Howdy, I’m Nick. 👋

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Latest post

A People’s History of New York Baseball

The Leftist case for the Mets.

May 9, 2026 06:59 PM

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Latest notes

1. I truly appreciate Tracy Durnell’s “Letting things build”, a reflection on a year and a half of more focused reading leading to her digital aura series posted to her website.

   I also wonder if some of the friction people are noticing in long-form reading comes from choosing the “wrong” books to start rebuilding their focus. Optimization culture makes us want to read “the best” book on any subject (or the longest novel if Goodreads is any indication), even if we might not be ready for it yet. We know better than to expect ourselves to be able to run a marathon without training, but it’s easy to forget that our minds are embodied too: our thinking both softens with disuse and can be honed with practice.

   This passage finds me thinking more about reading with purpose. I am not making as much time to read for pleasure as I used to, and am currently juggling a handful of books rather than one or two titles. In some ways I might need to re-train my own mind.

   May 15, 2026 08:11 PM

2. Likes Making a mark. by Michelle Barker.

   May 9, 2026 07:54 PM

3. One of the best descriptions of Mets fandom I’ve seen this year, from FanGraphs’ 2026 ZiPS Projections posted by Dan Szymborski in January:

   The Mets are a bit like an intellectual character in a 19th Century Russian novel. They’re well-read enough to understand why life just isn’t working, and while they make changes every winter, it always seems to come with the precognition that something will go horribly wrong, and there’s little recourse but to observe their own downfall. Yankees fandom is more transactional, and depending on how the season turns out, you either cheer the empire or curse Brian Cashman. Rooting for the Mets is existential; you go into every season with hope, but an unquenchable feeling that something will go horribly or maybe even comically wrong. Meaning as a Mets fan does not come from celebrating the team’s achievements, but the act of enduring and returning, year after year, with the knowledge that preparation offers no escape. Mets fans essentially become annotators of doomed worlds.

   Apr 28, 2026 12:51 AM

4. Bookmarked North American English Dialects, Based on Pronunciation Patterns by Rick Aschmann.

   This is a detailed map of North American English dialects, showing how pronunciation and word choice shift across regions. I don’t know much about the accuracy of this map or its creator but it is interesting to me as a bit of folk cartography. Ben T. Smith blogged about this back in 2011, but I only found out about this from an Instagram reel that Eleanor shared with me this week.

   The craziest thing about this map is I don’t think it can ever be reproduced. This guy built it in a program called Paint.net as like a layered personal project, so there’s no mapping software behind it… it’s just this one guy with decades of research, there’s 900 audio samples—if you click on the map it actually brings you to the audio samples… He last updated it in 2018 and it lives on his personal website, and its one of the most detailed maps I have ever seen.

   Apr 17, 2026 08:44 PM

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