On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done

New Price: $17.67
Used Price: $1.68

Mentioned in:

Most Anticipated: The Great Winter 2024 Preview

-
January Pure Wit by Francesca Peacock [NF] I first learned about the life and work of seventeenth-century writer and philosopher Margaret Cavendish in Regan Penaluna's stellar study of women thinkers, and I've been dying to read a biography of Cavendish ever since. And I'm in luck (all of us are) thanks to biographer Peacock. A proto-feminist, science-fiction pioneer, and divisive public figure, Cavendish is endlessly fascinating, and Peacock's debut gives her the rigorous, in-depth treatment that she deserves. —Sophia M. Stewart Nonfiction by Julie Myerson [F] A blurb from Rachel Cusk is just about all it takes to get me excited about a book, so when I saw that Cusk called Myerson's latest novel "glitteringly painful," "steady and clear," and "the book [Myerson] was intended to write," I was sold. A tale of art, addiction, and the ties that bind mothers and daughters, Nonfiction promises to devastate. —SMS Immediacy by Anna Kornbluh [NF] Did the pandemic kill postmodernism? And what comes after the end of history? University of Illinois–Chicago professor Kornbluh dubs our contemporary style “immediacy,” characterized by same-day delivery, bingeable multimedia, and real-time news updates that spin the economic flywheel ever faster. Kornbluh names this state of emergence and emergency, and suggests potential off-ramps in the direction of calm reflection, measured art-making, and, just maybe, collective wisdom. —Nathalie op de Beeck Slow Down by Kōhei Saitō, tr. Brian Bergstrom [NF] In this internationally-bestselling treatise, Japanese philosopher Saitō argues against "sustainable growth" in favor of degrowth—the slowing of economic activity—which he sees at the only way to address the twinned crises of inequality and climate change. Saitō's proposal is simple, salient, and adapts Marx for the modern day. —SMS Relic by Ed Simon [NF] From Millions alum Simon comes a slim study of the objects we imbue with religious (or quasi-religious) meaning, from the bone of a Catholic martyr to Jimi Hendrix's guitar pick. Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series never misses, and Relic is one of the series' most unconventional—and compelling—entries yet. —SMS Filterworld by Kyle Chayka [NF] The outline of reality has become increasingly blurry as the real world melds with the digital one, becoming what Chayka, staff writer at the New Yorker, calls “Filterworld,” a society built on a foundation of ever-evolving algorithms. In his book of the same name, Chayka calls out the all-powerful algorithm, which he argues is the driving force behind current and accelerating trends in art, consumption, and ethics. —Daniella Fishman Portrait of a Body by Julie Delporte, tr. Helge Dascher and Karen Houle [NF] A gripping narrative of coming to terms with her queer identity, Canadian cartoonist Delporte's latest graphic memoir—praised by Eileen Myles and Fariha Róisín—sees Delporte learning to embrace herself in both physical and metaphysical ways. Dreamy colored pencil illustrations and gently flowing storytelling capture the beauty, trauma, and ultimate tranquility that comes with learning to exist on your own terms. —DF Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino [F] In Bertino’s latest novel, following 2020's Parakeet, the launch of Voyager 1 into space coincides with the birth of Adina Giorno, who, much like the solitary satellite, is in search of something she can't yet see. As a child, she senses that she is not of this world and struggles to make a life for herself amid the drudgery of human existence. Playing on Adina's alienness as both a metaphor and a reality, Bertino asks, “Are we really alone?” —DF The Last Fire Season by Manjula Martin [NF] Martin returns ablaze in her latest memoir, pitched as "H Is for Hawk meets Joan Didion in the Pyrocene." Following an anguishing chronic pain diagnosis, Martin attempts to reconnect with her beloved Northern California wilderness in order to escape not only her deteriorating health but a deteriorating world, which has ignited around her in the worst fire season California has ever seen. Devastating and ambivalent, The Last Fire Season tries to sift through the ashes of climate change. —DF The Furies by Elizabeth Flock [NF] Violence by women—its role, its potential righteousness—is the focus of Flock's latest. Following the real-life cases of a young rape survivor in Alabama, a predator-punishing gang leader in India, and an anti-ISIS militia fighter in Syria, Flock considers how women have used lethal force as a means to power, safety, and freedom amid misogynistic threats and oppression. Is violence ever the answer? Flock looks to three parallel lives for guidance. —SMS Imagining the Method by Justin Owen Rawlins [NF] University of Tulsa professor Rawlins demystifies that most celebrated (and controversial) acting school, challenging our contemporary conceptions of screen performance. I was sold the moment I saw Rawlins received the ultimate stamp of approval from Isaac Butler, author of the definitive account of method acting: "If you care about the evolution of twentieth-century screen performance, you should read this book." —SMS We Are Free to Change the World by Lyndsey Stonebridge [NF] Famed twentieth-century philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote passionately about power, freedom, and inequality against the backdrop of fascism—a project as relevant today as it ever was. Stonebridge, a professor of humanities and human rights, revisits the lessons of Arendt's writings and applies them to the twenty-first century, creating a dialogue between past, present, and future. —DF Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea by C.D. Rose [F] In these 19 short stories, Rose meditates on philosophy, photography, and literature. Blending erudition and entertainment, Rose's fables follow writers, teachers, and artists through various situations—and in a standout story, imagines how St. Augustine would fare on Twitter. —DF Black Women Taught Us by Jenn M. Jackson [NF] Jackson's debut book foregrounds the work of Black feminist writers and leaders—from Ida B. Wells and Harriet Jacobs to Shirley Chisholm and bell hooks—throughout American history, revealing the centuries-long role that Black women have played in imagining and fighting for a more just society. Imani Perry calls Jackson "a beautiful writer and excellent scholar." —SMS The Bullet Swallower by Elizabeth Gonzalez James [F] Pitched as Cormac McCarthy meets Gabriel García Márquez (yeesh!), The Bullet Swallower is the second novel (after Mona at Sea) from Elizabeth Gonzalez James, who also wrote the weird and wonderful essay/play Five Conversations About Peter Sellers. Infusing the spaghetti western with magical realism, the novel follows a Mexican bandito on a cosmic journey generations in the making. —SMS Last Acts by Alexander Sammartino [F] In Sammartino's debut novel, the owner of a gun store hatches a plan to resurrect his struggling business following his son's near-death experience. George Saunders, Mary Karr, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah have all heaped on praise, and Jenny Offill finds it "hard to believe Last Acts is a first novel." —SMS I Sing to Use the Waiting by Zachary Pace [NF] Pace fuses memoir and criticism (my favorite combination) to explore the emotional and cultural impacts of women singers across time, from Cat Power and Rihanna to Kim Gordon and Whitney Houston. A queer coming-of-age story that centers the power of music and the legacies of women artists. —SMS Dead in Long Beach, California by Venita Blackburn [F] Blackburn, the author of the stellar story collections Black Jesus and Other Superheroes and How to Wrestle a Girl, delivers a debut novel about storytelling and unreality, centering on a successful novelist who gets hold of her dead brother's phone—and starts answering texts as him. Kristen Arnett calls this one "a bonafide knockout" that "rewired my brain." —SMS Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here by Jonathan Blitzer [N] New Yorker staff writer Blitzer traces the harrowing history of the humanitarian crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, foregrounding the stories of Central American migrants whose lives have been threatened and upended by political tumult. A nuanced, layered, and rigorously reported portrait that Patrick Radden Keefe hails as "extraordinary." —SMS The Survivors of the Clotilda by Hannah Durkin [NF] Durkin, a British historian, explores the lives of 103 Africans who were kidnapped and transported on the last slave ship to dock in the U.S., shortly before the Civil War began in 1861. Many of these captives were children, and thus lived their lives against a dramatic backdrop, from the Civil War all the way up to the dawn of the Civil Rights movement. What these people experienced and how they prevailed should intrigue anybody interested in learning more about our nation’s darkest chapter. —Claire Kirch Your Utopia by Bora Chung, tr. Anton Hur [F] Following her acclaimed sophomore novel The Cursed Bunny, Chung returns with more tales from the realm of the uncanny. Covering everything from unruly AI to the quest for immortality to the environmental destruction caused by capitalism, Chung’s story collection promises more of the mystifying, horror-filled goodness that has become her calling card. —DF The Rebel's Clinic by Adam Shatz [NF] Frantz Fanon—political philosopher, psychiatrist, and author of the trailblazing Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth—is one of the most important writers and thinkers of the postcolonial era, and his work continues to inform contemporary thinking on race, capitalism, and power. In this sprawling biography, Shatz affirms Fanon's place as a towering intellect and groundbreaking activist. —SMS You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, tr. Natasha Wimmer [F] Enrigue's latest novel, following Sudden Death, reimagines the fateful 1519 invasion of Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City) by Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés. With exuberant style, and in a lively translation by Wimmer, Enrigue brings the Aztec capital and the emperor Moctezuma to vibrant life—and rewrites their destinies. —SMS February Love Novel by Ivana Sajko, tr. by Mima Simić [F] Croatian literature may lag behind its Russian, Hungarian, Polish, and Ukrainian counterparts—roughly in that order—as far as stateside recognition goes, but we all make mistakes. Just like couples do in love and under capitalism. “A war between kitchen and bedroom,” as the liner notes read, would have been enough to sell me, but that war’s combatants, “an unemployed Dante scholar” and “a passable actress,” really sealed the deal. —John H. Maher The Unforgivable by Cristina Campo, tr. Alex Andriesse [NF] This new NYRB edition, introduced by Kathryn Davis, brings together all of the essays Campo published in her lifetime, plus a selection of additional essays and autofiction. The result is a robust introduction to a stylish—but largely forgotten—Italian writer whose "creativity was a vocation in the truest sense," per Jhumpa Lahiri. —SMS Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti [NF] Last year, I was enraptured by Heti's limited-run New York Times newsletter in which she alphabetized sentences from 10 years' worth of her diary entries—and this year, we can finally enjoy the sublime results of that experiment in book form. This is my favorite work of Heti's, full stop. —SMS Dinner on Monster Island by Tania De Rozario [NF] Blending film criticism, social commentary, and personal narrative, De Rozario (most recently the author of the Lambda Literary Award–nominated And the Walls Came Crumbling Down) explores her experience growing up queer, brown, and fat in Singapore, from suffering through a "gay-exorcism" to finding solace in horror films like Carrie. —SMS Wrong Norma by Anne Carson [NF] Everyone shut up—Anne Carson is speaking! This glistening new collection of drawings and musings from Carson is her first original work since the 2016 poetry collection Float. In Carson's own words, the collection touches on such disparate topics (she stresses they are "not linked") as Joseph Conrad, Roget's Thesaurus, snow, Guantánamo, and "my Dad." —DF Self-Portraits: Stories by Osamu Dazai, tr. Ralph McCarthy [F] Japanese writer Dazai had quite the moment in 2023, and that moment looks likely to continue into the new year. Self-Portraits is a collection of short autofiction in the signature melancholic cadence which so many Anglophone readers have come to love. Meditating on themes of hypocrisy, irony, nihilism—all with a touch of self-deprecating humor—Dazai’s work will either pull you out of a deep depression or crack your rose-colored glasses; there is no in-between. —DF Imagination by Ruha Benjamin [NF] Visionary imagination is essential for justice and a sustainable future, argues Benjamin, a Princeton professor of African American studies and founder of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab. In her treatise, she reminds readers of the human capacity for creativity, and she believes failures of imagination that lead to inequity can be remedied. In place of quasi-utopian gambles that widen wealth gaps and prop up the surveillance state, Benjamin recommends dreaming collective and anti-racist social arrangements into being—a message to galvanize readers of adrienne marie brown and Alexis Pauline Gumbs. —SMS Literary Theory for Robots by Dennis Yi Tenen [NF] Artificial intelligence and machine-generated writing are nothing new, and perhaps nothing to fear, argues Tenen, a Columbia English professor and former software engineer. Traveling through time and across the world, Tenen reveals the labor and collaboration behind AI, complicating the knee-jerk (and, frankly, well-founded!) reactions many of us have to programs like ChatGPT. —SMS A Sign of Her Own by Sarah Marsh [F] Alexander Graham Bell is best known as the inventor of the telephone, but what he considered his life's work was the education of deaf children—specifically, the harmful practice of oralism, or the suppression of sign language. Marsh's wonderful debut novel unearths this little-known history and follows a deaf pupil of Bell's as she questions his teachings and reclaims her voice. —SMS Get the Picture by Bianca Bosker [NF] Journalist Bosker, who took readers behind the scenes with oenophiles in her 2017 Cork Dork, turns to avid artists, collectors, and curators for this sensory deep dive. Bosker relies on experiential reporting, and her quest to understand the human passion for visual art finds her apprenticing with creators, schmoozing with galleristas, and minding canonical pieces as a museum guard. —NodB Columbo by Amelie Hastie [NF] Columbo experienced something of a renaissance during the pandemic, with a new generation falling for the rugged, irresistible charms of Peter Falk. Hastie revisits the series, a staple of 70s-era TV, with refreshing rigor and appreciation, tackling questions of stardom, authorship, and the role of television in the process. —SMS Acts of Forgiveness by Maura Cheeks [F] Cheeks's debut novel sounds amazing and so au courant. A woman is elected U.S. president and promises Black Americans that they will receive reparations if they can prove they are descended from slaves. You’d think people would jump on achieving some social justice in the form of cold cash, right? Not Willie Revel’s family, who’d rather she not delve into the family history. This promises to be a provocative read on how the past really isn’t past, no matter how much you run from it. —CK The Sentence by Matthew Baker [F] I minored in Spanish linguistics in college and, as a result, came to love that most useless and rewarding of syntactic exercises, diagramming sentences. So I'm very excited to read Baker's The Sentence, a graphic novel set in an alternate America and comprising single, 6,732-word sentence, diagrammed in full. Syntax wonks, assemble! —SMS Neighbors by Diane Oliver [F] Before her untimely death in 1966 at the age of 22, Oliver wrote stories of race and racism in Jim Crow America characterized by what Dawnie Walton calls "audacity, wit, and wisdom beyond her years." Only four of the 14 stories in Neighbors were published in Oliver's lifetime, and Jamel Brinkley calls the publication of her posthumous debut collection "an important event in African American and American letters." —SMS The Weird Sister Collection by Marisa Crawford [NF] Essayist, poet, and All Our Pretty Songs podcaster Crawford founded the Weird Sister blog in 2014, covering books and pop culture from contemporary young feminists’ and queer perspectives. The now-defunct blog offered literary reviews, Q&As with indie authors, and think pieces on film and music. For this collection, whose foreword comes from Michelle Tea, Crawford gathers favorite pieces from contributors, plus original work with a Weird Sister edge. —NodB Smoke and Ashes by Amitav Ghosh [NF] As research for his Ibis trilogy, Ghosh mapped the opium trade around the world and across centuries. This global and personal history revisits the British Empire’s dependence on Indian opium as a trade good, and how the cultivation of and profits from opium shaped today’s global economy. In his nonfiction The Great Derangement, Ghosh employs personal anecdotes to make sense of larger-scale developments, and Smoke and Ashes promises to connect his own family and identity to today’s corporate, institutional, and environmental realities. —NodB Private Equity by Carrie Sun [NF] In her debut memoir, Sun recounts her time on Wall Street, where she worked as an assistant to a billionaire hedge-fund founder and was forced to rethink everything she thought she knew about work, money, sacrifice, and living a meaningful life. This one sounds like a great read for fans of Anna Wiener's Uncanny Valley (e.g. me). —SMS I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both by Mariah Stovall [F] When Khaki Oliver receives a letter from her estranged former best friend, she isn’t ready for the onslaught of memories that soon cause her to unravel. A Black Bildungsroman about friendship, fandom, and sanity, I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both is an unflinching look at "what it means to be young in a hard, and nonetheless beautiful, world," per Vauhini Vara. —Liv Albright Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit by Aisha Sabatini Sloan [NF] I know from personal experience that anything published by Graywolf Press is going to open my eyes and make me look at the world in a completely different way, so I have high expectations for Sloan’s essays. In this clever collection, a Black creative reflects upon race, art, and pedagogy, and how they relate to one’s life in this crazy country of ours during the time period between the 2016 election and the onset of the pandemic. —CK Language City by Ross Perlin [NF] Perlin travels throughout the most linguistically diverse city on the planet—New York—to chronicle the sounds and speakers of six endangered languages before they die out. A linguist and co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, Perlin argues for the importance of little-known languages and celebrates the panoply of languages that exists in New York City. —SMS Monkey Grip by Helen Garner [F] A tale as old as time and/or patriarchal sociocultural constructs: a debut novel by a woman is published and the critics don't appreciate it—until later, at least. This proto-autofictional 1977 novel is now considered a classic of Australian "grunge lit," but at the time, it divided critics, probably because it had depictions of drug addiction and sex in it. But Lauren Groff liked it enough to write a foreword, so perhaps the second time really is the charm. —JHM Ours by Phillip B. Williams [F] A conjuror wreaks magical havoc across plantations in antebellum Arkansas and sets up a Brigadoon for the enslaved people she frees before finding that even a mystic haven isn't truly safe from the horrors of the world. What a concept! And a flexible one to boot: if this isn't adapted as a TV series, it would work just as well as an RPG. —JHM Violent Faculties by Charlotte Elsby [F] A philosophy professor influenced by the Marquis de Sade designs a series of experiments to prove its relevance as a discipline, specifically with regard to life and death, a.k.a. Philip Zimbardo (Chopped and Screwed Remix): The Novel. If you ever trusted a philosophy professor with your inner self before—and you probably shouldn't have?—you probably won't after reading this. —JHM American Abductions by Mauro Javier Cárdenas [F] Plagued by data harvesting, constant surveillance, mass deportation, and incarceration, the society at the heart of Cárdenas's new novel is less speculative dystopia than realist reflection. Channeling Philp K. Dick and Samuel Delaney, Cárdenas imagines a society where Latin Americans are systematically expunged. Following the lives of two Columbian-American sisters, one who was deported and one who stayed in the U.S., American Abduction tells a new kind of immigrant story, suffused with mysticism and philosophical rigor. —DF Closures: Heterosexuality and the American Sitcom by Grace Lavery [NF] I took Lavery's class on heterosexuality and sitcoms as an undergrad, and I'm thrilled to see the course's teachings collected in book form. Lavery argues that since its inception the sitcom has depicted heterosexuality as constantly on the verge of collapse, only to be reconstituted at the end of each half-hour episode. A fascinating argument about the cultural project of straightness. —SMS Whiskey Tender by Deborah Taffa [NF] Almost a decade in the making, this memoir from Taffa details generations of Southwest Native history and the legacies of assimilationist efforts. Taffa—a citizen of the Quechan Nation and Laguna Pueblo tribe, and director of the MFA in Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts—was born on the California Yuma reservation and grew up in Navajo territory in New Mexico in the 1970s and 1980s. She reflects on tribal identity and attitudes toward off-reservation education she learned from her parents’ and grandparents’ fraught formative experiences. —NodB Normal Women by Philippa Gregory [NF] This is exciting news for Anglophiles and history nerds like me: Philippa Gregory is moving from historical fiction (my guilty pleasure) about royal women and aristocrats in medieval and early modern England to focus on the lives of common women during that same time period, as gleaned from the scraps of information on them she has unearthed in various archives. I love history “from the bottom up” that puts women at the center, and Gregory is a compelling storyteller, so my expectations are high. —CK Blue Lard by Vladimir Sorokin, tr. Max Lawton [F] Upon its publication in 1999, Sorokin's sci-fi satire Blue Lard sparked protests across Russia. One aspect of it particularly rankled: the torrid, sexual affair it depicts between Stalin and Khruschev. All to say, the novel is bizarre, biting, and utterly irreverent. Translated into English for the first time by Lawton, Sorokin's masterwork is a must-read for anyone with an iconoclastic streak. —SMS Piglet by Lottie Hazell [F] Hazell's debut novel follows the eponymous Piglet, a successful cookbook editor identified only by her unfortunate childhood nickname, as she rethinks questions of ambition and appetite following her fiancé's betrayal. Per Marlowe Granados, Hazell writes the kind of "prose Nora Ephron would be proud of." —SMS Grief is for People by Sloane Crosley [NF] Crosley enlivens the grief memoir genre with the signature sense of humor that helped put her on the literary map. In Grief Is for People, she eulogizes the quirks and complexities of her friendship with Russell Perreault, former publicity director at Vintage Books, who died by suicide in 2019. Dani Shapiro hails Crosley’s memoir—her first full-length book of nonfiction—as “both a provocation and a balm to the soul.” —LA The Freaks Came Out to Write by Tricia Romano [NF] The freaks came out to write, and you better believe the freaks will come out in droves to read! In this history of the legendary alt-weekly the Village Voice, Romano (a former writer for the Voice) interviews some 200 members the paper’s most esteemed staff and subjects. A sweeping chronicle of the most exciting era in New York City journalism promises to galvanize burgeoning writers in the deflating age of digital media. —DF Burn Book by Kara Swisher [NF] Swisher has been reporting on the tech industry for 30 years, tracing its explosive growth from the dawn of the internet to the advent of AI. She's interviewed every tech titan alive and has chronicled their foibles and failures in excruciating detail. Her new book combines memoir and reportage to tell a comprehensive history of a troubled industry and its shortsighted leaders. —SMS Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange [F] Orange returns with a poignant multi-generational tale that follows the Bear Shield-Red Feather family as they struggle to combat racist violence. Picking up where Orange's hit debut novel, There There, left off, Wandering Stars explores memory, inheritance, and identity through the lens of Native American life and history. Per Louise Erdrich, “No one knows how to express tenderness and yearning like Tommy Orange." —LA March The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan [F] Callahan's debut novel follows a young artist as she faces sudden hearing loss, forcing to reevaluate her orientation to her senses, her art, and the world around her. Amina Cain, Moyra Davey, and Kate Zambreno are all fans (also a dream blunt rotation), with the latter recommending this one be "read alongside the novels of W.G. Sebald, Rachel Cusk, and Maria Gainza." —SMS The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft [F] When a group of translators arrive at the home of renowned novelist Irena Rey, they expect to get to work translating her latest book—instead, they get caught up in an all-consuming mystery. Irena vanishes shortly after the translators arrive, and as they search for clues to the author's disappearance, the group is swept up by isolation-fueled psychosis and obsession. A “mischievous and intellectually provocative” debut novel, per Megha Majumdar. —LA Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk, tr. Heather Cleary [F] This isn’t your typical meet-cute. When two women—one grieving, the other a vampire, both of them alienated and yearning for more—cross paths in a Buenos Aires cemetery, romance blooms. Channelling Carmen Maria Machado and Anne Rice, Yuszczuk reimagines the vampire novel, with a distinctly Latin American feminist Gothic twist. —LA The Great Divide by Cristina Henríquez [F] I'm a sucker for meticulously researched and well-written historical fiction, and this one—a sweeping story about the interconnected lives of the unsung people who lived and labored at the site of the Panama Canal—fits the bill. I heard Henríquez speak about this novel and her writing processes at a booksellers conference, and, like the 300 booksellers present, was impressed by her presentation and fascinated at the idea of such a sweeping tale set against a backdrop so larger-than-life and dramatic as the construction of the Panama Canal. —CK Bite Your Friends by Fernanda Eberstadt [NF] Melding memoir and history, Eberstadt's Bite Your Friends looks at the lives of saints, philosophers, and artists—including the author and her mother—whose abberant bodies became sites of subversion and rebellion. From Diogenes to Pussy Riot, Eberstadt asks what it means to put our bodies on the line, and how our bodies can liberate us. —SMS Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez [F] When Raquel Toro, an art history student, stumbles on the story of Anita de Monte, a once prominent artist from the '80s whose mysterious death cut short her meteoric rise, her world is turned upside down. Gonzalez's sophomore novel (after her hit debut Olga Dies Dreaming) toggles between the perspectives of Raquel and Anita (who is based on the late Ana Mendieta) to explore questions of power, justice, race, beauty, and art. Robert Jones, Jr. calls this one "rollicking, melodic, tender, and true—and oh so very wise." —LA My Heavenly Favorite by Lucas Rijneveld, tr. Michele Hutchison [F] Rijneveld, author of the International Booker Prize-winning novel The Discomfort of Evening, returns with a new take on the Lolita story, transpiring between a veterinarian and a farmer's daughter on the verge of adolescence. "This book unsettled me even as it made me laugh and gasp," gushes Brandon Taylor. "I'm in awe." Radiant by Brad Gooch [NF] Lauded biographer Gooch propels us through Keith Haring’s early days as an anonymous sidewalk chalk artist to his ascent as a vigilante muralist, pop-art savant, AIDS activist, and pop-culture icon. Fans of Haring's will not want to miss this definitive account of the artist's life, which Pulitzer-winner biographer Stacy Schiff calls "a keen-eyed, beautifully written biography, atmospheric, exuberant, and as radiant as they come." —DF The Riddles of the Sphinx by Anna Shechtman [NF] Sometimes you encounter a book that seems to have been written specifically for you; this was the feeling I had when I first saw the deal announcement for Shechtman's debut book back in January 2022. A feminist history of the crossword puzzle? Are you kidding me? I'm as passionate a cruciverbalist as I am a feminist, so you can imagine how ravenously I read this book. The Riddles of the Sphinx is one of the best books of 2024, hands down, and I can't wait for everyone else—puzzlers and laymen alike—to fall in love with it too. —SMS The Silver Bone by Andrey Kurkov, tr. Boris Drayluk [F] Kurkov is one of Ukraine's most celebrated novelists, and his latest book is a murder mystery set against the backdrop of WWI-era Kyiv. I'll admit what particularly excites me about The Silver Bone, though, is that it is translated by Dralyuk, who's one of the best literary translators working today (not to mention a superb writer, editor, and poet). In Drayluk's hands, Kurkov's signature humor and sparkling style come alive. —SMS Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls [NF] This multigenerational graphic memoir follows Hull, alongside her mother and grandmother, both of whom hail from China, across time and space as the delicate line between nature and nurture is strained by the forces of trauma, duty, and mental illness. Manjula Martin calls Feeding Ghosts “one of the best stories I’ve read about the tension between family, history, and self.” —DF It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over by Anne de Marcken [F] Haunting prose and a pithy crow guide readers through Marcken's novel of life after death. In a realm between reality and eternity, the undead traverse westward through their end-of-life highlight reel, dissecting memories, feelings, and devotions while slowly coming to terms with what it means to have lived once all that remains is love. Alexandra Kleeman admits that she "was absolute putty in this book's hands." —DF Parasol Against the Axe by Helen Oyeyemi [F] When I visited Prague, a year after the 1989 Velvet Revolution, the Czech capital struck me as a magical place, where anything is possible, and Oyeyemi captures the essence of Prague in Parasol Against the Axe, the story of a woman who attends her estranged friend's bachelorette weekend in the city. A tale in which reality constantly shifts for the characters and there is a thin line between the factual and the imagined in their relationships, this is definitely my kind of a read. —CK Say Hello to My Little Friend by Jennine Capó Crucet [F] Crucet's latest novel centers on a failed Pitbull impersonator who embarks on a quest to turn himself into a modern-day Tony Montana—a quest that leads him to cross paths with Lolita, a captive orca at the Miami Seaquariam. Winking at both Scarface and Moby-Dick, Say Hello to My Little Friend is "a masterclass in pace and precision," per Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. —SMS But the Girl by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu [F] Girl, a Malaysian-Australian who leaves home for the U.K. to study Sylvia Plath and write a postcolonial novel, finds herself unable to shake home—or to figure out what a "postcolonial novel" even is. Blurbs are untrustworthy, but anything blurbed by Brandon Taylor is almost certainly worth checking out. —JHM Wrong Is Not My Name by Erica N. Cardwell [NF] Cardwell blends memoir, criticism, and theory to place her own Künstlerroman in conversation with the work of Black visual artists like Lorna Simpson, Lorraine O'Grady, and Kara Walker. In interconnected essays, Cardwell celebrates the brilliant Black women who use art and storytelling to claim their place in the world. —SMS Great Expectations by Vinson Cunningham [F] A theater critic at the New Yorker, Cunningham is one of my favorite writers working today, so I was thrilled to learn of his debut novel, which cheekily steals its title from the Dickens classic. Following a young Black man as he works on a historic presidential campaign, Great Expectations tackles questions of politics, race, religion, and family with Cunningham's characteristic poise and insight. —SMS The Future of Songwriting by Kristin Hersh [NF] In this slim volume, Throwing Muses frontwoman and singer-songwriter Hersh considers the future of her craft. Talking to friends and colleagues, visiting museums and acupuncturists, Hersh threads together eclectic perspectives on how songs get made and how the music industry can (and should) change. —SMS You Get What You Pay For by Morgan Parker [NF] Parker, a brilliant poet and author of the stellar There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce, debuts as an essayist with this candid, keen-eyed collection about life as a Black woman in America. Casting her gaze both inward and onto popular culture, Parker sees everything and holds back nothing. —SMS Mother Doll by Katya Apekina [F] Following up her debut novel, The Deeper the Water, the Uglier the Fish, Apekina's Mother Doll follows Zhenia, an expectant mother adrift in Los Angeles whose world is rocked by a strange call from a psychic medium with a message from Zhenia's Russian Revolutionary great-grandmother. Elif Batuman calls this one "a rare achivement." —SMS Solidarity by Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix [NF] What does "solidarity" mean in a stratified society and fractured world? Organizers and activists Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor look at the history of the concept—from its origins in Ancient Rome to its invocation during the Black Live Matter movement—to envision a future in which calls for solidarity can produce tangible political change. —SMS The Manicurist's Daughter by Susan Lieu [NF] After her mother, a refugee of the Vietnam war and the owner of two nail salons, dies from a botched cosmetic surgery, Lieu goes looking for answers about her mother's mysterious life and untimely death. Springing from her hit one-woman show 140 LBS: How Beauty Killed My Mother, Lieu's debut memoir explores immigration, beauty, and the American Dream. —SMS Through the Night Like a Snake ed. Sarah Coolidge [F] There's no horror quite like Latin American horror, as any revering reader of Cristina Rivera Garza—is there any other kind?—could tell you. Two Lines Press consistently puts out some of the best literature in translation that one can come by in the U.S., and this story collection looks like another banger. —JHM Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel [F] Bullwinkel's debut collection, Belly Up, was a canful of the uncanny. Her debut novel, on the other hand, sounds gritty and grounded, following the stories of eight teenage girls boxing in a tournament in Reno. Boxing stories often manage to punch above their weight (sorry) in pretty much any medium, even if you're not versed enough in the sport to know how hackneyed and clichéd that previous clause's idiomatic usage was. —JHM Choose This Now by Nicole Haroutunian [F] Haroutunian's novel-in-stories, part of Noemi Press's Prose Series, follows a pair of inseparable friends over the years as they embark on careers, make art, fall in and out of love, and become mothers. Lydia Kiesling calls this one "a sparkling, intimate look at women's lives" that makes "for a lovely reading experience." —SMS Death by Laughter by Maggie Hennefeld [NF] Hennefeld's scholarly study explores the forgotten history and politics of women's "hysterical laughter," drawing on silent films, affect theory, feminist film theory, and more. Hennefeld, a professor of cultural studies and comparative literature, offers a unique take on women's pleasure and repression—and how the advent of cinema allowed women to laugh as never before. —SMS James by Percival Everett [F] In James, the once-secondary character of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn narrates his version of life on the Mississippi. Jim, who escapes enslavement only to end up in adventures with white runaway Huck, gives his account of well-known events from Mark Twain’s 1880s novel (and departs from the record to say what happened next). Everett makes readers hyperaware of code-switching—his 2001 novel Erasure was about a Black novelist whose career skyrockets when he doubles down on cynical stereotypes of Blackness—and Jim, in James, will have readers talking about written vernacular, self-awareness, and autonomy. —NodB A Chance Meeting by Rachel Cohen [NF] Chronicling 36 fateful encounters among 30 writers and artists—from Henry James to Gertrude Stein, Mark Twain to Zora Neal Hurston—Cohen paints a vast and sparkling portrait of a century's worth of American culture. First published in 2004, and reissued by NYRB, A Chance Meeting captures the spark of artistic serendipity, and the revived edition features a new afterword by the author. —SMS Who's Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler [NF] Butler has had an outsized impact on how we think and talk about gender and sexuality ever since the 1990 publication of Gender Trouble, which theorized the way gender is performed and constructed. Butler's latest is a polemic that takes on the advent of "anti-gender ideology movements," arguing that "gender" has become a bogeyman for authoritarian regimes. —SMS Green Frog by Gina Chung [F] Chung, author of the acclaimed debut novel Sea Change, returns with a story collection about daughters and ghosts, divorcees and demons, praying mantises and the titular verdant amphibians. Morgan Talty calls these 15 stories "remarkable." —SMS No Judgment by Lauren Oyler [NF] Oyler is one of our sharpest and most fearless cultural critics, and No Judgement is her first essay collection, following up her debut novel Fake Accounts. Opining on gossip and anxiety, autofiction and vulnerability, and much, much more, Oyler's caustic wit and penetrating voice shine through every essay. —SMS Memory Piece by Lisa Ko [F] Following up her National Book Award–nominated debut novel The Leavers, Ko's latest follows three lifelong friends from the 1990s to the 2040s. A meditation on the meaning of a "meaningful life" and how to adapt to an increasingly inhospitable world, Memory Piece has earned praise from Jacqueline Woodson and C Pam Zhang, who calls the novel "bright with defiance, intelligence, and stubborn love." —SMS On Giving Up by Adam Phillips [NF] Psychoanalyst Phillips—whose previous subjects include getting better, wanting to change, and missing out—takes a swing at what feels like a particularly timely impulse: giving up. Questioning our notions of sacrifice and agency, Phillips asks when giving up might be beneficial to us, and which parts of our lives might actually be worth giving up. —SMS There's Always This Year by Hanif Abdurraqib [NF] Abdurraqib returns (how lucky are we!) with a reflection on his lifelong love of basketball and how it's shaped him. While reconsidering his childhood, his relationship with his father, and the meaning of "making it," Abdurraqib delivers what Shea Serrano calls "the sharpest, most insightful, most poignant writing of his career." —SMS The Angel of Indian Lake by Stephen Graham Jones [F] The final installment of Jones's trilogy picks up four years after Don't Fear the Reaper. Jade Daniels is back from prison, and upon her release, she encounters serial killer-worshipping cults, the devastating effects of gentrification, and—worst of all—the curse of the Lake Witch. Horror maestro Brian Keene calls Jones's grand finale "an easy contender for Best of the Year." —LA Worry by Alexandra Tanner [F] This deadpan debut novel from Tanner follows two sisters on the cusp of adulthood as they struggle to figure out what the hell to do with their lives. Heads butt, tempers flare, and existential dread creeps in as their paths diverge amid the backdrop of Brooklyn in 2019. Limning the absurdity of our internet-addled, dread-filled moment, Tanner establishes herself as a formidable novelist, with Kiley Reid calling Worry "the best thing I've read in a very long time." —DF [millions_email]

In Play – Runs: Baseball and the Internet

- | 11
I.  From 200 to Infinity One of the popular fallacies of the internet is that it is "like cable TV on steroids."  Just as cable had expanded the range of channels from 12 to 50 to 200, the internet would expand the number of information outlets from 200 to something like infinity.  The problem with this analogy is two fold.  For one thing, infinity is completely different from 200, so much so that it renders the analogy useless.  For another, it ignores a key component of the web – namely, its accessibility.  Cable TV was one-way information – the TV gave you information, and you took it.  Occasionally, maybe, one might appear on a Larry King-style call-in show, or find himself wandering across the stage on The Price is Right, but it was highly improbable.  With the exception of public access TV, a limited-range outlet at best, the TV viewer was exactly that and little else.  Not so with the internet, where the proliferation of user-populated sites – from YouTube to Facebook to blogs to personal sites to message boards – means that the primary producers of the internet are the viewers themselves. It didn’t always seem that this would be the case.  When I first encountered the web, back in the mid-1990s, I had no idea what to make of it.  This was in the pre-Google days, and though there were plenty of search engines available to me, I wasn’t quite sure what I was searching for.  As a result, I turned to trusted sources from what we now think of as the old media.  I visited the New York Times website, the Boston Globe, and ESPN.com.  The latter provided my first “aha” moment on the web.  Here, at my disposal, were all sorts of facts and articles – updated every few hours! – on all the sports teams I wanted to know about.  The Syracuse Orangemen, the Washington Redskins, the Boston Red Sox.  It was like ESPN, but more so. At the time, it certainly seemed like the internet would be a lot like cable TV.  At the very least, it would be run by the same people.  Even when I started to learn about sites that weren’t connected to any corporation, to read blogs and the like, I still figured it was only a matter of time until all of this turned into something corporate.  Maybe it would play out like radio, itself first a two-way form of communication later harnessed and controlled by corporations.  Maybe someday The Clash would be writing songs about pirate websites and such. It didn’t happen.  At this point, it seems doubtful it will.  Instead, corporations sprang up to make money off the fact that anybody could write anything they wanted on a website (and eventually even appear on audio and video) and also to make money at the point of access – a continuing threat to the freedom of the web.  They monetized the web (parts of it at least) without corporatizing it.  The infinite number of niches and chasms remain, and while some sites have come to stand for expertise or quality through their association with some old media entity or individual, a sort of survival of the fittest remains on much of the web.  To be an expert, to know something, means only to prove it to your audience.  The web is fundamentally changing how we experience much of life, and nowhere is this more apparent to me than how we experience sports. II.  J.D. Drew as Baseball Litmus Test A few weeks ago, as the Major League Baseball season was coming to an end, Theo Epstein, the general manager of the Boston Red Sox, appeared on a local Boston sports talk radio show to discuss the season and the upcoming post season (You can listen to the audio here).  It wasn’t long before Epstein brought the conversation to one of the show’s favorite topics, Red Sox right fielder J.D. Drew.  Drew is a controversial figure in Boston, and to a lesser extent, around the league, as he embodies the dichotomy that exists between how two divergent groups of fans and commentators see the game.  As one of the posters on the popular Red Sox fan site Sons of Sam Horn put it, “It's reached the point where I can judge someone's knowledge of baseball based on how they view JD Drew.” To get an idea of what these people meant by these comments, we need a bit of historical perspective.  By now, even the most casual baseball fan is aware of the so called “Moneyball” concepts, popularized in Michael Lewis’ book Moneyball, about Billy Beane’s work running the Oakland Athletics – that the economics of baseball have forced teams to find value in players other teams have disregarded, and for most, statistical analysis has become the tool they use to find these players.  As a result, certain once underappreciated statistics, such as On-Base Percentage – the measure of how often a player reaches base by hit, walk or hit-by-pitch – have replaced the more traditional measurements of greatness, such as Batting Average or Runs Batted In.  Those who appreciate the value of statistical analysis are often called students of sabermetrics, a word derived from the acronym "SABR," for the Society of American Baseball Research, a group dedicated to studying the game. One of the tenets that sabermetricians adhere to is that the best thing a batter can do for his team is not make an out.  This doesn’t necessarily mean get a hit, but rather get on base and avoid being thrown out once you do so. In the field, of course, the object is reversed – convert as many batted balls into outs as possible.  To be a complete ballplayer, one would need to field his position well. All of which brings us back to J.D. Drew.  Few players in the game today are better at not making outs at the plate and converting outs in the field than J.D. Drew.  He consistently ranks near the top of the league in OBP, and this season, he was second among all outfielders in the American League in OPS (which measures on base percentage plus slugging percentage, the latter a measure of power hitting).  He’s also a solid fielder with above average range playing in the quirky and spacious rightfield of Fenway Park.  In addition to these skills, he’s also a talented baserunner, scoring a very high number of runs as taken as a percentage of opportunities. Based on this, one might reasonably expect J.D. Drew to be a fan favorite in Boston, respected for his good play and admired for his non-out-making prowess.  But this is not the case.  In fact, he’s arguably among the least popular players on the team.  The radio show on which Epstein appeared scapegoats Drew for his frequent injuries (he typically plays less than the average number of games) and for not driving in enough runs (only 67 in 2009).  They call him soft or aloof, in part because he sits out games with minor injuries rather than playing through the pain, and in part because he has a calm demeanor.  You aren’t likely to see Drew attack a water cooler with a bat or slam his helmet down and curse after grounding out.  And so they say he doesn’t care.  In fact, it’s so often said about Drew that it’s become a joke on the SoSH site.  Whenever Drew hits a double, someone on the site will remark, “If he cared more, he’d have hit a homerun.” Why this disparity between reality and the fans’ perception?  Why don’t more people recognize the greatness of a player like J.D. Drew?  The answers lie at the very heart of how we interact with sports and what we want sports to be.  As the web and mobile technologies make their way increasingly into the world of sports, the nature of being a fan or an expert is changing, as well.  As we’ll see, this change is hardly unique to the world of sports. III.  Sports Talk Radio:  The Fresh Take Radio is the medium of failure.  My limited exposure to political talk radio is of the guest ticking off the multiple failures of the opposing political party.  “Barack Obama failed to get his health care bill through Congress in any meaningful form.”  “Congress failed to pass Obama’s healthcare bill.”  Sports radio, I can attest, is positively obsessed with failure. It’s a cliché that baseball and the radio were made for each other.  Every hack writer and pundit has waxed rhapsodic on the charms of Harry Caray calling Cubs games on the porch, of Vin Scully’s dulcet tones filling the midsummer air.  Like most clichés, there’s some truth to it.  Baseball is slower and more contained than a “continuous flow” sport like basketball, hockey or soccer, and more open to description – due mainly to its lack of action – than football.  There’s room in baseball for storytelling, and radio broadcasters can use that room to describe the game, to fill in its gaps and to reveal its secrets. What baseball wasn’t made for was sports talk radio. A confession here:  when I’m in the car, I do enjoy listening to the idiocy of sports talk radio.  I imagine the pleasure is similar to listening to Rush Limbaugh and saying “wrong,” over and over again.  There is pleasure – the pleasure of superiority – in listening to someone who you believe knows less than you do prattle on about a given subject.  Perhaps it’s the host’s failure I revel in. For my money, the best sports radio program is The Jungle with Jim Rome. Full of bluster and arrogant to the point of parody, Jim Rome manages to execute the delicate balancing act of mocking the incessant parroting of call-in shows (he gleefully refers to his listeners as “clones,” much as Rush Limbaugh’s listeners self-identify as “Dittoheads.”) while simultaneously promoting the very qualities the show espouses to critique.  Rome welcomes calls and emails from listeners, each missive layered with his own brand of jockish patois.  A call might contain an oblique, abbreviated reference to the caller’s hometown (“Jeff in C-Bus, what is up?”) as well as certain bizarre Rome-isms that callers perpetuate (use of the word “war” to mean “I’m in favor of,” for instance). The Rome show is built around the call of the day and the email of the day (emailers frequently send in humorous emails in the name of some disgraced athlete, or even, in a few cases, in the name of an idea itself), challenging listeners to craft their best Rome-esque “take” on any subject they choose, often in the form of a series of insults hurled at the fan base of another team.  This leads to most callers memorizing their takes, as Rome will disconnect anyone he believes to be reading a pre-prepared take.  Have I mentioned yet that the Rome Show airs smack in the middle of the workday for the average American?  Where do the clones find the time? It’s the absurdity of the Rome Show that makes it so entertaining.  Rome’s personal cadence is so specific that it only plays on radio.  His forays into TV have been relatively forgettable with the exception of the infamous episode in which he provoked football player Jim Everett to attack him after repeatedly calling him by name of (female tennis star) Chris Everett (more on this in a moment).  For those who have never heard him, imagine a monologue delivered with the cadence of a Fugazi song, complete with numerous dead air pauses.  If anyone can vocalize an ellipses, it’s Rome.  When coupled with his trademark disdain for the audience, the combination can be lethally entertaining. The Rome Show, more than any other sports radio show, examines sports culture as much as it does sports themselves.  Much of the time, the actual game serves as nothing more than a starting point for a longer discussion of fandom.  After a recent Monday Night Football game between the New England Patriots and the Buffalo Bills, Rome spent the opening segment of the show discussing not the fumbled kickoff that ruined the Bills’ chances, but rather the behavior of one fan after the game (the fan took out his frustrations on the fumbler by carving an obscene design on the player’s front lawn).  While Rome is almost always critical of these troublemakers, one can’t help but detect some tincture of amusement beneath his contempt.  After all, without obscene lawn carvings, he and his clones would have to talk about the game itself, which they don’t want to do. Rome discusses baseball less than he does the other sports.  When he does talk about it, it’s more gossip column than box scores.  He’ll talk about A-Rod dating Kate Hudson or Manny Ramirez being suspended for steroids.  Just this past week, when the World Series was in full stride and Pedro Martinez had just returned to face the Yankees for the first time in years, Rome was busy talking about Andre Agassi’s drug use.  A previous show talked at length about Magic Johnson’s new book, rather than the upcoming series.  Rome isn’t as interested in baseball as he is in failure, and in that, he’s not alone. You’d think baseball would be perfect for talk radio, as it’s all about failure, something talk radio loves more than air itself.  In baseball, a great offensive player makes an out roughly 60% of the time.  That’s incredible failure right there.  Couple in the unique “walk off” aspect of its structure, in which the other team gets an equal chance to come back, no matter the score, and there’s the recipe for real, gut-punch level losses.  That’s the stuff of talk radio bliss.  But baseball lags well behind football and basketball in the trinity of sports talk fodder. In part, this is simply the result of baseball’s status as the least popular of the major sports, garnering smaller TV audiences every year, its long season causing fatigue in the casual fan. But there’s something else at work here, and it has to do precisely with why J.D. Drew remains a figure of some ambivalence in the world of baseball. As demonstrated by the Jim Rome show, sports talk radio is an intellectual-free zone.  Despite the intelligence level of those running the shows (likely quite high, in most cases), the fan base is decidedly anti-intellectual, and the audience, rather than the host, sets the agenda.  The discourse on the shows is to varying degrees sexist and homophobic.  Even the most progressive shows – Dan Patrick’s smartest guy in the country club shtick, for instance – have trouble transcending the hypermasculine rhetoric of sports.  Jim Rome’s lone transcendent TV moment came from insulting a football player by calling him the name of a female tennis star, after all.  Additionally, sport’s infatuation with militaristic pomp and corporate involvement (“Guests appear via the Subway Fresh Take Hotline”) create a climate not unlike the Republican National Convention at most sporting events. This comes as no surprise.  Much of the discourse about sports is couched in a conservative ethos, regardless of the political inclinations of those in the dialog.  This stems, I think, from sport’s status as a relatively pure meritocracy.  The best players rise to the top based on nothing but their performance on the field. It was long ego exposed that so much of the announcing in sports is inherently racist:  black players are often called “articulate,” while white players usually get credit for being “gamers” or for their exceptional hustle.  It’s assumed a white player would be well-spoken, while black athletes must be more naturally athletic than white ones.  Even this latter “compliment” is actually an insult, implying that black athletes' success stems from natural ability rather than work ethic (This isn’t unique to sports, of course; Joe Biden once referred to Barack Obama as articulate).  With this in mind, it isn’t surprising that most sports rhetoric embraces another aspect of conservative thought, a disdain for intellectualism. It is radio’s defiance towards intellectualism that creates this climate for J.D. Drew bashing.  To give Drew his due is to allow the cerebral back into the discussion, and that’s a losing game for the sports talk radio caller (or host, for that matter).  After all, what’s left to say when one side argues with facts and figures and the other with insults and names?  If we actually talked about the game on the field, what would Jeff in C-Bus do? IV.  “In play – runs:”  Baseball was made for the Internet Moving to the West Coast killed baseball on television for me.  East coast games start at four in the afternoon, long before I leave work most days.  To be honest, even the radio is out of the question.  I’m lucky to catch a few innings in the car on the way home (back when I used to drive to work) or as I make dinner in the kitchen, and then it’s the Angels or the Dodgers, neither team a favorite of mine.  Ten years ago, I might have been finished as a baseball fan.  But ten years ago, the fan didn’t have the resources I have at my disposal now.  Thank God for the internet.  Specifically, thank God for Gameday. Gameday is a browser-based program offered on the Major League Baseball website that allows one to follow a baseball game live via a series of graphic representations of the on-field play.  In plain English, this program tells you who is up, who is pitching, what the count is (how many balls and strikes) what pitches have been thrown and how many, and the result of each pitch.  In some ways, Gameday is the descendant of old telegraph systems that gambling parlors would use to reflect the results of a game in play, moving baserunners about a large board and reflecting balls and strikes and outs with colored light bulbs (such a system appears in the movie Eight Men Out). It may seem absurd to follow a game this way – you’re neither watching nor listening – yet to a baseball fan with little recourse, it’s a lifesaving invention on par with the telephone or whiskey.  And believe it or not, though it can feel soulless and dead, when paired with a game thread from a fan site like Sons of Sam Horn, it can be incredibly engrossing and fulfilling. Gameday watching, if one can call it that, is a strange thing.  In many respects, it is a poor substitute for watching the game or for listening to it.  It presents an incomplete picture of what happens on the field, a picture filtered through textual description.  As the ball is pitched, Gameday tells you whether it is a ball or a strike (each is color coded as well) or whether it has been hit in play.  If it’s been hit in play, it will say one of three things:  “In play – out(s),” “In play – no out,” or “In play – runs.”  Depending on the situation of the game, a blue dot – signaling a ball in play – can induce paranoia or euphoria.  Many are the times I’ve prayed to a God I don’t believe in for an “In play – runs.” Of course, this is where the incompleteness of Gameday becomes apparent.  “In play – runs” can mean a great number of things, depending on circumstances.  For instance, in a situation in which the bases are loaded with no one out, it might mean a grand slam or it might mean a double play producing one run and leaving two outs and a man on third.  Those are two radically different outcomes, both of which would be reflected with a little blue dot in Gameday. Yet Gameday also provides information that doesn’t appear on television or radio broadcasts.  For one thing, Gameday uses Pitch FX, a computer system that tracks the speed and movement of a pitch to determine what type of pitch it really is.  Compare this with the work of your average analyst who often calls a curve ball and change-up and vice versa, and one can begin to see the wealth of information that Gameday provides.  At the click of a mouse, the Gameday watcher can have just about any stat imaginable.  He or she can check back to see how a particular batter was pitched to several innings prior. By putting an absurd number of statistics and tools at a fan’s disposal, the internet makes several very important things possible.  First, it exposes many so-called experts as charlatans.  For instance, let’s say a manager decides to bunt a player from first base to second base in the fourth inning of a 0-0 game.  The announcer might say “That’s a smart baseball move.”  In the past, the average fan would have no way to know whether it was smart or not.  If it worked, it must’ve been smart.  If it didn’t, well… Now, that same fan can fire up his Fangraphs iPhone app and discover that the win expectancy of that play is negative.  In other words, the bunting team has a lesser chance of winning after the bunt than before it.  Stupid move. While I’d much rather listen to Vin Scully or even Dave Campbell than watch a game on Gameday, it has saved me from suffering through the Tim McCarvers and Joe Morgans of the world on many a night (Morgan is so terrible there was a website dedicated to having him fired).  These color commentators continue to play a role in the press box, but it’s one that must change with the times.  No longer do we need to rely on witchdoctors like Joe Morgan to tell us what makes sense and what does not.  We have a better way.  Which leads to the second thing the internet encourages – objective analysis. It is no coincidence that the rise of "Moneyball" and sabermetrics has coincided roughly with the emergence of the internet and the ubiquity of the personal computer.  While there were isolated statisticians and theorists toiling away with pencil and paper in the pre-wired era, the web has given those people powerful new tools and brought them together into meaningful groups.  In turn, it’s had an impact how the game is thought of at both the level of the fan and in the front offices around the league.  As a fan, sites like Sons of Sam Horn and their brethren give intelligent fans a place to discuss the team free from the constructs of a corporate radio channel, where the discussion must plunge inevitably to the lowest common denominator.  They’ve created a community where none existed before, a sort of virtual sports bar where everyone understood the value (and limitations) of OPS.  The internet is a sports fan’s utopia, a place where, for once, we can just talk about the game, without all that other crap. It isn’t hard to see the effect statistical analysis on the average baseball front office.  It’s as common now for a 35-year-old with a business degree and no on-the-field experience to be at the helm as is it for a grizzled former player or scout.  The industry has undergone a sea change, a transformation that is still underway.  The underlying principles are pretty simple – if we can determine who the best players are through statistical analyses, then with the right tools, anyone should be able to do it.  No baseball experience is necessary.  Carried to its logical conclusion, this idea leads to something still fairly unthinkable in the other major sports – a woman making the decisions about the players on the team.  The San Diego Padres recently gave serious consideration to Dodgers Assistant GM Kim Ng (They ultimately settled on Red Sox assistant GM Jed Hoyer), and it is likely that Ng will land a GM gig in the next few years.  This would have been impossible ten years ago, and in many ways, the internet and technology, by making the game knowable and quantifiable, made it happen. V.  Do Something:  J.D. Drew and Femininity There are few more frustrating moments in sports than watching a baseball player take a called third strike.  The player seems passive, his fate claiming him rather than the opposite.  “Do something!” the fans shout.  “At least if he’d swung he might have gotten a hit.”  And if that same player then walks slowly back to the dugout and gets his glove, not even pausing to curse or hit a water cooler, then that player might look like he isn’t even trying.  He might look like he doesn’t care. J.D. Drew takes his fair share of called third strikes – it’s the necessary byproduct of seeing lots of pitches – but what he doesn’t do is overreact, slam his helmet to the ground and steam in the dugout afterward.  He gets his glove, and he gets ready to play the field.  And this, it seems, pisses off a whole lot of people.  They see his selectivity as passivity, and, I think, they see this as being somehow less than masculine.  As proof, I'd offer the many homophobic and sexist insults hurled at Drew, but, really, I'd rather not. Baseball is unique among sports for many reasons, and one of the more important ones is that it is the one of the few sports (golf might be another one) where one can’t ‘try’ their way to greatness.  You can’t swing harder and expect to get a hit.  In fact, added effort often leads to worse play in baseball.  Pitchers overthrow, missing the strike zone badly.  Hitters flail at pitches they have no chance to hit.  In football, a player can “dig deep” and overpower the man on the opposite side of the ball, simply by brute physical force.  In basketball, you can out hustle the other team, finding a reserve of strength to dribble past a defender or out work someone for a rebound or a loose ball.  Not so in baseball, and I think this bothers a lot of people. We desperately want our sports to reflect the best of our society.  If you show up everyday and try hard, you can succeed.  Isn’t this why we celebrated Cal Ripken Jr.’s consecutive games played record?  Here was the embodiment of work ethic, a guy who showed up everyday.  It was baseball’s award for perfect attendance.  But I’ve always thought of Ripken’s streak with ambivalence.  How many times did he cost his team by playing through an injury?  How good was Ripken at sixty percent, and might the Orioles have been better off with a healthy player in his spot occasionally?  I see this at work, as well, where employees come into work with colds, work at diminished capacity and infect others with their germs.  Wouldn’t it have been better to stay home and recuperate?  I think it would be, but that’s the not the American way. J.D. Drew is the anti-Ripken; he sits out roughly a game a week, often at his own behest.  If he tweaks his ankle or pulls a muscle, he sits out rather than play through the pain.  The result is that he averages 130 games played out of a possible 162.  He doesn’t play unless he’s nearly completely healthy.  This earns him the label of being soft or fragile, not a tough guy.  It makes him seem almost feminine, and in sports, that isn’t a compliment. There are other aspects of Drew’s game that, at first blush, appear less than hyper-masculine.  For instance, he rarely dives to catch a ball in the outfield.  Some fans see this as soft, that he’s afraid to hurt himself by diving to the ground (Many baseball analysts judge a player’s level of effort by the dirt on his uniform).  Of course, the reason he rarely dives is that he’s often in position to catch the ball without diving (He gets to an above average number of batted balls for a rightfielder).  When he makes an out, he doesn’t throw a tantrum or sulk.  When he’s going well or when he’s in a slump, his demeanor is always relatively constant.  You’re not likely to see J.D. Drew instigate a brawl with the opposing team, as fan favorite Kevin Youkilis has been known to do on occasion. I think it's no coincidence that this year is the first season I've really appreciated Drew's talents.  This year I watched fewer games on TV than ever before.  When Drew makes an out on Gameday, his avatar just disappears, same as Kevin Youkilis or Derek Jeter or any other player.  When Drew makes a catch in right, I can't see whether he dove or not.  I can't see how dirty his uniform is.  It's easier to appreciate J.D. Drew when you aren't watching him, as so many of his skills come with the double-edged sword of frustration. This is also precisely why sports talk radio hates him – all of their analysis is based on what they can see and what their gut tells them.  To give J.D. Drew his fair credit is to admit that preparation and skill are more important than effort, that raw aggression isn’t worth much in baseball, that hyper-masculinity doesn’t reign on the diamond as it does on the gridiron or the court.  It’s also, I think, to acknowledge that there are real measurements for greatness in baseball, and that those measurements, with a bit of effort, are equally accessible to everyone – professional and amateur alike.  To acknowledge that is to admit that, for lack of a better phrase, you are full of shit. The internet has given birth to a new generation of sports expertise.  Drew Magary, writing on one of the web’s most popular sports blogs, Deadspin, theorized that we are seeing the end of “privileged sports reporting,” that is, reporting that relies on access to athletes, coaches and owners: Reilly assumes that, if you haven't been in a locker room, if you've never had access, then you can't possibly have any sort of valuable insight to offer on sports. This is wrong, of course. I'm pretty sure Bill James didn't set foot into a locker room before changing the fundamental nature of baseball scouting forever. He didn't need to see Rich Garces' tits in order to glean insight as to how he pitches (though I've heard Rich Garces' tits are AMAZING). Shit, he didn't even need to see him play on TV. In the same way that these privileged sports writers are now giving way to legions writing from the fan’s perspective (the way Bill Simmons -- now "Sponsored by Miller Lite" -- used to, as Magary points out), so too are traditional baseball experts ceding territory to upstarts with a spreadsheet.  Make no mistake, this is having a profoundly democratizing effect on baseball, both the sport on the field and its perception by fans. It’s even giving rise to a hybrid fan/expert, as countless message board posters use obscure stats like UZR and WARP, and learn to wield Pitch FX as a weapon.  These fexperts (a term I just coined) will probably never get on TV or radio as analysts (they might not be any good at talking, for all I know), but they’re making an invaluable contribution to my life as a fan.  They’re deepening my appreciation of the game, even as I get to watch fewer and fewer of the actual games themselves. The Red Sox were eliminated from the post season early this year, falling in three straight to the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.  They held a lead for much of the final game, built, in part, by a J.D. Drew homerun.  The announcers were probably busy praising the Angels for “playing the game the right way,” ignoring that they would eventually win the series because of their superior plate discipline and control of the strikezone.  I wouldn’t know, as I was following along on Gameday. All I had to go on was a ream of statistics, some conversation with my fellow fans and the occasional – far too occasional – “In play – runs.” It was after that last game, a sucker-punch of a loss, that I realized how different my life as a fan is in the wake of the internet.  I still called my father and commiserated over the loss, but afterwards I turned to Sons of Sam Horn, and found multiple threads – each one pages long – dedicated to specific decisions in the game, which moments actually led to the loss and what could be done to improve next years team.  There were eulogies for the team (a tradition is to post the text of A. Bartlett Giamatti’s essay "The Green Fields of the Mind") as well as threads about the upcoming ALCS between New York and Anaheim (or Los Angeles or…wherever) filled with gallows humor.  But most of all there were dialogs and discussions based around facts as much as emotion.  Discussions where a fan could use his brain as much as his heart. The next day, the radio call-in shows were no doubt full of vitriol and disgust – who should be fired, who should be ashamed.  Meanwhile, I was thinking about what happened to Jonathan Papelbon’s secondary pitches.  Thankfully, there’s a place for me now, a place where all of us who recognize that J.D. Drew is a valuable baseball player can talk about the game free from the noise of the ignorant.  Is it a tiny bit elitist?  Maybe, but I prefer to think of it as I do sports – it’s a meritocracy.  If you don’t know what you’re talking about or you can’t back it up with some facts, take it elsewhere (I don’t even post that much on the part of the board dedicated to baseball, as there are so many people there who know more than I). Of course, getting most of one’s information through the web comes with a price.  Recently in The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert reviewed a new book by Cass R. Sunstein called On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done.  In the book, Sunstein explains that while the net has given us more opportunities to find the information we want, it’s also given us unprecedented ability to ignore the information we don’t want.   This creates, in his view, "cyberpolarization." Two sides of one issue move farther apart as they spend an increasing amount of time around their fellow believers. Certainly there’s some of this on the web with regards to baseball.  There are those who argue that the sabermetrics crowd puts too much faith in numbers, even those that are plainly contradictory to what their eyes tell them.  Others say that the rise of the statistical baseball fan has sucked some vitality from the game, that it has, as the basketball site FreeDarko.com put it, “[turned] an art into a science.”  One might point out that as statistical analysis has increasingly gained acceptance, the game’s popularity has plummeted.  I don’t think this is the case, but it’s certainly an interesting coincidence. But I don’t feel that experiencing baseball on the internet has turned me into a zealot.  On the contrary, I think it’s allowed me to become the kind of fan I always wanted to be – quiet, contemplative, cerebral and yet still occasionally irrational.  Maybe it’s because there are so many divergent opinions online – some of the members of Sons of Sam Horn continue to doubt J.D. Drew, for instance – and where each position is analyzed and cross-examined.  It seems to me that as the internet provides more and more tools to the average fan, it reveals more about what the fan wants from sports, and, in a larger sense, from the world.  One person might want tangible proof of something while another has faith.  One person might want to see the triumph of effort over skill or vice versa.  The greatness of the web, I think, is that it allows all of those people to have their say. In the end, fandom of every kind, might best be described by the signature of one of Sons of Sam Horn’s longtime members. “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” [Image credit: Wendy Harman]