I had a few Insiders posts this week, starting with the top 50 draft prospects, along with the list of the most prospect-laden minor league rosters, and a scouting blog from games earlier this week on Erick Fedde, Josh Staumont, Dansby Swanson, and Braxton Davidson. I also held a Klawchat on Wednesday to tie it into the draft rankings.
And now, the links…
- Fusion looks into the shadowy world of “IP mapping,”, and God help you if the companies that do this use your house as a default address for thousands or millions of IP addresses.
- This incredible four-year-old New Yorker profile of a Michigan dentist who cheated at marathons resurfaced this week as a link in a NY Times story about a triathlon competitor who also stands accused of fraud.
- How can NPR survive in a world shifting towards podcasting? NPR’s core audience is aging, and they’re slow to adapt … but I’d still take their newscasts over any other single source in the United States for balance, thoroughness, and acknowledgement that there are more than five countries in the world.
- On the heels of last week’s longread about sugar vs fat in our diets, the director of the Cleveland Clinic’s Center for Functional Medicine describes his conversion from a low-fat diet to a “paleo-vegan” diet, built primarily around plants but without skimping on fats, even some saturated ones.
- Yes, of course President Obama can just appoint Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. I think that’s what the GOP is hoping he’ll do, so they can call him an autocrat and drum up support from their base.
- The BBC’s Trending column examines the right-wing troll who encourages followers to dox her critics. She’s married to an Illinois police officer, and claims she’s been harassed offline as well. The author describes this as one example of the “culture wars” online, and sure enough, a troll followed the publication of this article by creating a fake account designed to look like the author’s.
- A man who claims to be on the U.S.’s “kill list” for drone attacks describes what it’s like to be hunted, and how many innocent people have died in four failed attempts to kill him. Drone attacks are too palatable – as long as none of “our” people die, it’s all good, right?
- Brigham Young University treats sexual assault victims as criminals themselves, subjecting them to “honor code” investigations, with expulsion – yes, expulsion for being raped – among the possible outcomes. “Honor code” is just another way of victim-blaming, of course, and here it comes at a university founded by and named after a racist, abusive polygamist (he had 55 wives). The school’s actions violate Title IX rules and are now endangering a rape prosecution, but administrators don’t seem to see this as a problem.
- The Republican majority in Congress is trying to undo Net Neutrality by stripping the FCC of some of its regulatory powers and President Obama is having none of it. This puts the Republicans, historically the party of business and of capitalist policies, on the wrong side, favoring a few very large companies over an open-market solution that should encourage more innovation and more small business growth.
- People with anxiety disorder appear to have fundamental brain differences from those without.
- Rappers discuss their histories with depression in a surprisingly candid piece at VICE.
- Good stuff from FiveThirtyEight’s sports department: They examined a Joe Sheehan hypothesis about older hitters struggling with the game’s increased velocity and found no evidence to support it, even looking at it from a few different angles. Joe floated the hypothesis in his email newsletter, to which I have subscribed since day one, and recommend highly.
- The Tampa Bay Times reveals how many Bay-area “farm to table” restaurants lie about the provenance of their ingredients. This is horrifying on many levels, not the least of which is that these restaurants are outright lying to customers.
- Vacciner deniers aren’t stupid, says this Atlantic piece, arguing instead that it comes from parents feeling “powerless” in the face of mandates. I think that’s stupid. Vaccine-denialists are overwhelmingly practicing extreme selection bias in what they read or believe, and if that ain’t the definition of stupidity, well, maybe I ain’t that smart.