five quotes (4.11.25)

five things I read during the week the stock market horseshoed

This has become a problem for Major League Baseball, which needs all the stars it can find. In 1968, Bob Gibson started 34 games for the St. Louis Cardinals and finished 28 of them. In the process, he became a national celebrity. Last season, no pitcher managed more than two complete games. Six times, pitchers were pulled from games after the seventh inning when they had no-hitters underway. It even happened to Skenes again later in the year, after seven innings at a July 11 game in Milwaukee.

—Bruce Schoenfield, “How Analytics Marginalized Baseball’s Superstar Pitchers” (New York Times)

My dad talks about this problem a lot. Old-school pitchers like Gibson or Nolan Ryan would regularly pitch entire games and get 30 decisions in a year. Today, pitchers are pulled from games so early that they rarely get a win or a loss, let alone rarer things like no-hitters. On the one hand, I get it. The article is clear that pitcher health is part of the reason. However, it is also strategic. A batter has a better chance against a pitcher the third or fourth time he faces him than the first or second. By that standard, this is not just about Tommy John’s surgery but analytics. And it ruins the superstar appeal that the game so desperately needs.

But the debates aren’t only between characters; each person in the novel is capable of turning into their own opposite. At one moment Dmitry the libertine is roaring drunk in a tavern, yanking men around by their beards; the next, he is making the biggest sacrifice in the book. Ivan is clear-thinking and rational, Alyosha unworldly and devout. But it’s Ivan who agonises about the suffering of children, and Alyosha who may act as the sceptic. Ivan chooses Alyosha to hear his story of Christ’s return because in one obvious way Alyosha is Christ, patient and all-forgiving. This makes him the ideal person to hear out Ivan’s argument, as put in the mouth of the Grand Inquisitor. But Ivan, after all, has written both sides of the story, and he is making Christ’s argument too. Interrupting at one point, Alyosha says: ‘I don’t understand what this is. Is it boundless fantasy, or some mistake on the old man’s part?’ He’s the one to whom the notion of Christ walking on earth makes no sense. When the story ends, Alyosha kisses his brother on the lips, as if he was indeed Christ to Ivan’s Grand Inquisitor. But it’s a joke, a tease, as if he isn’t taking the parable seriously. Ivan’s response to the joke of the kiss is: ‘Literary theft!’

—Daniel Soar, “Will I, Won’t I?” (London Review of Books)

I love Dostoevsky, and I think this is part of his genius. His novels are regularly described as polyphonic, meaning they contain multiple voices. And his characters are rarely only one thing. I am currently reading Crime and Punishment, and I am amazed at how many times I identify with Raskolnikov and his grievances against people and how many times I am mystified by what a petty, whiny brat he is. The reality is that he’s both.

By April of last year, the health of the president had clearly declined. As with many older men in their eighties, this didn’t happen in a slow, predictable glide-path down — but in swift, turbulent declines. Suddenly he took a while to get out of his limo, and then would emerge “with a blank look in his face,” according to the new campaign book, Fight, by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes. By early summer, Biden was suddenly freezing up in public, staring motionless into the air. At a fundraiser in Los Angeles, Obama had to jump in to answer some questions, and then had to guide Biden off the stage by hand. We had already seen Joe wander weirdly off the set of MSNBC and during a Medal of Honor ceremony. His memory lapses mounted.

Everyone around him saw this. Everyone close to him had seen it for over a year by then. Everyone in his campaign knew that upwards of 86 percent of Americans thought he was too old to serve another term. And no one did anything about it.

—Andrew Sullivan, “The Man Who Brought Us Here” (The Weekly Dish)

None of this is intended to justify Trump and his haphazard handling of the economy. However, it is worth remembering what the Democrats did with Biden last year and what he and his people allowed to happen. He was clearly slipping in his physical and mental capabilities, yet we were reassured over and over again that he was better than ever, at the top of his game, tip-top, and ready to go. It was so evidently false but it kept being promoted until it became too late to do anything about it. It is things like this that erode trust in government and institutions. We have been lied to as a population over and over again since early March of 2020.

The success of the tactics I’ve outlined above contribute to a larger problem Wynn-Williams identifies, which is the impunity of the tech elite. As she writes, “Facebook is an elite product, born in an elite college, fronted by elite Harvard grads who show up for other elite Harvard grads, who are decision makers in all sorts of places.” Wynn-Williams realizes very late in her tenure that these people will not only never accept her into their circle on her terms, but that there’s a point to the nepotistic hiring of friends at the top echelons of the company: it allows them to circle the wagons and protect their own. This is not unique to Meta; at Amazon, one policy executive hired extensively from his social circle, allowing him to more effectively wield control in the office, much like how Sheryl Sandberg’s and Joel Kaplan’s social circles determined what was possible for Wynn-Williams at Meta. Tech companies like Amazon, Airbnb, Apple, and others conspicuously hired high-profile Obama administration alumni in order to merge powerful social circles, like two aristocratic families marrying each other to entrench their power.

—Casey Mock, “What Careless People Teaches Us About the Tech Lobby’s Playbook” (After Babel)

I am “looking forward” to reading Careless People once I can get it from my library. The smallness and overlapping nature of the circles of power in Silicon Valley seem overwhelming. They all seem to take care of each other, talent and performance aside. It is C.S. Lewis’s “Inner Ring.” It is more about belonging than it is about doing what is right. The merger of these big California companies with former government officials almost exactly mirrors the type of greasy intermingling of government and finance that preceded the crash of 2008. It couldn’t happen again, though, right?

Once rapidly growing commercial marvels, casual dining chains — sit-down restaurants where middle-class families can walk in without a reservation, order from another human and share a meal — have been in decline for most of the 21st century. Last year, TGI Fridays and Red Lobster both filed for bankruptcy. Outback and Applebee’s have closed dozens of locations. Pizza Hut locations with actual dining rooms are vanishingly rare, with hundreds closing since 2019.

—Meghan McCarron, “Where Will We Eat When the Middle-Class Restaurant Is Gone?” (New York Times)

This article provided a brief trip down memory lane. I grew up eating at precisely the restaurants McCarron discusses: Pizza Hut, Applebee’s, Chili’s, etc. I remember well when restaurants like Chipotle first hit the scene. It seemed so new and innovative. Now, they seem so cold and impersonal. Chili’s was corny, but fast-casual restaurants have no soul either. You take your food, go home, and stream more data. We don’t have time or the inclination to sit down at a Pizza Hut anymore. Which, fine, they came into existence fairly recently, but any 90s kid will well remember the beauty of the local Pizza Hut on a Saturday night.