David Bledsoe Digs into the Curse of the Washington Nationals

David Bledsoe will publish an e-book next month delving into the sources and extent of the playoffs curse afflicting the Washington Nationals, extending back into its days as the Montreal Expos. Titled Black Thursday, Blue Monday: In Search of the Curse of the Washington Nationals: A Baseball Whodunit, Bledsoe and the book were subject of a lengthy feature in the Washington Post on April 18. The article starts,

With the Washington Nationals protecting a one-run lead over the Chicago Cubs in the fifth inning of Game 5 of the 2017 National League Division Series, Manager Dusty Baker summoned his ace, Max Scherzer, from the bullpen for a rare relief appearance. No one could have predicted what would transpire over the next three outs at Nationals Park — a sequence of outcomes never witnessed in nearly 3 million half-innings of recorded history — but baseball fan David Bledsoe already had an idea how the game would end.

“I knew [the Nationals] were going to lose,” the 60-year-old Bledsoe, who watched Game 5 from the comfort of his Alexandria home, said in a phone interview this week. “There was no possibility they were going to win that game. It just had that supernatural air to it.”

Black Thursday, Blue Monday is the first book for Bledsoe, a lawyer in the Washington area who grew up in South Carolina. His grandfather turned him into a baseball fan by listening to Milo Hamilton announce the Braves games (Joe Torre was his favorite player).  Bledsoe attended the Nationals’ first opening day at RFK Stadium in 2005, and has been at virtually every opening day since.  He believes the designated hitter is an abomination, and likely unconstitutional. 

In discussing the book, Bledsoe notes some painful history, as covered in the Post article. In their last playoff appearance in 2018, with the Nats leading by a single run in Game 5, Max Scherzer, perhaps the best pitcher in baseball, suffered a meltdown unprecedented in the history of baseball, becoming the answer to an absurd trivia question in the process.

He asks, how to explain this bizarre history of failure for this powerhouse team?  There can only be one possible explanation.  They’re cursed. 

The Red Sox had the Curse of the Bambino.  The Cubs had the Billy Goat Curse.  So what is the curse of the Nationals?  Calling his book "a a non-fiction murder mystery," Bledsoe poses the fateful question: Who killed the Nats?

Richard Koret Publishes Book on Freud's Last Work, "Moses and Monotheism"

Richard Koret has turned a passion that dates back to his senior thesis into a new book, Heroic Fraud: How Sigmund Freud Got Away with Literary Murder, now available on Amazon. According to the book's website:

The book presents a kind of criminal case history of Moses and Monotheism, contending that Freud dissembled this much-criticized work in a kind of literary code. Most critics believe that this perplexing work — which claimed that Moses was an Egyptian killed by Hebrews — was a symptom of senility and Jewish self-hatred.

HEROIC FRAUD contends that Freud composed his final book so that its true meaning could only be understood by readers familiar with psychoanalysis. By tracing the many “Freudian slips” in the text and other symptomatic expression, one can decipher his latent intent much as a psychoanalyst might interpret the garbled manifest content of a dream.

Properly interpreted, the book is not hostile to the Jews but rather to their contemporary enemies, showing the root causes of anti-Semitism, conclusions too provocative to be outspoken at the time. Even now, his long-concealed ideas and conclusions are bound to arouse controversy and opposition.

Koret says the idea for the book has its roots in his senior project in the religion department. He produced a rock 'n' roll musical called Life: A Biblical Serial, that debuted to less than rave reviews from the department. He was allowed to write a supplemental paper to go with it, and that was "A Freudian Interpretation of Joseph's Dreams," referring to the biblical story of Joseph and his dream interpretations in Egypt. Sigmund Freud had himself written about Joseph and the later Jews in Egypt in his last book, Moses and Monotheism. Freud wrote the book when he was ill with cancer in the 1930s and under pressure from the growing anti-semitism in Europe.


Koret later lived in Israel, and the idea of whether Freud had laced that last book, which critics called his worst, with secret meanings meant for future generations stayed in his mind. Koret researched the book in Vienna and decided to publish it on his own rather than wait for an academic press to accept it.

The book has a strong, if understated Princeton connection, thanks to Freud's friendship with German author Thomas Mann, the 1929 Nobel laureate in literature. Mann's personalities and writings, especially his series of novels on Joseph and his brothers, appear throughout the book. Mann lived in Princeton at 65 Stockton Street from about 1939 to 1942 and lectured at the university.

Heroic Fraud analyzes the first two chapters of Moses and Monotheism, with a sequel appearing this spring covering the last two chapters.