My standings and awards predictions for 2016 went up last Saturday, in case you missed those. My one Insider piece since then was a draft blog post, co-authored with Eric Longenhagen, covering Jason Groome, Bryson Brigman, and more. We will have a top 50 draft prospect ranking up on Tuesday.

I held my usual Klawchat on Thursday, going a bit longer than normal because I was so busy answering your questions I lost track of time.

And now, the links…

• Best longread of the week comes from the Guardian, which explains how nutrition scientists pushed low-fat advice and ignored science for decades, even to the point of destroying the career of the first scientist to sound the anti-sugar bell. A Harvard professor is cited within the piece as demanding the retraction of a peer-reviewed article published in BMJ on the topic; I exchanged emails with him, and he said that the author of the article, Ian Leslie, was “clearly not interested” in hearing a contrary opinion.
• The NCAA isn’t just a group of corporate fat cats and millionaire coaches profiting off the unpaid physical labor of college athletes; it’s a giant wealth transfer from black to white.
• Amy Schumer’s “plus-sized is okay but I am not plus-sized” imbroglio got thinkpieced to death this week … but the A/V Club did do the subject justice by pointing out the damage of labeling women at all. Men don’t really face this – there’s “big and tall,” but hell, tall is considered good for men. (I am not tall; I’m 5’6″, very short for an adult American male, and trust me, I’ve long heard how this is not a good thing.) Why do women have to be plus-sized or minus-sized or whatever-the-fuck-sized at all?
• From the “look at this idiot” department: A vaccine-denier mom gave her newborn whooping cough. She regrets being an idiot now, apparently. If you think vaccines are not safe, you are wrong, and should listen to every reputable scientist and doctor in the world who says to vaccinate your kids.
• Eephus is a new sports-themed online magazine (do I even have to say “online” any more?) and one of its first pieces was by my friend Will Leitch, who waxes nostalgic over baseball boardgames.
• A great interview with culinary icon Alton Brown from Bitter Southerner.
• A state senator in Virginia wants Beloved out of public schools because it’s “smut,”, and he told a high school English teacher that he knew better than she did. Read his emails to see his ignorance at work, as he calls the greatest American novel of the last 40 years “vile,” “smut,” and “moral sewage.”
• Facebook now has a tool to report users who might be about to harm themselves and try to get them help.
• All this talk about the various laws raising the minimum wage to $15/hour led me to this takedown of a WaPo editorial criticizing the laws, in which the author contends (among other things) that the rise in wages for the lowest income bracket will lead to greater increases in demand, because when you have very little money, you spend each additional dollar you get.
• This JAMA editorial argues that we may be reaching the financial limits of pharmaceutical innovation. I think he’s half right, in that we are approaching that limit, but do not believe it will stop or even slow innovation, but must drive new price models. A fundamental problem of health care is that our demand for services that will improve, extend, or save our lives is essentially inelastic: You can raise the price and we’ll still want as much, and eventually we will simply pay everything we have if it means continuing to live.
• The chefs at Nashville’s wonderful izakaya and ramen joint Two Ten Jack read and respond to negative reviews in this funny 90-second video. I brought a group of writers to TTJ in December (Jess Benefield came out to chat while we were there) and had an unbelievable and very reasonably priced meal.