→ February 19, 2026
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Petersburg.

Andrei Bely was the pen name of Boris Bugaev, a Russian poet and novelist whose peak period came at the end of the Imperial Era, publishing through the Revolution but ultimately finding his works out of favor with the Soviet regime. His novel Petersburg, originally intended as the second part of an unfinished trilogy, appears frequently on lists of the greatest novels ever written. It appeared on The Novel 100, a book that attempted to rank the hundred greatest novels of all time, and Vladimir Nabokov named it one of the four great works of 20th century literature (along with Joyce’s Ulysses, Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, and the first half of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time).

The story revolves around a father and son who represent the past and the future of Russia. Apollon Apollonovich is a senator and head of something called the Institution, the nature of which Bely doesn’t reveal. He’s verging on retirement and seems largely consumed with work, especially since his wife ran off with another man two years before. His son Nikolai, also known as Kolenka (which confused me quite a bit), is sort of a layabout with no apparent job. He’s loosely involved with revolutionaries who are quite serious about their business – which leads one of them to hand him a ‘bundle’ that turns out to be a bomb that Nikolai is supposed to use to assassinate his own father. The bomb, which comes in a sardine tin, has a clockwork mechanism that Nikolai accidentally activates, leaving him 24 hours to dispose of it or else have it explode in his father’s house. Complicating matters further is that he’s in love with a married woman, Sofia, who becomes part of the conspiracy. There’s also the ‘red domino,’ appearing at various parties in that hooded cape popular at masquerades in the 19th century, which appears to be more than one character.

The plot is somewhat beside the point, according to just about everything I’ve since read about Petersburg, but there is some narrative greed here to keep you moving, not least to see what’s going to happen when the bomb finally goes off. Bely seems mildly sympathetic to the revolutionaries, but not to the point of supporting murder; it’s as if the book itself is advocating for a nonviolent overthrow of the Tsarist regime.

There’s no question in my mind that I missed a lot of the subtext in the book. Daniel Burt, author of The Novel 100, points out that Petersburg presaged what James Joyce did in Ulysses, both in making a city the central character in the book and in engaging in all kinds of wordplay, including puns and other jokes. Many of these probably don’t survive the translation into English, and in general I did not find the book funny in any way except maybe, if I squint a bit, the series of events that befalls Nikolai to prevent him from either fulfilling his mission or throwing the bomb in the river. I also lack the knowledge of St. Petersburg’s geography and some of the Russian literature that directly influenced Bely, notably Pushkin and other poets, although there’s an obvious parallel to Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, which I have read because it was also on Burt’s list.

One literary device I did catch was the use and symbolism of the color red – the red domino, a rust-red palace, red restaurant signs, the red border on the fabric of the dangerous bundle. Red had already been the color of the communist movement for several decades by this point, and has also been associated with revolutions (such as in Les Misérables) or the military more broadly (as in Stendhal’s The Red and the Black). Bely’s novel depicts a Russia on the brink of a massive upheaval, more than he likely even realized when he first wrote the novel – he revised it substantially for the final edition – where blood would eventually flow in the streets. His use of red foreshadows the conflict to come, without seeming to take sides; neither Nikolai the revolutionary nor Apollon the tsarist bureaucrat gets any sort of approval from the author. He makes them both clowns, just in differing ways.

I usually try to offer some sort of opinions on the books I read and write up, but I won’t do so for Petersburg because I know most of what critics and other authors love about the book went over my head. I can only say that I found the plot compelling enough to get me through it, and the prose was far easier to handle than the postmodernists who’d follow him.

This is the 90th book I’ve read from Burt’s original list; I’ve read only the middle part of the Beckett trilogy of Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable, so I didn’t count that, but I did count Proust after I read Swann’s Way, which is a whole-ass book and I’m not reading the entire seven volumes because I’m not insane. Almost everything I have left from the original 100 is extremely long (The Man Without Qualities, Clarissa, The Dream of the Red Chamber) and/or famously difficult (Finnegan’s Wake), although there are maybe a few more I could pick off if I feel so inclined.

Next up: I’m reading Philip K. Dick’s Lies, Inc., which is definitely one of his lesser novels, mostly because it’s a padded version of a novella called The Unteleported Man. I’d recommend Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said or The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch as books by Dick that cover similar ground but do so much more effectively.

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→ February 18, 2026
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Darwin’s Journey.

Darwin’s Journey is one of the greatest complex board games I’ve ever played – although I’d call it more medium-heavy than heavy – with its incredible balance of various mechanics, strategies, and even a little player interaction. It first came out in 2023 and has since soared into the top 100 overall on BoardGameGeek, a list that skews towards heavier games, while also jumping on to my own top 100 at #16 this November, the highest new entry of any game this time around. I’ve owned the game for probably two years, having picked it up on Prime Day in either 2023 or 2024 for half off, and also love the fact that the box is half the width of any other game of its playing weight I own. (It’s out of stock right now at Miniature Market, but Noble Knight has some used copies.)

Designed by Simone Luciani*, who has three games on my top 100 (Grand Austria Hotel is #17, Tzolk’in is #57), and Nestor Mangone (Masters of Renaissance, last year’s Stupor Mundi), Darwin’s Journey is a worker placement game at heart, asking players to place their four crew members on various action spaces to move their ship, place and move explorers on three mini-maps, gain ‘seals’ to give those crew members more abilities, place stamps for ongoing rewards at the end of each round, deliver specimens to the museum or research ones already there, and more. There are countless opportunities to chain your actions as the game progresses, and you can even add a fifth crew member if you complete a gold-level objective. There are also objectives for each round, plus end-game objectives, with two (one gold and one silver) given to each player at the start, then more available as the game goes along. You also have to make sure you have enough cash on hand, because taking actions nearly always costs at least one coin. There’s a lot going on here, to be sure, although I think the turns are so simple – and your options become more limited within each round as you have fewer workers left to place – that the game play isn’t that complicated.

The rounds are marked by the progress of the HMS Beagle, and that’s one of the few places in this game where the actual history of Darwin’s voyage intersects with the mechanics. (It’s still better at that than the acclaimed In the Footsteps of Darwin, a much inferior game to this one in every way.) You lose points if any round ends with your personal ship behind the Beagle’s position, after which it moves forward to the next marker on its path.

Within a round, each player will place one worker per turn, based in part on the seals (skills) that worker has. You start the game with four workers, one with a wild seal, and then three others with seals you’ll choose in a crew-card draft before the game. The seals represent ship movement (blue), explorer movement (green), stamps (yellow), and more seals (red). When the game begins, there’s one available space for each color of seal, and each of those spaces holds an unlimited number of workers. Once there’s one worker anywhere on the blue/green spaces or the red/yellow spaces, however, placing another one there will cost 2 coins (or 3 in a two-player game). Players can unlock further, more powerful action spaces under each of those four by paying the unlocking cost to place a ‘lens’ on those spaces, making them available to all players – although anyone else has to pay you a coin to use yours. There are six special action spaces that change each game, two of which are available at the start while four are locked. You can also go to the museum to submit or research specimens, go get another objective tile and gain some coins, or go move up in the turn order and gain some coins. If everything’s unlocked, which I don’t think is technically possible, there would be 24 possible action spaces by the end of the game; I think the maximum is actually 22, and I’ve never seen that many in an actual game.

Darwin’s Journey also offers players all sorts of … not quite mini-games, more like side quests that carry real bonuses. You start with 12 stamps in three sets; if you send out all four of a set, you get a bonus. Explorers can place tents on certain spaces on all three maps; you get five of them, and after the first one, each subsequent one you place gets you a bonus. Each crew card you drafted at the beginning has a specific set of five seals shown on it; if you get all five of those seals on one worker’s row, you can assign that card to that worker and get the bonus shown. Getting five seals on a worker also gets you three points at game-end; getting the sixth gets you seven points, and having at least four seals of a certain color gets you an additional benefit when you use that worker for that action. Still with me?

The game goes five rounds, after which you do the end scoring, adding to points you gained during the game from each round’s objective and from points you picked up with your explorers. You score all of your personal objectives. Then you score the research track: every time you submit a specimen, you gain some research points and/or coins, while you can also move up the research track via exploration and occasionally through a special action space. You count the completed rows of specimens in the 4×4 museum, add two, and multiply it by the highest number your marker has passed on the research track; it’s the weirdest part of the scoring by far, but the point gains here can be substantial, easily a quarter or more of your total. I’ve seen winning scores over 200 points, and I have won a game with only about 155 or so.

I’m worried I’m not selling this game enough: It’s fantastic, easily one of the best complex games I’ve ever played, behind only Great Western Trail on my top 100, one spot ahead of Grand Austria Hotel and four spots ahead of Agricola. GWT is a little more accessible, I think, but it has a small deckbuilding element, which is one of my least favorite mechanics. Darwin’s Journey is more forbidding, and getting all of the parts to work together in your head is a real challenge – and even after many plays, I’m still not great at it, because my preferred strategies may not work as well with the specific actions and maps and other facets specific to that game’s board. If you pulled both games out and asked me which one I’d want to play, I’d have a hard time choosing.

* I actually haven’t played Luciani’s highest-rated game, Barrage, which I’ve heard is amazing and quite brutal in its interactive elements. I hated Rats of Wistar – literally got up mid-game at a First Look demo at PAXU and left, although part of that was one of the other players was insufferable – and I would say I like but don’t love Lorenzo il Maginifico, preferring the card-game version. He also co-designed a new version of Railway Boom with Hisashi Hayashi, who won the Spiel des Jahres last year for Bomb Busters and designed the excellent Yokohama games. As always, forza azzurri!

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→ February 14, 2026
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Menagerie.

Menagerie comes from the designer collective known as Prospero Hall, which was acquired by Funko Games in 2019 but then effectively shut down when Funko sold its games division to Goliath Games in January of 2024. There were a few releases last year that were probably already completed when the sale took place, so this is the first new game we’ve had from Prospero Hall since late 2024 (the Only Murders in the Building tie-in game), and one of fewer than a half-dozen in the last eighteen months.

That makes it all the more disappointing to report that this game just doesn’t work. It feels unfinished, with moves almost automatic and no real strategy beyond collecting cards in the same colors you already have. The art is fantastic and the cards are high-quality, but beyond that, I don’t see anything here.

Players in Menagerie, which has the unwieldy full title Menagerie: Unlock the Wonders of a Miniature World, are collecting insects for their collection. Each player has three rows in their terrarium and must choose a different one on each turn into which they will place the insects they select. Then they get to pick two adjacent insects from the six on display and place them in that row, possibly using one of the relatively powerless powers from the symbols on the cards to move an insect, take an iridescent crystal, or break the adjacency requirement. Play continues until someone fills their terrarium with 15 cards, at which point you score.

The bulk of the points come from sets of the same color within a row, with the biggest bonus coming from getting all five cards in a row to be the same color. Each player also gets one private objective card to start the game, and leaning into that can also produce significant points. There are also some small point awards for getting sets of the same symbol within a row.

There is nothing to do in Menagerie aside from taking two cards of the color you want for that row if at all possible. You pick the row before the turn, so you can see what cards are available, and you can pick the row best suited to hold those cards. You can’t refresh the display, which seems like the most obvious power to give a player. It’s just the luck of the draw, and if you’re playing with just two players, you can plan ahead another move or maybe even two by anticipating what the other player might select.

I was a little surprised to see a game this thin come from Prospero Hall, as the group made a strong name for themselves for producing highly thematic midweight or medium-light games for family play, games like Pan Am, Horrified, and Villainous. I didn’t like the last Prospero Hall game I reviewed either, the 2023 game based on the film Rear Window, and looking back through their catalog, the last game of theirs I played and liked was 2021’s The Rocketeer: Fate of the Future. Maybe the makeup of Prospero Hall has changed, or different people are taking the lead, but Menagerie makes me think that their brand isn’t what it used to be.

Menagerie came out last August and remains a Barnes & Noble exclusive, which you can buy here.

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→ February 13, 2026
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Flesh.

David Szalay’s Flesh is an alienated novel about alienation: It keeps the reader at arm’s length from its main character, István, a young Hungarian man with no apparent morality or values who acts on impulse for most of his life. The spartan prose, especially the dialogue, helps create an atmosphere of futility and disaffection, reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange, but doesn’t ask any questions of itself, neither its protagonist or its world, to explain his feelings or his actions in a meaningful way. It won the 2025 Booker Prize, beating out books by previous winner Kiran Desai as well as Susan Choi.

When we meet István, he’s a 15-year-old living in a public housing project in Hungary who, after a friend tries to get him to lose his virginity with another girl they know, ends up groomed into a ‘relationship’ by an adult woman neighbor – although this is just statutory rape. This ends in violence that leads to István serving time in juvenile detention and then as a soldier in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which further hardens him; while there, he saw one of his close friends killed by an IED, later receiving an honor for his own efforts in the same incident. Upon his discharge, he moves to London, works in private security, and ends up in a relationship with the wife of his wealthy boss, leading to an elevation in his social status that he can’t match with any change in his attitudes, language, or ultimately his behavior.

Life largely happens to István; he perseveres but has almost no initiative, and the most active thing he does – the crime that gets him sent to prison early in the book – is an accident. He almost fails upwards, going from someone who doesn’t even know what sex is when the novel opens to someone who falls backwards into it by the time his boss’s wife seduces him. The pervasive anomie throughout the novel provides some context, although Szalay seems to be telling us that the world is making men like István – the incel argument, although he is certainly not celibate – rather than making István responsible for at least some of his own actions. He’s born poor, with fewer choices than someone born into more privilege, but he doesn’t lack agency entirely.

Much of the praise for Flesh has been for its ascetic prose, which does make the book a very quick read, while also preventing it from becoming leaden with its aimless protagonist and depressing plot. The sparseness is primarily in the dialogue; István is a man of few words, but none of the characters is especially garrulous. Szalay also creates paragraphs of a single sentence – “The news is disorienting,” “It’s already getting dark” – that make the book a faster read, but also don’t imprint anything on the mind. The words rolled off me, even when I sort of found some meaning in the story.

Flesh is built on a foundation of toxic masculinity. Is it, however, an indictment of toxic masculinity itself, or of the so-called masculinity crisis, which is (in my opinion) largely manufactured by, well, men. Szalay presents István as a man with limited options, not with no options. He seems to be making the case that society as a whole has lost its centers that provided young men with direction or purpose. Religion is dying. Traditional male job paths have declined. The man as head-of-household is no longer the dominant family paradigm. István goes into the military, which might be the one traditionally male or masculine field that’s at least similar to what it was fifty years ago, and it’s the only major event in István’s life that provides him with structure and meaning – and it’s accompanied by trauma. One of the Booker Prize judges said that István is “struggling to gain control of his life.” I could buy that if I saw any of the struggle.

Next up: About halfway through Petersburg by Andrei Bely, who for some reason is listed as “Deceased Andrei Bely” on Bookshop.

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→ February 11, 2026
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The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (And His Mother).

Raja is a portly gay 63-year-old teacher in Beirut who lives with his overbearing, impossible mother. He calls himself gullible, although I think he’s being overly self-deprecating; he’s surrounded by lunatics, and lived through more history than most of us, from the Lebanese Civil War to the collapse of the country’s economy to the 2020 explosion at the city’s port. Rabih Alameddine’s The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother), winner of the 2025 National Book Award, follows him in a sort of picaresque fashion through his memories of these and other major events in Lebanese history, as he ends up in one ridiculous situation after another, often with the city around him in ruins or chaos. It’s consistently funny, even in its sorrows, with an indelible main character (and his mother) as our tour guide through a sort of absurdist realism, where the improbable takes place right amidst the actual over the course of six decades.

The prompt that opens the novel is that Raja, a philosophy teacher who wrote one book that was reasonably successful, receives an invitation from a foundation in the United States to pay for him to come to their compound and give a lecture. This, he tells us, he accepted, because he is gullible, and it turned out to be a mistake, although we won’t find out what happened until the penultimate chapter of the book. On the way to that story, Raja walks us through multiple episodes in his life story, each tied to some major event in modern Lebanese history. He missed a huge chunk of the Civil War because he was kidnapped, but not by enemies: it was by a friend of sorts from school who hides Raja away after he witnesses a murder. He’s saving Raja’s life, but he also insists that Raja teach him to dance so he can sleep with some girl in their class – clearly assuming Raja can dance because he’s gay. That’s just the setup; the story goes off the rails from there, or perhaps the rails were blown up by the Israeli invaders. Who can say.

Raja is truly a delight as a narrator and a main character, and his relationship with his mother, who loves to respond to him in paradoxical fashion with “Fuck your mother,” is both an important throughline and a consistent source of laughs. The novel’s nested-stories structure allows Alameddine to jump around through time, while Raja and his mother are there in every one of those stories – true or not, as some of these tales are hard to believe, notably the one of the kidnapping, where Raja and his kidnapper become lovers in a sort of kicked-up gay Stockholm syndrome. Each of the stories, including the resolution of the speaking invitation, which itself is hard for Raja to believe because he’s not an author – he wrote one book, 25 years earlier, that wasn’t successful in the United States, so why on earth would someone there want him to come speak? The answer to that, as with so much else in the book, is hilarious on its surface, but comes with layers of meaning that point to Lebanon’s inability to reckon with or learn from its own history, which keeps looping back on itself, from crisis to crisis, with the Lebanese people always the ones to suffer – including Raja, who takes each setback in a fatalist’s stride.

There are probably further layers of the book that I missed because I’m not that familiar with Lebanon’s history; what I do know is largely through an American lens, such as the news coverage of the hostage crisis, which obviously didn’t paint Lebanon in a kind or accurate light. Alameddine depicts an entirely different Beirut, that of a worldly city with many modern aspects, beset by corruption and conflict, but one where a gay philosophy teacher and his overbearing mother can live their ridiculous life, with a too-large coffee table and a parade of terrible relatives, in something resembling happiness. It’s a richly textured work that takes great tragedies and packages them in wry humor, all delivered by one of the most delightful narrators I’ve encountered in ages.

Next up: I’m way behind on writing up books I’ve read, but right now I’m reading Andrei Bely’s Petersburg.

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→ February 10, 2026
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Stick to baseball, 2/10/26.

The top 100 index page is here, with links to all 30 team reports and everything else in the package. If you’re looking for the highlights, you can go right to the top 100 prospects, the prospects who just missed the top 100, and my ranking of all 30 farm systems, as well as the Q&As I did on top 100 day and this past Monday.

Over at AV Club, I reviewed the small-box game Point Galaxy, a sequel game to Point Salad; and Knitting Circle, a lighter game with a similar theme and art to Calico.

My free email newsletter is back as well, and you should sign up for more of me.

I appeared on the Detroit News’ Tigers Today podcast to talk about Detroit’s loaded farm system; on Friar Territory to talk about what’s left in the Padres’ system; on the JD Bunkis Show to discuss the state of the Jays’ system after their World Series run; and on Halo Territory to talk about the Angels’ system and why it’s so bad.

And now, the links…

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→ February 8, 2026
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Music update, January 2026.

This playlist includes a handful of tracks from December 2025 that I heard after I compiled my top 100 tracks of the year or that didn’t make the cut, plus songs from this January, through songs released on the final Friday (the 30th), but not anything released this month. As always, if you can’t see the playlist below you can access it on Apple Music or Spotify.

Courtney Barnett feat. Waxahatchee – Site Unseen. This second single off Barnett’s upcoming album Creature of Habit features Katie Crutchfield, so it couldn’t be more in my personal wheelhouse.

Brigitte Calls Me Baby – Slumber Party. BCMB’s sophomore album, Irreversible, is due out on March 13th; they do one of the best new wave-revival sounds out there, honoring the genre without sounding overly derivative of it. It’s catnip for me.

Arlo Parks – 2SIDED. Parks will release her third album, Ambiguous Desire, on April 3rd; she has yet to miss for me, with this song leaning more into a dance sound beneath her unmistakable voice.

Daughter – Not Enough. This Irish trio’s album Not to Disappear turns ten this year, so they re-recorded one of the tracks that didn’t make the cut, “Not Enough,” which showcases Elena Tonra’s haunting voice over a typically sparse backing track that hints at electronica, folk, and shoegaze.

Makthaverskan – Pity Party. I’d never heard of this rock band from Gothenberg (a town best known for producing melodic death metal), but I love this song, which has some dreamgaze and post-punk elements, and is the lead single from their upcoming album Glass and Bones, which will be their first new album in five years.

Ratboys – What’s Right. I can’t say I’m a huge fan of Ratboys, in part because of Julia Steiner’s warbly, sometimes off-key vocals, but their best stuff can be pretty catchy folk-tinged alt-rock. Their latest album Singin’ to an Empty Chair came out on Friday.

DEADLETTER – It Comes Creeping. I loved DEADLETTER’s very Madness-like 2024 track “Mere Mortal;” and this song is in a very similar vein. Their second album Existence is Bliss comes out on February 27th.

Flea – A Plea. Flea, best known as the bassist who replaced Derf Scratch in Fear, is about to release his first solo album, Honora, in March; it’s a jazz album, featuring six original tracks and four covers, and the two singles to date – this one and “Traffic Lights” – are both fantastic, featuring Flea on bass and trumpet, with Thom Yorke providing vocals on the latter song.

Whitelands – Blankspace. Whitelands is a shoegaze band from London – aren’t they all – who just released their fifth album, but second on a proper label, at the end of January. Sunlight Echoes also includes an appearance from Lush’s Emma Anderson on “Sparklebaby.”

Tigers Jaw – Head is Like a Sinking Stone. Another new-to-me artist, Tigers Jaw hails from Scranton and they’re also about to put out their first album in five years, Lost on You.

The Cribs – Never the Same. I think the main thing I knew about the Cribs was that they’re one of the eighty-nine bands Johnny Marr has joined since the end of the Smiths. They’ve been around for over 20 years now, with their ninth album Selling a Vibe coming out last month; this is the best track I’ve heard, while the album as a whole gets a little one-note.

The Twilight Sad – Designed to Lose. It’s the Long Goodbye, The Twilight Sad’s first album since three members left the band, leaving only founding members James Graham and Andy MacFarlane, will be out on March 27th, a big day for new albums, as it turns out. This song is pretty vintage Twilight Sad, dark and a little gothic-new wave but also still informed by pop.

Butler, Blake & Grant – Lonely Night. That would be Bernard Butler (Suede), Norman Blake (Teenage Fanclub), and James Grant (Love and Money). They released a self-titled album last March, while this is a folk-rock reworking of a song Blake wrote for Teenage Fanclub that that band recorded as “Dark & Lonely Night.”

Billy Bragg – City of Heroes. “When they came for the immigrants/I got in their face/When they came for the refugees/I got in their face/When they came for the five-year-olds/I got in their face/When they came to my neighborhood/I just got in their face.”

Arctic Monkeys – Opening Night. A midtier Arctic Monkeys track off the upcoming Help(2) charity album to benefit War Child, featuring other tracks from Olivia Rodrigo, The Last Dinner Party, Damon Albarn, Fontaines DC, and more.

The Format – Boycott Heaven. The Format just released their first new album in 20 years; they were Nate Ruess’ original band, before he and Jack Antonoff formed fun., which released that one album (note: and one before that, which I missed) and then broke up. I’ve always liked Ruess’ voice, even when they got stupid with autotuning it, and this track showcases it well in a great indie-pop vein.

SAULT – Chapter 1. SAULT’s latest album is full of … salt. It’s clearly a response to Little Simz’ Lotus, which was her album about how SAULT leader Inflo borrowed a seven-figure sum from her and didn’t repay it; here Inflo leans further into his religious act, with songs like “God, Protect Me From My Enemies” and “Lord Have Mercy,” along with hackneyed lyrics like “They’re jealous of what’s in your brain” and “Must go higher. I refuse to fight with fire.” But damn, nobody does ‘70s soul/funk revival like SAULT does.

TIGRA & SPNCR – Do It Like This. If you’re old enough to remember the 1980s rap duo L’Trimm, which had a couple of minor hits in “Grab It” and “Cars with the Boom,” Tigra was half of that group (as The Lady Tigra), and she’s back with an EP called Black Rice. Bunny appears on a different track, “Guillotine.”

Home Star – Come To. This track, by Evan Lescallette of the band Marietta, is perfectly fine punk-pop-emo whatever, but I couldn’t ignore an artist named Home Star.

Blackwater Holylight – Bodies. Metal in general is a male-dominated genre, and doom metal even more so, with the occasional female vocalist but very few all-women bands. Blackwater Holylight is three women, from Oregon, who put out three albums from 2018-21 and then took five years off before their fourth album, Not Here Not Gone, came out at the end of January. This track blends heavy, crunchy guitar lines with ghostly vocals to make it all much creepier than just some guy doing the Cookie Monster voice.

Maria BC – Marathon. Maria BC is an experimental singer/guitarist from Oakland whose music starts out as ambient but often goes in unexpected directions; here, their vocals sound like Alejandra Deheza of School of Seven Bells, set over dark guitar sounds like some of Alcest’s best work.

The Hu – The Real You. The Hu are a Mongolian folk-metal band that incorporates native instruments and throat singing into their music; they’ve toured with Iron Maiden and even covered “The Trooper.” Their third album will be out later this year, and yes, it’s pronounced like “the Who.”

Port Noir – Noir. Port Noir is a progressive rock band that has always at least toyed with metal, but their upcoming album The Dark We Keep seems to lean all the way into the heavy stuff – they’ve actually said on their Instagram that it’s the heaviest album they’ve ever made. Also in the metal space, The Ruins of Beverast has some great guitarwork on their newest album, but the death growls here are way too prominent for me; Kreator’s Krushers of the World had some solid stuff but also got a little clownish, as on the title track; and Sylosis’s “Erased” had some strong thrash riffs but got too metalcore for me.

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→ January 24, 2026
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Stick to baseball, 1/24/26.

I wrote two pieces for the Athletic this week, breaking down the MacKenzie Gore trade and the Freddy Peralta trade. My top 100 prospects ranking runs on Monday.

At AV Club, I reviewed the board game Gingham, a family-level game of area control that gets very tense as the game approaches its end.

I sent out an issue of my free email newsletter last weekend, but the next one won’t go out until at least Monday, for obvious reasons.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: My colleague Paul Tenorio wrote about the kidnapping of soccer coach Adrian Heath, as he was lured by the promise of a lucrative job with a Saudi club. The club exists, but the job didn’t, and Heath was lucky to survive the ordeal.

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→ January 17, 2026
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Stick to baseball, 1/17/21.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I had three pieces this week, on the Cubs’ signing of Alex Bregman, the Yankees’ trade for Ryan Weathers, and the three-team trade between the Rays, Reds, and Angels. I am primarily working on the prospect rankings, which are scheduled to start running on January 26th.

For the AV Club, I reviewed Iliad, a fantastic new two-player game from Reiner Knizia that made my top ten for 2025.

I am about to hit send on the next edition of my free email newsletter. It was almost done, then I set it aside for a moment, which turned into five days.

I have many links this week to pieces in the New York Times, which I often do because I assume many of you have access to those with your Athletic subscriptions (if you have the bundle). I believe the Times in general produces some of the best journalism in the country. I do not endorse all of the views printed in the paper; I just work there.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: The outgoing governor of Virginia, Glenn Youngkin (R), and the board that oversees the University of Virginia appear to have rushed through the appointment of a new President, even though that candidate, Scott Beardsley, appears to have fabricated or embellished large parts of his resume, according to the Augusta Free Press. After that ran, over 200 faculty members signed a letter to the board saying that the appointment should not stand.
  • The Times also profiled NPR CEO Katherine Maher, who has chosen to fight back against Republicans’ attacks on the public-radio institution and even taken the Trump Administration to court, although some other public-radio figures disagree with her tactics.
  • America, a magazine published by the Jesuits, published a scathing piece on the attempts by the Administration and its toadies to demonize murder victim Renee Nicole Good, just as the Reagan Administration did with the four nuns raped and killed by the right-wing government of El Salvador in 1980.
  • Those “alt” government accounts on social media that popped up during Trump’s first term always looked like grifters, not actual government employees trying to leak information. The Alt National Park Service one is the worst of the lot, and certainly not authentic in any sense of the word.
  • The notoriously left-wing Wall Street Journal exposes how RFK Jr. is cozying up to supplement makers, who peddle unproven and sometimes dangerous remedies that aren’t subject to the same safety and efficacy requirements as prescription medicines.
  • I came across this March 2025 story from the Times about the Norwegian black metal band Mayhem, as I saw they have a new album, Liturgy of Death, coming out in February. The article is a heck of a read, and treats the band – who have released just seven albums over 35 years due to suicide, murder, controversies (to put it mildly), breakups – as a sort of counterculture icon. It doesn’t mention that at least one of the current members, longtime drummer Hellhammer has voiced indisputably racist and homophobic views, which I find very hard to understand given that it’s hardly a secret.

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→ January 16, 2026
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Alamut.

I was going down a music rabbit hole in December, working up my year-end lists, when I saw that Laibach, the avant-garde Slovenian group who were especially influential on the industrial scene, had put out a new concept album called Alamut. It’s based on the Slovenian novel of that name, written by Vladimir Bartol, which (this is all stuff I learned in December) inspired the first Assassin’s Creed video game and one of the clans in the RPG Vampire: The Masquerade. Since I’d never read any Slovenian literature, I put in a request in our library system, and lo and behold, the Delaware Libraries have a copy.

Alamut is set at the fortress of that name, just south of the Caspian Sea in what is now northern Iran, in the 11th century, where a religious and military leader named Hassan-i Sabbah is building an army of fanatical assassins who’ll gladly die for his cause. He knows they will, because he has a diabolical plan to convince them that doing so will send them directly to the Islamic version of the afterlife: He’s built gardens behind his fortress and filled them with young women to act as houris, the women who appear in heaven to serve martyrs who died for the faith. He tricks the young men who are learning to become soldiers and assassins by doping a few of them with hashish, then having his eunuchs transport them to the gardens, where they wake up and think they’re in paradise – and that Hassan-i Sabbah, whom they call Sayyiduna, has the power to send them there.

The novel begins by following two characters in the fortress: Halima, a young woman whom Sabbah’s people purchased to serve in the gardens; and ibn Tahir, a young man whose family wanted him to join Sabbah’s garrison to serve as a fedai, a soldier who would give his life for the cause. We see both of them undergo “training,” while getting glimpses of some of the inner workings of the fortress and Sabbah’s command over it, although it’s not until closer to the midpoint of the book that his full plan becomes apparent. Once he has sent several of the fedayeen to his false paradise, he begins to use them, including sending ibn Tahir on a suicide mission to assassinate one of Sabbah’s enemies. Meanwhile, the young women are thrown into turmoil by the appearance and sudden disappearance of the young men, some of Sabbah’s advisers begin to question the wisdom of his plan, and a rival army shows up at the fortress, ready to lay siege to the place and starve the Sabbah’s people into submission.

Alamut is based on some historical truths; Sabbah was a real person who founded an order of assassins called the Hashashin, ruled a Shia Islamic state in the region of the fortress, and may even have been friends with Omar Khayyam. He was also a scholar and a schemer, fomenting insurgencies as far away as Syria. Bartol appears to have used this template to create a fictional analogue to a Slovene nationalist, anti-fascist movement of the 1930s called TIGR, who carried out bombings and assassinations against the Italian occupiers. With none of that historical or cultural knowledge, however, I read the novel on its own merits without understanding those metaphors, if that is what Bartol intended. The prose is somewhat dense, but the story picks up the pace as the novel goes along, with several unexpected twists. It ends with a few points unresolved, although it does adhere to the myth of Sabbah as the ascetic who seldom if ever left the castle through his reign.

I’d recommend Alamut, given how much I learned from it and the way the second half of the plot unfolds, but I also know I probably missed a lot, since I know very little of Slovene history and have almost no knowledge of Islam. I imagine it would also be more entertaining for anyone who’s played the games it ended up inspired, but as I never got into Assassin’s Creed (and am not going to – I’m afraid I’ll love it and get sucked in) I missed that context too.

Next up: I’m a few books on from this, but I’m currently reading the latest Booker Prize winner, David Szalay’s Flesh, which has a sparse, staccato prose style that reminds me of Hemingway’s.

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