Writing since 2019 On media, technology & strategy

Essays & Dispatches

26 essays · 13 dispatches · 8 notes by Narendra Nag
Cover Essay · Sports

The League and the Derivatives Regulator

In March, Major League Baseball named a prediction market its exclusive partner — and signed integrity paper with a federal derivatives regulator. The second clause is the story: the state-by-state settlement that built American sports betting just met its federal end-run.

On March 19, 2026, Major League Baseball made an announcement with two clauses in it. The first clause was the familiar kind, the kind the industry has learned to skim: the league named Polymarket its exclusive prediction-market partner. Leagues name exclusive partners constantly — official beer, official airline, official cryptocurrency exchange. One more logo on the wall.

The second clause was the strange one. In the same announcement, the league said it had signed an integrity framework directly with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission — the federal agency that regulates derivatives.

A baseball league and a derivatives regulator, signing paper together.

Continue reading the essay
02 Research Report The Oil Must Flow: A Global Map of EnergyAn open, cited map of the world's oil and gas system: what its disruption scenarios show about exposure to Hormuz and three pipelines, what they cannot show, and how one person and five Claude models built it between May and September 2026. Q3 2026

More from the desk

26 essays since 2019
№01

The Counting Problem

Career·7 Sep 2026

In 2013 India's official records put malaria deaths at 440. The Lancet put them at 205,000. The strategic problem was an instrument problem the who...

6 min
№02

Sports as AI Insurance

Sports·28 Aug 2026

Within five weeks this spring, the reporter, the banker, and the fund all said the same thing: sports is the asset AI cannot synthesize. They are r...

12 min
№03

The Cheapest Truck Wins

Sports·14 Aug 2026

Thirteen NBA teams and seven NHL teams became local-television free agents this spring, and every bid on the table is a haircut. The post-RSN war w...

13 min
№04

The Observer Effect

Sports·31 Jul 2026

Half a season into MLB's robot-umpire era, the machine's biggest effect on baseball has come from the calls it never made. Umpires shade toward the...

11 min
№05

The Machine Is Right and Nobody Believes It

Sports·17 Jul 2026

The World Cup's offside machine took a goal off the board for a touch no replay can show, and FIFA says the call was correct. It probably was. That...

11 min
№06

The Bounce-Click Argument

Media·19 Jun 2026

Google's defense of AI Overviews is that the clicks they replace were 'bounce clicks' — visits no one valued. The defense is technically true. It i...

11 min
№07

The Magicians

Sports·5 Jun 2026

Italy 1990 was the first World Cup I watched. I have not missed a single game played in any World Cup since — nine tournaments, more than five hund...

13 min
№08

The First WNBA Billion-Dollar Team

Sports·12 May 2026

The Golden State Valkyries are worth $1 billion two seasons into existence. That number is the cleanest case study of a league entering its second ...

10 min

Notes & marginalia

Short observations, filed as they happen

  • AUG 07 OpenAI said it had slowed development of its next major model, Astra, citing potentially critical cybersecurity capabilities.AI
  • JUL 21 Google released three new Gemini models. Gemini 3.5 Pro was not among them.AI
  • JUL 20 A federal judge approved Anthropic's $1.5B copyright settlement with authors — the largest on record. About 350 authors opted out.AI
  • JUL 16 Netflix disclosed in its Q2 shareholder letter that roughly 300 titles used generative AI in production this year.Streaming
  • JUL 14 US publishers sued Google over the use of their work to train Gemini.Media
  • JUL 01 Anthropic restored global access to Fable 5, and Mythos 5 for a set of US organizations, after the government lifted the June 12 directive.AI

From the archive

Pieces that keep resurfacing

“The FAST-era distribution stack has quietly inverted the unit economics of minor league broadcasting — most of the teams we already cut w...”

The Untapped Economics of Minor League BroadcastingSports ·May 2026 · 15 min

“Streaming P&Ls optimize for minutes produced, which is cheap. The scarce variable is minutes earned — attention that is genuinely arousal...”

The Unit Economics of BoredomMedia ·May 2026 · 14 min

“The eleven-year, $76 billion media rights deal was priced against a world that is already moving — generationally, geographically, and th...”

The NBA's Next Decade Will Not Look Like Its LastSports ·Apr 2026 · 16 min