→ August 15, 2017
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The Blue Sweater.

Jacqueline Novogratz is the founder and CEO of a non-profit called Acumen, which funds and encourages poverty-reduction efforts that work like business endeavors rather than aid dumps. Foreign aid itself is, in general, not very useful, and often nothing more than a way to prop up corrupt third-world regimes; the U.S. is slated to send out $42 billion in foreign aid in FY2017, but there’s little to no information on how well it works – something like an ROI, for eample. Novogratz has spent over three decades working in the developing world, including substantial time in Rwanda both before and after that country’s civil war and genocide, and her 2009 memoir, The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World, chronicles some of her work – but also has an unfortunate tendency to show her inability to escape her own privilege when describing the people she’s met and places where she’s worked.

The book works as part memoir – Novogratz has lived an incredible life, not least of which is the incredible story of the titular sweater, which she gave away to a donation outlet while in high school only to find a boy wearing the sweater ten years later in Rwanda – and part plea for a more sensible, rational approach to helping alleviate poverty. Novogratz details projects in multiple countries, from creating jobs for women in central Africa to developing mosquito nets that don’t lose effectiveness to expanding access to cataract surgery in India, where a small upfront investment coupled with some expertise led to a substantial return, particularly in economic growth for people who had no opportunities beyond subsistence farming and in improving health and sanitation conditions. (If you’re poor, and you’re not healthy or don’t have access to clean water, you’re much more likely to stay poor, since you can’t work if you’re sick and then can’t pay for the care to get well.)

Her individual anecdotes tend to be pretty compelling, in part because Novogratz has worked in some areas that were either desperately poor or were caught up in conflicts. One of Novogratz’ close colleagues in Rwanda was killed, perhaps assassinated, for pushing women’s rights, and another, mentioned above, ended up a leader in the genocide. She runs into surprising interference from women in Africa who resent her presence – that local men will listen to her, a white woman from the west, but not to local women, even if they boast some western education. Getting money isn’t a problem per se; it’s getting it from donors who are willing to think small, who’ll accept modest goals that people on the ground can achieve, rather than lofty goals (let’s end hunger! Let’s cure AIDS!) that are unattainable. It’s the idea behind sites like GlobalGiving, where the projects are small but the objectives clear and reasonable.

Novogratz speaks of her work in these countries with two voices, one of which tends to undermine the other. When speaking about the actual plans and execution, she sounds like a businessperson, keeping others accountable, asking questions that an investor in a startup might ask, and ensuring that money is going to where it will do some lasting good. But when she starts to talk about the locals in Rwanda, Pakistan, Brazil, and elsewhere, or to describe the places themselves, she sounds like a tourist. Everyone is beautiful, every color is radiant, everyone is so nice, even the ones who turn out to be corrupt or, in one case, associated with the genocide (and later imprisoned for her role). There’s a strain in travel literature where the white westerner fetishizes the natives of developing countries, and that’s on display here. I can’t doubt Novogratz’ sincerity, and it sounds like she’s tough on locals who come in for microloans with half-formed plans, but she appears to have met a long string of perfect and handsome people while traveling the world. The stories themselves are interesting, and I salute the sacrifices she’s made to live this life and try to improve the world, but The Blue Sweater doesn’t do enough to convince the reader that this is the right way to help the world’s poor.

Next up: I’m still several books behind in reviews, but I’m currently reading Chris Cleave’s Everyone Brave is Forgiven.

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→ August 14, 2017
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American Honey.

American Honey was the last movie on my to-watch list from 2016 that I hadn’t seen, put off by its running time (163 minutes) when there were so many other, shorter movies to see. It’s too long, which almost goes without saying, and the story doesn’t really gel until the final twenty minutes, but this is a star-making turn for neophyte Sasha Lane, and the meandering script still has some cogent points to make about the American teenaged underclass, enough that you might still want to tough this one out through the slow parts. The movie is available free on amazon prime or to rent on iTunes.

Lane, who was discovered by director Andrea Arnold while on spring break and then won the part after her audition, plays Star, a possibly 18-year-old girl who scavenges dumpsters for food, is regularly molested by her (step?)father, and watches two (half-)siblings because their mother is too busy getting drunk and line dancing to bother. A van of young adults traveling the country selling magazine subscriptions door to door stops in a parking lot right in front of her, when team leader Jake (Shia Laboeuf) flirts with her and recruits to join them. Star runs away the same evening, foisting the younger kids on their disinterested mother, and the remainder of the film follows the van of misfit boys and girls across several stops, focusing on the incipient relationship between Star and Jake – and the ongoing one between Jake and their boss, Krystal (Riley Keough, the daughter of Lisa Marie Presley).

Lane is a revelation in this role, stepping into it like a child actor who’s been on screen for years, switching effortlessly from false bravado to childlike neediness, emanating an inner strength shackled by her lack of any life experience or the self-confidence that comes from it. Lebro is convincing as Jake, but the character is so unlikeable – manipulative, greedy, amoral – that it’s hard to see why Star would remain attracted to him or desirous of his attentions after he has repeatedly taken advantage of her, lied to and in front of her, stolen, and even threatened several people with a gun (in the least believable scene of the film). If we’re just rehashing her childhood – girl from an abusive environment is attracted to abusive men – then we need some sort of growth for Star, character development she doesn’t really get from the script. And Krystal is as one-note a character as they come, a mere plot convenience who’s there to throw a wrench into the Jake-Star relationship.

The other fundamental problem with this movie is how joyless it is until the last couple of scenes. Even when the kids are supposed to be having fun, there’s nothing fun about these scenes; there’s often a Lord of the Flies vibe just under their surface. You can tell a story about kids with no direction and little hope yet still show their quotidian lives as having moments of happiness that eventually lose out to the bigger despair, but there just isn’t much of that here. Only when Star bottoms out and then runs into a family that reminds her of her own home life does she have a small epiphany that propels her forward even as the other characters remain the same. That may be the point – that for most of these kids, the same is all they’re going to get, and maybe we should pay more attention to this underclass so they don’t end up selling possibly-fake magazine subscriptions while riding around the country in the back of a van singing bad rap songs – but the story needs to go somewhere, and it doesn’t really get enough of an ending.

(One detail that bugged me: The van was full when Star joined, but later we see the crew picking up more recruits. So did they just dump some of the others? Or is the van actually a sort of clown car?)

Water recurs as a motif throughout the film, including in the final scene, in a way that I think was intentional, a symbol of rebirth but also of a primal need that ties everyone, regardless of wealth or poverty, together. (Thirst comes up several times in the movie, which I’m including as the same symbol as the water.) Star ends up taking a ride with a trucker – she’s too trusting – and they end up discussing how neither has ever seen the ocean. She slips into a puddle and has a momentary meltdown. And when she hits her nadir, she’s surrounded by oil, with no water in sight.

Will Leitch and Tim Grierson often refer to an old line of Gene Siskel’s, asking whether it would be more enjoyable to watch the movie or have dinner with the cast and crew. (At least, I think that’s the quote. If not, just go with it for now.) There is no question in my mind that dinner with the actors who play the kids in American Honey would be a more interesting, even educational experience. Arielle Holmes plays Pagan, but she herself spent several years as a homeless heroin addict on the streets of New York, eventually writing a memoir and starring in a movie about her own life. Arnold cast several other non professionals in the other roles; I can’t believe they wouldn’t collectively have a more interesting set of stories to tell me than the one told in this movie. Maybe she should have given us fewer characters but told more about the ones she shows, instead of using them as backdrop for the Star-crossed lovers’ broken romance.

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→ August 13, 2017
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A Feast for Odin.

Well, boardgamers, I think that with A Feast for Odin we have finally achieved Peak Uwe.

Uwe Rosenberg is one of the most acclaimed designers in this golden era of cardboard, the man behind Caverna (ranked #10 on BGG’s global rankings, which skew towards longer and more complex games), Agricola (#14), Le Havre (#30), Patchwork (#45), Fields of Arle (#53), and Ora et Labora (#77). A Feast for Odin, itself ranked #38 on that list, is his latest title of long, intricate engine-building games that take the general feel of Agricola and make it fussier and more involved. Agricola grew on me with repeated plays, thanks in part to the incredible app version of the game, but at heart the rules of that game are pretty simple; you have a lot of choices to make and several factors to manage, but what you’re asked to do isn’t that difficult. Le Havre and Caverna increased the complexity in different ways, but A Feast for Odin is over the top, turning a boardgame into real work, both in managing the accounting and in figuring out what you want to do.

As the name implies, we’re talking vikings now, and apparently vikings were big-time farmers. A Feast for Odin has, I believe, 36 different resource types, four of which are used like currencies with the remainder used as crops or food or for scoring. Each player starts with a player board that is covered with tiny squares, some of which are blank, some are worth -1 (yes, negative) point if uncovered at game-end, some of which can award you a bonus resource, and some of which, those on the x=y diagonal, represent potential income for you in each round. You take green and blue resources and place them on your board to cover as many squares as you can; there are eight different shapes, so you’re playing a little light Tetris (or Patchwork) and trying to cover the board as efficiently as you can. If you cover everything below and to the left of a specific income square, then that’s your new income, from 0 coins to +18 coins, with the potential for even more if you expand to other islands … but we’re going to just set that aside for the moment. There are also a handful of higher-value, unusually-shaped special items that cover lots of squares but which you can only get via a couple of actions you’ll reach later in the game, if at all.

A Feast for Odin. This is way over the top.

A post shared by Keith Law (@mrkeithlaw) on

You also have to feed the multitudes at the end of each round, and while it’s not as difficult as in Agricola or Le Havre, you still have to pay attention to it. There’s a “banquet” track on your board, and you have to have orange and red food tokens to fill the track, but can’t have two tokens of the same color touching each other – there are a lot of placement rules like that, one of the game’s worst features – and can use silver coins instead of food if you don’t have enough.

AFfO takes place over seven rounds, and in every round, each player uses his/her viking meeples to claim action spaces on the shared action board – which has, no shit, 61 different options for players on each turn. The action board has four columns, and each column as you move to the right requires more meeples to use it, so it’s one meeple in the first column and four in the fourth one. You can use actions to upgrade resources, to ‘harvest’, to buy and sell, to collect wood/stone/ore/silver from the mountains, to buy boats, to go raiding, to go pillaging, to hunt game, to go whaling, to plunder (whom, they don’t say), to add occupation cards that give you more benefits, to add islands, to build sheds or additional houses, and so on.

Needless to say, I wasn’t a fan of AFfO – it’s the fussier Le Havre, if that’s even possible, with more rules and more things to track, and a whole lot of “why can’t I do X?” or “how can I get this resource I need?” I’m sure it’s balanced, because Uwe is certainly a smart and careful designer and his games always ‘work’ in that sense. But I also don’t know who the target audience is for this game, which retails for $90+, weighs 7 pounds, and will probably take 90-120 minutes for 3-4 experienced players. (It plays with two and there’s a solo mode, but I haven’t tried either.) If you love Uwe’s games, and the whole idea of games that require obsession to detail with long-term planning and short-term demands, sure, this is probably right up your alley. I think it’s beyond the pale.

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→ August 12, 2017
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Stick to baseball, 8/12/17.

I’m back from a week of vacation in Aruba, which was lovely, not least because I turned my phone off when we took off from BWI and didn’t turn it back on until we landed on US soil seven-plus days later. That means my last Insider posts were at the trade deadline, including breakdowns of the Yu Darvish trade, the Sonny Gray trade, and the Justin Wilson/Jeimer Candelario trade.

I’m back at Paste with a new boardgame review, this time of the two-player variant of Uwe Rosenberg’s massive Caverna, Caverna: Cave vs. Cave.

I appeared on the Ringer’s Achievement Oriented podcast, co-hosted by Ben Lindbergh, to discuss the current golden age of boardgames and how that might be affecting videogame funding. I also spoke with Jeff Krushell, who worked for the Blue Jays for some of the same years I did, about my book, Smart Baseball, and the role of analytics in the sport.

While I was away, the Washington Post ran a favorable review of Smart Baseball.

I’ll be at GenCon 50 in Indianapolis starting on Thursday, appearing on a few panels, signing copies of Smart Baseball on Friday at 2 pm (or if you see me walking around), and trying lots of new boardgames. I hope to see a bunch of you there.

And now, the links…

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→ August 11, 2017
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Onirim.

Onirim is a solitaire card game app from Asmodee Digital, based on a solo or cooperative card game previously published by Z-Man (now part of Asmodee’s growing empire). It’s simple to learn and very quick to play, but calibrated to be reasonably challenging through several plays, especially with the Glyphs expansion. It’s available for free on iTunes and Android with in-app purchases of expansions for $0.99 apiece.

Onirim is played with a single deck of cards that, in the base game, contains cards of in four different colors with three shapes apiece on those colors (sun, moon, key), as well as eight door cards (two in each of the colors) and ten “nightmare” cards. Your goal is to unlock the eight doors before the deck runs out of cards, working with five cards in your hand at any given time. Every time you play or discard a card, you replenish your hand by drawing from the top of the deck.

You can unlock a door by playing three consecutive cards with the same color but different symbols – sun-moon-sun is fine, but sun-sun-moon is not – or by playing the correct color of key card from your hand when that color door appears from the deck. You can also choose to discard a key card to look at the next five cards in the deck, rearranging any four of them and restoring them to the top of the deck while trashing the remaining card. When the next card you draw to refill your hand is a nightmare card, however, the trouble begins, and you can dispense with it in one of four ways:

* You can discard all remaining cards in your hand.
* You can discard the next five cards from the top of the deck. Nightmare and door cards are ‘recycled’ rather than discarded, but color cards of any shape are gone from the game.
* You can discard a key from your hand.
* You can recycle a door card that you’ve already unlocked.

When you unlock a door, the remainder of the deck is reshuffled, so if you played a key and knew what was coming, well, now you odn’t.

The game is balanced enough that I could win comfortably more than half of the time, but rarely won by much (going by the number of cards remaining in the deck, which is one of the ways the app determines your score). Onirim requires sacrifices; it gives you enough ways to unlock doors that you can plan around the nightmares, but have to make tough choices, often discarding cards you were about to use because a nightmare appeared. There are more sun cards than moon cards, and more moon cards than key cards, so you’ll probably find yourself ditching sun cards to get something better in your hand, or playing a moon card just to ‘reset’ the board, since the last card you played in the preceding triple (to unlock a door) still factors into the rule that you can’t play two consecutive cards of the same shape.


So far I have only tried the Glyphs expansion, which adds a fourth shape, glyphs, to the deck, but also requires you to unlock twelve doors rather than eight. You can use a glyph as you might any other shape card, but you can also discard a glyph card to reveal the next five cards in the deck. If one of them is a door, you can unlock it immediately, regardless of color. All non-door cards then go to the bottom of the deck, which can be good (nightmares!) or bad (that moon card you were waiting for!). Unlike the rules for doors unlocked with keys or card triplets, the deck isn’t reshuffled after you open a door with a glyph. Playing a key card and then a glyph can be powerful if the key shows you a door in the next few cards, but doing so knocks out two cards that might otherwise have been useful in completing sets of three. The expansion makes the game a few minutes longer, but I think it’s better; there are more decisions to make and the challenge of completing that many doors is harder, while recycling an unlocked door becomes a much more reasonable choice than it is in the base game.

There aren’t many good solitaire boardgames out there, and only a few I know – Friday is another, and I’ll review that soon – so Onirim would be an easy recommendation even if it weren’t free for the base game. The screen layout is different on the iPhone vs iPad, but both work – the iPhone makes good use of the space and I preferred having the doors laid out along the topic so they were always in sight. The publisher really could get away with charging a buck or two for this given the amount of time I’ve already spent playing it.

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→ August 10, 2017
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Lab Girl.

Botanist Hope Jahren’s memoir Lab Girl, winner of the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for the best autobiographical work of 2016, is a wildly compelling, inspiring read, the story of a woman who has fought mental illness, institutional sexism, and the indifference of a country that would rather fund wars than basic science to become a successful researcher and professor. It’s full of observations on the lives of plants, processes largely beneath our awareness because plants aren’t sentient or, in most cases, particularly mobile. But more than anything else, Lab Girl is the story of Jahren’s unusual, decades-long friendship with a lab partner and co-conspirator named Bill, who threatens to overtake Jahren in her own life story.

Jahren grew up in a small town in southern Minnesota where most of the local economy revolved around the town’s hog slaughterhouse, the lone daughter of a scientist father and frustrated-scientist mother, and was drawn to science from an early age. She chronicles her meandering path to her current post at the University of Hawai’i by way of undergraduate work at the University of Minnesota (where she also worked in the hospital’s pharmacy, filling bags and running them to patient rooms) and graduate work at Georgia Tech and Johns Hopkins.

The heart of Jahren’s story, however, is this quixotic relationship she has with the itinerant Bill, whom she first encounters while they work at a research lab in California and then takes with her to Atlanta, Baltimore, and now Honolulu. Bill appears only in anecdotes and his dialogue revolves largely around a certain Anglo-Saxon gerund, but he comes across as a character right out of Inherent Vice – witty, gifted, cutting, loyal, poorly dressed, and a stoner. Jahren has some career ambition, driven in part by the sexism she meets at every stop – some overt, most just subtle enough to not get every one of those assholes hauled in front of HR – but also by lessons of her childhood. Bill, on the other hand, wants to be in the lab. He wants to work in the lab, yes, but also to inhabit the lab, which he actually does at a few points over the course of their shared history. His limited personal needs become fodder for inadvertent humor, such as the time he cuts most of his shaggy hair off … and stores it in the trunk of a nearby tree so he can go visit it. Every time Bill shows up on the page, the book goes from good to great.

Jahren manages to wrest the spotlight back from Bill a few times, especially in her descriptions of her bipolar disorder, which she depicts as occasionally useful for her work but also disastrous for her life and a major problem for the first 26 weeks of her one pregnancy. (I didn’t get the sense she intends for there to be a second.) Bipolar disorder, often misnamed as manic-depressive disorder, is still a widely misunderstood mental illness, even as we creep toward greater societal acceptance of the most common diseases like depression, anxiety, and panic disorder. Jahren’s story doesn’t revolved around her illness, but it is a shining example of how much someone can achieve in spite of that obstacle.

Lab Girl won as an autobiography, and it is much more that than it is a science book. Jahren explains her love of plants (and soil – you can’t separate the two) with concise lessons on topics like leaf structure, plant sex (fertilization), or how plants survive in the desert. She also takes us to some widely varying settings and depicts them with evocative, bright language, from the greenery of Ireland to the barren terrain of a nearly plantless Arctic island north of Nunavut. As someone who reads and enjoys popular science books, I was hoping for a bit more of this, and given the book’s length (under 300 pages), there was certainly room for that. For one important example, Jahren talks at length about the scarcity of funds for basic science research like hers – research that won’t help us in war or directly lead to a cure or a product – but climate change gets the drive-by treatment in the last two chapters. In an era when one of our two political parties has embraced climate change denial, and has recruited swaths of the religious right to join them in this delusion, we need more voices like Jahren to speak out about the truth.

I sell, share, or donate a lot of the books I acquire, because if I stored them all, I’d need a second room just to shelve them. (Also, books are heavy, and I’ve made two cross-country moves in the last seven years.) I’m going to keep Lab Girl for a few years; my daughter is eleven and enjoys science, so once she’s ready for the book’s vocabulary, she’ll devour it.

Next up: Fritz Lieber’s Hugo-winning novel The Wanderer, which is just $3.82 for the Kindle.

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→ August 9, 2017
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The Sense of an Ending (film).

I adored Julian Barnes’ Man Booker-winning novel The Sense of an Ending, a spare and unsparing look at how one impetuous act could ruin multiple lives yet leave the actor unscathed until he discovers the consequences decades later. Barnes’ protagonist, Tony Webster, is bright and can think critically except where he’s involved; his lack of self-awareness is the central theme of the work, and Barnes unfurls the history to Tony as he does to the reader, allowing us to share in the main character’s befuddlement, denial, and rationalization in a sort of literary real time.

The film version of The Sense of an Ending came out earlier this year and is now available to rent/buy on amazon or iTunes, and it is excellent but falls just short of the book. The acting is superb, and the story largely hews faithfully to Barnes’ concepts, but alters a few key details in ways that muffle the impact of various revelations – and utterly alter the meaning of the book’s ending.

Jim Broadbent plays Tony, a divorced, very slightly grumpy old man who runs an antique camera shop in his semi-retirement, maintains good relations with his ex-wife Margaret (Harriet Wheeler), and is on call for the imminent birth of his first grandchild to his unmarried daughter Susie (Michelle Dockery). Tony gets a certified letter saying that a woman he knew decades earlier, Sarah (Emily Mortimer), has died and left him an object, but it turns out that Sarah’s daughter, Veronica (Freya Mavor), whom Tony briefly dated, refuses to part with the object – the diary of Tony’s friend and later Veronica’s boyfriend Adrian. Tony becomes obsessed with obtaining the diary, largely because it’s legally his (rather than any expressed interest in its contents), and his efforts to acquire it lead him to an encounter with Veronica (now played by Charlotte Rampling) and revelations from their shared past that will discolor Tony’s entire understanding of his own actions and character.

This is in so many ways a very British movie, from the way almost everything in it is so understated and even under the surface to the murderer’s row of a cast all delivering sparkling performances. The filmed Tony is less self-aware than the literary one, and Broadbent infuses him with aloofness in manner and accent, as if he is constantly flummoxed by the existence of other people and their feelings. Rampling absolutely seethes in her few appearances in the film, an angrier Veronica than the one in the book, who holds herself above Tony in word and deed because it is the only victory available to her this late in the match. Mortimer also gets limited screen time, only in flashbacks, but the subtlety of her performance as Sarah is more evidence once Sarah’s role in the events that followed becomes clear.

The novel on which this is based is only about 165 pages, but it felt like the film still rushed past some of the book’s flashbacks to Tony’s time in school with Adrian and his dalliance with Veronica. It also changes several major details from the story, not least of which is dispensing with Barnes’ structure, where the book starts with the school days, and the bequest doesn’t happen until about a third of the way into the book, starting part two and causing Tony to reevaluate the story he has narrated in part one. Tony follows Veronica from one of their meetings, somewhat creepily, whereas in the book Veronica shows him what he discovers by stalking her in the movie.

The most unforgivable sin of the film’s script, however, is the ending, which is much kinder to Tony than the book’s conclusion – and kinder than the film version of Tony deserves. He set this all in motion, but the movie’s ending doesn’t make his culpability sufficiently clear, and concludes his story on a somewhat hopeful note – even as we hear the text of a new letter he has sent to Veronica that left me thinking that even after he’s learned the truth, he still doesn’t get it, and at this point, he probably never will.

I don’t usually give grades or ratings of movies, especially since I often write about them months after their release, but in this case I’ll make an exception. This is a good movie that falls short of a great book – a 55 film from a 70 novel, in scouting terms – buoyed by a tremendous cast and that very British way of letting the audience work out a lot of details on its own. If you’ve read the book and enjoyed it like I did, however, you may find the deviations distracting, especially as they’re all to the bad.

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→ August 1, 2017
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Music update, July 2017.

I’m going dark for a week, but I’ll tide you over with a new playlist, which you can access directly in Spotify or via the widget below.

Arcade Fire – Signs of Life. I’ve listened to their new album, Everything Now, and I can certainly understand why some people hate it. The lyrics are beyond pretentious; the too-clever-by-half songwriting we saw on Reflektor appears to be a feature rather than a bug. Social commentary and criticism by anecdote worked beautifully on The Suburbs, one of the best albums of the century so far, but their frontal attempt to ridicule their targets only leaves them looking ridiculous (“Infinite Content” comes to mind). But this song is good, “Creature Comforts” is solid, and the album’s title track is definitely the best thing ABBA has done in forty years.

Sløtface – Pitted. This Norwegian punk-pop act, definitely among my favorite finds of the last year or so, does what Arcade Fire used to do – they tell fun stories that seem frivolous but abound with meaningful details, and every song they’ve released has had a catchy hook.

Atomic Tom – Burn the Witch. Atomic Tom covered my #1 song of 2016, and managed to make it newly sinister via a different arrangement and the introduction of a heavy guitar line in the second chorus.

Allie X – Vintage. Almost too poppy for my tastes, but the chorus and the keyboard riff both stuck in my head after one listen.

Hundred Waters – Blanket Me. Hundred Waters had my top album of 2015, and this single is very much in the same vein of experimental, airy, voice-as-instrument music.

Foster The People – Lotus Eater. Didn’t love their new album, which dispenses with the stuff that worked (for me) on Supermodel, but this track does recall that album’s more rock-oriented moments.

Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark – The Punishment of Luxury. I can’t believe it’s 2017 and I put an OMD track on a best new music playlist.

Dan Croll – Bad Boy. I wasn’t familiar with this English singer-songwriter, who just released his second album, Emerging Adulthood. This seems like it has a good chance to be a big crossover pop hit if US radio gives it a chance.

The War On Drugs – Strangest Thing. I wish their songs were shorter, and maybe that the singer would stop wth the Dylan impersonations, but they’ve reeled off a bunch of compelling songs in a row now.

Wolf Parade – Valley Boy. I didn’t think these guys were ever getting back together.

Little Cub – Too Much Love. I felt like some of the vocals on this London trio’s debut album, Still Life, are just too precious, but the soulful electronica behind the words is simultaneously sophisticated and rapturous.

Nine Inch Nails – Not Anymore. I didn’t think much of NIN’s new EP; this was the best track of the five.

YONAKA – Wouldn’t Wanna Be Ya. Strong riot grrrl vibe here with a perfect putdown in the hooky chorus. This is the kind of track Mister Wives keeps trying to make.

The Night Café – Felicity. This Liverpudlian quartet is touring with Sundara Karma and sounds a lot like Sundara Karma.

Prong – Divide And Conquer. I’ve mentioned before how Prong’s Beg to Differ is both one of my favorite metal albums ever and a seminal record in defining my taste in music. New Prong kind of makes me sad, since they’ve long since morphed into any-metal act with only occasional hints of their former glory, like on this track, still angry if overproduced.

Arch Enemy – The World Is Yours. I thought Arch Enemy’s last album, its first with the band’s new lead singer, was formulaic and cliched, a far cry from the band’s heights as one of the most important bands in the Gothenburg school of death metal. This song, from their upcoming album Will to Power, is easily better than anything from that last record.

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→ July 30, 2017
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The Able McLaughlins.

Margaret Wilson’s The Able McLaughlins won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel (now Fiction) in 1926, the sixth time the award was handed out, part of a surprising run where four winners in five years were women authors (along with Edith Wharton’s wonderful The Age of Innocence, Willa Cather’s sentimental One of Ours, and Edna Ferber’s forgettable So Big). Why it won is probably a mystery lost to the sands of time, as it’s a trifle of a work, a slim slice of quaint Americana that pays tribute to homesteaders and the strength of family, without memorable characters or a particularly solid plot.

(I’m going to spoil much of the story here, because you’re probably never going to read this book, and if I don’t get into plot details this post will be just six words long.)

The McLaughlins are a hard-working family of Scottish immigrants in Iowa with some indefinite number of children, one of whom, Wully, takes a fancy to the neighbors’ daughter Christie. He goes off to fight for a second time in the Civil War, but when he returns, Christie won’t so much as give him the time of day … because, he finally discovers, she’s pregnant, having been raped by another neighbor (and maybe cousin of Wully’s) named Peter Keith. Wully runs Peter out of town under threat of death, marries Christie, and claims the child – born too soon to have been conceived legitimately – as his own. Minor scandals and controversies ensue and fade away, until eventually Peter returns, having gone to see Christie, leading into a multi-chapter search around the area for him or his corpse, although only Wully and a few others know the reason for his departure.

That’s not a whole lot to go on, especially when reading with the morals of the modern reader who will see this all for what it is. Rape victims still feel shame today, but the idea that a woman is responsible for her rape is at least less pervasive in society today, so Christie acting as if she’d done something wrong, and then everyone working to hide the truth, is an anachronism that makes the entire story hard to accept today – even if you know this was a widespread attitude in the time of the book’s setting or publication. Instead of even questioning the established order, Wilson wrote a book about forgiveness and Christian morality; how Wully’s mother is so disappointed in him when she believes the baby is his, how relieved she is when she finds out it’s not and that he was doing the Right Thing by marrying Christie anyway, how Wully and Christie end up forgiving her assailant when he comes to a bad end.

It was really a tiresome read, bearing none of the good qualities of classic American literature, not prose, not memorable characters, and certainly not story. I’m not surprised the book is hard to find – Delaware’s statewide library system didn’t have a copy, so I had to request it from the University of Delaware via an inter-library loan. The copy I got appeared to be a first or very early edition, and it was falling apart as I read it, perhaps an apt metaphor for the irrelevance of this kind of story ninety years after it was written.

Next up: I finished Anna Smaill’s dystopian novel The Chimes and am almost done with John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row.

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Stick to baseball, 7/28/17.

For Insiders, I ranked the top five farm systems in baseball, broke down the Jaime Garcia trade to Minnesota, and broke down Tampa Bay’s trades for Lucas Duda and Dan Jennings. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

UPDATE: I’ve got one more Insider post covering a few small trades from this week.

I appeared on the Freezing Cold Takes podcast this week, discussing my worst takes, my scouting process (and how failed evaluations have changed it), and Smart Baseball.

I’ve exhausted most of my signings schedule, but will be at GenCon in Indianapolis, signing books on Friday, August 18th, and I believe I will also be signing books at PAX Unplugged in Philadelphia in November. Also, Volumes Book Cafe in Chicago has signed copies for sale; call (773) 697-8066 to purchase one.

And now, the links…

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