→ May 8, 2025
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Rite of Passage.

In a not-too-distant future, where Earth is uninhabitable and humans have spread out to other star systems and colonized hundreds of worlds, a civilization on a starship has an unusual initiation for its adolescents called Trial: They’re dropped on one of those colony worlds with no information and no supplies, and if they survive for a month and are able to hit their rescue button, they pass. Many don’t return.

Alexei Panshin’s Rite of Passage, winner of the Nebula Award for Fiction in 1968, sounds like a YA novel by modern standards – and read that way, it’s quite a good one, not least because the main character, a girl of about thirteen named Mia Havero, is extremely well-written. She’s spirited and smart, but arrogant to the point of obstinacy, and her relationships with her peers, notably her best frenemy Jimmy, feel realistic within the artificial setting of the story.

Mia narrates the book, so we know she’s survived Trial already, but the bulk of the book comes before she, Jimmy, and their group are dropped on a hostile planet, as she recalls some of her adventures growing up on the starship and getting into various sorts of mischief. She sneaks around the ship through the air ducts, going to forbidden areas and learning things about their makeshift civilization that only people like her father, one of the ship’s political leaders, would know. She also struggles to make friends, between her father’s position in the hierarchy – with some hints at significant political divisions among leadership, including what the starship’s relationships should be with the colonies – and her own attitude, something she struggles to understand.

Kids employ two general strategies during Trial – turtle, hiding out as much as possible to survive the month with minimal risk; or tiger, exploring the world and making an adventure out of it. I’m not entirely sure why anyone would choose tiger in reality, but Mia does, and of course runs into trouble almost immediately. This world has a native simian population that the human colonizers have enslaved, assuming they’re not sufficiently sentient or intelligent to have basic rights, one of many things during Trial that affects Mia’s very limited worldview.

There are other events throughout her month on the colony world that also force her to reconsider past prejudices, which is where the book really clicks. What comes before Trial is fun, but trivial; she runs around the ship like a kid who’s a little too smart for her own good, narrowly escaping punishment and/or death, thinking that she’s invincible in the way most kids do. Trial is stark, a way to weed out the weak or unintelligent in the thinking of the starship’s authorities, but it’s also a strong metaphor for the ways in which teenagers become adults through experience. For me, it was college, where I was first exposed to people from other backgrounds and beliefs, first forced to reconsider things I’d always assumed or believed to be true, and first forced to take care of myself for any period longer than three weeks. I did not have to escape angry colonists mad that my home ship wouldn’t share all their technology, though.

The prose and general style in Rite of Passage feel slightly dated, and give the whole book the YA feel I mentioned earlier – this is what a lot of sci-fi writing was like in the 1960s. A huge part of Robert Heinlein’s bibliography reads just like this, to pick one, even his books that weren’t explicitly for young adults. Some of the ideas Panshin is pushing still resonate today, including ideas of colonialism and imperialism, or the moral obligation of developed nations to share technologies or medicines with the rest of the world. And content that might have seemed “adult” in 1968 is pretty tame by modern YA standards – there’s some violence, and one reference to Mia having sex that’s almost entirely off-page (thank goodness), and that’s it. I was pleasantly surprised at how well this held up, given how poorly some early sci-fi award winners – the ones that haven’t maintained their status atop the genre – have fared over the last half-century.

Next up: Han Kang’s The Vegetarian.

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→ May 7, 2025
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Vermiglio.

Vermiglio was Italy’s submission for this year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature, making the 15-film shortlist, and earned a nomination in the same category at the Golden Globes, although it is probably just too small and intimate to win against bigger competitors like I’m Still Here or Emilia Pérez. It’s a simple story of a family in an Alpine village in Italy near the end of World War II whose nephew comes home with the help of a deserter, Pietro, who then falls in love with their eldest daughter, an affair that has unforeseen consequences for everyone when he leaves to visit his mother in Sicily. (You can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

The patriarch of the family, who looks like someone asked an AI engine to make an Italian version of Sam Elliott, is the village’s schoolteacher, while his wife is the caretaker of their farm and does the majority of the work of raising the children. She’s already pregnant with their tenth child when Pietro arrives with Attilio, their nephew, who was injured and would have died had Pietro not carried him part of the way home. Pietro is extremely quiet, but settles in with the family and tries to help out around the farm while facing some backlash from other villagers because he’s a deserter and a southerner (there was, and still is, quite a bit of prejudice between northern and southern Italy, and in this case the village and Pietro’s home couldn’t be much farther apart). The eldest daughter, Lucia, falls for him immediately, although it also seems like she and the other girls haven’t exactly seen a whole lot of boys before, and Pietro is just an object of fascination. The next-oldest daughter, XX, is pious to the point of parody, and writes out punishments for herself for anything she thinks is a sin – which, of course, doesn’t stop her from committing them. Meanwhile, Dino, their oldest son, chafes under his father’s strict rule, and wants to continue his studies while his father sees his son as the heir of the farm, and instead wants another daughter to be the scholar of the family and go away to boarding school.

Pietro and Lucia end up marrying before the film’s midpoint, and Lucia becomes pregnant almost immediately, which is about as much excitement as we get in the first hour-plus of Vermiglio, until they get word that the war has ended and he reluctantly leaves to go see his family. What follows is the one big event of the film, and it further exposes some of the cracks in the family’s dynamic, especially in how the father has ruled the house in the same way even as the children are reaching adulthood.

Vermiglio is a slice-of-life film without the traditional narrative arc, and even downplays certain events – the death of a child, an unexpected wedding – that would normally be high points in a movie. It moves at its own pace, allowing for more characters to move to the center and for the script to develop them, even secondary ones like Dino, whose ambition is crushed by his father’s domineering parenting style.

Indeed, the patriarch seems at first like a gentle sort, an intellectual who takes care of his family like an Italian Pa Ingalls, but over the course of the film it becomes clear that he’s the source of many of the family’s problems. He’s why they have too many mouths to feed, why they don’t have enough money to feed them, why his daughters are utterly clueless about the world, why his son drinks too much, and so on. He views himself as the lord of the manor and his wife and children as his serfs, which the film never points out explicitly, but rather demonstrates through large and small events that beset the family.

The excellent review of Vermiglio that appeared in The Guardian said the film had “an almost Hardyesque intensity,” just without the class struggles of Thomas Hardy’s novels, and I have no better comparison. Even though it’s set in the 1940s, it has the pastoral quality of all of Hardy’s novels that I’ve read, and the same sort of bleak outlook, and the same contrast between the two. Hardy was a prose master who wrote beautiful phrases about tragic people. Vermiglio is a beautiful, leisurely film, where some of the tragedies are quieter than others, that throws one small match into the window of a family’s home and waits for something to catch.

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→ May 5, 2025
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Telephone.

Percival Everett’s Telephone is the most serious of the six of his novels I’ve read so far, with the only humorous elements some of the smartass dialogue coming from his main character. A finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (which it lost to the inferior The Night Watchman), Telephone finds Everett exploring how people respond to grief and the search for meaning in a world that appears to have none at all.

Zach Wells, another author surrogate for Everett, is a geologist and college professor who lives with his wife and their one child, a daughter named Sarah, who is the apple of Zach’s eye like Bonnie Blue was in Rhett Butler’s. Sarah starts to have absence seizures and reports some other neurological symptoms, and when Zach and his wife take her to the doctor, they learn that she has a fatal neurodegenerative disorder called Batten disease that will kill her in a few years, and on her way to dying, she’ll lose her faculties and won’t even recognize her parents.

Meanwhile, Zach orders a piece of clothing off the internet and finds a note that just says “ayúdame” (“help me”) in one of its pockets. He orders another item from the same place, and gets a similar note. He’s stymied, but eventually decides he has to do something to figure out if there is someone in trouble wherever these garments are made or repackaged. And at work, he has a younger colleague who procrastinated for years on publishing her work and now may not get tenure as a result, but Zach finds that her work is good enough and embarks on a late push to save her.

In just about all of Everett’s books, at least the ones I’ve read, he’s asking important questions and only hints at the answers. Here, Zach is a tragic figure from the start – his father killed himself, his marriage has stalled, he doesn’t seem to particularly like his work – and the one facet of his life that seems to give him real joy is going to be taken from him in the cruelest possible fashion. When you can’t save the most important person in the world, do you turn to try to save someone else? A colleague you respect, not even a friend, just someone who you think deserves more than she’s getting? A complete stranger, or more than one, who may not even exist, and if they do it’s in another country and maybe you’ll get killed trying to do it? Would any of this matter in the grand scheme? Would it help you save yourself?

Where Telephone ends up was something of a surprise, as I’m used to Everett concluding his novels in uncertain fashion – at least three of the other five lacked concrete resolutions to their plots. Wells gets an ending in fact where the ambiguity is interior to his character. Has anything changed? When he goes back to his regular life, will he be altered by the experiences, or has he just pushed away the grief that will be waiting for him at his front door?

Wells is an Everett stand-in in the same vein as Kevin Pace, the protagonist of So Much Blue, as middle-aged men facing some kind of emotional crisis, although Pace’s was more of his own making and Wells’s definitely is not. They’re well-developed, flawed, and very realistic. They make mistakes, especially in their marriages. They do not talk easily or openly about their feelings. And they are ill-equipped for what hits them, a combination in both cases of how they were raised and the choices they’ve made as adults. Telephone is just another piece of evidence in the case for Everett as our greatest living novelist.

Next up: Congo Inc.: Bismarck’s Testament, a satirical novel by In Koli Jean Bofane, who appeared in the documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat.

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→ May 3, 2025
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Stick to baseball, 5/3/25.

I had one post for subscribers to The Athletic this past week, a draft scouting notebook on Riley Quick, Kyle Lodise, some UVA bats, and three college hitters who could be top ten picks in 2026.

At Paste, I reviewed the two-player game Floristry, which is important as I think it’s the first two-player title to use an auction mechanic that really works, but unfortunately that doesn’t have enough game beyond that.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: The New York Times has the bonkers story of how a bunch of college-aged and high school kids stole nearly $250 million in crypto from one guy, and then got caught within a month because they were so sloppy about it. It includes a real-world kidnapping story that demonstrates how this stuff can and will spill over into physical danger, even for people not directly involved in the scams. (Also, the victim of the original theft is a ding-dong, falling for some of the most obvious tricks to get him to divulge his passwords.)
  • Polygon, the great gaming-news site that was under the Vox umbrella, was decimated after Vox sold it to a content-farming group, with nearly all Polygon staffers laid off. It’s now part of the same company that runs clickbait sites like ScreenRant. I wrote two pieces for Polygon in 2021-22, but if those disappear I’ll repost the reviews here for posterity.
  • Scientific American reports on the mass-brainwashing effort around measles, spearheaded by the Republican Party and specifically the Trump Administration, pushing the twin lies that the measles vaccine causes autism (again, it does not) and that measles isn’t that harmful (it has already killed two children in the U.S. this year, and can cause the fatal condition SSPE in people who recover from the infection).
  • The same anti-vaccine lunacy has led to a jump in pertussis cases – over 8400 already in the U.S. this year. Whooping cough kills about 1% of infants under one, children too young to be vaccinated, who contract the bacterial illness.
  • And bird flu continues to spread, with more people getting infected, raising the specter of another pandemic. If only we had some sort of government agency that could track and respond to this sort of thing.
  • A mathematician in Australia seems to have solved the problem of finding a generalized solution to polynomial equations of power 5 or greater. I keep seeing the same headline for this one story, but nothing further about the method, or whether other mathematicians agree with what sounds like a controversial approach (among other things, he says he “doesn’t believe in irrational numbers,” which…).
  • Two board game Kickstarters of note, even as the Trump tariffs threaten the entire industry: Flamecraft Duals, a two-player version of the hit game Flamecraft that promises to be more directly competitive; and Nippon: Zaibatsu, a brand-new edition of a heavy game from 2015 just called Nippon.

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→ May 2, 2025
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Music update, April 2025.

A couple of hotly-anticipated albums (by me!) dropped in April, along with one surprise release, although I’m not sure any of those albums truly lived up to expectations. As always, if you can’t see the widget below you can access the playlist here.

SAULT – K.T.Y.W.S. SAULT returns with 10, their tenth album, as usual with no fanfare or advance publicity. It’s better than Acts of Faith, the religious album they released in December, and probably ahead of any of the five individual albums they released on one day in November 2022. The album as a whole goes back to the ‘70s funk and R&B sound that characterized their first couple of albums, although there’s nothing quite as hard-edged, and much of the political songwriting is still absent here. All of the songs have initials as song titles, with this one standing for “know that you will survive,” which is kind of a gimmick and not a great one, in this case underscoring that the lyrics aren’t as strong as they were on SAULT’s earliest work. So my quick review of 10 is that the music is better and the lyrics are just meh when they’re there at all.

Obongjayar – Sweet Danger. Obongjayar first came to my attention with his appearance on Little Simz’s “Point and Kill,” fitting here as Simz has worked with SAULT’s Inflo multiple times. His music is a sort of crossover Afrobeat mashup, with some pop and electronic elements. This is the fourth song he’s released from his second album, Paradise Now, due out on May 30th.

Rachel Chinouriri – Can we talk about Isaac? Chinouriri put out an album last year that made Paste’s top 100 list for the year, although I missed it completely. She’s an English singer-songwriter who has cited two of my favorite bands, Oasis and the Libertines, as influences, along with Daughter, who’ve made a bunch of appearances on my lists here … and Coldplay, which can cut different ways depending on what part of their discography she likes. You can definitely hear the pop influences on this track, which comes off her new EP Little House.

Tunde Adebimpe – Ate the Moon. The lead singer of TV on the Radio released his first solo album, Thee Black Boltz, in April, and it was surprisingly tepid. I figured after this many years in the industry, with no new music since 2014, Adebimpe’s first LP would be bursting with ideas and ambition, but it’s not. There are two great songs in “Magnetic” and “Drop,” and a couple of decent tracks like this one, but I was hoping for a big swing and instead he just sort of went the other way for a soft single.

Hotline TNT – Julia’s War. My favorite track yet from this NYC rock act who are often miscategorized (in my view) as “shoegaze” just because they use a lot of distortion. It’s rock, definitely the sort you’d have heard on college radio 20 or 30 years ago, and this track has their best hook to date.

Say Sue Me – In This Mess. Say Sue Me are from Busan, South Korea, and have released three albums going back to 2014, but this was the first track of theirs I’d heard. It’s powered by a huge guitar sound that powers the track through six and a half minutes, veering a little into My Bloody Valentine territory near the end.

Turnstile – Never Enough. It doesn’t sound like a Turnstile song at the beginning, but be patient – the punk sound is still here. This is the title track from their next album, due out June 6th, and they’ve already dropped two more songs from it.

swim school – Alone With You. Not to get too deep in the weeds here, but I think swim school’s sound contains far more shoegaze than Hotline TNT’s does – which makes sense, as swim school, who hail from Edinburgh, have mentioned Slowdive as a major influence. Their self-titled debut album is due out on October 3rd, after a “mixtape” and three EPs so far in their short career to date.

Sunflower Bean – There’s a Part I Can’t Get Back. I thought Sunflower Bean might be running away from the hit, “Moment in the Sun,” when the first few singles from their new album Mortal Primetime all seemed heavier and more rock-oriented, but the album is pretty balanced between that and some more pop sounds. The best tracks are the singles they released ahead of the LP – this, “Nothing Romantic,” and “Champagne Taste.”

Momma – Rodeo. Someone, possibly a writer at Paste, described Momma as incredibly derivative of 1990s alternative rock, and yet still somehow really good. I completely agree. They sound a lot like Veruca Salt. I hear Hum in this track. If you remember the Sheila Divine there’s a little of that on the record. It’s all good, just maybe a little too familiar and pleasant to ever be great.

Wet Leg – Catch These Fists. I was thelow person on Wet Leg’s debut album, particularly the widely-praised hit “Chaise Longue,” but I did like “Angelica” and I think when their melodies show as much effort as their lyrics do, they’re on to something pretty good. This song fits that as well – the main guitar riff is catchy and the lyrics are smartassy but not obnoxious.

Yaya Bey – Dream Girl. Yaya Bey’s 2024 album Ten Fold earned widespread praise and made Paste’s top 50 albums of the year; it didn’t land for me at all. This is the first song of hers I’ve really liked, leaning hard into 1970s/1980s R&B sounds, with a little Prince vibe to the synth lines and vocals. Her next album, Do It Afraid, is due out on June 20th. (I only just learned that her father was Grand Daddy I.U. of the Juice Crew, one of the most important hip-hop collectives of the 1980s, where Big Daddy Kane and Kool G Rap got their starts. You may know their song “The Symphony,” which samples Otis Redding’s “Hard to Handle” and features both of those rappers along with Masta Ace and Craig G.)

DaWeirdo & Freddie Gibbs – Brother$. Here for the Freddie Gibbs verse.

Pat junior & Tecoby Hines – Nothing to Lose. This is the first song I’ve ever put on a playlist after discovering it on TikTok. That app’s algorithm showed me a slew of mediocre mostly white rappers before this song popped up; Pat Junior, who won a Grammy for Best Contemporary Christian Music Performance in 2024, has incredible flow to his vocals, and the music behind him here would make Stetsasonic and Digable Planets proud.

Cœur de Pirate – Cavale. I’ll include anything Béatrice releases; outside of one single in 2023, this is her first new material since 2021’s Impossible à aimer, and her first since having her second child. There’s a new album coming later this year from the Québécois pop singer/pianist, but that’s all the details I could find.

OK Go – Once More with Feeling. This is the most classic OK Go-sounding song on their new album And the Adjacent Possible by a country mile. It’s their first album since 2014, but unfortunately it’s pretty downtempo for these guys, losing what I liked most about their sound.

The Amazons – Night After Night. I’ve always appreciated the Amazons’ big guitar sound – they offer huge, muscular, heavily distorted riffs, so most of their best songs automatically sound anthemic. Their fourth album, 21st Century Fiction, comes out in a week, on May 9th.

The New Pornographers – Ballad of the Last Payphone. This song came out on vinyl earlier this year but just hit digital platforms in April; it’s a mid-tier New Pornographers song.

Ball Park Music – Please Don’t Move to Melbourne. I should hate a band called Ball Park Music, but they’re a perfectly delightful indie-pop band with that jangly sound that I think has become distinctly Australian in the last decade or so. This should be the B-side to the Melvins’ song “Stop Moving to Florida.”

Hives – Enough is Enough. Just two years after their comeback album The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons, the Hives are back with another new LP, The Hives Forever Forever the Hives, and, uh, they’re being really humble about it.

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard – Deadstick. Are they just taunting us at this point? The Phish/King Gizzard crossover is pretty big, and now the latter have put out a song with a similar title to one of Phish’s most popular tracks, “Meatstick” (which I think is kind of annoying). I can’t imagine this is a coincidence.

Ghost – Lachryma. The act is a little tired, but beneath the silly Satanic trappings and the masks, this is straight-up ‘80s hard rock, and I suppose their gimmicky isn’t all that much worse than hairspray, is it?

Tropical Fuck Storm – Dunning Kruger’s Loser Cruiser. It’s not that great of a song, but how could I possibly pass up a title like this?

Onslaught – Iron Fist. Wikipedia mentions Onslaught as one of the “big four” of British thrash metal, but they weren’t all that successful in their original run in the 1980s; the only one of that quartet I’d heard of at the time was Acid Reign, so I suppose the “big” part is just local to Britain. Anyway, Onslaught re-formed after about a 15-year hiatus, and have released more albums since their return than they did in their first stint, with their eighth overall LP, Origins of Aggression, due out on May 23rd. It’s a double album of covers, including this one of a Mötorhead song, and re-recordings of Onslaught songs from the ‘80s.

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→ May 1, 2025
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Atlanta & Tuscaloosa eats.

One of my last draft scouting trips of the spring brought me to Atlanta for the weekend with a detour to Tuscaloosa, my first-ever first to Alabama’s home stadium as they’ve generally been one of the weakest SEC teams for draft prospects.

In Atlanta, I hit Varuni Napoli, which would now make my top 50 pizzerias list if I revised it today. It’s Neapolitan pizza but just stretched a little differently, so the pizzas are larger with less of a puffy exterior ring, while they still have the wet centers that are the hallmark of the style. I went with their sausage, mushroom, onion, and red pepper pizza, a standard option that happens to be one of my favorite combinations as is. The dough was still airy around the edges, and the sausage, which is sliced like pepperoni so it cooks more quickly, had a peppery kick and strong fennel-seed note. The sauce was excellent, slightly sweet and slightly tangy. I haven’t been to Antico in a decade or more, so it’s tough to say truly that this is better … but I think it might be.

Buttermilk Kitchen showed up on some list of the best brunch spots in Atlanta, and I saw they 1) had homemade biscuits and 2) promised they made everything from scratch while using local ingredients where possible, which, coincidentally, are my two main criteria for breakfast when I’m in the south. The biscuits are enormous drop biscuits and very, very buttery, while also a little sweet even before you try the blueberry-basil jam it comes with. One of those and two eggs probably would have been a full breakfast for me on any day, although this was Sunday and I knew this was essentially breakfast and lunch in one, so I ordered the daily special omelet with butternut squash, onions, and fontina, along with hashbrown fritters as the side. The fritters were more like little knishes than hashbrowns, with the center more akin to mashed potatoes. The omelet was a gamble because I don’t normally care for butternut squash, but it looked like the best choice to get some vegetables without resorting to the lunch part of the menu (it was 10 am, I can’t eat “lunch” at that hour, it’s uncivilized). I wouldn’t have even thought to put winter squash in an omelet. It worked, though, I think because the eggs were so fresh and there was so much cheese that the squash was a supporting player in the whole dish. That had to be at least three eggs’ worth of omelet, and it was seasoned perfectly as is. I ordered a cortado, which is on their menu, but they seem to think that means a full-sized latte instead. I will caution you that parking there is complicated, although on weekends they share some of the neighboring lots – check their website for specifics.

I met some board-game world friends for dinner at Miller Union downtown, not too far from Georgia Tech, for a meal that reminded me in the best possible way of FnB in Scottsdale, one of my favorite restaurants in the Valley. The menu was heavier on small plates with a small number of larger entrees, and the smaller plates weren’t all that small, anyway. The smoked trout with spaetzle and mushrooms was the consensus winner at the table, with the pasta (it’s pasta, I know it’s not Italian, so what) a sponge for all of the umami coming from the other ingredients, and the smoky notes from the fish well-balanced by other flavors so it didn’t overwhelm the dish. The farm egg with celery cream is apparently a longtime standard, and it’s definitely one of the weirdest things I’ve eaten in some time: it shows up in a soup bowl with the yolk barely set in a pool of what looks like a latte, and you break the yolk and swirl it into the cream before dipping the crusty bread into it or spooning it on top. It’s good, just unusual; I kept expecting a different flavor profile, because I’m used to dipping bread into a pasta sauce, while this is rich and more muted. The butter-poached shrimp with English peas, salsa macha verde, and benne (sesame) seeds was on the quieter side, with delicate flavors even in the sauce, with particularly sweet peas since they’re in season now. I had the duck breast entrée, which was cooked medium rare (as it should be) and remained tender, with a blueberry mostarda, creamed greens (spinach and maybe mustard greens?), and corn pancakes. That last bit wasn’t great – they were dry, and there wasn’t anything for them to sop up elsewhere on the plate – although that’s nitpicking. I had two cocktails since I wasn’t driving, first a Last Word and then their gin-lemon-thyme syrup cocktail, which one server said was their riff on a gimlet, but a gimlet is gin/lime without sweetener so I don’t know if that’s apt. I was afraid a second Last Word (does that make the one before it the Penultimate Word?) would put me on the floor, so the latter drink was a sound compromise and much lighter on the palate. They have an enormous wine menu, if that’s your beverage of choice.

I had coffee at Spiller Park the other two mornings I was in town, visiting their newest location in Midtown and the Moores Mill store, so I’ve now been to all four spots. The biscuits at Midtown are solid – that’s a rolled biscuit, so very different from Buttermilk Kitchen’s, and while I like both varieties I’m definitely in the rolled camp (think Biscuitville or Cracker Barrel’s kind). The Moores Mill shop offers bagels; I had the Controversial Vegan, with mashed avocadoes and sumac onions, which was very sharp and highly spiced with sumac.

I only ate one meal in Tuscaloosa, and that had to be Dreamland BBQ, which scouts have been telling me about for years. I’d been to the Birmingham location, but I’m a believer in trying the original whenever possible, and it’s better in terms of the food and the atmosphere. The ribs were solid but a little tougher than I expected; the smoked sausage, though, was fantastic, perfectly moist, smoky, just faintly spicy, no sauce required although I did as I was told and tried the dipping sauce it came with (I wouldn’t bother). It’s a bare-bones menu – ribs, sausage, pulled chicken or pork, with platters or sandwiches, and just four sides: cole slaw, potato salad, baked beans, and mac & cheese. I picked the first two, because I was already out on a ledge eating that much pork, and believe it or not, the cole slaw was excellent. It’s so often an afterthought at barbecue places – sometimes it’s a goopy mess, sometimes it’s clearly not that fresh and so it has no crunch, and sometimes people put weird shit in there – that it was a delight to get a very basic, straightforward version that was fresh and not overdressed. Also, if you get the sweet tea, be prepared for a sugar rush. It was all great but I don’t know that I’ll go back, just because I don’t eat like this any more and certainly shouldn’t eat like this any more at my age.

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→ April 30, 2025
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We Were Once a Family.

The 2018 murder-suicide of the Hart family became a national story, first because it seemed like a tragic accident, then because it was an unthinkable crime where the parents murdered their entire family. News coverage afterwards tended to focus solely on the women, asking why they had done it, with some bigoted attacks that argued against gay couples’ rights to adopt. What nearly all of the ensuing news coverage omitted was anything about the six children, all of whom were Black and came from Texas, while the mothers, both white, lived in Minnesota.

Roxanna Asgarian covered the story for The Oregonian and developed her work into the book We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America, which tells the stories of the six children before and after their adoptions, and then branches off into a broader examination of the dysfunctional child-protection systems operating in Texas and many other red states. Her efforts to know who the six children, two sets of siblings, were, and to get to know their surviving family members – including an older brother whose life has been defined and probably ruined by Texas Child Protective Services – make for an exceptional if gut-wrenching read, filled with grief and needless suffering. The second half of the book loses the narrative greed of the Harts’ story, with broader descriptions of the many failings of the foster industrial complex, including the reckless pace at which Texas separates children from their birth parents, often adopting them out of state, with the policy hitting Black families at a disproportionate level. Asgarian’s arguments are convincing, but her strength is in the human stories that fill the first half of the book.

The Harts, Jennifer and Sarah, had a checkered history even before they took in the first trio of children; they’d fostered a teenaged girl before, but a bizarre incident at a Green Bay Packers game led them to lie about the girl and kick her out. They adopted three siblings from Texas after the mother relinquished her parental rights following multiple arrests for cocaine usage and her violation of an order not to contact her children. Those three children were already showing some signs of neglect and abuse when the Harts rushed to adopt three more children, all half-siblings. Minnesota investigated them after a teacher reported possible abuse of Hannah, one of the children, but the Harts managed to talk their way out of it – the educated white women having their word accepted over that of a Black child – and then decamped for the west coast, first Oregon, and, when Oregon authorities came calling, to Washington. It appears that another possible investigation was the provocation for the women, particularly Jen, to decide to kill the entirely family, rather than face prosecution for the way they starved and abused the children.

These kids were deprived of their shot at a normal life by a Texas justice system that was already stacked against Black families, and that pursued a policy of pursuing potential adoptions simultaneous with efforts by the parents to meet criteria to reunite with their children. The parents in this case had the misfortune to run into a corrupt, racist judge named Pat Shelton, who later earned some notoriety when he helped his daughter escape serious charges for an accident where she was driving drunk at age 19 that killed her passenger; she somehow also got credit for finishing her community service hours while still in prison. The Houston Chronicle referred to his courtroom as “running a kind of adoption express,” and he also operated a crony system that rewarded lawyer friends of his who didn’t talk back or fight his wishes in court. It’s emblematic of the approach in Texas that sees taking children away from their birth parents and giving them to adoptive parents as the solution to a problem. Once the kids are with their new families, they’re off the books, so to speak. There’s little or no follow-up, and often those kids get trafficked out of state where the birth parents can’t even see them, let alone work to regain any parental rights. Asgarian doesn’t draw the comparison, but it’s analogous to Texas and other states claiming their abortion bans are somehow “pro-life,” when there are no life-supporting policies to help mothers and children after birth.

Asgarian avoids the salacious aspects of the murder, and is careful when discussing the fraught topic of interracial adoptions, discussing multiple evidence-based perspectives and research papers, while mentioning the imperfect parallel to the policy of removing Native American children from their homes in the U.S. and Canada until well into the 20th century. It’s a thoughtful approach, but it also means the resulting work loses much of its humanity as soon as she leaves the stories of the children or their birth families. Some of the strongest parts of the work are with the boy who lived, Dontay, who had been separated from his three younger siblings before the Harts adopted them; Asgarian worked for months to gain enough of his trust for him to talk about his experiences in foster care and in institutions. She paints empathetic portraits of the birth mothers, especially Sherri, Dontay’s mother and the mother of the first three children the Harts adopted, and her husband Nathaniel, who comes across as something of a saint in the telling. (Another of Sherri’s sons, Devontay, was the boy who hugged a cop in the so-called “hug heard round the world” photograph during protests after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.) It’s a deep reminder that these six children died when there were people who loved them and never stopped trying to get them back; the government of Texas in particular chose to send them to a life of abuse rather than permit the possibility of reunion.

When Asgarian ties these two halves together, showing that the policies of the state of Texas began the collapse of dominoes that ended in the murders of the six children, the result is a cogent indictment of a system that purports to protect children while treating them like trash to be removed from the house, after which it’s taken away and no one ever has to see it again. It is angry, and it is infuriating, but at its best, it’s also a book of profound humanity. And maybe it’s a call to the rest of us to stop ignoring what is happening on our watch.

Next up: By the time this runs, I’ll likely have finished Alexei Panshin’s Rite of Passage.

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→ April 29, 2025
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A Day in the Life of Abed Salama.

Winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, Nathan Thrall’s A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy uses a single, devastating incident – an accident involving a school bus that killed six children and a teacher – to explore the nature of life in the West Bank under Israeli occupation back in 2012. The depiction of how a regime of apartheid – a word used by an Israeli official Thrall quotes in the book – makes life for ordinary Palestinians so much harder, and in this case probably resulted in more deaths and severe injuries than there otherwise would have been, comes across even more starkly today in light of the last eighteen months.

Abed Salama is a father living in the Palestinian town of Anata, on the ‘wrong’ side of the separation wall Israel built along the Green Line in the West Bank, whose only son, Milad, was on that bus at the time of the crash. An unqualified driver entered a busy intersection on a poorly-maintained road for Palestinian at high speed, slamming into the school bus, which then caught fire, burning several children and a teacher to death, although heroic efforts by several people rescued many children from the same fate. Thrall explains how the Palestinian-Israeli conflict shaped the lives of many of the adults involved, with many of them involved in Palestinian rights groups, some of them designated as terrorists by Israel, while Israel’s control of the West Bank and push to claim land through force and settlements has boxed Palestinians into tiny enclaves that often leave them without access to key public resources – like quality hospitals. Even the roads are segregated; Israel built a major highway to bypass the intersection where the accident occurred, but it’s off limits to most Palestinians.

Thrall, who is Jewish and lived in Jerusalem for several years, places blame for the accident and its aftermath squarely on the Israeli government – on several governments, really, dating back to Israel’s independence, the Naqba, and ethnic cleansing efforts like Operation Bi’ur Hametz, which wiped Palestinians out of the city of Haifa a few months after the UN partition order. Abed’s entire life has been shaped by the Palestinian-Israeli conflict; he was involved in the DFLP, a Marxist-Leninist group that was under the PLO’s umbrella, and was tortured and jailed for several months by a military tribunal. (Thrall notes that over 99% of verdicts by military tribunals against Palestinians are ‘guilty,’ and that at one point 40% of Palestinian men had been arrested during the occupation of the West Bank.) Abed’s extended family includes people working for the provisional government who maintain relationships with Israeli authorities – and get special privileges for doing so – and people who are or have been jailed for fighting Israeli forces, sometimes simply for throwing stones at Israeli officers. He explains how the Oslo accords presented Palestinians with a lopsided deal that they had little choice but to accept, creating concentric zones of control that limited Palestinian authority in the West Bank to those enclaves, where moving freely between them meant passing through checkpoints and facing possible arrest or detainment. It’s a brief history of the conflict from a side that isn’t as commonly presented here – I wasn’t aware, for example, of how little land the Palestinians truly controlled after Oslo, knew nothing of the Haifa operation, and have no memory of the mass murderer Baruch Goldstein, who killed 29 Palestinians and wounded over 100 more in a mosque during Ramadan, possibly a reaction to the first Oslo accords. The list goes on.

The main premise of the book is that none of this had to happen as it did, but that systemic and structural barriers made the accident more likely and its outcome far worse than it needed to be. The economy of the West Bank depended almost entirely on Israel, which tightly controlled the movement of people and goods within the territory and across the border into Israel. The Palestinian authorities – which are still rife with corruption, a point Thrall doesn’t address – lacked the funds and especially the power to build or maintain basic public infrastructure, including roads, hospitals, and firehouses, because of the garrote Israel has placed around its economy and territory. Thrall even quotes an Israeli official referring to the highway on which the accident occurred as the “apartheid road,” because Israel built its own highway (60) through the area and that portion of the road is forbidden to anyone with a Palestinian license plate. Several of the victims of the accident went to the local hospitals, which are understaffed and have inferior equipment, because getting them across the border into Jerusalem would have taken too long. Thrall even points to the ages of the bus and truck involved in the accident as the result of Israeli policies that have left Palestinians much poorer than their neighbors – although, again, corruption in the Palestinian Authority has to be a factor here.

I don’t think Thrall soft-plays the violence committed by some Palestinians against Israel, but it’s not his focus beyond implying that Israel’s response to any such attacks has been to tighten its grip on the West Bank and Gaza. They built the separation wall and argued it was to protect against terrorist attacks from Palestine. They have limited Palestinian movement even within the West Bank under the guise of preventing further attacks. Thrall doesn’t argue directly against Israeli security efforts, making no claims about their effectiveness or lack thereof, but presents evidence that the de facto police state that exists at least in the portions of the West Bank that abut Israel make daily life much harder for Palestinians who have nothing to do with any Palestinian terror groups. The result here is families devastated by the losses of their children, in several cases even unable to see their kids’ bodies, identifying them by scraps of clothing because their bodies were too burned for recognition. That is a tragedy that should affect every reader, regardless of one’s views on this particular conflict.

(I’m going to keep comments open here for now, but given the nature of the subject and the tendency I’ve seen for this topic to lead to personal attacks, I may close them at any point and will delete any comments that resort to insults or other invective.)

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→ April 28, 2025
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The Book of Love.

The Book of Love is Kelly Link’s first novel, coming nine years after her third short story collection Get In Trouble was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – a rarity for genre fiction of any sort. This novel, following a quartet of teenagers after three of them end up accidentally dead and are purposely brought back to life by a demon of questionable intent, is a damn masterpiece.

The novel opens with Susannah mourning the disappearance and presumed death of her sister, Laura, and two of Laura’s friends, Daniel – Susannah’s putative boyfriend – and Mo, a year earlier. But it turns out they were just mostly dead, and in the second chapter, we meet the three of them, plus a fourth character, as the guy they thought was their boring music teacher Mr. Anabin reveals he’s brought them back from the death place, and that he’ll give them another chance at life, altering everyone else’s memories so they think the trio were just away on a study-abroad program in Ireland. It turns out that this is part of a more complex deal between Mr. Anabin and another demon (or whatever he is) named Bogomil, whose history is longer and more complicated than anyone imagined. We follow the four as they try to figure out how to fulfill Mr. Anabin’s requests so they can stay alive while also navigating their relationships with each other, with people in their New England town of Lovesend, with a new visitor or two, and with an all-powerful evil entity who would like nothing better than to just eat them all up.

Link builds the world of this book piecemeal, giving us hints as we go along as to what lies just beyond the ‘door’ through which the three friends passed, even holding off on introducing or explaining some key characters until well into the narrative. It adds to the book’s dreamlike atmosphere, which itself connects to Susannah’s dreams about Bogomil and the way Mr. Anabin and later other characters play with sense and memory, while also keeping the reader from becoming too omniscient, so we can better feel the confusion of the troika as they seek to understand their situation and their changing abilities.

The book overflows with interesting characters, highlighted by the fantastic four at the heart. Susannah and Laura are sisters, opposites in nearly every way, but believable and fleshed-out, even more than the two boys. Daniel’s a bit of a goof, a well-meaning one, the guy who drifts through life while good things happen to him; while Mo is a more tragic figure who hates Daniel for exactly that reason. The way the four interact, with fights and tiffs and real moments of emotion, may be the greatest strength in a book that is as strong as any I’ve read in a year.

The story meanders at times, yet it never feels padded and certainly doesn’t slow down for anything or anyone; the final quarter or so seems to move at top speed, as the trio figure out some things about their predicament and the various competing forces lock Lovesend under a spell that may end in the destruction of the entire town. I don’t know if Link entirely stuck the landing here; it’s imperfect, but not bad by any means, just perhaps a little too tidy, where everyone gets some variation of a happy ending – or at least not a sad or tragic one. The denouement with the final boss is also of debatable quality; it works, barely, but again relies on a little hand-waving that this is all just fine and go with it. And I did go with it, to be clear.

If you like the work of Neil Gaiman, which I always have, but are looking for similar literature by any other author for obvious reasons, this is the most Gaimanesque novel I’ve ever read. It has dark, creepy elements, and it sits on both sides of the divide between life and death, with flawed main characters and demons from the benevolent to the purely evil. It has the feeling of an impossible story, that no one should be able to write this well, with prose this clear and clever, with characters this three-dimensional, and with a story that nearly sets the pages on fire as you progress. It’s on the list of finalists for this year’s Nebula Award, and I have no idea how the Hugos whiffed on it. The Book of Love is a marvel.

Next up: Alexei Panshin’s Nebula-winning novel Rite of Passage.

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→ April 26, 2025
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Stick to baseball, 4/26/25.

I had two posts for Athletic subscribers this week, a draft scouting notebook on Ethan Holliday, Eli Willits, and JoJo Parker; and a minor league scouting post on some Mets and Orioles prospects in high A. I’m very worried about what I saw from Carson Benge. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I’ve updated the top 50 pizzerias post from yesterday to reflect two places that closed (one just within the last five months).

And now, the links…

  • Harvard is fighting back, suing the Trump Administration over the latter’s (likely illegal) attempts to cut funding to research programs the school conducts on behalf of the government. The Times has more on the conservative twits on the Harvard Board of Oversees who wanted to make a deal with Trump – even though Columbia tried that and it got them nothing.
  • Vox has the story of grid-scale batteries and how they might help green energy sources replace more fossil fuels … if the Administration doesn’t stop it.
  • The damage from President Trump’s irrational and ever-changing tariff … uh, are they even policies? … may be irreparable and will certainly last well beyond his term.
  • Mississippi was on a heater last week in its effort to prove it’s the most backward state in the union. Their Supreme Court ruled that a transgender teen can’t legally change their name until they’re 21, because that’s the age of majority in that state. (For reference, the age of consent in Mississippi is 16. Real consistent there, fellas.) And then their Governor declared April Loser Heritage Month.
  • The Guardian has a story on former Royals minor leaguer Tarik El-Abour, who played four games in the Arizona Rookie League in 2018, making him the first player in the history of affiliated ball who was known to be autistic. (I don’t know what the best phrasing is for that, but I hope the point is clear.) El-Abour responds to the hateful, ignorant comments from the Secretary of Health and Human Services where he painted autistic people as a burden on society.
  • Texas’s House passed a school vouchers bill despite broad opposition from the public, because Trump bullied a number of legislators into voting for Gov. Abbott’s pet project. The program seems very likely to drain funds from public schools that need it and allow wealthy Texans to send their kids to private schools on the taxpayers’ dime.
  • The six brownshirts who forcibly removed a woman from a town hall in Idaho last month have been charged with various crimes, five of them with battery and four with false imprisonment.
  • Greater than Games has effectively shut down as a result of President Trump’s futile tariff war. Their most popular game is Sentinels of the Multiverse.
  • Bitewing Games has a Kickstarter up for two travel-sized board games, Gingham and Gazebo, the latter of which is from designer Reiner Knizia.

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