The Mookie Betts trade might be falling apart as I write this, but I did break down the reported three-team deal on Wednesday morning. I’ll update that as needed when the trade becomes final. Schedule conflicts prevented me from chatting but I did do a Periscope on Friday. My prospect rankings will run on The Athletic the week of February 24th.
My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, is due out on April 21st from Harper Collins, and you can pre-order it now via their site or wherever fine books are sold. Also, check out my free email newsletter, which I say I’ll write more often than I actually write it.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: I reviewed Colson Whitehead’s novel The Nickel Boys earlier this week. Read the Tampa Bay Times investigative report into the Dozier School for Boys, which inspired Whitehead’s book.
- “Pro-Trump forces are poised to wage what could be the most extensive disinformation campaign in U.S. history,” according to this article by the Atlantic‘s McKay Coppins, who details the methods operatives use to fool people, especially via social media, into believing fabrications are the truth and the truth is merely fake news.
- Rolling Stone‘s Ash Sanders spoke to adults who escaped the cult of Scientology and how they struggled to readapt to society.
- People keep dying in Mississippi prisons, but Governor Tate Reeves just wants to “turn the page” on the state’s responsibility to its inmates.
- Evenflo, one of the major manufacturers of child car safety seats, lied when marketing its “Big Kid” booster seats despite data showing kids in those seats could be injured or killed in side-impact crashes, according to this investigative report from ProPublica.
- Mass shootings get the headlines and the calls for needed gun control, but far more Americans who die from guns are suicides.
- The Economist‘s Nicholas Pelham tells his story of being detained in Iran in July 2019, despite his presence there on a journalist’s visa.
- Why the fuck is the New York Times running editorials defending Gwyneth Paltrow’s pseudoscience show GOOPagainst the evidence-based criticisms of its content?
- Developing countries with valuable internet top-level domains, such as .tv (Tuvalu), .ly (Libya), or .nu (Niue), have often missed out on the profits from those names, which instead flowed to programmers or entrepreneurs in the U.S. or western Europe.
- Southern Methodist women’s basketball coach Travis Mays stands accused of telling players they should kill themselves if they didn’t want to work and of otherwise verbally abusing his players. So far, SMU has backed him, and not its players (who are unpaid, mind you). Here’s a crazy idea, though: why not hire a woman to coach a women’s sports team?
- The Trump Administration is charging the Secret Service exorbitant rates as high as $650/night to stay at Trump’s hotels, yet another example of how Republican members of the executive branch are looting the American taxpayer.
- An abortion cannot be “reversed,” but six states require that women seeking abortions receive counseling that this is possible. There are also three times as many “pregnancy crisis centers,” which somehow receive federal funding,” in the U.S. than abortion clinics. STAT News argues in this piece that abortion advice needs to be safe and evidence-based. The United States is not a theocracy.
- US Bank came under (well-deserved) attack last week after news spread that they had fired an employee for giving a stranded customer $20 on Christmas Eve so he could get home, and fired her supervisor as well. They’ve said they offered to re-hire both women, although the first of the two says she still hasn’t received a formal offer or any apology for the way the company defamed her publicly.
- “Attention residue” reduces our productivity and happiness. One proposed solution is to carve out GLYIO (Get Your Life In Order) times during which you handle administrative tasks, or work out, or do other things that are bothering you because they’re always on your mind or your to-do list.
- The Facebook group Stop Mandatory Vaccinations, which has 178,000 members, urged a mother who reported that her unvaccinated four-year-old son had the flu not to give him TamiFlu. He died four days later. Facebook is a dumpster fire of anti-vaccine bullshit and other conspiracy theories, and they simply do not care about the real-world consequences of their choice to shield this content.
- Facebook also doesn’t do anything to stop anti-vaxxers from flooding pro-vaccine advocates, such as pediatrician Nicole Baldwin (whose pro-vax TikTok video went viral in mid-January), with threats and hate comments. That’s why Shots Heard Round the World was formed to help pro-vaccine advocates fight back against these armies of ignorance.
- C|Net has some advice on how to manage the information Google tracks about you.
- The FCC did something good, for a change: They have proposed a $13 million fine against a robocaller who used the death of Mollie Tibbetts to spread white-supremacist messaging.
- Miami, Florida, is the most vulnerable coastal city in the world as sea levels rise, yet Miami voters chose a Republican mayor, and the state has two Republican Senators and a Republican Governor – even though the GOP’s official stances on climate change range from opposing regulations on fossil fuels to outright climate denial.
- I reviewed Matthew Walker’s book Why We Sleep a few years ago and praised it; I listened to the audio version and it seemed to be well-sourced and backed by evidence. Now there are claims that Walker manipulated the data in the book, and his responses so far have not come close to addressing the criticisms.
Anyone else have Pear Jam stuck in their head after seeing the link for the Evenflo story?
Nothing worse than Pear Jam stuck in your head. Unless it’s Plum Jam, of course.
I could have guessed the NYT editorial on Goop was written by Jennifer Block. She wrote the since deleted editorial in Scientific American titled “Doctors Are Not Gods”.
Is she the one who went after Dr. Gunter?
Yep, in that same article as well.
If Miami ends up underwater, everyone can just move back to Cuba…..most of the Cuban-American community’s support for the GOP is related to it’s anti-Castro stance.
As we are seeing more women coaching men’s sports, your “get a woman to coach women” take is really pretty tone deaf. How bout just get a good coach?
Tone deaf? Women coached just 8.6% of men’s Division 1 teams as of the last TIDES report, while nearly 60% of women’s teams are coached by men. Women make up less than 1% of all coaches in MLB, the NFL, the NBA, and MLS combined. Do you have some facts to back up your insult?
I basically agree with Brian here. I agree that more women coaches is a good thing. And I strongly agree, of course, that abusive coaches should be fired and blackballed, regardless of the gender of their targets (ahem, Bobby Knight). However, if you argue or imply that only women should be coaching women’s sports, you are tacitly arguing/implying that only men should be coaching men’s sports.
Certainly, the original comment did not sit well with me when I first read it.
if you argue or imply that only women should be coaching women’s sports, you are tacitly arguing/implying that only men should be coaching men’s sports.
Nope. Not even a little bit close. This is a hilariously false analogy, CB.
I’ve banned “Charles Bolling,” aka “CB,” for posting a comment (deleted) full of personal insults aimed at me.
I think it’s reasonable that if one reads “why not hire a woman to coach a women’s sports team?” to then infer that the author is also supporting hiring men to coach men, whites to coach whites, kleptomaniacs to coach kleptomaniacs, etc. etc. It might not be what you meant, but certainly a reasonable inference.
My concern with a thought along that nature means that the people doing the hiring are foremost looking at the outside qualities of the person they are hiring, not the qualities that person possesses. Which of course isn’t fair to any applicant for any job situation.
The two most legendary women’s college basketball coaches are Pat Summitt and Geno Auriemma. When winning NCAA championships, I don’t think the UConn players and fans said “This is awesome! If only the coach had been a woman though!” They just cared that they won and their coach was excellent, the exact same feelings the Tennessee folks had with their many championships as well.
It’s not reasonable at all, because women are a historically disadvantaged, legally protected class, while men and kleptomaniacs are not. Any other reading is a deliberate misinterpretation or sheer ignorance of the fact that women are and remain disadvantaged in hiring.
Geno Auriemma is legendary, but he was hired at a time when women were almost never considered for those jobs. His legend is a function of his gender; had he been born a woman, he likely would not have received the same opportunities, and had he been forced to compete in the labor pool with women on a fair and equal basis, perhaps he’s never even hired.
I looked at the list of the women’s basketball coaches with the most wins article at Wikipedia and there several women on the list, especially at D-1 schools (there are more men at the lower divisions). The same is true with the various head coach of the year awards through the years. A lot were first hired before Auriemma was hired by UConn in 1985. This is probably due to the fact that being an assistant on the men’s team paid more than being the head coach of the women’s team at the time. So schools had to hire someone to coach the women’s team and the vast majority of those that applied were women. And there were a lot of positions opened in a very short period of time. It might be interesting to see what happens today, when it is more lucrative to be the women’s head coach than an assist on the men’s team. Thinking of the top schools today, there are a lot of head coaches that are women (Baylor, South Carolina) as well as men (Mississippi State, Oregon).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_college_women%27s_basketball_coaches_with_600_wins
It’s a reasonable inference because of syntax, regardless of the content. You have now explained your nuanced take on it, but at face value a reader wouldn’t necessarily understand that nuance.
Pat Summitt was hired in 1975 at age 22. History shows she was clearly the right person for the job. Likewise, history shows UConn hired the best person for the job as well. If somebody at UConn had said “we need to hire a woman to coach the women’s team” it would have been a flawed process, a lesser coach would have been hired, and they more than likely never would have won those titles.
Certainly over the years women who potentially could have been great coaches didn’t get hired because the administration favored men, but swinging the pendulum back the other way to not consider male coaches doesn’t right that wrong. It just creates another bad process.
history shows UConn hired the best person for the job as well
Does it? We don’t know that the most qualified women would have done any worse. The process didn’t give us that chance.
Yes, history shows that UConn hired the best person for the job. His teams’ achievements are unprecedented and mind-boggling. Given that he has by far done the best job of any coach, period, over the time he’s been coaching, yes, they hired the right person. Arguing otherwise is absurd.
Also, neither of us were part of the hiring process, we have no idea who else they considered. Maybe their second, third, and fourth choices if Geno didn’t accept were women. Maybe not. We have no idea. It doesn’t matter. They got the absolute best coach. That was their goal at the time, as it should have been, regardless of the sex of the person they hired. Good for UConn, too bad for the rest of the NCAA!
We´re not going to agree on this, Drew. You preclude the possibility that a woman would have done as well as Auriemma did, given the same players and whatever other advantages he had. I don’t. The system was always rigged in his favor. (Incidentally, we do know Chris Dailey was one of the runners-up when he was hired.)
This is a tangent to the main point: Saying women should coach women’s teams is not the same as saying men should coach men’s teams. I’m also not saying hiring women to coach women’s teams would eliminate the behavior of which Mays stands accused – but it would be less likely.