→ March 4, 2023
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Stick to baseball, 3/4/23.

I posted an early draft ranking of just 30 names, enough for a typical round, for subscribers to The Athletic. I’ll expand that list a few times and eventually get to 100 by May or so, but I’d like to at least see all the high school players get started.

No podcast this week as the guest I had lined up had to reschedule. Feel free to sign up for my free email newsletter, as I’ll be sending another one out this week.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: The Financial Times has a deep dive into how Putin blundered into Ukraine and has continued isolating himself from would-be advisers who might have helped him out of this mess. The writer posits that Putin may try to hold on until January of 2025, hoping we elect a Republican as President and thus pull our military support of Ukraine.
  • Anything Elizabeth Kolbert writes is a must-read for me; her latest piece in the New Yorker covers how our mining of too much phosphorus and subsequent waste of much of it is choking our oceans while leading towards a bottleneck that threatens our food supply. The article also describes the world’s longest conveyor belt, a 61-mile track in the illegally annexed territory of the Western Sahara.
  • A former employee came out with claims about malfeasance at a St. Louis medical center that treats transgender youth, telling her story to a newsletter author who doesn’t engage in any sort of fact-checking of stories. The Missouri Independent and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch both investigated and found no corroboration, finding instead that parents had nothing but praise for the center and the treatment their children received. Newsletters are fine for some types of content, but not for actual news.
  • The New Republic profiled Dr. David Gorski, who has also blogged as Orac, and his battle against pseudoscience, quackery, and so-called “alternative” medicine online. (There is no such thing as “alternative” medicine. If it works, it’s medicine.)
  • I enjoyed this Slate story on the 25th anniversary of Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea and the bizarre, cultlike fandom that album has generated. The title track from that record remains one of my favorite songs to play & sing.
  • The cesspool of Twitter had a debunked conspiracy theory trending earlier this week about Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs. It’s just one of several that Republican legislators there continue to push as they’ve seen the state turn increasingly blue.
  • There is no “lab leak theory.” There are a bunch of conspiracy theories, but no single, testable theory of how COVID-19 was supposedly engineered in and escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China. And the available evidence points to a zoonotic (natural) origin.
  • If you saw anything about Washington, D.C., attempting to update its criminal code this week, with hysterical tweets about reducing penalties for certain crimes like carjacking, there’s a lot more to the story. Most of this would be solved by just making the district a state with the same autonomy as the other fifty have.
  • Arkansas’ new education plan, which includes an extremely broad voucher program, is full of sops to banks and charter-school operators, and it’s also likely to gut public education in the state while favoring higher-income families. Sounds great!
  • Tennessee jumps on the bandwagon by banning drag shows. There is no evidence any drag show has ever harmed anyone. There is, however, copious evidence that guns have. The choice to ban harmless entertainment should tell you everything about this legislature.
  • Board game news: Restoration Games announced that they’re retiring the first two Unmatched sets, Cobble & Fog and Robin Hood vs. Big Foot, later this year, with no plans to reprint them.
  • The Gamefound campaign for Huang, a new game from prolific designer Reiner Knizia, is fully funded with five days to go.
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→ March 2, 2023
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Music update, February 2023.

February spawned a lot of great music, as it turns out, enough that I have 82 minutes of new tracks for you here. As always, if you can’t see the Spotify widget below, you can access the playlist here.

Temples – Cicada. I seem to like whatever Temples puts out, at least for their singles; their take on psychedelic rock, often with the kind of influences from Asia and north Africa that gave us Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir.” I love the interplay between the guitar and vocals in the frantic chorus here.

Fucked Up – Cicada. What are the odds of two great songs called “Cicada” dropping in the same month? Technically this came out in late January on these Canadian punk/post-hardcore stalwarts’ sixth album, One Day, and if you told me this was a lost track from Hüsker Dü I’d believe you.

Geese – Cowboy Nudes. This is the first new song from this young Brooklyn band (including Mets fan Dominic DiGesu on bass!) since their standout debut album Projector, and it sees them expanding their sound substantially. It’s less dissonant, better produced, and definitely more art-rock than anything on Projector, which was an incredible throwback to the heyday of post-punk.

CHVRCHES – Over. A one-off single from the Scottish trio, who just signed a new deal with Island Records, “Over” goes back a little in time, with a sound reminiscent of “Clearest Blue” from Every Open Eye.

Altin Gün – Rakiya Su Katamam. I didn’t know Anatolian rock, also called Turkish psychedelic rock, was a specific subgenre, but I’m extremely into it after stumbling on this track by this Amsterdam-based outfit. The “i” in the song’s title should be the Turkish character ?, without the dot on type, but I don’t think it’ll display properly.

Brooke Combe – Black is the New Gold. Combe is just 22, from Midlothian, Scotland, and this is the title track from her forthcoming mixtape. The hook was stuck in my head for days, and I like both her singing voice and the slight syncopation (here, stress on the third beat of each measure) that gives the track its subtle groove.

Caroline Polachek – Blood and Butter. Polacheck was half of Chairlift, who produced two of my favorite tracks of the last decade (“I Belong in Your Arms” and “Ch-Ching”), but her solo stuff has left me pretty cold. This is my favorite of her songs since Chairlift broke up, as it has a much stronger melody while still showcasing her impressive voice.

John-Allison Weiss – Tell Me to Go. Another strong single from The Long Way, Weiss’ first album in over seven years and their first since coming out as trans and non-binary.

Bartees Strange – Tisched Off. One of two tracks on a double-sided single from Strange as part of Sub Pop’s singles series, along with a song featuring Daniel Kleederman.

STONE – I Let Go. The first new song from STONE after their 2022 EP Punkadonk is a raucous rocker that’s less punk and more hard-edged rock-and-roll.

bdrmm – It’s Just a Bit of Blood. This British act takes an experimental approach to post-punk and shoegaze, releasing this as the lead single ahead of their second album, I Don’t Know, due out in June.

Squid – Swing (In a Dream). Squid are even more experimental, with a post-punk underpinning but a very definite bent towards the dissonant and the offbeat, but the chorus here is a complete earworm.

wilt – puberty. wilt are an LA-based quartet who’ve released just three songs so far, including this most recent one, which has a slow burn to a big finish with giant guitar riffs that reminded me of the band Hum.

beabadoobee – Glue Song. A cute two-minute acoustic number from beabadoobee, not one of my favorites from her but a solid showcase for her voice.

Beck – Thinking About You. I generally do not love Beck’s slower acoustic tracks, even though they tend to garner him more critical acclaim. I also didn’t like this song the first time I heard it, but then I went back, and I liked it more the second time, and even more the third time. So here it is.

Black Honey – OK. I include just about every single Black Honey puts out at this point. Their third album, A Fistful of Peaches, comes out on March 17th.

Girl Ray – Everybody’s Saying That. A North London trio that started out as an indie act and pivoted towards pop around 2018-2019, Girl Ray just released this funk-tinged pop track right at the start of February, with a great hook in the chorus and a prominent bass line that makes this a hell of a dance song too.

swim school – delirious. swim school describe themselves as “Tesco-value Wolf Alice,” which isn’t that apposite to this particular track, which is way more shoegaze than Wolf Alice’s cheerier indie-pop/rock style.

Inhaler – Just to Keep You Satisfied. Inhaler released Cuts & Bruises, their second full-length, two weeks ago, and I think they’ve stalled; this is more of the same from the Irish quartet, but even a step back in the quality of their melodies. Inhaler has a sound, and that only gets you so far without some hooks like their first album had.

Depeche Mode – Ghosts Again. I mean, if you want to go back to the sound of the ‘80s, you could just listen to one of the bands that made that sound. This is the first song from Memento Mori, the band’s fifteenth album and their first since the death of longtime band member Andy Fletcher. The album drops March 24th, and it sounds like it will be a melancholy affair, which isn’t really my favorite flavor of Depeche Mode.

San Cisco – Lost Without You. The first new song from this Australian trio since their 2020 album Between You & Me is a typically bouncy alt-pop track with witty lyrics that offer a dark contrast to the music. The video, which stars the three in a Sting-like gangster film, is worth a watch.

Demob Happy – Voodoo Science. I was unfamiliar with Demob Happy, who’ve been around for fifteen years, before hearing this track, but I love the guitar riffing here, which reminds me of Porcupine Tree’s heavier moments.

shame – The Fall of Paul. This London-based post-punk band’s Food for Worms dropped last month and the highs (“Fingers of Steel,” “Six-Pack”) are high but there’s too much filler where the band sound like they’re just fucking around, unfortunately.

slowthai – Feel Good. British rapper slowthai’s third album, UGLY, which supposedly stands for “U gotta love yourself,” drops on Friday. I find his music more interesting than appealing, as he’s crossing and mashing up a lot of genres but his technical skill as a rapper isn’t his strength. This is one of the better songs of his that I’ve heard.

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→ March 1, 2023
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The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.

Shehan Karunatilaka won this year’s Booker Prize for his novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, a fascinating work of magical realism that might as well be called Maali Almeida in the Bardo, as its protagonist is dead from the moment the book begins. Set in Sri Lanka in 1989, in the early years of what would be a 36-year civil war between the governing Sinhalese majority and Tamil rebels, the book follows the title character, a photographer who took many photos of victims of the war, through his seven days (moons) in purgatory as he tries to figure out who killed him and how.

Maali Almeida is dead, and finds himself in a bureaucratic afterlife where multiple entities try to coax him into different directions, one of which is “the Light” and promises some sort of salvation, while another might give him the chance to communicate with the living to try to direct them to solve the mystery of his death by retrieving an important set of incriminating photographs he’s hidden. One possible explanation is that his work for a shadowy non-governmental organization or his freelance work for the AP and other journalistic outlets covering atrocities committed by both sides during the war. Almeida photographed corpses, but also murders and murderers, and any number of people might have wanted him dead.

Almeida was also gay in a society that was not particularly hospitable to gay people, although in his tales of his life there were closeted gay men all over Colombo (the capital of Sri Lanka). He lived with two friends, Jaki, who was supposed to be his girlfriend; and Dilan, known as DD, who was one of those closeted men and becomes Maali’s lover, although the photographer is serially unfaithful to him. DD’s father is the powerful businessman and politician Stanley, who would strongly prefer that his son not be gay and join his business rather than working for an environmental activist group, and who is emblematic of the byzantine connections across Sri Lankan society at the time, where even the “good” guys could be tied to one side of the civil war or the other.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is a richly layered novel that explores themes beyond just that of the civil war, which ended in 2009 with the defeat of the main Tamil rebel group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, and the death of their leader. Maali is a complicated protagonist, part hero and part anti-hero, a drunk, a philanderer, a degenerate gambler, an atheist, and more. He professed to just taking photographs as a job, although of course he took photographs as a hobby as well; he’s not explicitly political, but hoped to take pictures that could end wars and bloodshed. His multifaceted character opens up all kinds of thematic possibilities, from discrimination to morality to how we cope with our own mortality, and Karunatilaka explores all of these, some more successfully than others.

Of course, because of the photographs Maali took, the authorities become very keen to find this missing stash – more keen than they are to find out who killed him, even with pressure from his family, from Jaki and DD, even from Stanley at one point. This creates two parallel narratives and a real sense of time pressure, as Maali tries to direct his friends to get to the photographs so they can expose the atrocities of both sides, while the authorities are trying to get the photos for themselves, and there’s an inherent tension from the question of who’ll get to the photos first – or whether the authorities will get to Jaki and DD before anyone finds the cache. There’s also the clock of the seven moons, referring to seven days before which Maali must decide whether he’s going to move into the Light or follow one of the other shades offering a different experience in the afterlife.

Karunatilaka seems to be well-versed in the history of this sort of political satire with elements of magical realism, from The Master and Margarita to One Hundred Years of Solitude. This novel isn’t at the level of those two masterpieces, but it’s an heir to their legacy, drawing heavily on the former’s sense of the absurd and fantastical, and on the latter’s sense of outrage, especially outrage at the lack of outrage. Both of those earlier novels targeted authoritarian regimes that would torture and disappear opponents, which is exactly what the Sinhalese government in Sri Lanka did during the civil war. So much of this novel takes place in the afterworld – an especially ridiculous one, with bureaucrats, flunkies, and talking leopards – that it shields the reader from some of the worst horrors of the civil war, allowing Karunatilaka to push forward with a narrative that might otherwise have been unreadable.

I haven’t read any of the other longlisted novels for last year’s Booker Prize, although Percival Everett’s The Trees is on my to-read shelf right now. As Booker winners go, though, this is one of the better ones among the 40 I’ve read, and I hope it signals a return to the peak the prize had from 2008 to 2018, with just one dud in those eleven years and several of my all-time favorite novels winning during the span.

Next up: Nadifa Mohamed’s The Fortune Men, which won the Wales Book of the Year award in 2022 and was shortlisted for the Booker in 2021, losing to Damon Galgut’s The Promise.

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→ February 28, 2023
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Nope.

Nope is the third feature film from writer-director Jordan Peele, who won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for the outstanding Get Out, which was a biting satire wrapped in a smart horror film. For some reason, the studio behind Nope tried to pitch it more as another horror film, but that’s not just underselling it, but also probably misrepresented it. This is much more of a sci-fi mystery with a surprising moral to it, another smart film from Peele but in a completely different vein from his debut. (I haven’t seen Us, his second film.) You can stream Nope on Peacock or rent it on amazon, iTunes, etc.

Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer star as the siblings OJ and Em Haywood, who run a horse farm where they train the animals for roles in film and television. As Nope begins, their father, Otis Sr. (Keith David), is killed by metal debris that falls from the sky, with a nickel impaling him in the eye and a key embedded itself in the horse he was riding. They assume these fell from an airplane and eventually they try to pick up more business, but when they find it’s lagging, OJ sells some of his horses to the nearby western theme park Jupiter’s Claim, run by Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun), a former child star whose TV series ended in tragedy when the chimp who starred on the show became violent to several of the cast members – but not to Jupe. When the electricity starts going off on the Haywoods’ farm without explanation, and the horses start reacting badly to some unseen force, the siblings decide to invest in some high-tech cameras to try to figure out what’s going on.

Nope is a slow burn, similar to Get Out, but not quite the same – where Peele’s first film was sinister until the big reveal, this one unfurls its mystery by degrees, with more misdirection that allows you to experience the perspectives of multiple characters. It was also easier to figure out what was happening in Get Out, or at least get the sense, than what’s happening in Nope. The obvious answer would be that it’s a UFO, which, of course, most of the characters think is the answer, including the Fry’s Electronics employee Angel (Brandon Perea), who realizes from the start that something weird is happening out at the ranch and invites himself to be a part of the investigation. What they find is much more interesting on a literal level and a thematic one.

The cast is fantastic across the board. Kaluuya has never missed for me, right down to his pre-fame appearance on Doctor Who (where we get to hear his British accent for once). The steely reserve that made him so menacing in Widows here works in a different direction, as his character is so tightly wound that he feels like he’s about to combust. Yeun probably needed more to do, but he’s excellent, as always, as a huckster and entrepreneur trying to squeeze every dollar he can out of the limited assets he has. Perea is a scene-stealer in a comic relief character that’s actually well conceived and well written – he’s hilarious, but also plays important roles in the plot and helps illuminate the relationship between the siblings and also later provide some connection to a fourth character who helps them try to unravel the ultimate mystery. If there’d been any awards attention for this movie, he would have been worthy of a Best Supporting Actor nomination, as well as a potential Original Screenplay nod for Peele. Wrenn Schmidt is a little wasted as Jupe’s wife, while Barbie Ferreira is even more wasted in a cameo as Angel’s co-worker, but I did enjoy the cameo from ‘80s prime-time soap star Donna Mills.

There’s one overarching theme to the story here that I might spoil by discussing, so if you haven’t seen Nope and intend to, you may wish to stop reading. The throughline that connects Jupe and the Haywoods is the use of animals for entertainment, with the implication that how we treat these animals in turn affects how they will treat us, or even what sort of animals they will become over time. OJ shows respect for their horses, and when he’s trying to show one horse, Lucky, for a commercial, he bristles at any suggestion from the director that might distress the animal, even telling a crew member not to make eye contact with Lucky for fear it will upset him. While we don’t see Jupe’s chimpanzee colleague being openly mistreated, the flashbacks – the one bit of the film where there’s some actual violence on screen – strongly imply that the chimp was being exploited, and that his rampage was the result of this treatment. (If you want to go down a rabbit hole about this, several critics and writers have noted that this subplot mirrors the actual story of Travis the chimp, who was separated from his mother at three days old and sold to a couple who kept him as a pet, only to have him turn violent one day, mauling and disfiguring a family friend.) All of this comes together in the film’s resolution, which also features some spectacular visual effects, to make it clear that the story is at least trying to make us realize the extent to which we are exploiting other creatures – and perhaps, on some level, other people – for no purpose beyond our entertainment. The characters who don’t understand this end up dead; the others survive. I don’t think you could make the moral much clearer than that.

Right now, I have Nope in my top ten for the year, although it could end up pushed out as I see more foreign-language films, since several of the most acclaimed non-English language movies, including two Oscar nominees, still aren’t available digitally as of February 27th. (Here’s hoping I wake up to find The Quiet Girl is rentable.) Regardless of its exact ranking for me whenever I wrap this cycle, Nope is excellent, another cerebral, thoughtful undertaking from Peele, even if it’s not quite up to the high bar he set for himself with Get Out.

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→ February 27, 2023
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Blonde.

Blonde isn’t just the worst movie I’ve seen from 2022, by a long shot; it’s one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. It’s a patched-together collection of scenes that barely connect to each other, jumping through aspect ratios and shutter speeds and even from color to black and white with neither rhyme nor reason, like a teenaged filmmaker’s limited understanding of what it means to be experimental. It also fails at its most important task – giving the audience an interesting, three-dimensional portrait of its lead character, Marilyn Monroe.

The film tries to do a cradle-to-grave story, although the script, based on Joyce Carol Oates’ novel of the same name, isn’t going for any sort of accuracy – most of what’s in this film is made up, often leaning towards the lurid, which you could probably guess quickly by how much time Monroe (Ana de Armas) spends topless for no apparent reason. We see her abusive childhood with a mentally ill mother (Julianne Nicholson, giving maybe the only decent performance in the movie). When she’s removed from her mother’s care to an orphanage, the film jumps forward to her pin-up years, then to a meeting with a studio head who rapes her almost the minute she’s done reading, then through a meandering story that sideswipes the films she made while spending far more time on her tabloid romances, one of her miscarriages, and an abortion that apparently never happened. She meets and marries Joe DiMaggio (played by some actor doing a bad Bobby Cannavale impression), then meets and marries Arthur Miller (Adrien Brody), with no chemistry between her and either of these men, and in the case of Miller, no explanation at all of why they ended up together. An ongoing subplot where Monroe receives letters from a man purporting to be her father, whose identity she never knew, ends ridiculously, leading Monroe to take her own life with barbituates.

There is no defending this movie. It’s badly shot, looks bad, poorly acted, and incredibly poorly written, from character to dialogue to pacing. The opening story with Monroe and her mother, which recalls a better-done scene involving Mitzi in The Fabelmans, is disjointed, dark, and features her mother using stilted, bizarre vocabulary that wouldn’t make sense for an adult talking to another adult, let alone a parent talking to a preteen child. The flips between color and black-and-white photography happen without reason, and add nothing to the film. Monroe’s character jokingly asks if she’s just “a piece of meat,” but that is exactly how this movie treats her – she’s a bag of flesh and bones to be passed around or discussed or ogled, but she has no agency, no depth, no explanation beyond these idiotic Freudian notions that she has daddy issues or desperately needs to be a mother. Even the idea that she wanted to be taken more seriously as an actor is only brought up in passing, where the script just sort of waves to the notion as is drifts on by. Marilyn Monroe in Blonde is nothing but a victim of the world. I can’t think of a less generous interpretation of her life.

There are two rape scenes in Blonde, the second of which is unspeakably gross and degrading, even beyond what a complete fabrication that particular scene is. The camera focuses its male gaze on de Armas’s face while she is performing oral sex and trying not to gag, and stays there for something like two minutes. It has no artistic intent or merit; it exists to shock. I guess it worked, but it also underscored just how terrible this movie is from conception to execution. I doubt I would ever defend the existence of an on-camera rape scene in any film, but this film’s version is the worst of the worst.

De Armas does a dutiful impersonation of Monroe, although she can’t entirely lose her Cuban accent (and she’s a lot smaller than Monroe was, which seems a very odd choice given all the efforts to otherwise make people in this movie look like their real-life counterparts). It’s just a dead character, and she isn’t capable of infusing any life into it. Her brief role in No Time to Die highlighted how ebullient and energetic she can be on screen; Blonde shows that a bad script can leave her a walking doe-eyed corpse. You could argue this isn’t her fault, but giving this performance an Oscar nomination for Best Actress is more an acknowledgement of the fact that she had to suffer through this awful film – as did everyone who voted for her – than a measure of actual quality. Giving de Armas a nod over Tilda Swinton (The Eternal Daughter) is a giant farce, and should have garnered way more controversy than the Andrea Riseborough one did. I can think of at least five other lead performances by actresses that would have been more worthy, and I’ve only seen about 36 films from the 2022 Oscar cycle.

(In no order: Emma Thompson from Good Luck to You, Leo Grande; Jennifer Lawrence from Causeway; Ruth Wilson from True Things; Florence Pugh from The Wonder; and Frankie Corio from Aftersun.)

No one else fares much better, although there’s a mercy in how many characters we see in that none of them is on screen for very long. The two actors playing Cass Chaplin and Eddy Robinson are the most cringe-inducing, as they’re both doing some kind of impersonation of Skeet Ulrich’s character from Scream, right down to the hair (wrong decade, guys), in yet another complete fabrication that in this case informs the movie’s incredibly ill-conceived climax.

Blonde barely qualifies as a movie. It’s an absolute mess. I admit that having not read the book, I may have been unprepared for how far it diverges from history. If I set that aside, however, this movie is still garbage. Norma Jean deserved so much better.

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→ February 26, 2023
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To Leslie.

Like most people, even like most film critics, I had never heard of To Leslie before the surprise nomination of Andrea Riseborough for Best Actress in this year’s Academy Awards in late January. The film had taken in just $27,000 at the U.S. box office and had just a handful of reviews on Rotten Tomatoes at the time; there are far more reviews now but they’re almost all new as critics have rushed to catch up. Despite the controversy over how Riseborough ended up getting the nomination, To Leslie is quite a good film, and deserves the much wider audience it’s received, with standout performances from Riseborough and from her co-star Marc Maron. (You can rent it on Amazon, iTunes, etc.)

To Leslie is supposedly based on a true story, although the real person who inspired it has never been named that I can find. Leslie (Riseborough) is a single mom in west Texas who wins $190,000 in a local lottery, but who spends it all, mostly on alcohol, abandoning her 13-year-old son, losing her friends, and ending up homeless. The film jumps forward to the point where she’s been kicked out of the motel where she was living and has to call her son, James (Owen Teague). He lets her stay with him if she quits drinking, but that goes as you’d expect, and her life continues to spiral downward until she ends up at another motel run by Sweeney (Maron), where she gets a job cleaning rooms that also includes a place to stay. The majority of the film comes after that point and watches her struggle to stay sober, find some sort of purpose, and deal with the notoriety she’s acquired through her windfall and how publicly she squandered it.

There are, of course, a lot of addiction/redemption stories out there, and To Leslie is very much of that ilk, but it does several things to distinguish itself from its peers. One is that it doesn’t lionize the addict. Leslie’s kind of a terrible person. She’s not just a fuck-up, to use the technical term, but really does not seem to grasp the effects of her actions on other people at all, most notably how her choices in life have affected her son. She’s not the addict with a heart of gold for whom you just can’t help but root; I was rooting for Leslie because I didn’t want to see things continue to get worse for her, or to see her cause more misery for anyone around her. There’s no sense of “oh, if only she could get better, she’d be this wonderful mother/friend/person.”

To Leslie also doesn’t provide much in the way of magical solutions to addiction. Sweeney certainly helps her, but in a more practical sense, rather than, say, dispensing words of wisdom or some pop philosophy. Royal (Andre Royo) also lives and works at the motel, and he knows Leslie from childhood, so he’s seen her act and is very disinclined to help her, even trying to convince Sweeney not to give her the job or a room. Nance (Allison Janney), who we only know at the start as a former friend of Leslie’s, is openly antagonizing her in public. There’s no panacea here and no too-perfect friend or family member to offer a cure. Instead, Leslie pretty much has to do this on her own.

Riseborough is on camera for virtually the entire movie, giving this role a level of difficulty that few of her peers could match for this year. It is, truly, a tremendous performance, on par with Cate Blanchett’s in Tár, which I had as the best performance by an actress I’d seen so far in this cycle (even though, sentimentally, I’m pulling for Michelle Yeoh). She’s completely lost in the role, so it’s hard to even remember that she’s English, let alone that she’s not actually Leslie. It’s a fine line to walk to keep this character interesting without making her too pathetic or making her detestable, and Riseborough manages to stay on it. (She’s also great in the musical adaptation of Matilda, which came out last year on Netflix.) Maron is also excellent, giving Sweeney some nuance and complexity without making him too nice, or too sappy, or too much of anything. He’s a regular guy, and while his interest in helping Leslie isn’t that well explained by his back story – it’s just not that plausible – their interactions come across as very real. None of the supporting actors have that much to do, with Janney slightly wasted in her one-note role, while Stephen Root, who plays her partner Dutch, suffers from a lack of screen time.

As for the controversy over the nomination … I get why the Academy has those rules in place, but this is a good outcome for Riseborough, for the movie, and for the awards themselves. Maybe it’s a reminder to everyone involved that there are always great performances that get overlooked because the movies are too small or commercially unsuccessful. I’d probably still vote for Blanchett, but I wouldn’t argue with anyone who thinks Riseborough is better.

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→ February 25, 2023
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Stick to baseball, 2/24/23.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I’ve had several new posts, including a ranking of the top 20 prospects for impact in the majors in 2023 and a draft blog post on the Globe Life College Baseball Showdown, which featured TCU (Brayden Taylor), Vanderbilt (Enrique Bradfield Jr.), and more. I chatted with three of our beat writers about prospects – Dan Connolly about the Orioles’ farm system, Jen McCaffrey about the Red Sox’ farm system, and Dave O’Brien about Atlanta’s farm system.

I’ve done a bunch of podcasts and other interviews in the last few weeks, including the East Village Times’ podcast (Padres), the Seattle Sports Union podcast, the Phillies Nation podcast, WTMJ Milwaukee’s Extra Innings podcast, the Locked on Dodgers podcast, and the Sox Machine podcast (White Sox).

Over at Paste, I reviewed the game Quacks & Co., the kids’ version of the great push-your-luck game The Quacks of Quedlinburg.

On the Keith Law Show this week, I spoke with Fangraphs’ lead prospect writer Eric Longenhagen as we compared some of our rankings on our top 100s (here’s his top 100) and discussed the top of this year’s draft class. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I sent out another issue of my free email newsletter on Friday, which marks my sixth so far this year, a better pace than I had in 2022, something I hope to keep up now that I’ll be writing something pretty much every week for the Athletic.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: The New York Times Magazine has a long feature on Ghibli Park, a sort-of theme park built around the works of animation legend Hayao Miyazaki.
  • A police officer in Pueblo County, Colorado, shot and killed an unarmed man in the car line outside a school because the man got into the wrong car by mistake. Video shows the officer gave no warning and neither he nor his partner gave the victim, 32-year-old Richard Ward, any assistance as he bled to death on the ground. The DA declined to charge the officers, saying they “justifiably feared for their lives.”
  • I grew up in Smithtown, New York, and from kindergarten through twelfth grade I attended public schools in that district, which is now further embarrassing itself by adding armed guards at its schools despite no actual evidence that these prevent mass shootings.
  • 25th Century Games has a Kickstarter up for three new tile-laying games: Agueda, Color Field, and Donut Shop. As of Friday morning it’s less than $2000 away from its funding goal.
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→ February 24, 2023
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Death is Hard Work.

Death is Hard Work is the most recent novel by Syrian novelist Khaled Khalifa to be translated into English, first published in Arabic in 2016 and appearing in translation three years later. It’s a play on William Faulkner’s classic tragicomic novel As I Lay Dying, this time set in Syria during the present civil war, as three siblings try to transport their father’s corpse to a specific graveyard where he’d asked to be buried, working as a commentary on the collapse of Syrian society as well as a window into the internecine squabbles of the family.

Abdel Latif el-Salim has died, not long after his beloved second wife, Navine, preceded him in death, and Abdel’s dying wish to his son Bolbol was that he be buried in a certain graveyard in his hometown of Anabiya, a long way from where he died somewhere in Damascus. Bolbol takes this request very seriously despite the obvious practical complications of transporting a corpse in a hot country that is bitterly divided by civil war, where passing between two checkpoints can be more complicated than crossing an international border. Bolbol then recruits his brother, the arrogant and short-tempered Hussein, and their sister, Fatima, to accompany him on what seems like a suicide mission to drive a van with their father’s corpse in back to Anabiya. The novel follows them through interactions with friends and acquaintances who try to help them, rebels and soldiers who usually try to hold them up, to a jail and a hospital and across roads that barely exist, before the trio finally reach their destination.

The absurdity of the novel comes primarily from the fact that their father was wanted by the brutal authoritarian regime that still controls Syria for some unknown offense, likely just thoughtcrimes, which causes problems almost every time they are stopped by any entity connected to the central government. At one point, the soldiers “arrest” the corpse, although fortunately for all concerned, it never progresses to a trial. There’s also the grotesque humor that comes from the decomposition of the body, the stench of which actually helps the siblings escape trouble on more than one occasion on their journey.

The quarreling among the siblings, and the back stories of all four of the main characters (including the father, whose life was full of joy and heartbreak), all give the novel its dramatic heft. There’s a contrast between the almost mundane lives they all lived prior to the start of the civil war in 2011-12 and the life-and-death struggle going on every day across Syria in the novel’s present day, as well as a parallel between the siblings arguing with each other and the split within Syrian society, pitting neighbor against neighbor in a conflict that has at least a half-dozen different groups fighting the government and sometimes each other. I have just superficial knowledge of the civil war, but it seemed clear that Khalifa was at least in part crafting a metaphor for the conflict and for his country, where siblings continue to argue long after the thing that ties them together – a nation, their father – is dead and decaying.

There’s another, less positive aspect to the connection between this work and Faulkner – the challenging prose. Khalefa’s writing is dense, without the long sentence structures of the bard of Yoknapatawpha County but a similar grounding in the details of every scene and every character. That creates a richer tapestry, with even secondary characters becoming more three-dimensional on the page, but also makes it a slower read for a novel just short of 200 pages.

Khalefa’s previous novel, No Knives in this City’s Kitchens, won the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, given annually since 1996 to a novel written in Arabic that has not yet been translated into English, with such a translation part of the prize. I’d be curious if any of you have read that novel (or this one), since I liked Death is Hard Work enough to seek it out.

Next up: I’m currently reading the most recent Booker Prize winner, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka.

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→ February 23, 2023
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The Fabelmans.

Steven Spielberg has apparently been trying to make a semi-autobiographical film for over twenty years, but waited until his parents died before producing it. He finally did so with last year’s The Fabelmans, a thinly-veiled rendering of his childhood and teenage years with a particular eye on the relationship between his parents. I don’t think Spielberg is capable of making a bad movie, but he is capable of missteps within his movies, and the way he depicts his parents here through their surrogates detracts from the movie’s overall power. (It’s available to rent on Amazon, iTunes, etc.)

Mitzi (Michelle Williams) and Burt (Paul Dano) Fabelman are Jewish couple living in New Jersey, near Philadelphia, in 1952, when they take their son Sammy to see his first film, Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth. Sammy is entranced, especially by the movie’s train-crash scene, and this sparks what becomes a lifelong love of the movies. The young Sammy’s burgeoning interest in filmmaking is set against the drama of his parents’ failing marriage, his mother’s apparent connection to his father’s best friend and colleague Bennie (Seth Rogen), and his mother’s mental health issues. The story takes us through the family’s moves to Arizona and then California, while Sammy makes films, often involving his younger sisters, dates the most comically Christian girl you could imagine, and encounters antisemitic bullies at his WASPish high school.

By far the best parts of The Fabelmans are the movies within the movie. There’s incredible care taken to depict the results of these efforts by Sammy, but also how he combined the ingenuity he inherited from his engineer father with the artistic sensibilities of his pianist mother to create and improve the sort of illusions he loved so much in Greatest Show. These track with the actual film projects from Spielberg’s youth, short films up through the longer documentary-style movie he made of senior skip day at his high school. It’s a little behind-the-scences peek at old-school moviemaking, and often quite joyous.

Sammy’s parents are so strangely drawn, however, that the scenes that center on either or both of them all feel too sharp-edged, bordering on caricature. Burt, who is based on Spielberg’s highly successful inventor father Arnold, is a milquetoast who does basically nothing while his wife openly flirts with his best friend, and just generally seems oblivious to most of what’s going on in his own house. There are hints about his ambitions at work, but it’s oddly unbalanced, especially since Spielberg has said that his father was a major influence on his own career, something that is completely absent from the film. Dano plays Burt with a simpering affect that makes the character seem sad and pitiable, but not interesting or complex. Mitzi is depicted with somewhat greater depth, although there’s still something hollow about the writing (not the portrayal), as if this is Spielberg’s visualization of his mother rather than an attempt to write and depict her as a complete person. It’s more sympathetic than empathetic, and while I suppose it’s not my place to tell a writer how to portray his mother on film, it doesn’t read well to me as a viewer.


There are several supporting performances here that stand out, not least of them a brief turn from Judd Hirsch as Mitzi’s uncle, who appears unannounced, spends a few days with the family to sit shiva after Mitzi’s mother dies, and then leaves after imparting some essential wisdom to Sammy. It’s the standout performance of the film, reminiscent of Judi Dench’s Oscar-winning turn in Shakespeare in Love (“Have a care with my name, you’ll wear it out”), which parlayed about 13 minutes of screen time into an Academy Award. Hirsch might have even less time in The Fabelmans, but it’s by far the best performance of the movie. Rogen gives a very solid turn as Bennie, further underscoring his shift as a serious actor after his excellent work as the carpenter-cum-thief in Pam and Tommy. Gabriel LaBelle is excellent as the teenaged Sammy, even when he’s more observer than participant in the action; there are a couple of scenes with Sammy and Mitzi where Sammy is the more interesting character, and LaBelle pulls these off well. (Also, he kind of looks like a younger Barry Keoghan.) And there’s a cameo later in the film that I won’t spoil but that involves someone known better as a director than as an actor and who is clearly having a blast in a tiny role.

Spielberg’s best work usually revolves around Big Things. His most critically acclaimed films rely more on broad brush strokes in plot and character, while he’s had more difficulty when he’s trying to work small, whether it’s nuance in story and theme or characters who require more three-dimensional depictions. The Fabelmans falls into the second category. As a love letter of sorts to the movies, and a memoriam to his parents, it’s fine, but as an actual film, it’s lacking. The story is thin and the two main characters are just too two-dimensional.

The Fabelmans picked up seven Oscar nominations this year, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress for Williams, Best Supporting Actor for Hirsch, and Best Original Screenplay for Spielberg and Tony Kushner, the latter marking Spielberg’s first-ever Academy Award nomination for screenwriting. I won’t be surprised if it goes 0 for the awards this year; it’s not the favorite, nor should it be, in any of those five categories, at least. Hirsch might be the most deserving, but Ke Huy Quan is better and he’s the favorite. Williams gives a good-not-great performance, limited by the way the character is written, although the scene at the campsite is sublime. (I do want to know why she can’t move the top half of her face, though.) This is a movie about how great movies are, so I can’t rule it out even for Best Picture, but the odds are against it. Perhaps there’s a sop to Spielberg in the Screenplay category, but that could easily be the place the voters honor Tár, assuming Everything Everywhere All at Once remains the favorite to win the whole thing. I can’t see picking The Fabelmans anywhere it’s nominated, though. It’s a perfectly adequate film, but it’s not Spielberg’s best, and I think highlights what he does well because so much of this film is about things that he doesn’t.

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→ February 21, 2023
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Dallas eats, 2023 edition.

My trip to Dallas didn’t involve many meals worth discussing, since I was mostly at the ballpark in Arlington (and ate stadium food, something I very seldom do, for good reason). Most of my food journeys involved coffee, as it turned out, with two very good spots near my hotel in downtown Dallas.

Stupid Good Coffee actually lives up to its name, serving beans roasted by nearby third-wave roaster Oak Cliff Coffee, with the drip coffee I had on Friday their Honduras El Puente (according to what I could see, at least). They also do a lot of ridiculous, sugared-up drinks that mask the coffee itself, but they’re at least using the right beans to start with. It’s a small shop in a small shopping area inside an office building next to the Renaissance on Elm St., but with just one employee on Friday – I know it’s hard to find staff now – the service was slow.

Weekend is another tiny shop, this one tucked into the Joule boutique hotel, serving coffee from Counter Culture – in this case, another Honduran offering from El Puente, so quite likely beans from the same wholesale lots. Weekend does pour-overs, which is the better option as their drip coffee is actually brewed too hot, while they also have espresso drinks and some small food options, including some prefab breakfast tacos and real croissants. Every hotel needs a café like this one.

I had two meals of note on the trip. One was at Angela’s Café, an all-day diner in the Bluffview neighborhood that serves Mexican-American cuisine. I went there for breakfast with my alter ego, who just happened to order exactly the same thing I did – chorizo and eggs with hashbrowns. It’s a simple dish but one of my favorites, and not something I ever see on menus up where I live. Angela’s’ version was excellent, although I’m also willing to accept that the eggs in this are always cooked more than I like, and their hashbrowns were perfect other than that they needed more salt (but I almost always think that, don’t I?).

The other was a quick bite between games from Flying Fish, a local chain serving Cajun-influenced seafood dishes. Their shrimp po’ boy was … fine, nothing special. The shrimp definitely weren’t as fresh as they could have been, but I would have also consumed an entire bag of the hush puppies that came with it. I wouldn’t go out of my way to eat at a Flying Fish, but it’s certainly better than eating anything in that ballpark.

I did get what I thought was pretty solid Mexican-American food from a place called Fernando’s, close to Angela’s, as some friends ordered dinner from there before they all came with me to the Saturday night TCU-Arkansas blowout, but my friends said there’s much better Mexican-American food to be had in the area and this was just the closest option. Of course now I’m going to leave more time on the next trip to make sure we eat at one of these better places.

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