I was having lunch the other day with a four-year-old when they told me the biggest number was 100. I went to the old Arsene Wenger playbook and asked them what would happen if they added one magic bean to 100 magic beans?

Pause, furrowed brow, wide eyes. ONE-HUNDRED-AND-ONE.

So, what’s the biggest number?

Rolled eyes, we just talked about this: 101.

What happens, though, if you add one to 101?

So went by one of the simpler and more profound half-hours of conversation either of us had enjoyed for a while.

I regret to inform you that the bidding for the exclusive naming rights to the Blog formerly known as the Blog with No Name didn’t go all the way to infinity. There are still lives left to be saved, if you’re minded to do so.

Nevertheless, I am pleased to report that the bidding did draw directly from Arsene Wenger’s Econ 101. Our brave and kind auction-winner, what with being a Master of Glaciers and a Doctor of Dunes, was able to go a step further than our four-year-old friend and first imagine adding a zero, starting up at £1000 and adding one from there. At £150 a pop, that’s the best part of seven years of an infant’s life to you and me. Truly, the stuff of legend, and well worth a month (or four posts, whichever takes longer (or even longer if it catches on)) of seeing his name up in lights.

I hope every time you look at the number 1001, you’ll see Arabian Nights:1 folklore compiled from many sources; storytelling as survival strategy; stories hidden within stories and unfurling over time; 1001 nights being how long it can take to change somebody’s mind. At least, that’s how long it took Scheherazade to change the mind of a mad king who had heretofore taken to killing a new wife each night. And are we really any more amenable to having our minds changed than him?

Every time I look at the number 1001, I’ll see Luis Suarez rubbing 31 boatloads of salt into Arsene Wenger’s wounded pride, and think life is oh so absurd.

Summer 2013, Arsene and Arsenal blinking their way out of the Banter Era. Arsene had spent £390 million of someone else’s money building the Emirates Stadium, which Arsenal moved into in 2006. Then he paid for it: the Banter Era (c. 2006-2013) was spent servicing debt, selling iconic players in their prime to clubs actually owned, not merely sponsored, by sovereign wealth funds, hunting for replacements in the bargain bin, and treating qualifying for the Champions League as a trophy.2

That fateful summer, with licence to spend more than chump change for the first time in years, Arsene comes to believe that Suarez’s contract with Liverpool has a buyout clause for bids “over £40,000,000”. Ever the economist, Le Professeur goes to work at the margin, submitting a cunning and club record bid of £40,000,001.

And so was served up another lesson, if one were needed, that being right is not enough.

You don’t have to be immoral to drive a Brink’s truck through the gap between what words say and what words mean in pursuit of your own interests: amoral people can do it too. The law living in spirit as much as statute means that vibes can defy reason in the court of public opinion. Shamelessness and indecency have a tendency these days to prevail when we rely on shame or decency to keep amygdala instincts in check.

Liverpool’s American owners, led by John W. Henry, interpreted Suarez’s buyout clause as requiring them only to inform him of bids over £40,000,000 and to negotiate in good faith, not necessarily to accept them. So informed, he asked them to accept this one. Nobody ever went broke betting on football culture being a bit allergic to things a touch too cute, especially if they smell intellectual. Henry and co bet the patent silliness of Le Prof going so strictly by the book would protect them from being on the receiving end of a backlash they couldn’t easily brush off. They told Suarez no, making one wonder what the clause could possibly have been good for other than the money power’s control over a streetkid from Montevideo.

Suarez was no saint. He’s been flagrantly crosswise with the law himself, for unapologetic cheating, unapologetic racism, and unapologetic biting. Once, a mistake. Twice, a mistake? Three times?!

Despite his flaws, and helpfully for remembering how the halo effect is a noxious bias and how everything is a tradeoff, prime Suarez was elite at making ball go goal. In 2013/14, surfacing few misgivings about continuing to serve the interests of the masters who defied him, he put together one of the finest seasons the Premier League has seen, scoring 31 times and earning himself a £75 million move to Barcelona the following summer.

It’s a dog eat dog world, unless and until we decide otherwise.

Thank you to all you bidders, most especially our Master of Glaciers and Doctor of Dunes, for kindly and bravely deciding otherwise.

Welcome to The 1001.

Training data

• 📖Among the Thugs (1991). American Bill Buford went and became an English football hooligan, up to and including being beaten by Italian police while rioting in their streets, so he and we could try to understand wtf that dishonourable culture is all about. Puts Hillbilly Elegy in the shade.

• 🎵My Number (2013). “You don’t have my number / We don’t need each other now / The creed or the culture / We can move beyond it now.”3

• 📖Behave (2017). Bearded Bob Sapolsky, primatologist and neuroscientist, goes long on our base instincts and how we keep them in check, biologically and culturally. The answer to whether we’re Good or Bad, like the answer to just about everything else, is it depends. (You can also inject his unrivaled nerd-charisma into your veins in lecture series format using video or audio.)

The thing Rafa was driving at, the troublesome truth at the end of every rainbow in a world defined by scarcity, is you simply cannot cover every base. If you go all out in attack, pushing everybody into forward areas to increase your own chance of scoring, there’s nobody back to stop the other team taking advantage all the times you run aground.

Flip side, if you park the bus, everybody back barricading the other side’s route to goal, there’s nobody up there to take advantage all the times they run aground.

Every front office’s dream is a squad full of players elite at increasing the likelihood you score and decreasing the likelihood you concede. Such players are vanishingly rare. Messi was not this way, even in his prime. Mbappe is not this way, now during his. Even the richest and most dominant teams need to confront the reality that every player’s game has holes. At almost every position, tradeoffs have to be made at the margin: pick and pay a player who contributes more in attack, or pick and pay a player who contributes more in defence.

Modern football tactics, discovered on the continent and given their fullest expression by economic migrants to the English Premier League, revolve around finding ways to hack one more fraction of a defensive FTE into the attacking structure or one more fraction of an attacking FTE into the defensive structure, and then fine-tuning the balance until the next innovation comes along.

Jose Mourinho broke everyone’s 4-4-2-addled brains by trading his second striker for a third central midfielder, taking more control of whatever the hell it is that happens in the middle of the pitch, against all odds winning the Champions League with a second-rate Porto squad, and parlaying that into decades of being called the Special One with nowhere near enough irony.1

Pep Guardiola is first a dancer, second Jose’s nemesis, and third a genius endlessly troubled by the impossibility of the game he loves providing him with the control he craves. One of his many innovative derivations was moving a full-back into central midfield in possession, freeing up one of the would-be midfielders to go be an attacker without exposing Pep to the fate he considers worse than death: the very possibility of a counter-attack up the middle.2

Mikel Arteta, Pep’s disciple, is first and foremost a sicko. Who wouldn’t be twisted by living through the Banter Years, which he, every other member of Arsenal’s makeshift midfield, and the rest of us, spent having our wellbeing counter-attacked to smithereens?

Then he was exposed to a heavy dose of Pep’s methods as his assistant manager. And now as Arsenal manager he practices never, ever getting counter-attacked with the zealotry of the recently converted.

The upshot is one of the greatest defences that has played the game in the Data Era (and very likely ever), and a discourse dominated by how bad and/or boring the attack is (this season’s third best).

According to betting markets, the balance Mikel has struck is good enough to win the league in about 5000 of our next 10,000 runs through the simulation. Arsenal and Pep City are neck and neck in the title race, strength of schedule favouring Arsenal and injuries favouring City. Arsenal’s net rating of +0.98 expected goals per game comfortably bests City’s +0.78. (Liverpool and Chelsea are next back at +0.47, also compiled on the strength of their defence and attack respectively.) If the mighty Gunners finish top of the xG table and second in the table table, it won’t be the first time, because destiny is just which way the bounces break.

Mikel could ask his uninjured players to prioritize attacking more. But he knows how much he hates being counter-attacked, and he knows he has not discovered a magic way to eliminate tradeoffs. He’s done his damndest with his innovative derivations of set-piece play design, hacking the game in a way that is deeply displeasing to watch, and so effective now everyone is doing it. Beyond the set-pieces, it’s not clear whether he has no new ideas about how to get more players into attacking positions, or whether he is actively choosing not to deploy those ideas because he deems them net-negative.

The classical rich-get-richer political economy of European soccerball means that between them the best teams generally have all the best attackers and defenders, so the marginal tradeoffs show up clearest within the top-right quadrant. In the land of the free and the home of the brave, collectively bargained salary caps mean this dynamic shows up even more clearly up and down major leagues characterized by parity.3

In the Premier League, only weirdo Bournemouth are above average at one end and below on the other. In the NBA, eight of the 20 teams that were trying to win this season fit the bill for top-left or bottom-right quadrant. It’s almost impossible to imagine a Premier League team distinguishing themselves the way the Denver Nuggets did, registering the best offense and the worst defense.

Nikola Jokic, the Nuggets’ superstar, is a goofball, a flawed player, and a flawed leader. He’s both an offensive genius and hard to build around defensively, a combination that was good enough to carry the Nuggets to the title in 2023.4

Luka Doncic is Joker Lite. He’s a below-average defensive player. He’s poorly conditioned as professional athletes go, and devotes too much of his scarce energy to yelling at the refs. Those flaws are enough to keep him out of the very top drawer, but not enough to keep him and his preternatural offensive gifts from having led a highly-flawed Dallas Mavericks squad to a Conference Finals and an NBA Finals between 2022 and 2024.5

Nico Harrison, Mavs General Manager, found himself torn between his superstar player and his belief in the shibboleth that defense wins championships. Eight months after reaching the Finals, he rolled the dice on a decision so shocking nobody believed the tweet was real.

Nico traded Luka and his limitations for some rounding errors and Anthony Davis, a once-elite defender more injury-prone and six years older than Luka whose offensive game fell off a cliff as he slid down the wrong side of the age curve.

Trading a superstar is not on its face insane. You could get another superstar in return, or several stars who are better in the aggregate, or draft picks that have a chance of turning into a future superduperstar. Nico could have caused there to be a bidding war that opened up all these paths. Instead, knowing there would be the backlash to end all backlashes when news broke, he did a secret deal with a GM he was mates with for a player whose jib he liked the cut of.

Six injuries, 31 appearances, and 367 days later, neither Nico nor AD were employed by the Mavs. Ownership relieved Nico of his duties to replace him with someone who would trade away AD’s gigantic contract for salary relief.

That the Luka trade would turn out to be an all-time own goal was predictable and predicted. There was no grand plan or just cause hiding out of sight. There was just a guy forgetting that everything is a tradeoff, that there are no perfect players, and that purity tests in service of shibboleths are almost always a bad idea. When you have one of the best half-dozen players on the planet, for all that doesn’t guarantee you a title, for all that you might wish you had somebody even better, the chances are the alternatives are worse, maybe much worse. Nico’s counterfactual was a fantasy, and not in the good way.

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When you start looking at your favourite game as tradeoffs all the way down, it makes more sense. Same goes for the workings of the “real world”. Few easy fixes. No free lunch.

You see it in every failure to build something good that lasts, every promising project derailed by not resisting the temptation to self-impose impossible purity tests. It’s there in every failure to balance competing priorities, every party pandering to their base and losing the electorate. There in every failure to prioritize at all, every government trying to please everyone and achieving next to nothing.

Gawd help us. Rafa was more right than he ever knew.

Auction deadline day has been and gone, your bids are in, and next time out the Blog will be coming to you under a new name.

Thank you to everybody who was brave and kind enough to play along.

Training data

• 📺Benitez’s blanket analogy! (2017). 13 years after arriving in England he was still patiently explaining this to people who despite their profession being built around asking questions prefer not to hear an answer more complicated than “just try harder and be better at everything”.

• 🎵Star Treatment (2018). “I just wanted to be one of The Strokes / Now look at the mess you made me make / Hitchhiking with a monogrammed suitcase / Miles away from any half-useful imaginary highway.”6

• 📝Luka Doncic Is a Los Angeles Laker, (Un)explained (2025). Shot.

• 📝The Anthony Davis Trade Is the Disaster Dallas Needed (2026). Chaser.

• 📝My simplistic theory of the left and right (2026). Simple, but effective.

Who really knows why we do what we do. I’m reasonably confident that for me it has something to do with the gift of having been read a lot of Winnie the Pooh as an infant and reading Moneyball as an adolescent. Off the back of that, I’m somewhat confident I didn’t get into this racket to improve my own retirement prospects. Blogging, for all its virtues, is not on the nest egg glidepath, and the Blog with No Name (working title) will be free for the foreseeable.

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I’m supremely confident it’s a good use of the limited resources available to me to help other people help other people as much as humanly possible.1 In particular to help you save someone else’s child’s life as cost-effectively as possible.

Remember Mo Salah, our Most Valuable Prophet. Remember his teaching about how it costs only £150 ($200) to give Grandma another year with her granddaughter. You’ll never know her face or her name, yet it costs only £6000 ($8000) to save that infant’s whole life.

And remember just how much blog names matter, at least to me.

Naming rights are as sporting as sportswashing. The Emirates Stadium, North London. Guaranteed Rate Field, Chicago. Crypto.com Arena, Los Angeles.2 The people who paid millions of dollars for these grotesque billboards know how frivolous it is to treat either speech acts or sport as inconsequential.

Pope John Paul II, patron saint of being right sometimes, said that of all the unimportant things, football is the most important. Jurgen Klopp, a messianic figure in his own lunchtime, he who married heavy metal football with humble compassion, liked to echo JP2. They needn’t have narrowed their claim to any one sport. They all matter as much as people believe they matter, and for an awful lot of them and for an awful lot of us that’s an awful lot.

Of course, sport is in some ways silly. It is not, as Jurgen’s predecessor Wry Bill Shankly surely knew, more important than life and death. Grown-ups go around golf courses saying birdie and bogey to each other with straight faces. Albatross, the word for scoring 3-under par on one hole, captures the absurdity of the best possible outcome being vanishingly rare, requiring of no little skill and a shedload of luck. And as your correspondent knows all too well, taking sports or the application of their lessons to “real life” too seriously can be a burden hung around one’s neck.3

Nevertheless, sport is a model that can help us. Save us, even. It can inform the words we say and the actions we take as we try to solve the most important problems in what might be the most important century.

Sporting decision makers made better decisions after they got serious about learning from analytical models of their games, models that often began life as blogosphere passion projects. In this front office, we believe that can happen again, one level up: sports themselves as the model for decision makers playing games with real lives and deaths. We can have all sorts of fun picking apart the rigour and the glorious randomness. The competitions and complex collaborations. The regulations and unwritten rules. The ingenious and idiotic strategies.

Models that break the Internet and serve it back to us in shards are irrevocably changing our minds, and with them the world. Those who knew their arse from their Elbow were forewarned that how we see things could change overnight, the moon made mirrorball, and that the morning after, the streets would be our empty stage. Whether that means desolation or opportunity is up to us.4 There’d better be a mirrorball, wrote the greatest lyricist of our generation, as he contemplated the importance of there being lightness in dark times, of putting on a show, to stave off our despair and to help us see things clearly, even, or especially, if that means taking them - or ourselves - apart and putting them back together again.5

Every song referenced by the Blog with No Name, past, present, and future, is on the Soundtrack.

Call me by your name

I’d like to call the Blog something like Mirrorball, or Albatross, or Most Important. Even after longlisting more than 200 names, though, eliminating three-fourths of them for failing Distinctiveness or Durability tests, and developing a rubric scoring the shortlist by Legibility, Territory, Tone, Thesis and Layers, I’m still not ready to say what I’d choose if it was up to me. In any case, it isn’t up to me. Not yet at least.

It’s up to you and the highest number you’re kind and brave enough to write on this form today, or at least between now and deadline day, Sunday 26 April.

Exclusive naming rights to the Blog with No Name will be sold by blind auction.

The highest bidder wins the right to name the Blog for the month of May, or for four posts (whichever takes longer). The second highest bidder is the first of the losers. The proceeds will go to GiveWell’s Top Charities Fund.6

The reserve price is one year of life (£150 ($200)).

The bidding has begun.

Bid now

Training data

• 📖The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds (2013). If you thought the Sapiens chapter about money being a construct was eyebrow raising, this book will melt your face off.

• 🎵One Point Perspective (2018). “Singsong Round the Money Tree” / This stunning documentary / That no one else unfortunately saw / Such beautiful photography / It’s worth it for the opening scene / I’ve been driving round listening to the score.”7

• 🎙️‘Mad Men,’ S4E7: “The Suitcase” | Best TV Episodes of the 21st Century (2018). When Don says to Peggy, “I give you money, you give me ideas,” I think what he means is, “I give you money, you give me ideas and the money to people who need it much more than either of us.”

• 🎙️How to Do the Most Good (2021). Ezra Klein and Holden Karnofsky walk the streets from GiveWell to preventing catastrophic risks from AI.

• 📝⏜ Our radical plan to replace the NBA draft ⏜ (2026). Maybe everything should be an auction? OK, except healthcare. And access to your regulator maybe? Taylor tickets, though, why wouldn’t you auction those?

The reason this matters, as we’re all about to watch play out at globe-melting scale, is that being right is not enough. It really doesn’t matter to most people whether you accurately predicted or vehemently denied that a time would soon come when an artificial intelligence would grow so capable it could do dangerous things human brains could only dream of. Like, as of now, in a matter of months/minutes identify and exploit countless vulnerabilities in the software systems that are the foundation of modern civilization, high-severity vulnerabilities that some of the most intelligent humans have been hunting for fruitlessly for years.1

Some bloggers also happened to predict it would be handy if the keepers of such an AI had a worldview that held open the possibility of deeming such a powerful force unfit for release into the wild, rather than letting market forces or manifest destiny or Mark Zuckerberg undermine society’s safety, security, and sporting infrastructure.

“token usage is NOT impact” is one of the foundational beliefs of this Blog, and while there’s some debate about whether a staff memo with that title has been doing the rounds at Meta, what’s not debated is that they had a literal AI usage leaderboard where you could become a “Token Legend”.2 It’s reportedly been taken down, but nobody believes their so-called leadership has stopped trying their damndest to incentivize everyone on payroll to apply the skills honed bilking our crazy uncles out of billions of dollars to open sourcing the aforementioned superhuman capabilities. A fun little game where bad dice could cost us the future of all carbon-based life forms.

Meta has been beaten to the punch by Anthropic, who are the keepers of the superhacking model Claude Mythos. Thankfully, their leadership seems to be a whole lot less hypocritical, naive, or anti-democratic than their motivated critics would have you believe, despite no doubt being at least a little bit hypocritical, naive, and anti-democratic, what with being human. They have decided to use the technological breakthrough they’ve made to catalyze coordination on risk reduction rather than loosing Mythos into the arms race. Nevertheless, once - and even while - everyone else goes Hammertime to catch up and overtake, it would be preferable to have something more than a handful of individuals’ discretion and valour as the only things standing between us and a world in which anyone with a laptop can take down every grid, ground every plane, and crash every bank.3

I’ve been around a bit and got to know some of the people token usage leaderboards are for. Of the two kinds of people, these are not those who take seriously the impact of their words and actions, rather those who are just trying to stay on the glidepath to a retirement home in Monte Carlo. One of the most memorable lessons I learnt during nearly a decade in an F1 fantasy league office was that there are a frankly terrifying number of people in positions of no little power who fall in the second category.

You see this affliction plain as day in Fantasyland through the lens of team names. In three different seasons, three different grown men on the payroll of one of London’s blue chip strategic consultancies, a company which prides itself on recruiting the best and brightest minds exclusively from elite universities, joined a fantasy league run by a bloke in their chain of command and submitted their employer’s name as their name. I am not making this up.4

OC&C, you see, has two of the same letters as Esteban Ocon. Esteban Ocon, as you know from Drive to Survive, is an unremarkable journeyman. Pause for a moment and ask yourself honestly, if you were presented with this fact pattern and then handed a keyboard and asked to make a personal and enduring statement about yourself, would you be able to resist committing white collar crime by submitting your name as “Esteban OCCon”, “OCCon Racing”, or - and I am still not making this up - “OC(&C)on”?5

It gets better! Or rather worse. It would be one thing if these drones were just doing a corporate shill version of a thing lots of people on the retirement track do without being disqualified, making their team name a pun from the name of someone on their team. Esteban Ocon, though, was not on a single one of these teams.

These, I cannot emphasise enough, are reputedly our best and brightest grown-ups. And I don’t see any reason worth betting on why those in the employ of the AI companies currently holding the entire present and future in their grubby hands would be any better or any brighter.

In the league office I wanted to know whether we were presiding over a game of any skill at all. Despite “real life” F1 being predictably rigged in favour of the rich teams, outcomes in Fantasyland were scrambled into being axiomatically lucky by which lap Nepo Baby Stroll happened to crash on, who he happened to crash into, and both the Commissioner’s made-up scoring system and his man-made spreadsheet functioning as random number generators. I turned to studying whether team naming is skillful. The proof that it is comes by showing that it’s completely uncorrelated with luck: one’s position in the championship standings predicted nothing about one’s position in the Team Name Power Rankings.

Which brings us back around to nerd blogs and their names and the search for some light amid all the dumb luck, good and bad. For the logical reader it will follow clearly that while blogs themselves might be noise, their names are assuredly signal. It’s a wonder we’ve made it so far into what some call the Internet Era and what I call the endgame without anyone ranking them.

Within each tier there is room for reasonable minds to disagree about the order, but unbroken ties are moral equivalence so hairs must be split. The tiers themselves are non-negotiable.

What am I missing?

• 24. Money Stuff (Matt Levine)

We won’t dawdle here.

Whacking your name on it

• 23. Joe Carlsmith’s Substack (Joe Carlsmith)

• 22. Andy Masley (Andy Masley)

• 21. Derek Thompson (Derek Thompson)

There was some cheap point-scoring against the president when he was giving hours-long press conferences about ballrooms and convention centres during a hot war, but as a noted knower of World history being long and complex, isn’t it more likely any schoolboy mistakes he might have made in the Mideast came from being laser-focused on the foundation-shaking implications of Mythos?6

If you’re a young man flaunting your name after 1970, Derek > Andy for irony reasons.

Joe happens to be right about a lot of things, and wrong about whether to put Substack in the title of your Substack.

It’s still your own name though

• 20. Silver Bulletin (Nate Silver)

• 19. Bentham’s Newsletter (Bentham’s Bulldog)

• 18. Otherwise (Julia Wise)

• 17. From Matter (Matt Reardon)

Nate is a doyen of the nerd blogosphere, having built the bridge from Moneyball to the electoral college. He’s good at backronyms: witness 538.com’s RAPTOR (rip), the Robust Algorithm (using) Player Tracking (and) On/Off Ratings, released in 2019 and named after the reigning NBA champs. These days, though, he’s settled on a standard-issue pun on his own name.

Bentham’s Bulldog is a top-tier pseudonym for a utilitarian blogger standing on Jeremy’s shoulders. Bentham’s Newsletter, though, keeps the bark while losing the bite.

Full disclosure: I’m in a professional chain of command with Julia (in my day job, when I’m not on parental leave), one half of effective giving power couple Julia & Jeff, and maybe that’s why I’ve read so much of her blog and relatively little of his. Or maybe it’s that he just whacked his name on it.7

“From Matter to Life: Information and Causality” is a lovely encapsulation of Reardon’s project, but the move of reclaiming a literary reference will score more highly when it’s decoupled from the ego, because the blogosphere is about humility first and foremost.

The Valley of Meh

• 16. By the Numbers (Hannah Ritchie)

• 15. Data Points (John Burn-Murdoch)

• 14. Future Perfect (Vox)

• 13. Platformer (Casey Newton)

• 12. Import AI (Jack Clark)

In soccerball, The Valley of Meh refers to the gap in our understanding between most of the game being played in midfield, and almost all of the value-creating actions quantifiable using early analytical models happening near the goal. It stood to reason then that some of the efforts at progress and prevention in midfield mattered somehow, and even now with next gen models it’s not at all obvious how or how much.8

You can see a similar dynamic playing out here: things are happening and intentionally so - writing from an online platform about social media platforms; import is apparently a programming pun and AI is apparently important - but none of them quite reach escape velocity.

With a twist

• 11. Expecting Goals (Michael Caley)

• 10. Transformer (Shakeel Hashim)

• 9. Cold Takes (Holden Karnofsky)

Caley is proof that analytics are just some crap some people who were really smart made up just to get in the game because they had no talent.9 Despite being a tireless pioneer bringing expected goals into the public consciousness, he’s still stuck making ends meet as one half of the Double Pivot, the world’s most agreeable soccer analytics podcasting duo called Mike.10

Transformer is proof of another of the foundational beliefs of the Blog: everything is derivative. AI was transformed by the discovery of the transformer, the discovery of AI will transform the world, and Transformer is a better name than Platformer.

Twisting from hot to cold is easy; Cold Takes earns its place at the top of this tier with self-awareness about how spreadsheet-based approaches to solving the world’s most pressing problems are easily mistaken for a lack of compassion.

Alphabet soup

• 8. Astral Codex Ten (Scott Alexander)

Get it? Before he was a big name, Dr. Scott’s anagram was Slate Star Codex, a blog he chose to delete off the face of the Internet rather than be doxxed by a retirement-tracker from that little old blog called the New York Times. Codex does a double shift as scripture and medicine.

I see what you did there

• 7. Marginal Revolution (Tyler Cowen)

• 6. The Swiss Ramble (Kieron O’Connor)

• 5. That Vast Variety (Matt Beard)

Legend has it that KOC, who freely chose to out himself when he moved to Substack, originally discovered his blog while hiking in Switzerland listening to The Football Ramble. The money shot here is using Switzerland, the home of neutrality and international banking, to tie together his finance background and his discursive breakdowns of football club accounts. Are you watching Matt Levine?

The discovery of marginal utility theory in the 19th century was the birth of modern economics, and the way it’s used by Cowen makes in two words the claim that the Revolution enabled and is enacted by his incremental approach to progress.

Another Matt, another literary reference.11 This time it’s Hume, and his caution against overfitting the vagaries of “real life” to one’s preferred and predetermined principles, at the cost of ignoring “that vast variety, which nature has so much affected in all her operations”. So quaint, and so true.

Oscar bait

• 4. Defector (Deadspin defectors)

• 3. Good Bones (Ajeya Cotra)

You know what’s not quaint? Stick to sports mandates from private equity wise guys. The staff at Deadspin knew that deep in their bones and so when their editor was frogmarched for sticking to his non-sporting guns, under their own steam they walked out and started Defector, a website (remember those?) where ball and life are inseparable. Which is true.

A skeleton worth fleshing out is a metaphor for every unwritten blog and every unfulfilled life. Good Bones, the poem, has a mother realtor-selling her children on a half-terrible world that could be beautiful. In Ajeya’s hands, the Good carries the torch for doing good and doing it better, proudly promoting the potential of radical empathy and taking ideas seriously to make the world a dramatically better place, and acknowledging that putting our principles into practice is and forever will be a work in progress.

Photo finish

It’s Slow Boring vs Stealing Signals for all the marbles.

Slow Boring starts where Cold Takes leaves off and turns it up several notches. It layers on ironic self-deprecation: we know that neither Yglesias nor his style are slow or boring and we know he knows it. The pun on boring works subtly in the background of a tiger-tight literary reference to the blog’s thesis: politics as a strong and slow boring of hard boards. Max Weber, who wrote that line in his classic Politics as a Vocation, can only have been a golfer.

Stealing Signals is the exception to the rule under which these have all been nerd blogs I actually came up reading. It’s such a good name it was on my own longlist (n>200) of names for the Blog with No Name (working title). It fell at the Distinctiveness hurdle, dammit, when my editor discovered during the shortlisting process that it was already spoken for, right here in Fantasyland.12 Peeling the onion: signal, not noise, of course. Stealing, not playing it safe, as in stealing bases, and smuggling in the idea that good ideas cross domains. And best of all, sign-stealing, not playing by the rules, as in the scandalous scheme used by the Houston Astros on their way to the 2017 World Series. In Fantasyland, where no holds are barred, game recognises game.

One more foundation belief to get us across the line: when in doubt, the tiebreaker is comedy. Stealing Signals is a really funny name for a fantasy football blog if you know about the scandal, especially if you know that once stolen by a secret camera, the catcher-to-pitcher signal was communicated to the batter at the plate by a batter in the dugout banging on a bin. Slow Boring, though, is on its surface a really funny name for any blog about anything.

• 2. Stealing Signals (Ben Gretch)

• 1. Slow Boring (Matt Yglesias)

You can bid for the exclusive rights to name the Blog with No Name (working title).

If you win you’ll get your name on the building and you’ll be saving lives cost-effectively: all proceeds to GiveWell.

Bid now

Training data

• 📖Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985). The medium is the message. Twas ever thus.

• 🎵Four Out Of Five (2018). “Cute new places keep on popping up / Around Clavius, it’s all getting gentrified / I put a taqueria on the moon, The Information-Action Ratio / It got rave reviews, four stars out of five.”13

• 📝The Astros stole signs electronically in 2017 — part of a much broader issue for Major League Baseball (2019). Yes, they were found thoroughly guilty by the league’s investigation. And no, they were not stripped of their 2017 World Series title.

• 🎙️What everyone is missing about Anthropic vs The Pentagon. And: The Meta leaks are worse than you think (2026). From the excellent 80,000 Hours Podcast, who regrettably took the excellent name of their organization and just added Podcast to it.

• 📝Why Anthropic’s new model has cybersecurity experts rattled (2026). And me. I’m rattled.

The Dean of Discipline presiding over my collegiate life was no golfer. He hadn’t learnt the game’s lessons and wouldn’t have recognized Rory McIlroy if he was sat on the bench in front of him, so the morning after young Rory’s first major triumph, failing to see it as just cause, he threw the book at our sodden watch party. For our part in the drama, including giving the powers that be the runaround and, upon apprehension, assuming false identities, we were hit with 12 hours of hard labour in the gardens, time served at three successive sunrises and primarily spent hand-trimming the edges of the Augusta-green lawns we’d danced on in the early hours.

Hanging over the edging and the daybreak alarms was the risk that failure to comply would result in being designated by the Dean as persona non grata, on its own distinguishing, but regrettably paired with a ban on being allowed to graduate, which would have been a shame having already taken the trouble to sit all the exams.

Despite the Dean’s best efforts, though, the worst of the damage was self-inflicted: one accomplice suffered through the dirty dozen and then had to spend the next decade and a half coming to terms with the mysterious disappearance of his undergarments, including his favourite tie. Looking back on it all, the turning point was that fateful morning after, when, having awoken in his own bed and counted it as a good outcome all things considered, he became aware he’d done so wearing his blazer, brogues, and nothing else.

Which is to say I and many of my nearest and dearest have been in the tank with Rory since the very beginning. Without his epic meltdown on the homeward holes at the Masters in April 2011, and us all having lived through that setback together, putt by punishing putt, there is no watershed moment at the US Open on the final Sunday of finals term in June.

I always arch an eyebrow when in one breath somebody tells me they can’t comprehend the fascination with sport, and in the next that they love novels or films or prestige TV or reality TV or good old-fashioned gossip. And not only because book club too rarely ends with a communal dip in the lake. What, if not a slice of life’s rich tapestry laid out in narrative longform, one of our too few antidotes to vertical video, do sceptics think sport is?

The ecstasy of summer 2011, a function of an excruciating spring, was mere prelude.

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With the major monkey off his back, Rory took up his mantle as the rightful heir to Tiger, who was publicly and privately living out his own tragic downfall at the same time. Ascendant Rory won the PGA Championship in 2012 and The Open (and another PGA) in 2014, leaving only absolution at the Masters between himself, the career Grand Slam, and the attendant immortality.1

Then a silverback gorilla glommed onto his shoulders and started taking steroids.

If you didn’t want to spend a decade listening to Drake find countless ways to say it’s too much to be famous these days, you could tune in each April to watch Rory wage one forlorn battle after another around Augusta. He was just like us, imperfect and striving, only with all the dials turned up to 11. In his 10 attempts to tame the course and his silverback between 2015 and 2024, he didn’t get close.2 Third round leads: zero. Second place finishes: one, off the back of a pressure-free final round 64, having already fallen 10 shots behind. First round scores: high and climbing, breaking 70 only once, and in the four years between 2019 and 2022 carding a pair of 73s, a shocking 75, and a not-surprising-anymore 76. In 2023, he gets Thursday under something resembling control and then course corrects with a Friday 77. In 2024, he keeps Thursday under control and then…course corrects with a Friday 77. He was a different man here than he was anywhere else, consistently taking himself clean out of the picture before anyone could accuse him of being in contention.

April 2025. Rory is 11 years and 38 starts removed from his last major win, 10 months removed from missing two short putts in the final three holes while leading the US Open, and, despite it all, world number two and the bookies’ second favourite. Rather than treating him as cursed or insane, bettors gave him about a 1-in-8 chance of doing the same very hard chaotic thing ever so slightly differently and getting a different result. Success, as the smart money knows and we all too easily forget, is a mess.3

Through 14 holes he’s 4-under par, on track to open in the 60s for the first time since 2018 and looking for all the world a heavyweight contender. But this is Rory on Thursday at Augusta, so he manufactures two double-bogeys out of nothing and cards a level-par 72, same old story. Friday, though, the low round of the day, 66. Saturday, no relapse, 66 again, and a two-shot third-round lead. The promise and perils of Sunday don’t bear thinking about, or as Butch Harmon would say, if you don’t love this, you don’t love golf.4

People have missed the cut at seminary for producing things half as nakedly hackneyed as this particular Sunday script. Rory’s lead evaporates in all of one hole, an opening double-bogey, hell. Then he gets hot, leading by four on the 10th tee, exactly as he had 14 years earlier before turning to a pillar of salt. This time, though, 10’s a birdie. Old-timers knew, of course, to hold their horses, gripping tighter after bogey at 11. Drowning sorrows’ odds drop like a stone as an in-his-sleep wedge into the 13th green dives into the creek, another double-bogey. 14, bogey, lead all gone, the room swimming for millions. Not Rory, though, not this time. Ship steadied off the tee at 15, setting up the shot of his life around the corner over the water for an eagle chance. Naturally, though, a tentative putt means settling for birdie and a fleeting lead soon snuffed out by another’s birdie up ahead, now friend and foe Justin Rose the leader in the clubhouse. Unperturbed, or so it seems on Rory’s surface, another sublime birdie at 17 and again the outright lead, he needs par at the last to slay the silverback.

Alas! From the middle of the fairway, the in-his-daydreams wedge lands in the greenside bunker, up-and-down eludes as another short putt slides by, bogey, devastation. The millions deflate with him.

He might never have a better chance than that, yet he does still have a chance. A head-to-head sudden-death playoff for all the marbles. Back in the middle of the 18th fairway, fate has him hitting the same shot again which just cost him the title, his whole damned experience reliving the same failure on repeat collapsed into 20 endless minutes.

Somehow, his sympathetic nervous system allows him to address his ball and swing his wedge, the millions long since behind our sofas. Somehow, he swings straight and true, finds the heart of the green, uses spin and slope to get it to a gimme, and suddenly this birdie putt is the best chance he’s ever had.

Drained: the putt, the blood from his face, the air from his chest, and anybody who’d been in the tank with him for what seemed like several lifetimes.

Training data

• 📖The Golf Omnibus (c. 1920). Wodehouse on the Great Mystery is an unbridled joy.

• 📖Chaos (1997). It’s not the theory I thought it was, and it explains so much more about how cause, effect, and randomness coexist.

• 📝The Secret History of Tiger Woods (2016). Wright Thompson’s shocking-and-surprising insight into what intense pressure can do to even the steeliest mind. My favourite piece of sportswriting, and best enjoyed paired with Charles P. Pierce’s Tiger Woods, the Man. Amen. (1997).

• 🎵Batphone (2018). “I want an interesting synonym / To describe this thing / That you say we’re all grandfathered in / I’ll use the search engine / We’ve got much to discuss / Too much to discuss over a bucket of balls.”5

• 📺The Final Five Holes (2025). Best paired, if you’re a sicko, with Rory Meltdown (2011). Drink it in.

Blessed as I was to manage Mo for five years and win three titles together, nobody knows better how he floated above the fray, immune to the vagaries of form and fate that afflict the rest of us grappling in vain with the least random parts of the number generator. The ascendance of Steph Curry established beyond doubt in the mid-2010s that three is greater than two. Until 2017, most of us had six being greater than two threes filed away under Huge if True. Mo revealed it to be true, and huge.

While many tokens are being spilled at the moment on the two Premier League titles Liverpool won in Mo’s nine years, grossly overlooked have been the four titles our MVP won in the seven seasons which overlapped with Theo Walcott Fan Club, the fantasy league which shut up shop in 2024 on account of its membership finding the demands of elite competition unsustainable as we aged out of our prime. As Mo moves on to the next realm,1 inshallah, it’s time to share how he guided my path, with faith that you too will apply his teaching to the part of the simulation rubes call “real life”.

Every corner of Fantasyland is built on prediction, but different jurisdictions incentivize different strategies. In auction- and draft-based formats typical of American sports, each player is in the game only once. No convergence on the same set of players whose cost-effectiveness becomes obvious as the season unfolds, a variance-sapping scourge all too familiar to managers who grew up playing traditional Fantasy soccerball. In the highest form, you either pony up for Mo on auction night, or you spend the season looking up at him scoring shedloads for your rival. The most important question facing bidders for the last decade has been not ‘can you predict the MVP?’, but ‘what’s the most you’re willing to pay to have Mo grace your team?’

First time out, I paid a pittance. Most had memory-holed the 21-year-old who did nothing in one season at Chelsea. Only the nerds who watched his loan spell in Italy on their spreadsheets - including the nerds who were running the show at Liverpool - had noticed him become a star-in-waiting, and the nerds with blogs were kind enough to notify their readers about the promise of his second coming. Nobody, though, expected quite what happened next: 32 goals and 10 assists produced an outlandish total of 277 Fantasy points, only topped once since (by the MVP himself), turning the TWFC title race into a procession.2

It wasn’t much of a fluke: the underlying stats showed him a bit over his head with his finishing, but even with some regression to his expected rate of converting shots into goals into points he still projected as one-of-one.3 And that’s what came to pass. In his first three seasons, the MVP averaged 6.4 points per gameweek. Second, Raheem Sterling, was more than a full point back at 5.3. Over the course of seven seasons, seven different players topped the non-Mo division, and even if you’d been able to predict each of them (you couldn’t), you’d still have been better off with Mo, 5.9 to 5.7.4 How, you might wonder, did my rivals allow me to get my hands on this points machine for five of seven? Why did others think I was lucking my way out of making the same expensive mistake and somehow getting the same winning results?

The answer, as far as I gleaned from Mo’s teaching, starts with what happens without him, the counterfactual. My willingness to pay more than anybody else for the MVP flowed, counter-intuitively, from me and my elaborate spreadsheet paying closer attention to the critical importance of the 90th most valuable player.

In a league with six 15-player squads, whoever ranks 90th is the replacement player, the worst player you might end up with, and 45th is the median. Let’s have Victor Moses and Gabriel Jesus play those parts, and predict they’ll score two and three points per respectively, against Mo’s six. And then let’s ignore Moses for a second, and consider that anybody who doesn’t automatically clock that Mo is twice as valuable as Jesus is a trolley with a wheel loose.5

Not so fast. What happens if you get neither Mo nor Jesus? The counterfactual isn’t you get nothing. You get Moses, and you get his two points per. If every spot in the squad is spotted two free points, the difference of three between Mo and Jesus isn’t what it seems. Rather than the difference between six and three, it’s the difference between plus-four and plus-one points above the replacement player (Points Above Moses, PAM). That’s what you’re paying for, Value Over Moses (VOM). And so Mo isn’t worth two Jesuses after all. He’s worth four Jesuses.6

Following our intuitions about Jesus doesn’t make anybody a bad person, but it will mean leaving expected points all over the floor. Without considering the counterfactual, without drawing a line at replacement level, everyman will systematically overpay for journeymen, and neglect the superstars breathing rarefied air up where the curve gets steep. Your squad having eight of the top 30 might feel like a safer bet, but all else being equal my squad having three of the top eight will eat it alive.

The same dynamic plays out in “real life” leagues, especially those with salary caps (although it’s often obscured by combining squad-wide caps with maximum individual salaries).7 And it plays out in other markets for talent. The next time you’re buying or selling some labour, you’ll be doing yourself a disservice if you aren’t thinking about what Moses brings to the team. You can bet your bottom dollar the AI researchers perpetually auctioning themselves off, not to mention the labs doing the bidding, have all been advised by their editors to think this way.

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This content, though, unlike so much else that comes out of clubhouses in Fantasyland, is not coming to you as a get rich quick scheme.

Expecting better

The same counterfactual-replacement dynamic underpins higher-minded endeavours like clinical trials, where the control group are Moses. And it underpins all the decisions we make in “real life”, where something will happen regardless of what we do, or don’t do.

Take saving the lives of others. Something we all do, in expectation, continuously, whether routinely, like driving slowly near schools, or exceptionally, like running the London marathon to raise money for the fight against cancer. Often, we face a choice: which life to save? Assuredly when we’re choosing which charity to run for, or donate to, and hopefully not whether to run over a grandmother on the school run or her granddaughter.

It would be better if we lived in a “real world” where we didn’t have to make these kinds of tradeoffs. For now, though, once you’ve put your time or money on one thing, you can’t spend that time or money again. If all lives are equal, and we can’t save them all, aren’t 75 years of one more valuable than five?

Following our intuitions about saving grandmothers doesn’t make anybody a bad person, but it will mean leaving expected life-years all over the floor. Without considering the counterfactual, everyman will systematically neglect the far too many granddaughters who die before they’re five.

My mum just became a Grandma for the first time, and promptly endorsed a pro-granddaughter allocation of resources. My Granny just became a Great Granny and her idiosyncratic beliefs (Mrs Thatcher mixed with Matt Yglesias) have had her advocating for defunding herself for as long as I can remember. My daughter declined to comment.

Relatively little money can go a very long way

In a rich country, if you couldn’t save everyone, you’d need to be saving grandmas for something like 1/15th (5/75) what it costs to save granddaughters to save a comparable number of life-years. If we go global, that order of magnitude jumps up. Some life-years can be saved for more like 1/100th the cost of others.

There is not, as far as anyone knows, any rich country Grandma who can be saved for less than $8000. The lowest figure I could find for buying a cancer patient one year of life with chemotherapy is $17,131.8 I think we’d all want that paid for another year with Grandma. $100k of the most cost-effective chemo buys 5.8 precious life-years.

At the same time, though, there’s the counterfactual: countless poverty-stricken granddaughters who can be saved for much less. Not if there were a cure, or if we could only break down the structural barriers to systemic change, worthy as those aspirations are. Just if you send the cash-strapped charity with a tried-and-tested intervention a small fraction of your disposable income.

GiveWell somehow heard the word before the MVP was preaching it. They started studying the cost-effectiveness of charitable dollars for a living in 2007, when Mido was the only Egyptian who’d ever played in the Premier League.9 Their exhaustive research and elaborate spreadsheets show that distributing inexpensive insecticide-treated bed nets to people in the poorest parts of Africa is highly effective at preventing malaria, saving an expected life for every $3000-$8000 spent.10 Three-quarters of those lives belong to children under five. If we make some overly-conservative assumptions (see footnote), then $100k of bed nets buys 500 precious life-years.11

In Fantasyland, when I first saw how much my model thought the MVP was worth, it blew my mind. I did a triple take, and then spent countless hours discerning the meaning of the message. With that divine inspiration, when I first found out how little it can cost to save someone’s granddaughter in “real life”, I could take it in stride, and take appropriate action.

A donation of $200 (£150) buys a child a year of life.

If I could inspire one more person to save one more child one more year of life by putting the MVP’s preaching into practice, that would be a fitting tribute.

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Training data

• 📖Moneyball (2003) and 📺 He Gets On Base (2011). Michael Lewis x Brad Pitt. The rest is history.

• 🎵American Sports (2018). “Can I please have my money back? / My virtual reality mask is stuck on “Parliament Brawl” / Emergency battery pack just in time / For my weekly chat with God on video call.”12

• 📝How Data (and Some Breathtaking Soccer) Brought Liverpool to the Cusp of Glory (2019). Amazing how nerds get cooler when they win at the jocks’ own game.

• 📖Noise (2021). You no doubt know the OG, Thinking, Fast and Slow. The sequel contains all sorts more insights relevant to building better prediction models in Fantasyland and in “real life”, including developing the leg-break provision: only override your model if information it’s missing is as obvious and consequential as a player being seriously injured.

• 📝Against Malaria Foundation (via GiveWell). Why not?

Already the reigning MVP and his Warriors the defending champions, Steph was on his way to becoming the first and only unanimous MVP and 73 wins in the NBA’s 82-game season, besting Jordan’s Bulls’ 72, which for the two decades prior many had treated less as a record and more akin to death and taxes.1 He revealed himself as comfortably the greatest shooter of a basketball ever in such euphoric fashion that he force-fed a new geometry of the game to a rapidly dwindling number of haters.2

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The NBA brought in the 3-point line in 1979, 35 years before Curry went nuclear. Suddenly there was an area of the court from which made shots were worth 50% more points. Surely, one might have thought, the game would change beyond all recognition, and sharpish. Yet the proportion of possessions that ended with a 3-point shot ticked up slowly, from 2.7% that first season, to 19.5% in Curry’s first season, with the 5 seasons up until 2009-10 below the long-run trend. Despite all the nerds and their spreadsheets saying it was, shall we say, suboptimal (like, leaving as good as one-third of the expected value on the floor suboptimal), the world’s best players stubbornly kept jacking it up from inside their comfort zone 18 or 20 or 22 feet from the hoop, instead of from 23 feet and 9 inches.3

Me and my childhood nickname Statto enter the story in 2014. I was passing the time between tweets by managing an international clinical research project spending tens of millions of euros to generate new charts and tables that might persuade doctors who hadn’t already been persuaded by half a century of best practice or a battery of contemporary randomized controlled trials to save their patients’ lives using anticoagulants. Anticoagulants, you see, are a problem for the poorly calibrated: don’t prescribe them, and the many strokes or heart attacks you fail to prevent are acts of God; prescribe them, and on your head be the handful of hemorrhages you cause. So I was all too familiar with being right not being enough, and with people leaving expected value - nay, expected lives - all over the fucking floor in order to avoid that fate worse than death: straying beyond the zone of one’s own comfort.4

The battle for the soul of the NBA was raging. The rate at which 3-point attempts were increasing had almost doubled since Steph entered the league, and Nate Silver was publishing probabilistic prediction models that had the upstart Warriors, who had never won a playoff series but shot a lot of threes, as Western Conference favourites. Charles Barkley, 1993 MVP turned not-in-my-day punditry personified, was yelling that analytics are just some crap some people who were really smart made up just to get in the game because they had no talent. I picked my side, fluttering on the Warriors at 16/1,5 a stake which got me invested enough to start watching regularly as they became the greatest show on earth.6

It wasn’t just Steph. Splash Brother Klay Thompson was maybe the second best shooter of a basketball ever. Skeleton key Draymond Green unlocked the Warriors’ Death Lineup which laid waste to the league by playing shooters at all five positions without derailing the dominant and oft-forgotten defense.7 Coach Steve Kerr’s egalitarian system (and Steph’s enthusiasm for moving off the ball) leveraged the long-range threat into uncontested dunks. All those pieces mattered. And Steph was the piece that mattered most, in fact and in the popular imagination.8

Not for Steph the athlete’s sense of supreme talent and its trappings as crosses to bear. No doubt dedicated to his craft, he doesn’t take himself too seriously. His range made him undeniable, and his on-court demeanor made him undeniably cool, our joy watching born of his joy doing. He became the baby-faced poster child for the analytics revolution, and in spite of the reactionary and tribal headwinds to individual transcendence in team sports, he became almost universally beloved. I fell in love twice over, once because he was the greatest showman, and again because he was proving the numbers right.

@nbaIt's been 10 years since this moment🕺 #NBA #basketball #StephenCurry #Warriors

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Nobody else yet has come close to joining Steph all the way out at the long-range volume-efficiency frontier. Not for lack of trying: general managers wantonly drafting wannabes, coaches giving them the green light, and everyone chucking with gleeful abandon. The 3-point attempt rate leapt from 24% in Steph’s first MVP season to 34% five seasons later. In a copycat league, the time when the game changed beyond recognition, and sharpish, wasn’t when three being greater than two became knowable, or known, or written down, but when it rained down, night after night in glorious high definition, as the greatest show on earth, and ended in a parade.

The inimitable Andy Masley wrote recently about how his own blog’s success is proof, if more were needed, that there’s a ready and willing audience for numbers and their implications. That seeming exactly right, based on my own appetite for analytics blogs and the thriving communities it’s led me into, underpins the existence of this blog. And it leaves open the question of how to reach consequential decision-makers and action-takers who haven’t yet found our corner of the Internet, or haven’t found it’s for them.

I read Steph’s teaching as, whenever there are deadly serious charts or tables getting less attention than their implications warrant, or lines which if they went up would make the world a better place, I should package them up in the most entertaining blog I can muster and send it. I’m betting sporting storytime is one of a million untried or under-tried ways to bring nuanced analysis to life in ways that land not as dry lecture but as entertainment, droll or otherwise. And there’s a version of this anybody dedicated to solving pressing problems can do every day, working not in secret or with a dour sense of duty, rather as showmen, shooting our best long shots.

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Training data

• 📺Analytics are just some crap some people who were really smart made up just to get in the game because they had no talent (2015). This, to me, is Obama at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

• 📝Stephen Curry is the Revolution (2015) and The Case For Stephen Curry, MVP (2017). The prophets didn’t stop posting just because Steph was incarnate, and these from Benjamin Morris at fivethirtyeight.com (rip) are gospel.9

• 📺Steph Curry Drains the Game Winner vs Oklahoma City (2016). The single most memorable moment of Steph’s ascension. The pursuit of 73 wins, the last second of overtime in a game he’s already hit 11 threes, the sheer audacity of pulling from that deep, the double bang, the shimmy.

• 🎵Science Fiction (2018). “I want to make a simple point about peace and love / But in a sexy way where it’s not obvious / Highlight dangers and send out hidden messages / The way some science fiction does.”10

• 📺Why Steph Curry might be the best offensive player ever (2021). Preach.

Sporting decision makers made better decisions after they got serious about learning from analytical models of their games, models that often began life as blogosphere passion projects. In this front office, we believe that can happen again, one level up: sports themselves as the model for decision makers trying to improve the outcomes that matter most.

We can have all sorts of fun learning from its rigour and its ridiculous randomness. Its competitions and complex collaborations. Its politics and power structures. Its regulations and unwritten rules. Its incentives and ingenious-to-idiotic strategies.

Come for a swift half or two in the clubhouse, stay after hours for spinning yarns about how, if you look at them right, sports really are a matter of life and death. And the dancing.

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Between now and opening day, while the anticipation sets us up, don’t forget, you can never beat the bandit.