Immersing their babies, they pluck them from Hades

• David Chase is clearly mistaken about the finale of The Sopranos. And Sanrio is equally confused about the identity of Hello Kitty. (Sanrio says Hello Kitty can’t be a cat because she walks on two legs and has a pet cat of her own. Stephen King covered all this years ago.)

• Having a beer with Tommy Carcetti.

• The Guardian looks at Rick Santorum’s plan “to build a new film distribution system in which faith-orientated movies are screened in churches rather than cinemas.”

This might seem like a ground-breaking marketing innovation — if Billy Graham and Russell Doughten and Bill Bright hadn’t already started doing this decades ago. And also if The Guardian’s related-stories algorithm didn’t generate a link to the paper’s one-star review of Santorum’s first movie release next to this article.

• “Dear Warden, you were right. Salvation lies within.” But this is not a rock hammer:

• “The responsibility of the indirect employer differs from that of the direct employer,” John Paul II wrote in Laborem Exercens, “The term itself indicates that the responsibility is less direct — but it remains a true responsibility: the indirect employer substantially determines one or other facet of the labor relationship, thus conditioning the conduct of the direct employer when the latter determines in concrete terms the actual work contract and labor relations.”

The National Labor Relations Board recently came to something of the same conclusion. This is, potentially, big news for the millions of Americans who work for franchise operations or exclusive subcontractors.

• I’m always interested in scientific studies about “being in the zone,” but I’m reluctant to accept those that say “hot hands” and/or slumps are just statistical flukes. This is a thing that should be studied as a thing — not treated a fairy tale to be debunked. Jump-shooters and batters and musicians are not dice or playing cards. They are human agents doing something difficult — something difficult that, at some elusive times, turns into something weirdly easy. Being told that “seeing the ball well” is a myth or a delusion is difficult to accept if you’ve ever experienced it. Science should be exploring how to replicate that phenomenon, not telling everybody who’s ever played anything that we are, all of us, mistaken.

• 10 reasons I’m looking forward to David Roberts’ return to Grist.