bones but Hone believes it’s possible. His book uses comparisons to living species as well as referencing the latest studies on prehistoric behavior. Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior uses diagrams, photographs, and the artwork of Florida artist Gabriel Ugueto to flesh out the dinosaur behavior picture.

Hone said discoveries from two centuries of research have expanded our view of life on the planet 70 million years ago. “We’ve been in a golden age of dinosaur discovery for the past 30 or 40 years and I don’t see it stopping anytime soon. Dinosaurs are no longer considered the cold-blooded, tail-dragging, stupid, lizard-like monsters of the Victorian age, but are instead recognized as animals that were upright, active, fast-growing, and if not especially intelligent, certainly not stupid,” he said.

Hone's a critic when it comes to the latest Jurassic Park movies. “The first ones (starting in 1993) were fine but the last few have been really woeful—both as movies and as a dinosaur spectacle,” he said. Dinosaurs depicted in recent films are less accurate than the Jurassic Park movies of 30 years ago, noted Hone.

As a scientist and writer whose first two books focused on the Tyrannosaurus rex, Hone is in a good position to comment on the creature he classifies as one of a kind. “Take an orca (killer whale) and put it on legs and you’ve got an extraordinary predator. Probably more scientific papers have been written about T.rex than any other dinosaur,” he said.

As for how fast a T.rex run can run, Hone said a beast that could reach a weight of seven tons could make 15 mph--not enough to challenge a Jeep as depicted in the first Jurassic Park movie but it could definitely outrun a man, he said.

The T.rex may have lost a battle with a Spinosaurus in Jurassic Park 3 but the author, whose next book will focus on Spinosaurus research, says that outcome would have been unlikely. T.rex had a decided size advantage, said Hone, comparing the confrontation as combat between a lion and a cheetah.

Figuring out how creatures behaved millions of years ago remains an ongoing challenge for scientists but Hone said it’s worth remembering that “the sum total of the behaviors of dinosaurs across 1,500 species and 170 million years were much more complex and interesting than we can ever know.”

A plaque standing in downtown Bloomington, Ill. pays tribute to that city’s circus heritage:

“In the era before movies, television, and the internet, it was the circus that entertained us…For more than 80 years, spanning the 1870s until the 1950s, countless numbers of brave Bloomington men and women risked their lives to entertain massive crowds by performing aerial tricks high up on the flying trapeze.”

After two local brothers, Howard and Fred Green installed a trapeze rigging in a Bloomington building in 1875, the town became known as a center for trapeze artists. When the Green brothers went on to international fame, others were inspired to perform.

Bloomington became the center of activity for aerialist training and trapeze act recruitment in the United States. More than 200 people from the Bloomington area became circus performers, according to the McLean County Historical Society.

Charting that history today is Maureen Brunsdale, a Special Collections Librarian at Illinois State University’s Milner Library since 2008.

Brunsdale has published dozens of articles and, in 2013, wrote her first circus book, The Bloomington-Normal Circus Legacy with co-author Mark Schmitt. In the Shadow of the Big Top: The Life of Ringling's Unlikely Circus Savior (2023) is Brunsdale’s second book on the circus.

In the Shadow tells the story of Art Concello, a trapeze artist who trained at the Bloomington YMCA and in a fabled barn on Bloomington’s Emerson Street. Concello became known for performing the triple somersault, “the killer trick,” as it was called because so many trapeze artists had died trying to perform it, said Brunsdale.

With wife Antoinette, they became known as the Flying Concellos, charting circus history with their circus. Antoinette, a trapeze pioneer in her own right, Brunsdale noted, later became the first woman to perform the triple somersault.

But Art went on to perform amazing feats on the ground, she said. He demonstrated the same skill as an executive as he did on the flying trapeze “after hanging up his tights as a performer,” noted Brunsdale. Concello handled the crushing task of transporting circus acts (that usually only stayed in the same place for two days) with hundreds of people plus animals and equipment from town to town with remarkable efficiency, she said.

Concello is credited with later working out the logistics of transitioning circus acts from tents to indoor arenas, enabling circus acts to reach the public in the 20th century.

Concello also played a major role in the making of The Greatest Show on Earth, the Cecil B. DeMille film made in 1952. Concello trained Betty Hutton on the trapeze for the movie while Charlton Heston’s role as circus manager is a character reportedly based on Concello, himself.

“Once the biggest moneymaker in the world of entertainment, the circus may not have the elevated status it once did but it’s still with us,” said Brunsdale, citing circus acts still performed on television, the success of the Cirque du Soleil, and a revived Ringling Brothers touring show.

Bloomington-Normal’s circus heritage is celebrated every April when the Gamma Phi Circus performs on the Illinois State University campus, a tradition since 1929, Brunsdale noted.