→ October 31, 2025
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Someone You Can Build a Nest In.

John Wiswell won this year’s Nebula Award for his novel Someone You Can Build a Nest In, while also making the shortlist for the Hugo for Best Novel and winning the Locus Award for Best Novel. It’s a queer love story that tries to approach some enormous questions about the meanings of family, secrecy, and what it means to trust and be trusted, but it gets bogged down too much in the details of how its shapeshifting protagonist works.

Shesheshen is that main character, a shapeshifter with no natural form who lives by eating living creatures – including humans – and absorbing their body parts to create facsimiles of them, although she* can also use inanimate objects to take the places of bones and other hard physical structures. Thus she can imitate a human’s form and even some of its senses despite lacking a circulatory or nervous system. She recalls being born from a sac of eggs within a host human and having to defend herself when her siblings tried to attack and presumably eat her, eating them instead to survive. She lives in a castle outside a town whose residents fear a “wyrm” in the countryside, and the story opens when three adventurers, one the scion of a noble family, invade the house to try to kill her – despite not knowing what manner of creature she is – and collect some sort of bounty. She survives the battle but is wounded, and when she wakes after a fall, she finds herself in the care of a traveling woman named Homily who rescues her and nurses her back to health. Shesheshen develops feelings for Homily, something she has never experienced before, which becomes far more complicated when the full picture becomes apparent.

* I believe Wiswell used she/her pronouns for Shesheshen, while specifically identifying other characters as nonbinary, but obviously the concept of gender for a literal shapeshifter is a bit silly.

Shesheshen learns early on that there’s a connection between Homily and the people who want her dead, and also realizes that Homily thinks she’s a human, but despite coming close multiple times she decides not to tell Homily the truth until much later in the story (mild spoiler, but obviously that reckoning is coming at some point). This presented the most compelling aspect of the entire narrative, even more than the “will they/won’t they” between the two main characters or the eventual conflict between Shesheshen and the Baroness Wulfyre, who has sworn to kill the wyrm and take its heart so that she can lift a curse on her family. Instead, Shesheshen goes through the very familiar and normal set of rationalizations as she vacillates between coming clean – hi, I’m a human-eating monster of no fixed shape, also I think I love you – and avoiding the inevitable conflict and recriminations, both of the actual truth and her choices to deceive Homily for what turns out to be quite some time. It’s a superb portrait of the internal monologue that people who are conflict-avoidant (raises hand) go through, and the lies we even tell ourselves to rationalize our decisions.

Wiswell’s a fine prose writer, but there is just way too much ink spilled here about Shesheshen absorbing and digesting parts of the humans and creatures she attacks. The issue isn’t so much that it’s gross – it is kind of gross, but I’ve seen worse, and Wiswell’s descriptions aren’t lurid – but that it occupies so much of the page when we should be following the plot. There’s a lot happening in this book, and I’d say at least one very big twist, and it gets a bit drowned by all the blood and viscera being spilled by Shesheshen and some of her enemies.

Wiswell has a neuromuscular disorder and other disabilities, which he speaks about often and incorporates into some of his work; I was looking for the possible metaphors for disability and visibility in Someone to Build a Nest In, but if they’re there, I missed them, and thus possibly missed some significant context for the story itself. All I saw was a mildly interesting love story (where you know they’re getting together somehow, although it could prove tragic in the end) boosted by Shesheshen’s moral dilemma and the wrong choices she continually makes, even as she tries to convince herself they’re the right ones. That made for a solid novel but hardly the best of the year, certainly not over finalist The Book of Love by Kelly Link, which remains the best new novel I have read this year.

Next up: I just finished Theft, the newest novel by Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah, and started Dorothy Baker’s Young Man with a Horn.

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→ October 25, 2025
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Stick to baseball, 10/25/25.

I ended up unable to do a links post last weekend because I was out scouting the Arizona Fall League (which also prevented me from doing something else on Saturday morning), so we’re back now and at least I can post my AFL wrap-ups. I broke them up into one post on the notable pitchers and another on the notable hitters I saw in the eleven games I attended, but of course I couldn’t see everyone.

Over at Endless Mode, I reviewed the games Twinkle Twinkle, a solid family-level tile-laying game; and Duel for Cardia, an excellent two-player capture-the-flag game that gets a lot of mileage out of its two 16-card decks.

I sent out another issue of my free email newsletter about two weeks ago, so I’m due for another one now that I’ve written some more stuff.

And now, the links…

  • An Arizona wannabe influencer tried to extort a local bakery, JL Patisserie, for a collaboration fee, or at least a bunch of free food, in exchange for a favorable video. The bakery declined; the woman showed up anyway, and then posted a negative review that had some false claims in it, so the bakery posted a point-by-point response … and then all hell broke loose. I went there and got a chocolate-pistachio croissant for $8.50; it was probably the best croissant I’ve ever had, and I’ve been to France three times.
  • Sen. “Cancun” Ted Cruz is targeting Wikipedia, claiming the site – which has extensive rules on reliable & verifiable sourcing – has a “left-wing bias.” Well, if you’re saying facts have a left-wing bias…
  • Defector has a good laugh at the Free Press writer – I’m not calling them journalists, sorry – Olivia Reingold, who is complaining that most of her friends are shunning her after she wrote a story claiming that the Gazan babies who died of starvation were actually sick with other things, so it wasn’t that big of a tragedy. I need a quantum violin to play for her, because anything else would be too large.
  • The hosts of a left-wing podcast called out Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) for his votes for Trump appointees and generally clubby attitude towards the rise of authoritarianism.
  • Raas: A Dance of Love is an upcoming board game from two Indian designers, now up on Gamefound; it’s the first game I’ve seen that uses an aspect of Indian culture and is also designed by people from the subcontinent.

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→ October 11, 2025
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Make Me Commissioner.

Full disclosure here: I got a review (electronic) copy of this book from Jane Leavy’s publicist, but also contributed a little to the book, as Jane asked me a few questions and mentions me once in the text as well as in the acknowledgements.

Make Me Commissioner: I Know What’s Wrong With Baseball and How to Fix It doesn’t exactly deliver on its title, and it isn’t really about Jane Leavy asking to take Rob Manfred’s job – although I have little doubt she’d be an improvement, as she doesn’t just like baseball, she loves it. It’s a series of interconnected stories, reminiscent of George Will’s Men at Work, that explain a lot about where baseball is right now as a sport and a pastime. I disagree with large portions of it, both Leavy’s opinions and the opinions of many of the people she spoke with in researching the book, but I also tore through it.

Leavy has been a sportswriter for … let’s just say longer than I have, and prior to this she wrote three biographies of Hall of Famers, most notably her biography of Sandy Koufax called A Lefty’s Legacy. This is Leavy’s first book where she’s the main character, as we tag along with her to Cape Cod League games, spring training games, Savannah Bananas games, and a few big-league games as well, listening in on conversations with players, coaches, scouts, and executives about baseball in our era. There’s a lot about analytics, of course, as well as baseball’s attempts to capture the attention of younger fans, both by changing the game on the field and updating how the sport is presented when the players aren’t actually playing.

The stuff about the Bananas works the least, and the idea that baseball – Major League Baseball, specifically – has to be more like the Bananas is, well, bananas. (The book was published a week before Defector revealed that the Bananas’ charity is maybe not very charitable.) The Savannah Bananas are entertainment, not sport. They build on baseball to put on a show, the way that WWE builds on real wrestling to put on a show. You might like one, both, or neither. But turning MLB into something more like the Bananas, which Manfred floated when he brought up the idea of the “Golden At Bat” – never has it seemed more like the guy just doesn’t understand baseball culture or tradition – risks alienating everyone: Current and longtime baseball fans will think it’s a joke, while people who like the Bananas for what they bring aren’t going to suddenly embrace ‘real’ baseball for putting the pitcher on stilts.

The lesson of the Bananas, if there is one, is that the fans do matter. Leavy does not suggest, or agree with the idea of, adopting Bananas ideas into pro ball; she does suggest making the sport more family-friendly, with earlier game times (good), cheaper tickets in family-only sections (good, but owners don’t really like giving up money), and more in-stadium entertainment (not a long-term strategy).

What baseball really needs to do is improve the product on the field – without diluting it, or making it into something it fundamentally isn’t. The pitch clock, of which I think Leavy approves, has been game-changing, literally. We get the same amount of baseball in about 10% less time. The baseball density has increased. The baseball per minute ratio is at its highest in decades. And the predicted rise in pitcher injuries doesn’t seem to have happened, probably because every pitcher was already hurt anyway.

This is where Leavy gets into the conversations that prove more interesting, if not always enlightening. She talks to players (Alex Bregman, Chase Delauter), execs (Mike Rizzo, still head of the Nationals when this went to press), coaches, and scouts. She goes to Driveline, and wonders what the cost of all of this easy velocity is. She’s asking people in the trenches what they think baseball should do, and the answer is that they don’t have the answers. That’s fine, if perhaps not the most compelling hook for a book, but along the way, she also talks to Bregman about his struggles in 2024 and how he’s changed his swing over time, and talks to Rizzo and Red Sox hitting development director Jason Ochart about the rise of analytics, all of which rank among the best conversations in the book. Leavy is clearly more of a traditionalist and not a huge fan of analytics, but not to the point of refusing to learn or understand it, which puts her miles ahead of some our colleagues whose response is to make bad WAR puns or call people who cite advanced statistics “nerds” like this is Happy Days (a show that actually gets a mention in the book).

Leavy’s love of the game comes through on every page, even when she says things with which I completely disagree. I’d be fine with her as Commissioner, although at this point I think a potted plant might be an improvement over someone who wants to eliminate another 20% of the minors. The book doesn’t get much into the weeds about the revenue model in the sport, which is a major reason why the sport has remained strong despite the aging fan base, so as a prescription for how to ‘fix’ baseball, it falls short. It’s just an engaging read about baseball as it is today, when most baseball books – including my own two – don’t really give you the feel of the game, the way so many of the best baseball books of the 1980s and 1990s did. Make Me Commissioner does, and reminded me so much of the books on the sport that helped forge my own voice.

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→ October 7, 2025
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Stick to baseball, 10/7/25.

Nothing new from me at the Athletic recently, although I’ll make up for that later this month. My latest review at Endless Mode looks at the new edition of the Reiner Knizia game Botswana, a family-level bidding game that has been published under a half-dozen names, including one edition by Milton Bradley in a traditional mass-market size under the name Quandary.

Now that this is up, I’ll work on another edition of my free email newsletter next. The next Stick to Baseball post will run on the 18th.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: Billionaire Amy Griffin took psychedelics and “remembered” past sexual abuse by a grade-school teacher. She wrote a memoir about it … but no one can confirm any of the details, and she may have just ruined an innocent man’s life.
  • The Huffington Post spoke to Leonard Peltier, who is now under home confinement after spending 47 years in prison for a crime he probably didn’t commit, about being slightly free and the threat Trump poses to indigenous Americans.
  • A New Jersey teenager stalked a girl who rejected him, even describing some of his actions on his Youtube channel, and after police did nothing, he drove his car at 70 mph at the girl and her friend while the two were on their bikes, killing them. Did police fail to react because his father’s a cop?
  • Bluesky is dealing with its first real existential crisis, as noted anti-trans crusader Jesse Singal appears to have violated the site’s TOS, after which Bluesky execs … altered the TOS? TechCrunch and the blog Azhdarchid both delved into the controversy, including Bluesky CEO Jay Gruber throwing a tantrum on the site over it.
  • Writer Kaleb Horton died suddenly of a seizure in September, and shortly afterwards an AI-generated slop book supposedly about him appeared on Amazon.
  • It’s gotten very little attention here in all the chaos, but the Trump Administration is bailing out Trump ally Javier Milei, whose mismanagement of Argentina’s economy and alleged corruption have put the country on the brink, a $20 billion deal that also happens to help billionaire hedge-fund manager Rob Citrone, a buddy of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
  • A Christian church leader in Miami had fifty-seven slaves – excuse me, “forced laborers” – in her mansion when FBI agents raided it in August. Michelle Brannon and her partner David Taylor are also accused of running a money laundering scheme, while Taylor is accused of sexual harassment.
  • The Alabama owners of three small Alaska newspapers edited an article to remove reference to Charlie Kirk’s “racist and controversial views,” leading to the resignation of three of the writers – which left one of the papers without any journalists on staff.

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→ October 3, 2025
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Music update, September 2025.

September turned out to be a monster of a month with new albums and tracks ahead of album releases for the next two months; as it was I had a hard time keeping this list to 33 tracks. As always, you can access the playlist here if you can’t see the widget below.

Geese – Cobra. One reader-friend who’s very into music mentioned that Geese’s latest, Getting Killed, is his album of the year so far; it’s going to end up high on my list, although Cameron Winter’s vocals sometimes come across like he’s not trying, even when the music behind him is experimental and ambitious. Regardless of where the album ends up on my rankings, Geese are one of the most interesting bands around, and the members aren’t even 25 yet.

SPRINTS – Need. The first ten songs on SPRINTS’ second full-length LP All That Is Over run 32 minutes in total, and then there’s the six-minute closer “Desire,” is a strange, slow-burning, gothic/post-punk track that stands in stark contrast to the straight-on punk of the rest of the record – such as this song, where singer Karla Chubb describes the desperation of being in a one-sided relationship.

Paris Paloma – Good Boy. The song is fine, but the intro, taken from a video where Emma Thompson dramatically reads the tremendous title of this Rebecca Shaw editorial from January, is a hell of a way to get me to put your song on a playlist.

Public Circuit – Samson. Is this Heaven 17? Bronski Beat? Early New Order? Rarely does a song take me back to such a specific time period, but this is straight out of 1982, a musical era that will always be central to my existence. And there’s a sample of Monty Python and the Holy Grail too.

Kid Kapichi – Stainless Steel. Maybe not as strong as most of their past singles but I do love the driving bass & drum line that provides the foundation for this track, their first since two of the four members left the band in May.

Portugal. the Man – Tanana. Not sure if this is about Frank, but it’s got the sweeping, psycheledic-inspired feel of their 2011 album In the Mountain in the Cloud. They also put out another single, “Denali,” that I didn’t like as much as this one. Their next album, Shish, comes out November 7th.

Maruja – Saoirse. If you like Geese, you might enjoy the debut album from Maruja, Pain to Power, which also reminded me a ton of the (probably) defunct band black midi and even a little of Swans. This track is probably the most accessible, combining free jazz, punk, and even hints of chamber pop.

Die Spitz – Riding with My Girls. Something to Consume, the debut album from this Austin-based punk/metal band, came out in September, and veers between those two genres, with some straight-ahead hard-rock numbers mixed in with more punk tracks like this one and a few that call back the crossover thrash era, like “Throw Yourself to the Sword.” (Speaking of crossover, Agnostic Front put out a new song in September. It was a big month for metal bands from the ‘80s, as you’ll see below.)

Creeper – Prey for the Night. The third single from the band’s upcoming Sanguivore II: Mistress of Death, due out on Halloween, is more in line with their previous stuff and less hair-metal than the last single, “Blood Magick.”

Sunflower Bean – Crashing Highs. A bonus track from the deluxe edition of Mortal Primetime, and a pretty strong indie-pop track – maybe a little too sunny for the album proper.

shame – After Party. Shame’s latest album Cutthroat, released on September 5th, is their most expansive and ambitious yet, although I have to admit this very Yard Act-ish track is one of my favorites.

flowerovlove – I’m your first. This 20-year-old DIY pop artist from London has released at least twenty singles already, so at some point I assume there will be an album. She’s got a great ear for creating catchy pop hooks that would fit in – and improve – any pop radio station’s playlists.

Hatchie – Lose It Again. This Australian singer-songwriter’s third album, Liquourice, comes out on November 7th; “Lose It Again” is yet another catchy-as-hell dream pop number from her, as she seems to have an endless supply of them.

St. Lucia – Lights Off. I know St. Lucia is never going to get back to the heights of his debut album When the Night, but this song, off the upcoming Fata Morgana: Dusk, is the closest he’s come since 2015’s “Dancing on Glass.”

Emma-Jean Thackray – Save Me (Radio Edit). A reworking by Thackray herself of one of the better tracks on her now Mercury Prize-nominated album Weirdo, one of the best albums of the year. Other notable nominees include the latest from Wolf Alice, Fontaines D.C., and, for some reason, Pulp.

Cœur de Pirate – Mélancolie. Béatrice Martin is having a moment, as “Corbeau,” from her 2008 eponymous album, was featured on The Summer I Turned Pretty’s final season, and Martin just released her seventh album, Cavale, last month, featuring this lush electro-pop track.

Tame Impala – Dracula. Best use of the name Pablo Escobar in a song yet. This is my favorite of the three singles released in advance of this month’s Deadbeat, by far.

Prides – Dynamite. This Scottish indiepop act had one of my favorite songs of 2014 in “The Seeds You Sow,” then disappeared after 2018 other than a few scattered guest appearances. They’re back this year with several singles, all of which have been pretty promising. They rose up during the peak of “landfill indie,” but I thought they were stronger musically and melodically than most of those groups.

Sudan Archives – Come and Find You. I haven’t loved the Sudan Archives singles this year as much as I did her last album Natural Brown Prom Queen, with this newest one the strongest yet because of the violin solo (as that is Parks’s main instrument).

Emma Swift – The Resurrection Game. The title track from Swift’s first album of original material is a lovely track of sophisticated folk-tinged pop, an impressive debut for anyone but especially someone whose previous output was an album of Bob Dylan covers and some tracks with her partner Robyn Hitchcock (who is 28 years her senior).

Yttling Jazz – Illegal Hit. I found this track on an NPR weekly new-music playlist, and only later discovered that this is Björn Yttling of Peter Bjohn and John, whose song “Young Folks” was a huge (and kind of annoying) hit about 15 years ago.

Lazarus & Rakim – Not to Be Defined. I love Rakim, and I’m warming to Lazarus, a Detroit-born rapper … and physician.

Bartees Strange – DCWDTTY. It’s not a cover of the DC post-hardcore song “DC Will Do That To You” by Smart Went Crazy, just alluding to it in the title.

Sloan – No Damn Fears. Sloan’s 14th album, Based on the Best Seller, dropped on September 26th, and the early reviews seem to be quite positive, although I don’t hear anything to match “Losing California” or “Everything You’ve Done Wrong.”

The Macks – Dually of Man. I don’t even remember where I found this song, from a longstanding Portland rock band that just put out their first proper album in September, but the intro synth riff is hypnotic, and the song just builds from there, passing through jam-band territory without ever drifting off into that direction entirely.

SONS – Do My Thing. This Belgian band has been putting out music since at least 2019 in Europe, although it seems like they’re making a push in the U.S. now with this latest single, which sounds a ton like The Hives (that’s a compliment).

Thrice – Albatross. Thrice’s latest album Horizons/West dropped today, the 3rd, so I haven’t had a chance to listen to it yet, but this was my favorite of the lead singles, with a dark, ominous vibe that recalls their 2016 album To Be Everywhere Is to Be Nowhere.

Castle Rat – Serpent. Castle Rat is full of gimmickry, but this is some excellent Sabbathesque doom metal, reminiscent of The Oath/Lucifer (since both have female vocalists with similar voices).

Coroner – Symmetry. It should be illegal for a band to go away for thirty-plus years and come back sounding this good. Not just good – ferocious. I would have been excited for any new Coroner album, but I cannot wait for Dissonance Theory to drop on the 17th.

Paradox – One Way Ticket to Die. This was a big month for ‘80s metal bands; Paradox put out two albums that decade, including one of the best concept albums in metal with 1989’s Heresy, then went on hiatus for 11 years. Their ninth album, Mysterium, was (possibly) recorded entirely by singer/guitarist Charly Steinhauer, the only remaining founding member, and it’s full of tight old-school Teutonic thrash, à la…

Kreator – Seven Serpents. The sixteenth (!) album from these German thrash icons, Krushers of the World, is due out on January 16th; their first album, Endless Pain, came out forty years ago this month. They proved extremely influential on the development of extreme metal, with their early sound similar to that of Celtic Frost, all of which led to the growth of ‘death metal,’ but by their third album Terrible Certainty they’d transitioned to a variation of thrash that became known as Teutonic thrash. (Old-school metal fans might remember MTV airing “Toxic Trace” and “Betrayer” on Headbanger’s Ball.) They still sound … pretty good, actually, better than any band this old has a right to sound.

Testament – Shadow People. One American thrash band for you, as these pioneers of Bay Area thrash metal are largely back to basics with this track. Their latest album Para Bellum drops on the 10th.

Elder – Liminality. Elder released two songs in September, but they’re a combined 18+ minutes, so isn’t that an EP? This sprawling prog-doom-metal track is a whole journey, full of the stuff that made their last LP Innate Passage one of my favorite albums of 2022.

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→ October 1, 2025
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The Naked Gun.

One problem the new Naked Gun film, now streaming on Paramount+ and rentable on iTunes/Amazon, has is that it’s not funny enough. The bigger problem it has, however, is that it’s not funny often enough. This movie shoots more blanks than me since my vasectomy.

The hallmark of the Zucker-Abrams-Zucker oeuvre, which includes AirplaneI, the Police Squad TV series (still the funniest show in the history of the medium), and the original three Naked Gun movies, was rapid-fire jokes that gave you little chance to catch your breath. That trio of writers had an endless capacity for humor, especially wordplay and sight gags, but they also understood that for jokes like theirs, it’s best to just keep them coming, so if one doesn’t land, there’s a better one right around the corner. Police Squad was the most joke-dense of their work, but most of their movies threw out jokes like automatic fire, so no one remembers the dull parts or jokes that weren’t as funny. You left all of those movies marveling about the jokes that did land.

So unfortunately the new Naked Gun film doesn’t follow that style at all, and is weirdly concerned with something the ZAZ crew rarely bothered with at all – plot. The film opens with a bank robbery where a very villainish-looking guy comes and retrieves a piece of electronics helpfully labelled as a “P.L.O.T. Device,” which I took as a wonderful sign that we were in for some silliness. Instead, there’s an actual plot, as Richard Cane (Danny Huston, unconvincing as an evil billionaire because he’s utterly charmless) wants to use this device to send out a frequency that will allow him to (the Brain voice) take over the world. It’s at least 50% more plot than the movie would need if there were more gags, and it seems like the writers made a deliberate choice to replace humor with plot, to the movie’s great detriment because the plot isn’t interesting or all that necessary.

Liam Neeson steps into some giant shoes – there’s a sight gag they could have used – as Frank Drebin, Jr., although he doesn’t have the same deadpan style or oblivious look that Leslie Nielsen brought to the Drebin role. (I still marvel at maybe the best joke from the TV show: “Who are you, and how did you get in here?” Drebin: “I’m a locksmith [pause] … and I’m a locksmith.” There is nothing as funny as that scene in this entire movie.) Drebin thwarts the bank robbery with a surprising display of combat skills and agility, although some of it is really quite funny, but of course it lands him and his partner Ed (an underutilized Paul Walter Hauser) in hot water with their boss (CCH Pounder, who gets one great scene). Frank is off the case, and gets reassigned to a car crash that might be a suicide, except it’s actually connected to the bank robbery and to Richard Cane and brings Frank into the orbit of femme fatale Beth Davenport (Pamela Anderson, the best part of the movie). She wants revenge, Frank wants Beth, and along the way they’ll both get what they want, along with a little hanky-panky with a snowman.

I was as primed to like this movie as anybody; I knew going in that it wouldn’t be the same as the original films or TV show, because it’s not the same writers, but I expected this film to mimic the original’s style a lot more than it does. Instead it tries to bridge the chasm between a conventional crime story and a ridiculous ZAZ comedy, and that just doesn’t work. There are many funny bits in the film – the windshield, the bedroom scene with Ronald, the name of the arena for the climactic scene – but they’re sparse. When Drebin asks Beth to take a chair, and she says that she has plenty of chairs at home, it’s such a callback to the original – and so rare in this movie – that it just left me with nostalgia for the first movie. You’ve got to follow that up with another gag, and another, and another. This film lets that joke hang, and revisits it at the end of the scene, without filling in the gaps with more one-liners, puns, and visual gags.

The ZAZ film Top Secret! had a bestiality joke that’s one of its funniest gags (and one I still can’t believe didn’t get the film an R rating), but it’s very quick and the scene quickly moves to the next joke. Compare that to the new Naked Gun’s bestiality joke, which is an eye-roller when it’s first on screen, and then it goes on … and on … and on. The writers failed to understand what made the ZAZ films and Police Squad tick: They would deliver a joke, and whether or not it worked, they’d just keep rolling to the next one. Instead we get the Krusty in the Big Ear Family treatment, even when a bit starts out promising (the Tivo gag).

Neeson doesn’t have Leslie Nielsen’s impeccable timing, which particularly shows up when his character delivers one of his nonsensical lines. When Drebin asks Cane to see some security footage, Cane asks “Oh. May I ask why?” and Drebin says, “Go right ahead.” The joke is great. The movie then screeches to a halt while Danny Huston screws up his face in confusion, as if they’re waiting for audience to laugh rather than just moving on to the next gag. The joy of the originals was that you often couldn’t catch your breath from one bout of laughter before the next, and you’d have to rewatch to see the jokes you missed from laughing the first time.

There are good jokes in The Naked Gun, from the snowman sequence to the Drebin’s conversation with a bartender to the football joke about Drebin’s late wife (where he was most reminiscent of Nielsen’s portrayal). There are a handful of great one-liners. There’s a very good running gag about coffee cups, something that the originals did well, going back to the same joke enough that a mediocre joke would become funny. There are even some pretty bold attempts at jokes that don’t work – the Bill Cosby one was probably too much – where you can at least respect the effort. They’re just dwarfed by fart jokes, shit jokes, a lengthy description of Drebin’s penis, and lots of lowbrow bits that don’t pay off. Fart jokes are the laziest type of comic writing there is, and in a movie that doesn’t even run to 90 minutes, it feels like padding the essay to get to the teacher’s word count.

It’s possible I am just too biased in favor of the originals and was hoping for something more similar to them in pace and style, but I’ve seen multiple reviews of this film that claim it’s a lot closer to the first Naked Gun film than it actually is. If ZAZ hadn’t set such a high standard, perhaps the new Naked Gun would seem stronger.

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→ September 27, 2025
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Stick to baseball, 9/27/25.

For subscribers to The Athletic, I wrote my annual column with my ballots for the awards I don’t have this year. A record number of people didn’t read the intro this year.

At Endless Mode, I reviewed the two-player game Naishi, which is a solid enough game, but which is yet another example of white European designers & illustrators using Japanese culture and history as a theme, and in this case they really misused it in a way that I couldn’t get past.

I sent out another edition of my free email newsletter on Friday, touching on (waves hands pathetically) all of this happening around us.

And now, the links…

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→ September 25, 2025
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Two books about games.

In Playing with Reality: How Games Have Shaped Our World, neuroscientist Kelly Clancy examines how the frameworks of games have affected myriad aspects of human society, and how more recently game theory and related ideas have led to damaging and even ruinous policies that continue today with the mindless (pun intended) push to make everything AI.

Playing games leads our brains to produce dopamine, and games with uncertainty function as variable reward systems, increasing those dopamine surges and further encouraging us to keep playing. Thus we see evidence of games going back to ancient Babylon (the Royal Game of Ur), Egypt (Senet), and Africa (mancala), with games often used as tests of intelligence or readiness for a position as a leader or even as royalty. Such games often included substantial elements of chance, including the progenitors of dice, which led to early calculations of probabilities well before the Europeans started to figure this stuff out in the wake of the Renaissance. Games have evolved over time in complexity, and as they have developed, they have further permeated our non-playing world.

Clancy sets the stage by giving that history and an explanation of what happens in the brain when we play games, including games of chance and games of strategy, and then moves into the more sordid history of games affecting … well, history. She goes into the story of Kriegsspiel, an early wargame that was first developed by a Prussian nobleman two hundred years ago, and after several decades found its way into military leaders’ hands, where it became a tactical training tool for officers in the Prussian and later German armies. Clancy connects it to the Germans’ early successes in World War I and the use of the Blitzkrieg strategy in World War II, both as a way to explain how we can use games to learn and to think more flexibly, as well as how games can lead to unexpected and even tragic outcomes when used without guardrails.

Game theory ends up the main character of the second half of Playing with Reality, as Clancy points out that the way game theoreticians took over much of economic teaching, dovetailing as it did with the myth of the ‘rational’ man, led to decades of policy failures across the world that were based on a set of faulty assumptions about how people would act. (She did not, unfortunately, mention the “it’s time for some game theory” meme.) This idea of “economic man” or “rational man” had a stranglehold on economic instruction throughout the world for decades, well past the point where folks like Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky had published research showing that people are in fact not rational, and often fall prey to cognitive biases, leading to results you won’t predict if you’re stuck in the standard model.

Clancy saves some of her particular ire for the AI gold rush and the grifters pushing it, cautioning that these LLMs are not actually exhibiting ‘intelligence,’ and that there’s danger in treating “language like a game without meaning.” Much of what she says about these energy-devouring scams could have been written this week, even though the book itself was first published last year; she decries the lack of regulation or even common sense in many of the uses of so-called AI, and the history of the overapplication of games and game theory to real-life – often treating the world as a zero-sum game, when it is manifestly not – shows how easily we can destroy the world by thinking in those terms. (She cites a specific example from the Cold War, where one Soviet engineer decided to ignore an alarm that a U.S. ICBM was heading towards Russia; the alarm was false, of course, but that one person’s decision, against the ‘rules’ of the game, saved us from World War III.)

Clancy’s focus is on how games are intrinsic to humanity, how we’ve tried to model reality in our games and then taken the games and tried to apply them back to reality, with mixed results if we’re being kind. Mathematician Marcus du Sautoy takes a different approach in his book Around the World in 80 Games: A Mathematician Unlocks the Secrets of the Greatest Games, which may not actually get to eighty games (and certainly not the greatest ones) but does at least provide some interesting histories of games outside of the western canon, truly going around the world to explain the origins and uses of games in Africa, South America, and across Asia. The book offers some superficial looks at the math behind some of these games, but it’s scant, and it’s hard to get away from du Sautoy’s pie-eyed optimism around AI, which he seems to view as an unmitigated positive that will take drudgery from our lives and allow us to play more games.

Du Sautoy succeeds most when he gets a little deeper into the specifics of a game, such as the analysis of which properties are the best ones to buy in Monopoly (the orange ones above all), or the history of tarot cards (which had nothing to do with the woo for which various charlatans have adapted the game), or the stories of games from non-European cultures that were unfamiliar to me, like Sudan’s Dala – many of which have been ‘solved’ by mathematicians, for better or for worse. Du Sautoy writes very much like a mathematician, so when he’s in the weeds, he’s actually clearer and his passion is palpable, but when he starts veering off into philosophy or his almost religious belief that AI is going to save the world, not only is the prose harder to read, but he’s clearly out of his depth.

Both books quote many of the same sources on the philosophy of games, including Bernard Suits’s The Grasshopper and C. Nhi Nguyen’s Games: Agency as Art, which makes their tonal differences more stark. Clancy is the realist here, someone who certainly seems to like games but understands their limitations as models for society as a whole, while du Sautoy is the Panglossian dilettante whose life of relative privilege – his grandfather ran the publisher Faber & Faber and his godmother was T.S. Eliot’s wife Valerie – has perhaps blinded him to the realities of daily life for most people. Du Sautoy does cover more specific games, if that’s where your interest lies, while Clancy has much more to say about games as a whole.

Next up: Staying on a theme, I’m reading Philip K. Dick’s pulpy The Game-Players of Titan.

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→ September 20, 2025
→ By

Stick to baseball, 9/20/25.

At the Athletic this week, I wrote my annual Prospect of the Year column, giving the nod to the Pirates’ Konnor Griffin and mentioning a handful of other prospects who had great years.

For Endless Mode, I reviewed the cooperative card game Beasts, another limited-communication game that I thought was perfectly fine, but not novel or interesting enough to unseat better games in this genre for me.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter on Friday. I feel like that’s going to be the best place for my thoughts on the state of things for now.

And now, the links…

  • NY Times reporter Michael Wilson details how he nearly fell for a phone scam, where the caller purported to be from Wilson’s bank, spoofing the bank’s phone number, with other plausible details.
  • Former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan was a Republican who refused to go along with Trump’s attempts to steal the 2020 election. He left the party entirely due to the harassment that ensued, and now he’s running for Governor as a Democrat.
  • Physicists at the University of Colorado-Boulder published a paper about how they managed to create visible time crystals, a strange state of matter that was only proposed in 2012 and had never been seen  at the macroscopic level until now.
  • Board game Kickstarters: Disco Heist Laundry is indeed a heist game, set in the early ‘80s; full disclosure: I know the publisher pretty well, as our kids go to the same school … Dinosaur Island: Fully Charged is an upgraded version of the 2017 tile & worker placement game, with better components and some rules tweaks to improve the game’s balance … I don’t know anything about this publisher but I’m intrigued by the game, Smallfolk, a “cozy” tableau-builder … I can’t remember if I linked this one before, but Bézier is publishing a new title called The Game Makers, featuring the images and names of 300 actual board games that you’ll compete to make.

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→ September 14, 2025
→ By

Stick to baseball, 9/14/25.

I had two articles for subscribers to The Athletic this week, my annual look at players I got wrong (which, of course, generated a bunch of comments from people who said I was wrong about players who had a decent half-season) plus a preview of the Arizona Fall League rosters (which seem to have changed already since I got the preliminary ones, alas).

And now, the links…

  • In The Atlantic – not my employer – Charlie Warzel writes that the Epstein birthday book is “a nightmare” and shows that the conspiracy theorists were at least partly right. It appears many, many of Epstein’s friends knew of his crimes against children and joked about it.
  • A child in the Los Angeles area contracted measles as an infant, before they were old enough to receive the first dose of the MMR vaccine, some years ago, and died this month of the side effect known as SSPE, which can show up a decade after the measles infection and causes dementia, dystonia, and eventually cardiac or respiratory arrest. I wonder if 1) this child was infected during the 2014-15 epidemic and 2) if they got it from an unvaccinated person, which seems almost certain.
  • Texas A&M fired a professor and two administrators after the professor distributed materials that indicated recognition that there are more than two genders (which there are), claiming they were complying with Texas law (that does not exist) and President Trump’s executive order (which I don’t think binds them to do anything).
  • A Tacoma man who went to the house of a QAnon follower to serve her an order to leave the foreclosed house where she was living was cleared of wrongdoing after she shot at him and he returned fire, killing her.

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