Baseball, like many sports, sometimes seems as though it’s leaving the realm of human athleticism and instead marching toward an almost technical optimization. Steroids (illicitly taken) have made some players stronger than ever. Sabermetrics, which involves the detailed statistical analysis of baseball data, has turned the artistry of staffing a team into mere mathematics, a phenomenon that the author Michael Lewis writes about in Moneyball.

Each installment of “The Friendship Files” features a conversation between The Atlantic’s Julie Beck and two or more friends, exploring the history and significance of their relationship.This week she talks with two friends who were both diagnosed with the same cancer—acute myeloid leukemia—one right after the other.

Berrien County, Michigan, is not the kind of place you would expect to be losing residents. Perched on the coast of Lake Michigan, “the Hamptons of the Midwest” is widely known for its sandy beaches and vineyards, which draw plenty of tourists from nearby Chicago and Indianapolis. But the county hasn’t yet persuaded those tourists to stay, and its population has been declining since the 1970s.

The board game “Puerto Rico” begins after everyone around the table receives a mat printed with the verdant interior of the game’s namesake island. Players are cast as European tycoons who have trekked across the Atlantic at the height of the Age of Exploration. “In 1493 Christopher Columbus discovered the easternmost island of the Great Antilles,” read the back of the game box that once sat on my living-room shelf.

When Barbara Klump ran into homeowners on trash-collection day, she would tell them that something very special was happening in their suburb of Sydney. She meant the birds. The big white ones?, the residents asked. The birds that are always opening trash cans and making a huge mess? Yes, those, the sulphur-crested cockatoos.