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I’m reading La Morte D’Arthur for the first time and, just a few dozen pages in, it’s not what The Once and Future King or even The Boys King Arthur give you. Right on page one, King Uther Pendragon tries to seduc

I was hard on Yeats a while back when I started reading a collection of his poems. The early ones were rough, but he’s improved greatly as it’s gone on (the collection appears to be roughly chronol

I just finished Little, Big and I felt like I was following along well until the last 75 pages or so. Around that point, things got very abstract. I think Alice Through The Looking Glass might be a key to piecing it together.

As a postmortem on the Cardinals’ season, I looked at their actual wins vs. their “expected” wins based on WAR (I’m using Fangraphs WAR here). I’d been tracking this throughout the season, so I wasn’t surprised to see that at the trade deadline, t

Something I love about baseball culture is that certain guys, even among their hundreds of professional baseball-playing peers, are considered more baseball than the others. They get nicknames like Teddy Baseball, Mr. Baseball, Jimmy Ball

The temperatures are coming down, so naturally I’m listening to Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You. A particular section of Time Escaping jumped out at me. Poison in the ether Swinging still incessant pen

Following Jimmy Buffett’s death on Friday, I was surprised by the way he was eulogized. I had expected contrarian takes about him as the mouthpiece of anhedonic Boomer excess, the colonialism inherent in the island lifestyle he protrayed, his prot

This is a thought exercise for me. I’m trying to suss out the different levels of “poor performance” that a team can have, and think about how much of it is attributable to bad luck, poor preparation, or just the weirdness of baseball. I po

The St. Louis Cardinals have massively under-performed this year. They were considered at the start of the season to be the favorite in the NL Central. Instead they are 16 games below .500. What happened? The long answer is “a whole lot wen

I don’t know whether this has been written about somewhere, but I just finished Swann’s Way. The whole novel feels like an inspiration for Peace (this is not itself a novel thought), but I am starting to think Aunt Olivia is a standin for