November 9, 2026  ·  No comments yet

The Edge of Space-Time.

In her 2026 book The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie, physicist and cosmologist Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein sets out to explain the universe in 300 pages. It has been done before, of course, but I think it’s fair to say it’s never been done quite like this, as Prescod-Weinstein dances between what I’d consider some abstruse concepts in particle physics and fields such as music, poetry, and sociology, along with her own experiences as a queer Black woman in the U.S. It’s a challenging read for someone who hasn’t taken a physics class in 35 years, but the end result was that I felt like I had a stronger understanding of the worlds of the very big and very small, where the sort of physics we all learned in high school breaks down.

(I don’t know Dr. Prescod-Weinstein, but we do follow each other on Bluesky and share an alma mater. I bought the book myself because I like science.)

The title itself nods to that last point – that the sort of F = ma physics that applies in the ‘real’ world of our everyday lives no longer applies when we are talking about subatomic particles like quarks and neutrinos, which is where quantum physics comes in; or when we’re talking about the accelerating universe and the expansion of spacetime, which is where special relativity comes in. This is fodder for many pop-sci physics books, since those are the parts of physics that we don’t learn about unless you study it in college, and even if you’re taught it, most of it is harder to grasp, from strings to entanglement to time dilation and more.

Prescod-Weinstein covers much of the same ground as other books in this space by Brian Cox or Brian Greene or Michio Kaku or Sean Carroll, all great writers who’ve tried to make some of the more difficult topics in physics accessible to broader audiences. We journey to the edges of the universe, back to the Big Bang, up to the speed of light, down a black hole, and many layers deep inside the atom. For many readers, this will be new stuff, and Prescod-Weinstein explains these and other concepts clearly without dumbing down the language or explanations – she expects you to show up to class ready to learn with pencils sharpened. I think that’s reasonable for a book of this style, but it means it’s not a book you’re going to fly through.

What sets The Edge of Space-Time apart is Prescod-Weinstein’s incorporation of so many ideas from outside the science world, ranging from literature and poetry from over a hundred years ago to contemporary rap. She also writes from a distinct perspective of intersectionality, as she identifies as agender and is both Black and Jewish, and brings in references from Black, feminist, indigenous, and queer thinkers and authors, which – as she notes – is not common at all in much popular science writing. I listed authors above whose work I’ve read, all men, only one nonwhite, and none of those writers worked in perspectives from other areas to inform their work and tie some of these abstractions to what it means to be alive and human.

Why should we care about the six kinds of quarks or whether the universe is expanding or what would happen if you fell into a black hole? The anti-science crowd would argue that answering these questions or even exploring them serves no real purpose, as they’re busy cutting funding for science research. Prescod-Weinstein often notes in the text that news of Republicans’ war on science was hitting as she was writing it throughout 2025, and makes two arguments about the value of such research, that the search for these answers can always yield unexpected results (and is, in and of itself, a worthwhile endeavor), and that the search also can elucidate more to us about the meaning and nature of our existence.

Some of the art/science connections within the book require a sort of mental flexibility akin to suspension of disbelief; I enjoyed Prescod-Weinstein’s flights of literary fancy, even though I’m very much of a mind that views science and art as distinct. Her view of the universe and all of the wonders within it is quite different than mine, more able to connect the artistic to the scientific, the fantastic to the rational, which made The Edge of Space-Time a challenging yet rewarding read.

Next up: David McCloskey’s spy novel Damascus Station.

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November 4, 2026  ·  3 comments

Everything Happens for a Reason.

A few weeks ago, I wrote in my newsletter about hearing Dr. Kate Bowler on The Hidden Brain podcast and reacting to her use of the phrase “everything happens for a reason,” a hackneyed response to bad news that implies some pretty terrible things about the universe. Dr. Bowler used as the title for her book Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved, where she tells the story of her sudden diagnosis with stage 4 bowel cancer at age 35, and how the reactions she got to that news squared with her academic research on the prosperity gospel of evangelical Christianity.

If you’ve listened to the podcast, Everything Happens for a Reason will mostly be familiar to you. Bowler gives her backstory, growing up in a Mennonite community in Winnipeg, with two professors as parents, eventually getting her PhD at Duke and joining the faculty at their Divinity School, where she focuses on the prosperity gospel. That’s the popular idea that God will give believers material success and physical health if they pray hard enough (and do other performative things), an idea that to me, is wildly unsupported by Scripture. It’s the core idea behind televangelists’ message – send me money, I’ll put in a good word with the Big Guy Upstairs, he’ll hook you up – and a lot of megachurches have picked it up as well, notably Joel Osteen, who will have a very tough time passing through the eye of a needle when the time comes.

Bowler’s cancer diagnosis came at a time when she might have called herself ‘blessed.’ She was happily married, had a very young son she adored (she makes this quite clear), and was on her way to a very successful career. After a few months of being ignored by doctors, at least some of involved men doctors dismissing her because of her gender, she forced the latest in the line of people telling her they couldn’t find anything wrong with her to run additional tests that found that she had bowel cancer and “it’s everywhere,” in the words of the nurse (or PA?) who called with the news.

Much of the second half of the book documents what came next, especially in her faith community, and then with the online responses to the column she wrote in The New York Times. Many people blamed her lack of faith for her cancer. Some people pushed quack remedies or bogus medical ideas (like that sugar feeds cancer, a popular one today in wellness circles) on her, which leads to a lot of kale in her kitchen. Others said God must have had a plan and that, indeed, “everything happens for a reason,” although one wonders what possible reason there would be for a benevolent deity to kill a mother of two-year-old child. Some did rally around her, and try to say the right things – in an appendix, she lists some do’s and don’ts to say to someone in that situation – and many people put themselves out to help her get better care or help support her. But man, people said some horrible things, both people she knew and people who wrote letters or emailed her in response to her column.

Bowler uses her own experience as a springboard for talking about the prosperity gospel movement more broadly in American Christianity, an idea that I would call heretical if I were still religious (I was raised Catholic), and that often directly contradicts the messages of the New Testament. Prayer isn’t supposed to be a vending machine, but there’s a broad strain of American evangelicalism that treats it as such. I noted in that newsletter how often I see “prayers up” posts and comments on social media; the next time that works, let me know, I won’t be waiting. It’s performative nonsense. It doesn’t work, and also, it’s not how the whole Christian God thing is supposed to work. What Bowler starts to get at, and what I wish she’d delved into more deeply, is why this is so effective. In my lay view, at least part of it is that it allows people who have had material wealth, physical health, or other forms of success to believe they deserved it, because God gave it to them as a reward. It’s a pernicious influence on our culture and our politics, and understanding it better would help the rest of us – the majority of Americans – keep it relegated to a loud minority. For its brief length, however, Bowler’s book, mostly memoir with a dash of theology and history, is a brisk and compelling read, for her own personal journey and the way she uses it to frame this dangerous ideology as the aberration that it is.

Next up: Randall Kenan’s novel A Visitation of Spirits.

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July 21, 2026  ·  12 comments

Big Fan.

Joe Posnanski and Michael Schur wrote a book together. It’s called Big Fan: Two Frieends, 82,490 Miles, and the Wild, Wonderful Sports We Love. If you have listened to their podcast, or read their writing, you know exactly what this book is going to be like. Reading it was like listening to a six-hour conversation between the two of them with occasional guest stars. I am also probably in the innermost circle of their target audience, not least because I know both of these knuckleheads, to the point where I am, in one paragraph, one of those guest stars. (They identify many of those one-graf guests by first name and occupation, which sometimes works to obscure who it is, but sometimes you get “Patton is a Comedian.”)

The general premise of Big Fan, which is the tiny bit of glue holding together a bunch of comical dialogues between these guys and a few of those guests, is that they’re exploring what it means to be a real fan of something, while also taking some of the longest and weirdest road trips possible. There’s a trip to Fairbanks, Alaska, for the Midnight Sun Game, which I have actually never attended in 25 years in the industry. They go to a darts championship, which sounds a lot more fun than I imagined. They have a pretty incredible experience going to an Unrivaled game. Joe makes Mike go to a WWE event that ropes in Jen Statsky, co-creator of Hacks, maybe my wife’s favorite show ever. Mike makes Joe play pickleball, which Joe (like my friend Will Leitch) claims to hate with the fire of ten thousand suns, something I don’t understand because pickleball is very fun and also good exercise for old people, which all four of us are. Dink. Dink. Whoops, you’re in the kitchen.

There’s a good bit of a lot of sports in there, obviously, and if there were nothing in the book but these two guys’ observations on sports, it would be great. I would gladly watch any real sporting event – not professional wrestling, sorry, that is pretend – with those two guys just to hear them riff. Maybe they could offer a real-time alternate feed to the World Series so I don’t have to listen to John Smoltz. I don’t need analysis of the game; I need to hear two people who are enjoying the game, and who let that come across in their chatter. They would be the anti-Smoltz. (Or anti-Lalas, as I was just exposed to that guy’s vapidity again today. He makes an inflatable doll seem like an intellectual giant.)

They also know a lot of people – I mean, a lot of people – and there are a couple of fantastic cameos in the book, not including mine. Tom Hanks wrote the intro, and I could probably just stop there. Linda Holmes explains her rebirth as a Phillies fan because of the likability (and success) of the current roster. Joe gets on the ice with the Shibutanis. They leverage knowing people into hugging Mookie Betts. Brandon McCarthy appears in transcripts of a group chat the three of them have. And those interstitials with the first name/vocation include a lot of famous and not-famous people talking about what they’re fans of and why.

It is a hoot, and I’m not just saying that because 1) they sent me a copy of the book and 2) I know both of them, and would at least like to remain on good terms with them, lest Mike create a character named Leith Kaw and make him a serial killer or, worse, a private equity bro in a future series. Big Fan is good fun, and it was just what I needed in the weeks leading up to the draft.

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July 20, 2026  ·  1 comment

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.

Part story of the genocide in Gaza, part scathing critique of Western culture, and part memoir, Omar El Akkad’s book One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This should be required reading in every American high school. It lays utterly bare the emptiness of American imperialist thinking, the ‘special’ relationship our governments have always had with Israel, and our willingness to look the other way when the deaths of others disturb or inconvenience us.

El Akkad was born in Egypt, grew up there and in Qatar before moving to Canada, and became a U.S. citizen a few years ago. He worked for many years for The Globe and Mail, and prior to this had written two novels, but no non-fiction books. It reads as if he has been saving up his rage, his indignation, his despair for decades so that he could pour it out on to nearly every page of this slender book of under 200 pages. It is a damning, heartbreaking read, rendered in extremely human language.

The main throughline of One Day is Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza, which El Akkad refers to as “the world’s first live-streamed genocide,” the last a word he uses often and with plenty of justification. Indeed, the west’s fear of using that word, which extends to its media and political leaders of both U.S. parties, is also a major subject in the book, because, unlike any previous genocide (including the one that is likely happening right now in Sudan), we have visual evidence, we have videos and audio recordings, we have witness testimonies from people who were there and survived, and from people who were there and did not, but whose testimonies made it out.

El Akkad minces no words for the pusillanimous pundits who bothsides their way around the conflict, or for those who seek to dehumanize Palestinians. He points to the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman’s comparison of various Arab groups to spiders and caterpillar larvae (the U.S., of course, was a lion), the Times of Israel’s Luciano Mondino saying that Palestinian children “are the explosives of the future,” and the Israeli “Defence” Minister who called Palestinians “human animals.” Palestinians, Arabs in general, or just all brown people are still seen as something less, as the savages who simply can’t understand democracy or the rules of war or western civilization, such as it is, where we attacked an entire country that had nothing to do with 9/11, simply because 9/11 happened and the people who did it looked sort of similar. Yet after Hamas’ terror attacks and the massacre of October 7, 2023, when a single, unsourced story about murdered Israeli babies appeared online and then in major newspapers, even earning a mention by President Trump, even though the story was a hoax. It was seen by tens of millions of people, at the least, and I’m going to go on a limb and say that few of them stuck around to read the correction.

He does condemn Hamas, and describes their barbarous acts of October 7 in appropriate language, while also asking why it is that all people of Arab descent are expected to condemn terror attacks by Arab or Muslim groups, while white people are not expected to do the same – are called antisemitic and threatened with consequences if they do condemn – when Israel bombs a hospital or an aid convoy, or blockades Gaza so no food or medical aid can reach the starving population. He brings receipts; when Canadian protestors scaled Mt Sinai hospital in Toronto and flew a Palestinian flag, Canadian leaders condemned it and called hospitals sacred places of healing. They did not condemn Israel for bombing such sacred places of healing in Gaza.

Within the broader framework of the Gaza genocide and the ongoing failure of American imperialism, El Akkad also gives glimpses of his own life story. He remembers Egyptian security forces, barely adults, stopping his father after curfew, tearing up his security papers, and trying to arrest him, only for his father’s boss to happen upon the scene and save him – maybe saving his life. He remembers life in Doha, Qatar, which was exploding with newfound wealth thanks to the oil deposits beneath the tiny peninsula, and imported laborers to build up the city, often in near-slavery conditions, with no rights, no freedoms, and no way out. He also explores the environment of the last two years in the writing world, where may writers have declined to use their platforms to call for an end to the genocide, and where enough did speak out that PEN America had to cancel its 2024 awards ceremony because so many winners and nominees withdrew. He points out that the cost, perhaps fewer books sold, a cancelled appearance here or there, pales compared to the costs borne by the victims of genocide. One person’s words will not stop an attempt to extinguish a people, but enough people’s words, spoken together, might.

While El Akkad was writing the book, the war on Gaza entered its third year, and he notes that our attention had moved elsewhere. Yes, there is more sentiment in the U.S. electorate now that we should not be funding Israel’s efforts, and a few more elected officials and candidates are speaking out, but media coverage of the assault on Gaza has waned. We can only stare at misery for a few minutes before our eyes glaze over and we choose to look elsewhere.

One day, he points out, this will end, either because someone will stop Israel from wiping out the people of Gaza, or they will succeed to the point that there are too few Gazans left to matter. At that point, we will all have to reckon with what we did and said, if we did or said anything, to explain it to our children, our grandchildren, to ourselves. How does one finish the sentence, El Akkad asks, “it is unfortunate that tens of thousands of children are dead, but…” He has no answer. Neither do I.

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June 29, 2026  ·  2 comments

The Score.

Multiple people suggested C. Thi Nguyen’s book The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game to me this spring, but I was way ahead of them, putting a hold request in at my library the week it came out. It is a book about games, although it is much more a book about philosophy and the modern world, and touches on games – good and bad – as a way to address how we are manipulated into pursuing goals or acting certain ways by the rules that other people or corporate entities set up to manage us.

Nguyen’s premise is that we are all, to some degree, playing other peoples’ games – passively choosing to do things that do not fulfill us or help us achieve our goals or just make us happy, because we are instead following what amount to scoring systems in all aspects of our lives. The simplest example is the pursuit of greater income over all else at work: If money is what truly makes you happy, then maybe that’s the right game to be playing, but for most people, money isn’t everything (once you have enough to meet your basic needs), and for nearly all people, there are diminishing returns to making more money, unless you’re a psychopath who needs to make more money than anyone else, in which case you are playing a different game as well.

Perhaps the most salient and accessible example Nguyen gives is health. The rise of personal health devices – I owned a Fitbit for about five years before I got sick of how they died every year and a half or so and became trash – has led owners or wearers to judge their health along a few specific scales, such as weight, BMI, resting heart rate, heart rate variability, and so on. None of these is an actual measure of health, and Nguyen points out that even defining what it means to be “healthy” in a global way is difficult at best, and probably impossible to operationalize in a practical sense.

Nguyen also discusses social media, even though he appears to be a very scant user – or perhaps he’s simply following his own advice. I recently hit 6000 followers on Instagram, a rather paltry number, and the app told me to celebrate it and gave me a graphic to share (I did not). Is the point of using Instagram, or any social media app, to amass likes or followers? I would argue it is not. Yet the rules of their particular game, in Nguyen’s framework, say that that is the point – this is how you measure success on Instagram, and therefore you should act accordingly. I gained followers particularly because of two videos I posted, one criticizing MLB’s proposal to the union, the other criticizing UNC’s head coach for abusing the arm of an 18-year-old pitcher on his staff. So should I post more critical videos to try to stir the pot and gain more followers and likes? Reader, I will not. That would be playing someone else’s game.

The Score is incredibly light and easy to read, certainly the most accessible philosophy or philosophy-adjacent book I’ve ever read. (It beats the pants off Sophie’s World.) The chapters are short, and most chapters are built around short anecdotes, many taken from Nguyen’s own life – I respect and appreciate how many quirky interests he has, some of which align with my own, like board games and cooking, and some of which don’t, like rock climbing (go around it) and yo-yo tricks (which I didn’t know was still a thing).

There isn’t much mention of specific games in The Score, which was a little disappointing because they would have provided some more specificity for Nguyen’s examples. He does mention The Mind for its elegance – it has a very short rule set, yet is very fun and offers significant replayability – and a few video games he likes, as well as the fact that he lost many hours to playing the original Civilization video game in college, which happened to me as well (fall of junior year … I was thoroughly addicted to it). I thought he might get more into the gamification phenomenon, where companies use various techniques like points, rewards, leaderboards, competition among friends or strangers, and so on to encourage users to engage in some specific behavior. Duolingo is gamified language-learning. I have mixed feelings on it; about two years of daily use got me to a very basic level of conversational Welsh, and I’ve been using it for German for the last nine months, where I’m probably also at basic conversation as long as you can forgive my incorrect word order. Verb at the end I get, but the rules for the stuff in the middle … well, Duolingo doesn’t teach that kind of material, because it can’t be as easily gamified. So am I learning languages, or playing a game about learning languages?

You don’t need to be a gamer of any sort to read and gain something from The Score, and to the extent that they’re marketing it as a book about games, that’s a mistake. This is a book about life; I’d call it a self-help book if that term didn’t have pejorative connotations. Nguyen subtly lays out how to figure out when you’re being played by someone who wants you to play their game, and then how to find the games, literally but more figuratively, that you do want to play, actions that will help you be happier and find fulfillment, whether it’s in your family, at work, or in your many hobbies. And if you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’re too online like I am, and could use a reminder that every app and algorithm is trying to sucker us into playing their games, so the answer is to log off and play something else instead.

Next up: I just finished Big Fan by my friends Joe Posnanski and Mike Schur and began Gene Wolfe’s Shadow & Claw.

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June 4, 2026  ·  1 comment

Mood Machine.

Music journalist Liz Pelly has spent most of her professional life working and living in indie music circles, which gives her a distinct and important perspective on the consolidation of the music industry around just a few streaming services, with Spotify foremost among them. In her book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, she explores the birth of Spotify, how it took over the streaming space, and how pernicious its effects have been on indie musicians and labels – as well as listeners who want to hear anything but the most anodyne music available.

Spotify began as an idea to sell ads, not as a way to save the music industry, or even just as a way for its founders, including the military-minded Daniel Ek, to get rich while working in music. Songs were just a vehicle for selling ads and collecting user data to do so more effectively. Ek and other Spotify execs have retconned their history to make Spotify out to be some kind of savior for music and musicians, even as their practices have proven predatory, including bringing back payola, and they’ve cracked down harder on musicians with tiny followings than they have on scammers posting fake music tracks and clips to try to deke Spotify’s algorithms and rack up streams from listeners who aren’t paying much attention to what’s playing.

Pelly spoke to over a hundred current and former Spotify employees, got access to internal Slack logs, and interviewed musicians, label executives, and others to research Mood Machine, and two consistent themes emerged (among many smaller topics). One is that Spotify’s entire structure, built largely around algorithmic playlists, which are made by machine-learning systems and are distinct from curated ones, assembled by humans, like the ones I post every month, is both corrupt and tends to funnel listeners to a small number of artists from major labels, while paying artists from outside of the big 3 labels a pittance (and paying no artists anything close to fair value). The second is that a huge portion of Spotify’s audience isn’t actually listening to the music: One of their main goals is to get listeners to stick on a playlist as some sort of background noise – similar to Netlix’s “second-screen” nonsense – and let it play for hours and hours, and if it runs out let Spotify’s algorithm just keep playing more songs, so they can serve more ads. Playing a song costs Spotify less than half a penny in royalties. Their dream scenario is The Lost Weekend except with some algorithmic chillwave playlist going in the background for 72 hours.

Harper’s excerpted a portion of Mood Machine in 2024 as a story called “The Ghosts in the Machine.” It exposed Spotify’s program to commission fake tracks from outside vendors under its “Perfect Fit Content” program, where those companies would supply songs by ‘ghost artists’ to pad Spotify’s playlists for deeply discounted royalty rates, allowing Spotify to deliver the same quantity of music to listeners for a lower cost. Spotify execs defended the practice, saying that listeners of those playlists were “half-listening anyway,” so why deliver them real music? Pelly spoke to a number of employees dismayed by the practice, saying it was unethical to deceive listeners and harmful to the music industry they were supposedly supporting. The few editors remaining who curated playlists themselves reported increased pressure to use these ghost artists on their playlists, even though that was antithetical to their mission (and, I would presume, their music fandom). Some of the companies Pelly cites as ghost-artist producers are now getting into AI-generated tracks, such as Epidemic Sound, which also sells royalty-free background music to video producers. It’s the most interesting chapter in a book that’s full of them, and the most overt explanation of why Spotify is harmful to the music industry.

Pelly wraps up with a chapter (not the epilogue) about how listeners can support artists better in the streaming era. The obvious answer – and I’m not criticizing Pelly here – is to buy music. You love an album? Pay for it, whether digitally or physically. Buy it direct from the label or from the artist. Going to shows and buying merch helps as well. Streaming an artist’s music barely makes a dent; you’d have to stream a song around 300 times to get them $1. She points out that while Spotify is generally presumed to have the worst payout rates to artists – no one knows because Spotify’s agreements with major labels are confidential and protected by NDAs, which seems like maybe a restraint of trade, but I’m not a lawyer – the other major streaming sites, like Apple and Amazon, aren’t that much better. I don’t believe she ever said not to stream music, but her message is more like “stream responsibly, and buy liberally.”

The book is so thoroughly researched, with citations as well as quotes from relevant sources, that it can bog down a little in the details, but I will gladly accept that tradeoff to get such an academic take on a popular topic. It is easy to find reasons to hate streaming and find people to tell you they hate streaming. It is a much harder task to explain just why streaming is bad for music, and culture, and explain why it’s also going to be hard to fix the problems streaming, and Spotify in particular, has created. Mood Machine does all of this, without once allowing you to forget that the reason you downloaded Spotify in the first place was because you, in fact, like music.

Next up: Susan Choi’s Flashlight. Dun dun, dun dun dun.

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October 11, 2025  ·  2 comments

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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September 25, 2025  ·  No comments yet

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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April 30, 2025  ·  4 comments

We Were Once a Family.

The 2018 murder-suicide of the Hart family became a national story, first because it seemed like a tragic accident, then because it was an unthinkable crime where the parents murdered their entire family. News coverage afterwards tended to focus solely on the women, asking why they had done it, with some bigoted attacks that argued against gay couples’ rights to adopt. What nearly all of the ensuing news coverage omitted was anything about the six children, all of whom were Black and came from Texas, while the mothers, both white, lived in Minnesota.

Roxanna Asgarian covered the story for The Oregonian and developed her work into the book We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America, which tells the stories of the six children before and after their adoptions, and then branches off into a broader examination of the dysfunctional child-protection systems operating in Texas and many other red states. Her efforts to know who the six children, two sets of siblings, were, and to get to know their surviving family members – including an older brother whose life has been defined and probably ruined by Texas Child Protective Services – make for an exceptional if gut-wrenching read, filled with grief and needless suffering. The second half of the book loses the narrative greed of the Harts’ story, with broader descriptions of the many failings of the foster industrial complex, including the reckless pace at which Texas separates children from their birth parents, often adopting them out of state, with the policy hitting Black families at a disproportionate level. Asgarian’s arguments are convincing, but her strength is in the human stories that fill the first half of the book.

The Harts, Jennifer and Sarah, had a checkered history even before they took in the first trio of children; they’d fostered a teenaged girl before, but a bizarre incident at a Green Bay Packers game led them to lie about the girl and kick her out. They adopted three siblings from Texas after the mother relinquished her parental rights following multiple arrests for cocaine usage and her violation of an order not to contact her children. Those three children were already showing some signs of neglect and abuse when the Harts rushed to adopt three more children, all half-siblings. Minnesota investigated them after a teacher reported possible abuse of Hannah, one of the children, but the Harts managed to talk their way out of it – the educated white women having their word accepted over that of a Black child – and then decamped for the west coast, first Oregon, and, when Oregon authorities came calling, to Washington. It appears that another possible investigation was the provocation for the women, particularly Jen, to decide to kill the entirely family, rather than face prosecution for the way they starved and abused the children.

These kids were deprived of their shot at a normal life by a Texas justice system that was already stacked against Black families, and that pursued a policy of pursuing potential adoptions simultaneous with efforts by the parents to meet criteria to reunite with their children. The parents in this case had the misfortune to run into a corrupt, racist judge named Pat Shelton, who later earned some notoriety when he helped his daughter escape serious charges for an accident where she was driving drunk at age 19 that killed her passenger; she somehow also got credit for finishing her community service hours while still in prison. The Houston Chronicle referred to his courtroom as “running a kind of adoption express,” and he also operated a crony system that rewarded lawyer friends of his who didn’t talk back or fight his wishes in court. It’s emblematic of the approach in Texas that sees taking children away from their birth parents and giving them to adoptive parents as the solution to a problem. Once the kids are with their new families, they’re off the books, so to speak. There’s little or no follow-up, and often those kids get trafficked out of state where the birth parents can’t even see them, let alone work to regain any parental rights. Asgarian doesn’t draw the comparison, but it’s analogous to Texas and other states claiming their abortion bans are somehow “pro-life,” when there are no life-supporting policies to help mothers and children after birth.

Asgarian avoids the salacious aspects of the murder, and is careful when discussing the fraught topic of interracial adoptions, discussing multiple evidence-based perspectives and research papers, while mentioning the imperfect parallel to the policy of removing Native American children from their homes in the U.S. and Canada until well into the 20th century. It’s a thoughtful approach, but it also means the resulting work loses much of its humanity as soon as she leaves the stories of the children or their birth families. Some of the strongest parts of the work are with the boy who lived, Dontay, who had been separated from his three younger siblings before the Harts adopted them; Asgarian worked for months to gain enough of his trust for him to talk about his experiences in foster care and in institutions. She paints empathetic portraits of the birth mothers, especially Sherri, Dontay’s mother and the mother of the first three children the Harts adopted, and her husband Nathaniel, who comes across as something of a saint in the telling. (Another of Sherri’s sons, Devontay, was the boy who hugged a cop in the so-called “hug heard round the world” photograph during protests after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.) It’s a deep reminder that these six children died when there were people who loved them and never stopped trying to get them back; the government of Texas in particular chose to send them to a life of abuse rather than permit the possibility of reunion.

When Asgarian ties these two halves together, showing that the policies of the state of Texas began the collapse of dominoes that ended in the murders of the six children, the result is a cogent indictment of a system that purports to protect children while treating them like trash to be removed from the house, after which it’s taken away and no one ever has to see it again. It is angry, and it is infuriating, but at its best, it’s also a book of profound humanity. And maybe it’s a call to the rest of us to stop ignoring what is happening on our watch.

Next up: By the time this runs, I’ll likely have finished Alexei Panshin’s Rite of Passage.

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April 29, 2025  ·  2 comments

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama.

Winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, Nathan Thrall’s A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy uses a single, devastating incident – an accident involving a school bus that killed six children and a teacher – to explore the nature of life in the West Bank under Israeli occupation back in 2012. The depiction of how a regime of apartheid – a word used by an Israeli official Thrall quotes in the book – makes life for ordinary Palestinians so much harder, and in this case probably resulted in more deaths and severe injuries than there otherwise would have been, comes across even more starkly today in light of the last eighteen months.

Abed Salama is a father living in the Palestinian town of Anata, on the ‘wrong’ side of the separation wall Israel built along the Green Line in the West Bank, whose only son, Milad, was on that bus at the time of the crash. An unqualified driver entered a busy intersection on a poorly-maintained road for Palestinian at high speed, slamming into the school bus, which then caught fire, burning several children and a teacher to death, although heroic efforts by several people rescued many children from the same fate. Thrall explains how the Palestinian-Israeli conflict shaped the lives of many of the adults involved, with many of them involved in Palestinian rights groups, some of them designated as terrorists by Israel, while Israel’s control of the West Bank and push to claim land through force and settlements has boxed Palestinians into tiny enclaves that often leave them without access to key public resources – like quality hospitals. Even the roads are segregated; Israel built a major highway to bypass the intersection where the accident occurred, but it’s off limits to most Palestinians.

Thrall, who is Jewish and lived in Jerusalem for several years, places blame for the accident and its aftermath squarely on the Israeli government – on several governments, really, dating back to Israel’s independence, the Naqba, and ethnic cleansing efforts like Operation Bi’ur Hametz, which wiped Palestinians out of the city of Haifa a few months after the UN partition order. Abed’s entire life has been shaped by the Palestinian-Israeli conflict; he was involved in the DFLP, a Marxist-Leninist group that was under the PLO’s umbrella, and was tortured and jailed for several months by a military tribunal. (Thrall notes that over 99% of verdicts by military tribunals against Palestinians are ‘guilty,’ and that at one point 40% of Palestinian men had been arrested during the occupation of the West Bank.) Abed’s extended family includes people working for the provisional government who maintain relationships with Israeli authorities – and get special privileges for doing so – and people who are or have been jailed for fighting Israeli forces, sometimes simply for throwing stones at Israeli officers. He explains how the Oslo accords presented Palestinians with a lopsided deal that they had little choice but to accept, creating concentric zones of control that limited Palestinian authority in the West Bank to those enclaves, where moving freely between them meant passing through checkpoints and facing possible arrest or detainment. It’s a brief history of the conflict from a side that isn’t as commonly presented here – I wasn’t aware, for example, of how little land the Palestinians truly controlled after Oslo, knew nothing of the Haifa operation, and have no memory of the mass murderer Baruch Goldstein, who killed 29 Palestinians and wounded over 100 more in a mosque during Ramadan, possibly a reaction to the first Oslo accords. The list goes on.

The main premise of the book is that none of this had to happen as it did, but that systemic and structural barriers made the accident more likely and its outcome far worse than it needed to be. The economy of the West Bank depended almost entirely on Israel, which tightly controlled the movement of people and goods within the territory and across the border into Israel. The Palestinian authorities – which are still rife with corruption, a point Thrall doesn’t address – lacked the funds and especially the power to build or maintain basic public infrastructure, including roads, hospitals, and firehouses, because of the garrote Israel has placed around its economy and territory. Thrall even quotes an Israeli official referring to the highway on which the accident occurred as the “apartheid road,” because Israel built its own highway (60) through the area and that portion of the road is forbidden to anyone with a Palestinian license plate. Several of the victims of the accident went to the local hospitals, which are understaffed and have inferior equipment, because getting them across the border into Jerusalem would have taken too long. Thrall even points to the ages of the bus and truck involved in the accident as the result of Israeli policies that have left Palestinians much poorer than their neighbors – although, again, corruption in the Palestinian Authority has to be a factor here.

I don’t think Thrall soft-plays the violence committed by some Palestinians against Israel, but it’s not his focus beyond implying that Israel’s response to any such attacks has been to tighten its grip on the West Bank and Gaza. They built the separation wall and argued it was to protect against terrorist attacks from Palestine. They have limited Palestinian movement even within the West Bank under the guise of preventing further attacks. Thrall doesn’t argue directly against Israeli security efforts, making no claims about their effectiveness or lack thereof, but presents evidence that the de facto police state that exists at least in the portions of the West Bank that abut Israel make daily life much harder for Palestinians who have nothing to do with any Palestinian terror groups. The result here is families devastated by the losses of their children, in several cases even unable to see their kids’ bodies, identifying them by scraps of clothing because their bodies were too burned for recognition. That is a tragedy that should affect every reader, regardless of one’s views on this particular conflict.

(I’m going to keep comments open here for now, but given the nature of the subject and the tendency I’ve seen for this topic to lead to personal attacks, I may close them at any point and will delete any comments that resort to insults or other invective.)

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