Ben Cosman is a writer originally from Rochester, New York. His fiction has been published by The Baffler, HAD, and The Twin Bill, and he’s also written for MLB.com, The Point, The Cleveland Review of Books, and others.
He recently finished writing a novel about hyperhidrosis and high school English teachers. It’s an ontological scavenger hunt.
He finished in third place on Jeopardy! but would’ve won if not for Art.
Fiction
The Game Doesn’t Have To End / The Twin Bill
The game doesn’t have to end, and it hasn’t. It’s been going year after year, day after day, inning after inning, hundreds of thousands of them, since back when they still started baseball games. Though no one alive remembers first pitch, obviously. One day, we suppose, no one alive will remember the last pitch, should it ever come—today, perhaps. Someday no one alive will remember today.
The Exorcist’s Apprentice / The Baffler
Claims to have seen the devil or his minions abounded. Missing property was attributed to burgling imps. Parents warned children of fiends stalking the western forests, ready to snatch any misbehaving brats for spit-roasting. Philandering husbands returned groveling to their wives, alleging seduction by succubae. Two handmaidens, returning through the deserted streets after escorting their mistress to a midnight tryst, reported a Beelzebubbish figure preening in the moonlight, as if awaiting its own paramour. The butcher said he saw a hellish sprite spring from a pie set on a windowsill to cool. “But not a pie baked with my meats,” he assured his customers.
They Call It Relief Pitching / HAD (originally published by Hobart)
Because if I never throw another pitch I can never blow The Save and The Blown Save is the most sadistic statistic, I don’t know which sick egghead dreamed it up, it only exists to shame, it curls up behind you and whispers in your ear: don’t fuck up, because if you fuck up, we will write it down, and they will, they will write it down if I blow The Save right now, and that is why I do not want to throw another pitch, because how many times do I have to screw the game before they stop sending me out here?
Other Writing
Jeopardy! | Examined Life / The Point
This is spreadsheet thinking, content-indifferent, devoid of meaning. It’s when efficiency is an end rather than a means. It’s when a metric subsumes the thing itself. It’s a consultant’s logic, which regards all enterprise solely as a means of value extraction. It’s the difference between coverage of Holzhauer’s winning streak that asked, “Can You Answer the Jeopardy! Clues James Holzhauer Couldn’t?” (Vulture) and that which graphed his “otherworldly” “money-winning pace” (FiveThirtyEight). In Take Time for Paradise, Bart Giamatti, the former MLB commissioner and literature professor, delineates “freely chosen leisure activities, games or others” from “tedious work.” For Giamatti, games are “active, not idle; entertaining, not simply useful; perfecting of our humanity, not merely exploitative of it.” And yet we increasingly surrender to the impulse to turn our games and hobbies into tedious work constrained by prescribed strategy, and our experiences into accomplishments.
The Size of Life: On Dino Buzzati’s “The Singularity” / The Cleveland Review of Books
With The Singularity, Buzzati makes a case for the necessary limitations of the “wretched flesh” in which we experience life, experience that cannot be reduced to the digital binary—singular experience. It’s the experience of Laura that Endriade misses, and it’s the experience of life outside military zone 36 for which Number One yearns. If the aim is to defeat death, then the Singularity is only a consolation prize. Endriade promises Number One not only an everlasting existence, but worship as well: “You will be the most powerful being on earth. … Glory! Glory, don’t you see?” Yet if it is Laura inside Number One, then the resurrected dead do not desire such transcendence: “Glory be damned,” the machine retorts. And then: “How come I can’t hear my blood pounding in my veins?”
True Enough: “The MANIAC” and “Oppenheimer” / The Cleveland Review of Books
Here, again, culpability is offloaded onto the very idea of science itself: unfeeling, inhuman, inevitable. These warnings do not allow for human ingenuity or variety of thought; they cannot imagine another way. But it’s a poor craftsman who blames his tools. In their trial-esque trappings and verdict-begging narratives, stories like The MANIAC and Oppenheimer may provide individual retribution but offer no suggestions for collective restraint; technological progress continues unabated. Labatut’s novel and Nolan’s film raise the question of how much personal remorse matters once what’s done is done—Oppenheimer’s bomb was dropped and von Neumann’s artificial intelligence is either here or on its way, regardless of how either man feels about the ramifications of his work. Oppenheimer’s hallucinatory regret only comes after the fact. But what of before? The witnesses can tell us how we got here, but not how to avoid where we’re going.
Feeding the Future: On the Algorithmic Apocalypse / The Millions
Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death provides the two ways, as he puts it, “culture may be shriveled.” There’s the fate of George Orwell’s 1984, where “culture becomes a prison,” or the fate of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where “culture becomes a burlesque.” Postman published Amusing in 1985, before technology remade our cultural landscape yet again, into the world O’Neil’s Weapons shows us. Now, there seems to be a third option: culture as math problem, stores of data and finely tuned algorithms dictating what we see, what we do, and what we are. “The only thing worse than the thought it may all come tumbling down is the thought that we may go on like this forever,” Violet says in Feed. It’s both teenage melodrama and science fiction dichotomy: The Feed finds horror in the former, Feed the latter. As for the rest of us—well, I’m sure there’s an algorithm to sort that out.
Existentialism on Game Night / MLB.com (see more)
These are the moments of lapse in our carefully curated baseball, the moments when we lose ourselves to the vastness of the universe, when everything melts away and we aren't ballplayers or bloggers or fans—we are simply organisms, alive. This is existentialism on game night.
Ken Jennings, Brad Rutter, and What It's Like to Be the Best Ever on Jeopardy! / The Atlantic Wire
Ken Jennings won the most Jeopardy! matches ever in a row—74, a DiMaggio-esque unbeatable mark—and has earned $3,196,300. He is, arguably, the most famous of all Jeopardy! contestants; five books, a board game, and a slew of media appearances followed his streak. Most conversations about Jeopardy! players begin and end with him. Jennings plays like the boy-genius-next-door, youthful and affable, like the kid who just can't help but raising his hand in class.