We updated my ranking of the top 50 free agents in baseball this offseason on Monday after all options were declined or exercised to reflect the actual free agent pool. My next article there will probably come when we have a big transaction.
I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter, covering my feelings on the election, on Saturday.
I locked my Twitter account earlier in the week due to the site’s change to allow blocked users to see your posts. At this point, I will only post links to my work there, and I’ll be more active on Bluesky and Threads. Of course, I’ll still be here, and in the comments under my articles on The Athletic.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: Does the NIL era mean the end of Ivy League athletics? I think it does, at least as we have known it. And maybe that’s fine.
- Fine, here are some of the better post-election pieces I’ve seen, bearing in mind I’ve skipped a lot of the blame game going around. The New Republic has had the best content in the wake of the election disaster, including Kat Abughazaleh’s story saying the Democrats need to clean out their party leadership after losing to Trump twice in three elections, a Greg Sargent column on how Trump voters don’t realize how he actually hurt the economy and reproductive rights, and a podcast with Sargent and the Philly Inquirer’s Will Bunch on Jeff Bezos sucking up to Trump after the election. In The Nation, Elie Mystal wrote what I also believe, that Trump is not a fluke, but that this is what the United States is. In The Atlantic, Lora Kelley wrote about how the economy ended up more important than the issues on which the Democrats focused, including abortion rights and democracy itself. The Texas Tribune wrote about the rightward shift of the southern part of that state. Just before the election, Tom Nichols wrote in The Atlantic that Trump needs help, as we had even more evidence that the former and now incoming President might be losing his grip.
- Scientific American covered how catastrophic a Trump Presidency will be for climate action.
- There were some tiny, isolated bits of good news from Election Day, including Arizonans defeating three GOP-led ballot measures to restrict voting rights; my state of Delaware electing Sarah McBride to be the first openly trans member of Congress (I’ve met her and I’m a big fan); and abortion rights passing everywhere except in a rigged vote in Florida, where the ballot measure got 57% of the vote, but the Republicans moved the goalposts to 60%.
- Iowa tried to purge alleged noncitizens from voter rolls after early voting had already begun. Sounds fair. It’s not like they had any warning that an election was coming.
- A court in Maricopa County, Arizona, cancelled the registrations of some voters based on errant information that they had been convicted of felonies.
- The Guardian’s Arwa Madhawi writes that we are witnessing the final stage of genocide in Gaza, citing historian Omar Bartov. The Associated Press covered Israel’s renewed attacks on hospitals in Gaza, buildings that Israel has already previously bombed.
- A dismaying story from the Times on older folks giving all their money to scammers while their kids have no way to stop them from doing so. This isn’t people with (diagnosed) cognitive decline or impairment, but people who are perhaps a little more credulous because of their age and unfamiliarity with the digital world.
- NPR has a story on attorney Victoria Burke, who helps victims of sexual assault fight defamation suits filed against them by the accused. Such lawsuits can become a way to silence victims and make it harder for them to come forward or pursue their cases, and Burke has helped expand anti-SLAPP statutes in California to cover these cases.
- Not all tech companies are bad: Apple quietly added a feature to iOS 18 to protect users’ data on phones seized by police from potentially unlawful searches. Phones that have remained in the lock state for four days will automatically reboot to their Before First Use state, making it harder for forensic analysts to break into them.
- Multiple women have accused University of Florida men’s basketball coach Todd Golden of stalking and sexually harassing them, according to a report in the independent site The Alligator. The University received a Title IX complaint against Golden on September 27th.
- Jason Yates, an evangelical Christian who supports Trump and previously was CEO of the activist group My Faith Votes, was arrested on charges of possession of over 100 images of child pornography. No trans people were involved in the case.
- Jamie Oliver wrote a children’s fantasy novel, and it turns out it has some really dated stereotypes of indigenous Australians. Worse, neither he nor his publishers even consulted with anyone on cultural sensitivity to maybe avoid this fiasco.
- A 13-year-old girl in Florida went to the police after she was raped by her adoptive father; the police didn’t believe her and charged her with lying. When he raped her again, she recorded it on her phone. Taylor Cadle, now 21, came forward this week in a PBS story on the police’s complete mishandling of the case.
- Prof. Donald Fanger taught my favorite class at Harvard, Comedy and the Novel, where we read several novels I still love, including my all-time favorite, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. Prof. Fanger died this July at age 94.
- I mentioned the letter urging a literary boycott of Israeli cultural institutions in an earlier roundup; there is now a countering letter opposing that boycott, with hundreds of signatories of its own.
- I had a couple of short links about the shocking and untimely death of Amber Cook, who worked in marketing for several board game companies and was an avid gamer herself, last weekend. Her partner wrote a slightly longer note about her passing and some upcoming events to raise funds for Amber’s young son.
- An 11-year-old girl in Alabama killed herself as a result of bullying, possibly after just one incident at school.
- Two updates on elections in Eastern Europe: Molvoda’s pro-western President Maia Sandu won re-election despite a massive disinformation campaign by Russia, while outside observers say that the election results in Georgia (the country) make no statistical sense. The incumbent Georgian Dream party claimed victory, while opposition parties have alleged fraud and blame Russian involvement.
- A new study in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia found a correlation between higher caffeine consumption and lower risk of memory impairment. This is just one study, and it showed correlation, not causation, but that’s none of my business (sips tea).
- Rich countries, led by the EU, blocked a proposal to help poorer countries restore their environments at the COP16 global biodiversity summit in late October.
- France is prosecuting seven people involved in spreading the lies that led to the beheading of a French teacher who had shown an example of the cartoons from Charlie Hebdo that Islamist terrorists cited as their reason for murdering 12 people at the magazine’s offices in 2015. The actual killer was shot dead by police shortly after he murdered the teacher, Samuel Paty; this trial is about the online “hate campaign” that took place before the attack.
- Trump’s Truth Social platform outsourced coding jobs to Mexico even as he threatened companies with retaliation for sending jobs outside of the U.S. American Second to Profits.
- The progressive voter mobilization group AllVote sent misleading and/or inaccurate text messages to voters in swing states claiming they had already voted or sending links to the wrong sites for voting information, according to state officials in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Arizona.
- Elon Musk’s false or misleading claims about the election, including those about the major candidates, were viewed over 2 billion times, according to an analysis by CNN. I’m sure that had no effect on anyone’s voting choices, though.
- Nearly 400 people have joined lawsuits alleging sexual abuse at state-run youth detention centers in Washington, with the allegations dating as far back as 1956.
Filterworld.
In his new book Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, journalist Kyle Chayka details the myriad ways in which we are thrust towards homogeneity in music, television, movies, books, and even architecture and travel because, in his view, of the tyranny of the algorithm. The book is more of a polemic than a work of research, filled with personal anecdotes and quotes from philosophers as well as observers of culture, and while Chayka is somewhat correct in that a small number of companies are now determining what people watch, listen to, and read, that’s always been true – it’s just happening now by algorithm when technology was supposed to democratize access to culture.
Chayka’s premise is sound on its surface: Major tech companies now depend on maintaining your attention to hold or increase revenues, and they do that via algorithm. Netflix’s algorithm keeps recommending movies and shows it believes you’ll watch – not that you will like, but that you will watch, or at least not turn off – thus keeping you as a customer. Spotify’s auto-generated playlists largely serve you artists and songs that are similar to ones you’ve already liked, or at least have already listened to, as I’ve learned recently because I listened to one song by the rapper Werdperfect that a friend sent me and now Spotify puts Werdperfect on every god damned playlist it makes for me. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok, and their ilk all use algorithms to show you what will keep you engaged, not what you asked to see via your following list. Amazon’s recommendations are more straightforward, giving you products its algorithm thinks you’ll buy based on other things you’ve bought.
Chayka goes one further, though, arguing that algorithmic tyranny extends into meatspace, using it to explain the ubiquity of Brooklyn-style coffee shops, with sparse décor, subway tiles, exposed wood, and industrial lighting. He uses it to explain homogeneity in Airbnb listings, arguing that property owners must determine what the algorithm wants and optimize their spaces to maximize their earnings. He is ultimately arguing that we will all look the same, sound the same, wear the same clothes, live in the same spaces, drink the same expensive lattes, and so on, because of the algorithms.
To this I say: No shit. It’s called capitalism, and the algorithm itself is not the disease, but a symptom.
Businesses exist to make money, and in a competitive marketplace, that’s generally a good thing – it drives innovation and forces individual companies to respond to customer demand or lose market share to competitors. These market forces led to the advent of mass production over a century ago, a process that depended on relatively uniform tastes across a broad spectrum of consumers, because mass-producing anything economically depends on that uniformity. You can’t mass-produce custom clothes, by definition. Companies that have invested heavily in capital to mass produce their widgets will then work to further expand their customer base by encouraging homogeneity in tastes – thus the push for certain fashions to be “in” this year (as they were twenty years prior), or the marketing put behind specific books or songs or movies to try to gain mass adoption. Coffee shops adopt similar looks because customers like that familiarity, for the same reason that McDonald’s became a global giant – you walk into any McDonald’s in the world and you by and large know what to expect, from how it looks to what’s on the menu. This isn’t new. In fact, the idea of the algorithm isn’t even new; it is the technology that is new, as companies can implement their algorithms at a speed and scale that was unthinkable two decades earlier.
Furthermore, we are living in a time of limited competition, closer to what our forefathers faced in the trust era than what our parents faced in the 1980s. There is no comparably-sized competitor to Amazon. Spotify dominates music streaming. Each social media entity I listed earlier has no direct competition; they compete with each other, but each serves a different need or desire from consumers. The decline of U.S. antitrust enforcement since the Reagan era has exacerbated the problem. Fewer producers will indeed produce less variety in products.
However, the same technology that Chayka decries throughout Filterworld has flattened more than culture – it has flattened the hierarchy that led to homogeneity in culture from the 1950s through the 1990s. Music was forced, kicking and screaming, to give up its bundling practice, where you could purchase only a few individual songs but otherwise had to purchase entire albums to hear specific titles, by Napster and other file-sharing software products. Now, through streaming services, not only can any artist bypass the traditional record-label gatekeepers, but would-be “curators” can find, identify, and recommend these artists and their songs, the way that only DJs at truly independent radio stations could do in earlier eras. (And yes, I hope that I am one of those curators. My monthly playlists are the product of endless exploration on my own, with a little help from the Spotify algorithm on the Release Radar playlists, but mostly just me messing around and looking for new music.) Goodreads is a hot mess, owned by Amazon and boosting the Colleen Hoovers of the world, but it’s also really easy to find people who read a lot of books and can recommend the ones they like. (Cough.) Movies, food, travel, television, and so on are all now easier to consume, and if you are overwhelmed by the number and variety of choices, it’s easier to find people who can guide you through it. I try to be that type of guide for you when it comes to music and books and board games, and to some extent to restaurants. When it comes to television, I read Alan Sepinwall. When it comes to movies, I listen to Will Leitch & Tim Grierson, and I read Christy Lemire, and I bother Chris Crawford. I also just talk to my friends and see what they like. I have book friends, movie friends, game friends, coffee friends, rum friends, and so on. The algorithms, and the companies that deploy them, don’t decide for me because I made the very easy choice to decide for myself.
So I didn’t really buy Chayka’s conclusions in Filterworld, even though I thought the premise was sound and deserved this sort of exploration. I also found the writing in the book to be dull, unfortunately, with the sort of dry quality of academic writing without the sort of rigor that you might see in a research paper. I could have lived with that if he’d sold me better on his arguments, but he gives too little attention to points that might truly matter, such as privacy regulations in the E.U. and the lack thereof in the U.S., and too much weight to algorithms that will only affect your life if you let them.
Next up: Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop.