→ June 17, 2022
→ By

The Netanyahus.

Joshua Cohen won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his short novel The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family, which fictionalizes a real event involving Benjamin Netanyahu and his father, the Zionist historian Benzion Netanyahu, visiting Cornell University and the esteemed literary scholar Harold Bloom. This is a travesty; in a year with several better books (at least two by Black authors), the selection of such an unfunny, narrow work for the highest honor in American literature undermines the award and robs more deserving books of attention.

The book is narrated as a memory by a professor from Corbindale College in upstate New York, a badly disguised stand-in for Cornell, who is chosen to be on the committee to interview the senior Netanyahu for a faculty position because he’s the only Jewish professor in the department. They expect Benzion to show up alone, but instead, he brings his wife and three unruly children – Benji, the middle one; Yonatan, who would later die a hero in the raid on Entebbe; and Iddo, who’d later become a physician, author, playwright. Benzion doesn’t actually reach Corbindale until the middle of the novel, so the first half is the sort of insular follies that made Netflix’s The Chair a modest hit among academics, as well as a portrait of the casual anti-Semitism of the late 1960s. Then the Netanyahus show up and trash everything, including the novel itself.

The entire family, in the book at least, sucks. The father is an intellectual, a strong Zionist who makes compelling arguments on the pages, but he’s also a selfish asshole. His wife is worse, and invites her entire family to stay with the protagonist, whose wife wants no part of this (nor should she). The two older boys are assholes, not just in the way that most teenaged boys are, but with a spectacular lack of self-awareness. I suppose Iddo is the least offensive of the bunch, but the point is that these are deeply unlikeable, one-dimensional characters who suffocate the last half of the novel with their presence, and add nothing to it.

Cohen’s writing is insufferably pretentious, right down to his frequent, deliberate choices of uselessly esoteric vocabulary words. Writing of a character “knowing at some chthonic lake-depth that …” is pointless, just a way to send the reader to the dictionary to show off your own linguistic prowess. (It means “relating to the underworld.” “Abyssal” would have worked better here, or just saying “knowing at the deepest level of his subconscious,” which uses words any middle school student could understand.) Another passage goes “logopoeic, propaedeutic,” using words only an academic might know and love – more on that in a moment. “Nugatory” does not, in fact, refer to the center of your 3 Musketeers bar, but is the rare word that describes itself: of no value or importance. In other words, worthless. The word Cohen needed was “worthless,” but he chose the more difficult one. The entire book is like this, and it is a work of supreme arrogance.

So why the heck did it win the Pulitzer? It’s not actually funny. The story is small and unremarkable, and the themes are fairly narrow. But it is a book about academia, and about Harold Bloom. At least 30% of the Pulitzer Prize Board for 2022 comprises current professors or Deans. The majority of the Board are current or former writers who would probably all be familiar with Bloom’s work. This is a book for them and about them. It’s The Artist and Argo telling Hollywood that movies are important. The Netanyahus puts a fancypants college at the center of its narrative, and takes one of the great critics and historians of literature and makes him the protagonist. The Board probably couldn’t resist. I can’t think of another explanation – I’ve read all of the Pulitzer winners, and this is the worst choice in at least 25 years. I found nothing at all redeeming in The Netanyahus except that it’s short. There were so many better books right in front of them – Hell of a Book won the National Book Award for Fiction and The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, so they weren’t obscure, and both were miles and miles better than this thing. Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This made the Booker Prize shortlist, and it’s better and far more relevant to our current moment. Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle and Torrey Peters’ Detransition, Baby were better. And that’s just among novels I read. I know it’s just a prize that doesn’t make the novels considered any better or worse, but these awards drive sales, and I’d rather see a better book get that big sales bump than this nonsense.

Next up: Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, a Booker Prize winner from 2004.

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→ June 11, 2022
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Stick to baseball, 6/11/22.

I had one post for subscribers to the Athletic this past week, on Kumar Rocker’s 2022 debut for the independent Tri-City Valley Cats. (I tried to go see Reading/Altoona this week, but got rained out after I parked but before I even got into the stadium.) My current writing schedule has one more draft blog post coming after I see Carson Whisenhunt’s official 2022 debut on Sunday night, and then an updated Big Board on Thursday, June 16th.

My guest on the Keith Law Show this week was film critic (and Cardinals fan) Tim Grierson, talking about the logistics of film festivals and their similarities to scouting showcases, plus our thoughts on The Godfather trilogy as the first film marks its 50th anniversary. You can subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I do send out a free email newsletter about twice a month. My two books, Smart Baseball and The Inside Game, are both available in paperback, and you can buy them at your local independent book store or at Bookshop.org.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Kathryn Schulz, author of the wonderful memoir Lost & Found, writes about the world of sunken shipping containers and the detritus that washes up on shore from them. I would guess the occasional meeple shows up among the flotsam and jetsam.
  • Steve Kirsch, one of the inventors of the optical mouse and a serial entrepreneur, has become a massive proponent of misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines and false cures. McGill University’s Jonathan Jarry looks at how Kirsch got from A to B.
  • A 13-year-old Baltimore middle school student died suddenly on a school field trip in Cecil County, Maryland. There’s still no indication why he died or details on what happened, five days later. What a nightmare for his family.
  • The Washington Post has fired writer Felicia Sonmez. I won’t even attempt to summarize this in a sentence or two – the article (from The New York Times) has the details.
  • The Guardian explains “greenwashing,” when companies contributing to climate change run ads, such as on podcasts that tell stories about climate change and the fight against it, implying that those companies are aligned with the show’s aims.
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→ June 8, 2022
→ By

Freedom.

Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom was his first novel in nine years, since his acclaimed 2001 novel The Corrections, and was greeted with even greater praise. Esquire called it the Great American Novel (or at least a Great American Novel), two New York Times writers wrote glowing reviews, and the Guardian called it “the novel of the century.” It is well-written and intricately plotted, but it’s also far too long and, like The Corrections, a terribly depressing take on American suburban life – white suburban life, specifically.

The family at the center of this novel is the Berglunds, Patty and Walter and their two kids, Jessica and Joey, who live in suburban St. Paul and whose family is gradually unraveling. The couple’s marriage is hanging by a thread, the kids are moving out and moving away from their parents, and Walter’s job is short-circuiting his brain by causing cognitive dissonance. Walter’s former roommate, Richard, is an aging ex-punk rocker who has had a second 15 minutes of fame thanks to a new indie band and our culture’s habit of making everything old cool again; his story intersects multiple times with both Walter’s and Patty’s. Patty has left behind her New York family, including her politician mother, but lost much of her identity as a stay-at-home mom whose mind has atrophied and who finds herself disdained by one child and used by the other. Walter’s job, creating a nature preserve for the cerulean warbler by giving away land rights to a company that intends to engage in mountaintop removal mining, a highly destructive practice that conflicts with Walter’s longheld environmentalist principles. Joey hooks up with the girl next door and has a hard time getting out of the relationship … I could go on, but you get the idea. Everyone’s a mess, and everyone’s miserable, despite having all of the privileges and benefits in the world.

Based on just those two novels, it seems like that’s Franzen’s worldview – money and prosperity won’t make you happy; in fact, they might make you less so. He creates these setups where the reader would think the characters’ lives would be easy, and they’d be better able to find happiness, and then the characters go and fuck everything up (often literally, by fucking people other than their partners, which, shocker, leads to a lot of trouble and unhappiness for multiple characters around them). Having money just leads them to greater opportunities to make mistakes. (They’re all white, though, so some very real problems that affect people of color are just not in play here.) The difference between Freedom and The Corrections is that this time, their misdeeds are more interesting, and sometimes even funny. The presence of some interesting side characters, especially Richard, elevates a huge portion of the novel – he’s the best character in the book, and the most believable. Franzen must be a longtime music fan, because even small details around Richard’s music career are credible, and he’s crafted a character who could just as easily have been part of Utopia Avenue.

Then Walter’s work project takes over as the primary narrative, and the book runs out of steam with about 200 pages to go. The plan itself is far-fetched, but the execution within the book is a mess, and requires more suspension of disbelief and acceptance of some of the less credible details, like Walter’s obsession with zero population growth or the plan he and Lalitha, the very attractive (of course) young employee with whom he must work very closely on this project, cook up. I’m sure you can imagine where that goes, but that’s probably the most believable part of this entire subplot. Franzen comes up with a local yokel to oppose their efforts in West Virginia, right out of central casting, and it all devolves from there until he writes himself out of a corner with a convenient plot twist to get us to the end.

Through about half of the book, I was on its wavelength, certainly appreciating the prose and the plotting even if I couldn’t quite say that I was enjoying it. Once the story moved to Walter and Lalitha and the cerulean warbler, though, I started to lose interest, to the point where eventually told my wife I just wanted the book to be over. It starts out better than The Corrections, but it seems like Franzen didn’t have a great idea where he wanted Freedom to go. The big conclusion to the West Virginia storyline doesn’t work well with what appears to be the overall theme of the book, unless Franzen was just trying to make fun of suburban liberals and their pet causes – but even that is weirdly set up, since Walter had interest in environmental causes like this going back to college, and his upbringing was nowhere near as privileged as the life that he’s given his children. I get it, Jonathan. Suburban life is hell. I don’t think I need to read another novel about it, though.

Next up: Just finished Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus this morning.

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→ June 6, 2022
→ By

Arthur and George.

Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending is one of my favorite novels of this century, and was adapted into a solid if very understated (or just very English) film a few years ago, so I’m likely to pick up any book of his I find lying around. Arthur & George precedes that book in Barnes’ bibliography, making the Booker Prize shortlist in 2005, six years before he won the honor for Sense. It’s a beautifully written fictionalization of a true story involving Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but lacks the tension and conciseness that made his subsequent book such a standout.

The Arthur of the title is the author who created Sherlock Holmes, while George is George Edalji, a bookish, half-Indian lawyer who was wrongly accused of a series of animal murders known now as the “Great Wyrley Outrages.” Edalji’s family had been harassed for years via letters and malicious pranks – thank goodness SWATting wasn’t a thing in the 1890s, as their tormentors would certainly have done it – while the local constables did nothing to stop the harassment, often intimating that George was the culprit in his own abuse. He was convicted on circumstantial evidence, boosted by prejudice and prosecutorial misconduct, and later released from prison without explanation or pardon. He wrote to Conan Doyle, who took it upon himself to prove Edalji’s innocence and campaign for a pardon, which he achieved after eight months of “detective” work of his own.

The novel follows the lives of the two men, starting in childhood, with brief sections on their upbringings (collected as “Beginnings”), followed by a long exposition of Edalji’s story (“Beginnings with an Ending”), then one on Sir Conan Doyle’s efforts to clear George’s name (“Endings with a Beginning”), before wrapping things up in a section whose title you can probably guess. The two middle sections constitute the bulk of the book, and that’s sort of where Barnes gets into trouble, as we get way too much of Conan Doyle’s personal life. His first wife was not a great match for him, and she spent the last several years of her life with tuberculosis. While still married, he met Jean Leckie, who would become his second wife after they maintained a chaste relationship for nearly a decade while, in effect, waiting for his first wife to die. Meanwhile, he also dabbled in spiritualism, his interest in (and gullibility towards) which only increased after his son died of wounds he suffered in the Battle of the Sonne.

Barnes tries to weave Conan Doyle’s personal life into the mystery around Edalji and the Outrages, but the former simply cannot compete with the latter: The crimes, trial, and Conan Doyle’s investigations have far more narrative greed and greater tension than his love life or his weird dalliances with superstition. There’s just nothing that interesting about his platonic friendship with Jean; their meetings are fraught with whatever the opposite of tension is. They’re flaccid. I couldn’t wait for any scene involving the two of them or spiritualism to be over with, so Barnes could get back to the good stuff – anything around Edalji, whether it was the harassment campaign, the accusations, the trial, or the investigation to clear his name. Those passages are electric, and if Barnes wanted to stop writing serious fiction at age 76, he could probably crank out of a couple of good detective novels before he’s through.

Fortunately for Arthur & George, there’s enough of the mystery to make up for the weakness of the other material, and Barnes makes it work without changing any of the substance of the real-world case, even where it makes Conan Doyle look like a bit of a hypocrite – he claimed another boy committed the crimes, but his case was just as circumstantial as the one that got Edalji convicted. It’s not in the same league as The Sense of an Ending, which was taut and focused, yet landed such a massive impact with its resolution, with the same clear and evocative prose, but good enough to get over the recommended line for me.

Next up: I’m reading this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winner, The Netanyahus, by Joshua Cohen.

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→ June 4, 2022
→ By

Stick to baseball, 6/4/22.

No new articles from me this week at The Athletic, but that will change over the weekend after I see Kumar Rocker on Saturday night.

On my podcast, I spoke with Sports Illustrated’s Emma Baccellieri about the “sweeper” slider, Brett Phillips, the Mets, and being Italian-American. You can subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Three Sisters, a fantastic new roll-and-write game from the designers of Fleet: The Dice Game.

I do send out a free email newsletter about twice a month. My two books, Smart Baseball and The Inside Game, are both available in paperback, and you can buy them at your local independent book store or at Bookshop.org.

And now, the links…

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→ June 3, 2022
→ By

Music update, May 2022.

May went by a little too quickly for my tastes, but it did have plenty of new music, including album releases from Everything Everything, Stars, Porridge Radio, Just Mustard, Craig Finn, The Black Keys, Florence + the Machine, Kendrick Lamar, The Smile, Belle & Sebastian, Arcade Fire, Sunflower Bean, and Black Star. If you can’t see the widget below, here’s a direct link to the playlist.

Jamie T – The Old Style Raiders. Jamie T has been quite popular in the UK for about 15 years now, since Zane Lowe gave him a boost before his debut album even appeared, but I haven’t been a fan of his music before, between the cracked-voice sung-talked vocals and off-kilter guitar lines, but this … put this straight into my veins. Every aspect of this song works, right from that initial power-chord riff through the vocals (his voice is fuller, and its tone more consistent) through the soaring lines over the chorus. I’m in.

Sharon Van Etten – Mistakes. I think this is SVE’s second-ever appearance on my playlists, and the other was a track she did with the National. Her laconic vocal style has never quite done it for me, but paired with a dark and insistent beat to contrast with some of her boldest singing yet. She leaned a bit into distortion and electronic elements on her last album, and they pop up even more on her latest record, We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong, although, once again, I’m less of a fan of her slower-tempo tracks.

Blossoms – Born Wild. I liked Blossoms’ latest album, Ribbon Around the Bomb, a bit less than I expected given how much I loved the two lead singles, “Ode to NYC” and “The Sulking Poet.” The title track, “Care For,” and this song are all quite solid. Recommended for fans of The Head and the Heart, Whiskeytown, and Lord Huron.

Folk Implosion – Don’t Give It Away. One of two new songs from Lou Barlow and John Davis, their first new music written and recorded together in 23 years, since the last Folk Implosion album was a Barlow solo effort. It sounds like they never left.

Young Guv – Nowhere At All. I saw the name “Young Guv” and thought it was going to be a horrible white rapper, but it’s actually Ben Cook, the guitarist for Fucked Up, making dream-pop tracks that sound like part of the Paisley Underground movement (early Bangles, Green on Red) rather than something new in 2022. I’m saying that’s a good thing.

Porcupine Tree – Herd Culling. Steve Wilson’s work with Opeth is evident once again on this new track, the third in advance of Closure/Continuation, the British prog-rock stalwarts’ first new album since 2009. This is edited to be a single, so I assume the album version will clock in at 10:28.

The Smile – Thin Thing. A Light for Attracting Attention, the debut album from The Smile (Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead plus Tom Skinner of Sons of Kemet), is almost certainly going to end up among my top ten albums of the year, but I’m still digesting it – it’s strange and ambitious and full of unexpected turns. This track has a big of “Jigsaw Falling Into Place” but moves into different territory with Skinner’s percussion when we hit the first break.

Foals – 2001. Foals promised us an upbeat dance album, and through four singles, where’s the lie? This is the funkiest these guys have ever sounded, and it turns out it melds extremely well with their previous sound.

Rina Sawayama – This Hell. A pretty straight-ahead pop track from Sawayama, this is the lead single from her sophomore album, Hold the Girl, due out September 2nd. I’d be surprised if this album didn’t make her a global star, although I know that isn’t always just about the music.

beabadoobee – Love Song. Beatrice is a talented guitarist who doesn’t let it rip enough, in my opinion, but this is a lovely little acoustic-ish number ahead of her second album, Beatopia, due out in July.

Sports Team – The Game. This extremely British rock band’s second album, Gulp, is due out in July. If the Libertines were more upper-class, but no more sober, they might sound like Sports Team.

Adwaith – Wedi Blino. If you think I’m including this song because it’s sung entirely in Welsh – the title means “Tired” – then, on the advice of my attorney, I will invoke my rights under the fifth amendment to avoid self-incrimination.

Suede – She Still Leads Me On. When Bernard Butler left Suede after their second album, Richard Oakes, who was just 17 years old, beat out hundreds of other guitarists to take his place. Oakes is now 46 years old. And Brett Anderson is 54. I suppose the bright side here is that I’m still young enough to put out that debut album!

Sky Ferreira – Don’t Forget. Ferreira released one single in 2019, and until now that was her only new music since 2013’s Night Time, My Time, her well-reviewed but uneven debut LP. This definitely sounds like a different artist – this is deeply rooted in mid-80s synthpop sounds, with music like Nu Shooz or even Peter Schilling.

Kendrick Lamar feat. Sampha – Father Time. I think I’ve settled into a space where I respect Kendrick Lamar’s work, but I know I’ll probably never love it. Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers is a fascinating work of art, with some tremendous highlights, including “Auntie Diaries,” which is a massive statement of trans acceptance that also includes frequent use of the f-slur (in context, but still, regrettable). Barring that, this is my favorite track on the record, thanks to the presence of Mercury Prize winner Sampha on the chorus.

Stars – Pretenders. From Capelton Hill is Stars’ first album in five years, and it’s lovely even without the highs of 2012’s The North, which contained my favorite Stars track (and our wedding song), “Hold On When You Get Love and Let Go When You Give It.” This is probably my favorite song from the new album, especially with the duet in the chorus between Amy Millan and Torquil Campbell.

Superbloom – Falling Up. Very Melvins meets the Smashing Pumpkins circa 1994. I’m very vulnerable to music that reminds me of very specific eras, bands, or moments in time. This does it.

Just Mustard – Seed. This Irish group lives on the abrasive side of shoegaze without becoming as inscrutable (or unlistenable) as My Bloody Valentine, whose music I could just never get into. Just Mustard’s second album, Heart Under, just came out last Friday.

Killing Joke – Lord of Chaos. This is not a drill – we have new music from Killing Joke, a four-song EP called Lord of Chaos, and they pick up right where they left off after 2015’s Pylon. (The EP actually came out in late March. I’m just behind.)

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→ May 28, 2022
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Stick to baseball, 5/28/22.

For subscribers to The Athletic, I published my redraft of the 2012 draft class, as well as the associated look at the first-rounders who didn’t make the cut for the redraft.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Azul: Queen’s Garden, the fourth game in the Azul series, which is solid on its own but also has no real mechanical connection to the original, and has a fiddly placement rule that really bothered me.

On the Keith Law Show this week, I spoke to my friend Jonathan Mayo about this year’s draft, including our different mocks that went up on May 19th. (Here’s mine, for subscribers to the Athletic, and here’s Jonathan’s.) You can subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I do send out a free email newsletter about twice a month, and now I realize I’m due for another one. My two books, Smart Baseball and The Inside Game, are both available in paperback, and you can buy them at your local independent book store or at Bookshop.org.

And now, the links…

  • People who fight new development in their areas (often referred to as NIMBYs,” for “Not In My Backyard,”) under the guise of opposing overpopulation or fighting climate change are motivated by racism, xenophobia, or just outright misanthropy. We’re threatened less with overpopulation than with an aging global population, declining fertility, and too many people spread over too much space.
  • Speaking of which, here’s a twitter thread on men who were supposedly “canceled” for sexual harassments or assaults, and how successful they’ve been since. I don’t think every tweet here is accurate, as some of these men clearly have been worse off, but the gist is accurate.
  • San Francisco Pride Parade organizers asked police, who typically march in the event, to do so in plainclothes. So the cops withdrew from the event, and now the Mayor has, too.
  • Gabe Kapler wrote on his personal site about his decision to stop coming out on the field for the national anthem, calling the performative exercise “participating in a self congratulatory glorification of the ONLY country where these mass shootings take place.” I haven’t stood for the anthem in several years now, in accordance with my own conscience. That’s all the anthem is – performative patriotism.
  • Meanwhile, the party’s hero appeared at CPAC along with a Hungarian talkshow host who has called Jews “stinking excrement” and the same clown who pushed the bogus Pizzagate conspiracy theory several years ago.
  • Paste‘s Clare Martin writes about John Mulaney’s decision to bring Dave Chappelle on stage, unannounced, at his comedy show, and the myth of the “good ones.”
  • Dr. Paul Sax wrote a post in praise of ophthalmologist Dr. Will Flanary, whom you may know as Dr. Glaucomflecken, the very popular TikTok account where he skewers America’s dysfunctional health care system, the journal review process, and orthopedic surgeons. Dr. Flanary was the commencement speaker at the graduation ceremony for the Yale School of Medicine this past week.
  • Board game news: Arcs, the latest game from Leder Games (Root, Fort, Oath), is now on Kickstarter.
  • I missed this Kickstarter, but Fliptown looks like a pretty solid roll-and-write, due out next March. I’ll post this link again if they allow late pledges at some point.
  • Offline Editions announced a new game, Kyudo, from designer Bruno Cathala, who also designed Kingdomino and Five Tribes. (Link in French, but there’s a video teaser.)
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→ May 27, 2022
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Eating to Extinction.

Dan Saladino’s Eating to Extinction: The World’s Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them makes its important point – that declining biodiversity will impact our food supply in multiple ways – in unusual fashion: Rather than arguing the point in a straight narrative, Saladino gives the reader a tour of many of the rare foods at risk of extinction from environmental degradation, globalization, even over-regulation in some cases, presenting the scientific case for preserving them but relying more on emotional appeals. We’ll miss these foods if they’re gone, or maybe we’ll want to try them more for knowing they exist and might disappear.

The strongest arguments here come in the various sections on plants, because of the evolutionary case Saladino offers. Take the banana, probably the best-known sustainability problem in our food supply: Most of the bananas sold in the world are Cavendish bananas, every plant of which is genetically identical, because the plants themselves are sterile and must be propagated via clones. This deprives the plants of the opportunity to develop new defenses to pathogens or environmental changes via evolution; mutations are discouraged in monoculture farming. The Cavendish itself is now defenseless against a real threat to its existence: Panama disease, which previously wiped out Gros Michel banana plantations, has mutated and is in the process of wiping out Cavendish plantations as well. The banana you know and love is, to put it bluntly, fucked.

Saladino offers examples from the other side of the evolutionary equation, identifying rare fruits, vegetables, and other plants like wild coffee that offer both the genetic diversity these plants will need to survive – forever, even after our species is gone – and more immediate benefits to us, such as unique flavors or cultural legacies. Coffee is struggling in the face of climate change that is driving it to higher altitudes and pests like the fungus that causes coffee-leaf rust; the wild coffees of Ethiopia may provide genetic solutions, at least until the next crisis comes along. There’s a wild maize plant in Mexico that fixes its own nitrogen through a symbiotic relationship with a bacterium, a crop that could help address the world’s growing need for food. The wheat we’ve selected for easy harvesting and processing is close to a monoculture, and it wouldn’t take much to collapse the annual crop, even though there are hundreds of thousands of known varieties of wild wheat, like the wild emmer wheat of eastern Turkey known as kavilca.

He explores the impact that even so-called ‘sustainable’ solutions often have on wild populations, and how what works for our food supply in the short term leaves it even more vulnerable in the long term. We’ve nearly wiped out wild Atlantic salmon and are well on our way to doing the same in the Pacific, while farmed salmon fill our stores and plates, but when those farmed salmon get loose from their aquaculture pens, they interbreed with wild populations and can reduce genetic diversity, leaving those fish more vulnerable to diseases.

Some of these endangered foods are more closely tied to culture than to global food needs or biodiversity, such as the honey gathered by the native Hadza people in Tanzania, where local bee and bird populations are threatened both by habitat destruction and the loss of symbiotic relationships they’ve developed with humans. Certain birds would identify hives in baobab trees that contained honey, and humans would hear their calls and bring down the nests. The humans would eat the honey and parts of the honeycomb, while the birds would wait nearby to consume what the humans did not. This entire way of life is disappearing as native populations lose their land and become assimilated into urban life and dependent on processed foods.

Along the way, Saladino explains (several times) the presence of various seed banks around the world, including the critical one on the island of Svalbard in the Arctic Ocean, and the two great success stories of the Haber-Bosch process of fixing nitrogen in artificial fertilizer and the Green Revolution – the post-WWII adoption of high-yielding varieties of cereal and grain crops, notably dwarf wheat and rice, along with scientific methods of increasing yields through those artificial fertilizers and massive monocultures. (Not mentioned is how Haber’s research, which has helped accelerate climate change, also led to the development of Zyklon-B.) There’s quite a bit of science in here, which does help move things along in what amounts to a series of mini-essays on dozens of foods.

Saladino’s reference-work approach isn’t entirely successful for that last reason; sometimes, it’s like reading an encyclopedia. It’s often an interesting one, and Saladino went to all of these places to try the endangered foods and eat them with the locals who grow or gather or develop them. But such a broad look at the subject guarantees that some essays will be duds, and by the time we get to the end, Saladino’s epilogue, “think like a Hadza,” is so far removed from the opening essay on those people and their honey-gathering that the throughline connecting all of these foods has started to fray a bit. It works best as a call to action – we need to find and value these products, to keep them alive and protect those habitats or those cultures, and to stop relying on these monocultures to feed ourselves. You can find other wheat flours even at Whole Foods and similar stores, while there might even be local mills or growers near you offering unconventional (and thus genetically distinct) flours and grains and beans. Our diets will be richer for it, and we’ll be taking a small step towards protecting the future of humanity before we scorch the planet growing the same five crops.

Next up: I just finished Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom.

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→ May 25, 2022
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On the James Bond films.

Last night, my wife and I finished a long-running project of ours: watching all 25 James Bond movies in order. (We didn’t watch the two non-canon Bond films, which weren’t produced by Eon.) Before I met her, I’d actually never seen a single Bond film, but she’d seen them all, mostly long ago, so we started this as a pandemic project and, with some breaks, finished last night.

Acknowledging that any opinion on the Bond film universe is likely to cause some controversy, I’ve got a few views that I don’t think will be that controversial:

1. The best Bond is Daniel Craig.

2. The best Bond film is the 2006 Casino Royale, the first one starring Craig.

I think I’d have a harder time choosing the best Doctor than the best Bond. (The best Companion, however, is Clara.) Craig is superb in the role, and gives the character actual depth that’s lacking from every previous person’s portrayal, aided by much better writing as well. Roger Moore had his moments but his Bond became more smarmy (and more obviously altered by cosmetic surgery) as his films went on. Timothy Dalton had no chemistry with the women in his films, and my wife has always called his Bond the ‘darkest’ of all. Pierce Brosnan looked the part but his Bond felt the most perfunctory, although on some level it’s hard to separate his performance from a couple of miserable scripts. I’ll give George Lazenby an incomplete, since he appeared in just one film and had the misfortunate of following the original Bond, which meant nobody was going to be happy with him.

The original was, of course, Sean Connery, who defined the role and thus colored our views of every actor who would later hold the Walther. Connery had the charm, and as a former footballer brought a level of athleticism that made the action scenes seem more credible, even when the writing and effects weren’t up to snuff. He made Bond a wit. But he also made Bond a cad rather than just a ladies’ man. You couldn’t watch his films without picking up the character’s disdain for the women he slept with, and in Goldfinger he rapes Pussy Galore. Is that on the script, the actor, or both? I choose the last option: It passes in the film because Connery made it so, and today it’s the low point in Connery’s tenure, one that also saw him slapping women, a practice Connery himself advocated in real life. The character’s enduring popularity is in large part his creation, but the passage of time has exposed his flaws.

The reboot of the series and character for Casino Royale marks the first time anyone seems to have looked at James Bond and thought, hey, what if we actually tried this time? The sixteen films before then all hewed closely to the formula – a preposterous villain has an improbable scheme to take over the world, Bond escapes a bunch of close scrapes in the process of fighting him (often on skis), he seduces one woman who is then killed by the bad guys, then he seduces another woman and they ride off into the sunset after he takes out the Big Foozle. You watched for the action, the one-liners, maybe for Q’s wonderful gadgets, but the plots were just the cheap glue that held the whole thing together. At their best, they were campy fun; at worst, empty calories. (The worst Bond film, in my view? The World Is Not Enough, which has a great theme song and goes straight downhill from there, with Denise Richards giving an absolute howler of a performance as a – wait for it – nuclear scientist. Really.) You were along for the ride and hoped the fights and chases were good and the plot wasn’t too absurd to get in the way of your entertainment. Often it was, as in Moonraker, which looks like a blatant attempt to cash in on the popularity of Star Wars, released two years earlier, by sending Bond into space.

With the Daniel Craig films, however, the plots started to matter, never more so than in Casino Royale, which rewrote his origin story and gave us a real explanation for much of his character, introduced Vesper Lynd as the best Bond girl character in the series, and gave us the best villain in “Le Chiffre,” played by Mads Mikkelsen. (Talk about looking the part.) It set up a story arc that would continue through all four of Craig’s subsequent films, and updated the template for a Bond movie. We still get the fights and the chases – no skis, but plenty of cars and other motorized vehicles on land, sea, and air – and several disposable Bond girls. The villains vary in ambition and absurdity, with things really bottoming out in Quantum of Solace. The stakes are consistently higher in these films, however; nobody is truly safe, so you can no longer just assume that it’ll all work out in the end.

All of these changes mean that Craig gets to inhabit a new skin, and James Bond suddenly has … feelings. I’m sure there are diehards who disliked the change, who think Bond should just be a manly man who cares nothing about the needs of others, who is happy just saving the world and bedding the girl, but that had become quite stale after sixteen films, even with changes of actors and improved special effects. Craig’s Bond has the dry wit, the panache, and the way with women, but he also clearly cares about people – about M, certainly, and Vesper, and later Madeline Swann. He has friends, of a sort, although the Craig films made far too little use of Jeffrey Wright as Felix Leiter, who often served as a partner-in-crime for Bond in the earlier films. The promotion of Eve Moneypenny to field agent from lovelorn secretary (in Skyfall) not only gives Bond a buddy cop, but shows Bond with a functional, platonic relationship with a woman (of color, in fact).

By the time we get to No Time to Die, the character has been fully realized as a three-dimensional person, a lothario but not a rake, an agent dedicated to the mission but with a sense of actual humanity. We even get a completely new subplot: Bond meets a gorgeous agent (Ana de Armas) and they … don’t. They win a firefight together, and she leaves, and that’s that. In Bond’s universe, this is unheard of. Even with a less interesting villain – you know he’s a bad guy, because he has bad skin and an unidentifiable accent – the film succeeds because the previous four films have built up a proper protagonist, and this script makes excellent use of him. The next Bond film, whenever it might come along, may reboot the series and character again, but I hope whatever they do, they learn from what worked in the Craig film. And count me among those who think Henry Golding would be great for the role.

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→ May 22, 2022
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Stick to baseball, 5/22/22.

For subscribers to The Athletic, I posted my first mock draft for 2022, and took reader questions in a Q&A on the site that afternoon.

On the Keith Law Show, I spoke with Jonathan Higgs of the band Everything Everything about their new album Raw Data Feel, which came out on Friday. You can subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I do send out a free email newsletter about twice a month, and for those of you who said you would attend an in-person event with me in London, it’s in the works now, so thank you all for responding. Speaking of books, Smart Baseball and The Inside Game are both available in paperback, and you can buy them at your local independent book store or at Bookshop.org.

And now, the links…

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