You may have heard about baseball’s new rules: Batters and pitchers have to work against a 15- or 20-second clock; “ghost runners” now appear during extra innings; and the bases have been flattened and enlarged to look like pizza boxes — heaven knows why.
A recent Red Sox game ended when a player was called out on strikes for dawdling around the batter’s box, an out-of-body event described by The Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Gay: “It was as if Babe Ruth had risen from the afterlife and told everyone he was now a vegan pole vaulter.”
But it’s not just baseball. There are new rules everywhere. In a recent break-the-Internet cover story, New York magazine’s The Cut trumpeted 140 new rules, “Do You Know How to Behave? Are You Sure? How to text, tip, ghost, host, and generally exist in polite society today and plenty of other categories.”
The Cut’s new guidelines seesaw from the abstruse e.g., “If you’re someone who types ‘hahaha’ to things that are actually funny, don’t just say ‘ha’ when they’re clearly not,” to the zany: “The correct number of slices of pizza to order for a group of X people is 2X + X/3.”
I agree with Rule 14: “Never send an Edible Arrangement” — omigod, those DOA melon chunks! — and I closet-admire the brazen wrong-footedness of Rule 38: “Always wink.” This is terrible advice, as winks are almost always misconstrued. I know because I am a bit of a winker myself.
New rules can mean big box office. Just ask Moses, who introduced his Ten New Rules, variously known as the Commandments or the Decalogue, perhaps three millennia ago. Had he lived into the 21st century, Moses would indubitably have added more rules to sell more books or, in his case, tablets.
In 2018, the trendy, right-leaning (by which I mean conservative, not that he tends to be correct) Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson published “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos,” ranging from the straightforward, e.g., “Do not bother children while they are skateboarding,” to the cryptic: “Tell the truth — or, at least, don’t lie.”
Peterson’s rules apparently cried out for a sequel, duly delivered in 2021: “Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life.” Is this really a “rule for life” — “Do not hide unwanted things in the fog”? And/or this: “Notice that opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated”?
HBO’s late night host Bill Maher has single-handedly rewritten the New Rules book, incorporating “New Rules” segments into his talk show since at least 2005. That year, he first assembled the apercus into a book, “New Rules: Polite Musings from a Timid Observer,” followed up a few years later by “The New New Rules,” with a subtitle that won’t be appearing in this daily newspaper.
Maher made small “h” history in a January 2020 segment when he correctly predicted that if Donald Trump “loses the election in November he’s not going to leave.” Just a few days ago, Maher aired a New Rules segment likening the hyperactive Marjorie Taylor Greene to “Cocaine Bear,” which prompted me to not grouse about the cost of an HBO subscription for the first time in decades.
Yes, I have my own New Rules.
1. Don’t listen to anyone’s idiotic travel stories (“and then they de-iced the plane for the SECOND time!”) unless they involve a direct confrontation with a yeti, Sasquatch, or Bigfoot.
2. You’re welcome to blame Exxon-Mobil for global warming, if I can blame Betty Crocker brownie mix for my being overweight.
3. Read every newspaper article until the end. The writer may have saved his best material for the final line. But in this case he didn’t.
4. Ignore all rules. Wink, wink.
Alex Beam is a contributing Globe Opinion writer. Follow him @imalexbeamyrnot.