I had two ESPN+ pieces this week, my annual look at the top 25 players under 25 (which has an error in it around German Marquez’s contract status, sorry) and a scouting blog post on Grayson Rodriguez, Deivi Garcia, Alec Bohm and more. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.
This piece went up a little while ago but I waited to post it until some small editing mistakes were corrected: I listed eight of my favorite noir and neo-noir films for Caavo and my friend Desi Jedeikin.
I’ll be at the MLB Futures Game in Cleveland on July 7th, and I’m staying in the area Monday night to give a talk and sign books at the Hudson Library and Historical Society at 7 pm. I hope to see many of you there.
I’ll send out the next copy of my free email newsletter this weekend, so feel free to sign up for more of my words.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: Deadspin had a peculiar story on a man in 19th century England who became a professional pedestrian.
- Grub Street has an oral history of Serious Eats, a site that went from a collection of very niche blogs to the go-to destination for dedicated chefs interested in a science-based approach to cooking.
- The President of the United States was credibly accused of rape – again – and his response was that his accuser was not his “type.”
- Why is it always Alabama? Well, an Alabama woman who was shot has been charged with manslaughter for the death of the fetus she was carrying, while the shooter was not charged at all.
- Why is it always Alabama? Well, after a Covington County Sheriff lost a bid for re-election, he went on a spending spree with public funds, with tens of thousands of dollars of equipment or cash now missing – on top of the over $100,000 of military equipment that went missing during his tenure. (And why the fuck does a rural county sheriff need a hundred grand worth of military equipment?) ProPublica found nine incoming sheriffs across Alabama who reported similar experiences with their predecessors looting public funds.
- The argument over whether to call the active concentration camps on our southern borders “concentration camps” is a counterproductive distraction from the actual harm being done in the concentration camps.
- Four scientists tried to replicate a frequently-cited research result from a paper published in Science in 2008, but failed to achieve the same results. Science refused to publish their new paper, arguing that the “field had moved on,” rather than accepting that, hey, sometimes a single study turns out to be wrong.
- An app appeared briefly this week that allowed users to create fake nudes of nearly any woman by using a type of neural-networking algorithm that works similarly to that behind “deepfake” videos.
- Above the Law points out that the proposed two-city solution for the Rays is a legal impossibility, based in part on this piece Sheryl Ring wrote for Fangraphs about the Rays’ obligations to St. Petersburg.
- “Vaccine skeptic” just means anti-vaccine. So does “pro-safe-vaccine.” Don’t let denialists’ obfuscations confuse you: These people are pushing dangerous misinformation that will worsen the health of the general public.
- A four-day workweek would go a long way to reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, more so than popular but low-value solutions like banning plastic straws. (Also, banning plastic straws hurts people with certain disabilities; encouraging people to use them less often is a better idea.)
- I had no idea that sand mining was a thing, or that sand, critical to much of the world’s construction industry, was a scarce resource, but in India, it’s a corrupt industry rife with labor abuses, causing massive environmental damage.
- Employees at one location of Seattle third-wave coffee purveyors Slate Coffee resigned en masse in response to a “toxic” work environment. The owners of Slate responded to the story on Instagram (included in the link).
- Maine Senator Susan Collins (R) now has a challenger in Democrat Sara Gideon, currently speaker of the Maine House. Gideon appears to be explicitly targeting Collins over her vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh after the justice was accused of sexual assault.
- I didn’t watch the debates among the ninety-four candidates vying to be the Democratic nominee for President in 2020, for the same reason I almost never watch debates: They reward the pithy and superficial, and they treat political discourse as if it were a sporting event. Jeb Lund argues much the same, and says this structure and mindset helped put Trump in the White House in the first place.
- Board game news: Dire Wolf has two new titles out – the social deduction game Game of Thrones: Oathbreaker and the expansion Clank! Upper Management Acquisitions Incorporated pack, which comes with four characters from the Penny Arcade universe that you can use in the dungeon crawl board game Clank!
I loved your use of vintage posters as part of your noir films list. That added some sparkle to distinguish your list. Well done.
NPR’s Planet Money had a great episode about thieves stealing entire beaches’ worth of white sand in Jamaica — much more fascinating a story than you’d imagine, and actually doesn’t overlap much with the sand story Keith posted here. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/07/13/628894815/episode-853-peak-sand
I feel the need to defend my home state of Alabama here as it relates to Marshae Jones. First, the shooter was charged, but the grand jury failed to indict. That, along with the grand jury actually indicting her and the prosecutor’s comments, indicates to me that the shooter pretty clearly shot in self-defense. Second, if she had had a five-month-old child rather than being five-months pregnant with the same remaining circumstances, I doubt there would be such outrage. This isn’t a case of aborting her fetus (on which there is clear disagreement). Instead, she put her (apparently desired) future child at extreme risk.
Aren’t you assuming that the grand jury was fair and unbiased? It comprised Alabamians, who seem to support the view that a fetus is a person (59% voted to put language in the state Constitution to that effect, just last November).
I don’t think it’s at all “pretty clear” the shooter shot in self-defense.
I am, but that same grand jury chose not to indict the shooter of the same fetus (another black woman). Obviously we don’t know exactly what was presented or the grand jury’s reasoning, but it’s a fair inference based on the publicly available information. And the amendment dialed in Jefferson County 43-57, so the 59% is irrelevant to the grand-jury pool. Finally, even though she was indicted, the DA has said she may not prosecute the manslaughter charge, or even at all
So 43% of voters in that county believed that a fetus, no matter how undeveloped, should have the same rights as a human. That doesn’t really support your point – there were probably a lot of people on that grand jury who see no issue with a charge of manslaughter where no actual person was killed.
Second, if she had had a five-month-old child rather than being five-months pregnant with the same remaining circumstances, I doubt there would be such outrage.
Well sure, but this a false equivalency and the entirety of the personhood debate–whether a fetus has the same rights as a child. I’m generally opposed to slippery slope arguments, but this type of charge really does pave the way towards charging women with manslaughter for miscarriages.
It seems the ultimate grift is to be an Alabama county sheriff. Remember, they can legally keep any unspent money from a program meant to feed inmates.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/03/14/593204274/alabama-sheriff-legally-took-750-000-meant-to-feed-inmates-bought-beach-house
Possibly missing the link on the replication problems those four scientists were having with Science? It’s difficult to google it just because of the generic mag name and the ever-present replication crisis stories everywhere. Many thanks for posting these, as always
Fixed. thank you.
I’m all for slapping the president around when he deserves it, which seems quite often, but calling this most recent rape allegation “credible” is nothing short of ludicrous. Anderson Cooper couldn’t get to break fast enough when he was interviewing this clearly disturbed individual who has not been heard from since.
Let’s try to weed out the nonsense when talking about issues deserving of our time – this was clearly from the get go, not one deserving of a second thought.
Disagree. First of all, I absolutely reject your labeling of Carroll as “clearly disturbed” based on one interview, where she made a weird comment about rape fantasies being “sexy,” which she didn’t get to explain on air but did so to Vanity Fair afterwards. To extrapolate from that to “clearly disturbed” is more than just a reach, but irresponsible.
Other than that, what evidence is there that her allegation is not credible? She provided specific details, including a time and place for the assault. told two friends about the alleged assault when it happened. All claims that she’s lying amount to what you just did – attacking her as a person, not addressing any part of the claims. A woman can be strange, unintelligent, even “hideous” herself and still be a victim of sexual assault.