Happy May. Yes, that conflicts with the fact that this is supposed to be April’s roundup, but I was on the road for 15 hours this weekend (more on that in this week’s Pretty Good). So this is both a bit late and a bit of a shorter edition, but the stories within are generally larger, meatier items.
Also, welcome to the new subscribers, who may be confused by the format. This is the end-of-month roundup of links from around the web. Regular Pretty Good entries will return later this week.
This also gives me the chance to ask you, as I will sporadically, if you have anything specific you’d like me to write about. I have a topic list deep enough to go into next year, but I’m always open to shuffling my planned entries to accommodate what matters most to you. Let me know in the comments.
Recommended Newsletter
This month’s recommendation was a newsletter I signed up for immediately upon its announcement, as it’s written by a writer I admire about an extremely specific topic about which I am also interested. It’s Popping Tins, by Tim Marchman, a newsletter about tinned fish. If you haven’t already dabbled in what has hilariously become a resurgent foodstuff, let Tim tell you why you should. At least once a week, I make myself a lunch salad with a quality tinned fish as its centerpiece (I’m sure I’ll include a recipe in a future newsletter) and it never disappoints.
Other Links
Staying on brand, I’m a bit late to this story about some of the fallout of the Ozempic weight-loss craze, but it’s got some fascinating insights on how the entire thing reflects our societal values. “If thin is an unspoken virtue, then part of its virtuousness comes from having worked for it, earned it.” Yep.
The East Palestine train disaster was marked and remembered in our social consciousness by the black clouds of toxins releasing into the Ohio sky. But the long-term impact — and the ongoing, widespread effects of plastics on everything we touch — is often brushed aside. This essay and history of plastics is something we shouldn’t look away from.
This is a really thoughtful essay about the infantilization of so much of our culture and the ramifications of and meaning behind it.
Here’s a fascinating view of how the biases inherent in our rudimentary artificial intelligence systems currently making headlines distort history and threaten to wallpaper over reality.
If you’re feeling the need to escape for a few minutes into an entirely different world, Cassidy Randall’s personal story of exploration and finding herself is about as well as you can do without leaving your life behind and wandering into the woods.
My favorite band released an album last week. It’s good, but not as good as this New Yorker profile about their history, their unusual, rising station in the American music scene, and how their music resonates with an unexpected crossover of demographics. I can’t wait to see them in three weeks.
For the final outside link, I’ll leave you with a story in one of my favorite genres — science that seems like fiction and reminds you just how much we’re capable of as a species, in spite of our collective idiocy. The reason it’s so hard to take the step of moving more than just rockets into space is the massive amount of energy required to get out of the Earth’s atmosphere. A space elevator, that would do that without the use of a rocket, is impractical for many reasons. But it actually might be possible to build one…backwards from the moon. Yes, really. I’ll let the scientists explain.
My Links
Well, this wasn’t exactly the A’s story I wanted to write, or the one that I was originally working on. But the team’s announcement that they are turning their attention to Las Vegas (with many of the same legislative hurdles still to clear that they had/have in Oakland), I wrote about management’s and MLB’s about face over the last couple years and how they’ve been setting the stage for this kind of play. I also wrote about how the differences between a solution in Oakland and one in Las Vegas reflect so much about the past, present, and future of the dueling philosophies that define the American West. Free to read as Baseball Prospectus with an email subscription.
If Nevada decides not to hand the A’s $500 million in tax breaks, and MLB’s January 2024 revenue share deadline comes and goes, I wonder if (a possibly financially compromised!) John Fisher might be more compelled to sell the team for a huge windfall to an owner or ownership group that will actually be motivated to get across the finish line in Oakland in a way that everyone can feel good about. A man can dream.