My one Insider piece from this week included my own scouting notes on prospects Jeff Hoffman, Spencer Adams, Gleyber Torres, and Brad Markey.
Klawchats have returned! They’ll be here on the dish from now on, as ESPN has ended all Sportsnation chats. The first one was on Thursday.
And now, the links…
- Marlins beat writer Juan Rodriguez is fighting brain cancer, and some of his friends have set up a fund to help support his family.
- Every Day Should Be Saturday says pay the players, dammit, through a personal essay about what it’s like to be broke.
- Hand-pulled oyster with activated artichoke, anyone? The man behind the Brooklyn Bar Menu Generator talked to the Village Voice about his creation.
- The passing of neurologist and author Oliver Sacks has led to some touching tributes, including Atul Gawande’s in memoriam piece, which also mentions their shared love of the excellent dystopian short story “The Machine Stops
,” available for a buck for your Kindle through that link. It’s never mentioned in discussions of E.M. Forster’s works, but I’d take that over A Passage to India any day.
- BBC’s Assignment radio program looks at Paraguay’s preteen pregnancy problem, exploring why schoolgirls there are so vulnerable to abuse.
- Digg interviewed the Food Lab’s Kenji Lopez-Alt ahead of the release of his first book, The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science
, later this month.
- I haven’t tried this recipe but I was intrigued enough to share it: Sichuan-spiced dry-brined turkey. Dry brining doesn’t require a giant bucket as a wet brine does, and the recipe calls for spatchcocking (stop laughing) the bird for more even cooking of the white and dark meats.
- New York has a rare positive story on climate change, arguing that we’ve finally gotten serious about slowing it. One major reason, in the author’s opinion, is the threat of a Republican candidate winning in 2016, as that party steadfastly denies the science on climate change in embarrassing fashion.
- How did lobster become so commoditized that it’s now on the McDonald’s menu? The New Yorker provides an “unnatural” history of the McLobster, looking at advances in lobster fishery that resemble other types of animal husbandry.
- If you want to know why baseball is becoming whiter, there’s a simple explanation: youth sports are too damn expensive.
- Celebrity chef Kerry Simon died this week at age 60 of multiple system atrophy. I first saw Simon on TV maybe fifteen years ago, on a Food Network show where he went to some off-Strip places in Vegas where he said the real chefs would go to eat. One of those places: Firefly, now one of my favorite restaurants in Las Vegas.
, a spiritual precursor to Catch-22, one that allows the absurdity of military life and bureaucracy to satirize itself while also humanizing the American occupation of Italy through one character, Major Joppolo, who becomes the wartime mayor of the Italian town of Adano.
.
, the dense 570-page opener, on Friday, and I can’t fathom why it won the Nebula or has spawned a cult following that appears to be leading toward a scripted series 
on amazon.
, the third album from Quebecois pop singer Béatrice Martin, features her first original compositions in English, although most of the album is in French like her previous work. 
sounds like a big drinking song – and like it was actually recorded in the pub where everyone was getting hammered.
, but it’s very safe and overproduced, emphasizing the pop over the punk. I know that not every African-American punk band can be Bad Brains, but these kids had some of that looser, angrier feel in their earlier releases.
is decidedly anti-commercial, almost grating, until the sudden arrival of this seventh track, a slower song that marries the anti-tonal vocal style of Kim Gordon with the dissonant math-rock of Polvo. 
. Ghost’s members all appear under pseudonyms, and they maintain a facetious Satanic theme in their lyrics and appearance, something that only detracts from the fact that they’re producing some of the most compelling metal in the market today – it’s heavy yet melodic, eschewing death growls and blast beats but retaining the musical sensibilities of the Gothenburg style or even Finnish acts like Children of Bodom. I think the
, part of the same Great Discoveries series that includes 
tells the story of rare map dealer turned thief E. Forbes Smiley III, and follows in the footsteps of an earlier book about another crook who cut rare maps from ancient atlases, Miles Harvey’s 
. While Blanding’s book is better written and organized, giving a breezy history of cartography and explaining why some of these maps are so rare, the subject of the book, Smiley, is a fairly milquetoast character, even when Blanding tries to give him more dimension by talking about his attempts to remake a small town in rural Maine. This sort of non-fiction book tends to work best when the central narrative involves a literal or figurative chase, but Blanding spends scant time on the portion of Smiley’s story between the discovery that he may have taken some maps (or even that maps were missing) to his arrest. Harvey’s book, on the other hand, tells the story of the appropriately-named Gilbert Bland, an antiques dealer with no apparent personality, by turning into more of an old-fashioned crime book, documenting his crimes and the process of tracking him down in a way that covers up Bland’s lack of character. Both books are solid reads in their own rights, with Blanding’s shorter and more tightly organized, while Harvey’s has more narrative greed.
reads like a fable, detailing the titular character’s rise from his youth as the son of a cigar-store owner to successful hotelier and entrepreneur, only to find with each new venture that his ambition is unsated, eventually pushing himself to build a hotel so grandiose that it fails. Along the way, Dressler marries the wrong woman, an entirely unconvincing subplot that undermined much of the novel’s narrative force. I could see the Pulitzer committee loving the book for its exploration of the superficiality of the American Dream.
, later adapted into a Best Picture-nominated film that starred three of the best actresses of its specific time (Julianne Moore, Meryl Streep, and Nicole Kidman, who won an Oscar for her performance as Virginia Woolf), seemed to fit the Pulitzer Committee’s loose standards less, but was a more literary, well-rounded work. Cunningham crafts three vaguely interconnected novellas and weaves them together with frequent shifts between them, setting them in three different times, with the only overt connection via Mrs. Dalloway: one story follows Woolf as she’s writing it, the other two revolve around women who’ve read the book and felt a deep connection to it. I would probably have enjoyed or appreciated The Hours more if I’d actually liked Mrs. Dalloway or had at least read it more recently, although the way Cunningham eventually connects the two non-Woolf stories, while somewhat predictable, is touching without devolving into mere sentiment, and still left me wanting more of that unified storyline.
, a short work of historical fiction, did nothing for me. It’s missing most of his trademark humor, instead telling a fictionalized version of the life of the Empress Helena, mother of Constantine, who made a pilgrimage to Syriana and, according to legend, rediscovered the True Cross on which Jesus Christ was crucified. Waugh converted to Catholicism after writing his first novel, Vile Bodies, and while there are strains of his religious belief through all of his later works, Helena feels maudlin and ends with a passage that you might characterize as magical realism depending on your point of view on Christianity. Waugh apparently considered this one of his best novels, but since his satirical prose and eye were what made him a great novelist, Helena feels inconsequential in comparison.
, winner of a National Book Award in 1982, came recommended by my friend Samantha, an avid bibliophile who favors shorter fiction where I go for novels. So Long is a 135-page novella that explores loss and memory through the eyes of an old man remembering his broken connection with a friend when the latter’s father committed a shocking murder. The narrator goes back to the time of the murder and recounts the circumstances that led up to it, although I imagine his account is supposed to be unreliable (as with the imagined recollections of the narrator of James Salter’s 
, that’s highly regarded in England but seems to have never caught on here, perhaps because its subject is so very British. The 1949 novel starts out like a Jane Austen book: Two sisters move into a remote castle with their author father, who subsequently falls into severe writer’s block and finds himself unable to produce another novel – or any income, with the girls’ stepmother only barely more able to provide. A wealthy family moves into the neighborhood, with two very eligible bachelor sons, one of whom takes a fancy to the narrator’s sister … but Smith avoids the predictable and crafts a compelling narrative by having the younger sister, Cassandra, tell the story through her journal, with scrupulous honesty. I was hoping for a little more humor, but the seventeen-year-old narrator’s voice doesn’t have Austen’s wry comic style. The descriptions of the family’s privations early in the book wore on, but the denouement justified much of the time spent to get there.
tells of an Italian expatriate’s return to his hometown after the devastation of the Mussolini regime and the second World War, and the tragedies he uncovers while obviously hoping to return to a town unchanged. Without any knowledge of the specific history of Italy under fascism, however, I failed to connect with the story or any of the characters. The isolation of the protagonist and the sparse prose reminded me of Camus, and not in a good way.