Three new pieces for Insiders this week – looking at the most prospect-laden rosters in the minors, and draft blog posts on the top prospects at the NHSI tournament and on Kentucky’s 6’11” RHP Sean Hjelle. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.
Smart Baseball is now out in paperback! You can buy it through HarperCollins directly or at any bookseller.
And now, the links…
- Longread: Novelist Rana Dasgupta, writing in the Guardian, looks at the ongoing decline of the nation-state system and the lack of a promising structure to replace it.
- The Useless Department of Agriculture ruled this week that organic food producers can use the bogeyman emulsifier carrageenan, derived from seaweed and blamed (without evidence) for lots of health ills. The real problem here is that the USDA shouldn’t be ruling on what organic means; it’s not clear any more that that term has any use, and one major reason is that the federal government has watered it down.
- ICE is trying to deport a U.S. Army veteran, contrary to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis’ directive that they should not do that. I feel safer already!
- The Thai government has had a long-running endeavor to open more Thai restaurants abroad, reasoning that it would help drive tourism to the southeast Asian country (which has a not entirely undeserved reputation for unsavory tourist business). It’s been successful enough, at least, that other countries are mimicking their strategy.
- This week’s NPR Hidden Brain podcast, a repeat of an episode from about two years ago, covered the scarcity trap, or how a lack of something leads us to focus inordinately on getting it. Among other things, it helps explain why people who live paycheck to paycheck (or with less) have a hard time spreading out the funds they do have until their next deposit.
- The Outline looks at why Wilmington, Delaware’s ongoing problem with gun violence hasn’t abated even as the national homicide rate has declined. Three major reasons: Urban poverty, the effects of trauma, and bureaucratic infighting.
- JAMA ran an anti-glyphosate editorial recently without disclosing the authors’ substantial conflict of interest. The authors are running what sounds like a scam site offering to test customers’ urine for the presence of glyphosate for a significant fee.
- The Athletic has a subscriber-only piece that includes a Q&A with Rob Manfred on MLB’s end run around the courts to suppress minor league salaries, and why Manfred’s answers don’t add up.
- The Good Phight’s Paul Boyé looks at Nick Pivetta’s new, sharper curveball. Pivetta was a sinker/slider guy in the Nats’ system, and had no real weapon for left-handed batters back when I first saw him in 2015, when he had a wide platoon split. He had virtually no split in 2016, then had a huge reverse split in the majors in 2017. With two effective breaking pitches now, though, I’d absolutely expect him to show substantial improvement against right-handed batters.
- Tim Grierson discussed the new film You Were Never Really Here with director Lynne Ramsey and star Joaquin Phoenix, who won Best Actor at Cannes for this performance.
- A pair of stories around my alma mater: I saw folks claiming on Twitter that Harvard had somehow suspended its largest evangelical students’ group; the truth is that the Undergraduate Council suspended funding for an evangelical group that violated the Council’s rules on non-discrimination by expelling an officer who came out as LGBT. The UC is a student-run organization, not the university proper.
- There’s also a stalking-horse lawsuit against Harvard alleging that the university discriminates against Asian-American applicants; the truth is that the lawsuit is arranged and funded by a white conservative who opposes affirmative action.
- The headline here is terribly misleading, but there was a flurry of stories this week like this one, about a new study arguing that diet affects mental health, particularly depression. The quick-and-dirty: eat more fiber in your diet from vegetables, fruits, and whole grains. As a whole, the prescription doesn’t sound that different from the so-called Mediterranean diet.
- James Beard award-winning chef Sean Brock went public with his alcoholism last year, and in a new piece for Bon Appetit he describes his new diet and self-care regime, a combination of good nutrition, mindfulness, and pseudoscience.
- Serious Eats has a guide to Italian amari, potable bitters that include Campari and Montenegro. The guide includes comments from Sother Teague, owner of tiny Manhattan bar Amor y Amargo, profiled this week on Liquor.com. I’ve been to Amor y Amargo and it’s superb; Teague uses only bitters, no sodas or fruit juices, in his drinks, creating clever flavor combinations with some serious alcohol kick.
- George Will writes that there’s no good reason to prevent felons from voting; there’s a reason states like Florida do it, of course, but it’s not a good one.
- Board game news: The Fireball Island Kickstarter was fully funded in an hour and crossed the $1 million funding mark inside of a week.
- Z-Man Games announced Taj Mahal, the upcoming game from Reiner Knizia, due out later this year.
- Asmodee Digital announced the imminent release of the Terraforming Mars app, with Steam coming first and iOS/Android soon after.
- In what appears to be an April Fools’ Day tradition, Berkeley Breathed released a new “Calvin County” crossover comic, bringing Calvin back to the meadow of Bloom County.