Saturday five, 10/4/14.

I’m off to Arizona on Monday for my annual Fall League scouting trip, and will be at two games every day from the 7th through the 12th. I’ll tweet where I am each afternoon; there’s just one night game each day. Feel free to come say hi if you spot me at any games – and of course I’m taking any suggestions for new restaurants to try while I’m there, as long as they’re somewhere convenient to the various AFL ballparks.

My ALDS and NLDS predictions posts went up this week, along with my regular Klawchat. The previous week’s column was my annual list of players I got wrong, along with another Klawchat last Friday.

And now, the links…

• A great/horrible Buzzfeed story about battered women jailed for failing to protect their children. The point is that these women are victims too, and their failure to get help for their abused kids can be a symptom of their victimhood, not complicity in the abuse. It’s probably more complicated than the case the piece lays out, but I found the emphasis on specific victims and the overlong sentences they received compelling.
• Novel antibiotic class created. A research team led by scientists at MIT has developed a new approach to killing bad bacteria while saving good ones by using RNA-guided nucleases to target specific DNA sequences in the undesirable pathogens. The original paper, in Nature Biotechnology, is here if you have journal access.
• On the other hand, GMO wheat was found on a Montana farm where it wasn’t supposed to be. One reason among many that I support labeling of GM foods, along the lines of this very one-sided rejoinder to a one-sided New Yorker piece against labeling.
• The Cult of Neil DeGrasse Tyson. This whole story has been extremely disappointing; when fighting monsters, Tyson himself has become a monster. It’s not the most comprehensive look at his intellectual improprieties, but it puts them in context, and I agree with the author’s contention that personalities sometimes seem to be driving even secular philosophies rather than the other way around.
• The Almost Forgotten Story Of The 1970s East Village Windmill. Much more than the story of a windmill, it’s a story of urban renewal in the face of government abandonment, and of a disadvantaged community treating a property differently because it was one of their own.
• How Sugar Daddies Are Financing College Education, from the Atlantic. The issue the article dances around until the very end is that the website it discusses, Seeking Arrangement, is a de facto marketplace for prostitution. Yet some of the very significant issues facing sex workers, such as lack of freedom, surrendering part (or most) of their incomes to their procurers, and risk of abuse, are lessened or eliminated by such sites, which run background checks on customers (the “daddies,” which is an incredibly creepy way to describe them, even if they are actually creeps) and enable the women to control their own terms of employment. So despite the clickbait title, there are some legitimate issues of freedom and women’s rights involved here.
• Via my colleague Buster Olney, a ridiculous story of the University of Alabama totally screwing over one of its athletes. The NCAA is a cartel and should be broken up. Where’s this millennium’s Teddy Roosevelt when we need him?

I’m reading War and Peace now, so aside from one book review I still have to write, there won’t be a lot of literature posts here in October. I do have a stack of seven or eight games to review, however, so between this site and Paste I should still have plenty to write about.