Matt Gemmell, writing on his site, describes a concert experience with his family and the estrangement of his brother. The writing is melancholy in its presentation with more than a hint of sadness behind experiencing one of the last few Mark Knopfler shows and experiencing it separately, but at the same time, as his brother.

I don’t know Matt. We’ve only ever corresponded via Twitter. I find the little insights into his family, his home, and his dog to be refreshing. I enjoy his writing and recommend his books.

Still, I feel for this man I’ve never met and hope the estrangement falls away.

Nicholas Bate on hard work –

1.What you seek will take hard work.

2. There is no quick fix for health, publication nor financial security.

3. Hard work-once started-feels good.

4. Hard work-once decided-is 100% under your control.

5. Hard work-once applied-is the easiest competitive advantage there is.

6. Hard work-once articulated-is powerfully compounding.

7. Hard work can start today. Now.

Mark Saxon, writing in The Athletic, talks about the mental and physical demands of professional baseball. Specifically, the St. Louis Cardinals who just played five major-league games in less than 52 hours.

It’s patently ridiculous at this level. Plus, they won four of the five. That’s uncanny.

If there’s ever a real turning point in a lengthy baseball season, this feat might be one to look back on to show the resilience of this team.

To the horror of decent writers everywhere, The Associated Press has issued new guidance on the use of hyphens, upending the normal order of things, and precipitating the decline of Western Civilization.

I’m sure they are coming for the Oxford comma next.

Seth Godin on everything else:

Everyone else also thinks it’s about them.

Everyone else is in a hurry.

Everyone else is afraid.

Everyone else wonders if they’re being left behind.

Everyone else is tired.

Everyone else isn’t sure, either.

The good news is that everyone else also has unused potential and the ability to make an impact.

Randy Rainbow has done it again with this video.

Tim Grierson, writing in Rolling Stone, bemoans the state of the movie industry with his ten hot takes on Summer 2019 at the movies. He’s probably not wrong.

Disney dominates, sequels and remakes are all the rage, original scripted movies are far and few between, some studios are smarter than others, and nothing is going to change in the foreseeable future.

For some reason, the internet has suddenly caught on to this hilarious video. Madilyn Bailey wrote a song only using hate comments from her YouTube channel. Brilliant.

Nate Jackson, writing for Deadspin, tells his own tale of professional football—“the cycle of injury, pain and rehab.”

While Andrew Luck’s decision to retire has baffled many fans (and I include journalists here, because journalists are the biggest fans), every NFL player understands why he’s doing it. When you make it to the NFL, people tell you that you’re living the dream. They tell you how lucky you are. They tell you it’s a good thing you don’t have to get a real job like they had to, because their lives suck and yours is awesome. When people constantly tell you how great you have it, it’s hard to do anything but nod and agree, even when you feel something else entirely.

Fans only see NFL players on Sundays, and only the guys who are healthy enough to play. But there are 349 other days of the year, and there only 22 guys on the field at a time. The rest of the days and the rest of the men are caught up in what Andrew Luck referred to as, “the cycle of injury, pain and rehab.” If you play football past high school, you are familiar with it. Three of my six seasons in the NFL ended on injured reserve. Broken tibia, ruptured groin, dislocated/separated shoulders, torn hamstrings, cracked ribs, fingers, concussions, bulging discs, torn knee ligaments, etc. The glory was fleeting; the injuries were constant. And everyone I spoke to reminded me that I was living the dream.

Football is important to my family. My brother is a coach. My nephew plays. The college game affects my family directly. However, a story like this is a sobering reminder of the pain and anguish both mentally and physically players go through.

The blindness in my right eye, a direct result of playing backyard football, is also a daily reminder.

Mark Evanier, writing on his personal blog, makes a really interesting observation about Trump.

So I’m thinking Trump’s trapped in a vicious circle of his own making. Whenever he feels his stature as President/God slipping away from him, he gets nastier and more insulting and more disconnected from reality…but the reason his numbers are slipping is because people are seeing him as nastier and more insulting and more disconnected from reality. The skill at which he’s most deficient is changing his act. In Trumpworld when you’re losing, you double-down on everything…which is the reason he no longer has those casinos. It’s the mistake every losing gambler makes.

I hadn’t thought of that exactly, but it makes sense.

What a wonderful, romantic story Karen B. Kaplan shared in The New York Times Modern Love section. It is ripe to be snagged for a movie.

Jack Crosbie, writing in Splinter, has a thoughtful, well-researched piece about what to do about guns in these United States of America. I have no idea if any of his ideas or others will do any good, but it will likely save lives to at least try something.

Seth Godin, writing at his site, is wrong. It happens.

He conflates truth and the acceptance of truth. Truth is truth.

In every fourth-grade classroom, the statement, “9 is bigger than 7” is clearly true. We can count out nine marbles. We have a mutual understanding of what “bigger” means in this context. From this shared understanding of the axioms and vocabulary, we can build useful and complex outcomes.

On the other hand, “Cheryl is a better candidate than Tracy” might be true for some people, but it presents all sorts of trouble if we look at it through the same lens of “truth” as a term we learned in arithmetic. We know who Cheryl is and we know who Tracy is, but it’s not clear what “better” means in this case. Are we describing who will win an election in two weeks? That’s awfully hard to test in advance.

And ‘words as building blocks of truth’ gets even more complicated when the ideas intersect with both science and culture. The statement, “The theory of evolution is our best explanation for how we all got here,” is demonstrably true in the realm of science, but for people with a certain worldview who value cultural alignment more than verifiable and testable evidence, this statement isn’t true at all.

The words matter. It matters whether we’re talking about ‘arithmetic true’ or simply an accurate description of what works for part of our culture.

Ahem.

Truth doesn’t give a flying fuck about your certain worldview or cultural alignment. If your worldview is the Earth is flat, the truth doesn’t care. The Earth is not flat, and that’s the truth. If you choose not to believe the Earth is round, then you are being willfully ignorant. You are actively trying to keep the world as you see it and not as it is.

I find people like that repugnant. Reality is reality. Sure, science can change, and new truths are always being uncovered. However, worldview and cultural alignment are all bullshit.

Those values are meaningless to the truth.

Ceclia D’Anastasio, writing for Kotaku, has an in-depth story on the origins of Dungeons & Dragons. It is a fascinating read.

Of course, I played D&D as a kid and really enjoyed the game. The first time I played my character died in the first few minutes and I was apoplectic as much as a dumb 15 year old could be. I did, however, get better.

In this video, University of Illinois Athletic Director Josh Whitman takes members of the media through the brand new Henry Dale and Betty Smith Football Center. It is quite impressive.

H/T: Jeremy Werner and Illini Inquirer

Check out the new poster for Star Wars: #TheRiseOfSkywalker that debuted at #D23Expo. See the film in theaters December 20. pic.twitter.com/FUSZaGQZE6

— Star Wars (@starwars) August 24, 2019

December can’t come fast enough.

Stayton Bonner, writing in Esquire, has a fun story about a private investigator who specializes in “a niche of a niche of a niche.” Joe specializes in recovering stolen cars, but not just any old cars. He finds rare, collectible cars worth upwards of millions of dollars.

Take a lazy Sunday and read it through.

Yep, this is the coolest thing you'll see tonight. Yadi knew Dex hit that out of the yard before he even swung the bat. #TimeToFly pic.twitter.com/mdiptBq46M

— Bally Sports Midwest (@BallySportsMW) August 23, 2019

Of course he did. Because Yadi is the GOAT.

James Fallows, writing in The Atlantic, has an interesting take on Donald Trump’s interesting week of verbal vomit. He thinks “a flat ban on at-a-distance diagnosis doesn’t really meet the common-sense test.” Of course, he thinks any medical hypothesis would be futile. Although, these last few days have been more unhinged than previously.

But now we’ve had something we didn’t see so clearly during the campaign. These are episodes of what would be called outright lunacy, if they occurred in any other setting: An actually consequential rift with a small but important NATO ally, arising from the idea that the U.S. would “buy Greenland.” Trump’s self-description as “the Chosen One,” and his embrace of a supporter’s description of him as the “second coming of God” and the “King of Israel.” His logorrhea, drift, and fantastical claims in public rallies, and his flashes of belligerence at the slightest challenge in question sessions on the White House lawn. His utter lack of affect or empathy when personally meeting the most recent shooting victims, in Dayton and El Paso. His reduction of any event, whatsoever, into what people are saying about him.

Obviously I have no standing to say what medical pattern we are seeing, and where exactly it might lead. But just from life I know this:

• If an airline learned that a pilot was talking publicly about being “the Chosen One” or “the King of Israel” (or Scotland or whatever), the airline would be looking carefully into whether this person should be in the cockpit.

• If a hospital had a senior surgeon behaving as Trump now does, other doctors and nurses would be talking with administrators and lawyers before giving that surgeon the scalpel again.

• If a public company knew that a CEO was making costly strategic decisions on personal impulse or from personal vanity or slight, and was doing so more and more frequently, the board would be starting to act. (See: Uber, management history of.)

• If a university, museum, or other public institution had a leader who routinely insulted large parts of its constituency—racial or religious minorities, immigrants or international allies, women—the board would be starting to act.

• If the U.S. Navy knew that one of its commanders was routinely lying about important operational details, plus lashing out under criticism, plus talking in “Chosen One” terms, the Navy would not want that person in charge of, say, a nuclear-missile submarine. (See: The Queeg saga in The Caine Mutiny, which would make ideal late-summer reading or viewing for members of the White House staff.)

Yet now such a  person is in charge not of one nuclear-missile submarine but all of them—and the bombers and ICBMs, and diplomatic military agreements, and the countless other ramifications of executive power.

If Donald Trump were in virtually any other position of responsibility, action would already be under way to remove him from that role. The board at a public company would have replaced him outright or arranged a discreet shift out of power. (Of course, he would never have gotten this far in a large public corporation.) The chain-of-command in the Navy or at an airline or in the hospital would at least call a time-out, and check his fitness, before putting him back on the bridge, or in the cockpit, or in the operating room. (Of course, he would never have gotten this far as a military officer, or a pilot, or a doctor.)

This is what keeps me up at night.