 |
| The Mets celebrate in Milwaukee. @Mets. |
Pete Alonso has done everything possible in his time with the Mets, starting with when he won the Rookie of the Year award through climbing the Mets all-time lists with 226 home runs, but he needed that one signature moment in a massive spot to define it.
.jpg)
I Once Was Lost: My Search for God in America
By Don Lemon
Little, Brown and Company; hardcover, 224 pages; $30.00
Don Lemon is a Brooklyn College alumnus who had a respected tenure on CNN as the anchor of Don Lemon Tonight, where he was a trusted voice covering the Sandy Hook school shooting, war-torn Eastern Europe, and the riots of 2020. He now is the host of The Don Lemon Show, which streams on all platforms. His book on race, This is the Fire, was a #1 New York Times bestseller.
I Once Was Lost: My Search for God in America is Lemon's follow-up to his acclaimed first book, as he faces a test of his faith through some of America's toughest moments, and how he had to compartmentalize his feelings while covering them in his role as a reporter.
Lemon always had a complicated relationship with God, as he cherished the Southern Black church he grew up in, but struggled with the fundamentalist rejection of his right to exist as a gay man who wanted to marry his longtime love in a church wedding with all the traditions.
Throughout his years on CNN, Lemon proved to be one a deep thinker, and with this book, that proves it more than ever. He deftly handles melding his feelings on the church to what it has been like for him in a United States that has had an emboldened right wing led by former President Donald Trump, whose supporters use the flag for their own means.
"Those of us who believe in the teachings of Jesus made a terrible mistake allowing right-wing Evangelicals to co-opt His name over the past fifty years. It's equally egregious for loyal citizens of the United States to allow election deniers and insurrectionists to alienate us from our Stars and Stripes. It's profane for them to carry the flag of the United States alongside the flag of the Confederacy, just as it is profane for an Evangelical church to hang a cross next to a sign that says GOD HATES F**S.
If the cross is shorthand for Jesus, displaying it should be a declaration of love. If the flag is a symbol of unity, flying it should be a declaration of our willingness to go together even if we don't match. If it's a symbol of belonging, it belongs to all of us - the multitudes within us - and we defend it by declaring our individuality.
Bold on bold on bold.
I've known for a long time exactly who I am, but I was so good at reading the room, I didn't always let the room read me, the United States of my own diversity as a gay, Black, Christian, American journalist.
In many unexpected ways, the process of thinking through, writing, and revising this book has given me my God back. Now I want my flag."
Lemon details some of the biggest stories he covered, starting with the Sandy Hook school shooting on December 14, 2012. He was at the Washington bureau that Friday morning, and got on the first Acela he could to get to Stanford, Connectictut, before heading to Newtown. While he goes into how tough it was to cover that excruciating painful event, he writes how, after covering a press conference by the CEO of the NRA, Wayne LaPierre, he gave an impassioned speech on-air about gun violence, and the backlash that followed on Twitter.
Then, nearly ten years later, there was another school shooting, in Uvalde, Texas, at Robb Elementary School, and Lemon also got there as soon as possible to cover the tragedy. One moment he writes of was covering a memorial service at the sanctuary at Primera Iglesia Bautista (First Baptist Church), and how he maintained his professional stance, which was being severely tested with all the raw emotion and heartbreak in the air.
"When the congregation started singing," Lemon writes, "I didn't understand the Spanish lyrics, but I recognized the melody and sang the hymn I'd known since I was a child.
I once was lost but now am found..."
Lemon forthrightly admits that the gun issue really tests his objectivity, as he sees those wanting more God in schools want more guns in them as well, that the issues of religion, freedom, and security are fused together. He also sees a country that drastically changed between Sandy Hook and Uvalde, that outrage has turned into acceptance, and that anyone can become a gun violence victim anywhere. He sums it up thusly, "Because freedom means gun, and security means gun."
In this discussion, Lemon admits that he has been a gun owner himself, but clarifies his feelings on being a well-regulated, responsible one and those who see it as a larger meaning of love for the country. Along with that, Lemon also writes of how he was a Young Republican, and how the party had a much-different platform in the mid-1970s than it does now, while a Democrat in Louisiana meant "Dixiecrat" and were stocked with racists still debating the Civil War. The switch in party identity happened soon after, in the early 1980s, as the Moral Majority, led by Evangelical Christians, began to dominate the Republican party.
One constant in the book, which gives it a real poignancy, is Lemon's relationship with his older sister, Leisa, who he leaned on while covering brutal moments like Sandy Hook and how she always looked out for his interests.
Leisa died tragically in 2018 in a fishing accident, as she drowned in a lake near her home. In processing her untimely death, he thought of religious axioms that he leaned on in tough moments, and their surprising origins.
In this excerpt, Lemon writes of the services he and Leisa grew up with, and what stuck with him: "I first ran a foul of the Holy Ghost on a sweltering summer evening in 1969 at Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church in Port Allen, Louisiana. Sunday night service was in full gospel swing. I was about three years old, restless and grumpy on my grandmother's lap, worn out by a long day of trying to be good. My mom, Katherine, and my grandmother, Ma'me (pronounced like the Cajun mah-MEE) dragged me and my sisters, Leisa and Yma, to Southern Baptist services every Sunday morning at 7:45. After church was fellowship and family time with cookies in the church kitchen and over-the-top Sunday soul food at my aunt's house. Then we went to Sunday school. There was some respite in the afternoon, but in the evening, we went to another revival-type service that thundered into the night, with Reverend Isaiah Warner exhorting righteousness and the choir singing salvation.
Services began in the parking lot. That's where the congregation did their congregating. We all gathered outside while the piano and organ players warmed up in the sanctuary. This was an era of musical genesis: the traditional music of the American Black Church had given birth to this fresh, distinctive thing called funk, and funk returned the favor, bringing its raw energy home again. You'd hear gospel standards like 'Jesus on the Mainline' alongside Billy Preston's 'That's the Way God Planned It." The driving rhythms and infectious harmonies were built for inclusion. Everybody in.
The matriarchs of Shiloh gathered under the muggy southern sky, wafting paper fans printed with pictures of Mahalia Jackson, JFK, or Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. They were voluminous dresses that looked and smelled like flower gardens, and most of them had white lace doilies bobby-pinned on top of their stiffly sprayed hairdos. As they nodded and greeted one another, those doilies bobbed like white lilies on the breeze.
Ma'me wore a hat with tulle netting and alligator shoes that matched her purse. Mom was always dressed to the nines: Lena Horne audacity meets Chanel boucle. Her tailored suit would be covered by a choir robe as soon as she got inside, but out in the parking lot, ladies would elbow Leisa and Yma and say, 'Girrrrl, your mama! You know she can rag.'
When the deacons opened the door, Mom went off to join the choir. Ma'me collected her program and led Leisa, Yma, and me to our usual pew up front, close to the choir side so Mom could see us from her place in the alto section and shrivel us with harsh looks as needed."
For the first time ever, there will be a watch party at Citi Field on Thursday night, as fans can watch the Mets' Game 3 of the Wild Card Series against the Milwaukee Brewers on CitiVision, the massive video screen above center field.
.jpeg) |
| Cole Ragans pitching in Wild Card round Game 1 for Kansas City on Tuesday. @Royals. |
The Yankees learned who their opponent will be in the American League Division Series starting Saturday night at Yankee Stadium, and it will be a renewal of one of their biggest rivalries from nearly half a century ago.
On The Edge: The Art of Risking Everything
By Nate Silver
Penguin Press; hardcover, 576 pages; $35.00
Nate Silver is a preeminent polling and data expert who founded FiveThirtyEight, and he writes the Substack Silver Bulletin. He is also the author of the New York Times bestseller The Signal and the Noise, in which he examined how forecasting would define the age of "big data."
In the new, engrossing book, On The Edge: The Art of Risking Everything, Silver investigates "the River," which is a vast ecosystem of like-minded people that has everyone from low-stakes poker pros to crypto kings, blue-chip art collectors, and venture-capital billionaires. It is a distinct culture because those involved share a way of thinking and a lifestyle whose mastery of risk allows them to shape, and ultimately dominate, a lot of modern life.
The River is not very well known, but Silver feels it should be, as while most involved aren't rich and powerful, those who are tend to be Riverians more than the wider population. The traits commonly found in the River are you need a high tolerance for risk, appreciation of uncertainty, and an affinity for numbers. Along with that is a distrust of conventional wisdom and a competitive drive that can border on irrational.
This is why some of the main figures in it that Silver examined are professional poker player Doyle Brunson, former CEO of PayPal Peter Thiel, Open AI CEO Sam Altman, and Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of cryptocurrency exchange FTX.
Those big names are representative of where Silver went to deeply research this book, as he goes behind the scenes at the casinos and venture capital firms, and the inner sanctum of FTX, as well as meetings of the effective altruism movement.
Understanding their mindset, which includes the flaws in their thinking, is key to understanding what drives technology and the global economy, as those in the River have increasing amounts of wealth and power in our society. He did this by interviewing over 200 hundred people, most of whom are people who he describes as being in the River, but also outside observers.
Silver acknowledges that in the time he wrote this book, a lot could have affected their sphere of influence, from poker cheating scandals to the spectacular collapse of Bankman-Fried and FTX to Elon Musk transforming himself from a rocket-launching renegade to taking over Twitter and remaking it into X, and changing his identity along with it. Despite all that, the River is still winning, with Silicon Valley and Wall Street accumulating more wealth and Las Vegas taking in more and more money.
A professional poker player from 2004 to 2007, Silver is able to identify with this way of thinking, which is also related to what he does with FiveThirtyEight. He also delves into the differences when dealing with probabilities for elections and sports, the differences inherent in analyzing each, and which one he gets more grief over.
In this excerpt, Silver writes of how his thinking of the River evolved, "I'm one of those people with a mediocre memory for names - don't bet on me to recall the name of your puppy on the first try - but a good memory for places. When I'm stuck on a knotty problem, I need to get up and take a walk. So in thinking through the material for this book, I've been making a mental map of the landscape of the River.
When I first pitched this project, I had a different name for this metaphorical place: the Pool. I thought this was cute. Poker players and other gamblers love metaphors involving water (a bad player is called a 'fish'), and 'pool' itself is a gambling term, as in a betting pool.
But the Pool implies some kind of exclusive membership, like a pool at a gym or a country club, when instead gambling is a relatively democratic institution. Imagine that you and your buddies could enter a 3-on-3 basketball tournament, and the first game you played was against LeBron James, Steph Curry, and Luka Doncic. In poker tournaments, that's exactly what you can get. Pay your buy-in, and you can literally play against the best players in the world - or against a celebrity that you'd never have a chance to meet otherwise. At one event at the 2022 World Series of Poker, the player seated one seat to my right was Neymar, the Brazilian great who is one of the best soccer players in the world. (Neymar got much too aggressive with a mediocre hand and I won a big pot off him. He's also scored seventy-nine career goals for the Brazilian national team and I've scored zero.)
So in my mental map, the River is not one discrete place so much as an ecosystem of people and ideas. Residents in different parts of the River don't necessarily know one another, and many don't think of themselves as part of some broader community. But their ties are deeper than I expected when I began working on this project. They speak one another's language with terms such as expected value, Nash equilibriums, and Bayesian priors.
I think of the River as having several subregions. Let's start with the one that will require the most explanation: Upriver. I imagine Upriver as being like Northern California with its major research universities, rolling hills, and ocean views - but also eccentric and aloof, not quite fitting in with the rest of the country. The clearest manifestations of Upriver today are in two related intellectual movements, rationalism and effective altruism...Although EA ostensibly has a narrower focus, taking a data-driven approach toward altruism and philanthropy, in practice both EAs and rationalists have a catholic appetite for involving themselves in all sorts of controversies...
EAs and rationalists have close ties to the tech sector, and many of the leaders of the movement are based in Northern California. And in recent years, some EAs have become less concerned with traditional philanthropy and more interested in the development of artificial intelligence. Many EAs and rationalists believe that AI is an extremely high-stakes problem, one of the most important developments in the history of civilization. Some also believe that AI, if it sufficiently powerful, could end or profoundly harm civilization and pose an existential risk to humanity. So it has been an interesting time to write about these movements. Between their catastrophic association with Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) on the one hand, and the astonishing progress of AI tools like ChatGPT on the other hand - progress that was well predicted by some EAs - it is vital to understand their mindset.
Further downstream, you'll find what I call Midriver, which I picture as having lots of tall, angular buildings, as Manhattan does. This is where people apply the EV maximizer skill set to make lots of money, such as through venture capital and hedge fund investing. There's more in this book on Silicon Valley than on Wall Street, though. The Silicon Valley guys are more of an open book, happier to flaunt their Riverian weirdness and show the middle finger to the East Coast establishment, and more explicitly aligned with movements like rationalism. But make no mistake: Wall Street is making money hand over fist from EV maximilization, too.
Then there's Downriver, the region we've talked about the most so far. I imagine Downriver as Las Vegas meets New Orleans: lots of tourists and lots of gambling. It's Downriver where the term 'edge' comes from (as in the title of this book). 'Edge' means having a persistent advantage in gambling - consistently making +EV bets. Against 99.99 percent of customers who set foot on a casino floor and the very large majority in a sportsbook, the house has the edge, but that doesn't stop Riverians from dreaming of being in the 0.01 percent."
The Dichotomy of Leadership: Balancing the Challenges of Extreme Ownership to Lead and Win
By Jocko Willink and Leif Babin
St. Martin's Press; hardcover, 336 pages; $30.00; available today, Tuesday, October 1st
Jocko Willink and Leif Babin served as U.S. Navy Seal Officers in the toughest urban combat mission in the history of the SEAL teams. Their task unit is to this day the most highly-decorated special operations unit from the war in Iraq. When they returned home, Willink and Babin founded Echelon Front, a leadership training and consulting group that teaches others to build and lead their own winning teams using lessons learned from the battlefield. They also are the authors of Extreme Ownership, which is a #1 New York Times bestseller. Willink has also authored numerous books, including Final Spin (click here for our review from November 2021), and he hosts the top-rated podcast titled Jocko Podcast.
Bad Reputation
By Emma Barry
Montlake; paperback, 297 pages $16.99; Kindle eBook, $5.99; available today, Tuesday, October 1st
Emma Barry is an acclaimed romance novelist, teacher, former political staffer, and recovering academic. She is the author of Funny Guy and Chick Magnet, as well as the Political Persuasions Series, whose books include The One You Want, The One You Need, The One You Hate, and The One You Crave.
