Hello! This week, baseball and its employment practices; a new Tessa Thompson film!; a classic novel about friendship and competing orthodoxies; my ongoing struggle with people who don't understand supply chains; and most importantly, Titanic! A film for people who hate and fear the sea (me).

Article: Hailed as a Trailblazer, Kim Ng Stands Alone by James Wagner, published by the New York Times in February 2021
This is an article about baseball, a sport I have never watched. I promise that it’s relevant if you’re at all interested in diverse, equitable workplaces. In November, the Miami Marlins hired Kim Ng as their General Manager. She is the first woman and the second person of Asian descent ever to run an MLB team. It took her 30 years of working in various executive positions in baseball to ascend to the very top of a sport whose ownership and management does not reflect its players or the league’s own aspirations – which, of course, makes it similar to other industries, including the ones I have worked in. To fix this, baseball and American football introduced quotas, requiring teams to interview “minority candidates” for the job. It won’t surprise you to hear that owners have continued to hire people who look like them because hiring processes are fundamentally flawed and unfair. For his story, James Wagner spoke to a number of baseball executives about how to change the game. Much of what is in this article is also frequently discussed in the only sport I pay attention to, hockey – a much whiter, much more privileged sport where, as in baseball, the same 40 people get hired and fired and re-hired over and over again. How do you change a sport, a system, an industry, a closed shop that relies on networks and prior achievements and knowing the right people? I don’t think the MLB has the answer but they do have some food for thought.

Film: Sylvie’s Love (2020), directed by Eugene Ashe
Honestly, who isn’t in the mood for a low key romance with great music that I watched because my mum recommended it? Tessa Thompson and Nnamdi Asomugha, charming, handsome, young and with their lives ahead of them, meet when he starts working in her dad’s record shop. She wants to be a TV producer; he is on his way to becoming a successful jazz saxophonist. It’s the 50s. Everyone looks great. They fall in love. But boom! Things don’t go smoothly! Will love defeat all obstacles? The answer… won’t surprise you. This is a classic melodrama with a baffling ending that kept me company when I curled up in bed with my cat late one afternoon.

Book: The Chosen by Chaim Potok (1967)
To continue the baseball theme, here’s a book that starts with two groups of teenage boys playing baseball in 1944 Brooklyn. It’s sweltering and the game is intense: one group of boys is from a Modern Orthodox school, the other from an ultra-orthodox Hasidic yeshiva, and their rivalry is about more than just the game. Reuven, the son of a Talmudic scholar and our narrator, is hit by a ball by Danny, the son of a Hasidic rabbi. In the aftermath, the two become friends and attempt to navigate the religious and political differences between their fathers and themselves. I had never heard of this book before picking it up in a bookshop a couple of years ago, though it is apparently a classic in the US. I started reading it one night when I couldn’t sleep – usually not a time when I do well with novels – and found the first few chapters completely absorbing. If there are two themes I love in novels, they’re friendship and long conversations about religion/theology/ethics/morality, so this was just perfect.

Learning: The Invisible Transport Workforce Keeping Supply Chains Moving by Frances House, IHRB
Over the past two to three years, I’ve learned a lot about supply chains, first because of Brexit, then because of work. I’ve also learned that many (most?) people don’t understand what a supply chain is, or how the thing that you bought online makes it to your door and why this might take longer if you don’t have a global network of fulfillment centres and pay no tax. I respond to a lot of emails about books not having arrived, which sucks for me, my stress levels, and the customer, but it mostly sucks for the people working in warehouses, fulfillment centres, postal and parcel services, trucks and everything in between who make sure that a book gets from South England to North America. The comment piece above sums up some of the risks and human cost involved in transport and logistics work; it was written in March 2020, and things have not got better since then. It does not go into the environmental impact (it's bad). 

Other: Titanic (the film and the ship)
Honestly, I would have just recommended Titanic as the film of the week after rewatching it the other day and saying, “My god, this is awful. This is so horrible. I’m never getting on a ship. I hate the sea!” approximately every five minutes. But, to quote my friend Greg, “Titanic is an excellent and terrible film. It would be 100% excellent if you cut out all the characters with lines.” This is true to some extent since all the main characters are annoying and uninteresting. 
So my recommendation is: simply skip the first half or so of the film and tune in for the last 100 minutes, which is still longer than a film should be. Then listen to this Overinvested podcast episode, which goes into the making of the film, a process that was by all accounts cold, wet, horrific and filled with drug-laced chowder that made everyone sick. Then realise that James Cameron was obsessed with historical accuracy and that a lot of random bit players in the film are based on real people. Victor Garber (aka Sidney Bristow’s dad in Alias!) plays the ship’s architect with a hilarious "Irish" accent! Finally, read about the chief baker and the second officer. As a result you’ll feel happy that you’re dry and warm(ish) in the flat you haven’t left in four days in your very landlocked country. Success!

That's it! Drink some water! Until next time.