Weekly Reading — 2026-09-12

Maybe you have heard of Roko's Basilisk. This is a thought experiment, for lack of a better term, popular among a certain set: hyper-rationalists, futurists, effective altruists. Tech-industry guys. You get the idea. The most exhausting humans who ever lived, that is to say. People who at present happen to command a critical share of the world economy.

If you're not familiar with it, Roko's Basilisk, in broad terms, supposes that at some point in the future a sentient and omnipotent artificial intelligence could arise, and that this intelligence could then decide to punish all those who had anticipated its possible arrival and either worked to prevent it or refused to participate in its development. In that case, the wise course of action for people now, who are aware of even the theoretical possibility of this scenario, would be to work in good faith to bring this AI into existence, lest they put themselves or their descendants in its future crosshairs.

I have been thinking about Roko's Basilisk this week. The occasion was a pair of engineers at the Anthropic artificial intelligence company using Twitter, as AI exponents regularly, exhaustingly do, to warn, as one of them put it, that "the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade." The other guy was even more strenuous about it: "We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade."

It hardly warrants pointing out that these claims, applied to the bullshit presently doing business as public-facing AI, are laughable on their face. No: I am very pleased to tell you that Autocorrect will not be exterminating humanity, no matter how voracious its appetite for the outputs of our energy grid, or for the collected creative works it devours in pursuit of its creators' hopes that a sufficiently large vocabulary database can ever transubstantiate into a mind. There are plenty of good reasons to unplug Claude without including the fear that it will hack your smart refrigerator and tell it to eat you.

The important thing to know about these claims (apart from, uh, the suggestion that human extinction might arrive before today's fourth-graders are old enough to buy a beer) is that these men are not urgently pleading for humanity to halt all AI development and destroy all the means by which it could ever be restarted. One of the two Twitter alarmists, Jacob Coxon, did quit his job at Anthropic, but in pretty much all other cases the technologists making these predictions of doom go right on working at the Creating The AI They Claim To Believe Could Exterminate Humanity Before Donald Trump's Successor Comes Up For Re-Election Factory. Coxon perhaps notwithstanding (I suppose I should read the rest of the Wall Street Journal story to find out if he gave back, or away, all the money he made at Anthropic), these men's fears and consciences only ever trouble them so much.

What the AI alarmists inside the AI industry overwhelmingly want is not for the development of AI to be halted or slowed. They want it to be accepted as inevitable. Their goal is to move the discussion past the Should we? question to the How should we? question. There are cynical marketing reasons why they would do this; there is also, probably, the ego gratification of believing one's work to hold the fate of humanity in balance. There is a two-percent chance that blogs will bring the planets into alignment within the next decade! We better start taking blogs a hell of a lot more seriously. You'd better throw your money at blogs to make sure they have sufficient guardrails.

But also: Maybe these assholes truly believe AI might kill all humans. What they definitely do not believe in is a future where humans can decide, collectively, that we do not want and simply will not permit any technology with the capacity to do that.

This is the basic trick of Roko's Basilisk. Like many supposed thought experiments noodled over by guys who thought Heath Ledger's Joker was the most important moral philosopher of the 21st century, it dresses up as an ethical conundrum what is in truth a deeply evil enticement to abandon the concept of human intention altogether. Decision-making truly cannot get more animal and reactionary than to extend fixed conclusions about what humanity is like out into the imagined indefinite future, conceived as boundary walls defining the path that future can take, and react to that future before it has even had a chance to arrive. It makes the future into the past. It is inherently regressive, fascist.

This is the insidious lie at the core of the AI movement. It disguises itself as a vision of progress and change, of a bright future, while at bottom resting on the idea that neither progress nor change are meaningfully possible and the future must always be just a dismal logical extension of the present. Humanity can't decide not to do the stupid thing; all we can do is accommodate ourselves to the stupid thing's inevitability and hope to sand the sharp edges off the stupid thing's extremities. We can't imagine a path into the future from a vision of what we hope the future can be like; we can only select from the short and shrinking menu of futures made possible by every moment before this one. Hey, don't look at us, we didn't chart this course. The AI can either be an unchecked genocidal horror or it can be a checked genocidal horror. Your pick.

Maybe they are right. I certainly don't know. Maybe all that smashing the extant AI infrastructure to powder and hounding its exponents into the wilderness will accomplish is smashing the extant AI infrastructure to powder and hounding its exponents into the wilderness. Maybe, over any longer timeframe, that will turn out to look like nothing more than a dumb hindbrain spasm by a species that was always destined to be ruled or exterminated by an overdressed Speak and Spell of its own creation. Maybe it was right for leaders to let society be dragooned into the schemes of unaccountable profit-hungry technologist freaks and eugenicists, to quake before the awesome prognosticative power of some dickhead on Twitter going Nice species you got there. Be a real shame if Johnny 5 annihilated it. There is at least one way to find out if they're wrong, though. It isn't a thought experiment.

The science fiction author William Gibson's pithy observation that "the future is already here—it's just not very evenly distributed" has had different shades of meaning since it was first formulated. In its original context, Gibson meant it as a measure of technological progress: certain people have access to gizmos, gadgets, and virtual-reality dugongs before that blessed day when those innovations trickle down to the rest of us.

There has always been an economic valence to this quote: Its first full appearance includes a mention of the “elite.” Over time, though, what I might call the post-Gibson interpretation of this insight tended increasingly toward economic inequality and left the technological aspect behind, since economic security is the axis along which "difference" has seemed to vary the most meaningfully across society since, say, the dawn of the iPhone, and "progress" stopped feeling like the right way to describe how technology has been changing once we all started to pack more computational power in our pockets than what was necessary to take humans to the moon. The most salient ways the rich differ from us these days no longer seems to lie in the technological horsepower they can harness, but more in the privacy they can rely on, the laws they can break, the impunity with which they can disregard the social compact, the scorn they can have for the future of the planet, and more. Or so I've heard.

But the uneven temporal and spatial impact of technology qua technology is having its moment again. Your experience of driverless cars is a lot different if you live in the Bay Area or Boston; the quality of your drinking water and the size of your electric bill depends on your proximity to a data center; and so on at ever finer scales, intruding on the neighborhood level, depending on how down your neighbors are with Flock cameras.

This extends into the world of work. Because the capability of artificially intelligent systems is deeply tied to whether or not there are easily quantifiable correct answers available to a question, your economic anxiety is different depending on how closely tied your job is to something like “correctness” rather than (optimistic version) judgment or (realistic version) corporate inertia. Coding is the paradigmatic example in which checkable, correctible answers abound, which is why artificial intelligence is primed to change the daily reality of coding work. Insofar as any given industry utilizes code these days, artificial intelligence looms in all workplaces, albeit unevenly.

There are some people to whom correctness matters even more than it matters to coders, however: mathematicians. When a mathematician brushes up against “correctness,” they have good reason to believe they are doing so in a truly fundamental way. And today’s mathematicians seem to feel like they have recently come under existential threat.

Here’s a question you might not have considered before, but is probably a bit richer than it would seem at first glance: Why is math hard?

Mathematicians and theoretical computer scientists concern themselves with proofs: starting with a small, fixed set of basic axioms and armed with a smattering of Latin phrases (where’s my modus tollens crew at), they build up incontrovertible arguments that have implications far beyond the superficially modest content of the original axioms. But if all math is is proof, and if all a proof does is build upon indisputable axioms in a purely logical way, and if every proof is a question with only two answers (yes or no, true or false), then how can any question be ambiguous or difficult to understand? All you need to do is remember the correct axioms or proofs and apply them in the right way at the right time.

The cognitive and computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter, best known for his concept of “strange loops” as explored in his tome Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, gave one answer to this question in a 2012 essay, which went lightly viral over the past year. In response to a question from a reader of the journal Mathematics in School about the experience of being a “distinguished mathematician,” he first demurred, protesting his mathematical bona fides. And then he went further, writing of the “traumatic” experience of waking up to his own mathematical inadequacy and limitation. He wrote of “bumping [his] head against [his] abstraction ceiling.” He uses a few more metaphors to get the point across, but I immediately knew the feeling, because, as a pre-predoc, I’d bumped my head hard. At the time, the feeling of being unsure of the truth of some mathematical statement, which I knew other people could perceive and work with, felt akin to a type of personal failure. How did I forget proof A? How did I not realize that implication of proof B? If my ceiling had been higher, I would have seen further, into deeper commonalities with shared structure and more abstraction.

This question can be rephrased with less freighted, less personal language: Why is math not tautology? And what stops us from taking this to the extreme? Why are all mathematical facts not just lying on a frictionless ramp of logic leading from 1 + 1 = 2 (I know, I know: that’s not the first axiom) all the way to the Riemann hypothesis?

If you’re an aspiring mathematician who encounters these thoughts, you have a few options. Obviously, the first and easiest choice is simply to leave math. If you stay, you’re allowed to ignore these foundational issues, as most working mathematicians do. But, if you have a particular type of nerd in you, you’ll dig into the foundations. If you follow this path chronologically, you’ll probably start off by encountering Frege and Russell. You might get to L. E. J. Brouwer, intuitionism, constructivism, and Bourbaki. But at some point, you’ll probably hit Gödel and Turing, and then you’ll likely start thinking about computability.

Computability is the abstraction of computation. Its avatars include the P vs. NP problem, Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems, Turing’s “Imitation Game,” and many descendants. As a field, computability leads to some deep, thought-provoking questions and to some that, once upon a time, I thought held no interest at all. In particular, I remember learning about computer programs called “proof assistants,” such as Coq (now Rocq). In 2005, Coq (famously!) helped settle the proof of the (notorious!) four-color theorem, after another attempt to use a computer to do so remained stuck in a, shall we say, intermediate epistemic status despite “more than 1,000 hours of computer time” and an announcement to great fanfare in 1976. It’s probably safe to say that the seismic shocks unleashed by that episode are finally reaching the surface of the field:

The math world lit ablaze with equal parts celebration and dismay. One of Appel and Haken’s colleagues, William Tutte of the University of Waterloo in Ontario, rejoiced that they “smote the kraken.” Others despised the thought of computers encroaching on human ingenuity. The affair also posed a philosophical problem in the math community. Does a proof that can’t be verified by humans count as a proof at all?

Still, the whole thing seemed, at the time, a little … dull. Foundations should be all deep philosophical pondering, not infinitesimal tweaks to computer programs!

And yet. Over time, computers have become more broadly capable, and computer-based pure math has been no exception. Its latest and most developed manifestation is a programming language called Lean. By eye, Lean doesn’t look a whole lot different from other programming languages. (You can mess around with it here.) There are types and conditional statements and variables; definitions can be made and reused. The main difference is that with a normal programming language, you write programs that give you outputs in order to automate some repetitive work; in Lean, all you can do is see if the program runs or not. If so, your proof is correct: QED. If not, your proof doesn’t work, try again. The promise—or threat—of Lean has seemed to me to be the realization of the frictionless ramp to the end of logic that would trivialize math. But what would give us the first push over the edge of the ramp?

The key step here was the innocuous “try again” in the last paragraph. The fact that every Lean program is a written artifact with a yes/no answer makes it ideally formatted for AI (and, trust me, I hate that I’m writing what I’m about to write) disruption. The Lean-ification of math may or may not make math any more interesting, and certainly not any more human. Rather, it renders it more efficiently doable by machines.

Since the end of last year, AI chatbots equipped with Lean have produced a stream of proofs of open problems in pure math. At first, when the hype was restricted solely to the predatory capitalist class, it was easy enough to ignore. But to my surprise, the “real” math world seemed ready to embrace the result: I looked at it differently when Terry Tao (the Patrick Mahomes plus LeBron James of modern math) posted about it. At the time, I still detected a bit of a raised eyebrow in most of what I read: “Yes, I guess it’s cool,” they seemed to be saying, “but here’s why it’s still at arm’s length from what I’m actually doing inside my gourd all day.” The questions at hand seemed a bit obscure, and the results didn’t have big implications for any significant vein of literature.

The raised eyebrow is now knitted. An OpenAI paper and accompanying Lean proofs from early August, entitled “Ten Advances in Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science,” followed closely by a new result from Anthropic, have kicked up a much bigger stir, all of which is sure to be dwarfed by the announcement that a Millennium prize has been nabbed. Although these results have not been fully metabolized by the community, the reaction makes it clear to me that what is happening now hits much closer to what most mathematicians consider their core work. Wild extrapolations of the future of math have abounded as refuseniks preach rejectionism and other, more measured, approaches are suggested.

My favorite skeptical take is from Tobias Osborne, referencing the Bible by way of the title of the reclusive mathematician Alexander Grothendieck’s quasi-mystical memoir Reapings and Sowings. He points out that each of the final human-legible results fits within a single chat session’s context window. The conclusion is that these results are in some sense cherry-picked, and the implication is that what we are seeing now is AI models bumping up against their own current ceiling.

The question that would keep me up at night if I was a working mathematician: Is the raising of that artificial ceiling from last winter to now merely illusory? Or is it real and will it continue apace? And if it does, are there any other significant barriers between now and the end of math? Because regardless of whether or not the right prompts ever got entered to manifest Lean’s thumbs up or down of my pet theory, and whether or not that given logical sequence could become knowable in human terms, and whether or not it was all a stunt to drive pre-IPO hype for a clown car full of extractive capitalist ghouls, the fact that all it took was chatting with a bot to know the answer would kill my interest in turning coffee into theorems.

Among the most admirable things about mathematics as a field is that high-quality conjectures are valued nearly as much as high-quality proofs. In effect, throwing up your hands and saying “I think this is the answer to this question, but I’m really not sure” is understood to be a vital part of how the field moves forward. These are the “sowings” alluded to by Grothendieck and Osborne, and they perform roughly the function that real-world inputs play in other sciences, like “diseases” for medicine, “experiments” for biology or physics, “astronomy” for astrophysics, and so on. Conjectures give not merely questions to answer, but hints born of experience that act as directions for the field to orient around, goals to strive towards. Famous open-ended mathematical musings like Fermat’s Last Theorem (whose name I think is 2/3 as incorrect as Voltaire thought “Holy Roman Empire” was) or the Riemann Hypothesis have driven mathematical research for centuries. The 23 “Hilbert problems” more or less demarcated the boundaries of serious math research for the entire 20th century; the Clay Millennium prize problems were intended to do the same for the 21st. Say what you will about AI bots writing barely intelligible proofs: They aren’t writing conjectures at all.

So is this the end? Will AI math remove the oxygen from the seminar room and suffocate human ingenuity entirely? Or have rumors of math’s demise been greatly exaggerated? If one thing is clear, it’s that different fields are differently predisposed to getting AI-ed. The future is here, but because it’s so unevenly distributed, it’s not really the future.

The frictionless ramp which I feared as a prospective mathematician, and which the roller-coaster cart of pure math now seems to be nearing the crest of, could also be described as a slippery slope. Slippery slope arguments are, always, incomplete: They substitute fear in the place of a critical explanatory step. It’s easy to be vaguely scared of what could happen without saying precisely how. So let me give one particular prognostication of a future for math in light of these recent developments.

The predecessor of what we might call the “conjecture era” we’re now in was the system of patronage, in which mathematics was but one of several baubles the powerful could hoard. I can imagine a re-closing of the workings of knowledge, where the locus of knowledge-making shifts from public, open, collectively (if imperfectly) funded grants to private, closed, quixotically personal discovery labs either inside the biggest tech firms or in small startups that get acquired or shadily co-owned. This will further devastate universities and continue to eat away at the “soft money” edifice they rely on. The resulting not-quite-academic findings will be leased back to us at profit, or held closely, developed in secret, and revealed as barely comprehensible jewels of arcana that, like Renaissance mathematicians at court, lend a bit of stature, a dash of rivalry, some injections of cash, and the imprimatur of legitimacy to the shadier primary activities of the companies. Anything that is old can be new again.

Similar to Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach, Imre Lakatos uses a heavily footnoted form of dialogue in his Proofs and Refutations as a way to address heady concepts indirectly. In a footnote in the chapter on “Concept-Formation,” he remarks:

Quite a few mathematicians cannot distinguish the trivial from the non-trivial. This is especially awkward when a lack of feeling for relevance is coupled with the illusion that one can construct a perfectly complete formula that covers all conceivable cases.

There are no completely closed systems. All of what anyone does is human, and as such, humanistic. Even Lean is fallible: Bugs can lead to ambiguities, and “trust” and “belief” are words that get tossed around when discussing it. The point is not that this is bad. The point is that this is not new, or really even all that different. Mathematicians, here are your accordions.

For as long as baseball’s All-Star Game has been played—almost every year since 1933, including twice a year from 1959 to 1962—it’s been the ultimate in wish fulfillment for fans. Want to see a team of future Hall of Famers playing together? It’s got that. Want to see your favorite local players honored on a national stage? It’s possible. Poignant curtain calls and unexpected comedy? You bet.

But actual fan participation in selecting All-Star teams? That’s been a rockier road.

In this generation, when baseball fans are inundated with emails and in-stadium announcements encouraging All-Star Game voting, it’s hard to believe this wasn’t always the case. But after the first game in 1933 featured fan voting, team selections were done briefly by player vote and then entirely by managers. 

Then, at the winter meetings in 1946, owners voted to allow fan voting for eight of the nine starting positions. (Then as today, managers would pick the pitchers, as well as the reserves.)

The arrangement worked well, for a while—until Cincinnati Reds fans got involved.

The first signs of trouble came in 1956. The Reds had made back-to-back World Series in 1939 and 1940, being swept by the Yankees then beating the Tigers. Their next World Series appearance wouldn’t come until 1961, another loss to the Yankees. The interceding two decades were relatively lackluster for the team, which from 1953 to 1959 officially changed its name to the Redlegs to avoid even a tenuous connection to communism during the days of HUAC and the Red Scare. 

But in 1956, Cincinnati finally fielded a team that could compete. They had an offense that hammered the ball, hitting 77 home runs over the season’s first 45 games, a record pace. (They would hit 221 home runs as a team that year, tying the record at the time.) The lineup included slugging first baseman Ted Kluszewski, who made it a habit of playing with no undershirt under his sleeveless Reds jersey, both for range of motion and, admittedly, the gamesmanship of showing off his bulging biceps. The outfield of Gus Bell and Wally Post was joined by a rookie named Frank Robinson, and through the first half of the season, the Reds were in the thick of a pennant race.

Fans, giddy at the first contending team in a long time, responded, electing five Cincinnati players to start the All-Star Game: second baseman Johnny Temple, shortstop Roy McMillan, Robinson in left field, Bell in center, and Ed Bailey catching. 

No Reds had been leading in the balloting when voting closed, but the league office, which tabulated the votes, was confused and overwhelmed by a late surge in ballots, to the point where ending fan voting altogether was considered. The drastic step was endorsed by The Sporting News, regarded then as “the Bible of Baseball. “It is conceivable that the fan poll is on the way out,” Dan Daniel wrote. “Its elimination would be regretted. But it would not necessarily be a serious blow to the event.” 

There were cries of unfairness in certain quarters (namely Brooklyn, home to the defending champion Dodgers), but Commissioner Ford Frick saw nothing untoward.

“Everybody had a chance to vote, no matter where they lived, so there should be no squawk if somebody doesn’t like the team,” Frick told the Enquirer. “I think it is a representative team. There is nobody there who doesn’t belong.”

It’d take only a year for him to change his tune.

In 1957, hopes were high for the Redlegs. The previous year, they’d been in first place as late as July, but hadn’t been able to overcome the onslaught of the Dodgers and Braves. Even in third place, Cincinnati had won 91 games. Could 1957 be the year?

As the Midsummer Classic approached, Cincinnati media and businesses strongly encouraged voting early and often—and inadvertently, so did baseball itself. There were ballots available at the ballpark and through local newspapers, which would collect them to send to New York for tabulation. But in the fine print, MLB said it would accept official ballots or “a reasonable facsimile.” In Cincinnati, they took that and ran with it.

There were ballots printed in the papers, most notably the Cincinnati Times-Star, which was the city’s official ballot collection point. Those ballots were blank, but ran next to a listing of Reds players to vote for. The Burger Brewing Company, which sponsored Reds broadcasts, printed up 350,000 of their own unofficial but valid “ballots” and distributed them to regional bars. At some establishments, patrons had to fill out a ballot before they would be served. There were also reports of mimeographed completed ballots being returned en masse to collection points in Cincinnati and Columbus. Some fans told reporters they’d each voted hundreds of times.

There might have been an element of defiance to Redlegs fans’ voting. That May, National League owners met six weeks earlier than usual (in preparation for Congressional hearings on the sport’s antitrust exemption), and stories suggested that one of the big topics discussed was relocation, with Giants owner Horace Stoneham and Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley both denying reports that they would be relocating to San Francisco and Los Angeles, respectively. Reports also indicated that if those moves did happen, the Redlegs would then relocate to New York. “I would not even dignify such rumors by commenting on them,” said Redlegs President Gabe Paul.

Of course, the Dodgers and Giants both decamped for California after the season. The Redlegs stayed in Cincinnati (with talk of a new ballpark to replace Crosley Field). But that summer, Cincinnati fans would have been forgiven for feeling like they had to prove a point.

A June 19 report from International News Service said that three Redlegs were leading on the ballot: McMillan, Robinson and Bailey. But once again, a late avalanche from the Queen City—estimated at 550,000 votes, more than half of all NL ballots cast—altered the outcome at the last minute.

Once the ballots were tabulated, it appeared that every starting position player on the National League team would be from Cincinnati.

On June 28, three days before the starting lineups were to be officially announced, Frick stepped in and made an unprecedented move. After consulting with the league presidents, he announced that Stan Musial would replace George Crowe as starting first baseman, and Willie Mays and Hank Aaron would replace Gus Bell and Wally Post in the outfield. (Musial would get a late surge and turn out to be the highest vote-getter at first base.)

The replacements were certainly deserving enough—Musial, Mays, and Aaron would all finish in the top four in NL MVP voting that year—but Frick’s decision had Redlegs fans seeing, well, red. They found the move capricious, even dictatorial. “This isn’t Russia,” fan William Hughes told The New York Times.

An effigy of Frick—constructed at a local bar that had turned in 12,000 all-star ballots—was put in the bed of a truck and driven around Cincinnati. Times-Star Sports Editor Bob Firestone suggested Frick be removed from office. 

“If a candidate for public office was elected because the supporters of his rival did not get out to vote, I am sure his election would still stand,” said Paul, the team president.

Frick conceded the point that the Redlegs and their fans had done nothing wrong, saying, “The overbalance of Cincinnati ballots has resulted in the selection of a team which would not be typical of the league.

“I don’t question the honesty of the poll, but something had to be done.”

In the interest of balance, the Times-Star did run some letters suggesting that Frick was merely correcting the mockery of the game made by Cincinnati fans. “By their unsportsmanlike partisanship, Cincinnati fans have demonstrated that they are not major-league enough to be trusted with the responsibility of voting for the all-star team,” declared one letter-writer. “If Cincinnati had eight players good enough to make the all-star team fairly, they would be 10 games ahead of the pack.” (The Reds would go 80-74 and finish in fourth place, 15 games behind the pennant-winning Braves.)

One fan, Harry Washer, a former Xavier University football player, threatened a federal lawsuit over the Redlegs’ dismissal from the all-star team, saying, “It’s not my fault that people in other cities don’t bother to vote for their team players.” (Washer’s lawyer was a former college swimming champion and World War II veteran named Charles Keating, who would go on to a prominent career as an anti-pornography activist, particularly targeting Larry Flynt, and a white-collar criminal who went to prison for his role in the Savings and Loan financial scandals of the 1980s.) Washer ultimately abandoned his suit after Bell was picked as a National League reserve.

The Sporting News, which had renewed its call to do away with fan voting, doubled down once the results were announced. The suggestion was made that sportswriters should pick the all-star teams, prompting Redlegs manager Birdie Tebbetts to joke, hinting at the writers’ own biases and grudges, “Ted Williams might not make the squad.” 

National League President Warren Giles suggested capping the number of ballots distributed to each major-league city. “Let the fans vote when they visit the ballpark,” he said. “In the end, we would have a team picked by the people who go to the games.” His American League counterpart, Will Harridge, was ready to do away with the fan vote entirely.

The all-star campaign turned out to be the last hurrah for the Times-Star, which was sold the following year to Scripps-Howard, the Cincinnati-based chain that owned the rival Post, and shut down. (The Times-Star building, a beautiful Art Deco masterpiece on Broadway, now houses county government offices.)

Early in 1958, Frick announced what just about everyone had seen coming: all-star teams would henceforth be selected by a vote of players, coaches and managers. “The fan poll was abandoned,” Frick said, “only after long consideration and with a great deal of regret.”

He added, “I’m in favor of the fan vote, if it can be done honestly. But the way it was, it was a joke.”

Frick left open the possibility that fans would get a vote again, but it wouldn’t happen under his reign.

Elected commissioner in 1969, Bowie Kuhn, who’d served as a lawyer for the National League, was serious to the point of austerity—“even his undershirt was stuffed,” wrote Dave Anderson of The New York Times. His tenure is probably best known for his ongoing conflicts with Athletics owner Charlie Finley and Major League Baseball Players Association head Marvin Miller. But one of Kuhn’s first actions as commissioner was to announce the restoration of fan voting for the Midsummer Classic. 

The new system would avoid the previous missteps. A total of 25 million ballots would be printed and available at retailers and ballparks, with special allotments sent overseas for the military, plus a million for Canada, now home to a major-league team, the Montreal Expos. No news organizations would distribute or collect ballots, and if they weren’t official MLB ballots, they’d be tossed out.

The system worked, until voting ventured onto the newfangled World Wide Web in the ‘90s; it didn’t take long before people tried to fix the vote there. In 1999, Chris Nandor came up with a program to vote for his favorite Red Sox players, casting 40,000 votes, all of which were eventually disallowed. 

In 2014, paper all-star ballots went the way of helmets with no ear flaps and the Montreal Expos. The following year, MLB disallowed more than 60 million votes, many of them from ballot box–stuffing Royals supporters, whose defense echoed that of Reds fans nearly 60 years earlier. “If you don’t like it,” said pitcher Jeremy Guthrie, “vote more.”

The technology may change, and the teams too, but stories like this are reaffirming. Nearly a century later, baseball’s All-Star Game still has resonance, and fans are still determined to do whatever they can to get their favorite players into the game.

“The whole concept of the All-Star Game is to match two dream teams for the fans,” Kuhn said in a 1979 interview with the Associated Press. “They’re the fans’ teams, nobody else’s. Not Bowie Kuhn’s, not the players’ and not the managers’.”

On Monday, the day after his arrest on a criminal charge of engaging in prostitution—later pleaded down to disorderly conduct—San Francisco 49ers owner Jed York, through his lawyer, submitted a motion in his criminal case. Specifically, he asked to the court to seal all records related to it.

His stated justification? The owner's request, which you can see in full by clicking here, gave a bit of background on the case before outlining the following reasons:

2. The Defendant is an eligible offender as defined by R.C. §2953.31.

3. There are no criminal proceedings pending against the Defendant.

4. The Defendant has been satisfactorily rehabilitated and poses no risk of recidivism.

5. The Defendant's interest in having the official records pertaining to the cases sealed outweighs any legitimate need of the government to maintain those records.

No other details were given about York's "interest" in having the records kept unavailable to the public. The judge denied the request, which is why they're here.

So what is it that York wanted to keep out of the public eye? The documents provide more details about what happened leading up to the Aug. 23 arrest; they've been providing the steady stream of news articles about the arrest since the news broke. The complaint affidavit, which you can read by clicking here, said that York initially was charged with one count of misdemeanor engaging in prostitution and one count of possessing criminal tools. A sworn law enforcement officer told the court the following:

Affiant states that an undercover ad was posted on a known prostitution website.

Affiant states that the defendant responded to the posted ad, and arrange to have sexual activity with the female in exchange for $140.

Affiant states that the defendant arrived at the meeting location and was found to have in his possession his cellular device which was used to arrange the criminal act.

(In all other documents, the amount York agreed to pay is stated as $160. There's no explanation for the discrepancy in the affidavit.)

More details about the arrest have come from the case report. This was not a court record; it was released by the Mahoning Valley Human Trafficking Task Force. (The San Francisco Chronicle reported that the area of York's arrest has been a "hot spot" for law enforcement stings.)

You can read the case report in full by clicking here.

York was released from custody following him posting a bail bond of $5,000, according to court records.

The rest of the court file is fairly standard documentation: A receipt. York's waiver of his rights. The plea agreement. The judgment entry, which confirms that York pleaded down the prostitution charge to disorderly conduct and was sentenced on that and possession of criminal tools to one day in jail. The same document says York completed an online course—it does not name the course, nor say where or when he took it—and that York would get his phone back.

As for the $160 York had brought with him? That was kept by the task force.

You can view all the documents in the case by clicking here.