President Donald Trump on Monday called on the House of Representatives to pass the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, linking the bill to the housing-affordability demands he made during his February State of the Union address.

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The dominant news story of the week was the Virginia Supreme Court’s 4-to-3 ruling on Friday, which struck down the Democratic-drawn congressional map that voters approved in a special election on April 21. The state’s highest court found that the legislature, which is led by Democrats, violated the Virginia…

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My older sister was, growing up, the coolest and smartest person in the world. She would kill me if I didn’t clarify that she still is, but as a middle and high schooler, I watched her excel socially and academically with a confidence that I spent years studying and failing to replicate.

She also introduced me to romance novels.

Along with access to her Kindle account, Caroline gave me permission to enjoy this kind of literature. That gift transformed my perception of books and reading. Before, I had understood that certain books were serious and certain books were not, and that certain people read serious books and kept quiet about the others. Romance novels were meant to be carried with shame and without a cover, on a Kindle and in private, like Biff Tannen’s nudie mags tucked within “Sports Almanac.”

I was a Smart, Serious Girl headed to a Smart, Serious College and then to a Smart, Serious Job. The books worth mentioning were by Hemingway, Salinger, Franzen, Plath, Woolf, and Gladwell. The other books were meant to be kept secret, guilty, saccharine pleasures to binge when no one was watching.

At my Smart, Serious College, I was a Smart, Serious English Major, and four years of close reading, literary theory, and seminar tables full of 21-year-olds with strong feelings about Chaucer, Eliot,1 and great American authors gave me a thorough education in what the culture considers Serious Literature.

Romance novels don’t qualify unless they’re Shakespeare or Austen, in which case they’re not called romance novels — even if “Romeo and Juliet” and “Pride and Prejudice” are the urtexts of the genre. Neither does most “chick lit,” a category loosely defined to include any book marketed toward women, whether because it’s about family, desire, or features a woman protagonist — or even simply because it’s written by a woman.2

Despite their popularity, these books are overwhelmingly read with shame among people who are taught to prize intellectualism and prestige, especially among women in male-dominated spaces. The usual counter-argument against this embarrassment and for embracing romance is that these books are actually good — underrated literary achievements, emotionally sophisticated, dismissed only by misogynists who haven’t read them carefully enough. This is true enough in some cases, but arguing for the genre on the grounds of literary merit concedes too much.

I’ve read romance novels I think are excellent. I’ve also read some that are jaw-droppingly, almost impressively bad. And those are worth reading, too. Certifying books as Literature based on merit accepts the premise that “literary merit” is the relevant standard and then tries to prove that the under-appreciated genre meets it. That argument undercuts and misstates the true value of this kind of “women’s literature.”

The value of these books is not in their quality. It is in their broad appeal, how pleasurable they are to read, and, when the shame is removed, how much fun they are to share.

The “Yesteryear” problem

Last Sunday morning, I barreled through “Yesteryear” by Caro Claire Burke. The novel follows a tradwife who suddenly and disorientingly wakes up in 1855 Idaho, where she is forced to confront the realities of living in the world she glamorizes and performs online.

I loved it.

The critical reception, though, has been … mixed. Nearly everyone seems to agree that the premise is genius and the pacing and plot genuinely compelling, but also that the character development is nearly nonexistent and the rich themes suggested by the premise go largely unexplored.

In Jerusalem Demsas’s critical case against “Yesteryear,” she notes the book’s shallowness and its failure to “tell us about women anywhere.” Alisha Ramos writes that the novel “doesn’t fully explore the interesting themes and questions it raises” and critiques its lack of character development, its “under-researched overgeneralization, hand-waviness, little nuance.” In her review for The Guardian, Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett condemns Burke’s seeming disinterest in investigating fundamental aspects of motherhood, including a mother’s relationship to her body and her child’s: “It feels cynical and under-researched,” Cosslett writes. “In her attempt to create a clever plot twist, Burke lets her characters’ humanity fall by the wayside.”

These points are well-taken; I certainly don’t disagree. And I also don’t begrudge anyone their critical analysis. Burke has presented the book as a commentary on our times, and I think it’s fair for readers and critics both to wrestle with the author’s stated aims. But I think it’s equally fair to simply take a pass, at times, from engaging with a text as Literature and choose instead to engage with it as an artifact of mass culture.

The book might be maddeningly lacking in rigor, but it is also the most-talked-about novel of the year. I’m certainly not arguing that popularity is necessarily an indicator of quality, but I think it would also be a mistake to dismiss readers of popular works as unsophisticated themselves simply because the texts are not particularly deep.

Because while Burke may not deliver on her promise to answer or even explore them, the questions “Yesteryear” poses are anything but shallow: What is the role of men — fathers, sons, husbands — in women’s lives? What is freedom? What is authenticity? These questions and the conversations the book has ignited, overwhelmingly among women, are evidence that unsophisticated but enjoyable stories can still play an important role in our culture.

Books like “Yesteryear” that drive these cultural moments are worth our time, even if they aren’t particularly Literary. And I’d argue that what the most popular book of the year tells us about women is that they sometimes want a deliciously frivolous story and are capable of extracting meaning and — more importantly — camaraderie from said frivolity.

Permission, passion, and the things we share

Romance (which “Yesteryear” technically is not) is the best-selling category of fiction in America by a significant margin, consistently outselling literary fiction, mystery, science fiction, and everything else. It is not a niche preference, and yet it is treated by the culture that takes books seriously as an unserious genre — or, more condescendingly, as evidence that most readers aren’t sophisticated enough to handle real Literature.

In taking these books seriously and enjoying them (almost) shamelessly, though, I — despite being a very Literary Woman — have made durable social connections with other women.

Caroline and I used to be at each other’s throats when our family dynamics got the best of us during breaks from our long-distance sisterhood. Now, we avoid regressing into our teenage tendencies by reading the same novels simultaneously, giggling, swooning, and cringing in tandem from opposite sides of the couch. (Fortunately, we read at the same speed.)

She, her best friend, and I have had a group chat for three years based entirely on discussing the genre’s latest releases. My little sister, Anne, caught the romance bug during a road trip with my mom to visit colleges. Listening to Emily Henry on audiobook, the two of them passed the time that would otherwise have been filled with tension during a particularly volatile time in her high-school life. They kept the stories going as they lay side by side on their hotel beds each night, unable to take a break before the resolution.

I had seven Smart, Serious female roommates in college. Most of them, it turned out, had a private affinity for romance novels that we did not address until senior year.

When I admitted one night what kind of books I was consuming between classes, the room lit up. I had made the confession they were each holding in, giving everyone else permission to share this thing they had secretly, shamefully loved for years. A new shared experience was unlocked, and we would spend the rest of the year — and the years since graduating — delighting in the simple pleasure and glorious freedom of sharing this thing that makes us all giddy.

And perhaps if more men took a chance on romance, we could do away with this alleged male loneliness epidemic. Early in their courtship, Caroline and her boyfriend exchanged vacation books. He gave her John le Carré’s “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.” She gave him Emily Henry’s “Beach Read.”

Caroline thought Carré was fine but wasn’t exactly stirred by it. Her boyfriend, on the other hand, finished Henry in shambles.

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The son of Serious Literary types and a graduate of Serious Schools, it had never occurred to him to read something like that. His foray into romance, he said, helped him discover a new relationship to literature: one where, as a reader, he found himself meeting characters he might well have encountered in real life and relating to plot points that mirrored his own experiences (as opposed to those that can only be found in books for those of us who, like him, are not spies).

“It sounds ridiculous that I had never read a book about the world I actually live in,” he wrote when I asked about his foray into romance. “But in a way, I think that was true. I hope I get insight into my own life from everything I read, but with most ‘serious literature’ that connection is so abstract and mediated. Somehow, I had got it into my mind that if a story is too relatable, it must have nothing interesting to say. Where did I get such a silly idea?”

He is now a middle-school teacher in Tulsa and encourages his students to read whatever books interest them. Making his rounds in his classroom, he asked one girl what she was reading. Her face turned beet red when she revealed the romance novel she had been devouring. Fortunately for her, she had a teacher who, instead of making her feel embarrassed for her choice, validated it.

Books are for learning, yes, and books are also for sharing. Shame closes down the possibility for conversation before it can begin and, with it, the potential for connection.

The case for reading “chick lit” isn’t that every novel ever written by a woman is secretly as good as “Middlemarch.” It’s that enjoying something because it is pleasurable and accessible is a complete justification. And, like March Madness, embracing things on their own terms creates the possibility for connection.

I don’t really care if “Yesteryear” makes good on its premise in a literary sense. I’m still grateful for the conversations it’s inspired and for the romp it was to read.

Weekend letter of recommendation:

• Read a contemporary romance novel or a little bit of chick lit. Here are some of the greats, with varying degrees of romance:

  • “Beach Read” and “People We Meet on Vacation,” by Emily Henry

  • “Writers and Lovers,” by Lily King

  • “Normal People” and “Conversations With Friends,” by Sally Rooney

• In a departure from the topic at hand, I recently enjoyed “Empire of Pain” by Patrick Radden Keefe. And to be quite fair to my sister’s boyfriend, I do love Carré’s “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.” If you haven’t already, read one of those after you finish your women’s lit assignment.

• I’m watching “Margo’s Got Money Troubles” on Apple TV and finding it to be simultaneously fun and stressful. The pacing is great.

• Take a mother in your life dancing over the weekend. My mom went to a public dance class in her local park with a couple of her girlfriends this week and was positively beaming when she told me about her experience. (Consider this your reminder that Mother’s Day is on Sunday.)

• “Yesteryear” by Caro Claire Burke

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The oldest member of Gen Z is 29 years old. Despite the basically stable rate of college-educated women getting married over the last 100 years, there is a near-constant flood of think pieces online about why Gen Z isn’t marrying, the evidence that isn’t true, and warnings about what happens if young people don’t get their acts together and tie the knot. The data tells us that college-educated women are still marrying — they are just marrying later. It’s actually the numbers among non-college-educated women that are falling. Many of the people who will eventually marry simply haven’t reached the average age of marriage among college-educated women.

In March, Matt wrote that “yelling at ambitious young women won’t boost marriage.” His piece and the others he cites got me thinking about how highly educated young adults are actually approaching marriage.

I conducted interviews and sent a questionnaire to my network and their extended networks to gather responses from 112 people between the ages of 18 and 35. These people are mostly college-educated, and they are distributed across American cities of all sizes, from Ann Arbor to San Francisco, Brooklyn to Beaverton, and Austin to Salt Lake City. The survey was an attempt to hear, in their own words, what these young Americans actually think about marriage.1

What came back was not a portrait of disillusionment. Rather, the portrait that emerged was of a generation that has decided that marriage is worth having, and that value makes it worth waiting for.

The importance of marriage

Of the respondents, 83 percent rated marriage as a 7 or higher on a 10-point scale of personal importance. The median score was 8.

Some are skeptics. Sammy, 26, who lives with her partner of six years in Ypsilanti, Mich., rated marriage a 1 after she attended too many expensive weddings to sustain much enthusiasm. She also does not want to have children and sees marriage in that case as pointless. Abigail, 27, lives in Cincinnati with her girlfriend of five years, and gave it a 2. She also describes marriage as structurally unnecessary without children.

“Marriage just feels like an unnecessary prison,” Abigail wrote. “If something goes wrong like one of us having an affair, developing a gambling problem, etc., and neither of us are solely doing unpaid domestic labor, then what’s the benefit of all the strings attached?”

But Sammy and Abigail are outliers; the overwhelming majority who responded to the survey want the thing.

“There remains a romance in making a commitment to someone you love,” a 26-year-old Chicago man in a long-distance, long-term relationship wrote. “Marriage is an important milestone, and there’s inherent value in these points of demarcation in our lives that separate one stage from the other. As we get older, they’re fewer and farther between.”

The question, then, is more “when” than “whether.”

And on that question, this particular slice of young Americans has arrived at a near-consensus on the right time: From the ages of 28 through 32, once the career is established and the geography has settled, after the self feels adequately assembled.

The lack of urgency is not to be confused with indifference, though.

“In general I think the vibes are that there’s no rush,” wrote Jack, a 26-year-old who lives with his girlfriend of seven years in Denver. “But marriage is still viewed very positively.”

This view reflects a carefully constructed and socially promoted theory of the right order of operations for adulthood among the professional class. Marriage, in this schema, is the reward, not the foundation. Nearly all respondents laid out the same sequence in their answer for why they and their peers have not married yet: They need to finish school, establish a career, find their city, and then, and only then, they’ll commit.

“I want to be out of school, to have financial stability, to have put down the beginnings of roots in a city, and to have a few serious career years under my belt,” wrote one 24-year-old law student in a long-distance relationship.

When asked what is delaying marriage for them, respondents pointed to the same forces again and again:

• 79 percent cited a focus on career and personal development — by far the most commonly selected factor in the survey.

• 65 percent named financial instability or debt.

• 62 percent pointed to the erosion of social pressure.

• More than half emphasized the desire to live together first.

Andrew, 28, who is engaged and lives in Beaverton, Ore., described the ideal moment as when both partners are “old enough to have an idea who [they] are and young enough that it’s more of a cornerstone than a capstone.”

The marriage tax

The financial dimension is a reason for delay among nearly two-thirds of respondents. One man in the South, who lives with his girlfriend of more than five years, described his “opposition to the spectacle of the wedding-industrial complex.” Sammy — one of the marriage skeptics — wrote that weddings, and everything associated with them — from bachelorette trips to dresses to hair and makeup — have become demands on other people’s money, and that the person getting married should absorb those costs themselves. A 30-year-old in Boston avoided the problem entirely by having a courthouse wedding that cost $500.

But the more structurally interesting obstacle is one that emerged among Gen X and has bloomed since: geography. Gen Z, the children of the generation who set off the trend, move more frequently than any other, having scattered to different cities for college and graduate programs and first jobs, and have discovered that the shape of an ambitious young life is not easily compatible with the shape of a shared one.

Julie, 24, is in medical school in New York while her boyfriend of six years is pursuing a doctorate elsewhere. “I want to make sure that our residency and graduate school paths align location-wise before we commit to getting married,” she said. Another woman, also in medical school, in Cambridge, noted something more counterintuitive: If she married now, her husband’s income would be counted in her financial aid calculation, reducing her package.

Even some who mixed marriage with graduate school found diverging ambitions as a barrier. One 26-year-old medical student married her husband in 2025 before starting school, knowing she and her husband would spend at least the first year and a half of marriage apart.

Josh, 27, who lives in Wisconsin, is engaged and planning a September wedding. He got to that milestone because his then-girlfriend made a sacrifice on employment to stay in the same city. He is clear-eyed about what that required and appropriately skeptical of the standard excuses. “I think career positioning is overrated,” he wrote. “But I also don’t work at a stereotypical company where promotions are required to get raises.”

He also pointed out that due to social media, members of Gen Z are more likely to compare themselves to their peers, influencers, and celebrities.

“Some of the stuff our parents have came over decades, whereas some people feel the pressure to get it now, when earnings are at your lowest,” he wrote. “I think the thing that helped me most towards proposing was not being on social media and feeling outside pressure on ‘what to do.’”

And, of course, decisions are informed by where respondents grew up and live now. Philip, who got married at 28 in the Northeast, said his peers felt it was an unusually young age to make the big leap. Kate, who grew up around mixed communities in Southern California, said that among Hispanic friends and family, she saw marriages at 18 to 22; in the white professional world she entered, late twenties to mid-thirties was the norm.

Austin, 33, is married. He and his wife met 10 years ago and got married after dating for six years. Now in Brooklyn but from the rural Midwest, Austin remarked on the clarity that comes from having lived in multiple worlds.

“We are from the rural Midwest where marriage norms are not as decayed as in San Francisco, Los Angeles, N.Y.C., and Boston,” he said.

Most of Austin’s former roommates and two of his three brothers are married. Among his Brooklyn peers, he said people express “a sincere desire for family and children,” but are “so terrified of having children and then getting financially rug-pulled that they delay the choice.” His conclusion, offered with some regret, was that the security they’re waiting for is largely illusory: “We should have just done it.”

Jack, in Denver, captured the social texture of his particular world that informs and reinforces attitudes toward marriage: “There is definitely some snide talk about people who get married ‘early,’ which at this point means before 25 or right after college.”

In certain zip codes and certain alumni networks, marrying young has come to register not as a charming traditionalism but as a mild social failure, as evidence that you didn’t have enough going on to wait.

In other groups, though, marriage says more about the relationship than the individual’s success. Taylor, who lives in Florida, married his wife in 2020 — about a year after she finished her undergraduate degree.

“I don’t think we ever considered the idea of not getting married after we had been together for a couple of years,” he said. “I don’t think anyone I know would think it was very strange to get married anywhere between 22 and 35; we do wonder why people we know who’ve been in a relationship 5+ years haven’t either gotten engaged or broken up.”

The girlboss who won’t wed

The years before marriage are understood as uniquely open — perhaps the only period of adult life when one can move freely, experiment, fail, and reinvent without negotiation.

Elise, a 24-year-old engineer in Denver, has been with her boyfriend for nearly five years, having known him for seven. She has no immediate plans for engagement. She loves her job, she told me, but she could also imagine quitting to travel, or to coach pickleball. The relationship works, she explained, because it does not constrain either of them.

“I do what I want,” she said. “We compromise to an extent, but if something really isn’t working for one person, I just don’t feel like the relationship works.”

Her boyfriend, she added, “absolutely would move in and do all that soon. I feel like I’m the stopping factor.”

This is the asymmetry that runs through the heterosexual couples in this survey. Women are more often the ones setting the pace, and they are setting it slower. Emily, a 28-year-old lawyer in Seattle, said that as the second woman in her family to attend college and the first to attend graduate school, she appreciates the relatively new opportunities for women outside of marriage and wants to take advantage of them.

“My grandmother got married right after high school,” she said. “She couldn’t even get a credit card without a husband. I’m not going to give up the chances she never had.”

Adam, 30, in Columbus, Ohio, is on the other side of this dynamic. His girlfriend of two and a half years “doesn’t feel comfortable getting married” while she’s in graduate school. He is waiting on her timeline.

Several respondents, unprompted, pointed to their mothers. Elise’s father died when she was six, and her mother never remarried. Growing up with a single mother who managed independently shifted her perspective, she said, toward asking what she actually wants in a life that does not have to center marriage.

One woman said that having divorced parents makes it harder to identify a good partner in the first place. To marry too young, in this view, is to risk stepping onto a conveyor belt that has a destination you cannot fully control.

What’s it all for?

And then there is the question of what marriage is actually for, a question to which most respondents answered with straightforward comments about the legal and financial case for a union: taxes, hospital visitation rights, inheritance, immigration status. Many also pointed to wanting to have children only once married.

Beyond logistics, the less straightforward reason that came up is what Jonathan, 24, who lives with his girlfriend of three and a half years in Ann Arbor, called it “social messaging” — a signal that a relationship is real. They want what one 29-year-old man articulated as “becoming a part of something bigger than you are if you’re just two people cohabiting.”

“You can’t just end it if you’re mildly dissatisfied with the way the relationship is going,” he wrote. “You’re committing to working it out.”

Austin framed it as a community act rather than a private one. “Marriage is not about the two of you, but rather about a public opt-in by everyone you care about to support your commitment to each other and your family.”

Another man in Michigan wrote that marriage means you’re “locked in,” before he hesitated. “I guess a marriage could just end, too.”

This is a generation that grew up with divorce as a background condition. Clare, 22, who is single and living in Dayton, Ohio, noted that many of her peers “grew up with divorced parents, so they might be less likely to marry young.” Abigail’s parents stayed together until she left for college, then separated and never divorced — living an hour apart in what she described as “at best, a platonic companionship.” And yet, even Abigail still assigned the institution a 2, not a 0.

For a generation that optimizes everything, marriage is the next logical thing

What holds so many of these people back is not, in the end, doubt — it is a habit of optimization. Philip, reflecting on his first year of marriage, wrote that his peers are waiting for “a magical switch that will go off in your head that says ‘I’m ready.’” It does not exist. “There is always going to be a degree of taking a leap of faith,” he wrote. A culture oriented toward certainty, he wrote, “dissuades that act of taking risks, especially with another person.”

This is a generation trained to wait for complete information — for the best option, the right moment, the optimal conditions. Marriage resists this habit because the data is never complete and the conditions never fully stabilize.

Some, looking back, recognize the trap. One 33-year-old man in Kansas City waited eight years to marry his now-wife. He now sees the delay as unnecessary. “At some point it felt like we had been married long before the actual ceremony,” he wrote.

A woman living in the Netherlands who married at 26, partly to secure an E.U. visa and simplify the legal architecture of buying a house and having children, offered the most pragmatic corrective: “You are still growing, and growing together, after you’re married,” she wrote. “In my mind, it’s a valuable commitment and legal protection that doesn’t stop you from doing any of the things that people give as wanting to put things off.”

In the end, these young Americans are not rejecting marriage en masse. They are pursuing it with deliberation and caution, waiting for the right city, the right job, the right financial footing, the right version of themselves. It is a reasonable approach to a big decision. It also, as the married respondents might tell you, has a way of going on forever.

“I read a line somewhere that, ‘If it’s the right person, it’s the right time,’” wrote a single, 25-year-old man. “I really think that’s true.”

Happy Friday! I have a longer piece about young adults’ attitudes toward marriage coming on Sunday, so stay tuned for that. In the meantime, I am feeling kind of spicy, so I thought I’d share some takes and, as always, some weekend recommendatio…

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On any given Saturday in late spring, a man called Shakespeare will drive from Pennsylvania to New Jersey to play baseball.

He will travel about two hours in each direction, cross at least one bridge, and spend the better part of the day on a grass field in a uniform made by an Amish community in Indiana. He will play some 60 games without a glove before October. He will do all of this at age 64 as he did 30 years ago, and just as men did 162 years ago.

On one such spring afternoon in the mid-1990s, Frank Van Zant — “Shakespeare,” on the field — was walking with his children through the Old Bethpage Village Restoration on Long Island when he stumbled upon a game that looked something like the sport he knew. Having played baseball throughout much of his life, he had soured on the game because of his experience with adult recreation leagues.

It was vintage baseball, with its 19th-century rules, its throwback uniforms, and its curious fellowship, that made him fall in love with the game all over again.

That intrigue, shared by hundreds of players across the country, leads to the same place: a loose, growing confederation of more than 120 clubs playing baseball the way it was done before the sport calcified into the institution we’re all familiar with today. In vintage baseball, there are no batting analytics, no radar guns, and no replay reviews.

“It’s so much better than regular baseball,” Steven “Scarecrow” Cruz, who will be 37 on Saturday, said. “It’s more challenging. Not having a glove is completely insane but fun at the same time.”

Once a professional wrestler, Scarecrow said that he has been far more roughed up on the field than on the mat. In his 11 years playing vintage baseball, he has broken just about every finger on both his hands and ripped the webbing between them.

The umpire wears a three-piece suit, calls balls and strikes at his own discretion, and may choose not to call any pitches at all for a while if he doesn’t feel like it. If a batted ball bounces once and a fielder catches it bare-handed, the batter is out.

“We’re kind of like the Amish Mennonites of baseball,” Shakespeare told me. “No electrical scoreboards and rockets going off and things like that. The magic of it is that it calls up the days of horses and buggies and the farm fields where baseball was born.”

The Brooklyn Atlantics — Shakespeare and Scarecrow’s team — is one of the sport’s more storied franchises. The original Atlantic Base Ball Club of Brooklyn was organized in 1855, went undefeated in 1864, and was recognized as champions that year. In 1865, the Atlantics were, alongside the Washington Nationals, the first baseball team to visit the White House. The team was the precursor to the Brooklyn Dodgers and eventually the Los Angeles Dodgers.

The modern revival has been operating in its present form since around 2002. More than two decades later, some of the founders’ children have joined the roster. A few players have tattoos of the team logo, an honor that must be well-earned through on-field achievement and demonstration of one’s dedication to the game and each other.

“We’re a brotherhood,” Scarecrow said. “There’s nothing like it. We look out for each other, and we’re there to have fun. We’re also there to win.”

The game they’re playing

The rules of vintage baseball vary by era. Different clubs choose different years — 1864, 1884, 1896 — typically based on when the team they’re re-enacting was active.

The Brooklyn Atlantics play by 1864 “Beadles” rules, which are the most common standards on the East Coast and represent the earliest codified version of the sport. These rules are largely the work of a New York physician and player named Daniel Lucius “Doc” Adams, who is not in the Baseball Hall of Fame — a fact about which there is, among vintage baseball enthusiasts, considerable agitation.

The one-bounce rule in particular changes the entire tenor of the game. When a ball could be caught after bouncing once, players weren’t trying to hit towering fly balls. Instead, they were trying to place the ball strategically, because an outfielder can let it drop and still get their opponent out. This produces, by all accounts, a faster, scrappier, more tactical style of play than the modern version.

It is also, Shakespeare explained, a style that was deliberately changed in an early version of the kind of game-smoothing optimization that all modern professional sports are undergoing.

In the winter of 1864, a group of New York captains met and voted to eliminate the one-bounce rule, which came from an even older set of rules — the Knickerbocker Rules of 1845. They found it unsatisfying that fielders were choosing not to catch balls in the air. From 1865 onward, if it hit the ground, you had to throw the runner out.

The Atlantics, purists as they are, still play by the pre-1865 version.

The people who play

The Brooklyn Atlantics are a roster of Long Islanders and Brooklynites. Their players are construction workers and teachers. Scarecrow is a driver for FedEx. The median age falls somewhere between 40 and 50. The team’s oldest player, 65-year-old Wild Horse, is just a few months Shakespeare’s senior and says this will be his final season.

On the other end of the bench is the team’s youngest player, 26-year-old Dean Gordon — “Splash” — from Los Angeles, who moved to New York a few years ago.

“One of my big life passions is history,” he said, explaining his reasons for joining the team. “I get obsessed with reading about history and learning history.”

He describes his teammates with affection and bemused accuracy. “As you might imagine, the people who join and do this sort of thing are, like, super weird. They’re weird guys for sure, and gals,” he said. “They’re the best.”

He got his nickname last summer in Ohio.

The field had a pond in left-center, reachable only by a truly big hitter. The opposing team had such a hitter, and he sent the ball flying. Gordon, playing the outfield, went running and dove full-extension directly into the water. The home team, following tradition, stood up and sang a song in praise of the young, soggy outfielder.

The home team got a home run, and Dean Gordon became Splash.

Shakespeare’s own nickname has a gentler origin. His friend Robert “Bob” Harrison, the father of a player who was then a teenager, was himself a poet. He invited Van Zant to his first vintage game and on the spot declared that a poet’s vintage name could only be Shakespeare. Bob Harrison died in 2024.

His son Flash — now himself a father, the team’s webmaster, and a towering first baseman — still plays.

The roster is about 25 to 26 men (and sometimes women — one of the confederation’s only inaccuracies) drawn from all over, whose nicknames carry the history of the people who gave them. Shakespeare, who moved from New York last year, commutes from Pennsylvania.

“I’m not giving up my beloved Atlantics,” he said. “Luckily, I’m retired. I can do whatever the heck I want.”

The team travels as far as Ohio, Michigan, and Virginia. The commitment required is non-trivial — an away game means hours of driving, bridge tolls, and a full day given over to sweating in cotton uniforms under the summer sun.

“The guys who are making that investment really love it and are committed,” Shakespeare said. “They definitely are less assholeish than other guys who are showing up on a Wednesday night and drinking beer between innings. It’s a real community, vintage baseball.”

Rec leagues tend to be cutthroat, Shakespeare said. Players get benched for going hitless. People jockey for roster spots. There is a transactional quality to it, a sense that anyone who doesn’t perform is replaceable.

Vintage baseball, by contrast, runs on different logic. Conflict usually emerges as genuine disagreements about historical accuracy that function as a kind of ongoing scholarly debate. East Coast teams like the Atlantics play with stealing allowed, which Shakespeare says the research supports. Midwest teams often play by a modified rule that inhibits base-stealing — partly, it seems to Shakespeare, to keep scores down.

Shakespeare is polite but clear that this is historically inaccurate, and that the Midwest teams, when pushed, know it. When the Atlantics travel to the Midwest, they insist on their rules. Generally, they get their way.

“After all,” Shakespeare said, “we’ve invested the money to come out there.”

The point

As baseball keeps optimizing itself — the M.L.B. recently introduced robo umpires — toward some theoretically more perfect version of the game, what is preserved by refusing to follow along?

Shakespeare thinks of vintage baseball players as “the docents of baseball history.” They are putting on a re-enactment, showing audiences what the game looked like before it became a product.

But he also thinks that at the most basic level, the game is just more fun. More human.

A version of the sport where the ump wears a waistcoat and can call whatever he wants, where a fielder has to decide in a split second whether to let the ball bounce and make the easier play or go for it bare-handed, where a dive into a pond earns you a nickname you’ll carry for the rest of your playing life — that version has something the optimized version can’t offer.

“Every game to me is something special,” Scarecrow said. “When I’m out there on the field, I’m in my happy place. That’s all that matters to me.”

Splash, a recent liberal arts college graduate surrounded by middle-aged Long Islanders, puts it a different way.

Playing on a team that has existed, in some form, since the 1860s — that is connected to the actual Brooklyn Dodgers, to actual games played in actual Brooklyn, to a New York that no longer exists — makes him feel rooted in a city where he was recently a stranger.

“I’m part of something that was around almost 200 years ago,” Splash said. “That sense of connection is like lightning in a bottle.”

Weekend letter of recommendation:

• Go to a baseball game. Perhaps a vintage baseball game in your area. But be careful — Scarecrow will make you play.

  • I am attending the Rockies - Atlantics Dodgers game on Saturday.

• Take a hike! I’ve been in Colorado this week and am absolutely loving my time outside.

• Read “North Woods” by Daniel Mason.

• Happy spring! Prepare your garden.

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