Stick to baseball, 3/3/18.

I’ve had one Insider post in the last week, this one on the MLB Draft, looking at Florida starters Brady Singer and Jackson Kowar, as well as several other prospects from the Gators and the Miami Hurricanes. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Chris Crawford and I did an impromptu podcast previewing Sunday night’s Oscars, looking at about a dozen categories with our picks of who should win and our very-much-outsider guesses on who will win. It looks like a few hundred of you have already indulged us by listening and we both appreciate it.

Smart Baseball drops in paperback in just ten days! Buy copies or see more details on HarperCollins’ site.

And now, the links…

• Long reads first: Harvard blew off sexual harassment charges against a notable professor in 1982, allowing him to remain on faculty to this day and apparently discouraging other women from coming forward. They know now, but haven’t even responded to this article that I can see.
• The Guardian looks at the link between processed meats and cancer that appears to come from the use of nitrates and nitrites in curing, which the author argues is about color and flavor rather than safety.
• I’m surprised anyone takes Turning Point USA, a college conservative front group for some major right-wing donors, seriously, but it seems that it took a man in a diaper to alert anyone to the group’s bizarre and unpopular stances.
• The Washington Post looks at the problems that arise from testing huge backlogs of rape kits, including widespread misunderstandings of what law enforcement must do in such cases.
• The Huffington Post has the scoop on how the New York Times’ editorial page is justifying itself to the rest of the staff. This piece just reinforced my decision to cancel my digital subscription.
• Alex Pareene wrote more about this for Splinter, saying that Bennet lacks an important qualification for his job as the Times‘ editorial page head: He can’t seem to understand readers’ reactions to the columns he runs.
• Matt Martin, who served as an infantryman in Afghanistan, argues eloquently that arming teachers is insane. I thoroughly agree and would not want my daughter in a school with weapons already present. The hilarious idea of installing metal detectors at school entrances and then putting weapons INSIDE the building can’t make sense to anyone but the manufacturers of guns and metal detectors.
• Vox looks at the lack of evidence or research on emotional support animals.
• How did Melanie Trump land an EB-1, informally called the “Einstein visa,” to stay in the US back in 2001? (My favorite conservabot response to this is “she speaks five languages!” Honey, in Europe, they call that “average.”)
• Alt-right news outlets ran with the claim that CNN “scripted” questions in its town hall show on gun control after one of the kids involved claimed they rejected his question. He was lying, of course, but I haven’t seen many corrections from those same publications.
• The Dallas Observer covers Rangers broadcaster CJ Nitkowski’s latest meltdown, including his denial that he knew he was following a white supremacist group & liking their tweets. By siding with Nitkowski, the Rangers and their TV partner Fox Sports Southwest have made their preferences quite clear.
• Several “Instagram stars” have taken substantial steps to hide their connection to noted racist Pamela Geller, whose comments have been labeled “hate speech” by the Southern Poverty Law Center. They’ve already lost a TV show on Verizon’s Oath channel, as a result of this piece and the discovery of anti-Islamic tweets they’d posted years ago. My main question: What on earth makes someone who just posts other people’s content an “Instagram star?”
• Max Boot, now a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, decries the decline in the conservative movement from intellectual roots to “owning the libs.”
• Researchers believe they’ve discovered the pathogen responsible for acute flaccid myelitis, which has caused hundreds of cases of polio-like paralysis in the last few years.
• A new book details how yeast made modern civilization possible, even in foods and drinks you don’t associate with the fungi, like chocolate and coffee.
• Two posts to prep you for Sunday night’s Academy Awards ceremony: a list of important “firsts” among this year’s nominations, and how a rule change may have screwed independent animated films – giving Boss Baby a nod over better but less-known features.
• I don’t think I’ve ever linked to an advice column before, but this answer on how to deal with a classmate who won’t stop touching you (in a non-sexual but still non-consensual way) is excellent, and I think can be generalized to a lot of situations where someone is doing something that makes you uncomfortable.
• Please enjoy this too-perfect mashup of Ratt’s Round and Round with Marvin Gaye’s I Heard It Through the Grapevine.