I was busy these last two weeks, with numerous reaction pieces for ESPN+ subscribers.
- The Gerrit Cole signing
- The Anthony Rendon signing
- The Didi Gregorius signing + two Giants moves
- Smaller winter meetings moves (Mazara, Roark, rule 5)
- The Tommy Pham trade
- The Zack Wheeler signing
- The Mike Moustakas signing
I also held a Klawchat, probably my last of 2019, on Friday.
Over at Paste, I reviewed the new small-box game Ankh’or, which plays up to four but works nicely with two, and wrote up the best games I saw in two days at PAX Unplugged (before my daughter got sick and we had to skip day three #sadface).
My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, comes out on April 21st, 2020. You can pre-order it here, and I have tentative appearances for that week at Politics & Prose (DC), Midtown Scholar (Harrisburg), and One More Page (Arlington, VA).
My free email newsletter will return in the next few days – sorry, I got sick, then the winter meetings happened – and you can sign up here.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: This New York Times piece on two woman artists, Celia Paul and Cecily Brown, is devastating in multiple ways as it explores divers forms of misogyny in the art world.
- Former major-league pitcher Bobby Jenks opens up about years of substance abuse and pitching through pain.
- A GP writes in the Guardian about things he’s learned from his suicidal patients, with a discussion of the death of Frightened Rabbit lead singer Scott Hutchison.
- The Verge reveals the toxic work environment at the trendy luggage maker Away.
- Multiple researchers and publishers worked together to try to come up with a definition of predatory publishers.
- Nouns in romance languages have genders, and when a plural noun refers to a group of people that includes men and women (or any non-men), the default is to use the masculine plural. So a group of 100 teachers, 99 of them women and just one a man, would still be “los profesores.” Teenagers in Argentina are fighting to change that in favor of gender-neutral language.
- I love The Monster at the End of this Book, having read it many times to my daughter (complete with my Grover impression), so of course I enjoyed author David Burr Garrard’s essay on how that book opened his mind to the world of literature.
- Deposed Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin has been busy pardoning murderers who contributed to his campaign, as well as pardoning a man convicted of beheading a woman and a teacher convicted of possessing child pornography.
- The Washington Post looks at Israeli people trying to escape Ultra-Orthodox communities, which keep their members in cult-like isolation from the outside world.
- David J. Roth, formerly of Deadspin, writes about the Astros’ McKinsey connections and mentality. McKinsey’s business practices are under scrutiny elsewhere as well, such as how they charge U.S. taxpayers $3 million per year for the work of a recent college graduate.
- France has mounted an extensive information campaign to fight vaccine hesitancy in a country with some of the highest levels of vaccine stupidity … er, distrust in the world. One side note in the article describes two families, one from France and the other from the U.S., bringing unvaccinated kids carrying the measles into Costa Rica. If I’m Costa Rica, or any other country, I would start demanding vaccination records for idiot travelers from rich western countries with vaccination rates below the herd immunity threshold (95% for measles), and making it a crime to bring an unvaccinated child into a country and putting my local populace at risk.
- “Samoa buries its children as measles outbreak worsens.” I think that says it all.
- That measles outbreak is what happens when anti-vaxxers win, according to this LA Times editorial.
- Anti-vaxxers hate your children. Dead kids don’t bother them; they’re so obsessed with their fantasies of vaccine ‘injuries.’
- Aung San Suu Kyi stands accused of deliberately saying nothing while the Burmese government massacred the Rohingya people in an International Court of Justice trial over the genocide.
- A first-grade teacher in Alameda County, California, teaches his students about race, class, and privilege.
- If you missed the Thanksgiving Twitter backlash over a now-deleted Scientific American editorial that (in my view) was just a hit piece on Dr. Jen Gunter, Slate offers one balanced take on the situation, while the American Council on Science and Health called out SciAm’s embrace of “anti-medical” pseudoscience. The piece’s author, Jennifer Block, maintains that she did nothing wrong, despite hiding her conflict of interest in the matter.
- Climate change deniers love to argue that past climate models have been wrong … but that’s not true.
- House Democrats have passed nearly 400 bills that Mitch McConnell refuses to even consider in the Senate. I’m reasonably certain that this is not how the Framers intended for our legislature to work.
- My alma mater screwed up, again, this time denying a popular and highly regarded Latina professor tenure. Harvard President Lawrence Bacow could do something about it, but says that’s just not how we do things around here. Why does it matter? Because the rejection may push other minority professors and grad students out of academia.
- If you live in or near Clarksburg, Maryland, there’s an indie bookstore that needs your help. The owner has Parkinson’s disease and is struggling to keep the store afloat.
- If you’re not constantly on Twitter, you may have missed this video of British citizens aghast at how expensive health care is in the United States. Basic health care is a right, not a privilege for the wealthy or the employed.
- Board game news: Dire Wolf Digital’s app version of Reiner Knizia’s Yellow & Yangtze, a sequel/reimplementation of his hit game Tigris & Euphrates, is now live for iOS, Android, and Steam.
- Z-Man Games has a bunch of mini-expansions for Stone Age, Cacao, First Class, NMBR9, and the Voyages of Marco Polo.
A tenured professor’s take:
García-Peña’s case underscores how hard it is to evaluate the research records of people in other fields in an objective manner. I looked up her CV, citation counts, and journal metrics, and thought: “Yeah I’m not surprised Harvard didn’t give this person tenure.” Then I read the glowing testimonials from prominent people in her field about how brilliant and groundbreaking her work is. My hunch is that Harvard was placing too much weight on scholarly publication metrics and not enough weight on letters from appropriate external reviewers (not to mention quality of teaching, but that’s a battle for another day).
If Harvard doesn’t reverse their decision, she’ll have no trouble getting a prestigious academic job somewhere else.
Going through the tenure process right now, and I strongly agree. I would even have trouble adjudicating cases in fields adjacent to mine. IME, tenure standards at most institutions are fuzzy, which makes tenure decisions susceptible to bias.
I think this is an important article:
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/ames/human-activity-in-china-and-india-dominates-the-greening-of-earth-nasa-study-shows
While it has been 30+ years, my memory is that Derek Bok (then President of Harvard) overturned a negative vote on the tenure of a well know philosopher who teaches an immensely popular course in the general education offerings but made the political mistake of being more conservative than his colleagues and writing a book attacking John Rawls’ interpretation of Kant. A quick google search did not find supporting evidence for my memory, so I might have some of the details wrong, but it was a huge deal at the time and I think I have the broad strokes right.
Such decisions are indeed rare, but there is a reason that administrators review tenure recommendations from departments. García-Peña published a book with a well respected press, eight articles, and won teaching awards. Even by the lofty standards of Harvard it is hard to believe that isn’t over the bar.
Coupled with the well established biases around evaluations of women, POC, and international scholars, this recommendation clearly merits re-examination. I would add there is also a “tax” on POC in the service area as well, where they are often asked to serve on numerous committees in the name of improving the diversity of that committee, but has the consequences of tying up time a tenure-track faculty member could utilize in better ways.