Tuesday Recommended: Other Writing

The second installment in an occasional series of brief recommendations.

I don’t have much in the way of new writing yet, so here are four things I read and liked that I’ll share instead:

This essay by Kelsey McKinney about cherries, sadness, and finding things to look forward to. As a native of New England, I can’t help but raise an eyebrow at her occasional histrionics about winter in DC, but it’s a good piece nonetheless.

Ice hockey has been one of the more successful sporting scenarios of the pandemic, and Fluto Shinzawa’s analysis of this designed ice hockey play will give even non-fans a sense of the tactical realities of an incredibly fast and only seemingly chaotic game.

Here is a humane grammatical perspective on the misguided pedantry of the in-quotation bracket by adept and reasonable editor Tom Scocca.

And finally, Fangraphs has a retrospective on Dustin Pedroia’s career, which officially ended with his retirement on Monday.

I won a $20 bet when I said on Opening Day of 2007 that Pedroia would win Rookie of the Year. When he did, I doubled down and said he’d win MVP in 2008. Easiest $40 I ever made.

Injuries limited the second baseman to just 9 games since 2017, but he’ll always be my favorite.