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L.A. Material is an independent news organization aimed at filling some holes in the Los Angeles news landscape and making that fascinating, fragmented city more legible. You can learn more, and subscribe, at lamaterial.com. This story originally ran at the site on Sept. 30. I had been going to Dodger Stadium with my dad for about 30 years before he pointed them out to me. “See that?” he asked, gesturing toward two rectangular panels of concrete on a far wall of the main seating structure. They looked almost like friezes, carved with inscrutable designs. My dad had been wondering about them for decades. Turns out the pieces he’d spotted are just the beginning. Eventually I’d locate more custom bas-relief sculptures around the park—about a dozen in total. Smaller ones visible from the field-level entrances. Massive, multi-story pieces that wrap around certain outside corners of the building. They’re subtle: abstract scenes unadorned with color, camouflaged into the rest of their concrete environments, in some cases obscured by trees and bushes. 

After a flyout and a strikeout in his first two attempts, Jake Bauers's third time facing Blake Snell in Wednesday's Game 3 of the National League Championship Series went like this: Bauers took a slider down the middle of the plate for strike one. He took two non-competitive pitches down low to make the count 2-1. He foul tipped a changeup, and then, sitting on two strikes, four pitches into his at bat, he decided that he simply would not strike out again. So he fouled off a slider in the zone, then a curveball. He laid off an inside fastball to draw the count full. Then he managed to foul off a high fastball, and, immediately after, slowed down to catch a changeup in the zone. As the pitch count for this at-bat ticked over into double-digits, Bauers pulled a slider that sat up in the zone a bit too much, sending it into the stands past the right-field foul pole. On the 11th pitch, Bauers made no mistake. Snell threw a middle-middle, 98-mile-per-hour fastball, and Bauers smoked a no-doubt, two-run homer that carried over 400 feet into right field to give the Milwaukee Brewers a 3-2 lead. When his teammate Garrett Mitchell hit his own home run off Snell just two pitches later, it was, comparatively, an anticlimax. Spiritually speaking, a guy hitting a home run one pitch after just missing out on another home run counts for two home runs. Bauers had already won the game; Mitchell's own homer was just overkill on Snell's way out.

This week on Nothing But Respect, Harry and I had on our two favorite WNBA writers to talk about the Golden State Valkyries' forthcoming championship. Both Maitreyi Anantharaman, whom you all know from her work here, and Maya Goldberg-Safir, whom you also know from her work here and should know from her work at Rough Notes, know ball and will be covering the series between the Valks and the Atlanta Dream. We spent a solid hour talking about the series and the path the two teams took to get here, but mostly we talked about Kiah Stokes. You can find Nothing But Respect in Apple Podcasts or whatever podcast app you use. Follow the show on Instagram, and contact the Broke Jumper Tip Line at (347) 380-6426. Thanks for listening!

Ross Douthat has a fantasy novel for young-adult readers: The Falcon's Children, the first in what reportedly will be a trilogy from the respectability-conservatism peddler, who left his sinecure as a columnist at the New York Times earlier this year so that he could lower television's aggregate charisma level by 944 percent as a correspondent for Bari Weiss's 60 Minutes. That is virtually all I will ever know about The Falcon's Children, and I beseech you, tender reader, to follow my example. I am here today to talk about fantasy maps. Here, via Douthat's Substack (where he first published at least some of the text of The Falcon's Children), is the hand-drawn map of his fantasy world:

Hydras, the tiny freshwater invertebrates that resemble tentacular palm trees, are often considered immortal. They fasten themselves to rocks with their sticky foot, stretch out their tube-shaped body, and unfurl the stinging tentacles that halo their mouth to catch prey that passes by, an activity they can do ad infinitum if given the right conditions. Although they can be felled by predators or disease in the wild, in the lab, the little animals seem resilient to anything. If you cut off their head, they will simply grow a new one (and sometimes the decapitated head will regrow the rest of its body.) If you mince or dice a hydra, each segment will regrow into a hydra. If you blend a hydra and run the resulting mush through a centrifuge, that mush will reorganize and regrow into a hydra. But hydras do not just regenerate lost body parts. They regenerate their own cells, turning over their entire bodies in less than a month. In the lab, hydras can renew their cells indefinitely, replacing old and worn cells with shiny new ones. We replace our cells too, but as we get older we start to make mistakes and lose our ability to replace cells that no longer work. But the hydra renews its cells from three different populations of stem cells and makes extremely faithful copies. This means the creature keeps "all its characteristics unchanged for an almost unlimited time," per a 2014 paper. This quality has earned the hydra the nickname "the eternal embryo" and thrust the creature into the spotlight of anti-aging research. At least this is the lot in life for all other hydras. The brown hydra Hydra oligactis is not so lucky. When the water is warm, the brown hydra defies aging like any other of its ilk. It reproduces by budding, creating clones of itself that pinch off and become new hydras. This asexual lifestyle allows the hydra to reproduce without any signs of aging. But when temperatures dip to around 50 degrees Fahrenheit, according to a new paper in the journal Aging Cell, the brown hydra stops budding and instead produces sperm and eggs. In other words, the hydra transforms and prepares itself for sexual reproduction. But this milestone comes at a brutal tradeoff. After the hydra reproduces sexually, it loses its immortality. It begins to die. Sex! But at what cost?

It is late August, the waning days of a long summer. Though the oppressive heat still imposes itself on you, the days are shortening noticeably, the faint whisper of a chill in the air perceptible in the stiller moments of deep night. Soon there will be red leaves, sweaters onto shoulders, and NBA basketball. You both anticipate and fear the turnover of the seasons, though it feels abstract—that is, until your phone lights up. Someone has sent you an Instagram link to a clip from Michael Porter Jr.'s podcast, Curious Mike, where he and Lonzo Ball are inadvertently inventing effective altruism from first principles. Unable to look away, you scroll further and select a clip with the banner text "HOW WOMEN ARE TOXIC," and the captioned text "girls be toxic," learning about how these females often display toxic tendencies. Ah yes, you think to yourself, Brooklyn Nets basketball is right around the corner. Porter Jr. is a figure of fascination around these parts, as he is a starting-caliber NBA player who is seemingly more dedicated to cutting odious podcast clips than he is to helping his team win basketball games. Last offseason, Porter Jr. called attention to himself—it wouldn't be quite right to say he "got himself in trouble" or "generated controversy," since those formulations presuppose both a consensus reality against which he clashed, and a mechanism of consequence that doesn't exist—by going on one of the Nelk Boys' podcasts and saying stuff like, "I'm not saying I'm a misogynist or anything, but I'll throw on some Andrew Tate and see how they react," because you have to "test a girl early" and "do your research." It was an occasion to reflect on the alarming, shrinking distance between high-level athletes and the internecine culture of the right-wing internet, which is to say: the internet.

Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday at Defector during the NFL season. Got something you wanna contribute? Email the Roo. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. “Everyone’s a critic” has been a lament my entire life, but the advent of the internet rendered it literally true. Anyone can review anything online, from new albums to tubes of toothpaste. But just because you can review something doesn’t mean you’re doing criticism. It’s easy to conflate the two nouns, especially now that the occupation of professional critic is all but extinct. Every critic out of a job has been replaced by an endless crowd of civilian reviewers, which means fewer enlightening pieces of cultural criticism. That sucks for a lot of reasons, but above all, it leaves the culture at large unable to understand what good criticism looks like, or even what criticism is. Because criticism isn’t just me telling you “this was great” or “this sucked.” A good critic provides necessary context to whatever it is that they’re evaluating. My favorite music critic ever is Stephen Thomas Erlewine, who used to review albums for AllMusic before the site cut him loose and he was forced to open up his own Substack. Erlewine knows far, far more about music than I do. He's listened to every previous album/B-side an artist has put out before reviewing their newest release. He knows the background story of how that album was made. He knows if the lead singer and lead guitarist stopped talking to each other a week into the recording sessions. He knows the producer of the album, and he’s heard all of the other albums that producer has made. He’ll render a final judgment on a work, as the job requires, but he’s done enough homework to make certain that his is an educated judgment.

There are two men running for Senate in Michigan, and one of them sucks. See if you can guess which one based on their official statements about the condition of the Detroit Red Wings, solicited by the blog Octopus Thrower. For context, the Red Wings hold the longest active playoff drought in the NHL by three seasons; don't currently employ an official, non-interim GM; haven't yet agreed to a new deal with young defensive standout Simon Edvinsson; can't seem to solve the problem of ex-captain Dylan Larkin's trade demand; and are dealing with dwindling fan interest as they've won just one of their first six games. Anyway, here's one candidate's statement: I was at the game when Darren McCarty took on Claude Lemieux. The ‘97 and ‘98 Stanley Cup championships are still highlights of my childhood. The teams the last few years have been a far cry from the Wings I came to love as a kid. They’re stacking losing season on losing season, yet the Ilitch family’s wealth has done nothing but grow. Michiganders are sick of sky-high ticket and concession prices buying them nothing but disappointment. The team holding out on Simon Edvinsson is just the latest example in a long series of ownership prioritizing their bottom line over the team and the fans. Our teams aren’t just assets for billionaires, they’re part of our culture and heritage. Hockeytown deserves better. And here's the other:

If you’re not following Francis Fukuyama on Instagram, you’re missing out. His posts exemplify a Boomer picaresque aesthetic: the occasional typo in his captions, pictures of electronic parts that he’s fiddling with, a linear algebra textbook, a landscape shot of the Danube, mysterious but alluring architectural highlights of various European cities, and unsmiling selfies while wearing a ballcap. It’s all charming, yet interspersed within the grid are more eyebrow-raising indications: a debate with Peter Thiel at the Aspen Ideas Festival; pictures of meetings with various political figures, including a former PM of Turkey and Alexei Navalny; highlights of conferences and summits featuring a program he runs at Stanford University, the Leadership Academy for Development; and giving a talk to an organization called the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. How did he get here? Fukuyama’s memoir In the Realm of the Last Man offers a kind of answer, though perhaps not in the way that he intended.  The title of Fukuyama’s memoir references the 1992 book that made his reputation. Long after Fukuyama is dead, and the rest of his work is gathering dust in libraries, The End of History and the Last Man will remain a point of reference. The book was an expansion of an earlier 1989 article he wrote as a first attempt to historicize the meaning of the end of the Cold War. Fukuyama in the book took a particular interpretation of Hegel as propounded by the Russian-French philosopher and civil servant Alexandre Kojève. Given Marx’s line that he stood Hegel right side up, Fukuyama can be said to have turned Hegel sideways: History has a kind of structural developmental logic to it, as determined by the human drive for recognition and respect, encapsulated by the Greek term thymos. Iterations of the demand for thymos have created conflict and change throughout history, determining the form of the state through time. For Fukuyama, the liberal capitalist order that won the Cold War, as led by the U.S., was the end of history, in that there would be no further political developments toward new kinds of state orders. This is not a triumphant vision, however, as at the end of the book he theorized the Last Man, a product of this world capitalist order, whose needs would be easily met and who would have no desire to strive for achievement or greatness, as his thymos would be so easily assuaged. This Last Man would be a pathetic figure, a mere passive consumer and the society that created him would stagnate culturally and politically. Eventually this society would collapse, as the Last Man would himself destroy it out of boredom. History itself for Fukuyama then is a process that can never satisfy humanity, and his Hegelian-inspired theory of structural historical development at the end reveals itself to be another high-level cyclical interpretation of history as eternal conflict. Fukuyama notes at the beginning of the memoir that “I have been asked several times a week over the past three decades whether I wished to recant my argument.” In sum, no, Fukuyama sticks to his guns, but clarifies that his suggestion was more “that History, rather than ending, had simply paused on its way to an uncertain future.”  So what is life like in the realm of the Last Man? As a memoir, it is less the story of a life than a narrative of intellectual development. The incidents and chapters have no discernible order; Fukuyama simply plucks things from his mind and memories at random to stage out. It makes for oddly compelling reading, mixing anecdotes with study guide-esque writeups of various intellectuals and books. Fukuyama's life is full of improbable connections and moments, with his family background ensconced in elite academic and political circles. His maternal grandfather was Shiro Kawata, an academic agricultural economist who was part of Japan's modernization drive. Kawata studied in imperial Germany before WWI, where he was somehow able to gain access to parts of the personal library of the economic historian and theorist Werner Sombart. Sombart, alongside Max Weber, was one of the great intellectuals of late imperial Germany, before supporting the Nazis in the 1930s. Sombart's work influenced generations of German-speaking academics, which was then translated and widely disseminated in English among American academics, and thereby influencing Anglosphere scholarship as a whole. Sombart is widely credited as having developed the term and theory of “late capitalism.” Fukuyama notes that from his grandfather's portion of Sombart's library, he inherited a first-edition copy of Das Kapital. 

Sally Rooney, one of the most popular novelists alive, says she will no longer sell her books in the U.K. In 2025, the British government proscribed Palestine Action as a terrorist organization, and in August of that year, Rooney published an op-ed in The Irish Times titled, "I support Palestine Action. If this makes me a ‘supporter of terror’ under UK law, so be it." Now, because the laws have not changed, Rooney and her publisher Faber & Faber announced this week that they will no longer be publishing her work in the U.K. Rooney's novels have sold more than 2 million copies in the U.K. alone, a monumental number for any modern novelist. Her books Normal People and Conversations with Friends have been adapted for television. In her op-ed last year, Rooney stated that she intended to give the royalties from her books sold in the U.K., as well as her residuals from the television adaptions of her novels, to Palestine Action, a direct action network known for disrupting weapon manufacturers that sell arms to Israel. Under U.K. anti-terrorism laws, Rooney's publisher can no longer give her the royalties for her novels, knowing that she will donate them to Palestine Action, without putting them both at risk. Technically, Rooney's books could still be sold in the U.K., but she would not be paid for their sales. Her publisher did not want to withhold the earnings from her. "As such, and in full agreement with Sally, we have taken the decision that we can no longer supply her works in the UK in any format," Faber & Faber said in a statement.