The Twilight of Baseball →

Ben McGrath:

If Mike Trout walked into your neighborhood bar, would you recognize him? Let me rephrase: If the baseball player who is widely considered the best in the world—a once-in-a-generation talent, the greatest outfielder since Barry Bonds, the most accomplished twenty-two-year-old that the activity formerly known as the national pastime has ever known—bent elbows over a stool and ordered an I.P.A., would anyone notice?

Baseball is making money—there’s no denying it. But is baseball planting the seeds of another generation of fans?

/via Deadspin

The Strange Tale of the North Pond Hermit →

Michael Finkel:

Perkins-Vance called dispatch and learned that Knight had no criminal record. He said he grew up in a nearby community, and his senior picture was soon located in the 1984 Lawrence High School yearbook. He was wearing the same eyeglasses.

For close to three decades, Knight said, he had not seen a doctor or taken any medicine. He mentioned that he had never once been sick. You had to have contact with other humans, he claimed, in order to get sick.

When, said Perkins-Vance, was the last time he'd had contact with another person?

Sometime in the 1990s, answered Knight, he passed a hiker while walking in the woods.

"What did you say?" asked Perkins-Vance.

"I said, 'Hi,' " Knight replied. Other than that single syllable, he insisted, he had not spoken with or touched another human being, until this night, for twenty-seven years.

The best part of this is the juxtaposition of the whiffs you get of his conservatism and/or libertarianism (“‘Don’t mistake me for some bird-watching PBS type,’ he warned”) and the fact that he’s the epitome of the Welfare Queen caricature. You’ll laugh bitterly when you see his jail sentence.

Your Old Droog Isn’t Nas →

Jay Caspian Kang:

On a recent Saturday morning, a tall, slouchy twenty-five-year-old in a polo shirt, baggy jeans, and Timberland boots that, by his own admission, had gone “mad dusty,” showed up at a subway station in Coney Island. He admitted to being Your Old Droog, the previously unknown rapper, who, for the past two months, has been at the center of an ongoing conspiracy theory in hip-hop. This was the first time that Droog had shown his face—boyish, bearded, and permanently scowling—to a reporter. As we walked through the housing project where Droog spent much of his childhood, he seemed to have a more pressing concern on his mind than revealing his identity. After some idle talk about the dice game Cee-lo and some more idle talk about gambling problems, he came out with it: “So, did you think I’d be white?”

The last knot to cling to in this story is that Nas hired someone who could impersonate him and rap and then (for some reason unbeknownst to me) wrote him some great songs for him to perform. Rather than just—perform them himself? 

YOD was never Nas for a much easier reason to see—there’s no money to be made selling music.

All we’re left with is a new artist who perfectly captures the vibe and nostalgia of mid-90’s hip hop. And maybe that’s enough.

I Didn't Expect to Find Pornography in My 9-Year-Old's Web History →

Dave Eagle:

“Ossie,” I intoned, making clear the fact that he was speaking out of turn. "I know you did. For a fact, and lying to me isn’t going to make this any better.”

His eyes darted back and forth, as if looking for an escape hatch inside his own head.  He was formulating a plan, something to get out of this situation, and then he stopped. His brow furrowed.

“Wait,” he said, sitting back upright. And then he followed up with possibly the sweetest thing he ever asked me, given the context. “What’s porn?”

I couldn’t help but smile. His defense hadn’t been self-preservation so much as it was genuine confusion. “It’s videos and pictures of people having sex,” I told him. He slumped back into embarrassment. “Oh. Then, yes. I looked at porn.”

Good thing the internet is going to be like, the lamest thing ever by the time my baby is nine.

Oh, and make sure you read this at least until the point where you find out what Oscar thought a “bimbo” was.

‘Hello, Gabby. It’s Raffi.’ →

Gabrielle Canon:

Four little words and I was instantly transported. Raffi might very well be the first person outside my family whom I truly adored. Now he was talking to me on the phone. A real phone! Not a banana phone.

I was part of a generation who grew up with Raffi songs. Because of Raffi we wonder what we might see down by the bay where the watermelon grows. We know the solution to sillies is to shake them out. We found out we liked to ate, ite, ute, and eat eeples and baneenees. And, of course, we learned all about our favorite whale, Baby Beluga. There are a lot of us.

"You are one of millions of what I call Beluga Grads," he told me. "There are apparently between 20 and 50 million, depending on how you count it."

Right now, “Baby Beluga” is #1 on the charts in our house. And just to show you what my life’s like these days, I read this article and thought: Oh, wow—a new Raffi album!

Now That Every Human Owns a Pair of Nike Free Sneakers… →

Andrew Cushing:

I told you from the start that the humans’ absurd fashion obsessions would be their undoing. You asked, “But what about those who do not exercise? What about those who do not go running?” And I assured you, in my infinite divine wisdom, that even those who do not run would still wear the running sneaker. I told you that whether or not they use the sneaker for its intended purpose does not matter to the humans.

Still, you questioned me.

I own three pairs.

The Problem With Blindly Protesting Genetically Modified Crops →

Michael Specter:

Americans demand labels, at least in part, because they are afraid. And they are afraid because of the kinds of assertions made by people like Vandana Shiva, an Indian activist whom I profiled this week in the magazine. Shiva and her allies talk constantly about dangers of G.M.O.s that are not supported by facts.

G.M.O. labels may be a political necessity, but they make no scientific sense. Most of the legislation that has been proposed would require a label that says something like “produced with genetic engineering.” Almost none of the labels would identify any specific G.M.O. ingredient in any particular food. In fact, the laws now proposed are so vague that many of the foods in a grocery store would have to carry a label. They would tell you how your food is put together, but not what it contains. How could that help anyone make a sound decision about his health?

As someone who has sneered about G.M.O.s in the past, the little piece I’ve linked to here, as well as the profile of Vandana Shiva that Specter mentions (which I cannot recommend enough), made for eye-opening reading. I’ll think twice before sneering so easily (and fact-lessly) again.

Ferguson’s Freedom Summer →

Jay Caspian Kang:

The suggestion that the protesters in Ferguson would be better off with what would amount to white human shields is disturbing (and not without a paternalistic tinge), in part because Smith may be right. It is a sad and cynical compromise, but perhaps a pragmatic one.

Careful—there’s a truth bomb with a sputtering fuse in this one.

Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy—Along With Son, Spencer—Releases His First Solo Project →

Steven Hyden:

“As a parent sometimes you feel like you’re supposed to always be a fount of wisdom, and doing something meaningful and enriching with your children,” Tweedy said. “My mom, she never slept for very long. She took naps at like different hours of the day. I never had bedtimes, so I spent a lot of time watching old movies with my mom on the couch while she fell asleep with a lit cigarette. Is that good parenting? I don’t know, but it’s meaningful to me. It’s a scene in my life that evokes warm feeling toward my mom. In spite of it being this thing where you’d go, ‘Well, that’s terrible. You know, the little boy should have been in bed and not around cigarette smoke and not in danger of being burned alive.’”

I was torn about including the fact that Tweedy’s son is the drummer for this project in the title of this link. That shouldn’t be why it gets attention or praise. But, as a long-time fan of Wilco, and a father in the making, I find the story of the little boy drumming on his Dad’s lap at the end of I Am Trying to Break Your Heart now making music on stage with him just crushingly sweet and beautiful.

Luckily, the album’s pretty good too.

Celebrity Portraits by Chris Buck →

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The Chris Farley one is really great.

/via this isn’t happiness

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