My one Insider piece this week covered my opinions on the best pitcher tools in baseball. ESPN’s chat software was inaccessible this week, so my Klawchat has been postponed to next Thursday.
And now, the links…
- Minneapolis Star-Tribune writer Amelia Rayno
tells how disgraced former AD Norwood Teague harassed her. There’s no way his superiors were unaware of this activity, right? - One of the most famous longreads in history – written before “longreads” was a term or even a concept worth mentioning – is now online, John Hersey’s 1946 New Yorker piece on Hiroshima survivors. Hersey had just won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel for A Bell for Adano
- Why are we letting infectious diseases make a comeback? This story isn’t about vaccines, but about our lack of preparedness for new diseases creeping up from warmer regions.
- This isn’t new, but it came in handy with a Facebook argument with a high school classmate who threw out a little climate-change denial: The polar ice caps aren’t “recovering.”
- The FDA doctor who blocked thalidomide’s rubber-stamp approval died at 101 this week. Frances Oldham Kelsey – yep, a woman doctor, the kind that chauvinist José Mourinho has such a problem with – said “no” in the face of resistance from multiple sides. Only seventeen cases of thalidomide-related deformities were reported in the United States, compared to thousands in Europe.
- If you’ve seen Going Clear and want to see the IRS revoke Scientology’s bogus tax exemption, former Scientologist Tony Ortega tells you what to do. I sent one; the more of us send it … well, we can only hope we get some response, as a $3 billion for-profit entity shouldn’t have any tax exemption.
- Miles Teller’s publicist might want to find a new client after this self-immolation in Esquire. I don’t feel great about the writer’s role, either, as she takes a pretty slanted view of him even considering his boorish behavior.
- Pedro Moura, one of the best beat writers in the country, has a series on Brazilian baseball, looking into why a country that has a baseball tradition and produces tons of athletes for other sports hasn’t become a huge MLB pipeline. Hint: It’s corrupt as hell.
- The New England Journal of Medicine came out in support of Planned Parenthood, and against the “radical antichoice group whose goal is the destruction of Planned Parenthood” which “continues to twist the facts to achieve its ends.”
- Tiling the plane – gleaming the cube, but for math majors – is at the heart of a series of unsolved problems in mathematics, but a recent advance found a new solution among convex pentagons, the first such discovery in decades.
- Via my friend and frequent dining partner Kiley McDaniel, a piece on how restaurants can’t find enough cooks, a phenomenon that’s at least partly the result of a drop in immigration from Mexico to the U.S.
So I finally saw Birdman yesterday, and thought it was full of great performances but the story was hackneyed at many points, while the ending didn’t work for me at all. I’m sure many if not most of you have seen it already; what did you think? Did this deserve the Best Picture win, or was it a combination of a movie about movies that used a cinematography/editing gimmick that won the prize? And what, if anything, happened at the end?