The Ghost Map.

Our current understanding of the ways in which diseases spread goes back to a little-remembered cholera epidemic that devastated a London neighborhood in 1854, when a physician-scientist and a minister began working, first on their own and then together, to trace the outbreak’s origins. In a time of superstition and errant beliefs in “miasmas,” these two men realized through hard work, going door to door at one point to ascertain where each household obtained its water, that the agent causing the disease was spread through human waste that contaminated a particular water supply. In The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic – And How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World, author Steven Johnson tells this story in the fashion of a medical mystery – until a pointless epilogue full of speculation about the future of epidemics and treatments that has aged very poorly in the 16 years since its publication.

Cholera today is a disease of extreme poverty, and even more so of the lack of infrastructure that accompanies it; nearly all cholera outbreaks occur in desperately poor (or desperately corrupt) countries, or in those ravaged by war. Large outbreaks occurred in Syria during the early part of its civil war and Yemen during its endless civil/proxy war. In the third quarter of 2023, the hardest-hit countries, measured by cholera cases per capita, were Syria and Afghanistan, followed by Haiti, Bangladesh, and several countries in sub-Saharan Africa. The disease, caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholerae, first emerged in India in 1817 and then spread around the world, killing over 35 million people, with multiple pandemics affecting Europe and North America, until advances in sanitation and public health helped eliminate the disease in more affluent countries. Those advances, and the lives saved, all came about because of the work of physician and scientist John Snow and Anglian priest Henry Whitehead.

Snow was an avid researcher and experimented with ether and later with chloroform, developing more reliable methods of anesthetizing patients that brought him significant renown, to the point where Queen Victoria called on him to assist her with chloroform during the birth of her eighth child, Prince Leopold. He took a general interest in cholera’s spread during the pandemic that first reached England in 1848, publishing a paper that argued that the prevailing theory that it was spread via polluted air, the “miasma” theory, was wrong. That outbreak eventually petered out, but cholera returned to England in 1854, leading to a horrific outbreak near Broad Street in London’s Soho district. Snow created a dot map to track cholera cases in the neighborhood, gaining help from Whitehead in going door to door to ask families about cases in the house – including houses where the majority of family members had died – and, after Snow’s initial research identified the Broad Street pump as a possible link between nearly all of the cases, where they got their water.

When Johnson tells this history, which takes up about 80% of the book, it’s fantastic. He balances the historical details, the science, and the biographies of the two main characters in the story well enough to maintain the interest level without ignoring the significance of the effort or the context in the history of science. He also has quite a bit of detail on some of the families destroyed by the outbreak, and on the quotidian lives of the inhabitants of this overcrowded part of what was becoming a massively overcrowded city. It’s a great, brisk history of science book.

If he’d stopped there, around page 200, I’d be raving. Unfortunately, there’s a long, tacked-on epilogue that goes well beyond the scope of the book in both its historical and scientific aims. Johnson couldn’t have known that we’d have several epidemics and one global pandemic before 20 years were up, but the larger point is that this book is about history, not predictions, and his don’t hold up particularly well. I read the epilogue wondering if an editor had asked him to add it, because it’s so out of character with the rest of the book.

That’s not a reason to skip The Ghost Map – you can always choose not to read the last bit – and the story it’s telling remains extremely relevant. The work the CDC and the WHO did to track SARS-CoV-2 in 2020, or that they’re doing right now to track current epidemics like chikungunya in Burkina Faso or Mpox in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is a direct ancestor of the work that Snow and Whitehead did in 1854. If the field of epidemiology has an origin point, it’s their efforts, and we have them to thank for all of the outbreaks of highly infectious diseases that never reach our shores.

Next up: I just finished R.F. Kuang’s Babel and started Tana French’s In the Woods.

Stick to baseball, 11/4/23.

My ranking of the top 50 free agents this offseason went up this week for subscribers to the Athletic, and we’re updating it as options and other news (e.g., Clayton Kershaw’s shoulder surgery) affects the list, since it ran the day after the World Series ended. I’ll be breaking down any major signings where a player changes teams as well as any significant trades this offseason.

After a four-month hiatus, I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter today, with some scattered thoughts on this World Series as well as a more thorough rundown of things I wrote in October.

And now, the links…

Stick to baseball, 10/28/23.

Nothing new from me at the Athletic this week as I’ve been working on my top 50 free agents rankings, which will run on Wednesday. My only new content outside of this site was a review of the game Forest Shuffle over at Paste Magazine; it’s got some lovely art but it’s a heavy thinker for a game that’s entirely made up of a large deck of cards. I do like it, though.

My guest on the Keith Law Show this week was Dr. Lee McIntyre, a philosopher at Boston University who discussed his new book On Disinformation: How to Fight for Truth and Protect Democracy. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links…

Stick to baseball, 10/14/23.

My one piece this week for subscribers to the Athletic this week was my first dispatch from the Arizona Fall League, covering prospects from the Tigers, Cardinals, and Rockies. I’ll have a longer wrap-up once my trip concludes on Saturday evening.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: ProPublica continues to lead the way in exposing the role of Leonard Leo in creating the conservative super-majority on the Supreme Court and packing federal courts with right-wing jurists, often of dubious credentials, and how he plans to push the country further towards a Christian theocracy.
  • New York’s Olivia Nuzzi followed the clown car of Republican candidates trying to run against the disgraced former President – and, so far, failing.
  • The richest man in Pennsylvania is spending millions of dollars to support Republican candidates for judicial races, most of it to support Carolyn Carluccio, a right-wing justice running for a seat on the state’s Supreme Court.
  • Sports Illustrated’s Steve Rushin wrote a lovely memoriam to sportswriter Jim Caple, who died last week at age 61 of frontotemporal dementia. I did not know Jim well, and even argued with him at times about matters such as the value of the runs scored statistic for individual hitters, but I believe the outpouring of sadness from people in our industry who did know him well is a testament to his legacy.
  • Several new instant-loan apps in India have targeted borrowers with threats of leaked nudes, harassment, and other forms of coercion that have led to multiple suicides.
  • I have taken a psyllium husk supplement every day for nearly 25 years now to help manage my stomach, as I was diagnosed with the meaningless term “irritable bowel syndrome,” which means that I don’t actually have a GI disease or disorder but the doctors didn’t want me to walk away empty-handed. Psyllium husk works wonders, and it’s probably pretty good for my overall health anyway. Now it’s a fad food and if you fucking hippies and influencers create a shortage I will come for you all.
  • Target closed several Seattle stores, blaming crime for the decisions – but is that really the reason for the failures of these Target mini-stores?
  • Arkansas, befitting its status as a backwater state, gave prisoners with COVID-19 ivermectin without their knowledge or consent, so now the ACLU has filed suit on their behalf. Just a reminder that ivermectin is completely ineffective against COVID-19 and comes with rather unpleasant side effects, no matter what the grifters on the interwebs told you.
  • Mississippi was one of the only two states that disallowed religious exemptions to childhood vaccination requirements until a Republican judge struck down the state’s rule, and this fall over 1800 such exemptions have been issued – even though no major religion bans or forbids vaccines. This is all a con from parents who are ignorant, denialist, or just sheep going along with the Republican party’s anti-science platform. We’re likely to see some sort of outbreak there in the next few months, perhaps measles, as it’s the most contagious of the vaccine-preventable diseases that affect humans.
  • Eric Trump hosted an overt anti-Semite who denies the Holocaust and once killed someone while driving drunk at the Trump Doral Miami resort for a “Reawaken America” event this week.
  • And some prominent Texas Republicans hosted Holocaust denier and white supremacist Nick Fuentes at the headquarters of right-wing consulting firm Pale Horse Strategies.
  • Elon Musk is actively promoting false information about the Israel-Hamas war, even sharing a video that falsely claimed a reporter there was actually an actor. (By the way, I’m avoiding any commentary on that conflict. I know I don’t know anywhere near enough to say anything worthwhile beyond condemning any and all attacks on civilians.)
  • Alex Norris is the creator of the web comic known simply as Webcomic Name, but after he signed a deal with Golden Bell Games to publish a board game using his creations, the publisher is trying to claim ownership of his intellectual property. There’s a GoFundMe to support his legal case, but I’m also linking this so people know what Golden Bell – publishers of Unbroken, Dungeon Dice, and other titles – are all about.

Stick to baseball, 10/7/23.

I’ve had one post up for subscribers to the Athletic since the last roundup, with my hypothetical postseason awards ballots for 2023. I do have another story filed for Sunday, so keep an eye skinned for that.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Votes for Women, a (mostly) two-player, asymmetrical game about the fight for women’s suffrage. It’s fantastic, and I also love that this review went up the week that Glynis Johns turned 100.

On the Keith Law Show this week, my guest was MLB’s Sarah Langs, talking about the season that was, who she would vote for in the various awards, and what excited her about this year’s playoff teams. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links…

Stick to baseball, 9/23/23.

For subscribers to The Athletic, I posted my annual Minor League Player of the Year column this week, as well as my last regular-season scouting notebook of 2023, covering prospects I saw from the Red Sox, Orioles, and Nationals. I’ll head to Arizona in October for Fall League coverage, of course. My podcast will be back next week and I’ve already filed my next review for Paste.

And now, the links…

Stick to baseball, 6/30/23.

I posted my 2023 Mock Draft v3.0 this week, and as usual did a Q&A to take your questions on it. Going forward, I’ll have the last Big Board update later this upcoming week and then mock 4.0 on Saturday, the morning I fly to Seattle to cover the Futures Game and then the draft. I also did a just-for-fun piece on who I’d put on the All-Star rosters, and then I avoided the comments entirely. I was a lot more active in the comments on the other pieces, including my scouting blog on Jackson Holliday and Brady House. And I weighed in on Friday night on the two players going to Kansas City in the Aroldis Chapman trade.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Rebuilding Seattle, a midweight economic game with some polyomino tile-laying aspects, an imposing game on the table that plays pretty quickly and doesn’t have that many rules to learn.

And now, the links…

Stick to baseball, 4/1/23.

Since the last roundup, I’ve written three new posts for subscribers to the Athletic – my annual predictions post, my first dispatch from spring training (mostly Cactus League), my annual breakout player picks, and a draft blog post on three potential first-rounders from Wake Forest and Miami.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the cooperative game Paint the Roses, which has simple rules but poses a difficult deductive challenge for players, working best with three or more.

I appeared on the streaming Scripps News Network to talk about why major-league salaries keep rising while minor leaguers’ haven’t, although this was recorded and aired before the recent CBA announcement.

My podcast will return now that my spring training travel is over, with David Grann lined up as my next guest. I did send out a new edition of my free email newsletter about two weeks ago.

And now, the links…

Neurotribes.

Steve Silberman’s 2015 book Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity is a history of autism, but one told through anecdotes of people with the neurodevelopmental condition or the scientists who studied it. It’s also an education, and an attempt to set the record straight that we are not, in fact, in the middle of an autism “epidemic,” but that the condition has always existed, even if doctors at those times didn’t realize what they were seeing.

Much of the history of autism is one of tragedy, as people with the condition were often treated as insane, or as imbeciles, and stuck in institutions or otherwise abandoned by their families. The condition was seen as incurable – meaning it was seen as something you’d want to try to cure – and that an autistic child was nothing more than an animal. This view persisted, at least in the west (there’s no discussion here of views of autism outside of the U.S. and Europe), until the early 20th century.

That’s when two researchers working independently* had their Newton/Leibniz moment, as both Leo Kanner, working in the U.S., and Hans Asperger, working in Vienna, both published key papers identifying autism as a condition with a specific, and in both cases narrow, set of symptoms. Asperger’s name has lived on beyond Kanner’s, but at the time, Vienna was under Nazi control, and Kanner’s work and views took precedence on the larger stage.

*I got a kind note from Steve Silberman via Twitter, saying: “The biggest historical scoop in NeuroTribes is that Kanner and Asperger were NOT working independently, but shared two assistants, Anni Weiss and Georg Frankl.”

If you know of Asperger, it’s through the now-deprecated “Asperger’s syndrome,” which has been subsumed into the larger diagnostic term autism spectrum disorder. One of the most enlightening parts of Neurotribes is Silberman’s explanation of that entire process, although its roots are horrifying: Because the Nazis were murdering any children held in institutions for health or mental reasons, Asperger’s work focused on the socially awkward prodigies he found. This spurred the still-extant stereotype of the autistic savant, which was further cemented in the public mind by the film Rain Man, the history of which Silberman details at great length and with significant empathy for everyone involved in the film.

Kanner viewed Asperger much as Newton viewed Leibniz, and we’re all quite a bit the worse for it, as the rivalry meant Kanner worked to “own” the definition of autism for some time. He claimed the disorder (a term still in use in the technical literature) only affected young children – if they were older, they had schizophrenia or something else – and that the cause was parental indifference. The idea of the “refrigerator mother” who failed to love her child enough, thus giving the kid autism, persisted for decades, at least into the 1980s. When that finally started to crumble, parents began looking for other explanations, landing on environmental toxins and, with the help of a fraudster named Andrew Wakefield, vaccines.

All the while, parents and researchers were looking for a cure, in no small part because Kanner’s definition of autism excluded all but the most serious cases. Some attempts were well-intentioned, while others were (and still are) quackery, and even dangerous. There’s still an institution in Massachusetts that uses shock therapy on autistic residents, despite no evidence that it works (and ample evidence that it’s torture). The FDA has had to issue warnings about so-called “miracle mineral solution,” which is bleach by another name, and which Youtube for one has banned but refuses to remove instructional videos about. (MMS does not cure autism, or anything else, but it can kill you.) Silberman gets into some of this, although I think the bleach stuff largely postdates his book.

It took some substantial efforts by later researchers and especially by activist parents to bring about changes. Those parents demanded changes in how the medical establishment viewed and treated their autistic children, and lobbied for changes in the definition of autism so that school districts would be forced to provide accommodations for autistic students who were previously left behind or even told that they had to attend school elsewhere. The passage of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in 1975 and again in 1990 as well as the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990 allowed autistic children to stay in public schools and required the districts to provide them with individualized education programs (IEP) to determine what accommodations and modifications the child needs to succeed in school. It shouldn’t have been that hard, but Silberman makes it clear that Kanner’s narrow definition and the stranglehold he had on the definition of autism, helped by a small number of others who seemed to profit from their work with autistic kids, made this process far more difficult.

There’s far more to Neurotribes than just a history, however. Silberman discusses a few notable historical figures who almost certainly were autistic, including chemist and physicist Henry Cavendish, the discoverer of hydrogen; and Nikola Tesla, inventor of an overpriced electric car. (Hold on, I’m getting a note here that that isn’t correct.) Temple Grandin makes several appearances on these pages as well. There’s also a deep dive into the correlation between autistic people and sci-fi fandom, including Claude Degler, a key early figure in spreading the gospel of science fiction (until his views on eugenics caught up with him), and perhaps an autistic person himself. Silberman argues that sci-fi fandom was one of the first safe spaces for autistics, as personality “quirks” were less important than one’s passion for the subject – and perhaps because those quirks were more common among the fan base anyway.

There’s a wealth of information within Neurotribes, even though the book is now seven years old and it seems like the medical community knows even more about autism now than it did then. It’s a well-researched and well-argued work, one that encourages empathy for autistic people but not pity, and if anything gives more respect to Wakefield, the NVIC, and other cranks than they deserve, presenting the views of people who seek to find non-genetic causes for autism fairly before explaining that the evidence says they’re wrong. And Silberman makes it very clear that autism isn’t what history tells us it is, or even what many people probably still think it is, thanks to Rain Man or, worse, Music. It’s a deeply humanistic work of non-fiction, and that alone makes it worth a read.

Next up: Dr. Stephanie Cacioppo’s Wired for Love.

Stick to baseball, 5/22/22.

For subscribers to The Athletic, I posted my first mock draft for 2022, and took reader questions in a Q&A on the site that afternoon.

On the Keith Law Show, I spoke with Jonathan Higgs of the band Everything Everything about their new album Raw Data Feel, which came out on Friday. You can subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I do send out a free email newsletter about twice a month, and for those of you who said you would attend an in-person event with me in London, it’s in the works now, so thank you all for responding. Speaking of books, Smart Baseball and The Inside Game are both available in paperback, and you can buy them at your local independent book store or at Bookshop.org.

And now, the links…