Happy Friday! If you're new to Now I Know, you'll notice that today's format differs from the rest of the week. On Fridays, I pause to write the "Weekender," my  "week in review" type of thing, or to share something else I think you may find interesting. Thanks for reading! — Dan

Hi!

As many of you know, I’m a die-hard New York Mets fans. They’re a baseball team, although barely so these days. (And no, today’s essay really isn’t about baseball.) After starting this season winning and winning and winning, they’ve done almost none of that recently, with 13 losses over their last 15 days. And it feels like they’ve found new ways to lose each game. Yesterday, they had a one run lead with just a few more outs to go, but blew it; the day before, they had a seemingly insurmountable six run lead early on, but managed to lose by five runs. A week ago, they lost a game when the guy trying to score the tying run was thrown out at home plate to make the last out of the game; a few days earlier, the guy who could have been the tying run stayed at third base because of the same threat of being thrown out at the plate. The Mets feel like baseball’s version of Murphy’s Law right now.

And that gives me some hope. Well, no, not the fact that the Mets are losing, and brutally so. But the fact that a team of some of the world’s best baseball players can’t find a way to succeed. They’re in a slump (I hope), and if they can slump, we shouldn’t feel bad when we — normal people — do.

A few years ago, Ted Berg, then a writer covering Mets training camp, wrote a blog post that stuck with me. It tells the story of a minor leaguer who just isn’t going to make it to the Majors. And it struck me — here’s a guy who was an elite baseball player at every stage of his career until this point. He was almost certainly the best player on his Little League team at age 12. (Which reminds me, Go Fairfield!) He probably was the best hitter and pitcher on his high school team, and if he went to college, was dominating there, too. But as he went up the ladder, the air became thinner, and ultimately, it became too thin for him. It must be crushing to be so good at something but, ultimately, not good enough.

The guys playing for the Mets — despite their 2-13 record since late July — aren’t any of those guys. They’re better. They, literally, are some of the best baseball players in the history of the sport simply by virtue of being on the team right now. Yes, one or two are likely destined for the Hall of Fame at some point, but that’s not the cutoff I’m talking about. In the century-plus of pro baseball, fewer than 25,000 people have ever played the game. That’s 25,000 out of billion and billions of people who lived over that time.

And yet, they’re still capable of falling into slump like the one the Mets are in.

None of us are Major League Baseball players. (And if you are, please let me know, because I’m a huge fan!) But if they can have a bad few weeks, we can, too. They’re paid millions to not give up home runs, to not make throwing errors, to not strike out when the game is on the line. But they do. They fail, just like everyone else. And that’s a good takeaway, I think — a silver lining from, again, a brutal month of Mets baseball. Failure is part of life and we don’t have to embrace it, but we should tolerate it, especially from ourselves.

(But I’d rather if the Mets started winning.)

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Monday: Excel Has Bad Genes: The video in the bonus fact is 2:28 minutes, not seconds, as I originally wrote. Oops. I guess, like the Mets, I’m prone to stupid errors.

Tuesday: His Hometown Went to Pot?: I know a lot of people from Hempstead and a bunch from the Atlanta suburbs, too, and it never occurred to me that they aren’t aware of each other — certainly, not to this degree!

Wednesday: Why Lefties are Often Left Out: On the other hand, if you are a lefty, you’re a lot more likely to find a job as a Major League pitcher.

Thursday: Why Some Movies Can't Give it a Rest: The missing piece of some cars… in movies, at least. One mistake I made in this one: the car from Harry Potter never had that piece of equipment in the first place. But the point still holds, I think — the producers would have removed it had it been there to remove.

Here are a few things you may want to check out over the weekend:

1) “The Talented Mr. Bruseaux” (The Atavist, 24 minutes, July 2025). The subhead: “He made his name in Chicago investigating racial violence, solving crimes, and exposing corruption. But America’s first Black private detective was hiding secrets of his own.”

2) “What Happened When I Tried to Replace Myself with ChatGPT in My English Classroom” (Lit Hub, 23 minutes, July 2025). A professor at the University of Virginia conducted an experiment over the 2024–2025 semester with 72 students across four sections. Instead of banning AI, he invited students to explore its role in writing and decide—via vote—whether ChatGPT could replace him as their instructor. The good news is that it mostly couldn’t. The also good news is that it may have made the class more effective. The bad news is that we had to ask the question in the first place — and that we’ll likely have to keep asking it.

3) “Gary Keith and Ron, the Magi of Mets Nation” (New York Times/gift link, 11 minutes, September 2018). OK, this one is about baseball. Gary Cohen, Ron Darling and Keith Hernandez, are the Mets TV broadcast team, and even though I’m biased, unbiased fans would agree that they’re the best in the business. It’s a story about the art of storytelling when the source material you’re working with isn’t all that good, so you may enjoy it even if you don’t care about baseball.

Have a great weekend!

Dan