I had one ESPN+ post this week, covering the Luis Urias/Trent Grisham trade with a note on the Kyle Gibson signing. No Klawchat due to the holiday, but I did do my annual Periscope live chat where I spatchcocked the turkey.
My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, comes out on April 21st, and you can pre-order it now through that link or anywhere fine books are sold. Also, I’m trying to be more diligent about my free email newsletter now that we’re in the offseason.
I’ll be at PAX Unplugged here in Philadelphia next weekend, and if you’ll be there and are up for a game, just drop me a line. I have some publisher meetings, but my goal is to check out as many games in the First Look section as I can, and I may bring a game or two from my review queue as well.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: The Guardian explores how how our obsession with home delivery is reshaping the world. I think the traffic angle was the most eye-opening – how much delivery trucks contribute to urban traffic, especially because of their frequent stops at the curb to drop off.
- Graig Graziosi writes about the death of the Youngstown Vindicator, the 150-year-old Ohio newspaper where he’d worked as a reporter.
- Baby bumpers have been tied to dozens of infant deaths. So why don’t regulators do something about it?
- Andrew Yang is talking up a universal basic income but gets its tenets wrong while pandering to the investor class, failing to acknowledge the growing wealth and income gap in the United States that is the real problem his plan doesn’t address.
- Is virtue signaling hypocritical? Is it even real? What about virtue signaling about others’ virtue signaling? The term gets thrown around a lot on social media, often as a way to shut down discussion about real societal problems, but this is a bit more thorough treatment of what the phrase implies.
- Yet another anti-vax grifter has emerged, calling herself The Skeptical Doctor’s Wife; Orac has the details on her all-too-familiar shtick, and how she cloaks herself in some false appeal to authority to seem more reliable.
- A woman who developed Guillain-Barré syndrome from a vaccination – an extremely rare side effect that affects about 1 in every 1 million recipients of the flu shot – did a Reddit AMA to explain why she remains staunchly pro-vaccine.
- Anti-vaxxers targeted Samoan families with their disinformation, helping stoke a measles epidemic that has already killed 38+ kids aged 4 and under. Now a group of anti-vaxxers are claiming the disease is the result of “malnutrition” and are sending a bunch of worthless vitamins to the island. If you want to actually help, donate to this GoFundMe that is tailored to hospitals’ stated needs as they try to stem the spread of this highly contagious, dangerous virus.
- Memorial Sloan-Kettering, a major cancer treatment and research institution, announced proudly that they’re going to waste $3.7 million studying acupuncture, a pseudoscientific ‘treatment’ that does not work.
- Ohio continues its fight to be the most backwards state in the union as Republicans in the state’s lower house passed a bill that would require doctors to implant ectopic pregnancies, a procedure that does not exist, rather than abort them, which they do routinely to save the mother’s health and life.
- Meanwhile, Kentucky Republicans, mad their guy lost the gubernatorial race, are trying a Wisconsin move to strip powers from the governor’s office before the incoming Democrat can take his seat. They say it’s a coincidence; sure, Jan.
- West Virginia joined several other states in making prisoners pay by the minute to read e-books that are available free from Project Gutenberg. Other states have gone further and banned outside donations of print books to force prisoners to pay for e-books or simply not read, although Pennsylvania and three New York prisons relented after public outcry.
- Author Tom Nichols showed his ass on Twitter last week by saying “Indian food is bad,” then tweeting through the reaction and defending his statement in a McPaper editorial. Madeleine Davies’ perfect response on Eater explains that you can always shut up.
- If you’ve seen the great documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, Jiro’s restaurant in Tokyo lost its Michelin stars because you can’t get a seat there. It’s so exclusive that you have to have a connection or be staying at a luxury hotel nearby to eat there.
- Zimbabwe is on the brink of man-made starvation, with 60% of the sub-Saharan African country, which is still just emerging from the nearly 40-year grip of dictator Robert Mugabe, considered “food insecure.”
- Teen Vogue had a group of teenaged girls from groups indigenous to North America explain the real origins of Thanksgiving, which involved white settlers killing native peoples and then celebrating with food.
Jiro’s place seats 10 and has two seatings per night. Since his emergence as a great sushi chef decades ago, it was never easy to get a seat there. I can only imagine how difficult it has become since the movie.
Jiro is presented as some sort of folk hero/eccentric genius.
From where I sit, he’s a jerk and a snob who only has time for the wealthy and the powerful. His restaurant will thrive, because people enjoy being treated badly by assholes like him. But I, for one, look forward to the day that his restaurant is closed for good.
The Foxconn boondoggle in Wisconsin keeps getting worse. All the benefits stated by the proponents of these sorts of handouts tend to be greatly over-inflated, while ignoring the costs.
https://www.jsonline.com/story/money/business/2019/11/27/foxconn-likely-drag-wisconsin-economy-study-suggests/4322322002/
Baby bumper article is behind a pay wall so I can’t read it. Regulation seems like an excessive step though, for a product that is perfectly useful and safe once a baby reaches a certain age. Is it really too much to ask for parents to be informed and responsible? Bumpers, at the right age, saved our baby from many head bruises.
The product isn’t perfectly useful, though. From the article:
My son got bruises from his crib rails before the bumpers. Bruises stopped after bumpers installed. QED as far as I’m concerned.
The article makes the point that bruises heal, suffocation doesn’t. Not saying any parent wants their kid to be in pain, but that’s a reasonable point in my mind. Plus the article is more focused on the fact that the regulatory body is refusing to act despite the fact that every other expert group is pushing for a ban.
Sam,
Certainly a valid point. At the time we installed the bumpers our pediatrician assured us that suffocation was no longer a concern.
One of the little things that gives me hope that the whole world isn’t going to be the dumpster fire it looks like is the ongoing excellence of…Teen Vogue. I would have bet against that 20 years ago. Thanks for the link.
I’m seriously confused about the Tom Nichols thing. I was completely unfamiliar with him, but after reading his article, I think I like him. He was asked for a controversial food take, provided one, and found that he could turn the responses into a column. In the column he notes that publications around the world wrote about him, makes a few serious points, and largely pokes fun at himself, equating his dislike of Indian food with his dislike of Led Zeppelin.
Why would you say he “showed his ass”? (Which is an interesting term to use anyway.) Why would Madeleine Davies write an article which rudely tells him to “shut up”? Why did you feel it was perfect?
Sorry, but the way I read it, the only people who look bad are Davies and you, as at no point in the tweet or the article was he rude or uncivil, which unfortunately both Davies and you appear to be in this instance.
I don’t know Nichols either, and i don’t fault him for his ‘controversial’ food take. However, I do take issue with his comfort in judging all of Indian cuisine based on the ‘numerous’ Indian restaurants he’s been in the states, and the one he bravely went to (on his own!) in the UK.
Davies is just pointing out how ludicrous it is to pass judgment on the incredibly diverse foods eaten by 1.3B+ people in India, based on a few bad trips to Curry Up Now.
I had the same reaction you did, Drew. I LOVE Indian cuisine, and when I first read Nichols’ tweet a few days ago I thought he was nuts (the “we pretend it isn’t” part was especially dumb, as if we Indian food lovers secretly hate the food but love to put on airs). And yet… he was asked to provide a contrarian opinion, he gave one, poked fun at himself a little, and it was all NBD. Turning it into a cause célèbre strikes me as even sillier than the tweet itself.
Nichols showed his ass by denigrating “Indian food” as if it were a single cuisine, and then backing it up by showing how little he knows of the cuisines of that country (let alone the subcontinent). That’s as absurd as saying “European food” isn’t good, or more so; India has about half a million more people than Europe does, and far more ethnic diversity, with over 100 languages that have at least 10,000 speakers and perhaps over 1000 languages with any native speakers. There are dozens of cuisines within India, as you would expect given the country’s geography and ethnic/religious diversity. Nichols dismisses it all with a wave of a hand as if he had chicken tikka masala once and decided that was enough.
UBI is a stealth wage-suppressor, pass it on.