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You may think you've experienced joy before, but you had previously never seen a mascot version of a 99-year-old woman with a cane dancing and cartwheeling around a baseball field in Springfield, Ill., which ushered in the inaugural weekend of the first professional women’s baseball league in nearly 30 years. I have never been happier than I was witnessing that moment. Our lives are all downhill from here. That mascot is modeled after Maybelle Blair, a former pitcher for the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, honorary chair for the new Women's Pro Baseball League advisory board, and wearer of iconic sunglasses. As was mentioned several times on the broadcasts of the WPBL's first two games, she broke four ribs and still made sure she was in Springfield for the occasion. Because I risk writing 1,000 words about everything I love about Maybelle Blair, I will put it succinctly: She is cool as fuck. The mascot Blair is not dressed in the human Blair's sensible slacks, nor the WPBL's uniform. Instead, mascot Maybelle wears the skirted uniform of the AAGPBL that many will recognize from A League of Their Own. The AAGPBL was everywhere during the new league's opening weekend. Springfield, the location for all of its games this season, was chosen specifically to reference the historic league. Former players came to watch. Fans wore Rockford Peaches merchandise and shirts that read "There's no crying in baseball." And commentators made reference to the famous "dirt in the skirt" line from the movie when talking about sliding. But the women of the WPBL wear pants, and they don't have to perform a rigid version of femininity. That's a big deal, even now.

The Washington Post remains in the midst of its weird, cheap transformation into the world's most boring conservative newsletter. This is happening at the behest of owner Jeff Bezos, who decided that he was tired of owning one of the most storied newspapers in America, and instead wanted to publish something much dumber and worse. You can see Bezos's priorities most clearly in his gutting of the paper's workforce and the revamping of its opinion section, which has proclaimed that its mission is to celebrate and defend "personal liberties and free markets," which is something like the opposite of "stuff you can't get anywhere else." As a result of that pivot, the section routinely publishes some of the worst writing in the country—dull, lazy, artless, and familiar. That section now also has a podcast, which really aims to test that format's ability to create parasocial bonds with the audience.

The podcast is called Make It Make Sense, and it appears to have been born out of the following pitch: What if we put three losers in a room and recorded them complaining about things nobody else cares about? Plenty of representative clips can be found on the show's official Bluesky account, which has 27 followers as of this writing. Here's one where the hosts, in 2026, sit around and get kind of worked up about school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic: