I have analyses up for Insiders on the Aaron Hicks-John Ryan Murphy trade, the Andrelton Simmons trade, and the Craig Kimbrel trade. I also held my weekly Klawchat here on the dish.
My various offseason buyers’ guides all went up this week:
• Catchers
• Corner infielders
• Middle infielders
• Outfielders
• Starting pitchers
• Relief pitchers
Plus, you all saw my ranking of my all-time favorite boardgames, right?
And now, the links…
- One of the bigger surprises on Art Angels, the outstanding new album from Grimes (née Claire Boucher), is the presence of the female Taiwanese rapper who goes by the name Aristophanes. Fader has a little more info on her with some Soundcloud links.
- The Atlantic has a good review of Art Angels that talks about Grimes’ emerging fame and choice of musical direction. I’ll try to get a review of the album up early next week.
- Public schools in Louisiana are teaching kids Christianity and creationism, a blatant violation of federal law and of the students’ rights.
- The New Yorker has an excellent piece up on using “free speech” to distract from discussions of racism, focusing on the protests at Yale and the University of Missouri. The Yale controversy has seemed particularly easy to parse to me: You don’t get to go around in blackface in a closed environment and then claim you’re exercising your free speech rights. You get expelled.
- Pennsylvania has the second-worst student immunization rate in the nation, but there are bills pending in their legislature to end the “philosophical exemption” (that is, the opt-out for parents too stupid to understand basic science), while the state’s departments of health and education are working to end the “grace period” that allows kids to attend school before they’ve gotten all their shots. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette‘s editorial board supports these moves, as do I, not least because the state of Delaware told me building a border wall was too expensive.
- Doctors need to do a better job of encouraging parents to give their kids the HPV vaccine, according to Aaron Carroll, Professor of Pediatrics at Kyle Schwarber’s alma mater (well, technically at IU’s Medical School). The problem, in Carroll’s view, is that it touches on ignorance about vaccines as well as the dirty dirty subject of teens having sex.
- J. Kenji Lopez-Alt talked to NPR’s Here and Now, and the resulting interview includes three recipes from his new cookbook The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science.
- The BBC has a quirky story up on a brand-new record store in Ulan Bator, the capital of Mongolia. And if all you know of Mongolia is “Mongolian barbecue,” well, that’s Taiwanese, sorry.
- Last week’s links included a story on Elizabeth Holmes, the Stanford dropout whose blood-testing startup Theranos may have lied about its product’s capabilities. The Washington Post has a story on how the NY Times erased Holmes from a story on tech heroes, as well as failing to discuss a potential conflict of interest by that story’s author.
- This story by a pro-science skeptical blogger about an vaccine-denier nut job is a bit inside-baseball, as the saying goes, but highly amusing.