16 Comments

Congrats on the new place! I hope the move goes smoothly.

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I’m sure a big chunk of the readership wouldn’t care (being that this isn’t a sports column), but I’d love to read a piece containing your general thoughts on basketball and the NBA. Might be a good free post and get you a few extra eyeballs that might never see your work otherwise...?

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Excellent comment from MarkS. He's right, in ranked-choice voting you just list the candidates in the order YOU prefer. Electability or who you think "has a realistic shot at winning" has nothing to do with it. If your preferred candidate(s) fall by the wayside, and the list gets winnowed down to two candidates, your vote will end up going to the one you find preferable of those two as long as you included that one in your ranking. So be sure to always rank ALL the candidates, and rank them purely in terms of your own preferences.

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Woo-hoo! Comment of the week! I can ride off into the sunset now ...

I do regret the *sigh* though. It was genuine, but came off snarky.

I am thrilled to see ranked-choice voting (which I learned about half a century ago) finally coming into mainstream use. I hope it spreads far and wide.

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Perhaps a stronger paywall could help with the subscriptions. I feel like this post, for example, would be easy to hide. Weekly digests feel like 'a paid service' to begin with. I get that there's a dimension of 'free stuff is marketing' so the calculus isn't so simple.

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Very amused to see the Martha Stewart cookbook recommended. I gotta say you are such a surprising mix of all kinds of interests. I’m an enthusiastic home cook -but especially a fan of low maintenance, efficient and yummy recipes. Check out the Smitten Kitchen blog for great, easy, reliable recipes. And she’s a funny, warm writer as well w great photos. Best wishes on your move. Moving sucks but it’s great once it’s done.

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My gf points out that I forgot to mention that there is a French bakery close by so that she can get Madelines whenever she wants.

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mission accomplished on Sula review - just finished it and thank you for the recommendation

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I LOVE the Sula piece. This is why I am glad to subscribe. There aren't that many places online for book talk that is actually "serious book talk"and if writing that makes me a lit nerd, oh well. Sula is a masterwork.

“She had been looking all along for a friend, and it took her a while to discover that a lover was not a comrade and could never be - for a woman. And that no one would ever be that version of herself which she sought to reach out to and touch with an ungloved hand. There was only her own mood and whim, and if that was all there was, she decided to turn the naked hand toward it, discover it and let others become as intimate with their own selves as she was.”

I get annoyed at the lumping in of people based on race - Alice Walker is fine but no, she's not on the same level as Morrison! This sort of thing pops up in sports all the time, too. White athletes must be compared to white athletes; Black athletes to Black athletes.

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TrueHoop is the #3 sports Substack... wouldn't you rather share something less well-known?

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Your piece on first/third person in academic writing is excellent. But when you tell students to listen to their professors, do you assume that the professors of this figured out? Because we don't... :)

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I just read the Miami Heat piece and it may be my favorite Freddie piece ever. I would love to see some sort of update to this because it seems like a harbinger of the "all culture war everything" world we now live in. That elites/peasants divide in those sports opinions would soon mirror the same in culture war opinions. It's not a coincidence that so many of the writers in that Lowe/Barnwell milieu became stridently woke. And what is being woke if not showing you have the right opinions, unlike those gross, unwashed masses?

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