PicoBlog

In the beginning, there was no postseason. The first college football game was played in 1869, and the Western Conference formed in 1896, but the first Rose Bowl wasn’t played until 1902. It didn’t become an annual game until 1916. There were other bowl games scattered through the 1920s — the Dixie Classic, the San Diego East-West Christmas Classic — but it wasn’t until 1934 that they added the Sugar Bowl and Orange Bowl to create a “bowl season”.

If you enjoy this newsletter, I’d be eternally grateful if you shared it with a friend. Share The premise of this newsletter is that the conventional nuclear family concept is not serving everyone well enough. And implicit in that argument is the idea that there must be something better. I suspect that “something” is different for different people, but one of my goals here is to explore alternatives of all shapes and sizes.

The CONCACAF Champions Cup is, more often than not, the domain of the Liga MX giants. Club América have won the competition seven times since its inception, and Mexican clubs have taken home thirty-eight titles in total, including sixteen straight before the Seattle Sounders eventually ended the run in 2022. The Sounders victory felt like a glass shatter… ncG1vNJzZmiskaG4qrrSqJqcnaJjwLau0q2YnKNemLyue89on56qlZm2orrOrGSvoZOpvLPFjKitnqpdmLFuwM6lrJyZ

Welcome to the first Range Widely post at this newsletter’s new home: Substack. If you were already subscribed, nothing is changing except the e-mail address from which you’ll get each post. If you aren’t subscribed, you can do that (it’s free!) here: Annie Duke studies decision making. For nearly twenty years, she did so as a professional poker player. According to PokerNews, she’s the fifth-highest earning woman ever in live poker tournaments.

A month ago, a friend (the brilliant bi author Rachel Krantz) texted me urging me to write a think piece about Miranda Hobbes’s bisexuality. “Please!” she said. “The world needs it and I don’t have it in me.” “Do I have to?” I replied.  Culturally we’ve run the topic of Miranda’s sexuality into the ground—most of us are still recovering from 2022’s Che Twitter discourse. But And Just Like That’s Season 2 has wrapped, and even though it’s Bi Visibility Week, I still haven’t seen any recent memes or op-eds lead us to progressive conversations about bisexuality.

I can feel it right this second—especially in the middle of a busy work week. It’s the urge to ignore calls and texts from friends. I’d rather focus on work and use my scarce free time to Netflix and chill with my partner. Part of me is like, I don’t really need to talk to anyone else but her. I’m so busy with work, I don’t have time to set up hangouts with my friends.

This week, something a little different… my friend, director Emma Rosa Went, is preparing for a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She brought up some difficulties she was having with casting the role of Hermia, and her thoughts about the character fit so perfectly in the context of this newsletter, I couldn’t resist making her elaborate. You can read more about Emma’s work on her website. Remind us who Hermia is?

Two featurettes in one week! Three days ago, Affirm Films, the “faith-based” producers of the upcoming Christmas musical Journey to Bethlehem, released a promotional video that introduced us to Mary’s sisters from that film. Now they’ve got a new video that introduces us to King Herod’s oldest son Antipater, who is played in the film by Joel Smallbone of the Christian pop duo For King & Country. You can watch the video here—and be warned, it starts on a spoiler-y note:

The Romans were city building masters of the Ancient world. They knew how to build orderly and well-functioning cities. Their basic premise was to build a square grid of streets, or at least as much square grid as the local topography allowed. From this basic structure the city could grow more or less infinitely simply by adding more blocks to the city grid. This Roman approach to city planning has more or less stayed the same over the last 2000 years.