The NFL draft allows a cabal of billion-dollar companies to control the labor market for an entire industry. The draft caps young workers’ earnings, mandates which company they work for, where they’ll live, and how long it will be until they’re able to seek a market-value wage.

And I’m all for it.

This is not the popular position among pro-labor sportswriters; fellow travelers like Patrick Hruby have long argued for the draft’s abolishment. And now that real money is finally, legally flowing to college athletes, draft-slotted rookie salaries might actually be a pay cut for some players. Why not let prospects sign whatever pro contract best suits them?

The first thing Melissa Mayer did after acquiring Tumblr was promise not to screw it up.

Then she screwed it up.

Mayer, then the CEO of Yahoo[!], didn’t just misjudge Tumblr’s culture—she misunderstood what a social network is: an intricate web of human beings who’d collectively found it useful to communicate on certain terms.

I had grand plans for a one-year anniversary post about my ADHD diagnosis–but my plans kept getting grander while I kept getting distracted, and now it’s kind of moot.

*pauses for laughter*

I was going to write an essay about playing through the new remastered Switch edition of a classic video game I hate, but first I have to actually play through the whole entire game.

I used to work all day in a steel shop, pretending I was a writer. I’d get off work, come home, realize the stink of rust and dust and cigarette smoke permeated every bit of me, shower it all off, sit down at the computer and not write.

Working construction felt like work: it was hard, and I only did it for the money. I punched a time clock when I came in, again when I went home, and got paid for every half-hour in between. Writing? Writing was a fun cool thing I thought I’d like to do someday—maybe all day—instead of work.

Not quite ten years later, I started a blog in hopes of writing for real. I set goals, schedules, deadlines. I thought about marketing and promotion, tools and platforms. I scoped out competition and sharpened my craft. I treated writing like work: I showed up every day and did the thing, even though I wasn’t punching a clock—or getting paid.

If you spend all day thinking about writing but never put fingers to keyboard, spend hours typing without adding to your wordcount, or spend all your time writing but never publish? You just might be a BAD WRITER.

That’s the name of a new indie PC game by Paul Jessup, who’s also an author with publication credits at many of the biggest, best science-fiction and fantasy outlets around. BAD WRITER is a cozy little role-playing adventure where you play the role of a struggling writer.

Perhaps inevitably, the game raced its way through Writer Twitter and soared to the top of the Itch.io charts:

Has a sentence ever felt like a knife at your throat?

Have you ever read a piece of news and dropped into freefall, the world blurring around you and your phone while your stomach sinks because what you’re seeing can’t be real?

Has someone written something so wrong that it makes your bile rise and your hands shake? That you didn’t know a person could contain enough malice and ignorance to even think those words, let alone type them out and hit “Send”?

I was pacing around the parking lot of the dayjob I was about to quit with my cell phone to my ear. The voice coming through the speaker was a managing editor trying to sign me to a full-time-equivalent freelance contract.

Permalance, in industry parlance: a job’s worth of work for a job’s worth of pay, with no actual employment promised or implied.

“So far only one writer has managed to become an employee with benefits. So I’m not going to say it’s likely,” he told me. “But if you come in and kick ass for us, it is possible.”

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has destroyed buildings, killed people, and thrown global geopolitics into chaos. It’s tested our global ability to tell truth from lies, right from wrong, good from evil.

It’s also smacked a lot of online smartypantses right in the credibility.

As much as I care about political analysis (I went to school for it), I write about sports because there are concrete rules and definitive winners. You can make evaluating performances and modeling outcomes your life’s work—but at the end of the day, your subjects are what their record says they are.

[CONTENT WARNINGS: Death, grief, drug use, curse words and Detroit Lions football.]

I have no fucking business writing a memorial for Neil Bulson.

First of all, he should still be here. He should not be gone. I should not have heard via mutual friends that Neil died unexpectedly at home last weekend. But he did, and he would not appreciate my wallowing in bullshit hypotheticals.

At one point late in an evening otherwise lost to the dark, dank haze of Five South Case, one of the guys I was hanging out with uttered a phrase that can only precede something amazing or terrible. On this occasion, it was both.

“Check this shit out,” he said, and popped a VHS tape into his player. This is what appeared on screen:

The sun has set on Tom Brady’s quarterbacking empire. For 22 seasons he was inescapable, inevitable. His utter dominance didn’t just stand out over multiple discrete eras of the game, it erased multiple discrete eras of the game.

He led the league in passing yards again this year; 26 of the next 31 quarterbacks on the list were former first- or second-round draft picks. He out-passed eight former No. 1 overall picks, per StatHead: elite prospects with incredible traits, all between age 22 and 33. At 44, Brady has just broken his and Warren Moon’s shared record as the oldest quarterback ever to make the Pro Bowl.

But Brady’s career started when he, a sixth-round pick who wasn’t even the unquestioned starter at Michigan, was put in the game to relieve an injured former No. 1 overall pick.

Writers know the power of a good lie.

As authors, we put quotation marks around words that have never been spoken, and attribute them to characters that exist only in our heads. As journalists, we know that as soon as something is 50.1 percent of something else, we can go to our golf bag of words and pull out the big dog: “most.”

As PR flacks, we describe bad things as if they’re actually good:

Millennial and Zoomer creatives are leading the charge for labor rights in North America–and they’re racking up incredible wins, from video-game developers beginning to organize to #NewDealForAnimation leading to better contracts and newly unionized studios.

Artists have been more effective than anybody of changing the discourse around NFTs, explaining all the exploitative and terrible aspects of blockchain-minting art. Scroll through any working artist’s Twitter feed, and you’ll see screeds against theft of intellectual labor.

Right next to tweets about stealing books:

It’s been killing me to watch so many of my friends Tweet about how nobody cares if they die. Brilliant and lovely people. Writers, artists, activists, musicians. The immunocompromised, the high-risk. Souls whose presence on Earth makes Earth a better, brighter place. People who’ve made me a smarter, better person just by sharing their thoughts and art.

People crying out in desperation as they feel like the world is giving up on them. Like everyone’s pretending they don’t exist, deeming them expendable, throwing their bodies into the furnace that fuels the engine of capitalism.

But the evolving nature of COVID, and medical science’s race to out-pace it, means public-health guidelines not only can but must change to get the best possible outcomes for everyone.

As long as I’ve been writing about sports on the Internet, I’ve been apologizing to sports fans for how much of a nerd I am—and for as long as I’ve been alive, I’ve been apologizing to my fellow nerds about how much I love sports.

But as we approach the 13th anniversary of the blog post that started my writing career, I’m more comfortable than ever being unapologetically myself in any forum or crowd. For several years, my pinned Tweet has been one positing the existence of advanced Quidditch analytics:

I’ve sent smarter, funnier, and lots more popular Tweets. But this one, in one sentence, tied together everything you could expect from me and my Twitter feed in a pithy little bow.

This week I went back to the office for the first time in 21 months.

All I was doing was picking up a new laptop—but it might not be long before I have to go back there to regularly do, you know, work. I swung by my desk, just to see the state of the place, and found a couple of friends waiting for me:

Mai and Trunks, standing guard

It’s hard not to have an inflated self-concept when your country dedicates a national holiday to doing your personal favorite things. So every year, when we all get together with our loved ones and set out inexhaustible spreads of fatty and carbo-loaded foods, then watch Detroit Lions football and possibly fall asleep in our chairs a little bit? T-Day stands for Ty Day.

It’s also Ty Day every time I sit down to write this week’s Gimme Schalter and remember 375 busy humans have voluntarily signed up to read whatever I feel like writing. It’s literally humbling, in that I feel very small as I wonder how I’m going make it worth all of your time. But it’s also “humbling” in the same sense some use “literally,” i.e., the exact opposite of what the word means.

So, in that spirit of overstuffed ego and belly, I offer you the recipe to my Actually Good Green Bean Casserole. Not that the standard version doesn’t have a certain appeal, but this is good. I end up making a couple of pans for both Thanksgiving AND Christmas, by request.

Gimme Schalter is supposed to go out at 10:00 a.m. every Thursday, which will come as a shock to many of you who’ve come to expect it sometime around lunch on Friday. I haven’t stressed (too) much about blowing my own self-imposed deadline—but this Friday, the Friday my younger half-sister got married, I really really blew it.

Between driving to Minneapolis and back, recording and producing the giant 100th episode of Three & Out, attending the wedding and generally prioritizing more pressing tasks, I failed to get an issue out during a week for the first time since Gimme Schalter launched in July. In a way, it’s not a big deal; I haven’t accepted any payment for the work of this newsletter, and I’m going to try to get two out this week to catch up.

But in another way, it’s huge.

My son and I walked into the gym 17 minutes early, and froze. Out on the gleaming blue court were a bunch of ripped dudes in workout clothes and pinnies, playing a game like soccer but about a zillion times faster.

In the middle of it all was the guy who’d invited us to drop in: Jeremy Klepal, member of the U.S. men’s national futsal team. A few months ago, he was representing our country in the FIFA Futsal World Cup–a competition we hadn’t even qualified for since 2008. Now, my son and I were watching him run the floor with nine other guys we couldn’t hope to compete with.

Football culture is a specific subset of sports culture, and not a particularly great one. All the major coaching trees that propagate approach and mentality from generation to generation have strong roots in the WWII-era U.S. military—and while we’ve thankfully moved on from ideas such as drinking water during practice makes a player soft, the idea that a football player is a soldier whose duty is to sacrifice everything for the team, without question, is still imprinted on the minds of many coaches, fans, and media members.

So in some circles, there’s nothing worse than calling a football player “selfish.” I usually push back on that, because it’s most often applied to football players (whose careers are shockingly brief) trying to make the most money they can in the time they’ve got, or taking care of their body instead of aggravating injuries trying to gut out one more game.

Aaron Rodgers is selfish.