My Insider content from this week’s activity in San Diego, which was the best setup I’ve ever seen for the winter meetings and resulted in more trades and signings than any meetings I can remember covering:
* The Jimmy Rollins trade
* The Mat Latos and Alfredo Simon trades
* The Matt Kemp trade
* The Rick Porcello/Yoenis Cespedes trade
* The Wade Miley trade
* The Howie Kendrick/Andrew Heaney trade and Brandon McCarthy signing
* The Dee Gordon trade
* The Jon Lester signing
* The Francisco Liriano re-signing
* The Miguel Montero trade
* The Jeff Samardzija trade (and David Robertson signing) and Oakland’s return
* The Jason Hammel signing
* The Brandon Moss trade
Outside of ESPN, my review of the boardgame Concordia is up at Paste. I’ll have my top ten games of 2014 up for them next week.
Here on the dish, I posted my top 100 songs of 2014 and top 14 albums of 2014, as well as this week’s Top Chef recap.
And now, this week’s links…
- Slate on sexism and elitism at Wikipedia, starting with a story about an editorial dispute that saw one side sanctioned while the other, despite committing the same offenses, was merely warned.
- From the Washington Post: When my son survived a serious accident, I didn’t thank God. I thanked Honda. A rumination on the miracles that science creates.
- Are fiction readers more empathetic towards others than other readers? I’d like to think so, given how much my own reading skews toward fiction, including what the research calls “literary fiction.”
- NPR’s The Salt talks about trendy vegetables for 2015, although I think only the kale-Brussels sprout hybrid is actually new.
- Scientists, led by Bill Nye, Lawrence Krauss, and James Randi, are asking the media to stop calling climate-change deniers “skeptics.” The actual letter is here, and makes clear the distinction between skeptics, who use evidence to support their views and demand it from those who make extraordinary claims, and deniers, who refuse to hear contradictory evidence to their preconceived notions.
- The Los Angeles Times had the investigative journalism piece of the week with their exposé of exploitation of tomato farm laborers in Mexico. That’s one good reason to buy American – workers here generally experience less exploitation, and have better success in the courts when they are being abused.
- I don’t agree with all of the points in this Vox piece, Nine things I wish people understood about anxiety, but points 5, 6, and 8 are good reading for anyone not currently facing anxiety and trying to understand it.
- Finally, Drew Magary had me cracking up over at Deadspin with his Hater’s Guide to the Williams-Sonoma Catalog, in which people with too much money are asked to waste it on crap they don’t need.