Stick to baseball, 1/5/19.

Just one ESPN+ piece this week, due to holidays & my work on prospect rankings, this one looking at the Mariners’ signing of NPB star Yusei Kikuchi. I also held a Klawchat this week.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: There’s yet another grift on the amazon marketplace, for consultants claiming they can teach you how to get rich selling Chinese products without ever handling the goods yourself.
• The Guardian retweeted a piece from last January, on why the dominant narrative about depression might be incomplete, in highlighting some their best longreads from the last year. It’s an excerpt from a longer book, and argues that simply giving medication to people with depression may miss the underlying causes.
• The Washington Post looks at the rise of ‘deepfakes’ and their potential for extortion or revenge. Deepfakes are porn videos where the target’s face has been swapped for that of one of the performers in the clip.
• Packers beat writer Ryan Wood shared the story of his wife’s mental illness, including multiple suicide attempts and, more recently, some hope due to treatment and medications that seem to be helping.
• Antibiotic resistance is rising, but the Trump Administration is allowing growers to spray them on citrus plants to fight a disease called “citrus greening.”
• The EPA is also trying to make it easier for coal plants to spit more mercury and more particulate matter into the atmosphere by changing how the agency measures costs and benefits. You can still weigh in on this proposal by emailing a-and-r-docket@epa.gov with Docket ID No. EPA-HQ-OAR-2018-0794 in the subject line.
• My friend Tim Grierson explains why we shouldn’t listen to Netflix’s claims of a huge audience for Bird Box. Tim’s year-end post on his personal blog, which includes his top ten movies of 2018, is also well worth your time, even though he’s clearly wrong about Shoplifters.
• Outgoing Maine Governor Paul LePage, an outright racist who claimed 90% of drug dealers in Maine were people of color, pardoned a Republican buddy of his of a felony drug trafficking charge, which may in turn complicate an investigation into a firearms possession charge against the latter.
• A healthy 39-year-old man got the flu last winter and ended up in a coma, so this year he’s getting his flu shot and encouraging others to do the same. It isn’t too late to get yours.
• For subscribers to The Athletic, Cliff Corcoran asks what it takes for a new advanced metric to catch on. One factor that I would have mentioned had Cliff asked me was the reputation of the source – the genetic fallacy in practice, of course, but I believe it matters even though it shouldn’t.
• The “likeable” bullshit line has resurfaced this week with Elizabeth Warren’s announcement that she intends to run for President in 2020; the Atlantic points out that the biggest reason for her perceived unpopularity is that she’s a woman. People, both men and women, view women who are in power or who seek power more harshly than we do men, and journalists need to point this out when discussing whether a politician is “electable.”
• House Democrats wasted no time after their swearing-in ceremonies in introducing a bill to make it easier to register to vote and harder for states to gerrymander their Congressional districts. It also includes a “requirement that sitting presidents and vice presidents, along with candidates for those offices, release their tax returns from the past 10 years.” I wonder what that’s about.
• George Will writes that Republicans should be concerned by ‘signs of intelligent life’ in the Democratic Party after Rep. Cheri Bustos won election as chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
• Bloomberg looks at what opponents of Seattle’s $15 minumum wage law got wrong, as evidence mounts that the hike hasn’t hurt job growth or reduced hours for workers. The article says the early analyses of the law’s impact weren’t just wrong, but extremely wrong, because the people looking at the data did so through the bias of existing theory that the law would indeed have these deleterious effects.
• Nicaragua has slipped back into autocracy since the Sandinista leader who ran the country in the 1980s, Daniel Ortega, returned to power in 2007, and this year he’s led a violent crackdown on dissidents. The family of one protestor, a 24-year-old Belgian-Nicaraguan named Amaya Coppens, has been pleading with the international community to pressure Ortega’s government to no avail. It’s as if despots see the void left by the United States’ departure from the international arena and now can act with impunity against their own people.
• The same is certainly true of the Saudis, with Jamal Khashoggi of course, but also with other dissidents, including Loujain al-Hathloul, a leader of the Saudi women’s right-to-drive movement. The Saudis kidnapped her and her husband in Dubai, trafficked them back to Saudi Arabia, and jailed them both – even though women were granted the right to drive in June.
• CartoonBrew surveyed some animation critics before the Oscar shortlists came out, and they argue that the Academy whiffed on the best shorts of 2018. I’ve seen five of the ten on the shortlist; four were good, including Bao, Weekends (available there for just a few more days), and Lost & Found.
• WIRED argues that more people should be using Tor, software that protects your anonymity online by routing traffic through an overlay network of thousands of relays so that your location and history online aren’t visible to sniffers or other forms of surveillance.