Stick to baseball, 4/8/23.

I had two new pieces up this week for subscribers to The Athletic, my second minor league scouting notebook from the Cactus League and a draft blog post on a few potential first-rounders I saw in Arizona. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday. I’m down with some sort of cold right now, though, so I’ll be away from the stadium for a bit.

My first column for Wirecutter on board games, giving recommendations for five great roll-and-write games for different age/skill levels, ran this week.

My podcast will return this week, now that I’m off the road (and even if I’m still not 100% on Monday). I am about to send out a new issue of my free email newsletter today, though.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: The Atavist has the story of Lesley Hu, whose ex-husband was so brainwashed by anti-vaxxers whose content he found online that he killed their son rather than allow him to be vaccinated. It’s a horrifying story of misinformation, mental illness, and a court system unprepared to deal with these cases.
  • BMC Infectious Diseases is set to retract a paper published last year that claimed, with insufficient evidence (to put it mildly), that COVID-19 vaccines had caused up to 278,000 deaths. How did such a terrible study get through peer review? The problem is with the process, not just this particular paper.
  • I linked to a story a few months back about a U.S. Marine who used the courts to kidnap an Afghan baby whose parents had been killed but who had living relatives willing to take her in. This past week, a different U.S judge voided the adoption. It’s not over, but this is a step in the right direction. The Marine and his wife used their Christianity as a justification for taking the child, who is now 4 years old.
  • Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and his handpicked, denialist Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo omitted key data from a flawed COVID vaccine report that claimed that young men should not get these safe, effective immunizations. Infection with COVID-19 carries a much greater risk of cardiac-related deaths than the vaccines do, but the report left out data showing this.
  • Why do so many of the people on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list of entrepreneurs and business leaders end up in prison?
  • I wasn’t familiar with the Indian metal band Bloodywood, who fuse Western styles from thrash to death metal to rap-metal with Indian folk music, but they’ve become a breakout act in a country that has never embraced the metal genre the way other nations with comparable arts scenes have.
  • Board game news: Klaus Teuber, the designer of the game now known simply as Catan, died this week at age 70. The New York Times, Washington Post, and Boardgamegeek all published worthwhile obituaries, honoring the man whose creation has sold over 40 million copies and divided board game history into Before and After. Catan and Ticket to Ride are the two games that did the most to turn me into a board gamer, and in turn into something of a board game writer, too.
  • Inside Up Games has a huge hit on its hands with Earth, which I’ll be reviewing this month or in early May and which I think is the favorite right now to win the Kennerspiel des Jahres. Their next big release, the route-building and resource management game Terminus, is on Kickstarter now.

Stick to baseball, 12/26/20.

I had one post this week for subscribers to the Athletic, looking at six of the players who impressed me or beat my expectations for them in the truncated 2020 season.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Tekhenu and Tawantinsuyu, two heavy, complex games from the publishers Board & Dice. Tekhenu made my top ten games of the year. I also have a post up at Vulture on the best board games of 2020 in various categories.

If you missed it here on the dish, I posted my annual rankings of my top 100 songs and favorite 15 albums of the year.

This link roundup is a bit skewed – I was fully possessed by the Christmas spirit this week and offline a good bit more than usual – but here are the links…

Stick to baseball, 4/6/19.

No ESPN+ content from me this week, although I have a draft blog post to file tonight that will cover what I saw at NHSI this week as well as potential first-rounder George Kirby of Elon. I did hold a Klawchat on Tuesday.

Meredith Wills helped me do some of the research that went into Smart Baseball, and, in addition to being an astrophysicist and general baseball expert (who realized that a change in the thickness of the baseball’s laces likely explains the current home run surge), she’s also a knitter and generally quite crafty. She’s disassembled many baseballs to look into their construction and is now selling crafts made from the leather on these baseballs, repurposing material that would otherwise go to landfills.

And now, the links, with a note. I didn’t get through all the longer reads I’d saved this week, so I may post a bonus roundup tomorrow or Monday. We’ll see how my weekend goes.

How We Decide, Lady Almina, and Bitters.

Time to catch up on a few recent non-fiction reads…

* Jonah Lehrer ended up back in the news recently, again for the wrong reasons, this time because a journalism foundation paid him their standard $20,000 honorarium to come speak at their conference about how he went from one of the brightest stars in science writing to fabricating quotes from Bob Dylan (and, it turns out, in many of his articles forWired) for his third book, Imagine, which was a great read but has been removed from publication. (I don’t understand why it couldn’t be fact-checked more thoroughly, rewritten, and re-released.) I still like the guy’s writing even if I have to read his work with a more skeptical eye, and I think How We Decide, his second book, was an even more valuable read than Imagine for its insight into how the two sides of our brain, the rational and the emotional, interact in our internal decision-making processes.

Lehrer’s premise here is that recent advances in neurology and related fields have allowed us to better understand what goes on inside our brains when we are forced to make different kinds of decisions, and whether those processes are ideal or counterproductive. He cites numerous psychological studies and, as in Imagine, makes heavy use of the results of fMRI scans of the brains of people as they’re confronted with choices or decisions to see what parts of the brain are activated by which stimuli or questions. He gives shocking examples like the pilot who saved a plane from a terrible crash by making a fast yet totally rational decision to try something that had never been tried before by a pilot and wasn’t even taught in flight school, or like John Wayne Gacy and other psychopaths whose emotional response systems are broken, usually due to childhood abuse or neglect. (Lest you think Lehrer shows sympathy for the devil in that section, his descriptions of broken brains, thoughout the book, are quite dispassionate.) Lehrer’s conceit is that between looking at people who can only use one of those two decision-making processes and looking at what kinds of images, numbers, or thoughts light up certain parts of our brains, we can better understand how we make decisions and thus better understand how to improve that decision-making – such as when it’s good to let your rational brain take over and when it’s better to let your emotional side help simplify things for you. It is a real shame that Lehrer’s name is mud right now among much of his potential audience, because his main gift as a writer was in making complicated matters of science, especially neurology, available and accessible to the lay reader. His crimes were serious, but I’d rather see him writing under much stricter controls than he had before than to have him out of the game entirely.

* My wife bought me Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey because we’re both fans of the British soap opera (although I thought season 3 was a big letdown from a writing standpoint), and I was pleasantly surprised by how well-written the book was and how much real-life drama the family that held the house, called Highclere Castle, during the time period of the show actually underwent. Written by the current Countess of Carnarvon (that is, the wife of the current Earl of Highclere, three generations removed from the Earl of the time of the show), the book focuses on Lady Almina, the illegitimate daughter of Alfred Rothschild, who grew up privileged because of her parentage and managed to land the young heir to the earldom of Highclere, after which she put her energy, force of personality, and organizing skills to work in rebuilding the family’s status and the Castle itself, eventually shifting her attention to wounded soldiers when she volunteered to turn the estate into one of the most luxurious wartime hospitals for wounded British soldiers during the Great War.

Almina’s efforts at a time when women’s rights were pretty limited led to her overshadowing her husband in the book, and, one presumes, for most of their marriage, but that table turned in 1922 when the Egyptian explorer Howard Carter, whose expeditions had long been financed by the Earl, discovered the intact tomb of King Tut, making Carter and Lord Carnarvon instant celebrities, touching off a media storm just as the Egyptian public was becoming restive under unwelcome British colonial rule. (You can see the earliest seeds of today’s political strife in the Maghreb and Middle East in the Countess’ brief descriptions of Egyptian protests.) The Countess manages to make this seem like an almost inevitable climax or conclusion to the family’s efforts and struggles during the war, in which many of the household staff gave their lives while their son served but survived. The lead-up to the war, the Castle’s conversion into a hospital, and the episode in Egypt moved a little slowly, since we’re largely getting background material, some of it feeling like the intro to a Regency romance, but once Almina gets cracking, she’s a fun and interesting character to follow, buoyed by the Countess’ clear, evocative prose.

* Bitters: A Spirited History of a Classic Cure-All isn’t a book to read so much as a book to own, one to keep with the cookbooks or in the liquor cabinet rather than in your library. The book contains about fifty pages of text describing the history of bitters, its definitions and types (the book focuses on the highly concentrated flavoring bitters, not potable bitters or digestifs like Campari or Fernet Branca), listing the major artisan bitters makers, most of which have begun production in the last ten years, and explaining how to make your own bitters, with numerous recipes. The back of the book lists recipes for common and obscure drinks that rely on various flavors of bitters as well as some recipes for dishes that use bitters as an ingredient. I particularly enjoyed the two-page essay on the 2010 Angostura bitters shortage, with the explanation of how it began and ended, but not before much hoarding had taken place, especially by better bartenders in New York City.

And a Bottle of Rum.

Wayne Curtis tries to downplay the ambitions set in the title of his book And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails, implying that he’s not going to credit human existence or history to rum the way other authors have to cod or salt or other mundane foodstuffs. That’s all to the good in my opinion, as he sticks mostly to the history of rum and various people and products associated with its rise from “the distilled essence of industrial waste” to a top-shelf liquor commanding premium prices for aged varieties as you might pay for whiskey or brandy. (It’s also available on iBooks.)

Rum is, of course, distilled from molasses (or, rarely, sugar cane juice), which was originally discarded by plantation owners as the unwanted, unsaleable waste product of sugar production and refining. It gained popularity among sailors, even becoming part of a daily grog ration for members of the Royal Navy (a practice that was only discontinued in 1970), and then became the main liquor in colonial America, first as an import from the Caribbean and later as a homemade product, playing a role along the way in the Sugar and Stamp Acts. (Curtis also attempts to dispel the myth of the triangle trade, with a few references, saying that there’s no evidence any ship actually sailed those three legs or that the trade was as simple as the middle-school story indicates.) Rum faded from view in the U.S. only to regain popularity during and after Prohibition through Cuba tourism, the song “Rum and Coca-Cola,” and the rise of the tiki bar. It is a tumultuous history with plenty of associations with major world events, even if rum itself wasn’t always the cause of them.

Along the way, Curtis provides digressions about the real Captain Morgan and his namesake rum (which wasn’t always spiced), the American temperance movement against “demon rum” even though rum was rarely consumed at the time, the history of the mai tai and the tiki bar trend, Coca-Cola (and the Andrews Sisters’ song about the two), and Paul Revere’s ride with its possibly-apocryphal stop for a dram of rum. He weaves these stories into ten chapters, each covering a specific drink, including planter’s punch, the daiquiri – not the frozen sickly-sweet concoction, but the original rum-lime-sugar-crushed ice beverage that was the libation of choice of Ernest Hemingway – and the mojito. To his credit, he has proper scorn for flavored rums, pina coladas, and Coca-Cola, since all of the three take the focus of the drink off rum by inserting a dominant alternate flavor.*

*Curtis hits on a distinction I’ve been thinking about between cocktails and mixed drinks. If you read about the history of alcoholic drinks, you’ll come across two kinds – those that try to enhance the flavor of the central liquor or push it to the front of the drink, and those that cover it up because the liquor is of low quality or because the drinker can’t abide the taste of alcohol. The former group, what I think of as cocktails, comprised drinks that were seen as masculine, like you might find a Bertie Wooster drinking at the club, while the latter, simply mixed drinks, were seen as either girly or just déclassé. Curtis even mentions the rise of vodka, a liquor devoid of character and nearly devoid of taste, and its rise as younger male drinkers in the 1950s refused to acquire the taste for strong drink. A true daiquiri remains an acceptable drink in this dichotomy, as the rum is the star ingredient with the rum and sugar as supporting players. A pina colada isn’t, as Curtis explains, because “pineapple and coconut are the linebackers of the taste world,” obliterating any indication that there’s rum in the beverage. A dark-and-stormy (dark rum and ginger beer) works because ginger and rum are complementary flavors, much like mushrooms and onions or haricots verts and almonds, but a Cuba Libre doesn’t work because it’s just a Coke with a higher proof content. I’m not quite sure how a mai tai passes muster with Curtis – I think that’s only an acceptable drink if you’re on a tropical island, and even so, there are likely better options – but in general he’s pretty consistent.

Curtis also includes recipes for modern drinks as well as brief recipes for ten classic (or just old) drinks that lead into the ten chapters. One of them, just called “punch,” looked familiar, and after making it I realized it’s the drink called “planter’s punch” in Bermuda, where my wife and I honeymooned and to which we returned for our fifth and tenth anniversaries. It’s strong and the predominant flavor is rum (Gosling’s Black Seal in Bermuda), and while you can garnish it with all manner of garbage, at its heart it’s a daiquiri with some water and maybe a pinch of nutmeg, the latter a nod to the classic punches of Britain. And it’s very easy to assemble:

Juice half a lime into a glass. Add one tablespoon of sugar, simple syrup, or agave nectar; 1 1/2 ounces of rum; and two ounces of water. Mix well and add ice.

The end of the book has a brief selection listing Curtis’ favorite rums from a cross-section of countries and multiple price ranges. I found most of them at a nearby liquor store (the one at Fresh Pond next to Whole Foods, for those of you who live around here). They’re sipping rums rather than mixing rums, for more serious drinkers than myself.

Next up: Booth Tarkington’s 1921 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Alice Adams.

Cranberry daiquiris.

Here’s the recipe, since some folks have asked for it. It’s from Bon Appetit’s November 2004 issue, but for some reason, it’s not on epicurious. I made one or two tweaks, including adding the cloves.

Be careful. You can get completely hammered on these rather quickly, and drunk cooks don’t make good turkeys.

1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup water
1 cinnamon stick
2-3 whole cloves
1/2 tsp orange peel
1/2 cup cranberries
1/2 cup light rum + 6 Tbsp light rum
6 Tbsp dark rum
6 Tbsp cranberry juice
6 Tbsp lemon juice

1. Dissolve sugar in water in a medium saucepan over moderate heat.
2. Add the cinnamon stick, cloves, and orange peel and bring to a boil.
3. Add the cranberries and cook until they begin to pop.
4. Cool, discarding spices, and pour into a glass container with 1/2 cup light rum. Chill.
5. Strain liquid, saving cranberries for garnish. Add remaining ingredients to pitcher and chill thoroughly.
6. Serve over ice, garnishing with drunken cranberries.