I have analyses up for Insiders on the Aaron Hicks-John Ryan Murphy trade, the Andrelton Simmons trade, and the Craig Kimbrel trade. I also held my weekly Klawchat here on the dish.
My various offseason buyers’ guides all went up this week:
• Catchers
• Corner infielders
• Middle infielders
• Outfielders
• Starting pitchers
• Relief pitchers
Plus, you all saw my ranking of my all-time favorite boardgames, right?
And now, the links…
- One of the bigger surprises on Art Angels, the outstanding new album from Grimes (née Claire Boucher), is the presence of the female Taiwanese rapper who goes by the name Aristophanes. Fader has a little more info on her with some Soundcloud links.
- The Atlantic has a good review of Art Angels that talks about Grimes’ emerging fame and choice of musical direction. I’ll try to get a review of the album up early next week.
- Public schools in Louisiana are teaching kids Christianity and creationism, a blatant violation of federal law and of the students’ rights.
- The New Yorker has an excellent piece up on using “free speech” to distract from discussions of racism, focusing on the protests at Yale and the University of Missouri. The Yale controversy has seemed particularly easy to parse to me: You don’t get to go around in blackface in a closed environment and then claim you’re exercising your free speech rights. You get expelled.
- Pennsylvania has the second-worst student immunization rate in the nation, but there are bills pending in their legislature to end the “philosophical exemption” (that is, the opt-out for parents too stupid to understand basic science), while the state’s departments of health and education are working to end the “grace period” that allows kids to attend school before they’ve gotten all their shots. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette‘s editorial board supports these moves, as do I, not least because the state of Delaware told me building a border wall was too expensive.
- Doctors need to do a better job of encouraging parents to give their kids the HPV vaccine, according to Aaron Carroll, Professor of Pediatrics at Kyle Schwarber’s alma mater (well, technically at IU’s Medical School). The problem, in Carroll’s view, is that it touches on ignorance about vaccines as well as the dirty dirty subject of teens having sex.
- J. Kenji Lopez-Alt talked to NPR’s Here and Now, and the resulting interview includes three recipes from his new cookbook The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science.
- The BBC has a quirky story up on a brand-new record store in Ulan Bator, the capital of Mongolia. And if all you know of Mongolia is “Mongolian barbecue,” well, that’s Taiwanese, sorry.
- Last week’s links included a story on Elizabeth Holmes, the Stanford dropout whose blood-testing startup Theranos may have lied about its product’s capabilities. The Washington Post has a story on how the NY Times erased Holmes from a story on tech heroes, as well as failing to discuss a potential conflict of interest by that story’s author.
- This story by a pro-science skeptical blogger about an vaccine-denier nut job is a bit inside-baseball, as the saying goes, but highly amusing.
Aaron Carroll does great work on Healthcare Triage. Highly recommended for his science based (“To the research!”) approach.
Who was wearing blackface at Yale, now?
These folks.
Eight years ago?? These Yale protests were a response to an email sent by a professor about hypothetical Halloween costumes.
https://www.thefire.org/email-from-erika-christakis-dressing-yourselves-email-to-silliman-college-yale-students-on-halloween-costumes/
Yeah, no kidding. I never said the protests were about blackface. And since 2007 was pretty clearly a time when white students should have known better, I don’t see why “eight years ago” demonstrates anything beyond your ability to handle basic arithmetic.
The issue isn’t that there was a blackface party (as far as we know) this year; it’s that one of the masters of one of the colleges and his wife were defending the “right” to wear racist costumes without repercussion, trying to use colorblind arguments (especially around issues of students’ “development” to different things) without understanding how bigoted costumes like blackface serve to just reinforce the marginalized status of Black Yale students. The email from the master’s wife (who’s also a professor at Yale) mentioned blackface and cultural appropriation, then tossed both out of the window.
The fact that they responded like that to one of the few parts of campus that tries to make that white-dominated institution hospitable to people of color is astounding.
Or maybe just tone-deaf AF
I don’t think Yale should linger long over the question of wiping Calhoun’s name off the college either.
He does not deserve such an honor and keeping the name is indefensible on any level.
I’m appalled by the blackface incident and completely agree that it is not acceptable on campus.
But after reading the school’s e-mail regarding costumes and the professor’s response, I did wonder where the line will be drawn, in the future, between acceptable and unacceptable behavior or expression. The issues of Calhoun College and of a student donning blackface are easy to recognize for their obvious insensitivity to matters of race and slavery. But the issue of racial sensitivity isn’t always so easy. It’s a tough issue.
After reading the guidelines, I wondered if dressing up as George Washington would be insensitive. And I concluded it might be… but then I wondered that level of insensitivity was a permissible amount… and then my head hurt thinking about it.
Keith, just have Pennsylvania pay for the boarder wall…all is solved.
That New Yorker article by Jelani Cobb could be charitably described as disingenuous.
He writes:
“The default for avoiding discussion of racism is to invoke a separate principle, one with which few would disagree in the abstract—free speech, respectful participation in class—as the counterpoint to the violation of principles relating to civil rights.
Pointing out the actions by college students across several schools who have been taking demonstrable steps against free speech isn’t being pursued to avoid discussions of race.