Fantasy Baseball: Fun, Run Amok

April 19, 2015

I was thumbing through the April 13 issue of the New Yorker the other evening. I have a particular order with the New Yorker. First I read Tables for Two and Bar Tab. Always. Then I double back to Talk of the Town, hoping for a James Surowiecki column on an economics or behavior issue, or something by George Packer or Steve Coll. (My hopes are almost always met.) Only then do I read the articles.

So in the April 13 issue Dream Teams, about the rise of fantasy sports, caught my eye. I wrote briefly about my fantasy baseball experience in Stuff You Wonder About, and mentioned Daniel Okrent, the creator of the game, in Two-fer

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Stuff You Wonder About!

January 17, 2015

Is there stuff you wonder about? For me the answer is a big YES, and the more trivial the better. (Many years ago a friend shared with me her bucket theory of the brain. Because of limited capacity, she said, I needed to keep filling, sifting, and refilling/positioning, to make sure I was only holding the best stuff. I took a pass, clearly!)

So … ever wonder why Bambi’s a male deer, and in the real world only women use that name? In fact, Felix Salten wrote Bambi, A Life in the Woods in 1923 in Austria. Earlier, in 1914, Marjorie Benton Cooke wrote Bambi, a novel about a young American heiress. The name stuck, but it has nothing to

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