No Insider piece this week, but I held my weekly Klawchat on Friday.
My latest boardgame review for Paste covers the reissue of the classic Reiner Knizia game Samurai.
I mentioned this on Twitter yesterday but it’s such a good deal it’s worth sending again – Ruhlman’s Twenty
- Julie DiCaro wrote a great piece for SI about the threats female sportswriters receive via social media. She’s been besieged by numerous accounts (several fake so I presume they’re all from the same sociopath) calling for her to be maimed, raped, or killed.
- Dan Rather, of all people, had a spot-on rant about science denialism and false balance in the media.
- Foreign Policy has an excellent longread on the history and future of antibiotics, focusing on the iChip, a new device that allowed scientists to find and work with new species of bacteria that can only survive in soil.
- Opposed to genetic modification? GMO methods are in more than just foods, appearing in medicines, detergents, and other products that make our lives safer and better.
- The New Republic looks at the complicated world of cannabidiol, the anti-convulsant/anti-psychotic chemical in marijuana, as state and federal authorities try to roll back often pointless policies on the drug. (Delaware became one of eighteen states to decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana this summer, and we now have one dispensary for medical marijuana.)
- Sour flavors are making a comeback, thanks to globalization, rising popularity of healthful fermented foods, and a change in our attitudes towards sugar.
- Reader Kelvin sent along this piece on Chris Bianco and the rise of Phoenix’s pizza scene, and I read it only to realize afterwards that I know the writer.
- Harvard Law and Policy Review discusses the fallibility of finality vis-a-vis the death penalty, specifically the case of Richard Glossip, whose execution in Oklahoma was delayed about five weeks but only due to questions about the drug cocktail the state will use to murder him.
- Superhumanoids’ new video, for the wonderfully-titled “Norwegian Black Metal,” features SNL player Kyle Mooney in corpse paint. I reviewed their latest album Do You Feel OK? last week.
Thank you Keith for the CBD article. I have a cousin whose 5-year-old daughter was suffering from almost daily seizures. Since Minnesota passed the medical marijuana laws, she has been able to use CBD in combination with anti-seizure drugs, which has reduced her seizures to maybe once every two weeks.
Keith, thanks for the Samurai review. Your board game reviews are the reason I keep coming back – they’ve helped my family find a nice way to spend time together.
Unrelated, but I was reading Jim Caple’s article on the “rootability” of the various playoff teams, and this sentence describing why to root for the Twins just struck me as…well…insane would be the best word. Your thoughts?
“But they are back in part because of new manager and Hall of Famer Paul Molitor’s expertise and people skills, plus the veteran presence of Torii Hunter (the friendliest player in baseball). “
Yeah, it’s nonsense, but I never agree with anything Caple writes about the sport on the field. He’s a big advocate of using runs scored to evaluate individual players, whereas I think (okay, I kind of know) that it has virtually no value for that.
Keith, thank you for continuing the chats on your personal web page. I was disappointed that ESPN stopped hosting them. It was one of the primary reasons that I visited their site each day. How do we post questions under the new format? Do we have to wait for the chat to be active or is there another way? I apologize for the lack of my computer skills. They seem to get worse as I get older.
There’s a chat widget that I use to conduct the chat, and afterwards I use a script a reader wrote for me that converts it to straight text for the transcript. I’ll post the chat link that morning and you can put questions into that widget before I start the chat.
Nice article there genetic engineering. While I am naive in this thought I have also believed science can and should be apolitical. Hopefully policymakers will focus on peer reviewed science only when regulating anything related to science.
Thanks for the recommendation on Ruhlman’s 20. Have probably made 10-15 recipes out of it and all have been easy to do with fantastic results.