Stick to baseball, 4/22/17.

Smart Baseball comes out on Tuesday, so this is the last stick to baseball post before its official release. If you haven’t preordered yet, you can still do so here, or by, you know, walking into a bookstore and asking them to preorder it for you.

The media push for Smart Baseball has begun, with my hourlong chat with Joe Posnanski on his podcast, including talk about the book, boardgames, and how Mike Schur is dead wrong about pies. The Baltimore County Public Library interviewed me about the book and asked about time management. I also answered some questions in an interview for AM New York.

I currently have signings/appearances scheduled for Philadelphia (May 8th), Atlanta (May 16th), Minneapolis (May 18th), Toronto (June 26th), and Miami (July 8th). There are a few more in the works, including a likely signing at GenCon in Indianapolis, but if you don’t see your city on there, contact your local bookstore and ask them to contact HarperCollins. It’ll depend on my travel schedule, of course, but I do have time for a few more of these.

I wrote one draft blog post this week on Vandy’s Kyle Wright and Jeren Kendall, with notes on some Florida players as well. For Paste, I reviewed the epic boardgame The Colonists, which is actually a good game but punishingly intricate.

As always, you can get even more Klaw by signing up for my email newsletter.

And now, the links…

• The best longread of the week was the Guardian‘s remembrance of comedian and writer Harris Wittels, who coined the term “humblebrag” and was a writer on Parks & Recreation who appeared a few times as Harris the idiot animal control guy.
• Also great if somewhat hard to swallow: The Stranger‘s Ijeoma Oluo interviews Rachel Dolezal, the white woman who says she “identifies” as black, and comes off here as, to be kind, nuts.
• I also enjoyed this look at F. Scott Fitzgerald and his unfinished novel The Last Tycoon.
• Worth remembering: in 2015, Mother Jones revealed that Bill O’Reilly had lied about his experiences reporting on the Falkland Islands War.
• Most of the world’s greatest restaurants rely on unpaid labor in the form of “stagiaires,” essentially interns who work grueling hours for no pay just to get the experience of working in a prestigious restaurant for an acclaimed chef.
• You probably saw the brouhaha over the $400 Juicero juicer that can be replaced by a pair of hands. Also worth pointing out: Juice isn’t that good for you, because you get all the sugar and none of the fiber.
• A licensed naturopathic “doctor” in California killed a patient with an injection of turmeric. Important lessons here: Turmeric is not a panacea – in fact, it probably doesn’t work at all – and naturopathy is bullshit.
• Anti-vax nutjobs are claiming Sesame Street is ‘normalizing’ autism by introducing a muppet character on the spectrum. What the hell is wrong with these people?
• Herd immunity is a big part of why making sure everyone who can be vaccinated gets vaccinated is important. Here’s a post with some useful graphics showing why that matters. You know parents who aren’t vaccinating? Don’t just avoid the subject. What they’re doing hurts their own kids and puts the whole community at risk.
• Frog snot kills flu viruses. Really, it does, at least if it’s from this one frog species found in South India (which I’m sure will die off soon from chytrid disease anyway).
• Alabama’s legislature voted to repeal permit requirements for residents to carry concealed weapons in the state. In a related story, I’ll skip the SEC tournament, held annually in Hoover, Alabama, this year, and will probably head to the ACC instead.
• If you live in Florida and believe that people convicted of nonviolent felonies should be allowed to vote after they have served their sentences, there’s a petition to get a question on the 2018 ballot to make that change. Florida’s current rules are unusually draconian, and this amendment to the state’s constitution would still prohibit those convicted of murder or sex crimes from regaining their right to vote.
• An LA Times editorial claims the American right is bringing back an old attack on Rachel Carson that says her anti-DDT activism cost millions of people their lives, a response to a Paul Offit piece from The Daily Beast that I linked here a few weeks ago. Skeptical Raptor looks at this in much greater, evidence-based depth, concluding that Offit’s take, that Carson’s writings and work had the unintended consequence of costing many people (mostly in developing countries) their lives, is largely accurate.
• Advances in technology mean fake news is going to get worse, with the potential arising for faked audio recordings and video clips.
• Racism was a major motivation for Trump voters, according to research by Ohio State assistant professor Thomas Wood.
• Trump’s appointments appear to be violating ethics rules left and right, with “no transparency” on these hires and the elimination of a provision designed to limit such conflicts of interest.
• A new Washington Post poll found that fewer people believe Trump’s lies, which may be a major reason Trump is making the Republican party “heinously unpopular” (according to New York magazine). But will it matter in 2018?
• Oklahoma, which is dealing with earthquakes and drinking water pollution from fracking in the state, ended a state subsidy on wind power generation four years before originally planned.
• Historian Aaron O’Connell argues that our ongoing efforts in Afghanistan are failing (audio link), and that we’re losing “hearts and minds” in addition to losing ground to the Taliban. He has edited a new book of essays on the subject, called Our Latest Longest War.
• The Pacific Island nation of Palau is seeing clear, positive results from establishing an offshore marine sanctuary to restore the declining ecosystem in its waters. The irony of this is that Palau was previously a U.S. Trust Territory, becoming independent in 1994, and had that not happened their environmental efforts would likely be undergoing a reversal now (probably death by funding cuts) under our current Administration.
• Comedian Ian Abramson did a standup set on Conan while wearing a dog’s shock collar, with an audience member holding the control. I’m including it because 1) the idea itself is kind of funny and 2) there’s a hilarious math joke in the set.
• Extra Crispy tells us where to get a great croissant in fifteen US cities. This is very important information.