→ November 12, 2022
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Stick to baseball, 11/12/22.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I wrote a piece on the folly of the five-year deal for Edwin Díaz, based on the dismal history of deals of four years or longer for free-agent relievers. This was on the heels of last week’s ranking of the top 50 free agents this winter.

Over at Paste, I reviewed The Spill, a Pandemic-like cooperative game where players work to contain the damage from a Deepwater Horizon-like oil spill.

My free email newsletter returned last weekend, and with Twitter possibly on its way out, that’s one good way to keep up with everything I write. I’ve also set up accounts on counter.social and cohost, in case either of those proves a worthy alternative (the former is actually okay, if a bit quiet). Also, you can buy either of my books, Smart Baseball or The Inside Game, via bookshop.org at those links, or at your friendly local independent bookstore. I hear they make great holiday gifts.

And now, the links…

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→ November 9, 2022
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The Dark Frontier.

Eric Ambler was a British author of spy thrillers whose first novel, The Dark Frontier, started out as an attempt to satirize the genre. Written while he was a copywriter for an ad agency in London, The Dark Frontier morphed as it went along into a more serious spy novel, one that proved highly influential and set him on a new career as novelist and later screenwriter. His works influenced many later practitioners of the form, including (according to Wikipedia) Graham Greene and John Le Carré.

Dr. Henry Barstow is a mild-mannered British physicist who ends up drafted into a bit of international intrigue involving the eastern European nation of Ixania, which appears to be attempting to build a weapon of mass destruction. The plot partially foreshadows (and perhaps influenced?) that of North by Northwest, but this time, Barstow suffers a head injury, after which he decides Barstow is just a cover story, and he’s really Conway Carruthers, international man of mystery and scientist-adventurer who believes that the Ixanians are a threat to world peace. He sets about trying to stop them from developing this weapon while working with the Ixanian resistance and avoiding the arms dealer who tried to rope him into the conflict in the first place.

You can see the tonal shift in the novel a little before its midpoint. The first half feels jocular, even silly, as Ambler sets up the most absurd situation for a quiet, nerdy scientist, right down to the point where he gets bonked on the head. When he wakes up and thinks he’s James Bond, it would have been so easy for Ambler to turn him into Austin Powers, bumbling his way through intrigue after intrigue and narrowly avoiding getting himself or his comrades killed. Not long after Barstow’s transformation into Carruthers, however, the novel’s tone and pace change, and suddenly we are in full-on spy novel mode, with great action scenes, including chases and shootouts, and some Bond-esque cleverness (Fleming was another writer who credited Ambler for influencing his own work). The parodic humor of the first half is almost completely absent in the second half, even to the point where you might think Barstow really is Carruthers, something Ambler seems to be playing with over the last few chapters.

I’m not a connoisseur of the spy novel, but I have enjoyed most of the ones I’ve read, including Greene’s “entertainments” (notably The Confidential Man), Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands, Dennis Wheatley’s Black August, and others. I didn’t write it up because I was on vacation for nearly two weeks when I read it, but I also liked Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male, which is told from the first person and follows the spy after the incident as he tries to run from multiple international authorities. The protagonist, who is never named, is hunting in a nameless eastern European country and aims his rifle at the dictator but doesn’t pull the trigger. He’s caught by the secret police, who try to kill him but fail, after which he goes on the run, making his way back to England, where the authorities can’t help him because he’s a suspected assassin, so he continues to hide in Dorset while the agents of the dictator, who’ve learned he’s still alive, hunt for him. It’s a little slow in parts because Household is so bent on a realistic depiction of his character’s predicament, but also has some great action sequences and chase scenes, with a tremendous denouement that I didn’t see coming.

The Dark Frontier is more fun than that, without skimping on the action stuff, although in the end its dichotomous nature works against it a little too much. I picked this after reading something about Ambler’s role in the history of the spy novel, figuring his first one was the place to start, but after reading this book – and enjoying it, just to be clear – I felt like this was a tune-up, and maybe some of his subsequent novels, where he has his purpose in mind from the beginning, would be even better.

Next up: Just about done with Jess Grose’s Screaming on the Inside: The Unsustainability of American Motherhood.

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→ November 7, 2022
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Museum Suspects.

Phil Walker-Harding has been busy this year, with at least five brand-new titles I can think of hitting the U.S. market as well as the redesign of the 2006 game Fjords (originally someone else’s) and a new Adventure Games entry. One of the new games is Museum Suspects, which is kind of just the kids’ deduction game Outfoxed redone as a game for slightly older kids, with a fun deduction element but a huge random factor that makes it hard to play it well.

In Museum Suspects, you build the central board by placing tiles showing sixteen animals with different, ridiculous outfits on in a 4×4 grid, and players will peek at clues to try to eliminate some of those suspects to figure out which one(s), if any, committed a robbery at the museum. There are eight different clue types that differ each game; during setup, you’ll pick one of the four clue cards from each category and place them face down along the sides of the board in random order. Some clues tell you to eliminate an entire row or column, or a quadrant, while others tell you to eliminate all suspects with a hat or a scarf of a certain color. The game lasts six rounds, so you don’t get to see all the clues, and requires that you place a token on a suspect in every round.

On your turn, you choose a clue you want to look at. If it has no investigation tokens on it, you just get to look, but if it already has a token on it, you must have a token of equal or higher value to be able to look at it. After you’ve peeked, you place one of your numbered investigation tokens on the clue, making sure it’s at least the same value as the highest token that was already on it. You’ll marking off several squares on your personal scoresheet to eliminate up to four more suspects for each clue. Afterwards, you place another of your investigation tokens on one of the suspects on the board. If that suspect turns out to be one of the guilty parties, you will receive that many points at game-end. If you believe that none of the sixteen is guilty, you can place a token on the Emergency Exit tile to try to gain points for that outcome instead.

After six rounds, you reveal all eight clues and all players jointly flip over suspect tiles as the clues eliminate them. Then you hand out points based on the values of players’ investigation tiles on the remaining suspects – a player may place more than one such tile on a suspect, just doing so on different turns – and determine who has the highest total. There’s no tiebreaker, but it’s possible for nobody to win if you all guessed wrong.

The core mechanic here is almost identical to the deduction part of Outfoxed, which is a very fun cooperative game for kids as young as 5. To distinguish itself and play well with older kids, Museum Suspects really needed to do something different beyond making it a competitive game. If we knew which clue type was in which location, for example, you could plan which clues to target – you might see that looking at the clue showing one type of animal would be more fruitful than looking at the clue about a type of hat. Instead, it’s just random, and so are your choices – and you have no idea whether it’s worth going after a certain clue with one of your stronger investigation tokens. The game also isn’t great with two players, because the small competitive aspect of the investigation tokens on the clue cards doesn’t work – you can more or less avoid each other’s clues and tokens, and neither of you will have any incentive to use your more valuable ones on clue cards.

Museum Suspects just misses the mark for me; I’d actually rather play Outfoxed, even though that’s clearly a game for younger players. This game doesn’t let you develop any sort of strategy, and even in a game for ages 8+, that’s a minimum requirement. You could house-rule it, where you know what clue is placed in each location, following the precise order that’s shown in the rulebook (which isn’t meant to dictate their placement – I asked Walker-Harding and he confirmed). I judge games as is, though, and I didn’t think this one worked.

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→ November 6, 2022
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How High We Go in the Dark.

Sequoia Nagamatsu’s How High We Go in the Dark was one of three finalists for this year’s inaugural Ursula K. Leguin Prize for Fiction, losing the ultimate honor to Khadija Abdalla Bajaber’s The House of Rust. Nagamatsu’s work is a short story novel, a series of connected anecdotes that involve related characters, all of it set in a dystopian but easy to foresee near future where climate change is melting permafrost, thawing out a virus that causes a horrifying global pandemic. Each story after the opening one explores the ramifications of these two events, ranging from the ridiculous to the tragic, but always returning to the humanity of their characters.

The initial story sets up everything that follows, as we meet Dr. Cliff Miyashiro at an archaeological dig site in eastern Siberia where his daughter, Clara, fell and died shortly after discovering the remains of a possibly-Neanderthal girl who died of mysterious causes with strange markings on and near her body. It emerged as the ice melted due to climate change, which also activated a virus in the corpse that quickly infects several members of the camp. By the start of the second story, it has become a global pandemic, and, in almost direct contrast to SARS-CoV-2, it is far more deadly to children, which leads to especially perverse ideas – like an amusement park where parents take their gravely ill children to be euthanized on a rollercoaster.

Within a few stories, Nagamatsu has reshaped society around the pandemic, making funerary companies the most valuable in the world that also control the cryptocurrencies that take over the world’s economy. It goes a bit too far – the company that manufactures the spaceship that heads out in search of another habitable planet is Yamato-Musk, which seems especially embarrassing for Nagamatsu after the last week – but that’s clearly his concept, pushing every idea to the farthest possible boundary and then exploring how his characters respond to it. In that sense, it’s very Philip K. Dick, but less insane, with at least some grounding in actual science, at least to the extent that he’s anticipating readers’ first objections to some of his concepts. There are a pair of stories that broke my suspension of disbelief, but even in those cases, I could go with it because they were both well-written and focused on the characters rather than the impossible facts.

Nagamatsu eschews easy answers, and one possible reading of How High We Go in the Dark is as an  extremely bleak outlook on the near future of our planet and our species, that climate change is inevitable (true) and we are totally unprepared for its impact (partly true), that our current pandemic, which isn’t mentioned in the book, is a harbinger of more and larger ones to come (likely). I didn’t read it that way, as grim as the subject matter is. Nagamatsu’s characters all look forward and try to find not just ways to survive, but reasons. There’s just one direct suicide in the book, and some euthanasia of the very sick, but the vast majority of the characters here are fully engaged in living. Even Dennis, a character in multiple stories who would probably have been equally at odds and ends in a non-catastrophe world, is still striving for something, even if he has no idea what it might be.

Even with such dismal subject matter, How High We Go in the Dark is one of the most compelling and fastest reads I’ve had in ages. Nagamatsu’s prose is clear and unadorned, hitting the right amount of detail when he’s delving into science or his speculations. There’s so much more focus on people than ideas here that the work rises above most cli-fi or other stories of realistic dystopias, up to the level of Station Eleven, a novel that turned a global pandemic that crumbled civilization into a story of great beauty around humanity, kindness, and the enduring power of art. Nagamatsu deals more with the personal tragedies of his characters and how society might grapple with mass deaths that involve far more children than our current pandemic, where the world has largely shrugged at the deaths of 1 in every 1000 people. It’s a remarkable novel and thought experiment, one of the best things I’ve read this year.

Next up: Jess Grose’s Screaming on the Inside: The Unsustainability of American Motherhood. I have an advance copy so I can read it before Jess comes on my podcast in two weeks.

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→ November 5, 2022
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Stick to baseball, 11/5/22.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I ranked the top 50 free agents in this year’s class, and held a Q&A about it that afternoon. Based on my Twitter replies, a lot of people looked at the raw rankings without reading any of the content. Good times!

My guest on the Keith Law Show this week was Caroline Criado Perez, author of the book Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Menand host of the podcast Visible Women. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Last week’s roundup went up late because of all the sportsball going on over the weekend, so I’m relinking it here for folks who missed it.

And now, the links…

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→ November 4, 2022
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A Desolation Called Peace.

Arkady Martine won the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Novel for A Memory Called Empire, the first in what is now the Teixcalaanli series of stories involving a character who has the memories of the man who preceded her as ambassador implanted into her brain. I despised it for its pretentiousness and its lack of character development, so I wasn’t exactly pleased to see the sequel, A Desolation Called Peace, won the same award this year. It offers more plot than the first novel did, and has one new, interesting character (giving it one more than its predecessor), but suffers from the same pretentious style and emphasis on all the wrong things.

Mahit Dzmare returns from the first novel as the ambassador from the outpost Lsel Station to the Teixcalaanli empire – you know we’re in outer space, because the letters are all in the wrong order! – but the story here goes well beyond her. Where Memory was a bit of a whodunit, as she tried to find out who assassinated the previous ambassador – and that’s whose memories she has in her brain, although it’s not just memories, but his entire persona. She’s part of a bigger story this time that involves an unknown species that has attacked Teixcalaanli settlers on a remote mining world, eviscerating the victims for no apparent reason, and then attacks a fleet of military ships with some sort of viscous substance that eats through metal and might be ingesting (dissolving?) the pilots. Mahit’s superiors want her to sabotage any Teixcalaanli attempts to negotiate peace with the aliens to protect Lsel’s interests and sovereignty. Meanwhile, the heir to the Teixcalaanli throne, a precocious eleven-year-old boy, finds himself involved in the discussions that ensue around how to proceed against the unknown enemy.

One some level, A Desolation Called Peace didn’t stand a chance coming in, because the same elements I found so pretentious in the first novel are still here. The constructed language is back, with the same overly complex grammar and unpronounceable or just plain weird phonemes, like “ezuazuacat” or “yaoklat.” So are the Teixcalaanli names, which involve a number and usually a noun, like Nineteen Adze, Eight Antidote (the heir to the throne), or Three Seagrass. It’s showy, except that it’s not showing anything. This is the stuff I would have found extremely cool when I was a teenager, but that’s not a compliment here – it’s a sign that the entire endeavor starts from the wrong place.

However, the story here exceeds that of the first novel, both in construction and in interest. It’s part Ender’s Game, part Imperial Radch series, part Star Trek: The Next Generation, and nothing here is all that original, but it’s at least reasonably entertaining. Eight Antidote, the future Teixcalaani emperor, is the best character to appear in either novel, which is also a low bar to clear, but given how uninteresting Mahit Dzmare is – which is quite a feat, given that she’s simultaneously two people – it’s a huge improvement. He’s not just some imp, nor is he a savant; he’s a smart kid, doing smart kid things, getting into trouble, but also finding his way through an adult world that he knows, one day, will revolve around him. Martine divides the story into three interwoven plot lines, one around Eight Antidote, one around Mahit Dzmare, and one around the military discussions.

The other saving grace of A Desolation Called Peace is the resolution, where all three storylines converge in a reasonably satisfying conclusion, albeit one that’s a bit derivative of one of the works cited above. Even with the mediocre writing, with heavy use of archaic or esoteric terms that have common equivalents, and the bizarre nomenclature of Teixcalaanli characters, it’s pretty quick-moving. I also appreciated the de-emphasis of Mahit Dzmare’s character and her implanted predecessor, which got old very quickly in the prior book. If you enjoyed A Memory Called Empire, you might enjoy this one even more, even though I’m still not a fan.

Next up: Sequoia Nagamatsu’s How High We Go in the Dark.

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→ November 2, 2022
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Music update, October 2022.

October was a big month for new releases, but the one I was probably most excited to hear, Arctic Monkeys’ The Car, was a huge, boring disappointment. I wasn’t that enamored of the new albums from Dry Cleaning or Alvvays, to say nothing of larger acts like Taylor Swift or Tegan & Sara. But for lesser-known acts it was a great month, including a bunch of artists I heard for the first time. As always, if you can’t see the widget below, you can access the playlist here.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6K4bRVCxkcTXo4TrMkqT2q?si=72309fd0f0b54e64

Anxious – Where You Been. This Connecticut punk quintet just dropped their first full-length, Little Green House, and it’s one of the year’s best records, including the 2022 single “In April” (#76 on my top songs of 2021 ranking), “Sunsign,” “Call from You,” and “Let Me.” It’s hard-edged but with a strong melodic sense, too heavy to be punk-pop but too rough-and-ready to be post-punk.

The Lathums – Say My Name. Anthemic indie rock from Wigan, reminiscent of the Amazons but maybe a bit less slick? Their debut album came out last September, but this is the first track from them I’ve heard, from their upcoming LP From Nothing to a Little Bit More, due out February 24th.

The Reytons – Avalanche. That opening riff … it’s Royal Blood, Turbowolf, the Amazons, Death from Above 1979. I can see why this south Yorkshire band are rising stars in the UK. As with the Lathums, they’re new to me, but had an album out last year called The Kids Off the Estate; this is from their upcoming album What’s Rock and Roll?

The Rills – Landslide. Merseyside lads who nod to the Arctic Monkeys and the Libertines as their primary influences. The B-Side, “Spit Me Out,” is almost as good, and maybe the title is a nod to the refrain of the Monkeys’ “Fake Tales of San Francisco?”

Crawlers – I Don’t Want It. This Liverpool band reminds me quite a bit of their neighbors The Mysterines, both led by women singers with powerful voices and crunchy guitar rock behind the vocals.

Black Honey – Out of My Mind. I’ve been on Black Honey’s wavelength since day one, with “Hello Today,” and this track reminds me of a few of their earliest tracks, with a crisper melody and less of the harder edges (which also work) from their second album or this year’s “Charlie Bronson.”

CVC – Good Morning Vietnam. That opening melody line sounds familiar to me, like it might be almost borrowed from something else, but I’m still in on this new Welsh band’s updated psychedelic rock sound.

Inhaler – Love Will Get You There. I feel like Inhaler has produced enough good new music that we can stop talking about who anyone’s father is, although if you listen to any of their tracks you’ll probably realize how much the lead singer sounds like his dad. I love how their sound feels like an evolution of you-know-who without sounding derivative; here it sounds like they’ve been listening to a bit of Lord Huron, incorporating that kind of folk-rock shuffle into their normal style.

Autre ne Veut – Okay. Arthur Ashin’s first new music in seven years, “Okay” is a lovely track that somehow manages to sound lush without coming off as overwritten or overproduced. Critics tend to describe their music as some form of R&B, but I think that sells it a bit short, with jazzier elements and more electronic work in the backdrop.

Cumulus – Teenage Plans. “Can you please slow it down?/It’s too much change to take.” There are so damn many songs about being a teenager and trying to slow down time to appreciate the moment – or being older and wishing you’d thought more like that when you were that age – that it’s rare for something else to break through the monotony, but this new track from Alexandra Lockhart does so, notably with the melody in the chorus.

John-Allison Weiss – Feels Like Hell. I think I liked Weiss’ previous single, “Different Now,” better, but this is also some great indie-pop ahead his 2023 album The Long Way.

The Wombats – I Think My Mind Has Made Its Mind Up. The second track from the Wombats’ forthcoming EP Is This What It Feels Like to Feel Like This?, which will be their second release this year after the full-length LP Fix Yourself, Not the World, which all puts them on track to put out the most good new music of any band this year.

Sports Team – Fingers (Taken Off). Gulp! is one of my favorite albums of the year so far, the second full-length album from this London band who just sound so very English between the vocals and the offbeat lyrics.

The Cool Greenhouse – Get Unjaded. Singer/lyricist Tom Greenhouse has a way with words and packs them into this tight post-punk track, talk-singing his way through a track that slithers like a tritone in search of its resolution.

The Go! Team – Divebomb. The Go! Team have been around for 22 years, so I’m rather remiss in that this was the first song of theirs I’ve heard. Their mix of samples and various pop styles reminds me a bit of the Space Monkeys’ “Sugar Cane” and the more contemporary Bad Sounds.

Young Fathers – I Saw. Heavy Heavy is due out on February 3rd, with this the second very promising single from the Mercury Prize-winning trio, who’ve moved away from their original alternative-rap style to a more experimental lo-fi electronic sound instead.

Archers of Loaf – Screaming Undercover. Reason in Decline is the first new album in 24 years from this Chapel Hill band, who had a brief run of critical success and built a cult following in the mid-90s with their hard-edged indie rock sound.

Crystal Axis – Black AF. This is the third single from Crystal Axis, a Nairobi Afro-punk band whose lyrics are a mix of Swahili and English. I found them via this BBC profile.

Pinkshift – nothing (in my head). One of two tracks from this Baltimore trio’s new EP i’m not crying you’re crying. If you wondered what Paramore would sound like if they didn’t suck, this is a pretty good approximation. The title track from the EP is solid too.

Quicksand – Felíz. Another remnant from the Distant Populations sessions, but man, if this is what you leave on the cutting room floor, you are doing something very right. This thing rocks with this giant muscular riff that frames the sludgy chorus, where they sound most like the post-hardcore icons they are. They’re on tour right now with Clutch and Helmet, in case you wanted to wonder what year it was.

Blessed – Anything. This Canadian art-rock band announced their second full-length album, Circuitous, and released this lead single, which has a very doom- or sludge-metal feel without the big crunch.

Gojira – Our Time Is Now. I’ve been listening to less metal overall this year, but I will stop traffic for a new Gojira song, and this track has a glorious opening followed by some intense riffing in the verse before the bottom-heavy chorus.

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→ October 29, 2022
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Stick to baseball, 10/29/22.

One new post for subscribers to the Athletic this week – a fairly quickly-written post on what the Yankees could do this winter to fix their club, notably their offense. I’m about ¾ of the way through the top 50 free agents rankings, which will run the day after the World Series ends.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the trick-taking game Cat in the Box, which takes the Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment as its inspiration. Cards have numbers but no suits until they’re played – as in, when they’re observed. Apparently my review was so positive the game has sold out everywhere!

My guest on the Keith Law Show this week was Joe Posnanski, who helped me preview the World Series, talk a little about the highs and lows of the playoffs so far, and talk a little about free agency. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

You can sign up for my free email newsletter and at some point I’ll send another one out. Also, you can buy either of my books, Smart Baseball or The Inside Game, via bookshop.org at those links, or at your friendly local independent bookstore. I hear they make great holiday gifts.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: ProPublica has the best story yet on how the couplpe that owns the shipping materials behemoth U-Line uses their profits to fund all kinds of extreme right-wing causes, from election denial to anti-LGBTQ+ laws to anti-abortion laws and more. They oppose anything that might improve workers’ rights or raise taxes on the ultra-rich, too. If you get a box made by U-Line, contact the shipper and ask them to use someone else. I’ve done this many times and only once have I gotten a negative reply – and I won’t do business with that company again.

This Atlantic story about a realtor in Michigan who was convinced he’d cracked the state lottery’s algorithm is a great illustration of our innate tendencies to see patterns in randomness – and how we can convince ourselves of almost anything.

Music journalist and author Caryn Rose ranked all 234 U2 songs for Rolling Stone. I found myself agreeing with most of the top of the list, although as someone who first encountered the band through MTV’s heavy rotation of “New Year’s Day,” I think that one is too low.

MLB.com writer Matthew Monaghan wrote a lovely piece for Travel + Leisure on revisiting his late wife’s favorite vacation spot, Bermuda. It’s a tough but beautiful read.

Texas no longer requires a permit for handguns, leading to more spontaneous shootings. It sounds like police – the blue we’re supposed to back – don’t seem to like this new lawless reality.

The massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, again, a state that decided that anyone can carry a gun without a permit, has made an activist out of one of the 10-year-old survivors.

Why didn’t St. Louis police take the gun from the kid who killed a teacher and another student in a school there last week, since he failed a background check?

At The Verge, Nilay Patel writes how Elon Musk can’t possibly adhere to his stated “free speech” goals and run what was already a “disaster clown car company” profitably. It’s not hard to agree – Twitter hasn’t been growing, its ad revenues lag behind any competitors, it faces a tangle of regulations and pressure from markets where Musk’s Tesla wants to grow, and the site has never figured out how to deal with harassment and abuse. I’m not leaving, but I’ve already been engaging less on the site, and if a viable alternative emerges I’ll gladly check it out.

Meanwhile, conspiracy theories spreading on the farcical social media app Truth Social have led to actual armed idiots “patrolling” around ballot boxes to try to spot voter fraud.

This year’s Nobel Prize for Physics went to three scientists for their work on quantum entanglement, which Albert Einstein once derided as “spooky action at a distance.” Author John Horgan writes of the beauty of this work and how it seems to defy common sense for Scientific American.

Physicist Peter Fisher gave a talk at my alma mater about the search for dark matter and the theory that WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles) are what make up this missing mass.

The Washington Post reports on the network of people helping direct pills to terminate pregnancies to people in states where abortion is now illegal.

Disinformation dealer Dinesh D’Souza’s publisher deleted defamatory details after recalling his new book 2000 Mules, even though he’d promised to name names. What a ding-dong.

As President, Trump had his hotels charge the Secret Service – and thus, all of us who pay taxes – five times the maximum room rate allowed by federal law, and then he lied about it.

I don’t link to the Federalist, a disinformation-spewing site funded by the owners of U-Line, very often, but this piece arguing that conservatives should fight for stronger government and more intervention in all areas of society certainly seems to remove the mask from the extreme right, because that is not conservatism – it’s fascism.

In good Administration news that seems to be flying under the radar, President Biden is moving to cancel a program to develop a new submarine-launched nuclear cruise missile, which wouldn’t have been ready until 2035 and which the administration says is redundant with existing weapons. Some anti-nuclear weapon groups say Biden hasn’t gone far enough. The military, meanwhile, wants all the weapons.

As the parent of a teenager, I often feel like part of my job is try to reduce the stresses she faces in school and life, because we hear so much about how much stress our kids are under and I have a natural instinct to want to protect her. Psychologist Dr. Lisa Damour argues instead that we should teach our teenagers to embrace stress so they’re better equipped to handle it throughout their lives.

Longtime Philly Inquirer writer Stephanie Farr wrote a fun piece on Philadelphia sports fandom.

Over 250 writers signed a letter to Penguin Random House protesting the publisher’s $2 million book deal with Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, given her pivotal role in removing a fundamental right from tens of millions of Americans.

Board game news: Aegean Sea, the newest game from Glory to Rome co-designer Carl Chudyk, is up on Backerkit with 12 days to go.

Oh My Brain!, a new game from Bruno Cathala and Theo Riviere, is now up for pre-order at $5 off on 25th Century’s website.

The Queen’s Dilemma, a standalone sequel game to the Spiel-nominated King’s Dilemma, is closing in on $400K raised on Kickstarter.

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→ October 27, 2022
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The Red Cathedral.

The Red Cathedral slipped through the cracks of my reviews over at Paste, as it came out at the very end of 2020, and I didn’t get a copy until Gen Con of 2021, so it missed my 2020 best-new-games list but was ineligible for the 2021 list. I’ve played it a few times now, including its very good solo mode, and I have to say it’s one of the best games of its weight (sort of medium-heavy) I’ve ever played, and is both great value at under $35 and for such a small box.

Players in the Red Cathedral will work to construct the building of the game’s title, which has six sections per player and varies slightly in shape in each game, with base, middle, and top sections that can be accentuated with different ornaments. Players move dice in six colors around a rondel to gather resources they can use to build sections or ornaments, or to collect coins, but choosing which die to move isn’t as simple as just figuring out what resource you want – you can get much more stuff if you pick the right one, or you might not move a die to prevent your opponents from getting an even bigger windfall. You gain points mostly for building cathedral sections and ornaments, although there are other ways to gain a point here or there.

There are two scoring tracks in The Red Cathedral, although they’re overlaid on each other and you don’t have to keep track of two separate point totals (like in Rajas of the Ganges, although I like how that determines the end of the game). There’s the Reputation point track, which just looks like a regular scoring track around the edge of any game board; and the Prestige track, which starts out with a marker every 4-5 spots, but those gaps quickly drop to 3 spots and then 2, eventually lining up with the Reputation track in the 40s. This matters a lot early in the game, because you can drop down one Prestige point to gain two coins, and because placing ornaments gains you one or three Prestige points depending on whether you add one gem or two (in the two colors) to the cost. You can only build an ornament on a section that’s already completed, although you can do so on someone else’s section. You’re limited to four ornaments, two for middle sections and one each for the top and bottom sections.

The dice rondel is the real heart of the game and its most clever aspect. There are eighteen spaces on the circular track, divided into six zones. At the start of the game, the five dice go into five separate zones after someone has rolled them all. On your turn, you may pick any die and move it forward the number of zones shown on its face (1 to 6). Then you collect the reward for that zone, resources, coins, or points, times the number of dice currently in that zone, which can be up to three – so you might get, say, 6 bricks, or 3 green gems. Then you re-roll all dice in that zone for the next player.

Each zone also has a “guild” card next to it that offers you a choice of two benefits when you move a die to that quadrant of the rondel. For most of those cards, which change every game, you can choose either something for free, or you can pay coins/exchange resources for something better. Thus every time you choose moving a die as your main action, you have to consider where the other dice are, what resources you’ll get, what guild card is there, and how this might leave the dice for the next player.

Your other choices of actions are to place one of your six banners on an unclaimed segment of the cathedral or deliver resources to a building site to complete a section or build an ornament. Four of those six banners start out in spaces in your inventory, which can hold up to ten resources when all the banners are placed, so you have a strong incentive to get out and claim some sections early on to free up room on your board. Delivering resources is the one frustrating part of the game: you can only deliver up to three resources in one turn, but many sections require four or five resources to complete, so it’ll take you two separate turns to do it. You can, however, deliver to multiple sites at once, so a little more planning can make this less inefficient.

The game ends when someone completes their sixth section, after which you add up the scores. Most of your points come from completing sections, which vary in their returns and may give you some coins but fewer points rather than just a higher point total; and ornaments, which, as I wrote above, come in the form of Prestige points and are more valuable earlier in the game. Ornaments only require one or two resources to build, but if you can also spend one green and one purple gem when building one, you max out your turn with three Prestige points.

The box suggests a game time of 80 minutes, which is probably true when everyone knows the game; the last time I played, with two friends who hadn’t played before, we ran closer to two hours for the full game, although I can say all three of us felt like it was a great game. (I lost, though.) There is a smart solo mode here that works well to mess with you by limiting your options, although I think it’s far more satisfying to play this with at least one other person so that the competitive aspect of dice selection comes into play.

There is an expansion called Contractors that came out earlier this year, which adds a lot of new elements, including another game board, diamonds as a wild resource, an additional (black) die, and more. The more games I play, the more skeptical I become of the majority of expansions; a few are good, like Pandemic’s On the Brink, Ticket to Ride’s 1910 (even if just for the full-sized cards), or Carcassonne’s Traders and Builders, but most just complicate the original’s game play without making it truly better. I can’t tell you if Contractors does that, because I saw it on a table at Gen Con and watched a little bit of game play, after which I thought, “I don’t need that.”

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The Anomaly.

Hervé Le Tellier won the Prix Goncourt, the French equivalent to the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, in 2020 for his psychological thriller The Anomaly, which was subsequently translated into over three dozen languages and became a worldwide bestseller, an uncommon outcome for a literary prize in a language other than English. It’s an impressive combination of a page-turning plot with a fascinating thought experiment in speculative fiction, crafted in expert fashion so that the twist comes late enough in the novel that you’re already engaged with its diverse characters.

The Anomaly opens with a series of what appear to be unconnected short stories about various people around Europe and the United States, all of whom happened to be on the same Air France flight Paris to New York that encountered severe turbulence on its way into JFK. Each of those stories ends with police approaching those individuals, for an unknown reason, and given how different each of these characters and their lives are, it’s especially foreboding. Anything else would just be a spoiler.

Le Tellier tries to accomplish two very different goals in The Anomaly, and succeeds on both counts. The story picks up the pace and intensity as it goes along; he wisely starts out the novel with a section on a contract killer, which sets a specific tone that doesn’t last but immediately grabs the reader’s interest. You’re already on edge before you even get to the second character, so despite the fact that this isn’t a novel about a hit man, that opening sets up the possibility that anything might happen. By the time you find out what’s actually going on, you’re already flying through the book (pun intended), and that’s when Le Tellier really messes with your head.

There’s a real philosophical question at the heart of The Anomaly, centering on identity and the nature of self, along with more modest questions of personal rights and ownership in a modern capitalist society. Once we find out why the police are gathering everyone who was on that flight, we’re thrown into the existential crisis that’s about to face the passengers, turning what seemed like a potboiler murder or spy mystery into a work that explores deeper and unanswerable questions through the actions and reactions of its characters. It’s a hard line to travel, but Le Tellier manages to do so because he’s set up a collection of characters who would naturally respond differently to the massive shock they receive.

Le Tellier has a solid sense of humor as well, working in a couple of misfit scientists who were first called in by the feds in the wake of 9/11 to come up with a packet of recommendations for the response to all manner of improbable events, only to have them befuddled by this impossible event and responding in kind – by making it up as they go along. There’s a slew of pop culture and other contemporary references, which might not age that well but do give the novel an added sense of realism that balances out the unreality of the latter half.

Whether this novel ultimately works for you will probably come down to your willingness to suspend disbelief for the thought experiment in the latter half. I had no issue with this because it’s so well crafted, even before we get to the reveal, and because the novel does not wallow in the details or make the event itself the center of the story. This is a humanist story – although there’s a brief detour into a meeting of religious leaders that is wryly funny – that has characters at its heart, with Le Tellier writing believable reactions for each of them and representing a broad range of emotions in the process. I found it incredibly compelling from start to finish, even as the author leaves some questions unresolved.

Next up: I’m reading this year’s Hugo winner, Arkady Martine’s A Desolation Called Peace.

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