I’ve had no new content off the dish this week, as baseball is boring, and I’m working on my top 100 prospects package, which will run later this month. I will have a new board game review up on Paste next week, however.
Feel free to sign up for my email newsletter, which costs you nothing and totters somewhere between occasional and infrequent. And, of course, thanks to everyone who bought Smart Baseball for themselves or as a Christmas gift, or as a Christmas gift for themselves.
And now, the links…
- Longreads: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, whose book The Food Lab I’ve recommended a few times around here, will open his first restaurant, Wursthall, in the next few weeks, and expectations are very high.
- BBC News tells the story of a woman whose father, a Catholic priest, doesn’t even want to know her.
- The Guardian looks at why paper hasn’t disappeared in a digital world.
- In local news, the Delaware River Valley Commission has proposed a permanent ban on fracking in the region, but would still allow the dumping of fracking wastewater in the river basin.
- The UK is experiencing a measles epidemic because of anti-vaxxer scaremongering. The MMR vaccine does not cause autism; it is both safe and very effective.
- Meanwhile, in California, there’s a network of doctors willing to issue bogus medical exemptions to the state’s vaccination laws. The group is led by Bob Sears, who has profited handsomely from selling the lie that vaccines are harmful, including pushing an “alternative” vaccine schedule (with no benefit, just increased risk of exposure), and is facing a licensing hearing over one such exemption he issued. The state’s board of licensing needs to clamp down on these doctors abusing their privileges.
- Computer science pioneer Barbara Simons wants an end to electronic voting because she believes such machines can’t be as secure as paper ballots. I guess she hasn’t seen Election.
- Ad targeters are now pulling data from your browser’s password manager – all the more reason to not use that feature.
- Women constitute nearly half of Iceland’s Parliament, so it’s no surprise that they passed a law making it illegal to pay women less than men.
- Science-Based Medicine offers the top ten signs your ‘detox’ program might be a scam. There’s only one real detox or ‘cleanse’ program that works, and it’s happening in your liver already.
- The EPA has hired a guy banned for life from the banking industry to oversee the Superfund program. As much damage as we’re seeing to our country’s institutions across the board right now, it pales compared to the massive rollbacks in environmental protections, which will take years and probably cost billions to clean up if and when we get the chance to do so. Yet another example: A tax on crude oil that generated $500 million per year to fund oil-spill cleanup efforts expired last week, a huge windfall for oil producers.
- “Swatting,” the practice of phoning police with prank calls that lead authorities to send a SWAT team to someone else’s house, turned deadly last week with a man in Kansas getting shot by police after someone in LA made just such a bogus phone call. The suspect had a history of calling in false threats.
- Coffee stuff: Is pour-over dead? Probably not, but I do expect to see more third-wave shops offer faster drip-coffee options for folks who don’t want to wait the 5+ minutes for hand-poured.
- Four Barrel Coffee has long been among my favorite third-wave roasters in the country. Four former employees have said Four Barrel co-founder Jeremy Tooker sexually assaulted or harassed them.
- Coachella’s owner, Philip Anschutz, gave nearly $200K to anti-LGBT and anti-abortion candidates in 2017, which seems at odds with the political stances of many of the artists who play the event.
- National Review‘s Kyle Smith wrote that the publication’s support of stop and frisk was wrong. There’s still a bizarre swipe at New York Mayor Bill De Blasio for merely appearing in the same parade as a paroled Puerto Rican terrorist.
- I enjoyed this Filipino teenager’s video explaining relativity in simple terms, which won her $400,000 in the annual Breakthrough Junior Challenge.
- FiveThirtyEight gets it right by calling Tom Brady out on his pseudoscience bullshit.
- People are getting very sick from taking rattlesnake pills. Today I learned that there is such a thing as rattlesnake pills, which are indeed made from ground-up rattlesnakes.
- David French of the National Review wrote last week about how concerns over Trump’s mental state aren’t just about ‘tone’ or ‘style,’, which seems prescient in light of the President’s tweets Saturday morning.
- In the wake of the release of Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff’s instant best-seller about the first year of this Administration and the chaos within, James Fallows writes for The Atlantic that none of this is news to anyone in Washington.