There's the old adage that no one ever remembers who came in second. It's even more likely that no one will remember who came in second to last. There's probably no worse fate in sports than to be the second worst team of all time. Which brings us to the 2024 Chicago White Sox. The team has lost 120 games this season and their next loss, assuming they realize what now has to be seen as a goal, will make them the losingest MLB team of the modern era. My San Francisco Giants have been hovering around .500 for the entire season. How boring is that. How utterly forgettable. Up until their elimination from playoff contention, I watched nearly every inning of every game. Commentators Mike Krukow, Duane Kuiper, Dave Flemming, and Jon Miller are the soundtrack of my life. And yet, ever after those endless hours of dedication, I won't remember anything about this middling season (other than the fact that this was the year we got cushions on our seats at Oracle Park). White Sox fans will never forget 2024. And so today, we'll start things off with a pastime as American as baseball: Punching down. All baseball fans, even those as disappointed in our seasons as I am, can look down on the lowly Chicago White Sox. At least until they lose one more game, at which point, those of us stuck in the land of half wins and half losses might feel just a little jealous. At least losing that much is funny. Will Leitch in NY Mag: The Beauty of the White Sox’s Historically Abysmal Season. "It’s natural to focus on successful teams: Winning is, after all, the point of every game, the reason we have scoreboards in the first place. But we remember the truly great teams far more than we remember the regular everyday champions: to be the best at something will make you immortal. It thus stands to reason that being the best at losing is also eternal. Do you know who won the World Series in 1962? Do you even care? The only thing that has lasted from that year is the horribleness of the Mets. Besides being more memorable, losing is more relatable and far more familiar than winning. A finite few of us will ever understand what it’s like to be revered, to have tens of thousands of people chanting our name. But doing our best and falling short? Of being bested by a superior? Things not working out? We all know that feeling."

+ Sam Anderson in the NYT (Gift Article): How Does a Baseball Team Lose 120 Games? Every Way You Can Think Of. "I walked out to Section 108, notebook in hand, like a zoologist documenting the last frog pond in the rainforest. I wanted to know many things. What does it feel like to witness, up close, this much losing? How had everything gone so wrong? And why on earth would anyone pay to see it? 'It’s a mental illness,' [a fan named] Beefloaf said, succinctly."

+ ESPN: Chicago White Sox use wit to report recent defeats. It's funny now. But if the White Sox don't lose one more game, no one will be laughing. So go out there and give 'em hell boys. And White Sox fans, heed the words of baseball's most quotable philosopher, Yogi Berra: "It ain’t the heat, it’s the humility."

2

Good Fella

In television and movies, we tend to glorify the mafia. Well, fuggetaboutit. In real life, if you're looking for someone to celebrate, consider a man who has spent his life opposing the mafia and running a secret operation that liberates women from the criminal underworld. D. T. Max in The New Yorker: The Priest Who Helps Women in the Mob Escape. "To help such women, Ciotti, who is seventy-nine, has spent the past twenty years creating an informal network of safe houses, burner phones, and coöperative policemen. When he needs an officer or a government official to facilitate someone’s flight, he often makes the request in person, thus avoiding any phone logs or digital traces."

3

Cyclical Industry

"It was the perfect New York hustle, a scam of subtle perfection. And for three years, it helped Mark Epperson pay his rent. The hustle, in its simplest form: Borrow a Citi Bike. Ride it one block. Wait 15 minutes, then ride it back." NYT (Gift Article): The Hustlers Who Make $6,000 a Month by Gaming Citi Bikes. "By 10:14, the crew had created an algorithmically perfect situation: One station 100 percent full, a short block from another station 100 percent empty. The timing was crucial, because every 15 minutes, Lyft’s algorithm resets, assigning new point values to every bike move. The clock struck 10:15. The algorithm, mistaking this manufactured setup for a true emergency, offered the maximum incentive: $4.80 for every bike returned to the Ed Sullivan Theater. The men switched direction, running east and pedaling west."

4

G Willikers

"If your phone shows '5G,' you’re not necessarily connected to the latest and zippiest cellphone network technology. It might just mean that 5G connections are available nearby. And the bars are a cellular version of a shrug. There is no standard measure of how much signal strength each bar represents." Shira Ovide in WaPo: Your phone’s ‘5G’ icon and signal bars are lying to you.

5

Extra, Extra

Aleph Bet: "Israel's military said the airstrike on the Lebanese capital killed Ibrahim Qubaisi, who it said was the commander of Hezbollah's missile and rocket force." Israel has decimated much of Hezbollah's leadership and upended its communications. The bet seems to be that they can quickly get the terror group to stop launching rockets into Israel and that Iran doesn't want to enter a wider war. WaPo's David Ignatius is not very optimistic: Sadness and dread as the next Lebanon war looms. "It’s like watching people trapped as a violent hurricane approaches. Each time, you hope they can escape and disaster can be averted. But too often, they can’t." Meanwhile, the US is sending troops to be ready to help evacuate U.S. citizens from Lebanon. Here's the latest from CNN.

+ Divided Nations: "I know many look at the world today and see difficulties and react with despair. But I do not. I won't." Biden notes "remarkable sweep of history" in his final United Nations address as president.

+ The Prosecution Doesn't Rest: "The public doesn’t want this execution to move forward. The victim’s family doesn’t want this execution to move forward and the St Louis county prosecuting attorney’s office doesn’t want this execution to move forward." And yet, it's moving forward. Missouri to execute Marcellus Williams despite prosecutors’ objections and innocence claims.

+ The Lies Are the Crimes: If you listen enough Trump rallies or watch enough Fox News, you're likely convinced that we're living through a historic crime wave. Surprise. Murder and other violent crime dropped across the U.S. last year. Shall we zoom in on one town? How about one that's been in the news a lot lately, Springfield, Ohio, where all those pet-eating Haitians have brought crime to a peaceful community. Springfield had more murders under Trump than under Biden-Harris.

+ Give Me a Hire Love: "Shortly after taking the oath of office, the first-term congressman hired his longtime fiancée’s daughter to work as a special assistant in his district office, eventually bumping her salary to about $3,800 a month, payroll records show. In April, Mr. D’Esposito added someone even closer to him to his payroll: a woman with whom he was having an affair, according to four people familiar with the relationship." NYT: A Congressman Had an Affair. Then He Put His Lover on the Payroll.

6

Bottom of the News

"Can a person do something so awful that it would shut down a p-rn site?" Joel Stein on Mark Robinson's infamous achievement.

+ Do people really want a spiced version of Coca-Cola? Nope.

+ Humans tend to fat shame. Penguins, it seems, fat celebrate. Meet Pesto: the fat baby penguin and viral superstar (who looks pretty much exactly like one of my cats).