November 12, 2026  ·  No comments yet

Stonk Market.

Allplay has brought back a minor Reiner Knizia game from 2002, originally called Wheedle, but now with the very how-do-you-do-fellow-kids name Stonk Market, complete with the meme guy on the cover of the tiny box. It’s a very silly, fast-moving game that works really well at its higher player counts because it becomes a chaotic shoutfest – which I happen to think is great – even though there isn’t exactly a lot of game in here. It’s available on Allplay and is showing up as a pre-order on Miniature Market.

In Stonk Market, the deck has 61 cards showing nine different colors/suits that represent different companies. At the start of each round, you deal the entire deck to all players, with one card left in the middle. The companies are numbered 5, 7, or 9, showing how many cards in total there are from that company in the deck, so you need 3, 4, or 5 cards, respectively, to get a majority. (The companies have names and their own imagery, all pretty silly, although they don’t matter for game play and I can never remember them.)

Your goal in a round is to get a majority of the cards for any company where you have at least one in your hand; if you get a majority, you score one point per card, but otherwise your cards aren’t worth anything. You get those majorities by frantic trading, either by swapping a card from your hand with the one card on the table, or by making trades with other players. It’s much faster to trade with the table, of course, but that’s limited to one card at a time, whereas in trades you can give or receive any quantity.

The round ends when someone has only majorities in their hand and yells “Stonks!” to stop play. Then you score: 1 point per card if you have a majority of that company, 2 points per card if you have all cards of that company, -1 point per card you have that matches the card still on the table, and 5 points if you were the person who yelled “Stonks!” – unless you were wrong, in which case you get 0 points for the round. You play two more rounds and total your scores from all three rounds to determine the winner.

A number of gamers have compared this to Pit, the 1903 commodities-trading game that is one of the few games of that era to survive and remain somewhat popular today. They’re similar in that you’re shouting with other players to make trades, but I think that’s as far as it goes. Pit insists that you get a monopoly in one commodity, and you make trades by shouting the number of cards you’re trading but not the commodity. Stonk Market is inherently going to be faster because all players are saying what they need, there’s always a trade on the table, and you only need to get majorities rather than monopolies. I can’t say if that’s better than Pit – I have never actually played the older game, I just know the rules – but it’s not really the same.

Stonk Market plays 3 to 6, but it really needs the higher player counts to be more fun – there’s more madness on the table and more people shouting for trades. With three, the market isn’t fluid enough, although with six it can be faster for someone to get to “stonks!” You can also play this with just about any age, as long as they can understand the concept of getting a majority of those three numbers (5, 7, 9). It’s another tiny-box game in the $9 line from Allplay, so it’s a pretty low bar to clear for me to recommend it – there are a few I don’t like, but this one’s a keeper. It’s a B- for me.

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November 9, 2026  ·  No comments yet

The Edge of Space-Time.

In her 2026 book The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie, physicist and cosmologist Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein sets out to explain the universe in 300 pages. It has been done before, of course, but I think it’s fair to say it’s never been done quite like this, as Prescod-Weinstein dances between what I’d consider some abstruse concepts in particle physics and fields such as music, poetry, and sociology, along with her own experiences as a queer Black woman in the U.S. It’s a challenging read for someone who hasn’t taken a physics class in 35 years, but the end result was that I felt like I had a stronger understanding of the worlds of the very big and very small, where the sort of physics we all learned in high school breaks down.

(I don’t know Dr. Prescod-Weinstein, but we do follow each other on Bluesky and share an alma mater. I bought the book myself because I like science.)

The title itself nods to that last point – that the sort of F = ma physics that applies in the ‘real’ world of our everyday lives no longer applies when we are talking about subatomic particles like quarks and neutrinos, which is where quantum physics comes in; or when we’re talking about the accelerating universe and the expansion of spacetime, which is where special relativity comes in. This is fodder for many pop-sci physics books, since those are the parts of physics that we don’t learn about unless you study it in college, and even if you’re taught it, most of it is harder to grasp, from strings to entanglement to time dilation and more.

Prescod-Weinstein covers much of the same ground as other books in this space by Brian Cox or Brian Greene or Michio Kaku or Sean Carroll, all great writers who’ve tried to make some of the more difficult topics in physics accessible to broader audiences. We journey to the edges of the universe, back to the Big Bang, up to the speed of light, down a black hole, and many layers deep inside the atom. For many readers, this will be new stuff, and Prescod-Weinstein explains these and other concepts clearly without dumbing down the language or explanations – she expects you to show up to class ready to learn with pencils sharpened. I think that’s reasonable for a book of this style, but it means it’s not a book you’re going to fly through.

What sets The Edge of Space-Time apart is Prescod-Weinstein’s incorporation of so many ideas from outside the science world, ranging from literature and poetry from over a hundred years ago to contemporary rap. She also writes from a distinct perspective of intersectionality, as she identifies as agender and is both Black and Jewish, and brings in references from Black, feminist, indigenous, and queer thinkers and authors, which – as she notes – is not common at all in much popular science writing. I listed authors above whose work I’ve read, all men, only one nonwhite, and none of those writers worked in perspectives from other areas to inform their work and tie some of these abstractions to what it means to be alive and human.

Why should we care about the six kinds of quarks or whether the universe is expanding or what would happen if you fell into a black hole? The anti-science crowd would argue that answering these questions or even exploring them serves no real purpose, as they’re busy cutting funding for science research. Prescod-Weinstein often notes in the text that news of Republicans’ war on science was hitting as she was writing it throughout 2025, and makes two arguments about the value of such research, that the search for these answers can always yield unexpected results (and is, in and of itself, a worthwhile endeavor), and that the search also can elucidate more to us about the meaning and nature of our existence.

Some of the art/science connections within the book require a sort of mental flexibility akin to suspension of disbelief; I enjoyed Prescod-Weinstein’s flights of literary fancy, even though I’m very much of a mind that views science and art as distinct. Her view of the universe and all of the wonders within it is quite different than mine, more able to connect the artistic to the scientific, the fantastic to the rational, which made The Edge of Space-Time a challenging yet rewarding read.

Next up: David McCloskey’s spy novel Damascus Station.

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November 7, 2026  ·  7 comments

Stick to baseball, 11/7/26.

I had one post this week at the Athletic, ranking the top 40 free agents in this winter’s class. It’s a bad group, with exactly one star and then a whole lot of (throws hands up in abject despair).

I’ve been sick all week, so while I did get some work calls in I’ve been doing a lot less writing/reading, with the result that the majority of these links are from the Times and the Guardian. That’s also meant no videos since Monday on Instagram and TikTok, but I’ll get back to those next week.

And now, the links…

  • Jess Grose wrote in the Times before the election that the wave of doctors running for office – many of whom won on Tuesday – signal the beginning of the end of MAHA.
  • Finland’s tourism board is holding a fun promotion: they’re going to bring sixteen singles from around the world for an all-expenses paid food-tourism trip to Finland, to be split into two groups, with a mixer with Finnish singles at the end.
  • It wasn’t all good news this week: Marshall Rawson marched with neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, has spoken positively about slavery, and has said queer people should be executed. Florida elected him to their state legislature this week. (I’ve corrected this as I’d previously written that they elected him to Congress.)
  • Did Haley Stevens use AI to write her post about endorsing Republican xenophobe Mike Rogers? I’m not sure it matters; she should be finished in the public sphere regardless.
  • Conrad Lant, better known by his stage name Cronos, died in early October. His band Venom’s album Black Metal was hugely influential on the subsequent rise of thrash (good) and gave its name to the satanic strain of extreme metal that followed (bad, even in Cronos’ view). I never liked Venom’s music, but I can’t deny their importance in the last forty years of metal.
  • Television guitarist Richard Lloyd died this morning at age 75 of bile duct cancer; Tom Verlaine died in 2023 and bassist Fred Smith died earlier this year. Richard Hell is probably the most famous member from Television still alive, although he left the band before Marquee Moon, forming Richard Hell and the Voidoids and recording “Blank Generation.”

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November 4, 2026  ·  3 comments

Everything Happens for a Reason.

A few weeks ago, I wrote in my newsletter about hearing Dr. Kate Bowler on The Hidden Brain podcast and reacting to her use of the phrase “everything happens for a reason,” a hackneyed response to bad news that implies some pretty terrible things about the universe. Dr. Bowler used as the title for her book Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved, where she tells the story of her sudden diagnosis with stage 4 bowel cancer at age 35, and how the reactions she got to that news squared with her academic research on the prosperity gospel of evangelical Christianity.

If you’ve listened to the podcast, Everything Happens for a Reason will mostly be familiar to you. Bowler gives her backstory, growing up in a Mennonite community in Winnipeg, with two professors as parents, eventually getting her PhD at Duke and joining the faculty at their Divinity School, where she focuses on the prosperity gospel. That’s the popular idea that God will give believers material success and physical health if they pray hard enough (and do other performative things), an idea that to me, is wildly unsupported by Scripture. It’s the core idea behind televangelists’ message – send me money, I’ll put in a good word with the Big Guy Upstairs, he’ll hook you up – and a lot of megachurches have picked it up as well, notably Joel Osteen, who will have a very tough time passing through the eye of a needle when the time comes.

Bowler’s cancer diagnosis came at a time when she might have called herself ‘blessed.’ She was happily married, had a very young son she adored (she makes this quite clear), and was on her way to a very successful career. After a few months of being ignored by doctors, at least some of involved men doctors dismissing her because of her gender, she forced the latest in the line of people telling her they couldn’t find anything wrong with her to run additional tests that found that she had bowel cancer and “it’s everywhere,” in the words of the nurse (or PA?) who called with the news.

Much of the second half of the book documents what came next, especially in her faith community, and then with the online responses to the column she wrote in The New York Times. Many people blamed her lack of faith for her cancer. Some people pushed quack remedies or bogus medical ideas (like that sugar feeds cancer, a popular one today in wellness circles) on her, which leads to a lot of kale in her kitchen. Others said God must have had a plan and that, indeed, “everything happens for a reason,” although one wonders what possible reason there would be for a benevolent deity to kill a mother of two-year-old child. Some did rally around her, and try to say the right things – in an appendix, she lists some do’s and don’ts to say to someone in that situation – and many people put themselves out to help her get better care or help support her. But man, people said some horrible things, both people she knew and people who wrote letters or emailed her in response to her column.

Bowler uses her own experience as a springboard for talking about the prosperity gospel movement more broadly in American Christianity, an idea that I would call heretical if I were still religious (I was raised Catholic), and that often directly contradicts the messages of the New Testament. Prayer isn’t supposed to be a vending machine, but there’s a broad strain of American evangelicalism that treats it as such. I noted in that newsletter how often I see “prayers up” posts and comments on social media; the next time that works, let me know, I won’t be waiting. It’s performative nonsense. It doesn’t work, and also, it’s not how the whole Christian God thing is supposed to work. What Bowler starts to get at, and what I wish she’d delved into more deeply, is why this is so effective. In my lay view, at least part of it is that it allows people who have had material wealth, physical health, or other forms of success to believe they deserved it, because God gave it to them as a reward. It’s a pernicious influence on our culture and our politics, and understanding it better would help the rest of us – the majority of Americans – keep it relegated to a loud minority. For its brief length, however, Bowler’s book, mostly memoir with a dash of theology and history, is a brisk and compelling read, for her own personal journey and the way she uses it to frame this dangerous ideology as the aberration that it is.

Next up: Randall Kenan’s novel A Visitation of Spirits.

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November 3, 2026  ·  1 comment

Music update, October 2026.

Big month with five Fridays of new releases, including a couple of albums I’ve been waiting months to hear (like the first three artists below). As always, if you can’t see the widget below you can access the playlist on Apple Music or Spotify.

Wishy – Covergirl. Nature’s Pill came out at the top of the month and is easily a top 5 album for me this year, with a ridiculous number of highly catchy power-pop tracks. My favorites are still “Lovesick” and “All the Rage.”

Moses Boyd feat. Shantéh – More to Life. Songs for Sinners, Boyd’s second true solo album, came out on Friday; it’s Boyd’s fusion of the sounds of gospel music he grew up hearing with the jazz and soul that have become his trademark sound. I haven’t heard anything yet to rival “Shades of You,” my #1 song of 2020, but there are some strong tracks here powered by his always-interesting drumwork.

Olivia Trevor Control – Timewaster. OTC’s final, posthumous album The Same Place came out last week, and it’s a monster, with 27 tracks and about 70 minutes of music. Much of the album was recorded in the 2010-12 period, before Bill Doss, one of the two guitarist-vocalist-songwriters at the head of the collective, died of an aneurysm; Will Cullen Hart, the other g-v-s in OTC, died of multiple sclerosis in 2024.

Brigitte Calls Me Baby – Altitude. This B-side from the Irreversible sessions would have been a top five song on the album for me, after the first two singles, which were both outstanding.

The Tubs – Hard Life. The title track and opening single from this Welsh jangle-rock band, which features two former members of Joanna Gruesome, is a great example of the way they blend that mid-80s sound with somewhat harder rock edges.

Slow Pulp – Melodie. I was hoping for a little more of this from Slow Pulp’s latest album, also called Melodie, as the rest of the album is a mixed bag with some slower and less hooky tracks. I don’t know what I expected.

World News – Frog. ThisLondon indie-rock quartet finally released its first LP, In Purgatory, in October, with the two standout singles from 2025 (“Don’t Want to Know” and “Everything is Coming Up Milhouse Roses”) as well as “The Way It Goes,” “Sidestep,” “Vinegar Swimming Pool,” and this rousing opener.

girl in red – blue. I’ve never been a huge girl in red fan; her earnest bedroom-pop was usually a little twee for me, although she’s a big deal in her native Norway. This song has a lovely build to it and highly introspective lyrics that elevate it above other songs of hers I’ve heard.

Bluegirl – Look at All the Happy People. Bluegirl is Phoebe Xenofontos, a producer and songwriter who just released this single, her first, which has a strong bedroom-pop feel and got the seal of approval from Courtney Love.

Heartworms – Guess I’m Stuck in the Dark. Heartworms’ first new music since last year’s Glutton for Punishment gets most of its energy from Jojo Orme’s swirling, angsty vocals, with less of the electronic elements that boosted her amazing debut album. This seems to be either a one-off single or a lead track from a new unannounced album, which would be great news for 2027.

@ – Bird. Yes, the band is named @, which predisposes me to dislike them, because that’s extremely pretentious in a way Brooklyn Coffee Shop would gleefully satirize. The music is pretty good, unfortunately; they’re a folk duo who draw on psycheledic music and chamber-folk with a darker sound particularly evident on this track. Their second album, Autosmile, has earned rave reviews.

San Cisco – Miles Away. The Australian indie-pop trio returns with their first new song since 2024’s Under the Light and it’s one of their better singles of the last ten years or so.

Pardoner – Don’t Slouch. Pardoner is an indie-rock quartet from San Francisco whose music reminds me a good bit of Wishy – it’s power pop, but more punk-influenced. Their fifth album Target Practice came out last month.

Dummy – Full Spectrum Dominance. I wanted the whole Dummy album do you love the color of the sky to be made of this spacey, epic-feeling track that reminded me of sounds from just about every decade of my life, although the 1990s alternative-radio vibe was the strongest part.

They are gutting a body of water feat. Horse Jumper of Love – charter spec. This Philly shoegaze band released a new mixtape – don’t ask me how this differs from an album, I am too old to care – called Kool Faith/Loosies II, with a guest appearance by Boston-area shoegazers Horse Jumper of Love on this track.

Exploding Flowers – Information Dark Age. Rough-edged power pop with a good dose of Parquet Courts. Their fourth album, Alphabet Window, came out last month.

Dazy – Ugly. Dazy is James Goodson, but more to the point here, this song reminds me a ton of Hotline TNT with less distortion. Goodson released the second Dazy album/compliation, MAXIMUMBLASTSUPERLOUD Vol. 2, on October 23rd, his first full-length anything since 2022’s Out of Body. Uh oh y’all it’s gettin kinda dazy…

Automatic – Shadowplay. Idon’t include a lot of covers here, but Automatic’s version of Joy Division’s “Shadowplay” is good enough to make my cut, capturing the hypnotic, gothic sound of the original, leaning more into the subsequent new wave atmosphere than the post-punk vibe of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures. Also, I learned when writing this that Automatic is now a duo, as drummer Lola Dompé (daughter of Kevin Haskins, the drummer for Bauhaus) seems to have quit the band in the last year.

Do Nothing – Smile. This is not the first Do Nothing track to make me think they’re Wild Beasts disciples, and that’s a damn good thing. I can’t believe Boy King came out ten years ago.

CHVRCHES – Overthinker. Not as strong as the first single (“Roses”) from their upcoming album, All the King’s Men, due out on January 22nd, although this time it’s the vocals rather than the music that falls a little short. I’m choosing to remain optimistic that the album will draw more on their earliest work.

BODEGA – Slow Train. I’ve had one BODEGA song on a playlist before, back in 2024, but generally have been lukewarm on their stuff. This track, off their new album All Inside Aquarium, veers into post-hardcore territory, with a chorus that seems to draw on Quicksand/Thrice, and way better guitar work throughout the song than most of their stuff.

Post Animal – Wings on the Ground. Post Animal was Joe Keery’s original band, which he left for some time (he was busy) before rejoining for their 2025 album Iron, which is relevant because this song originated in the sessions for their 2014 debut album When I Think of You in a Castle, with the music recorded along with that album but the vocals recorded fresh for this release.

Ugly – In Samphedoo. Ugly’s debut album The South Façade represents a musical shift for them – they’ve been around for ten years but their longest releases were a six-song EP in 2022 and a nine-track compilation of singles from 2017-19. Their earlier stuff was post-punk/art-rock, while this new record is extremely proggy, with jazz and folk influences, definitely the kind of songs where you wouldn’t be surprised if someone showed up with a Chapman stick or a theremin.

Shabazz Palaces – Heliocentric Immortality Manifesto H.I.M. Shabazz Palaces is now an extended solo project by Ishmael Butler, perhaps better known as Butterfly of Digable Planets (who appeared on Cadillac Chronicles last December). His latest album, It’s a Style Sport, is more structured and focused than 2024’s Exotic Birds of Prey, although I’d still call it experimental – at least, there’s no one else in hip-hop who sounds anything like this. The other track I considered for the playlist was “Ahh World (I Won the Alpha Bet).”

Sampa the Great – Location. The Zambian rap star’s latest album Nu Zamrock is her first since returning to the country of her birth after spending time in Botswana and starting her music career while living in Australia (where she won multiple ARIA awards). It features multiple appearances by her uncle, George “Groovy Joe” Kunda, one of the founding members of the band WITCH, the originators of the Zamrock sound, and that musical theme is present throughout the record, which blends Zambian and other African genres with western hip-hop and psychedelic rock. “Can’t Hold Us,” featuring her sister Mwanje, is the best track, although I regret to inform you that Sia makes a guest appearance.

Ghost Funk Orchestra – Leave Me Alone. GFO is Seth Applebaum’s project, so, yes, another white man making distinctly Black music, which … where are the Black artists in this space? Applebaum does a pretty good facsimile of 1970s funk/soul, kind of the other side of the coin from Jungle (two white men making distinctly Black music), who also mine 1970s soul but from the disco side of things. I happen to really like this song, but the broader trend here makes me uncomfortable.

Prince – Prince and the Band. The Prince estate’s decision to spike Ezra Edelman’s Netflix documentary about Prince’s life and career – which was because they didn’t want the truth about how Prince treated people, especially young women, to get out there, which seems absurd given how a biopic about a guy accused of molesting young boys just made a billion dollars worldwide – meant that the estate regained the rights to release music from Prince’s extensive vault. They released a compilation album called Timeless in August, featuring the song “Calabama,” and then in October released a four-song EP called Calabama that included a raw version of the original without the overdubbed horns (added for Timeless) along with two versions of “Prince and the Band,” which he played live but never released on any record.

Caspian – Hiraeth. I like Caspian, an instrumental, vaguely-progressive rock band, but them using a Welsh word meaning “that sense of incompleteness you feel when you’re acutely aware of something missing in your life,” particularly for something that is no longer there. You’ll also see it as described as a Welsh person’s longing for Wales. Anyway, this is a lovely song with Celtic folk-like strings over the sparse guitar lines.

Evil Invaders – D.S.S. (Death Strikes Suddenly). This Belgian thrash band is a complete throwback, almost to the point of parody, but I do love the commitment to the riff.

Forbidden – Flower of Life. This nine-minute closer from Forbidden’s self-titled album, their first new LP in 16 years, is a strong showcase of this classic Bay Area thrash band’s brand of metal, which bridges the (possibly nonexistent) gap between thrash and speed metal. The new album is their first without original lead singer Russ Anderson but does feature original guitarist Craig Locicero and bassist Matt Camacho.

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October 31, 2026  ·  6 comments

Stick to baseball, 10/31/26.

Nothing new from me at The Athletic this week as I was writing up my annual rankings of the best free agents, which will run on Monday. This year’s list is just 40 deep because the class is so bad. I’ll shoot to get a newsletter out that afternoon or evening, too.

I did post videos on Instagram and TikTok after each World Series game this week, and will try to find more topics for commentary (without resorting to hot takes, I promise) as we enter the dark night of the soul. I’m also still most active on Bluesky and occasionally trolling anti-vaxxers on Threads.

And now, the links…

  • Citation Oil & Gas is one of the country’s largest privately owned oil companies. Despite racking up over 1000 pollution and other environmental violations, it has never been punished by Oklahoma regulators. This is a great example of why red states are cheaper to live in than blue states: To some degree, residents get what they pay for.
  • The Atlantic looks at Cuba’s economic collapse, with the U.S. blockade causing substantial misery for its already impoverished people.
  • NPR music journalist Ann Powers writes about why music feels so fake right now and the history of the quest for ‘authenticity’ in popular music, with a quick detour into the hack Stella Lefty’s success and nods to the truly novel acts breaking out this year like Westside Cowboy, Twisted Teens, and Angine de Poitrine.
  • Also in the Times, Amish families in New York have been fighting the state’s mandatory vaccination laws, even as measles sweeps through their community. The courts’ answer should be simple: Educate your kids elsewhere. You do not have the right to put other children at risk.
  • The spam text messages and mailers sent to Texas voters claiming to offer resources for trans youth actually came from a Republican-backed PAC, supported by the Republican Women’s Caucus Fund, which denied involvement, and a Washington state senator running for Congress named John Braun. The trans panic is disgusting on many levels, but one is how inaccurate it all is.
  • Scientific American was first published in 1845 and until fairly recently was the gold standard for science journalism. A recent sale and the corporate owners’ bending the knee to Trump has left the magazine’s future in doubt.
  • You may have seen the clip of a man being interviewed on Fox News at a Trump rally, where he says he always wanted to see what a cult was like but was too young for Jonestown. Marisa Kabas found the guy, Tom Hoyle, and interviewed him about his comments and that awesome Death shirt.
  • Republicans’ favorite streamer Hasan Piker is suing CNN talking head Scott Jennings for $72 million for Jennings’ use of a highly edited video to make it appear that Piker called for Black Americans to be lynched.
  • The Cleveland Plain Dealer broke with its policy of avoiding endorsing candidates in major races to endorse Amy Acton in the wake of Republican Vivek Ramaswamy’s disgusting ad that used Acton’s stepfather sexually assaulting her to attack her credibility.
  • Federal immigration judge Chadwick Dotson, who has a track record of rulings against asylum seekers, also writes about the Reds for Cincinnati Magazine. I haven’t seen any comment from the publication about their relationship with him.
  • The excellent social deduction game Deception: Murder in Hong Kong is getting a new version, Deception: Heist in Hong Kong, that’s up on Kickstarter right now.

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October 29, 2026  ·  1 comment

Feather Lane.

It’s a beautiful day in the Feather Lane neighborhood, with tree-lined streets and brightly-colored houses, along with birds who are definitely not drones to spy on you. Can you build the nicest trio of streets with the right combinations of houses, birds, and trees to earn the most points?

Feather Lane is the newest title from Last Night Games, owned by designers Nathan and Jake Jenne, whose biggest hit is the dice-drafter Panda Royale and who also made the cute flip-and-write game Horticulture. This title is also pretty light, and very easy to learn, with enough strategy and variety in the cards to give it high replay value. You can pre-order it now on Miniature Market.

Players in Feather Lane will draft 24 cards over 12 turns to build three streets in front of them, with the goal of scoring the most points from the four public objective cards and from having the longest top, middle, or bottom streets. Each card has three segments on it, with each segment showing a house, a tree, or a birdbath. When you add a card to a street, you must overlap cards – the new one can go over or under an existing one, and you can cover as many segments as you like, but you must cover at least one segment on a new or current card. Each pair of cards you draft also gets you a bird token that you’ll place on a house of the same color at the end of that round.

There’s a central market of cards that allows the active player to select from sets of two cards and a bird. After each selection, the market is refilled so that the pairs change – the left column’s cards shift down into the open space, the right column’s cards shift up, and then new cards go to the top-left and bottom-right spaces. (The birds don’t move. They do what they please.) The round ends once every player has made four selections, getting eight cards and four effin’ birds, after which players place their four birds anywhere on their streets as long as the birds’ colors match their buildings. If a player can’t place a bird, or doesn’t want to, they can return it to the bag and take one mouse instead; a mouse on a building is worth one point at game-end.

There are four decks of objective cards in Feather Lane, each covering a different type of criteria, and you’ll choose one card randomly per deck at the start of each game. One deck is specific to birds, one to trees, and two to different buildings. There are four colors of buildings and of birds, and buildings come in large or small, while there are also different colors of trees. Bird baths are worth a flat two points each and I don’t believe they count for any objectives (but it’s possible I haven’t seen one of those yet). The points for these objectives vary based on how difficult they are to achieve, and you can rack up a lot of points if you hit some of them repeatedly.

Feather Lane suggests a play time of 30 minutes, but I’d say that’s the low end of the range; it plays up to six people, which I haven’t tried, but there is no chance six people play this in a half hour unless everyone plays like Chandler Simpson runs. If it weren’t for the complexity of some of the objective cards, you could play this with an 8-year-old, and you could probably select specific objective cards if you wanted to get some younger kids to the table.

I can’t help but compare this game to Tenby, another street-building game that came out this year, but a more complex and challenging one that tickled my brain more – but also isn’t a great game for new or younger players, which Feather Lane would be. I could teach anyone Feather Lane in five minutes; Tenby almost requires a few rounds to fully teach someone the selection and scoring mechanics involved. Tenby is the better game, but I would recommend Feather Lane first for family play. It’s a grade B for me,

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October 24, 2026  ·  9 comments

Stick to baseball, 10/24/26.

At the Athletic, I had three posts recapping my week covering the Arizona Fall League, one on the AL prospects of note I saw, one on the NL, and one on the silly rule experiment that requires the corner outfielders to stand somewhere in Siberia.

Here on the dish, I reviewed the Nebula-winning novel A Time of Changes, the mystery Murder in the Crooked House, and the game Wingspan Pocket. I also wrote up the new restaurants I tried in Arizona.

I did send out a new edition of my free email newsletter this week, finally. I also posted two new videos to Instagram and Tiktok, while I’m most frequently on Bluesky.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: The best thing I read this week was this New York story about boomers turning into “screenagers” and how my generation has to learn to manage our parents’ algorithms.
  • The Delaware News-Journal has run a four-part series on sex trafficking and the state’s ‘massage parlors.’ Here’s part three, about the buyers who fuel the industry.
  • Billionaire Julio Herrera Velutini was facing felony bribery charges. He gave a $50 million deal to Trump lawyer and DOJ adviser Alina Habba, giving her a job at a fictitious company, and got a pardon a few months later.
  • Definitely the craziest story I read this week: A Florida cop found a dead man during a wellness check, and promptly assumed the man’s identity, stealing his house and even renovating it, getting away with it for three years. When a real estate firm bought the house from the dead man’s heirs, they found the cop, Brian Sguros, living there, and he demanded that they repay him for the cost of the renovations.
  • Business school professor Chris Marquis wrote an op ed in the Times arguing that business schools shouldn’t exist. I agree with his general premise, that what these schools are teaching at a general level is not what society needs or what (many) students want. That also says to me that there’s an opportunity for some of these schools to meet the underserved demand.
  • Writing in Racket, Keith Harris describes his experiences at a MAHA Summit in Minneapolis, and why “it scared the hell” out of him. These people aren’t just anti-vaxxers, but full-on anti-science cultists, mostly spurred by religion.
  • Board game news: Osprey Games has let go of its entire staff a few months after owner Bloomsbury Publishing put the unit up for sale. Osprey’s catalog includes the tremendous deduction game Cryptid and the Undaunted series of military-themed games.
  • Pandasaurus has a Kickstarter up for Echoes of the Apostate Crown, a worker-placement and route-building game with some impressive miniatures and artwork.

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October 23, 2026  ·  2 comments

Murder in the Crooked House.

Soji Shimada’s Murder in the Crooked House earned a recommendation from the great Anthony Horowitz as a successful, modern locked-room mystery. I could not possibly have been less impressed: The resolution of the mystery is absurd, and the detective character – the only interesting person in the book – doesn’t show up until the novel is almost three-fourths done.

A locked-room mystery involves a murder that takes place in a room that is locked from the inside, so it appears to be an impossible crime; the killer would have to still be in the room, in theory. Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is the first known example, while there are two Sherlock Holmes locked-room stories, and “Golden Age” author John Dickson Carr wrote several. Horowitz’ reference came up in Close to Death, and the recent film Wake Up Dead Man had a similar mechanic. The resolutions usually involve some clever way to kill the victim(s) that don’t require the killer to actually be in the room.

Shimada’s novel is quite long for a straight mystery, about 350 pages, and that would be fine if the mystery and/or the characters were interesting enough to sustain it. The murders take place in the eccentric mansion of a Japanese industrialist who has invited some subordinates for a holiday party, also attended by his daughter and son-in-law and a few others. The mansion is oddly designed, with slanted floors and weird paths so that you can’t easily get between rooms on the same floors. The chauffeur of one of the guests is the first victim, in a locked room, and no one can figure out how he was killed or see any possible motive, not even the local police officers who arrive and end up staying at the house because of bad weather and, eventually, to try to prevent the killer from striking again.

His detective character is the voluble Kiyoshi Mitarai, who claims to be a psychic or a fortune-teller, and who says ridiculous things so that people will underestimate him and potentially fall into traps he’s set for them. He’s reasonably funny on the page, but more than that, he provides some actual life to the story, keeping things moving, engaging in realistic dialogues that shine compared to the boring-as-hell conversations taking place in the house before his arrival. It’s not quite as bad as the Netflix “you have to explain the plot to people every half hour” before Mitarai shows up, but it’s close, with lots of long-winded explanations of things that don’t matter at all to the story.

Worse than that, however, is the resolution, which comes after a page that taunts the reader by saying that you have all the information you need to solve the case. I won’t spoil the answer beyond saying that it required more of a leap than any mystery I’ve read before, and I’ve read north of 100 of them. It’s not a case of deduction, and you can’t go off motive, because the ultimate motive involves information the reader doesn’t have before the killer confesses.

Horowitz recommended a few books in that passage of Close to Death, including The Honjin Murders, which was a better read but which had a similarly unsatisfying answer, in that case relying on the reader to properly visualize the room as the author wrote it. Both of these novels ultimately used the physical spaces of their settings as key parts of the mystery, rather than using motive, psychology, or ze leetle grey cells to let the reader reason through the suspects and find the solution. There may very well be readers who enjoy this sort of engineering puzzle – Shimada is a best-selling author in Japan – but I’m not among them.

Next up: Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie.

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October 21, 2026  ·  No comments yet

Wingspan Pocket.

Wingspan Pocket is the fourth standalone Wingspan game, following the original, Wyrmspan, and Finspan, each bringing its own level of difficulty and rules tweaks. The Pocket version is the simplest, smallest, and cheapest of the line, as you might expect, and serves as a great introduction to the core concepts of the Wingspan games, especially for teaching people who want to know about “the bird game” but haven’t played any modern board games. (It’s available now for $16 on Miniature Market.)

In Wingspan, players play bird cards to three habitats, represented by rows on their player boards, spending food tokens in five varieties and eggs to do so. On other turns, they invoke the bird cards in one habitat, moving right to left and using the powers printed on some or all of those cards; or spend a turn drawing new bird cards. The game lasts four rounds, with each player getting 26 turns, and by the end of the game most players will have at least ten bird cards on their boards.

The Pocket version streamlines this game in several ways. You’re creating just one line of bird cards, and the game ends when any player plays their sixth. There are different food types, but they aren’t represented by separate tokens; the backs of bird cards show one or two food types, and if you take a ‘draw cards’ action, you take two cards – two birds, two food cards, or one of each, after which you can’t flip them to the other side (so food stays food and birds stay birds). There are only two public objectives in the Pocket game, rather than four, and no private ones.

Other than the size of the game, the biggest difference here is that you activate all of your bird cards on every turn. You can draw cards, or play a card, or lay 3 eggs total on your birds, and whichever you choose, you then run through the powers (printed in brown) on your bird cards, left to right. Drawing cards I described above; playing bird cards requires discarding the correct food cards from your hand, and possibly an egg as well. Placing eggs is straightforward, with one difference from the original: you must place the three eggs on three different birds.

Those ‘brown’ powers will be familiar to players of the original Wingspan. You may get to lay an egg, or ‘tuck’ a card from your hand beneath a bird you’ve played; each of those is worth 1 point at game end. You may also get to draw any card, a bird, a specific food type, or any food card of your choice. Some powers you’ll activate also give some benefit to other players. A majority of bird cards have these brown powers you activate on each turn, while some others have ongoing powers, printed in green, that are always active, such as giving you a permanent discount for birds that require a particular food type, or let you treat one particular food type as wild.

The objective cards give you one point per egg on a matching bird, so you’re looking for birds that meet a card’s criterion and that can hold more eggs. You also have space for up to three eggs on your starter nest card, and many birds require an egg to play them along with their food costs. The position in your row doesn’t matter for the bird’s cost; it only affects when it’s activated.

The end-game scoring is simple. You add up the points shown on each of your played bird cards, take 1 point for every egg and tucked card in your row, and then take 1 point for every egg you have on birds that match the two public objectives.

Wingspan Pocket plays 1-5 players; the solo mode is extremely easy to use, as is true for pretty much all Stonemaier titles. If you like Wingspan, or even Finspan, I don’t think you need Wingspan Pocket, unless you want a simpler version of these games to play with kids or to teach friends who are boardgame-curious. It distills Wingspan into a smaller box and much shorter play time – about a half an hour – and can give new/younger players a sense of the mechanics so that they might be able to play one of the full-length games, and might be more interested in playing them, since I have had plenty of adults and kids say they’ve seen Wingspan but found it intimidating. I wouldn’t choose to play this over any of the Fullspans, though, because I find the simpler game less satisfying now that I know what the whole experience is like. I’m giving it an A- because it is Wingspan, simplified, even though it’s probably not going to see a lot of table time in my house.

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