My Insider post this week named Astros first baseman A.J. Reed my 2015 Prospect of the Year, while listing other prospects who had fantastic years and highlighting Boston’s Andrew Benintendi for the best pro debut by a 2015 draftee.
I held my regular Klawchat here on Thursday. This upcoming week I may shift the chat and Periscope up by a day each, to Wednesday and Tuesday respectively.
And now, the links…
- Here’s a shocker: Most fast-food and fast-casual chains use meat loaded with antibiotics. The major exceptions aren’t surprising; both Chipotle and Panera have been committed to eliminating meat from animals raised with antibiotics for years.
- A wonderful chart highlighting twenty of the most common cognitive illusions that screw up our decision-making. If you want to learn more about these, read my reviews of the books The Invisible Gorilla and Thinking, Fast and Slow.
- Mexico has a real problem with woman and girls vanishing without a trace, often to human traffickers.
- This beautiful description of general relativity is an excerpt from an upcoming book that comes out this Thursday in Europe called Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
- More goodness from J. Kenji Lopez-Alt at the Food Lab: The best way to reheat that old bagel. Lopez-Alt’s book, The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science
- A good overview of the rising popularity of bitters.
- The good news about the vaccine denial we saw in this week’s GOP
circusdebate was that the outcry against it was swift and severe. The bad news, as this Atlantic piece argues, is that vaccine denialism is now being linked to fear of big government, and that makes it even harder to argue with these dangerous nitwits. - Hugh Acheson brought his wisdom to food trucks in Luxembourg this week, which I mostly included because I’ve been to Luxembourg and it is kind of adorable.
- The New York Times looks back at the 1815 eruption of the Tambora volcano in Indonesia, the most destructive volcanic eruption in modern history, a cataclysm that resulted in a massive global cooling episode. The spur for the piece was the release of a new book on the subject, Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World
- That recent incident where a security guard at a Whole Foods beat a black customer unconscious is a symptom of a larger trend, where lots of minimally-screened guards are running around, often with guns, rarely with consequences for their actions.
- Exxon’s own researchers showed their fossil fuels would lead to global warming back in 1977, which they subsequently ignored as they championed climate-change denial in the 1990s.
- The hot mess that is Cobb County’s new stadium for the local racist-nicknamed baseball team is even worse than you thought because fans won’t have a safe route from the parking lot to the stadium. This wouldn’t have been such an issue if the majority-white (65%) county had allowed the light rail line to build a route to the stadium, but they didn’t want those city folk (Atlanta’s population is 54% black) to have such easy access.
- Ruhlman waxes poetic on duck confit for Thomas Keller’s new magazine.
- The BBC’s Why Factor explores why we love tea while giving a brief history of the drink.
- Bloomberg looks at how most daily fantasy players lose money. A tiny percentage of players racks up nearly all of the winnings.
