→ June 6, 2026
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Stick to baseball, 6/6/26.

Quirky timing this week led to just one post for subscribers to the Athletic, a scouting notebook on Gage Wood, Gavin Fien, Eli Willits, and some other Nats/Orioles prospects. I’ve got at least two already on the docket for this upcoming week.

I appeared on the Rates & Barrels podcast to talk about my top 50 prospects, which you can get on Apple, Youtube, or directly on our site.

My free email newsletter is still free and still infrequent. I also posted a new video about hitting 20 years as a full-time baseball writer to Instagram and TikTok.

  • A devastating flesh-eating parasite called a screwworm that regularly devastated U.S. cattle farms until the 1960s has reappeared in Texas, just in time for an Administration that has slashed budgets for food safety and epidemic prevention.

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→ June 5, 2026
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Waddle.

I did not know that a group of penguins is called a waddle until I encountered the small-box board game Waddle, published by Allplay, last year at Gen Con. It’s one of the best games Allplay has produced, playing 2 to 5 but best with at least 3, and is great value at $19. (It’s $24 on amazon for some reason, but $19 direct from Allplay, or $26 for the base game and the three-in-one expansions.)

In Waddle, you’ll place your penguins on the white ice hexes on the modular board adjacent to the blue water hexes, which form fishing ponds of varying sizes. You only score points in two ways in Waddle, which is something of a relief: you score for every waddle of penguins you create, and you score for having the most or sometimes second- or third-most penguins around a pond with at least one fish (scoring icon) on it. So there’s some pattern-building and some classic area control, with very quick turns.

On your turn you either can place one of your penguin tokens, most of which show one penguin but two of which show a pair of penguins, or ‘scout ahead,’ passing your turn to move up in the turn order for the next pond. Once you’ve build the modular board, you find the pond with the white number 1 on it, and players begin placing penguins on open white hexes around it, going in turn order. Play moves to the pond with next number once all hexes around the current one are filled with penguins.

If you would rather jump ahead in turn order for the next pond, you can scout ahead, taking your marble off the current turn order track and moving it to the next track, either at the bottom or behind any players who’ve already scouted ahead. If you are the last player with a marble on the current track, however, you must place penguins on all open white hexes around the current pond before play can continue. (Single penguin tokens are considered unlimited, so you can’t run out.)

There are twenty pond tiles with numbers on them, and play progresses through them in ascending order, although you may skip some because there are no open hexes adjacent to them by the time you get there. Once you’ve finished pond 20, all white spaces should have penguins on them, and you begin the scoring. Your waddle is worth anywhere from 1 point for a single penguin all by its lonesome to 36 points for a waddle of 8 or more penguins; there’s a table on each player aid card, but for the math-inclined among you, the number of points for a waddle of size N is the sum of all integers from 1 through N. Double penguin tokens count as 2 penguins for both scoring methods.

Then you check each pond with yellow points icons and look at all white hexes surrounding the entire pond. The player with the most penguins around it gets the number of points shown on the highest icon in the pond. If there are multiple fish/scoring icons, then the player with the second-most penguins gets the second-highest points total, and so on, until you’ve either scored all of the fish or each player has scored once. All ties are ‘friendly,’ so ties players get the full amount shown.

There are a couple of rules tweaks for playing with two players, but that player count kind of obviates the scout-ahead mechanic, and I don’t think Waddle is nearly as good without at least three. It sings at four or five, though, as there’s a ton of competition and you can often find a move that helps you and blocks someone else, and with turns this quick you can play with five and never get bored. Allplay promises a one-minute teach and that’s about right – I think I described every single rule in this review, and you don’t need all of those details to get started.

I’ve played nine of the games in Allplay’s Small Box Big Game series, with one more on my Shelf of Shame (9 Lives), and I’d put this near the top. It might be second, behind Sail; I think Sequoia is a real sleeper, but I’m one of its bigger fans, I think. I would even put Waddle over Mountain Goats, which is good but I think has a limited ceiling. It’s a keeper for me, and the best game Allplay put out in 2025.

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→ June 4, 2026
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Mood Machine.

Music journalist Liz Pelly has spent most of her professional life working and living in indie music circles, which gives her a distinct and important perspective on the consolidation of the music industry around just a few streaming services, with Spotify foremost among them. In her book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, she explores the birth of Spotify, how it took over the streaming space, and how pernicious its effects have been on indie musicians and labels – as well as listeners who want to hear anything but the most anodyne music available.

Spotify began as an idea to sell ads, not as a way to save the music industry, or even just as a way for its founders, including the military-minded Daniel Ek, to get rich while working in music. Songs were just a vehicle for selling ads and collecting user data to do so more effectively. Ek and other Spotify execs have retconned their history to make Spotify out to be some kind of savior for music and musicians, even as their practices have proven predatory, including bringing back payola, and they’ve cracked down harder on musicians with tiny followings than they have on scammers posting fake music tracks and clips to try to deke Spotify’s algorithms and rack up streams from listeners who aren’t paying much attention to what’s playing.

Pelly spoke to over a hundred current and former Spotify employees, got access to internal Slack logs, and interviewed musicians, label executives, and others to research Mood Machine, and two consistent themes emerged (among many smaller topics). One is that Spotify’s entire structure, built largely around algorithmic playlists, which are made by machine-learning systems and are distinct from curated ones, assembled by humans, like the ones I post every month, is both corrupt and tends to funnel listeners to a small number of artists from major labels, while paying artists from outside of the big 3 labels a pittance (and paying no artists anything close to fair value). The second is that a huge portion of Spotify’s audience isn’t actually listening to the music: One of their main goals is to get listeners to stick on a playlist as some sort of background noise – similar to Netlix’s “second-screen” nonsense – and let it play for hours and hours, and if it runs out let Spotify’s algorithm just keep playing more songs, so they can serve more ads. Playing a song costs Spotify less than half a penny in royalties. Their dream scenario is The Lost Weekend except with some algorithmic chillwave playlist going in the background for 72 hours.

Harper’s excerpted a portion of Mood Machine in 2024 as a story called “The Ghosts in the Machine.” It exposed Spotify’s program to commission fake tracks from outside vendors under its “Perfect Fit Content” program, where those companies would supply songs by ‘ghost artists’ to pad Spotify’s playlists for deeply discounted royalty rates, allowing Spotify to deliver the same quantity of music to listeners for a lower cost. Spotify execs defended the practice, saying that listeners of those playlists were “half-listening anyway,” so why deliver them real music? Pelly spoke to a number of employees dismayed by the practice, saying it was unethical to deceive listeners and harmful to the music industry they were supposedly supporting. The few editors remaining who curated playlists themselves reported increased pressure to use these ghost artists on their playlists, even though that was antithetical to their mission (and, I would presume, their music fandom). Some of the companies Pelly cites as ghost-artist producers are now getting into AI-generated tracks, such as Epidemic Sound, which also sells royalty-free background music to video producers. It’s the most interesting chapter in a book that’s full of them, and the most overt explanation of why Spotify is harmful to the music industry.

Pelly wraps up with a chapter (not the epilogue) about how listeners can support artists better in the streaming era. The obvious answer – and I’m not criticizing Pelly here – is to buy music. You love an album? Pay for it, whether digitally or physically. Buy it direct from the label or from the artist. Going to shows and buying merch helps as well. Streaming an artist’s music barely makes a dent; you’d have to stream a song around 300 times to get them $1. She points out that while Spotify is generally presumed to have the worst payout rates to artists – no one knows because Spotify’s agreements with major labels are confidential and protected by NDAs, which seems like maybe a restraint of trade, but I’m not a lawyer – the other major streaming sites, like Apple and Amazon, aren’t that much better. I don’t believe she ever said not to stream music, but her message is more like “stream responsibly, and buy liberally.”

The book is so thoroughly researched, with citations as well as quotes from relevant sources, that it can bog down a little in the details, but I will gladly accept that tradeoff to get such an academic take on a popular topic. It is easy to find reasons to hate streaming and find people to tell you they hate streaming. It is a much harder task to explain just why streaming is bad for music, and culture, and explain why it’s also going to be hard to fix the problems streaming, and Spotify in particular, has created. Mood Machine does all of this, without once allowing you to forget that the reason you downloaded Spotify in the first place was because you, in fact, like music.

Next up: Susan Choi’s Flashlight. Dun dun, dun dun dun.

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→ June 3, 2026
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Music update, May 2026.

Thirty-six tracks might be a record for one of my monthly playlists. May was loaded beyond the normal boost from having five Fridays, and I think it’s going to be a tremendous summer for new music given how many albums were teased with strong singles this past month.

As a side note: NPR appears to have put an AI-generated track by a fake band on its latest New Music Friday playlist. I can’t promise I’ll never be fooled, but I do not intend to ever put an AI-generated song on any of my playlists on purpose, and if I do so, I’ll own up to it. They’re spreading like ice-nine.

As always, if you can’t see the playlist below, you can access it on Apple Music or Spotify.

KNEECAP – Carnival. I loved the movie Kneecap, but I thought the group’s music was a little more of a novelty – they were certainly serious about their politics, but the music itself wasn’t that sophisticated. Their latest album Fenian turns that entirely on its head; as it’s smart, experimental in places, and surprisingly polished, without losing the urgency and power of Mo Chara and Móglaí Bap’s lyrics. It’s one of the best albums of the year, buoyed by a cavalcade of guest appearances, with some incredible hooks as on this song as well as the title track.

The Waterboys – Don’t Even Have to Say His Name. A one-off track by Mike Scott – the singer, not the 1986 Cy Young Award winner – that’s about you-know-who without ever having “to say the motherfucker’s name.”

Blondshell – Heart Has to Work So Hard. Blondshell just put out her second album last year, but she’s back with this new, way more uptempo rock track that’s one of her best songs yet. There’s a new album and a big tour coming, but there are no details on the LP yet.

DMA’s – Heatin Park. This Australian trio started out as a very Oasis-like rock band, with “For Now” and “Too Soon” among their best early songs, then tried an electronic sound for a few years, but now they’re back with what appears to be a return to their roots. Their new album, just called DMA’s, comes out August 7th.

Mystery Jets – Black Sage. This is Mystery Jets’ first new track in over six years, with their last album releasing in April of 2020, so just in time to sink into the abyss of the pandemic. The British indie-rock band will release their seventh album, A Hole To See The Sky Through, in August; I don’t think I’d ever heard anything from them before, but I love the Amazons-style guitar riffs here.

Ceremony – Other Hells. Ceremony’s last album was my #1 LP of 2019, their post-punk/new wave In the Spirit World Now, with the opening 1-2 punch of the title track and “Turn Away the Bad Thing.” They’d released all of two songs since then before this single dropped in late April, and this one harkens way back to their early hardcore punk sound. No word yet of a new album.

Yard Act – Redeemer. My favorite group of Gang of Four fans return with a darker track that still features singer James Smith’s wry, sesquipedalian lyrics, ahead of their third album, You’re Gonna Need a Little Music, due out on July 17th.

Y – Duplicate. Y is a fairly new band that crosses many genres and talks about it a lot in interviews, but it ain’t bragging if you can bring it. Their music is interesting, and unusual, and seems to combine elements of several musical styles while also pushing the boundaries of what you hear in a typical radio-length rock song. This is the first track off their second EP, ENTER, released in early May. T was unavailable for comment.

1000 Rabbits – White Horse. There’s some wildly inventive music coming out of the UK right now, with My New Band Believe, KNEECAP, Dry Cleaning, Yard Act, Plantoid, JJerome87, and 1000 Rabbits, just to name a few artists, all putting out new music so far in 2026. 1000 Rabbits is a five-piece experimental rock band from Suffolk who’ve put out three singles so far, all rather out there in arrangement and song structure.

Genesis Owusu – Life Keeps Going. I liked Owusu’s last album more than his newest, Redstar Wu & the Worldwide Scourge; this record seems more electronic, more dance-oriented, although the lyrics are more political and more (appropriately) angry than his previous work. This is the best song I’ve heard from the album, with the best hook, even though it’s one of the most dance-oriented tracks on the record.

Chanpan – confessions part ii. Chanpan are a trio of Asian-American musicians who try to blend drum & bass, jazz, and indie-pop with occasional dashes of other genres. The driving bass line is the big hook here on their second single of 2026, with one EP, Endlessly, to their credit before this year.

Weird Nightmare – If You Should Turn Away. Weird Nightmare is the side project of Alex Edkins of METZ, and just dropped its second album, Hoopla, at the start of May. This song is almost a 180 from METZ’ music; it’s mellow, jangly, and subtly catchy.

youbet – Ground Kiss. Shoegazey bedroom-pop from Nick Llobet and new bassist/vocalist Micah Prussack; Pitchfork referred to part of their sound as “country-grunge” and I had a similar thought on this specific track.

feeble little horse – Dior.  FLH released their third album, bitknot, on May 26th, with this extremely Smashing Pumpkins-esque track as the lone single that I could find. It’s more straightforward than thir last album, 2023’s Girl with Fish, at least.

Swim Deep – Mud. The second single from this shoegaze/dream pop band from Birmingham is one of their strongest yet. Their fifth album, Hum, comes out in June, almost exactly two years after There’s a Big Star Outside. If you’re going to go for a slower tempo like this, vast guitar sounds like Swim Deep has on “Mud” help give the song some textural contrast.

TV Star – The Package. Speaking of “country-grunge,” that may apply to this TV Star track even more than it does to youbet’s. It’s got the acoustic guitars of the former, the lo-fi distortion of the latter, and vocals that sound like early Miki Berenyi.

Failure – Crash Test Delayed. With Location Lost, Failure has now released more albums since they reunited (four) than they did before they broke up in 1997 (three). This track reminds me quite a bit of Pinback, which is funny because 1) Pinback debuted after Failure’s first hiatus began and 2) I only really like one Pinback song, “From Nothing to Nowhere.”

Lip Critic – Shoplifting. There’s definitely a media/label push behind this dance-punk band’s second album, Theft World, as their tracks have shown up on all sorts of playlists, both curated and algorithmic, over the last month or so. The story behind the new album may be better than the album itself.

The High Curbs – RACER #23. Fun California surf-punk with a great melody and perfect run time. Also, check out the band name’s acronym.

False Advertising – Next Big Thing. I wasn’t familiar with this British duo, which features the niece of the original lead singer of Madchester band Inspiral Carpets, before this song, which comes off The Sorry Window, their first album since 2019. It’s close to a punk, with the slightly sung-talked cadence of many post-punk bands.

MUNA – Eastside Girls. MUNA’s latest album Dancing on the Wall is more MUNA-y, but I don’t think that’s necessarily better, and I much preferred Katie Gavin’s solo album to this. “Eastside Girls” is the best track here, and also a good example of the direction of this LP.

Radhika – Since Yesterday. I don’t include many covers on these playlists because they’re often boring and/or cash grabs. This is neither: It’s a cover of a wonderful 1980s new wave track by the one-hit wonders Strawberry Switchblade, sung in a late-60s folk-pop vein by an Indian-Scottish singer from Glasgow. Music is fuckin’ awesome, man.

Arab Strap – You You You. Like a dark synth-pop track sung by Brian Cox. And I’m into it.

Jorja Smith – What’s Done is Done. Smith’s vocals win every time, even when the music is just mid as it is on this electronic track. Also, she’s blonde now.

Alabaster DePlume – Bringing up the Nakba. DePlume is a saxophonist & jazz musician who often adds spoken-word lyrics with strong political content to his songs … or just gives them highly political titles, like this one, which refers to ethnic cleansing during the 1948 Palestine War.

Knats feat. Geordie Greep – Carpet Doctor. Knats are a “nu jazz” trio from the UK who sprinkle in various rock subgenres on top of many of their tracks; their latest album, A Great Day in Newcastle, was produced by Greep, former lead singer/guitarist of black midi, who also appears on this track.

Ezra Collective feat. Pa Salieu – Only Love. Salieu is the star of this track – less than two years after he was released from prison – with the Mercury Prize-winning Ezra Collective fading a little into the background with music that feels more jazzy than jazz.

Tamikrest – Imanin. Tamikrest is a desert blues (or assouf) band from Mali with a sound very similar to that of the Nigerien musician Mdou Moctar. They hadn’t released anything since 2020 before their sixth album Assikel came out last month.

They Are Gutting a Body of Water w/Horse Jumper of Love – charter spec. TAGABOW just put out an album in October, and now they’re back with this track, which alternates My Bloody Valentine-level shoegaze with what sounds like detuned guitars playing arpeggios without distortion alongside mumbled lyrics. It’s almost metal in its own strange way.

Gurriers – Nobody’s Coming to Save You. Noise-rockers from Dublin who clearly take some inspiration from post-hardcore bands like Thrice, while the chorus here reminds me quite a bit of Irish shoegaze revivalists Just Mustard. This is the title track from the band’s second album, due out September 25.

Monolord – Iodine. I’m new to this Gothenburg doom metal band, whose sixth album, Neverending, just came out on Friday, but I love what I’ve heard from them so far, including this, “You Bastard,” “Oozing Wound,” and “It’s Neverending.” It’s heavy, Pallbearer-level stuff with occasional dashes of the melodic death metal that’s a hallmark of Gothenburg bands.

Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats – I’ll Cut You Down. I thought this was a pretty dumb name for a band, but there’s some history here, as their music is heavily inspired by the proto-metal band Vanilla Fudge, which devolved into Cactus, whose lead singer Rusty Day later had a band called Uncle Acid and the Permanent Damage Band. This Uncle Acid is from Cambridge, England, and their sound is bluesy hard rock mixed with doom metal and, appropriately, a dose of psychedelia, so the result is lighter than that of Monolord.

All Them Witches – Red Rocking Chair. The opening track from this hard rock/blues/stoner band’s latest album House of Mirrors, whichcame out on Friday, is a very slow burn, bordering on doom metal in pace and heaviness.

If These Trees Could Talk – Blurry Creatures. This “post-metal” band is a metal band. I hope that clears that part up. It’s instrumental, layered, with elements of post-hardcore (a genre name I accept), with more focus on atmosphere than melody.

Karmanjakah – Diamond morning. This Swedish progressive metal band produces highly technical, textured metal tracks that incorporate less traditional elements like synths and choirs, while also working in some of the dropped-tuning riffs common to extreme metal. (I’ve seen their music called “thall,” a subgenre of technical metal.) I’m into the big riffs near the end here and the way the song builds on its earlier textures for a finish that feels conclusive.

Cemetery Skyline – Dream Delusion. A bonus track from the new deluxe edition of this metal supergroup’s lone album to date, Nordic Gothic.

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→ June 2, 2026
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Qomet.

Qomet is the latest game in Gigamic’s line of well-produced abstract strategy games that have made-up titles starting with Q, dating back to the 1991 game Quarto. Qomet’s all-wood components are indeed impressive, but the game itself is a little too light and doesn’t have enough room for any deep strategy, instead coming down to which player makes a mistake first.

In Qomet, each player is trying to create a square on the board with four of their seven stones. A square of any size counts as long as the paths between the corners are connected by the carved grooves on the board – you can make a square that is 45 degrees off from those grooves, but it won’t count. On your turn, you can place a stone on any open space on the board, or move one of your played stones one space along a groove. If there’s another stone in that direction and nothing beyond it, you can push that stone one space at the same time as you move your own. A second stone beyond that one would prevent you from moving in that direction at all. You may push a stone off the edge of the board as well, using any of the eight spaces around the perimeter, giving that stone back to its player to re-use on a later turn. Play continues until one player makes a square or one player has no legal moves.

The extent of the strategic elements in Qomet is trying to set up a situation where your opponent has to choose between two options, either of which works for you, so that no matter what they do, you can either get the square on your next turn or set up an inevitable win from there. It seems like control of the center is helpful, although the board’s concentric squares allow you to win without placing anything in the nine central spaces, assuming your opponent hasn’t won by filling those up. In my few plays, the plays after the first few felt very reactive, without enough pieces or options to build up towards something. It’s also easy to fail to see a square in progress, but that may decline with more plays as you get used to the board and the rules.

The components here are all wood and extremely high quality. That wooden board is surprisingly heavy and polished to the smoothness of plastic, and the game should be able to withstand years of play. I assume that’s why the game retails for $40, but for a game I didn’t love and that you could easily replicate at home with some coins and a print-and-play board, I couldn’t justify purchasing it at that price, even though I respect the decision to go for high-end components. Qawale is a better strategy game in the same line and comes in a mini version for $25 that’s more reasonable and also takes up less space on the shelf. I’d give Qomet a 5.5 on the old Paste grading scale, with some regrets given how much effort Gigamic put into its production.

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→ June 1, 2026
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Sorrowland.

Rivers Solomon’s debut novel An Unkindess of Ghosts was a marvel of ingenious plotting and superb character development, using its generation ship as a setting without excessive focus on its mechanics, instead exploring racial caste systems through the literal stratification of its residents across higher and lower decks by skin tones. Their second novel, Sorrowland, shifts its setting to a modern-day gothic milieu, following a queer Black woman who escapes from a Christian cult’s compound in California, only to find the real world inscrutable and inhospitable to her and her two infant children.

Vern Riley was raised at in the Blessed Gardens of Cain, which began as a sort of Black autonomy movement but morphed, as cults often do, into something more insidious when one man took control of the group and converted it into a cult of personality, complete with control regimens and isolation from the outside world. Vern was even forced to marry that first leader’s son, Reverend Sherman, who took over when his father died and continues to suppress the group’s members, including strapping all cult members down while they sleep. She flees one day while pregnant, giving birth to twins in the woods near the compound, beginning a flight that will take her across multiple states, exposing her to a civilization she barely knows or understands, before her eventual return to try to liberate those still in Sherman’s grip – including her mother and brother – and the exposure of the malevolent forces propping up the entire endeavor.

There is a lot going on in Sorrowland, to put it mildly, from the obvious exploration of racism and racial stratification in American society, as well as religion’s role as a tool of oppression, to allusions to the Black power movement and to government efforts to fight it like COINTELPRO. The Blessed Gardens of Cain may be a Black cult, but there are parallels to the Branch Davidians, Heaven’s Gate, and the Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps, the last of which received significant press attention when two women who escaped told their stories in a new book. (The temporal precedence is backwards, but the cult Solomon envisioned sounds a hell of a lot like the ACMTC.)

The book could easily have been weighed down by all of its meaning and metaphor, but Solomon gives the readers a compelling, complex protagonist in Vern, who pairs extreme innocence in the ways of the outside world (and the people in it) with strong survivalist skills honed in her time in the cult. She’s on the run almost immediately, first from what she believes is a demon chasing her in the woods, and later from enforcers associated with the cult trying to track her down. She does all of this with two infants and later toddlers in tow – the novel skips ahead in time at several points – giving the whole novel an adventure/horror vibe to keep it moving; every time I thought the story would bog down in its seriousness, something would happen to keep the pace moving.

Sorrowland is still a gloomy read – I can’t say the title didn’t warn me – as Vern runs into obstacle after obstacle, seldom of her own making, and even the denouement only provides partial satisfaction, although I’d argue a fully happy ending would have been unrealistic and out of sync with the remainder of the book. Solomon also explains some of the more mysterious events of the plot with a clever detail, the one bit here that takes this novel into the world of science fiction, although again those elements are there in service of a broader point.

I still prefer An Unkindness of Ghosts, as that book’s protagonist Aster Gray was even stronger than Vern and the mystery within that book was even more compelling, although Solomon set a high bar for their next novel to clear. (They also wrote a novella in between the two called The Deep, a collaboration with Daveed Diggs’ rap trio clipping.) That novel also had better pacing, perhaps because it seemed to try to tackle fewer serious themes, with Sorrowland a more ambitious work. This book was one of two winners of the Otherwise Award in 2021, given to sci-fi or fantasy works that explore or expand our understanding of gender; explaining how Sorrowland does so might risk spoiling some of its secrets, but it’s a worthy honoree that also gets into queer themes and how Vern’s journey is even further complicated by her intersectionality. That Solomon could take something this dark and still make it an exciting read is a testament to their talent as storyteller.

Next up: I’m about halfway through Dinaw Mengestu’s How to Read the Air.

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→ May 30, 2026
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Stick to baseball, 5/30/26.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I updated my ranking of the top 50 prospects in the minors, and also held a Q&A to take questions about that and really anything else. I also posted a minor-league scouting notebook that covered Kyson Witherspoon, Yoeilin Cespedes, and other Boston/Baltimore prospects.

I sent out a new missive of my free email newsletter last Friday.

I’ve continued posting baseball-related videos, mostly about the players I’m going to see live, to Instagram and TikTok. My daughter is now mad that I have more TikTok followers than she does. I told her to talk more about baseball. I’m also posting often on Bluesky.

And now, the links…

  • The New Republic, spoke to Paulina Mangubat, author of that iconic DNC reply tweet calling Stephen Miller an “ugly fuck” – a charge he is not going to be able to escape any time soon – about how Miller’s wife’s choice to dox her has affected her life, and why she’s not sorry for the tweet. It was a reply to Miller falsely labeling Senate candidate James Talarico as “transgender,” because to MAGA, that’s an insult. Meanwhile, the real issue is that Talarico’s opponent, Ken Paxton, approved a plea deal that gave a serial child rapist one day in prison.
  • The Commonwealth Prize, a British literary award that includes publication of winning stories in Granta magazine, is embroiled in controversy as one of its winners this year was very likely produced largely with the help of AI. That story, submitted by a writer from Trinidad named Jamir Nazir, was full of turgid prose that has inspired mockery online – but it’s also true that these AI “detectors” aren’t necessarily trained on different styles of prose, such as that from non-native speakers or those from regions where their English dialect varies from British or American English. Meanwhile – and probably not coincidentally – the Afro-Caribbean author Chanel Sutherland is now having to defend her work as not AI-generated after that same AI detection program (mentioned in the Atlantic piece) claimed her Commonwealth Prize-winning story was the product of AI.
  • Another person who was penalized for comments about Charlie Kirk after his death has won compensation after a lawsuit. Suzanne Swierc posted on her private Facebook account that his death was a “tragedy” but the killing was “a reflection of the violence, fear, and hatred he sowed,” after which Ball State fired her. The University settled the suit, which alleged that the school violated her First Amendment rights, arguing that it was cheaper than fighting it.
  • In Washington state, a sketchy clean-energy storage project to be build on land sacred to the Yakama peoples is actually going to help power new data centers. From this story: “There is no sign the project is needed to provide more power to meet growing local energy demand in Klickitat County.”

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→ May 27, 2026
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Yokohama Duel.

Yokohama is a medium-heavy economic worker placement game that incorporates some engine-building, route-building, and set collection mechanics, along with a board that’s quite a table hog. It’s a great game, but it’s heavy enough that I don’t own it, not even the beautiful new edition brought out by Synapses Games in 2024. (I should note that it’s also the rare game set in Japan that is designed by someone from Japan, Hisashi Hayashi.)

Synapses followed this with a new edition of the two-player game Yokohama Duel, and while I’m in the minority on this, I prefer this two-player version. It strips down the game to the best parts, reducing the complexity, producing a game that plays reasonably quickly but still gives you most of the satisfaction of building something from the original game.

In Yokohama Duel, you’re both merchants in that Japanese city as the opening of the port has led to an economic boom. You’ll collect materials to fulfill orders for yen and trade goods and other rewards, and use the gains to upgrade your power (worker) cards, gain favor at the church, add technology cards, and finish off those trade goods for more points. The game lasts just four rounds, with sixteen total turns per player in the entire game.

Each player starts with the same four power cards, with powers 1 through 4, and will play them to any of the ten action spaces on the board, two of which (new orders and technology) are unlimited while the others are blocked once one worker card is on them. Four of those action spaces get you the game’s resources of silk, tea, fish, and copper. The bank gets you yen. The Chinatown card lets you trade goods for yen and sometimes yen for goods. Customs lets you take trade goods you’ve acquired and flip them over to their finished sides for more victory points at game-end (1 point per unflipped good, 4 per flipped). The church lets you take cards worth victory points and sometimes immediate rewards.

On your turn, you place the lowest-power card still in your hand on an available space and then take the associated action. What you get is a function of the total power of your worker, which is equal to the number on the card, plus any +1 or +2 power cards you play (you can play just one per worker), plus one more for a shop and one more for a trading post if you’ve built either on that site. You then check the little table and take the reward, which can be nothing if you don’t have enough power. You may then build a shop on that site for 1 yen and a trading house for 4-7 yen, as long as you don’t have one of that type already on the site.

You also have free actions available on every turn, which include fulfilling order cards in your hand by paying the resources shown and taking the reward; and collecting and using foreign agent cards. You get a foreign agent when you fulfill your third order card, buy your third tech card, get your second church card, or flip your second trade good. There are only seven foreign agent cards, however, there’s a competitive aspect here as someone will get four and the other three. Foreign agent cards have power 3 and can be played as a bonus worker, giving you a turn within a turn. They can even be modified by a +1 or +2 card, and they can visit a site that’s already occupied by a power card.

When you play with power 5 or more, you can claim a power bonus card, gaining up to three rewards if you play with a total power of 7. It doesn’t make your regular action stronger, but it’s usually worth aiming for once you have some shops out on the board.

Once each player has played all four of their power cards, the round ends. Refresh the technology cards, retrieve all of your workers, and then, if you wish, upgrade one of your four workers by paying the cost in yen. You flip that worker card to the other side, with 1 more power, for the remainder of the game.

After four rounds, with each player getting two rounds as the start player, the game ends and you add up your points. There are eleven ways to get points, including what you get for leftover yen and resources. You get the points from your order cards, church cards, any tech cards that give rewards, shops (1 point each), trading houses (5 points each), flipped goods, and unflipped goods. The player with the most completed orders gets 6 points. The player with the most total production on their tech cards gets 6 points. That’s it.

It’s not Yokohama, especially since it dispenses with that game’s mechanic of needing to trace a path for your workers through the city, which I respect but also found more frustrating than fun. Yet this two-player game keeps the spirit of the original, and has plenty of direct competition between the two players – the sites for power cards, the foreign agents, even the trading posts, which are limited to just one per card. You may not be constantly vying for the same things, but you will run into each other plenty. It’s just not that big of a city. This is also about half the cost of Yokohama and comes in a much smaller box. If, like me, your most common player count is 2, this is the better choice. I also love the new art, which is attractive and also very bright and easy to look at for the 30-40 minutes it’ll take to play a full game.

I’m a big fan – if I were still doing grades, as I did at Paste, this would have been an 8.5. You can get Yokohama Duel on Amazon but right now it’s about $10-12 cheaper on specialty sites, so probably still less even with shipping.

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→ May 23, 2026
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Stick to baseball, 5/23/26.

For subscribers to the Athletic this week, I spoke with teenaged umpire Jameson Morris about his confrontation with a standoffish rec league coach, the video of which has gone viral; published a minor league scouting notebook on Seth Hernandez, Edward Florentino, and some other Pirates & Phillies prospects; and wrote up scouting report on hard-throwing high school lefty Brody Bumila.

I appeared on TSN 1050 in Toronto to talk about the Jays, Trey Yesavage, and what the next year or so will be like for Jose Berrios; and on 95.7 The Game in San Francisco to talk about the Giants’ lost season and how maybe Buster Posey isn’t the savior.

I sent out a new issue of my free email newsletter on Friday.

Apropos of nothing, this Lyrics Born performance of his 2003 song “Callin’ Out” for KEXP is an absolute banger. KEXP is on quite a roll this year with their in-studio performances.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: This New Yorker story on a mysterious Chinese couple in LA who have used surrogate mothers to amass over 20 children doesn’t have a big, punchy finish, but the whole thing is wildly disturbing, from the neglect and abuse of the kids to the broader issues of what the fuck is even going on.
  • I usually put the board game news at the bottom of these links, but whoa boy, this one is special. BoardGameGeek fired their longtime advertising manager for rejecting an ad because he claimed demonic possession is real and an unfit subject for a game. It’s worse than it sounds; I hope this guy gets professional help, as he seems to be suffering from delusions, notably that demons are real (they are not, nor is demonic possession). Here’s the Gamefound page for Possess Me, Satan, which is already fully funded, perhaps thanks to a little extra publicity.
  • A Trump-loving Tennessee sheriff jailed a resident of his county for 37 days for posting a meme after the death of Charlie Kirk. That resident just won an $835,000 settlement in his lawsuit against the county. Maybe Perry County Sheriff Nick Weems should have to pay some of that.
  • Sports Illustrated is at it again with the AI slop; Sportico caught SI plagiarizing some of its content, Futurism delved further, and now everything that author supposedly wrote is gone from SI’s site, along with the author’s social media presence.
  • I’ve seen several stories this week about the murders of trans women; one was Juniper Blessing, a student at the University of Washington whom the Seattle Times honored with a piece about her life and legacy.
  • The Broadview Six, including onetime Congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh, had all charges against them related to their protests outside an ICE facility dismissed with prejudice this week, with the judge issuing some excoriating commentary on the unethical behavior of federal prosecutors in the game.
  • The Times Guild, representing workers at the New York Times, filed an unfair labor practice charge this week against the paper. The Athletic’s unionizing effort has been fighting for over a year for the Times to recognize us as part of the Guild as well, rather than a separate bargaining unit.

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→ May 22, 2026
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Angel Down.

Cyril Bagger is a malingerer and a coward, hanging back in every battle his troop encounters in the hellscape of France during World War I, which leads to his selection for a group of five disposable heroes who are ordered to go retrieve a shrieking wounded soldier from the battlefield. The shrieker isn’t a soldier, however; it’s an angel, and she seems to appear as someone different to everyone who sees her.

Daniel Kraus won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Angel Down, the slightly experimental novel that puts us in the trenches with Bagger and company. The entire novel is written as a single sentence, broken frequently into paragraphs and chapters, with every paragraph starting with the word ‘and.’ It’s a fast-moving, extremely graphic work, contributing to the growing body of grotesque novels of the Great War, but ultimately the gimmick wears out its welcome, and the remainder is 1917 with magic.

Bagger is our protagonist, and as the book begins he and four other idiots are selected for what appears to be a suicide mission by the mad modern Major General Reis, who was born with just one arm. (The New York Times’ review refers to Reis’ willingness to “single-handedly prolong the war,” which I have to assume is a tasteless reference to the birth defect.) When Bagger and the teenager Arno, who is desperate for anything resembling a family and clings to Bagger as a combination of a father figure and an older brother, reach the weeping angel, Bagger is overcome by the light that pours out of her and assumes she is one of the fabled Angels of Mons. When they bring her back to the trench where the other three knuckleheads await, it becomes clear that everyone who sees this angel sees something different – something they want or need, like a carnival attraction, a mother, a girlfriend left behind in the U.S., or later a weapon to win the war. Bagger sees her as some sort of salvation, but she also turns out to have supernatural healing powers, which allow him to strike a devil’s bargain with the angel later in the story.

Kraus’ strength here is in the ways in which the angel becomes a device to reveal the interior thoughts, desires, or intentions of his various characters, often in horrifying fashion. No one, save perhaps Bagger, sees her as an independent being with agency. Every character has been ground down by war to a sharpened point, and their needs become paramount, even if they are malicious or deranged or outright insane. The angel, who is never named, becomes a sort of prism through which each character is refracted, broken down into their component parts so we can see how thin the whole actually is.

The use of the literary device of a single sentence screams “gimmick” to me, although the frequent breaks prevent it from turning into Finnegan’s Wake (he says confidently, having never read past the first page of that inscrutable work). It does not add anything to the text, and starting every paragraph with “and” for 280-plus pages results in the word disappearing from view; you just stop seeing it and start with the next word. I also found Kraus’ florid descriptions of the violence to be too over-the-top, even though many reviews have praised that aspect of the novel; if you’ve ever cringed at the sound of someone’s head getting crushed or bashed in, like the death of Michael’s stepfather in The Wire, there are dozens of sentences in Angel Down that evoke that revulsion.

I don’t know that the canon of World War I literature needs more entries, and Kraus’ choice of that conflict in and of itself should at least invite some skepticism going into the work. He creates one strong character and some intriguing if shallow secondary ones, but leans too heavily on verbal sleight-of-hand and depictions of violence to pad the often superficial narrative. It’s a quick read, at least, but not an especially deep or satisfying one.

Next up: I’m reading Jo Walton’s The Just City at the moment and finding it unusually dry compared to her other novels.

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