I know a lot of you are new to the dish – welcome, thanks for stopping by – so here’s the point of this post. On most Saturdays, I put together two sets of links, one to everything I wrote for my day job over the last seven days, and another to interesting articles (originally just five, but that’s more of a minimum now) from the same period, usually about non-baseball topics like science or food. Comments are welcome as long as everyone’s civil, and I’m always taking suggestions for links for the next post.
I was as busy with baseball posts as I’ve been during any previous Thanksgiving week, with five over the last five days:
* The Josh Donaldson trade
* Arizona signing Yasmani Tomas
* Boston signing Pablo Sandoval
* Boston signing Hanley Ramirez
* The White Sox’ and A’s’ signings from last weekend
I’ve also been updating my offseason guides/rankings, with the top 60 boardgames ranking before I went dark on Twitter and the favorite cookbooks guide right after.
And now, the weekly links:
- At this time of year, many people with disposable income will think about giving money to charity – it’s the holiday spirit, or maybe just advice from the accountant. NPR’s The Salt has a great piece up on what goods to donate to food pantries. A little thought goes a long way. Food pantries can always, always use money, which, since I seldom buy canned foods anyway, is my preferred method of helping – and since food pantries focus on small, achievable goals, they’re among the best places to donate.
- Two good pieces I read this week about Ferguson, Missouri, and the murder of Michael Brown: This piece by Prof. Carol Anderson from the Washington Post, arguing that the core issue is “white rage” against racial progress; and a piece from the British left-wing paper The Guardian, annotating the grand jury decision with critical notes on subtext.
- The Embryo Project at Arizona State tweeted me this link to their site, on Charles Darwin’s study of embryos as part of his argument in favor of evolution as the mechanism behind the origins of species. Speaking of which, this graphic plotting countries’ GDP against what percent of their populations believe in evolution is distressing. But there’s good news – ornithologists discovered a new bird species on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.
- A little basic for this crowd, but this Washington Post piece reminds you not to ask for antibiotics when you have a cold.
- A powerful piece from the New York Times by a mother, remembering the Thanksgiving her then two-year-old son spent in intensive care.
- Maybe it was buried by Ferguson and the holiday, but the news that Alaska’s Mount Pavlof went boom again this past week should have gotten a lot more play. The eruption column reached nine miles; by comparison, the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo, which was so powerful that it lowered global temperatures for the next year-plus, reached twelve miles.