→ May 16, 2025
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Chicago eats, 2025 edition.

I had a short run through Chicago last week, with some disappointing scouting looks at a trio of high school players, but I managed to hit a couple of spots on my wishlist, and found a great local diner out in the suburbs.

Robert’s Pizza & Dough Company is located downtown, right by the Navy Pier, and appeared on this list of the 50 best pizzerias in the United States, compiled by an Italian outfit and skewed towards Neapolitan-style pizzas. Robert’s isn’t Neapolitan, though – it’s thin-crust, but crispier rather than doughy, without the wet center, and damn is it good, about as perfect a marriage as you’ll find between Neapolitan and New York-style pizzas. Robert is Robert Garvey, who chatted with a number of customers and explained to me that the dough was the result of years of experimenting in his home oven, so it’s really not any style but his own. I’d read on that same Italian site that they loved the sausage topping; it’s made in house and has a strong fennel flavor, and paired well with mushrooms (my favorite make-your-own toppings). The pizza was about $30, but really could have fed two people; I ate maybe ¾ of it, mostly because I knew I wasn’t going to eat for seven hours or so afterwards. It would definitely make my top pizzerias list, somewhere in the top half.

I didn’t love Rose Mary when I tried it last year, although it’s widely acclaimed and a few of you said you loved it, but I read that Chef Joe Flamm had opened a second place, Il Carciofo, featuring the cuisine of Rome, and managed to slip in there when the player I went to see on Tuesday was pulled after one at bat (I think because his team was already up 6-0). The best dish I had was the gnocchetti, which my server said was brand-new to the menu; despite the name, these were typical gnocchi (not small ones), with morels, asparagus, and Vacche Rossa Fonduta, the historical precursor to Parmiggiano-Reggiano. The gnocchi had just a little chew to them, while the sauce that formed around and from the other ingredients was a salty umami explosion. I also loved the fried artichoke – “carciofo” is Italian for artichoke – which was surprisingly light and delicate in texture. The filetti di baccalà, fried chunks of salt cod, came in a tempura-like coating, but were greasy, and the dessert I tried, maritozzi, sweet bread filled with whipped cream, had almost no flavor at all. (They often have a coating of crushed pistachios or chocolate to give them some kind of kick; this one didn’t.) I tried one cocktail, staying on theme with The Art of Choke, a combination of Cynar (an artichoke-based amaro), green Chartreuse, Flor de Caña rum, and mint, which was just a little sweet with a heavy herbal-vegetable undertone.

I tried Chicago tavern-style pizza for the first time, picking up a pie from Frank’s on Belmont Avenue to bring to a friend’s house for an impromptu game night. (He taught me Tiletum, which I liked, and we played 1987 Channel Tunnel, which I loved, and which finally got off my Shelf of Shame.) As much as I rag on Chicago pizza because I don’t like deep dish, I’m a fan of tavern-style pizza – it’s not too far apart from the Brooklyn coal-fired crust, crispy with enough structure to hold its shape when you pick up a square, and it practically screams for a cold beer.

I stayed out near O’Hare because it saved a ton of money, and happened on the Lake St Cafe, a fairly new diner in Addison that’s family owned, and serves huge portions for breakfast and lunch. I went there twice, the second day getting the veggie omelet, which was enormous. The menu says three eggs, but those had to be ostrich eggs or something. Anyway, it was one of the best diner omelettes I’ve had … maybe ever? They’re clearly using good eggs, and it had plenty of feta to give it some saltiness and acidity. The breakfast potatoes, however, had clearly been sitting for a while and were unchewable. The day before, I tried their chilaquiles, which came with a delicious, mildly spicy green salsa, but had what seemed like half a party-sized bag’s worth of tortilla chips, so after I ate the eggs (correctly cooked over medium, always a sign someone’s cooking things to order) and the chips with cheese on them, I had still had a giant plate of soggy chips in front of me. They may still be fine-tuning some recipes, but the foundation is good.

Maybe five minutes away is one of the locations for Brewpoint, a coffee roaster with a huge space in Elmhurst that is perfect for sitting to work for an hour or two. Their spring blend, The Botanist, is a little darker of a roast than I like, but if you like a medium roast it’s quite good. At Jack Bauer’s game, Caleb from Connect Roasters came by to watch the local flamethrower with me (I didn’t see the triple digits, unfortunately), and he brought me a cup of Guatemala La Colina that I desperately needed at that point; like most of the Guatemalan beans I’ve tried, it has cocoa notes with some small berries like raspberry.

And near Brewpoint in Elmhurst is a little sandwich shop called Zenwich, where I tried the fried shrimp sandwich with garlic, arugula, cilantro, and spicy mayo. It was sort of like a po’ boy by way of Vietnamese cuisine, and the shrimp had clearly just been cooked – and they were perfectly done, squeaking past the line between undercooked and done.

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→ May 15, 2025
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The Vegetarian.

Han Kang won the first Booker International Prize given to a single work of fiction for her novel The Vegetarian, and in 2024 she won the Nobel Prize in Literature for her entire body of work, much of which is still unavailable in English. The Vegetarian is a shocking novel in many ways, not least of which is how the title character, who is assaulted in multiple ways for deciding on a simple act of bodily autonomy, never gets to tell us her perspective.

The Vegetarian has three parts, each of which is told from the perspective of someone close to Yeong-hye, a housewife in Seoul who has violent dreams about animals and decides to stop eating meat. Her husband, whose perspective we get in the first section, is bewildered and incensed; he found his wife to be boring and “completely unremarkable in every way,” and so this remarkable choice leads him to arrange an intervention that includes her sister, brother-in-law, and parents. The intervention ends in violence of one sort, leading into the second part, told from her brother-in-law’s perspective, which ends in violence of a different sort, before we get the perspective of her sister, who is the only person in Yeong-hye’s life who seems to care even one iota about whether she lives or dies.

While there are multiple shocking scenes in The Vegetarian, including sexual and physical assault and a suicide attempt, the manner in which Kang tells the story is so anodyne that these incidents appear to come out of nowhere. It is the ultimate “that escalated quickly” novel, where an ordinary situation spirals out of control within a page, and the settings of these jarring events – on gray days, in industrial apartments – just make them seem that much more out of place.

Where I struggled with The Vegetarian was less in its violence or shocking nature than in figuring out what the ultimate point was. Giving up meat is a common choice, for ethical, health, financial, or religious reasons; it is actually the most normal thing Yeong-hye does in the novel. What she does beyond that, including almost completely stopping speaking to anyone around her, is harder and harder to understand. She doesn’t want to die, but she doesn’t not want to die, even asking “why is it such a bad thing to die?” – twice, in fact, although the way in which she asks it varies subtly in a way I won’t spoil.

Is this, then, a story about death as an escape from intolerable conditions? Yeong-hye is technically free, but lacks freedom. She has no real agency in her own life, except for what she chooses to take into her own body – and even that decision to assert one fundamental bit of autonomy elicits furious, violent responses from her immediate family. She has no job, and thus no money of her own. Where she lives and what she does during the day is largely if not entirely dictated by her husband. Her consent to sex is not required in her husband’s view. After their marriage dissolves, ostensibly because she chose to stop eating meat (which, to her husband, means she’s gone crazy), she endures different assaults on her physical and personal autonomy, which seems to drive her further inward, reducing her interactions with and dependence on the outside world. When her sister visits her in the psychiatric ward where she is staying in the final third of the book – even though she seems far less disturbed than the other patients we glimpse – it’s as if she has decided to leave the physical plane, not to die, but to shed the parts of herself she can’t control. I’ve seen reviews referring to it as a satire or commentary on misogyny in South Korean culture as well, but knowing nothing of that topic, I didn’t see that in my reading.

That’s a long way of saying I respect and appreciate The Vegetarian, but couldn’t entirely connect with it, either. It’s challenging in multiple ways, some of which is very good – Kang’s intent doesn’t leap off the page, certainly, and that results in a book that, if nothing else, made me think about it long after I was done.

(Also, every time I say or think the title of this book, I hear Skoob saying, “no Parks sausages, mom, please!”)

Next up: I just finished Stacey Levine’s Mice 1961 and started Percival Everett’s I Am Not Sidney Poitier.

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→ May 13, 2025
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TEN.

Somehow I never reviewed TEN, a great small-box card game from the Flatout Games group (Point Salad/City, Verdant), even though I first played it at least two years ago. We broke it out again on Monday and played a quick two-player game, refreshing my memory enough for a writeup. It’s fun, and so easy to teach and play.

TEN comes with a deck of cards numbered 1 through 9 in each of four colors and currency cards of value 1 through 5, with various wild cards I’ll describe in a moment, and black and white tokens used as currency in the game. The goal is to create sequential runs of cards in each of the four colors. You’ll score one point per card in your longest run for each color, and if you complete a run of cards 1 through 9, you get an extra point as a bonus.

On your turn, you flip cards from the top of the deck until you choose to stop, or until you bust by exceeding ten in total value on the numbered cards or on the currency cards (but not combined). If you chose to stop, you can take all of the numbered cards into your hand and all opponents get the tokens shown on the currency cards, or you can take the number of black tokens shown on the currency cards and your opponents get nothing. In the latter case, you move the numbered cards into the ‘market.’ If you take the numbered cards, you then get to buy one card from the market by paying tokens equal to its face value.

If you bust, then the numbered cards go to the market and you get a white token, which is equal to three black tokens. You can use black and white tokens to buy cards or in the auctions of wild cards (put a pin in that), and you can also discard any cards from your hand for a value of one in any purchase action.

The wild cards come in three flavors. One is just a straight wild card, which can be any color and any number of your choice; you don’t have to decide any of this until the end of the game. Then there are wild cards of a fixed number where the color is wild, and ones where the color is fixed and the number is wild. When the active player flips one over from the deck, they pause their turn and a one-round auction begins; the active player will always get the last bid. Then they resume their turn.

Play continues until the deck is exhausted; you alter the size of the deck based on the player count. Then each player picks the values/colors for their wild cards and scores their longest run of consecutively numbered cards in each of the four colors. That’s all there is to it.

TEN works best with more players, of course, as there’s more competition for the cards and within the auctions. You can’t plan on certain cards still being in the market, or know that once your opponent took a green 3, they’re not likely to keep another one, whereas in a two-player game, you’re probably going to get most of the cards you need, and the auctions are anticlimactic. Two-player still works, as long as you are fine with the higher scores and the probability that you’ll both finish at least two nine-card runs.

You can definitely throw this in a bag without the box – you don’t even really need the tokens if you have a pile of coins, and the cards are just a fat deck you can secure with a rubber band – and the teach is super quick. My younger stepdaughter had no problem grasping the game, and in our most recent play I beat her by just a single point, with only a little help required to get her to see how to maximize the points for the wild cards she had at game-end. The push-your-luck aspect of TEN is so fun and so easy for people to understand that I can’t imagine anyone over the age of 7 who wouldn’t be able to play it. I’m going to start bringing it on more trips.

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→ May 10, 2025
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Stick to baseball, 5/10/25.

I posted my first mock draft of 2025 this week for subscribers to the Athletic, and took questions from readers about that and other prospect matters on Friday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Finspan, the new fish-themed spinoff to Wingspan that features simpler rules and a faster teach.

I’m about to send out the first new issue of my free email newsletter since February, before my travel schedule went nuts; I’ve been to fourteen states to see players, just via air, plus two more around here.

A short list this week, for no particular reason, but here are the links…

  • Longreads first: Automakers are going back to physical buttons and moving away from touchscreens, like the massive billboard-sized screens in Teslas, as consumers prefer the physical buttons and touchscreens are associated with much-reduced reaction times. I rented a car with physical buttons and no touch screen recently, and it took me all of about 30 seconds to figure it out.
  • The Pulitzer Prize board chose to give the Fiction award to Percival Everett’s James, overriding the selection committee, which recommended three other titles. I just started one of the three, Mice 1961, because I want to see if I agree with the choice. I thought James was incredible.
  • Trump threatened to withhold $3 million in USDA funding from Maine schools because their Governor, Janet Mills, refused to comply with his extra-legal demand that they ban trans girls from playing girls’ sports. The USDA caved. If you don’t comply in advance, they back down. There’s still an ongoing court case over trans athletes in Maine, but the funding is restored.
  • Trump’s entire process for finding people to fill out executive branch jobs seems to be picking the worst purveyors of misinformation on Twitter: He made Vinay Prasad, a massive COVID and vaccine denier, in charge of the FDA’s vaccine regulation arm; and now he’s nominated a grifting “wellness influencer” without a medical license to be his Surgeon General.
  • Côte d’Ivoire had been one of the democratic success stories of Africa in the last decade-plus, but the recent court ruling that the leading candidate to oppose three-term incumbent President Alassane Ouattara is ineligible because of a technicality. The “little-used post-independence law” says that Tidjane Thiam, who was born in Côte d’Ivoire, should have lost his Ivorian citizenship automatically when he accepted French nationality, something he already had had through his father.

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→ May 8, 2025
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Rite of Passage.

In a not-too-distant future, where Earth is uninhabitable and humans have spread out to other star systems and colonized hundreds of worlds, a civilization on a starship has an unusual initiation for its adolescents called Trial: They’re dropped on one of those colony worlds with no information and no supplies, and if they survive for a month and are able to hit their rescue button, they pass. Many don’t return.

Alexei Panshin’s Rite of Passage, winner of the Nebula Award for Fiction in 1968, sounds like a YA novel by modern standards – and read that way, it’s quite a good one, not least because the main character, a girl of about thirteen named Mia Havero, is extremely well-written. She’s spirited and smart, but arrogant to the point of obstinacy, and her relationships with her peers, notably her best frenemy Jimmy, feel realistic within the artificial setting of the story.

Mia narrates the book, so we know she’s survived Trial already, but the bulk of the book comes before she, Jimmy, and their group are dropped on a hostile planet, as she recalls some of her adventures growing up on the starship and getting into various sorts of mischief. She sneaks around the ship through the air ducts, going to forbidden areas and learning things about their makeshift civilization that only people like her father, one of the ship’s political leaders, would know. She also struggles to make friends, between her father’s position in the hierarchy – with some hints at significant political divisions among leadership, including what the starship’s relationships should be with the colonies – and her own attitude, something she struggles to understand.

Kids employ two general strategies during Trial – turtle, hiding out as much as possible to survive the month with minimal risk; or tiger, exploring the world and making an adventure out of it. I’m not entirely sure why anyone would choose tiger in reality, but Mia does, and of course runs into trouble almost immediately. This world has a native simian population that the human colonizers have enslaved, assuming they’re not sufficiently sentient or intelligent to have basic rights, one of many things during Trial that affects Mia’s very limited worldview.

There are other events throughout her month on the colony world that also force her to reconsider past prejudices, which is where the book really clicks. What comes before Trial is fun, but trivial; she runs around the ship like a kid who’s a little too smart for her own good, narrowly escaping punishment and/or death, thinking that she’s invincible in the way most kids do. Trial is stark, a way to weed out the weak or unintelligent in the thinking of the starship’s authorities, but it’s also a strong metaphor for the ways in which teenagers become adults through experience. For me, it was college, where I was first exposed to people from other backgrounds and beliefs, first forced to reconsider things I’d always assumed or believed to be true, and first forced to take care of myself for any period longer than three weeks. I did not have to escape angry colonists mad that my home ship wouldn’t share all their technology, though.

The prose and general style in Rite of Passage feel slightly dated, and give the whole book the YA feel I mentioned earlier – this is what a lot of sci-fi writing was like in the 1960s. A huge part of Robert Heinlein’s bibliography reads just like this, to pick one, even his books that weren’t explicitly for young adults. Some of the ideas Panshin is pushing still resonate today, including ideas of colonialism and imperialism, or the moral obligation of developed nations to share technologies or medicines with the rest of the world. And content that might have seemed “adult” in 1968 is pretty tame by modern YA standards – there’s some violence, and one reference to Mia having sex that’s almost entirely off-page (thank goodness), and that’s it. I was pleasantly surprised at how well this held up, given how poorly some early sci-fi award winners – the ones that haven’t maintained their status atop the genre – have fared over the last half-century.

Next up: Han Kang’s The Vegetarian.

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→ May 7, 2025
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Vermiglio.

Vermiglio was Italy’s submission for this year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature, making the 15-film shortlist, and earned a nomination in the same category at the Golden Globes, although it is probably just too small and intimate to win against bigger competitors like I’m Still Here or Emilia Pérez. It’s a simple story of a family in an Alpine village in Italy near the end of World War II whose nephew comes home with the help of a deserter, Pietro, who then falls in love with their eldest daughter, an affair that has unforeseen consequences for everyone when he leaves to visit his mother in Sicily. (You can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

The patriarch of the family, who looks like someone asked an AI engine to make an Italian version of Sam Elliott, is the village’s schoolteacher, while his wife is the caretaker of their farm and does the majority of the work of raising the children. She’s already pregnant with their tenth child when Pietro arrives with Attilio, their nephew, who was injured and would have died had Pietro not carried him part of the way home. Pietro is extremely quiet, but settles in with the family and tries to help out around the farm while facing some backlash from other villagers because he’s a deserter and a southerner (there was, and still is, quite a bit of prejudice between northern and southern Italy, and in this case the village and Pietro’s home couldn’t be much farther apart). The eldest daughter, Lucia, falls for him immediately, although it also seems like she and the other girls haven’t exactly seen a whole lot of boys before, and Pietro is just an object of fascination. The next-oldest daughter, Ada, is pious to the point of parody, and writes out punishments for herself for anything she thinks is a sin – which, of course, doesn’t stop her from committing them. Meanwhile, Dino, their oldest son, chafes under his father’s strict rule, and wants to continue his studies while his father sees his son as the heir of the farm, and instead wants another daughter to be the scholar of the family and go away to boarding school.

Pietro and Lucia end up marrying before the film’s midpoint, and Lucia becomes pregnant almost immediately, which is about as much excitement as we get in the first hour-plus of Vermiglio, until they get word that the war has ended and he reluctantly leaves to go see his family. What follows is the one big event of the film, and it further exposes some of the cracks in the family’s dynamic, especially in how the father has ruled the house in the same way even as the children are reaching adulthood.

Vermiglio is a slice-of-life film without the traditional narrative arc, and even downplays certain events – the death of a child, an unexpected wedding – that would normally be high points in a movie. It moves at its own pace, allowing for more characters to move to the center and for the script to develop them, even secondary ones like Dino, whose ambition is crushed by his father’s domineering parenting style.

Indeed, the patriarch seems at first like a gentle sort, an intellectual who takes care of his family like an Italian Pa Ingalls, but over the course of the film it becomes clear that he’s the source of many of the family’s problems. He’s why they have too many mouths to feed, why they don’t have enough money to feed them, why his daughters are utterly clueless about the world, why his son drinks too much, and so on. He views himself as the lord of the manor and his wife and children as his serfs, which the film never points out explicitly, but rather demonstrates through large and small events that beset the family.

The excellent review of Vermiglio that appeared in The Guardian said the film had “an almost Hardyesque intensity,” just without the class struggles of Thomas Hardy’s novels, and I have no better comparison. Even though it’s set in the 1940s, it has the pastoral quality of all of Hardy’s novels that I’ve read, and the same sort of bleak outlook, and the same contrast between the two. Hardy was a prose master who wrote beautiful phrases about tragic people. Vermiglio is a beautiful, leisurely film, where some of the tragedies are quieter than others, that throws one small match into the window of a family’s home and waits for something to catch.

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→ May 5, 2025
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Telephone.

Percival Everett’s Telephone is the most serious of the six of his novels I’ve read so far, with the only humorous elements some of the smartass dialogue coming from his main character. A finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (which it lost to the inferior The Night Watchman), Telephone finds Everett exploring how people respond to grief and the search for meaning in a world that appears to have none at all.

Zach Wells, another author surrogate for Everett, is a geologist and college professor who lives with his wife and their one child, a daughter named Sarah, who is the apple of Zach’s eye like Bonnie Blue was in Rhett Butler’s. Sarah starts to have absence seizures and reports some other neurological symptoms, and when Zach and his wife take her to the doctor, they learn that she has a fatal neurodegenerative disorder called Batten disease that will kill her in a few years, and on her way to dying, she’ll lose her faculties and won’t even recognize her parents.

Meanwhile, Zach orders a piece of clothing off the internet and finds a note that just says “ayúdame” (“help me”) in one of its pockets. He orders another item from the same place, and gets a similar note. He’s stymied, but eventually decides he has to do something to figure out if there is someone in trouble wherever these garments are made or repackaged. And at work, he has a younger colleague who procrastinated for years on publishing her work and now may not get tenure as a result, but Zach finds that her work is good enough and embarks on a late push to save her.

In just about all of Everett’s books, at least the ones I’ve read, he’s asking important questions and only hints at the answers. Here, Zach is a tragic figure from the start – his father killed himself, his marriage has stalled, he doesn’t seem to particularly like his work – and the one facet of his life that seems to give him real joy is going to be taken from him in the cruelest possible fashion. When you can’t save the most important person in the world, do you turn to try to save someone else? A colleague you respect, not even a friend, just someone who you think deserves more than she’s getting? A complete stranger, or more than one, who may not even exist, and if they do it’s in another country and maybe you’ll get killed trying to do it? Would any of this matter in the grand scheme? Would it help you save yourself?

Where Telephone ends up was something of a surprise, as I’m used to Everett concluding his novels in uncertain fashion – at least three of the other five lacked concrete resolutions to their plots. Wells gets an ending in fact where the ambiguity is interior to his character. Has anything changed? When he goes back to his regular life, will he be altered by the experiences, or has he just pushed away the grief that will be waiting for him at his front door?

Wells is an Everett stand-in in the same vein as Kevin Pace, the protagonist of So Much Blue, as middle-aged men facing some kind of emotional crisis, although Pace’s was more of his own making and Wells’s definitely is not. They’re well-developed, flawed, and very realistic. They make mistakes, especially in their marriages. They do not talk easily or openly about their feelings. And they are ill-equipped for what hits them, a combination in both cases of how they were raised and the choices they’ve made as adults. Telephone is just another piece of evidence in the case for Everett as our greatest living novelist.

Next up: Congo Inc.: Bismarck’s Testament, a satirical novel by In Koli Jean Bofane, who appeared in the documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat.

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→ May 3, 2025
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Stick to baseball, 5/3/25.

I had one post for subscribers to The Athletic this past week, a draft scouting notebook on Riley Quick, Kyle Lodise, some UVA bats, and three college hitters who could be top ten picks in 2026.

At Paste, I reviewed the two-player game Floristry, which is important as I think it’s the first two-player title to use an auction mechanic that really works, but unfortunately that doesn’t have enough game beyond that.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: The New York Times has the bonkers story of how a bunch of college-aged and high school kids stole nearly $250 million in crypto from one guy, and then got caught within a month because they were so sloppy about it. It includes a real-world kidnapping story that demonstrates how this stuff can and will spill over into physical danger, even for people not directly involved in the scams. (Also, the victim of the original theft is a ding-dong, falling for some of the most obvious tricks to get him to divulge his passwords.)
  • Polygon, the great gaming-news site that was under the Vox umbrella, was decimated after Vox sold it to a content-farming group, with nearly all Polygon staffers laid off. It’s now part of the same company that runs clickbait sites like ScreenRant. I wrote two pieces for Polygon in 2021-22, but if those disappear I’ll repost the reviews here for posterity.
  • Scientific American reports on the mass-brainwashing effort around measles, spearheaded by the Republican Party and specifically the Trump Administration, pushing the twin lies that the measles vaccine causes autism (again, it does not) and that measles isn’t that harmful (it has already killed two children in the U.S. this year, and can cause the fatal condition SSPE in people who recover from the infection).
  • The same anti-vaccine lunacy has led to a jump in pertussis cases – over 8400 already in the U.S. this year. Whooping cough kills about 1% of infants under one, children too young to be vaccinated, who contract the bacterial illness.
  • And bird flu continues to spread, with more people getting infected, raising the specter of another pandemic. If only we had some sort of government agency that could track and respond to this sort of thing.
  • A mathematician in Australia seems to have solved the problem of finding a generalized solution to polynomial equations of power 5 or greater. I keep seeing the same headline for this one story, but nothing further about the method, or whether other mathematicians agree with what sounds like a controversial approach (among other things, he says he “doesn’t believe in irrational numbers,” which…).
  • Two board game Kickstarters of note, even as the Trump tariffs threaten the entire industry: Flamecraft Duals, a two-player version of the hit game Flamecraft that promises to be more directly competitive; and Nippon: Zaibatsu, a brand-new edition of a heavy game from 2015 just called Nippon.

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→ May 2, 2025
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Music update, April 2025.

A couple of hotly-anticipated albums (by me!) dropped in April, along with one surprise release, although I’m not sure any of those albums truly lived up to expectations. As always, if you can’t see the widget below you can access the playlist here.

SAULT – K.T.Y.W.S. SAULT returns with 10, their tenth album, as usual with no fanfare or advance publicity. It’s better than Acts of Faith, the religious album they released in December, and probably ahead of any of the five individual albums they released on one day in November 2022. The album as a whole goes back to the ‘70s funk and R&B sound that characterized their first couple of albums, although there’s nothing quite as hard-edged, and much of the political songwriting is still absent here. All of the songs have initials as song titles, with this one standing for “know that you will survive,” which is kind of a gimmick and not a great one, in this case underscoring that the lyrics aren’t as strong as they were on SAULT’s earliest work. So my quick review of 10 is that the music is better and the lyrics are just meh when they’re there at all.

Obongjayar – Sweet Danger. Obongjayar first came to my attention with his appearance on Little Simz’s “Point and Kill,” fitting here as Simz has worked with SAULT’s Inflo multiple times. His music is a sort of crossover Afrobeat mashup, with some pop and electronic elements. This is the fourth song he’s released from his second album, Paradise Now, due out on May 30th.

Rachel Chinouriri – Can we talk about Isaac? Chinouriri put out an album last year that made Paste’s top 100 list for the year, although I missed it completely. She’s an English singer-songwriter who has cited two of my favorite bands, Oasis and the Libertines, as influences, along with Daughter, who’ve made a bunch of appearances on my lists here … and Coldplay, which can cut different ways depending on what part of their discography she likes. You can definitely hear the pop influences on this track, which comes off her new EP Little House.

Tunde Adebimpe – Ate the Moon. The lead singer of TV on the Radio released his first solo album, Thee Black Boltz, in April, and it was surprisingly tepid. I figured after this many years in the industry, with no new music since 2014, Adebimpe’s first LP would be bursting with ideas and ambition, but it’s not. There are two great songs in “Magnetic” and “Drop,” and a couple of decent tracks like this one, but I was hoping for a big swing and instead he just sort of went the other way for a soft single.

Hotline TNT – Julia’s War. My favorite track yet from this NYC rock act who are often miscategorized (in my view) as “shoegaze” just because they use a lot of distortion. It’s rock, definitely the sort you’d have heard on college radio 20 or 30 years ago, and this track has their best hook to date.

Say Sue Me – In This Mess. Say Sue Me are from Busan, South Korea, and have released three albums going back to 2014, but this was the first track of theirs I’d heard. It’s powered by a huge guitar sound that powers the track through six and a half minutes, veering a little into My Bloody Valentine territory near the end.

Turnstile – Never Enough. It doesn’t sound like a Turnstile song at the beginning, but be patient – the punk sound is still here. This is the title track from their next album, due out June 6th, and they’ve already dropped two more songs from it.

swim school – Alone With You. Not to get too deep in the weeds here, but I think swim school’s sound contains far more shoegaze than Hotline TNT’s does – which makes sense, as swim school, who hail from Edinburgh, have mentioned Slowdive as a major influence. Their self-titled debut album is due out on October 3rd, after a “mixtape” and three EPs so far in their short career to date.

Sunflower Bean – There’s a Part I Can’t Get Back. I thought Sunflower Bean might be running away from the hit, “Moment in the Sun,” when the first few singles from their new album Mortal Primetime all seemed heavier and more rock-oriented, but the album is pretty balanced between that and some more pop sounds. The best tracks are the singles they released ahead of the LP – this, “Nothing Romantic,” and “Champagne Taste.”

Momma – Rodeo. Someone, possibly a writer at Paste, described Momma as incredibly derivative of 1990s alternative rock, and yet still somehow really good. I completely agree. They sound a lot like Veruca Salt. I hear Hum in this track. If you remember the Sheila Divine there’s a little of that on the record. It’s all good, just maybe a little too familiar and pleasant to ever be great.

Wet Leg – Catch These Fists. I was thelow person on Wet Leg’s debut album, particularly the widely-praised hit “Chaise Longue,” but I did like “Angelica” and I think when their melodies show as much effort as their lyrics do, they’re on to something pretty good. This song fits that as well – the main guitar riff is catchy and the lyrics are smartassy but not obnoxious.

Yaya Bey – Dream Girl. Yaya Bey’s 2024 album Ten Fold earned widespread praise and made Paste’s top 50 albums of the year; it didn’t land for me at all. This is the first song of hers I’ve really liked, leaning hard into 1970s/1980s R&B sounds, with a little Prince vibe to the synth lines and vocals. Her next album, Do It Afraid, is due out on June 20th. (I only just learned that her father was Grand Daddy I.U. of the Juice Crew, one of the most important hip-hop collectives of the 1980s, where Big Daddy Kane and Kool G Rap got their starts. You may know their song “The Symphony,” which samples Otis Redding’s “Hard to Handle” and features both of those rappers along with Masta Ace and Craig G.)

DaWeirdo & Freddie Gibbs – Brother$. Here for the Freddie Gibbs verse.

Pat junior & Tecoby Hines – Nothing to Lose. This is the first song I’ve ever put on a playlist after discovering it on TikTok. That app’s algorithm showed me a slew of mediocre mostly white rappers before this song popped up; Pat Junior, who won a Grammy for Best Contemporary Christian Music Performance in 2024, has incredible flow to his vocals, and the music behind him here would make Stetsasonic and Digable Planets proud.

Cœur de Pirate – Cavale. I’ll include anything Béatrice releases; outside of one single in 2023, this is her first new material since 2021’s Impossible à aimer, and her first since having her second child. There’s a new album coming later this year from the Québécois pop singer/pianist, but that’s all the details I could find.

OK Go – Once More with Feeling. This is the most classic OK Go-sounding song on their new album And the Adjacent Possible by a country mile. It’s their first album since 2014, but unfortunately it’s pretty downtempo for these guys, losing what I liked most about their sound.

The Amazons – Night After Night. I’ve always appreciated the Amazons’ big guitar sound – they offer huge, muscular, heavily distorted riffs, so most of their best songs automatically sound anthemic. Their fourth album, 21st Century Fiction, comes out in a week, on May 9th.

The New Pornographers – Ballad of the Last Payphone. This song came out on vinyl earlier this year but just hit digital platforms in April; it’s a mid-tier New Pornographers song.

Ball Park Music – Please Don’t Move to Melbourne. I should hate a band called Ball Park Music, but they’re a perfectly delightful indie-pop band with that jangly sound that I think has become distinctly Australian in the last decade or so. This should be the B-side to the Melvins’ song “Stop Moving to Florida.”

Hives – Enough is Enough. Just two years after their comeback album The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons, the Hives are back with another new LP, The Hives Forever Forever the Hives, and, uh, they’re being really humble about it.

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard – Deadstick. Are they just taunting us at this point? The Phish/King Gizzard crossover is pretty big, and now the latter have put out a song with a similar title to one of Phish’s most popular tracks, “Meatstick” (which I think is kind of annoying). I can’t imagine this is a coincidence.

Ghost – Lachryma. The act is a little tired, but beneath the silly Satanic trappings and the masks, this is straight-up ‘80s hard rock, and I suppose their gimmicky isn’t all that much worse than hairspray, is it?

Tropical Fuck Storm – Dunning Kruger’s Loser Cruiser. It’s not that great of a song, but how could I possibly pass up a title like this?

Onslaught – Iron Fist. Wikipedia mentions Onslaught as one of the “big four” of British thrash metal, but they weren’t all that successful in their original run in the 1980s; the only one of that quartet I’d heard of at the time was Acid Reign, so I suppose the “big” part is just local to Britain. Anyway, Onslaught re-formed after about a 15-year hiatus, and have released more albums since their return than they did in their first stint, with their eighth overall LP, Origins of Aggression, due out on May 23rd. It’s a double album of covers, including this one of a Mötorhead song, and re-recordings of Onslaught songs from the ‘80s.

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Atlanta & Tuscaloosa eats.

One of my last draft scouting trips of the spring brought me to Atlanta for the weekend with a detour to Tuscaloosa, my first-ever first to Alabama’s home stadium as they’ve generally been one of the weakest SEC teams for draft prospects.

In Atlanta, I hit Varuni Napoli, which would now make my top 50 pizzerias list if I revised it today. It’s Neapolitan pizza but just stretched a little differently, so the pizzas are larger with less of a puffy exterior ring, while they still have the wet centers that are the hallmark of the style. I went with their sausage, mushroom, onion, and red pepper pizza, a standard option that happens to be one of my favorite combinations as is. The dough was still airy around the edges, and the sausage, which is sliced like pepperoni so it cooks more quickly, had a peppery kick and strong fennel-seed note. The sauce was excellent, slightly sweet and slightly tangy. I haven’t been to Antico in a decade or more, so it’s tough to say truly that this is better … but I think it might be.

Buttermilk Kitchen showed up on some list of the best brunch spots in Atlanta, and I saw they 1) had homemade biscuits and 2) promised they made everything from scratch while using local ingredients where possible, which, coincidentally, are my two main criteria for breakfast when I’m in the south. The biscuits are enormous drop biscuits and very, very buttery, while also a little sweet even before you try the blueberry-basil jam it comes with. One of those and two eggs probably would have been a full breakfast for me on any day, although this was Sunday and I knew this was essentially breakfast and lunch in one, so I ordered the daily special omelet with butternut squash, onions, and fontina, along with hashbrown fritters as the side. The fritters were more like little knishes than hashbrowns, with the center more akin to mashed potatoes. The omelet was a gamble because I don’t normally care for butternut squash, but it looked like the best choice to get some vegetables without resorting to the lunch part of the menu (it was 10 am, I can’t eat “lunch” at that hour, it’s uncivilized). I wouldn’t have even thought to put winter squash in an omelet. It worked, though, I think because the eggs were so fresh and there was so much cheese that the squash was a supporting player in the whole dish. That had to be at least three eggs’ worth of omelet, and it was seasoned perfectly as is. I ordered a cortado, which is on their menu, but they seem to think that means a full-sized latte instead. I will caution you that parking there is complicated, although on weekends they share some of the neighboring lots – check their website for specifics.

I met some board-game world friends for dinner at Miller Union downtown, not too far from Georgia Tech, for a meal that reminded me in the best possible way of FnB in Scottsdale, one of my favorite restaurants in the Valley. The menu was heavier on small plates with a small number of larger entrees, and the smaller plates weren’t all that small, anyway. The smoked trout with spaetzle and mushrooms was the consensus winner at the table, with the pasta (it’s pasta, I know it’s not Italian, so what) a sponge for all of the umami coming from the other ingredients, and the smoky notes from the fish well-balanced by other flavors so it didn’t overwhelm the dish. The farm egg with celery cream is apparently a longtime standard, and it’s definitely one of the weirdest things I’ve eaten in some time: it shows up in a soup bowl with the yolk barely set in a pool of what looks like a latte, and you break the yolk and swirl it into the cream before dipping the crusty bread into it or spooning it on top. It’s good, just unusual; I kept expecting a different flavor profile, because I’m used to dipping bread into a pasta sauce, while this is rich and more muted. The butter-poached shrimp with English peas, salsa macha verde, and benne (sesame) seeds was on the quieter side, with delicate flavors even in the sauce, with particularly sweet peas since they’re in season now. I had the duck breast entrée, which was cooked medium rare (as it should be) and remained tender, with a blueberry mostarda, creamed greens (spinach and maybe mustard greens?), and corn pancakes. That last bit wasn’t great – they were dry, and there wasn’t anything for them to sop up elsewhere on the plate – although that’s nitpicking. I had two cocktails since I wasn’t driving, first a Last Word and then their gin-lemon-thyme syrup cocktail, which one server said was their riff on a gimlet, but a gimlet is gin/lime without sweetener so I don’t know if that’s apt. I was afraid a second Last Word (does that make the one before it the Penultimate Word?) would put me on the floor, so the latter drink was a sound compromise and much lighter on the palate. They have an enormous wine menu, if that’s your beverage of choice.

I had coffee at Spiller Park the other two mornings I was in town, visiting their newest location in Midtown and the Moores Mill store, so I’ve now been to all four spots. The biscuits at Midtown are solid – that’s a rolled biscuit, so very different from Buttermilk Kitchen’s, and while I like both varieties I’m definitely in the rolled camp (think Biscuitville or Cracker Barrel’s kind). The Moores Mill shop offers bagels; I had the Controversial Vegan, with mashed avocadoes and sumac onions, which was very sharp and highly spiced with sumac.

I only ate one meal in Tuscaloosa, and that had to be Dreamland BBQ, which scouts have been telling me about for years. I’d been to the Birmingham location, but I’m a believer in trying the original whenever possible, and it’s better in terms of the food and the atmosphere. The ribs were solid but a little tougher than I expected; the smoked sausage, though, was fantastic, perfectly moist, smoky, just faintly spicy, no sauce required although I did as I was told and tried the dipping sauce it came with (I wouldn’t bother). It’s a bare-bones menu – ribs, sausage, pulled chicken or pork, with platters or sandwiches, and just four sides: cole slaw, potato salad, baked beans, and mac & cheese. I picked the first two, because I was already out on a ledge eating that much pork, and believe it or not, the cole slaw was excellent. It’s so often an afterthought at barbecue places – sometimes it’s a goopy mess, sometimes it’s clearly not that fresh and so it has no crunch, and sometimes people put weird shit in there – that it was a delight to get a very basic, straightforward version that was fresh and not overdressed. Also, if you get the sweet tea, be prepared for a sugar rush. It was all great but I don’t know that I’ll go back, just because I don’t eat like this any more and certainly shouldn’t eat like this any more at my age.

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