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LA-LA LANDINGS:

The Rapture of Listening to a Fake Baseball Game: Nine innings of made-up balls, strikes, and ads is enough to put you to sleep—or bring you to life. ( Katy Waldman, July 14, 2022, The New Yorker)

Even though I know that there’s no cure for insomnia, the same part of my brain that believes the polar bears might be O.K. in the end keeps me trawling the Web for miracles. Recently, bleary-eyed, I stumbled across “Northwoods Baseball Sleep Radio,” a podcast from the mysteriously monikered “Mr. King,” a humorist in Chicago. (On Spotify, Philip T. Hunter, Corrbette Pasko, and Beth King are listed as the show’s co-producers.) Episodes, which run around two hours, are full-length fake baseball games. The players have names like Lefty Thorn and Hiroki Nomo, and the fictitious sports commentator Wally McCarthy narrates their progress through a gently interminable, pleasingly varied dance of strikes, balls, and hits. It’s minor-league elevator music, honeyed with a small-town nostalgia. Pauses are filled by the crowd’s muted cheers, and, every few minutes, a man with the voice of a relaxed, grandfatherly robot reads ad spots for made-up businesses—Ted’s Fishing World, Big Tom’s Shoe Repair—over the faded brightness of Muzak.

I had come to the podcast as an insomniac, but I was intrigued as a consumer of weird texts.

Learned the trick decades ago of falling asleep by playing your favorite golf course in your head or pitching to your favorite team.

But the website for this cheat code is at Sleep Baseball

You can also find classic radio broadcasts of baseball games at the Internet Archive.

IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERSTATE DEFLATIONARY PRESSURES:

Robots fast-track antibiotic discovery by building hundreds of metal compounds in days (Neetika Walter, Dec 23, 2025, Interesting Engineering)

Robots are now doing what once took chemists months, building potential antibiotics in days as drug resistance tightens its grip on the world.

In a striking demonstration of automated chemistry, researchers have used a robotic synthesis platform to rapidly generate and test hundreds of metal-based compounds, uncovering a promising new antibiotic candidate in the process.

The approach could reshape how scientists search for urgently needed drugs to combat antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

NO MORE ROAD APPLES:

Gone in 2.5 pitches: The fleeting life of a baseball in modern MLB (Tyler Kepner, Sept. 18, 2025, The Athletic)

If Lugo gets a ball with a mark on it, he said, he’ll try to use it as long as he can. But the baseball gods almost never bestow such a gift anymore. As soon as a ball touches dirt, it’s tossed out of play before the next pitch.

It’s got to be a rule, right? To root out the trickery that crafty pitchers once mastered?

“No, no, it’s not automatic,” said Marvin Hudson, an MLB umpire since 1998. “If it hits the dirt, catchers will throw it out quicker than I would. If they hand it back to me, I look at it, and if it’s not scuffed, I’ll wipe it off and keep it in my ball bag. But players are a lot different than they were back when I first came in, as far as what type of ball they want. It’s kind of comical, to be honest with you.”

Watch a ballgame today — really watch it — and you’ll be amazed at how often the pitchers, catchers and umpires change the ball. Just how many does it take to get through a game? It’s like trying to guess how many jelly beans are in a jar. You can’t tell on TV, because the ball isn’t always on the screen. And you can’t tell in person unless you commit to looking solely at the ball the entire time.

So that’s what I did. Twice this summer — on July 22 in Philadelphia and August 11 in the Bronx — I tracked the fate of every baseball used in the game.

The first lasted only one pitch…

ABSOLUTION:

The Ledge: How the true story of three lives lost at sea in December 1956 became Maine’s most famous short story. (Edgar Allen Beem, December 2012, Down East)

On December 27, 1956, a hunting party of five set out from Ash Point in South Harpswell to go gunning for ducks between Eagle Island and West Brown Cow Island. Only two made it home alive.

Fisherman Lawrence C. Estes, Jr., known to one and all as Buster, skippered his boat the Amy E. with son Steven, 13, son Maurice, 12, nephew Harry Jewell, 16, and fellow fisherman Everett Gatchell on board. The thirty-seven-foot lobsterboat, named for Estes’ wife, towed a pair of skiffs.

Near Eagle Island, Estes dropped Gatchell and son Maurice off in one rowboat. They intended to row ashore and hunt from Eagle Island, but the rough winter seas made a landing too dangerous, so Gatchell and the boy spent a chilly day shooting from the skiff.

Buster Estes and the other two boys motored on out across Broad Sound, anchored the Amy E. near West Brown Cow, and rowed to the half-tide ledge known as Mink Rock. The seaweed-covered ledge is under four to five feet of water at high tide, but it makes an excellent perch for cormorants, seals, and duck hunters when exposed. After the fact, it became apparent that the Estes’ little skiff must somehow have drifted away, leaving him and the two boys marooned on the ledge as the freezing tide was coming in. All three perished.

No one knows what actually happened on Mink Rock that day, but the late author and Bowdoin professor Lawrence Sargent Hall built his literary career on his imaginings in his short story, “The Ledge,” one of the most famous stories in the annals of Maine writing. First published in the Hudson Review in 1959, “The Ledge” was selected as the best American short story of the year in Prize Stories 1960: The O.Henry Awards and has subsequently appeared in close to forty anthologies.

TV WRITERS SHOULD DO THE SAME:

Rifling Through the Archives With Legendary Historian Robert Caro (Chris Heath, March 2025, Smithsonian)

Students of Robert Caro know of a particularly famous trope of his: In order to write a book, he must first know its final line. Deep into his reporting of The Power Broker, he tells me, “I couldn’t figure out how to write it. It was just such a mass of stuff, and I couldn’t see how it all tied together.” He was, he says, “in a sort of mood of despair.”

Then on June 3, 1967, he attended a dedication ceremony for a park at the site of the 1964 World’s Fair. Moses’ power was waning by then, but the front two rows were stacked with his old-guard loyalists. “All his engineers and architects,” Caro says. “You know, the ‘Moses Men.’ What I remember was they all had gray heads.” Moses alluded to the public’s ingratitude to great men. “And I remember them nodding,” Caro says. Afterward, the men walked past Caro, and he could hear them talking, saying that Moses was right and wondering why people didn’t appreciate what Moses had done. And a phrase stuck in Caro’s head that summed it all up: Why weren’t they grateful?

In that instant, Caro says, everything became clear. “When I heard that line, I said, ‘Oh, that’s what this book is about,’” he recalls. And he didn’t just know how the book would end—with a description of that day’s event, ending with those four words. He could see—“in a flash,” he says—how everything he had learned and everything he was still to write would lead to that point. “I knew in that moment how to do the book. And I remember going back to my office and writing an outline as fast as I could. I was abbreviating words because I wanted to get all the words in there.”

With each subsequent book, Caro has needed to know where he would end before he could launch into writing it. “I mean, everybody has their own way of writing,” he says. He is careful to clarify that knowing a final line isn’t some kind of glib talisman. “Somehow that ending tells you what’s important in everything that’s come before it, even if it’s 1,000 pages that came before it.” He goes on, “Once you have it, everything becomes easy for me.”

The moment he says this, his chosen adjective—“easy”—hangs in the air between us. The first volume of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, The Path to Power, which is about Johnson’s early life leading up to his first failed campaign for public office, took seven years. The second, Means of Ascent, detailing Johnson’s eventual election to the Senate (an election that Caro’s groundbreaking research definitively established was stolen), arrived eight years later. The third, Master of the Senate, about Johnson’s years as Senate majority leader, came 12 years after that. Then another ten years passed before the publication of The Passage of Power, which ends in 1964 after Johnson has assumed the presidency following John F. Kennedy’s assassination. That book was published nearly 13 years ago.

“Easy,” I point out, doesn’t feel like a sufficient adjective.