Michael Scherer, Washington Post:

President Biden is finalizing plans to endorse major changes to the Supreme Court in the coming weeks, including proposals for legislation to establish term limits for the justices and an enforceable ethics code, according to two people briefed on the plans.…

The announcement would mark a major shift for Biden, a former chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who has long resisted calls to make substantive changes to the high court. The potential changes come in response to growing outrage among his supporters about recent ethics scandals surrounding Justice Clarence Thomas and decisions by the new court majority that have changed legal precedent on issues including abortion and federal regulatory powers.

Long overdue. Several recent SCOTUS decisions are destabilizing our democracy. Expanding the Courts and introducing term limits is a good start.

Alison Durkee, writing for Forbes, expands on how term limits would work.

After their term is up, justices wouldn’t resign completely, but would only hear a smaller subset of cases: Only the nine most recently appointed justices would hear most cases, while other justices would join in for cases that originate in the Supreme Court, which include disputes between states or foreign officials.

That’s a clever workaround to the constitutional “lifetime appointment” (which, as noted in the article, is stated as “judges… shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour.”)

Apropos of my aforelinked piece is this, from Pew Research:

Nearly two-thirds of U.S. adults (65%) say the way the president is elected should be changed so that the winner of the popular vote nationwide wins the presidency.

Younger people are more in favor of it than older people. 82% of Democrats support it, while only 47% of Republicans do.

The ideological divide is unsurprising. Democrats wish to press their small numerical advantage. On the flip side, Republicans recognize the massive power imbalance the Electoral College gives them.

In fact, the more politically savvy Republicans are, the more they support keeping the status quo:

[72% of] [h]ighly politically engaged Republicans overwhelmingly favor keeping the Electoral College….

[51% of] Republicans with a moderate level of engagement [want] to keep the system as is….

[70%] of Republicans with lower levels of political engagement… back moving to a popular vote.

In summary, less-engaged Republicans may believe “one person, one vote” sounds fair. More-engaged Republicans realize this likely means losing most presidential elections.

The National Popular Vote bill would guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states and the District of Columbia…. It has been enacted into law by 17 states and DC with 209 electoral votes…. It needs an additional 61 electoral votes to go into effect.

When last I looked at this site (in 2016), there were 165 electoral votes. Back then I called it “a brilliant hack.”

Since 2016, seven more states have signed the bill into law. Each of those states voted for the Democratic candidate in 2016 (when the popular vote candidate lost the election) and again in 2020.

Eliminating the effect of the Electoral College may be the only way to ensure meaningful presidential elections, but securing those 61 electoral votes may prove Herculean: No solidly Republican state has yet to sign on.

Joe Lucia at Awful Announcing:

The dust has settled, the votes have been counted, and Awful Announcing’s readers have voted on their favorite (and least favorite) local MLB broadcast teams for the 2024 season.

Any ranking of “best baseball announcers” will necessarily be partisan, driven as much by fan interest as by any objective quality.

No surprise, then, that I disagree with the results. San Francisco should have taken this, as they did in four of the six previous contests—including last year's. Duane Kuiper, Mike Krukow, Dave Flemming, and Jon Miller are—individually and collectively—the best broadcasters in the game. The new guys—Shawn Estes, Javier Lopez, Hunter Pence—are solid up-and-comers. I enjoy them enough that I’ll turn on the radio and mute the TV if the game is nationally televised.

Of course, the last time I regularly listened to Mets baseball was the late ’90s, when their announcers were Bob Cohen, Gary Thorne, Ralph Kiner, and Tim McCarver. I have no idea if their current team of Gary Cohen, Ron Darling, and Keith Hernandez is actually good.

Like I said, partisan.

More important than any of that, though: the Giants and Mets beat out both the Dodgers (5) and the Yankees (22).

I do feel awful for Oakland (29), though. And someone had to be last, White Sox fans.

Apple PR:

Today, Apple introduced HomePod mini in midnight….

Why, though?

The best explanation I've heard so far is from the fellas over at ATP: Color matching. The old ‘space gray’ and the new ‘midnight’ may be superficially similar, but they're not the same. If you buy a second one to form a stereo pair, the old and the new won't match.

That would be a very Apple-y thing to consider, of course, but I wonder if it’s also Apple’s way of saying “no new HomePod minis on the horizon,” which is a bummer for those of us with a HomePod (or mini) in literally every room of our home, and who were hoping for new hardware that supports Apple Intelligence.

Staying with today’s theme of divisive topics, Robert Sietsema at Eater NY:

Which hot dog is better: Papaya King or Gray’s Papaya?

Can’t we all just get along?

Truthfully, I’ve eaten probably hundreds of hot dogs from both. They’re both tasty and I’m thrilled they’re still battling for supremacy.

I very much enjoy Papaya King, but I slightly prefer Gray’s—partly because I find their dogs more flavorful; partly because their (former) locations in Hell’s Kitchen and Greenwich Village were closer to where I hung out. Many a late-night bar crawl ended at Sixth and 8th.

Rivalries have helped define the New York City hot dog: a slender, all-beef frank with a natural skin, served with a choice of mustard, sauerkraut, and, later, stewed onions.

I’m a simple man. A dog with mustard, that’s all I need.

Over the years, Papaya King has added over a dozen variations to its basic hot dog featuring incongruous toppings like pastrami, pineapple, jalapenos, grated cheddar, onion rings, hot honey, and mushrooms, generally priced at $7 each. You should ignore these: They’re a diversion from the flavor that defines the New York City frank. 

Completely correct. Same for the abomination that is the Chicago dog. Woof.

Donald Trump, today:

After lengthy deliberation and thought, and considering the tremendous talents of many others, I have decided that the person best suited to assume the position of Vice President of the United States is Senator J.D. Vance of the Great State of Ohio.

J.D. Vance, 2016:

Trump is cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it.

J.D. Vance, 2016:

I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical a--hole like Nixon who wouldn't be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he's America's Hitler.

J.D. Vance, 2016:

I’m not a Trump supporter, but I even feel a certain attachment, and I get a little bit cheery when he says certain things on the campaign trail, when he criticizes the elites.

Says the bestselling author, Yale Law School graduate, Silicon Valley venture capitalist, and protege to billionaire Peter Thiel (who donated $10 million to Vance’s 2022 Senate campaign).

Also:

Vance, whose full name is James David Vance, will turn 40 in August.

Not yet 40, with eighteen months of political experience, and he’s now the GOP’s Vice Presidential nominee. Sounds right.

A reminder that Sarah Palin was older (44), and more experienced (a two-term mayor, and Governor of Alaska for eighteen months) when she was selected as John McCain’s VP pick. We remember how well that turned out.

So my only question is: Who plays J.D. Vance on SNL?

My pick is Seth Rogen.

Timothy Snyder at Thinking about...

If a radical-right politician such as Donald Trump is the victim of an assassination attempt, should we not presume that the perpetrator is on the radical left?

No, we should not.

That sort of presumption, based on us-and-them thinking, is dangerous. It begins a chain of thinking that can lead to more violence. We are the victims, and they are the aggressors. We have been hurt, so it must have been them. No one thinking this way ever asks about the violence on one’s own side.

Snyder offers an historical perspective from the 1920s and 1930s to Saturday’s shocking violence.

(via Dave Spector.)

John Gruber at Daring Fireball:

Do not accept, not even at this fraught moment, the claims of anyone blaming yesterday on Democrats describing Trump as a threat to democracy. Saying so is not even on the spectrum of hyperbole. We saw what we saw after the 2020 election, and especially on January 6.

Do not fret, either, that yesterday’s event somehow cedes the election to Trump, on the grounds that he survived and projected strength. The side that wants a strongman was already voting for him.

Spot on.

We also ended with similar calls to action:

So here is what the Democrats should do. Tomorrow morning Chuck Schumer should put on the floor of the Senate a law mandating strict background checks for all gun purchases….

Give it a name like the “Anti Political and School Violence Act”.

Way more professional than mine.

A follow-up on my aforelinked piece on Priscila Barbosa:

[Uber] detected a ring of people bypassing its background checks in Massachusetts and California, and tipped off the FBI in Boston. Investigators served a warrant to Apple; they wanted to see the iCloud account of a Brazilian guy named Wemerson Dutra Aguiar who, after getting hurt at his job in construction, started driving for apps and later dealing fake accounts. Barbosa didn’t know Aguiar, but a Mafia member had once asked her to email him a Connecticut driver’s license template. She did. By February 2021, law enforcement had circled in on her, and served Apple a search warrant for her iCloud too. In early April, the FBI had tracked Barbosa’s location via her T-Mobile cell number. Investigators staked out her apartment and watched her come and go.

A good reminder that while iCloud is encrypted, by default Apple holds the encryption keys (so they “can help you with data recovery”) and that “only certain data is end-to-end encrypted.” That means the FBI and other law enforcement organizations can get access to your account with a subpoena.

If this concerns you, consider enabling Advanced Data Protection for iCloud (available in iOS 16.2, iPadOS 16.2 and macOS 13.1)—though note that even then your iCloud Mail, Contacts, and Calendar remain accessible to Apple.

Lauren Smiley, writing in Wired about Priscila Barbosa:

Just three years after landing at JFK, she had risen to the top of a shadow Silicon Valley gig economy. She’d hacked her way to the American Dream.

An absolutely wild story. I was reluctant to use "defrauding" in the headline. Barbosa exploited holes in the identity verification systems for Uber, DoorDash, and other gig economy businesses, allowing her and other undocumented immigrants to work. But she did commit fraud.

Two things:

1. Barbosa is smart, entrepreneurial, and tech-savvy. While in Brazil, she

studied IT at a local college, taught computer skills at elementary schools, and digitized records at the city health department. She also became a gym rat […] and started cooking healthy recipes. In 2013, she spun this hobby into a part-time hustle, a delivery service for her ready-made meals. When orders exploded, Barbosa ramped up to full-time in 2015, calling her business Fit Express. She hired nine employees and was featured in the local press. She was making enough to travel to Walt Disney World, party at music festivals, and buy and trade bitcoin. She happily imagined opening franchises and gaining a solid footing in the upper-middle class.

And during her exploits:

Barbosa noticed that all of her axed accounts had, in fact, been created on her phone—iPhone de Priscila Barbosa. What if she made her computer look like a different device each time? She restarted her laptop, accessed the web through a VPN, changed her computer’s address, and set up a virtual machine, inside which she accessed another VPN. She opened a web browser to create an Uber account with a real Social Security number bought from the dark web. It worked.

Her skills should be admired—and used for good. In a different world, under a more welcoming set of immigration policies—or, let’s admit it, if she was European—Barbosa would be an expat not an immigrant, and hailed as a success story.

2. Uber prosecuted Barbosa, claiming financial losses.

During the legal wranglings, the company accused the ring of stealing money and tallied its losses: some $250,000 spent investigating the ring, around $93,000 to onboard the fraudulent drivers, plus safety risks and damage to its reputation.

Claiming losses from onboarding drivers who then went on to pick up and drop off riders? Ridiculous.

Defense attorneys shot back that no one lost money at all: The jobs were done. The food was delivered. People got their rides. The gig companies, in fact, profited off the undocumented drivers, taking their typical hefty cut—money that, once the fraud was discovered, there was no evidence they’d refunded to customers.

Far from losing money, Uber profited because of these drivers. Indeed, had Uber simply ignored these drivers, or better still, advocated for a way to legally support them, they would have only benefitted by having a large pool of eager and willing partners.

The real victims were those who had their identities appropriated. Except:

None of the three identity-theft victims who spoke to me—a Harvard professor and two tech workers—knew how or when their identity had been stolen. None had experienced financial harm. They felt unnerved because their information was exposed, but they were also curious about, and even showed a degree of empathy for, the thieves. One victim mused to me, “It’s kind of a sad crime in a way, isn’t it? Obviously, it’s a crime and they shouldn’t have done it, but sad that people have to do stuff like this to get by.”

Additionally, Barbosa and her partners could have done far, far worse with the data they had. Alessandro Da Fonseca was one such partner:

With all the personal information the ring had access to—enough to open bank accounts, credit cards—their only con was to… create Uber profiles? Fonseca shrugged it off. “We are not criminals, with a criminal mind,” he told me in a jail call. “We just want to work.”

Smiley writes about Barbosa:

she felt like an entrepreneur, supplying the demand. Undocumented immigrants wanted to drive in the gig economy, and with the system that existed, they legally could not. People like Barbosa—with no family in the States to sponsor them for green cards and their undocumented status precluding them from applying for many other types of visas—were short on options. “If the US gave more opportunities for immigrants to be able to work legally and honestly here,” she says, “nobody would look for something like this.”

Completely agree. Immigrants (documented or otherwise) are 56% of the gig economy in San Francisco. 78% are not white. I’m guessing the numbers are similar across the country. They may be “taking our jobs,” but only because they’re not jobs most (white) Americans seem to want. Without immigrants, much of the gig economy would crash.

They just want to work.

You’ve undoubtedly received text messages seeking political donations or exhorting you to vote a certain way. Most conclude with Stop to End, Stop2End, Stop to Quit, and similar stock phrases to request removal from their list.

I always reply Stop because I can’t abide unsolicited solicitations. I’ve wished I could automate it.

Brad Greenlee, in March:

It took three of us to figure out Shortcuts' arcane UX, but we managed to automate “STOP to end"

The method is only for iOS; it uses a Shortcuts Automation to respond to messages containing one of the magic phrases, and, as Brad notes,

Setting it up is completely non-obvious.

An understatement. In fact, the important UI is completely hidden—first behind a long press, and then behind a second tap. Kudos to the three of them for discovering how to do this.

Fortunately, their walkthrough is easy enough to follow. The biggest hassle is that you must repeat it for each phrase, and for every device: You can’t duplicate an Automation, you can’t share them, and they don’t sync across devices.

(The second biggest hassle is that Shortcuts is buggy, at least on my main device. I can’t delete an Automation (FB14246121), and icons blink for no reason (FB142246569). Things work fine on a duplicate device, and in the betas.)

(Via Kris Arnold.)

Yours truly, on the pattern-based bullshit of AI chatbots:

Our acceptance of this BS as truth is dictated both by our knowledge of the topic at hand and our personal level of skepticism.

My friend (and former colleague) Thaddeus Cooper, after spending multiple hours querying ChatGPT about the history of Skee-Ball:

So far, ChatGPT has:

• misidentified the inventor of Skee-Ball
• created references to a non-existant game called Newcomb’s Parlor Table
• incorrectly identified the authors of “Seeking Redemption: The Real Story of the Beautiful Game of Skee-Ball”
• stated that the book “Seeking Redemption: The Real Story of the Beautiful Game of Skee-Ball” contains a section talking about Newcomb’s Parlor Table, which it doesn’t
• invented two articles that never existed AND provided fake links to those articles
• and finally, it produced a third article and attributed the website to the American Skee-Ball League (which doesn’t exist) in supporting evidence of Newcomb’s Parlor Table.

Thad’s conclusion:

This lengthy interaction shows that it will make up information at will and present it as fact. And, when asked to produce a source it will fabricate one for the fake information. The AI researchers have a name for this. They call it hallucinating. Frankly I call it lying.

ChatGPT picked the worst person to lie to about Skee-Ball. Thad is the co-author of Seeking Redemption: The Real Story of the Beautiful Game of Skee-Ball, a “464 page tome” about the game. There may be no one on the planet more knowledgeable about its history.

I meant to post this yesterday, but it’s never a bad day to listen to this powerful speech, made more powerful still by the emotive baritone of James Earl Jones.

A wonderful annual tradition.

Politico:

Rudy Giuliani has been disbarred in New York for his efforts to subvert the 2020 election.

🎶 Disbarred! Oh boy, I’m so disbarred! 🎶

(To the tune of Betrayed.)

The decision is a remarkable rebuke of the former mayor of New York City who rose to prominence as a hard-nosed tough-on-crime prosecutor before gaining national fame for his leadership of the city after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

A reminder that in the wake of that horrific attack, Giuliani sought to cancel the November, 2001 mayoral elections and stay on, despite being “termed out” and unable to run for, or legally serve, a third term. His anti-democratic behavior isn’t new or surprising to any New Yorkers who survived his terms. (Hi.)

As then-presidential candidate Biden remarked about him in 2008,

There’s only three things he mentions in a sentence—a noun and a verb and 9/11. There’s nothing else! There’s nothing else! And I mean this sincerely. He’s genuinely not qualified to be president.

Nor a lawyer.

Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the Court’s 6-3 majority:

Under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of presidential power entitles a former president to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority, and he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts. There is no immunity for unofficial acts.

An absolutely stunning—yet completely expected—ruling from the conservative majority of the Supreme Court expands the scope of a president’s powers, and positions the Court itself as the arbiter of what is deemed an “official act” and therefore “legal”.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing the minority opinion:

Today’s decision to grant former presidents criminal immunity reshapes the institution of the presidency. It makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of government, that no man is above the law.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in a separate dissent:

Ultimately, the majority’s model simply sets the criminal law to one side when it comes to crimes allegedly committed by the President. Before accountability can be sought or rendered, the Judiciary serves as a newfound special gatekeeper, charged not merely with interpreting the law but with policing whether it applies to the President at all.

Justice Sotomayor, concluding her dissent:

Never in the history of our Republic has a President had reason to believe that he would be immune from criminal prosecution if he used the trappings of his office to violate the criminal law. Moving forward, however, all former Presidents will be cloaked in such immunity. If the occupant of that office misuses official power for personal gain, the criminal law that the rest of us must abide will not provide a backstop. With fear for our democracy, I dissent.

Read the entire opinion. The dissents are both blistering and illuminating.

Speaking of the Say Hey Kid, when he first moved with the Giants to San Francisco from New York, racist neighbors made it difficult for him to buy a house in the Sherwood Forest neighborhood. That’s just a mile from where I currently live, and a few minutes walk from a friends’ house.

One of the neighbors who pressured the seller to renege on the deal reportedly said

Certainly I objected. I happen to have quite a few pieces of property in that area and I stand to lose a lot if colored people move in.

Here’s a brief interview with Willie at the time where he seems quite calm about the whole matter.

While Willie eventually bought the home thanks to pressure from the mayor, he never felt welcome in the area. He later bought another home, this time in Forest Hill, the neighborhood I currently live in, where the neighbors seemed less racist.

The San Francisco Chronicle ran the story under the headline Willie Mays Is Denied S.F. House—Race Issue. In it, the same racist neighbor is also quoted as saying

Do you realize how much money you’ll lose?

I guess it was all about “economics” in 1957, too.

Dave Fleming:

Every single one of us who cares about the Giants, who’s part of this Giants family, is a friend of Willie Mays, and always will be.

Mike Krukow:

He won the hearts on the East coast, he won the hearts on the West coast, and everybody in between.

And:

We all loved him, he was our guy. He was the guy who taught us the basket catch, and who didn’t try to catch the basket catch?

Duane Kuiper:

Willie made sure his cap fell off.

Jon Miller, narrating a five minute tribute film:

The best there ever was.

You should also watch “The Catch” section of Ken Burns’ Baseball, which describes just how smart and athletic Willie was. Archived at The Internet Archive (jump to 1:14:16).

During the game, every Giants player wore Willie’s number 24. They won in a dramatic, bottom-of-the-ninth-inning comeback after being down 4-0 to win 5-4: Double to center, bunt to third, sacrifice fly to left, ground ball to center, walk, sacrifice fly to center, intentional walk, walk to end the game. Willie would be proud.

I never got a chance to see the Say Hey Kid play live, but he was always part of my baseball life growing up in New York, and later living in San Francisco. He was the soul of the Giants. He’ll be missed.

Absolutely mesmerizing. I was enthralled for its entirety. There’s an anthropomorphic otherworldliness in the growth that suggests sentience. Some seemed almost too alive as they reached and grasped their way, and I half-expected them to start singing, Audrey II-style.

Also: As a city boy who only sees fruit and vegetables in their picked state, this was fascinating, and a tad disconcerting. We eat these things?!

(Via kottke.org.)

Coraline is one of my favorite movies, with an evocative score, sublime stop motion animation, and beautiful visuals (especially in 3D). Hard to fathom it’s been 15 years. A remastered 3D version in theaters? Tickets already bought. It’ll be an early birthday gift to myself.

Between this and Batman: Caped Crusader, August is shaping up to be a great month.

Coraline | Official Website | 15 August 2024

Get tickets for Coraline 15th Anniversary. In cinemas worldwide from August 15.

Coraline | Official Website | 15 August 2024Powster

Moody visuals, classic animation style, and a stellar voice cast. From Bruce Timm (creator of the multi-Emmy Award-winning Batman: The Animated Series), J.J. Abrams, and Matt Reeves. Set, seemingly, in an alt-’40s, with a familiar rogues’ gallery: Catwoman, Harvey Dent/Two-Face, Harley Quinn, Penguin, and more. On Amazon Prime Video, of all places.

Exquisite headline for The Verge’s story on Microsoft’s new Arm-based laptops. I won’t spoil it, just click the link and enjoy.

Anil Dash (at an absolute gem of a URL):

I realize that most people who've never been in the boardroom have a lot of questions (and often, anxieties) about what happens on a board, so I wanted to share a very subjective view of what I've seen and learned over the years.

I definitely have both (questions and anxieties).

He goes into great detail, based on his many years of serving on boards, both for his own companies and for other organizations. He describes the job of a board, what board meetings look like, how they’re organized and function, and the day-to-day experience of being a board member.

Too few people are willing to share their experience of actually being in the room. What is it really like to be, for example, a software developer, an engineering manager, or, I dunno, a flautist? Having an “insider view” can help demystify a role, making it seem less unobtainable (or, perhaps, less idyllic).

The section most relevant to me, then, was How do you get in the room?

The first thing to know is, your initial impressions and suspicions are correct: it’s not fair, and it’s not nearly inclusive.

No surprise there, and one of several reasons motivating me to join a board.

The for-profit organizations were overwhelmingly comprised of very wealthy white men, with a small smattering of Asian American men, though the non-profits were notably better in nearly every dimension of inclusion.

A reality we can see across many Fortune 500 companies.

More pervasive, though, is the old-boys’ network.

Oh dear. My goal: To bring the benefits of the old-boys’ network to more than just the old boys.

From talking to those who’ve served on more traditional boards, there’s an almost uniform, reflexive dismissal of the idea, where legacy board members will assert that any class of people who haven’t been in the board room before must certainly have been excluded on the basis of merit, as everyone in the room got there purely on their own skills and talents. It’s bullshit, but I’ve heard it so consistently, in almost the same stupid “we can’t lower the bar” phrasing, that it must be the common belief of the majority of people serving on boards today.

Disheartening, but unsurprising. Meritocracy is a pervasive (and wrong) belief of the already successful.

And I expect that a lot of people who agree with the desire to make things more inclusive probably also feel the pressure of being the “only one” in the room, so they don’t want to be seen as arguing for inclusion, lest they get treated as the token diversity hire on the board and have their other ideas dismissed.

As “the ‘only one’ in the room” for most of my career, he’s spot on about this tension.

I’m deeply thankful to Anil for these insights. They offered valuable clarity for what I should expect from being on a board. Joining a board of directors is one of my post-retirement goals. I see it as a way to contribute my experience and energy to an organization doing work I care about. Forming a board will be necessary as I get closer to launching a nonprofit organization.

I’ll be revisiting this article many times in the next months.

Update: There's now an extensive Q&A, sourced from his readers.

Damien McFerran at TimeExtension.com shares the story of Nvidia’s near-bankruptcy in 1995, after partnering with Sega to build a game console:

If we had finished that game console with Sega and fulfilled our contract, we would have spent two years working on the wrong architecture while everybody else is racing ahead in this new world that, quite frankly, we kind of started.

On the other hand, if we didn’t finish the contract, then we run out of money. And so I was confronted with a situation where we would finish the project and die, or not finish the project and die right away.

Sega released them from their contract, and also paid them the $5 million that would have been due.

It was all the money that we had. And it gave us just enough money to hunker down.

Nvidia is now worth over $3 Trillion, briefly surpassing Apple and Microsoft.

What a remarkable comeback.

I also enjoyed this recent Joy of Tech comic spotlighting Nvidia’s recent massive growth.

nVidia then and now!

Hard not to be envious!

The Joy of Tech

(Via @Sonikku.)

In my recent linked post about the US team’s loss to England, I wrote:

I’m hoping this is the start of America’s love affair with cricket.

Rishabh Sharma, writing for India Today:

For the unversed, this may sound unbelievable. [...] But the gentleman's game has a long history in the US. Long before baseball claimed the American sports landscape, cricket was a prominent and popular game, embraced by a diverse array of players across the young nation.

Of course cricket was once popular in America, it was a British colony. It was shortsighted of me not to consider that.

For the British colonists who settled in North America, cricket was a pastime. By the mid-1700s, cricket had spread to other territories, with matches being reported in Virginia and Pennsylvania.

After 1783, when the American Revolution ended, the interest in all things British waned in America. But cricket continued to thrive and by the mid-1800s, the sport was being played in 22 states.

At one point, cricket was more popular than baseball, and The Philadelphia Cricket Club, established in 1854, is still around today.

Why did cricket lose out to baseball? As you might suspect:

The Civil War also saw a cultural shift in American sports as baseball began to be seen as a more American sport compared to cricket, which had a strong British association. The post-war period was a time of growing American nationalism, and baseball fit well into this cultural shift.

But, cricket is having a resurgence today, driven, ironically, by immigrants from former British colonies where cricket remained popular. There’s now a six-team Major League Cricket league, and the USA Cricket organization.

I guess what I should have said was I’m hoping this is a restart of America’s love affair with cricket.

Ben Burrows, writing for The Athletic:

The United States is out of the T20 Cricket World Cup after a heavy defeat by England in Bridgetown, Barbados.

A colonizer defeating one former colony on the grounds of another former colony. That’s cricket for you.

The U.S. was a revelation in its first global competition and by reaching the Super Eights — a second group phase — will automatically be part of the next T20 World Cup, which will be held in India and Sri Lanka in 2026.

It’s hard to be too disappointed by the loss, though, considering it’s the team’s first match on the world stage, they upset Pakistan, and will play in the next T20 World Cup.

I’m hoping this is the start of America’s love affair with cricket.

U.S. captain Aaron Jones:

“The wicket was a bit sticky and Adil Rashid is for sure a very good bowler. I didn’t think our shot selection was the best. We knew he was the dangerman on this wicket for sure, and we still gave him some wickets as well.”

Translation for baseball fans: The ball was darting around the plate, and the pitcher was on his game. We were swinging at balls way out of the strike zone. We knew he was the ace on their staff, and we still gave him some easy outs.