September 25, 2026  ·  1 comment

A Drop of Corruption.

Robert Jackson Bennett won the 2025 Hugo Award for Best Novel with his fantasy/mystery mashup The Tainted Cup, which introduced the world to Ana and Din, an eccentric (to put it very mildly) detective duo who operate in a world that combines medieval trappings with an alternate science built around biohacking and the exploitation of massive and deadly sea creatures called leviathans. The story was solid, if a little more convoluted than that of the typical mystery novel, while the two main characters were the novel’s biggest strength, and the setting was innovative and curious enough to make me want to spend more time within it.

Bennett has written two more novels in the series already, the second of which, 2025’s A Drop of Corruption, was nominated for this year’s Hugo, losing out to The Everlasting. As in the first book, we have Ana and Din working to solve a murder that is hard to fathom and that will ultimately expose a broader conspiracy of graft, betrayal, and, of course, corruption. Set in the neighboring kingdom of Yarrow, which Ana and Din’s native empire Khanum will be taking over in an arrangement that sounds similar to the transfer of power in Hong Kong, the book goes deeper into the weird science that powers this fictional world, and the very bizarre ‘enhancements’ people within it use to do this difficult work.

Ana is the Sherlock Holmes/Nero Wolfe here, a savant who is nearly always blindfolded because she says the visual stimuli of the world are too much for her senses to handle. Din is her faithful assistant, more sagacious than Dr. Watson and more serious than Archie Goodwin, and has himself been enhanced as an engraver who can record things he sees in his mind, as if he had an eidetic memory. Their partnership, awkward and tentative for most of the first book, is more solid and more fluid here, so we step almost directly into their work to solve the first murder – which, mild spoiler here, gets solved far sooner than you might expect because of the way it expands outward into a larger story.

Again, the characters are the real thing here, although in this book Bennett has dropped more clues that might help readers piece together the ultimate solution. (The intermediate one I just mentioned isn’t solvable in that way.) Din gets more screen time than Ana, and it helps flesh out his character more, although if you jumped right to this book without reading the first, you might think Ana is two-dimensional and a bit of comic relief when her oddness is inherent to her character. One of the new characters introduced here, Malo, who has an enhanced olfactory sense, is a strong comic foil for Din, and balances his overly serious manner with her sarcasm.

The setting was what really sucked me into A Drop of Corruption. I’ve played a handful of role-playing games, almost entirely computer ones with a little D&D and its ilk in high school, and I would absolutely play the hell out of a roleplaying game set in this world – especially Yarrow, which is richer and stranger and more foreboding than even Khanum, with political intrigue and what sounds like a massive grey-market economy, along with a people hostile to almost any stranger. Fantasy novels almost always seem to involve magic on some level; Bennett replaces that with his science, which involves the use of plants and fungi to alter people and even create buildings along with the chemical enhancements that many of these characters have undergone. It’s highly imaginative, yet also coherent enough to work with the story rather than detracting from it.

The story is overlong, but the core mystery and its resolution are tighter than that of the first novel, and there are definitely more clues to catch if you’re that sort of reader. (I wish I was, but I am not.) The first murder is a locked-door mystery, part homage, part parody, and that’s about the only thing I sort of figured out here – how it was done, but not who did it. Bennett’s ambition in his plotting works for and against him, making the narrative broader and more interesting, but resulting a book that’s quite long for the genre. I’ve read a few hundred mystery novels by myriad authors and have read very few of this length, mainly by Anthony Horowitz in some of his novel-within-a-novel works. I was pulled through the book quickly – it’s 450 pages and I read it inside of six days – as much because of the characters as my desire to find the solution to the story.

Bennett also slips in a little social commentary here that the first novel lacked, some obvious (hey, slavery is bad!), but some more timely, such as Din’s family story that serves as a metaphor for the crushing pattern of medical debt in the U.S., and the main plot’s exploration of what happens in a world without regulations. Yarrow is an absolute monarchy, but Khanum is also an autocracy, and Bennett should continue to explore what that means for his main characters, who, for now at least, serve its emperor.

I will confess I’m glad to see the next book in the series, A Trade of Blood, came in under 400 pages. I’m a fan, and would have read the third book regardless, but I’ll be happy to see Ana and Din get to the point a little more expeditiously. As for this year’s Hugo, I’m fine with this book being on the shortlist but not the winner; it’s not as good as The Incandescent or The Everlasting but I’d probably put it ahead of Death of the Author.

Next up: A book off the Hugo longlist, There Is No Antimemetics Division, by Sam Hughes, who writes under the pen name qntm.

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September 24, 2026  ·  No comments yet

Canal Houses.

I’m a little bit of a sucker for games that have you building colorful houses. I don’t know why they speak to me so; they might just remind me of places I’ve traveled, including Italy and some places in the Caribbean. Walking in Burano is probably my favorite of these, and I just reviewed Tenby, which is a little more complex.

Canal Houses is the first English version of a Dutch game first published as Grachtenpand in 2024, asking players to build pastel-colored houses along a canal in Amsterdam. Houses all start with a shop on the ground floor, any number of window cards you’d like, and ideally a roof on top. You gain points from the shop and roof cards if their buildings meet the criteria shown on those cards, while the window cards have the four features – cards, birds, flags, and flowerpots – that appear in most of those criteria. The game ends when someone plays their fourth roof card, at which point you score all shops and roofs you fulfilled, take 1 point for every flowerpot, and then give 4 points to the player with the largest contiguous block of cards of the same color.

It’s also a card-drafting game, so you’ll start with a hand of three cards, drawing one from the deck of your choice, then playing any of the four cards you hold, after which you pass your entire hand to your left. You must build upward; each building must start with a shop, and then windows (you could build without one, but it would score nothing), and then the roof. Once you’ve placed a card, you can’t move it, and a building with a roof on it is permanently finished.

I don’t like the term ‘cozy’ in board games or mysteries, but if you know what that word means in this context, sure, Canal Houses has it. It’s light, very fast (you place cards simultaneously), and the only player interaction within the game is when you pass the cards. There’s a two-player variant that’s more directly competitive, skipping the card-drafting aspect, where you also can’t build a roof unless the building fulfills its requirements; I haven’t tried it, but I think I might prefer that with two players. (Mysteries can’t be “cozy.” Someone’s been murdered. Maybe multiple people. That’s not “cozy.” That’s just shit writing.)

I do think Canal Houses is a great family game – it’s very quick (15-20 minutes), and quick to learn or teach. It does have a ceiling, pun intended, because there are so few ways to score, and the window cards have plenty of those icons on them. It becomes just a medium challenge to fulfill your shop/roof criteria, unless someone is able to get their fourth roof down quickly to speed the end of the game. I love the packaging as well – it’s a small, narrow box that will barely take up any space on the shelves. It’s a solid grade B for me, a filler game I’ll gladly keep and throw in the bag on trips.

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September 21, 2026  ·  2 comments

Crook Manifesto.

Colson Whitehead followed up his second Pulitzer Prize win with the first book in what has become his Harlem Trilogy, the action-packed, dark crime novel Harlem Shuffle. Set in the early to mid 1960s, the book introduced us to Ray Carney, the prosperous owner of a Harlem furniture store who occasionally fences stolen goods, although he’s less involved in criminal enterprises than his late father Big Mike or his cousin Freddie. The second book about Ray, Crook Manifesto, is itself a triptych of stories featuring him and some of his less scrupulous acquaintances, set in three different years in the 1970s against the backdrop of a rapidly changing New York City. It’s a pale successor to the first novel, with far less interesting plots and a shallower look at its social and physical setting than Harlem Shuffle offered.

Ray is still running his furniture store, and has largely left the criminal scene entirely by the time the story opens in 1971, when his young daughter asks for tickets to an upcoming Jackson 5 concert. Ray asks around to see if anyone has a hookup when he lands on the crooked cop Munson, who conscripts Ray into a fencing job that touches multiple underworld elements and ultimately threatens Ray’s life. Two years later, a blaxsploitation film shoot in Harlem brings us Ray’s muscle man Pepper, a side gig, along with some scenes in Ray’s store, but the project goes sideways when the lead actress disappears. In 1976, Harlem is beset by arson cases, many set by landlords torching their own buildings for fraudulent insurance claims. When one fire nearly kills a young boy in the neighborhood, Carney decides to investigate, running into a major real estate scam that sets him against some of the most powerful people in the borough.

Part of Crook Manifesto’s problem is that the stories are too short, and Whitehead packs in so much action – it’s a quick read – that there’s very little space for the bigger picture he’s trying to paint of a city in decline, or at least a neighborhood in decline as other, whiter areas hold their ground. The third section, about the constant threat of fires, whether deliberate or not, has a more profound point about the intersection of racism, corruption, and ineffective (if not outright counterproductive) public policy choices, even by those who profess to be trying to help economically disadvantaged areas. Whitehead barely gets to any of that because he’s racing through the story – sometimes literally, given the speed of some of the fires – and has to get us to the twist ending, which wasn’t all that surprising given how few possibilities there were for the solution to the mini-mystery anyway.

The first section with the crooked cop has the slowest buildup, but it does capture the noirish vibe that characterized most of Harlem Shuffle, particularly once Munson has Ray hooked enough that there appears to be no physical or figurative way out for the protagonist. We know Ray survives to part two, so that’s not much of a plot point, so Whitehead instead creates a situation where Ray’s predicament gradually gets worse, and he realizes it’s getting worse, until there’s the slightest opening for something to happen that gets Ray out of this in one piece. As I was reading that section, I was hoping that would be the worst of the three, because Whitehead was setting up something larger, but it ended up the best section by default.

I’ll still check out the third book, Cool Machine, at some point, but it’s another triptych, which doesn’t give me very high hopes for it.

Next up: The fourth of this year’s Hugo nominees for me, A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett.

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September 19, 2026  ·  4 comments

Stick to baseball, 9/19/26.

This week at the Athletic, I did my annual column on players I was wrong about, previewed the Arizona Fall League rosters, and held a live Q&A on Thursday.

I’m due for another issue my free email newsletter this week. For socials, I’m still mostly on Bluesky, Instagram, and TikTok. I’d love to hear any feedback on my videos on the latter two so far, particularly around their length.

And now, the links…

  • One of the best and most horrifying longreads of the year comes from WIRED as they explain the “burnerverse,” where anonymous accounts on X trade nonconsensual intimate videos and images, and then try to ruin the subjects’ lives by doxing them and contacting family and friends. The story centers on University of Florida student Maddie Kowalski, who is fighting back with lawsuits even in the face of a tepid police response (two of her accused tormentors remain on campus). One of the other burner accounts unveiled here was of Jacob Gomberg, a pitcher at Indiana University; I reached out to their Athletics Department and received this comment: “Yesterday we were made aware of charges filed against Jacob Gomberg in Alachua County, Florida. We take these allegations very seriously and promptly turned the matter over to the University’s Office of Civil Rights Compliance who will continue to gather information, assess the matter, and determine any next steps.”
  • Hackers stole a Flock camera, extracted its software, and revealed how it collects data on cars and people.
  • Four measles deaths so far in Pennsylvania, while the vaccine-denial crowd is busy trying to claim that none of those were actually due to measles. That’s four preventable deaths due entirely to the efforts of the misinformation crowd that has also seized power in the Republican Party.
  • Meanwhile, Thomas Ross, the Republican candidate for MO-161, was arrested and charged with attempting to plant drugs on his primary opponent. He won the primary by 31 votes, but has since withdrawn, allowing the party to replace him with Louise Secker, the woman he tried to frame.

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September 18, 2026  ·  1 comment

My tomato sauce recipe (for now).

I grew up Italian-American, eating some variety of pasta tomato sauce multiple times a week, plus some homemade pizza (with dough purchased from the same place for 25-30 years), but I didn’t grow up with a family tomato sauce recipe, and even into adulthood, when I made it from scratch, I’d almost always use canned tomatoes – which, out of season, are the better option anyway. (For years, when I would only need a small amount of sauce for pizza, I’d buy a jar of good sauce that had zero added sugar; Trader Joes has one that’s excellent for that.)

The last few years, however, we’ve grown so many tomatoes that we can’t eat them fast enough, and I’ve started getting into making sauce from fresh tomatoes. It’s not difficult, although the two things you need are time and a food mill, and I fully understand that some people have neither. It is amazing how different the finished product can be when you start with fresh tomatoes – and, contrary to what every cookbook and almost everything on the internet has told me, you can make a good sauce from any tomatoes you grow.

So here’s my current iteration of sauce from fresh tomatoes, as simple as I can make it, with six ingredients, one optional. It’ll keep a week-plus in the fridge and freezes for much longer, although I always use it up within a few days. You do need a food mill to get the skins off fresh tomatoes; you can follow the same ratio with canned tomatoes, but can hand-crush them if you’re willing to live with a few extra seeds, and I would probably simmer it for a shorter time because they’ve already been ‘cooked’ once in the canning process.

Tomato sauce from fresh tomatoes

2-3 pounds fresh, ripe tomatoes (the smaller the tomatoes, the more total weight you want)

1 onion, diced

1-2 Tbsp olive oil

Salt

¼ cup vodka (optional)

1-3 tsp minced thyme, to taste

1. Put all tomatoes in a saucepan or skillet with a cover over medium heat. Cook about ten minutes, covered, shaking the pan often to prevent sticking or scorching, until the tomatoes have started to burst their skins.

2. Pour everything – tomatoes, skins, juices, whatever – into a food mill set over a bowl large enough to hold at least 3 cups of liquid. Mill everything until no more pulp comes through the disc. (I have two discs for my food mill and I use the one with smaller holes for this.) Set the bowl aside and toss or compost the skins and seeds left in the food mill.

3. In the same pan, add the olive oil and sweat the diced onion with a pinch of salt over low heat until translucent, 7-10 minutes. You don’t want any browning here.

4. Add the milled tomatoes, the thyme, and the vodka (if using) and simmer 30 minutes to 1 hour over medium-low, stirring often, until the sauce is visibly thickened. The ultimate consistency is up to you, but there’s a lot of water to evaporate here. You can also skip the mincing and throw thyme sprigs in the sauce for the whole simmering stage, then discard them, if you don’t have time or prefer not to have the leaves in the sauce.

5. Season to taste with more salt, and black pepper if desired.

That’s all I use – no garlic, no basil (I love it, but it can overpower the tomatoes here), no cheese, and absolutely no sugar. I know sugar is a contentious topic in tomato sauces, and maybe if you’re using out-of-season tomatoes that have less sugar in them, you might want to add it … but I hate what sucrose does to the flavor and texture of tomato sauce. It’s cloying, and I think that because it’s hygroscopic it tightens up the sauce’s consistency. I want my tomato sauce to taste like tomatoes.

That’s just my palate, though. This is a template for a tomato sauce. You can add garlic if you want. Or crushed red pepper. (Add enough, or maybe use fresh chilies, and you’ll get an arrabbiata sauce. But you’ll need a tray.) Start with 4 ounces of diced guanciale or pancetta, drain the fat, set the meat aside, then add ¼ heavy cream at the end before adding back the meat, substituting basil for thyme, and you have pasta alla vodka. Skip the cream and alcohol, use guanciale/pancetta, add a lot of black pepper to serve, and you have pasta all’amatriciana. You can swap in white wine for the vodka; it’ll be sweeter and a little tangier, but the alcohol will still boost the flavor by liberating some alcohol-soluble compounds in the tomatoes.

I also use whatever shows up in the garden, which is always a mixture of red and yellow tomatoes, varying from grape and pear tomatoes up to round ones the size of a racquetball. Yellow tomatoes are less acidic than red, so I wouldn’t go more than half yellow because I’d worry the sauce would be too bland and might spoil faster. Yellows are also sweeter than red tomatoes, which further reduces the need for adding any sugar. You can make a pretty great uncooked sauce from yellow tomatoes, come to think of it, although I haven’t done that in ages.

Anyway, I hope that’s helpful to someone. If you’ve got your own method – or something passed down from your ancestors – I’d love to hear it.

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September 17, 2026  ·  4 comments

The Everlasting.

Mousy academic and erstwhile war hero Owen Mallory uncovers a mythical manuscript about the folk hero Una the Everlasting, only to learn that the book is actually a time machine – and that he needs to go back in history to make sure that the real Una does what she’s supposed to do according to the myth. The two fall in love, however, which makes completing her legend a bit complicated, since it ends in her death. And so Owen goes back in time again, and again, egged on by the War Minister of his country, Dominion, to try to set the story straight, until he eventually discovers that someone else is writing their story, too.

Alix Harrow’s The Everlasting won the Hugo Award for Best Novel this year, quite handily according to the voting, and the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel, while acquiring what appears to be a dedicated fan base online for its sweeping romance, a love story that literally knows no bounds of time. The time-travel bits don’t add up here; you have to suspend your disbelief early and go with the flow, pun intended. That’s not a serious flaw when the time-travel aspect comes in service of a larger goal, and in The Everlasting, a story about power and loyalty and courage, that goal is evident. Where the story falls short, however, is in its two characters, and the weak chemistry between them that undermines much of the love story.

Una comes from the archetypal wild-child woman warrior, wielding a magical sword that apparently can’t be broken or destroyed, often living by her wits and her hunting prowess, feared by many of the peasants of her time but revered in hindsight by the Dominion of the present day. Dominion has just recently fought a bruising war that resembles our World War I in some ways, and Owen, still a coward, turned out to be a crack shot, dispatching enemy soldiers until he was nearly decapitated in a battle that became a massacre. He’s returned from that war dead-set on becoming a historian with a particular interest in Una’s legend, so finding and translating an original manuscript of her story, or any of the artifacts associated with her, would make his academic career. When the book arrives, of course he dives in, and he remains devoted to the task until he notices several details that make him question the nature of everything, from the righteousness of his cause to his own free will. Yet he’s much more of a Nick Jenkins here, observing, noticing, more involved in the action than Jenkins typically was but still on the outside of most of it, and as such ends up a blander character whose primary attribute is the cowardice that he tells us about – but seldom shows in these pages.

The world that Harrow has created may be the book’s real strength, as it’s recognizable and, other than the time travel, plausible, while allowing her to play around with setting and style. There are subtle shifts in the prose and tone between the more medieval settings of Una’s ‘true’ time and the contemporary vignettes of Owen’s childhood, the war, and the aftermath, along with an unsubtle warning about fascism and people who’ll destroy everything, even time itself, to gain power. (I’d also note that the identity of the villain here is as obvious as a sledgehammer to the forehead.)

The Everlasting is also an exploration of the gap between myth and reality, and the way that history, especially oral history, can change over time while also changing those who follow and hear it. Una’s legend turns out to be very far from the truth, and Owen, who grew up hearing some of the folk tales and believes he may have met Una under a yew tree when he was a child, has to grapple with the difference between the Una of the page and the one he’s traveling with, and whose mission he must protect to save Dominion. As he changes the story, however, the future changes as well, not quite in an A Sound of Thunder way, but enough to lay out an argument that past and future are intertwined in ways beyond the merely physical.

I read The Everlasting expecting to be sucked into the characters and their romance, but for the most part, I didn’t buy it. (There is one very well-written sex scene, however, especially shocking for a genre that produces some of the cringiest sex scenes put to paper.) I found the political and historical narrative much more compelling, which is enough for me to recommend the book, but also left me knowing I didn’t get what many readers seem to have gotten, and feeling like maybe I just missed something. Instead there’s some padding here and there on the duo’s repeated quests that was probably part of how Harrow tried to build their chemistry, and without that foundation, those parts dragged.

I’ve only read three of the six Hugo nominees this year, but I’d put this behind The Incandescent and ahead of Death of the Author. A Drop of Corruption is on my to-read shelf right now.

Next up: Tattoo by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán.

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September 12, 2026  ·  4 comments

Stick to baseball, 9/12/26.

One post this week on The Athletic, a scouting notebook on Gage Wood, Zyhir Hope, and a couple of other Phillies & Tigers prospects. I feel like the minor-league schedule has been personally screwing me over the last month or so; I’ve been home and around to go to games, but the matchups have been lousy.

You can sign up for my free email newsletter. For socials, I’m still mostly on Bluesky, Instagram, and TikTok.

And now, the links…

  • “I moved to New York to pay more in taxes – and I’m glad I did.” I resonated with this, having moved to Delaware in part for the lower taxes, only to learn that the outcome is worse public schools. Our taxes here should be higher, and people in many low-tax states don’t realize how much they’re losing in public services.
  • Kickstarter szn again: Tycoon Games has one up for Everdell Journeys, the latest game in the Everdell universe, with a card-drafting adventure rather than the forest city tableau- and engine-builder of the original.
  • Inside Up Games has a Kickstarter up for The Adventure Store, a deckbuilding trick-taking game built around the theme of buying equipment for your adventuring party.
  • The Kickstarter for the Clank! Big Box is already well over $1 million.
  • The annual Summit Awards honor games that represent historical themes through board gaming. This year’s winners include games about the 1968 protests in Chicago, one of the last Japanese soldiers to surrender after WWII, and queer life in early 1700s London.
  • Charlotte board game people – there’s a new FLGS (friendly local game store) opening in Camp North End called Good Game on September 19th. I’ll have to wait till spring to check it out, but I hope some of you can visit now and report back.
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September 8, 2026  ·  4 comments

Death of the Author.

Metafiction can be a powerful tool in the hands of the right author; At Swim-Two-Birds is one of my favorite novels of all time, using the technique to explore the relationship between an author and their creation, and to ask broader questions of free will and the meaning of life. More frequently, at least in my experience as a reader, it’s a gimmick that interrupts the narrative and results in one good story and one mediocre one, as in The Blind Assassin, which creates a work that ends up less satisfying than it would have been had the author just focused on a single work.

(I’m using the term “metafiction” here to refer to a fictional story within a novel, which is the definition I learned in college while we studied Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, one of the best examples of the genre I’ve ever read. Wikipedia defines it differently.)

Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author, which made the shortlist for this year’s Nebula and Hugo Awards for Best Novel, is more than just one novel; it’s trying to be at least two, the story of a disabled Black woman named Zelu who writes a best-selling sci-fi novel, and the novel itself, called Rusted Robots, with interviews interspersed throughout the book. The result is more like one and a half novels, each of them feeling about three-quarters full.

Zelu is Nigerian-American, raised in Chicago, one of six children to a couple of Igbo and Yoruba origins. When she was 11, she fell out of a tree while playing with friends, an accident that left her a paraplegic and made her the subject of pity and infantilization from her parents and siblings and of scorn and fear from relatives in Africa. She’s tried for years to write serious literature, barely making ends meet by working as an adjunct professor, but as the novel opens, she’s fired from that job and gets her umpteenth rejection letter from a publisher, forcing her to move back in with her parents. At this personal nadir, she begins writing a science-fiction novel about a post-human world populated by two types of artificial life, robots in human-shaped shells called Humes and bodiless AI programs called NoBodies. The novel is an immediate success, sparking a bidding war before it’s published and making Zelu rich.

The sudden media attention brings her into the sights of a scientist who has developed a form of intelligent prosthetic limbs called exos; Zelu decides to take the leap, regaining some mobility and independence while making herself world-famous as “that robot author.” Her family, however, doesn’t understand her writing, despises her choice to use the exos as a violation of God’s will, and wishes she’d stop smoking so much weed. As the novel keeps building, along with a film adaptation and expectations of sequels, Zelu struggles to adjust to the rapid shift from anonymity to celebrity, and grapples with an existential crisis of her own – much as the protagonist of her novel, the Hume named Ankara, has to do in the escalating conflicts of its post-apocalyptic world.

Rusted Robots is not a very good or convincing novel, and that undermines huge parts of the rest of Death of the Author. It’s written in a different voice from Okorafor’s usual writing, and the result sounds like a stilted attempt at YA literature. There’s some character development, and there’s a plot-shaped object there, but because it’s maybe the length of a short novella and written in a simpler style, it feels like she’s showing us the veneer of a novel rather than an actual one.

The constant interruptions to veer into Rusted Robots or those interview segments also end up detracting from Zelu’s story, which is the most interesting and the most fleshed-out by far. She’s a fascinating character, at least in part an author surrogate, evolving in some ways as her life changes rapidly, while still maintaining the fatalism that forms her main line of defense against her family and the world in general. Her choices can be irrational, which makes her maddening but also recognizable as a three-dimensional character who feels human. She deserves a better partner than Msizi, the South African entrepreneur whose AI-powered personal assistant app ends up a secondary distraction throughout the book.

Then there’s the ending, which is clever, maybe extremely clever, but also rather unsatisfying. Okorafor throws several matters into question with the resolution of both of the main plot points, and I’m not sure it’s internally consistent with what came before. I’ve seen this novel described as a Möbius strip; that doesn’t fit the structure, as it’s not Finnegan’s Wake, but the conclusion at least should force readers to re-evaluate some of what’s come before.

Death of the Author is very much a novel of ideas, which does mitigate some of the plot deficiencies. The main story sits on a foundation of Zelu’s identity as a disabled Black woman born to immigrant parents, with a large extended family in Nigeria, and as someone who perceives herself as an intellectual but ends up finding success writing a genre piece wildly different from her previous work. Zelu lives much of her life feeling like whatever she does is going to go wrong, which at least in some part is a function of the number of people expecting something of her, and the number of different faces she has to present to the world. (Okorafor hints at a religious divide, where Zelu is secular but retains some of the trappings of belief, such as thinking the universe is ready to smack her down if she gets too high.) Yet her ability to interrogate these influences on her life is limited. Her decisions are often impetuous, even if they’re right, and she doesn’t seem to have the introspection required to understand what’s pushing her in any direction.

The role of technology in society and individual lives, including AI, pervades both the novel proper and Rusted Root, while that inner novella’s story hinges on the power of storytelling and whether that is unique to humanity. Okorafor seems to be an AI believer, or at least a proponent, as there’s no hint in the novel of anything going awry from the technology, and its presence in the story is only positive. Zelu’s meteoric rise is possible because of technological progress, including her exos, and it opens up further opportunities for her later in the novel, one of which comes about in part due to the absence of real privacy caused by tech firms gathering endless information on us. Even I found myself skeptical of some of the pro-technology language in this book, as someone whose career also arose due to the changes in our world that technological progress has brought about.

Death of the Author is a lot of book, and offers plenty to discuss and debate, more than even the typical Hugo winner would. It’s an ambitious book, and a profound one. It’s also not entirely successful as a work of fiction, thanks to the shared narrative that results in neither Zelu nor her robots getting their due in the end. It’s a better work of literature than The Incandescent, also nominated for those same two awards, but nowhere near as enjoyable a read.

(Aside: I have read Okorafor’s Who Fears Death, about a year ago, and loved it.)

Next up: Colson Whitehead’s Crook Manifesto, the second book in his Harlem trilogy.

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September 5, 2026  ·  22 comments

Stick to baseball, 9/5/26.

Over on the Athletic this week, I looked at nine September(ish) callups of note; posted a minor-league scouting notebook on Jarlin Susana, Joseph Dzierwa, and other O’s and Nats prospects; and posted a draft scouting notebook covering both the PG All-American and Under Armour games.

I sent out a new issue of my free email newsletter this week. For socials, I’m still mostly on Bluesky, Instagram, and TikTok, and posted a new video to the latter two sites this week about the top three prospects recalled in the last week.

And now, the links…

  • ICE gave a 20-year-old Haitian immigrant and Wright State student, here legally, an ankle monitor. He killed himself a few days later. I’m unclear whose interests were served here.
  • Dan Ariely, the best-selling author of Predictably Irrational and the inspiration for the network procedural Irrational, is facing a new round of allegations of research fraud after a review of the data used for a major 2002 paper on procrastination found evidence of fabrication.
  • The police chief in Senatobia, Mississippi, where an officer shot and killed a 1-year-old while pursuing a woman suspected of shoplifting, has been fired. Harold Vanderford had also used racist slurs about Black people in text messages, and tried to resign before he was fired. Maybe Arizona State will hire him?
  • The widow of a U.S. airman killed in Trump’s illegal war on Iran had to go to social media to get death benefits because, in her words, the military claimed it wasn’t a war, so she wasn’t entitled to the benefits that accrue to the surviving spouse when a soldier is killed during a war.  
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September 3, 2026  ·  4 comments

Music update, August 2026.

August was a monstrous month for new music in a great way, so much so that I posted a list of album grades on Bluesky covering LPs that came out in July or the first three weeks of August, which was before we got new records from Mastodon, Russian Circles, Elephant Stone, Billy Strings, flowerovlove, Interpol, and Alabama Shakes on the month’s final Friday. Anyway, as always, if you can’t see the widget below, you can access the playlist on Apple Music or Spotify.

The Afghan Whigs – House of I. The Whigs sound as good as ever, with their latest album, Soft Control, maybe their best yet, at least rivaling 2017’s In Spades, and up there with Gentlemen from the band’s first incarnation. This song and “Loose Talk” were two of the best new songs I heard all month; I picked this one because of the guitar riff that opens it.

Kiwi jr. – Pure Michigan. The answer to the eternal question: What if Vampire Weekend made a song that wasn’t twee as fuck? Anyway, this Canadian band’s latest album, Blowing Up, came out on August 14th, featuring their usual blend of jangle-pop sounds and sardonic lyrics.

Do Nothing – Act Natural. This song reminds me so much of peak Wild Beasts, whose farewell album Boy King remains one of my favorites of this century, that I have come back to it repeatedly since first hearing it a few weeks ago. Do Nothing’s sound is a similar blend of art rock and post-punk, but here with big, almost bombastic vocals. Their second album, Friend World, comes out on November 6th; they previously released another single, “Stars,” that’s a little blander and less catchy.

Squirrel Flower – Cleveland. Squirrel Flower is Ella O’Connor Williams, a multi-instrumentalist from Boston by way of Grinnell who has released five albums, with the latest, Say a Prayer to the Gods of Getting Going, among my favorites of the year so far. She blends indie folk with shoegaze elements, but the real star is her strong voice that communicates deep longing and sadness on much of the album.

she’s green – close your eyes. The final song on this Minneapolis shoegaze band’s debut album is seven minutes long, but it’s a stunner, calling to mind Slowdive and early Lush, with waves of sound washing over you beneath Zofia Smith’s atmospheric vocals.

Smidley – Love in Every Direction. Smidley is Conor Murphy, lead singer of the maybe-defunct band Foxing, who is set to release his second solo album Murphy Horse on the 25th. It’s different from most of Foxing’s work, especially their last album, and feels more like the kind of indie rock that was popular in the wake of the Killers’ massively successful debut album.

Keo – That’s Me. Based in London but with roots all over Europe, Keo will release its first album, Put A Smile On For Me, on the 25th, with this song sounding like the Gin Blossoms by way of the Amazons with a lyrical reference to R.E.M. in the chorus.

Sailor Honeymoon – Click Click. This South Korean all-girl punk band’s debut album The Worst of Sailor Honeymoon came out in August and shows plenty of promise, although it’s pretty short (27 minutes) and gets a little repetitive over 13 songs. This song, “I Wanna Leave You,” and “Bad Apple” are standouts.

Ceremony – Dark Summer. I did not like Ceremony’s latest album, Tell Me Your Dream, which has no real identity and features a lot of filler tracks. This is one of two tracks on the record I liked, along with “Other Hells,” but there’s nothing here to rival In the Spirit World Now.

DIIV – The Fountain. DIIV’s critical acclaim has always outpaced their music for me; this song, from their upcoming fifth album Zirp! (due October 30), might be my favorite song by this Brooklyn indie-rock band, blending genres while maintaining a consistently strong hook in the chorus.

Quicksand – Bring on the Psychics. The title track from this seminal post-hardcore band’s third post-reunion album is one of its strongest, and the record as a whole might be their best. It’s certainly their most cohesive, and stays true to their musical roots while tightening up some of the noise-rock elements more present in their first two records.

Elephant Stone – I Got a Pill. Elephant Stone’s latest album ASHA came out on August 28th; I’ve heard three songs, this power-pop track, the tremendous rocker “Everything Evil,” and “Fascists Killed Yer Rock ‘n’ Roll,” which made NPR’s best songs of the week list last week. I wasn’t familiar with the band before this year, but they’ve been around since 2009, and I’m a fan of what I’ve heard so far.

The Olivia Tremor Control – Garden of Light. OTC was part of the Elephant 6 collective in Athens, Georgia, that also spawned Apples in Stereo and Neutral Milk Hotel, releasing two albums of jangly power-pop before internal strife ended the band’s first run in 2000. Founding members Bill Doss and Will Hart recorded most of a third album before Doss died in 2012, and the band released two singles from the record in 2024 on the same day that Hart died at age 53. The band’s final album, The Same Place, comes out on October 23rd, including this song and the just-released “Advice from the Oceans.”

Billy Strings – Burn the Other End. Strings won the Grammy for Best Bluegrass album in February, and he’s already back with a new LP, So Much for Goodbyes, which came out in August. He also hopped on stage with the latest version of Canadian death metal band Cryptopsy at his own Ionia Freak Fair last week.

Wolf Alice – Hammond Song. How the hell is this a B-side from The Clearing? It would have been among the five best songs on the album, easily, maybe top three after “White Horses” and “Bloom Baby Bloom,” and it’s the best showcase of Ellie Rowsell’s voice of anything from those sessions.

beabadoobee – Memories. This is the third single ahead of Beatrice Laus’ fourth album, Pylon, due out on the 18th, which apparently is not a note-for-note cover of Killing Joke’s final LP.

flowerovlove – KISS KISS KISS. Joyce Cissé’s debut album MINI SKIRT WARRIOR dropped on August 28th, and it’s one of the best pure pop albums of the year. Her ear for a great melody is incredible, and the album is littered with songs that should be all over pop radio, including this one, “American Wedding,” “I’m Your First,” “girls will be girls” (featuring Willow), and “shady.” I hate the term “sophisti-pop” but it would certainly apply here.

Iben – Dead End. A Norwegian singer who just released her debut album Hulder, Iben blends folk music, atmospheric metal, and morbid lyrics for an intriguing combination that somehow also sounds … not poppy, but potentially mainstream. I can’t figure out if she’s the same Iben who released a pure pop song a few years ago called “Childish;” Spotify has them as separate artists but I wouldn’t swear those are different voices.

Heathers – Bite. Heathers is Heath Michael Thomas – there’s an Irish pop duo of the same name, but this ain’t them – who’s released three singles so far this year, with his debut album Awesome coming out on October 30th. It’s very lo-fi, DIY, garage rock; sometimes he sounds like he’s singing with his mouth pressed up against a screen door. There’s a real melodic sensibility here, though. Props to Jon Natchez from The War on Drugs for the rec.

Soft Science – Fade. More power-pop with some shoegaze elements, reminiscent of Velocity Girl and Belly, from this long-running Sacramento band whose fifth album, Sand, comes out this Friday.

Gang of Youths – Things Take Time. This one-off single is the Australian band’s first new music since 2022’s Angel in Realtime, which had a couple of stellar singles in “The Angel of 8th Ave.” and “In the Wake of Your Leave.” This feels like a lyrical throwaway, and singer/songwriter David Le’aupepe has said the song isn’t really about anything. The music’s fine, though.

Ezra Collective – Jubilee Feeling. This Mercury Prize-winning jazz quintet will release its fourth album, Here Because of Hope, on September 18th. This single is the first instrumental and third single they’ve released from the LP, after “Only Love” (feat. Pa Salieu) and “Well Organized” (feat. Lila Iké).

Jorja Smith – Dancing. I love Jorja Smith’s voice, but prefer when she leans more towards jazz or classic R&B sounds than EDM. Her latest album What Are the Odds bridges the gap between the two, with largely electronic beats but less frenetic tempos, allowing her voice to remain front and center, as on this Afrobeat-tinged dance track.

Jungle – Sunshine. The best song off Jungle’s disappointing new album is the title track, which has a good enough hook to stand out over the sea of sameness on the rest of the record. There’s no “Busy Earnin” or “Happy Man” to be found anywhere on the LP.

Rakim, Kurupt, Masta Killa, & Kokane – Goin Down. The first three MCs here have collaborated on The Godbody LP, which was supposed to be released on August 28th, and has now been pushed back to September 18th. This lead single is basically an average Rakim rhyme and some other dudes. By the way, there are a couple of new Rakim collaboration videos on Youtube that I think are AI slop – they sound entirely plausible but there’s no media coverage whatsoever and the videos are just stitched together from old clips.

CZARFACE & Frankie Pulitzer feat. Method Man – Mad Technology. CZARFACE is Inspectah Deck, 7L, and Esoteric, but more importantly, Frankie Pulitzer is Tom Hardy – and he can rap a little! He’s better than Esoteric, at least, and isn’t embarrassed rhyming after two Wu-Tang members.

Royal Blood – Ten Over Ten. This heavy-rock duo’s fifth album, Dead Company, comes out on November 13th, with this track the first single. It might be a sign they’re returning to their heavier roots from their first two albums after Typhoons went for a little more funk and pop and Stuck in the Water Below felt like a lesser version of their previous work.

Sleep – The Morrisist. Sleep’s newest album, Hemispheres, comes out today, featuring only Al Cisneros from the original lineup; guitarist Matt Pike is out, replaced by Bubba Dupree of the early ‘80s punk band Void, while drummer Jason Roeder has been replaced by Melvins drummer Dale Crover. I know some Sleep fans are pissed about this, but 1) Pike’s public comments and his embrace of antisemitic conspiracy theorist David Icke are a serious problem and 2) this song is great, so just enjoy it.

The HU – Second Face. HUN, the latest album from this Mongolian folk-metal band, is one of the best albums of the year for me – it blends a genre I know nothing about with a genre I know a lot about, classic heavy metal like that of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. It’s no surprise that the Hu covered Maiden’s “The Trooper.”

Mastodon – Snakes for Dinner. Mastodon’s latest album and their first since the death of Brent Hinds, Marrow Deep, is solid but unfocused; it’s a collection of songs, some pretty good, including “Your Ghost Again” (which, I’m calling it now, is going to get a Grammy nomination and maybe win) and this track. I only felt like one track was a miss, “A Vampire’s Demeanor,” and thought the closer “The Three Fates” was a strong finish that recalled some of Mastodon’s more ambitious and longer tracks.

Sarcator – In Search of Oblivion. This young blackened thrash band from Sweden came up with its name by combining the names of two of their favorite bands, the early death-metal act Sarcófago and German thrash titans Kreator. You can really hear the latter’s influence in the vocals on this track from the band’s upcoming fourth album, The Ones We Follow, due out October 30th.

Flotsam & Jetsam – The Edge of Nowhere. Flotsam & Jetsam were probably best known in the 1980s for being the original band of Jason Newsted, who served as Metallica’s bassist after Cliff Burton’s death; and for their commercial track “Wading Through the Darkness” from 1992’s Cuatro. Unlike many bands from that first wave of American thrash, however, they never stopped recording, and I loved “Primal” from their last album. Their newest, Rats in the Temple, seemed a little heavier to me, and thus less like the classic thrash sound I love.

Russian Circles – Seventh Seal. This instrumental metal band’s latest album, Nine, is heavy and proggy and pretty endlessly interesting, which is what I want from this kind of music. It’s seven tracks, one of which is just shy of two minutes, with the others all 4:57 or longer.

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