Readers Up #23: Racing Manhattan
Growing up in a place that wasn't New York City pre-Lin Manuel Miranda, I absorbed the Hollywood notion that NYC is the center of the universe. Of course,...
Readers Up #22: Above It All
The curse of interesting times! Spring seems to be the season for scandal; as I was writing last March’s edition on Headless Horsemen, Santa Anita’s...
Readers Up Year One
Hey folks, She's here! A few weeks ago I decided to compile the first year of newsletters into an e-book, mostly because the complete TinyLetter archive is...
Readers Up #21: Racing Romance Roundtable
The three Rs? Tired: reading, writing, 'rithmetic. Wired: a roundtable of racing and romance! By now, hopefully everyone's well-apprised of my position on...
Readers Up: Giveaway
Dear readers, now that we're firmly on the other side of 2019, how about... an opportunity for free stuff? Some of you may know that in addition to this...
Readers Up #20: On Swift Horses
From the liner notes to my ongoing collaborative art concept with Jessica Chapel, The Secret Life of the American Racegoer: “[The term terrain vague] made me...
Readers Up #19: 2019 Yearbook
2019 was... a year. I think that's the kindest thing most of us would say about it: it sure was a year that progressed through time in a linear manner! If...
Readers Up #18: The Scorpio Races
Horses are a staple of speculative fiction; iconic author Judith Tarr has an entire column devoted to the fact. They appear as fairy mounts and sometimes...
Readers Up #17: Eclipse
You may have noticed that Thoroughbred people are obsessed with class. A Grade 1-winning horse running in a Grade 2 race is undergoing a drop in class. A...
Readers Up #16: The Jockey Poems
Horse racing is a sport for aesthetes. The vignettes and tableaux of a racetrack, the poses that its actors tend to fall into, the dizzying resolution of...
Readers Up #15: Making Her Mark
Did I just read a Renee Dahlia romance for issue 11 of ye old newsletter? Yes. Am I about to talk about the new one, Making Her Mark, right now? Yes! It’s my...
Readers Up #14: Saratoga Journal Club
There are four seasons in New York: autumn, winter, spring, and Saratoga. In the grand scheme of horse racing, a fair amount of text has been devoted to the...
Readers Up #13: Sir Barton
“Turf writers might have had short attention spans,” Jennifer S. Kelly quips in her racing biography Sir Barton and the Making of the Triple Crown, “but they...
Readers Up #12: A Tale of Two Fan Guides
2001 was a banner year for author Betsy Berns: not only did she have a book entitled Win, Place, and Show: An Introductory Guide to the Thrill of...
Readers Up #11: Merindah Park
“Earnest on main” is, in social media parlance, pretty much my brand. Irony is fucking exhausting; how much of your early twenties did you lose to...
Readers Up #10: The Lady is a Jock
There are truisms in any community--chestnuts tossed out at intervals, increasingly predictable as familiarity grows. A race is 90% horse and 10% jock. Pound...
Readers Up #9: Southbound
Gambling! I don’t really get it. Now you may be thinking to yourself, oh Diana, I have some bad news for you, but fear not. I, a veteran of several terrible...
Readers Up: Housekeeping
Housekeeping. Stall-mucking? Anyway, a few items of business. First, thank you for being here! The number of people interested in reading along about...
Readers Up #8: Headless Horsemen
I’m always surprised that there’s not a blind gossip site for horse racing devotees. A significant chunk of comment sections on Blood-Horse and Paulick...
Readers Up #7: I Dedicate This Ride
Young and old point at me and their eyes say hero. They probably never heard of Austin Curtis or other slaves who did more than what I do a hundred years ago...