→ May 16, 2015
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Saturday five, 5/16/15.

My Insider content this week includes my redraft of the 2005 class as well as a recap of the first round picks who didn’t pan out. I also held my weekly Klawchat on Wednesday. My first mock draft will go up on Tuesday.

And now, this week’s links…saturdayfive

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→ May 13, 2015
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The Invisible Gorilla.

I’ve got two posts up for Insiders looking back at the 2005 draft, one redrafting the top 30 picks and one examining the sixteen first-round “misses” from that loaded class. I’ll be chatting today at 1 pm ET.

Since reading Daniel Kahnemann’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow about this time last year, I’ve been exploring more titles in that subgenre, the intersection of cognitive psychology and everyday decision-making, particularly in business settings. Kahnemann discusses the phenomenon of inattentional blindness, which was first demonstrated in the experiment by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris that you can take here. That experiment gives The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us, the book by Simons and Chabris that explores six “everyday illusions” that distort our thinking and decision-making, its title, but the scope goes well beyond inattentional blindness to expose all kinds of holes in our perception.

(Speaking of perception, the short-lived TNT series of that name, which just ended its three-season run in March, devoted an episode called “Blindness” to two of the cognitive illusions discussed in The Invisible Gorilla, inattentional blindness and change blindness, even reproducing the experiment I linked above. It’s worth checking out when it reairs, even with its hamhanded crime story.)

The Invisible Gorilla is one of the best books of its kind that I’ve encountered, because it has the right balance of educational material, concrete examples, and exploration of the material’s meaning and possible remedies. The authors take a hard line on the six illusions they cover, saying there’s no way to avoid them, so the solution is to think our way around them – to recognize, for example, that just because we don’t notice our inattentional blindness when we talk on the phone while driving, we’re still prey to it. Yet the book remains instructive because forewarned is forearmed: if you know you’re going to fall for these illusions, you can take one more step back in your decision-making processes and prepare yourself for the trap.

The six illusions the authors cover are easy to understand once you hear them explained with an example. Inattentional blindness occurs when you are so focused on one task or object that you don’t notice something else happening in the background – for example, the gorilla wandered across the basketball court while you’re counting shots made by players in white. Change blindness is similar, but in this case you fail to notice the change in something or even someone when you’re focused on a different aspect of the person or image – which is how continuity errors end up in movies and escape the notice of most viewers, even when somewhat glaring once they’re pointed out. The illusion of memory revolves around our false confidence in what we remember, often to the point of being convinced that a story we heard that happened to someone else actually happened to us. The chapter covers the unreliability of eyewitness testimony, including a compelling (and awful) story of a rape victim who actively tried to remember details of her attacker’s face and still identified the wrong man when police arrested a suspect. The illusion of confidence involves overrating our own knowledge and abilities, such as the oft-cited statistic that a wide majority of American drivers consider themselves to be above-average at the task. (I’m not one of them; I dislike driving because I know I’m not good at it.) The illusion of knowledge is our mistaken belief that we know more than we do; the authors give a great test of this, pretending to be a child who keeps asking you “but why?” to show that, for example, you may think you know how a toilet works until someone actually asks you to go into detail on its operation. The sixth illusion, the illusion of potential, seems a bit forced in the context of the first five, even thought I enjoyed the authors’ attacks on pseudoscience crap like using Mozart or other classical music to raise your IQ (shocker: it’s bullshit) or the use of subliminal messages or advertising to change your thinking (the original subliminal advertising stunt in a movie theater was faked). It encapsulates the belief that we can improve our cognitive skills more quickly and easily than we actually can, or that improvements in a small, specific area result in more generalized improvements than they actually do.

The two “blindness” illusions make for the best stories, and are even applicable at times in baseball (how often have you been at a game, focusing on a particular player, and not realized that the pitcher had changed or another player had changed positions?), but the illusions of knowledge and confidence resonate more with the work that I do for ESPN. I’ve accepted and even embraced the fact that I will be wrong frequently on player evaluations, especially of amateur players, because that’s just inherent in the job: there’s far too much unpredictability involved in the development of individual players, so scouting relies on heuristics that will often miss on outliers like the Dustin Pedroias of the world. It’s also why, at a macro level, projection systems like ZiPS beat individual guesses on standings or overall player performances. (Projection systems can miss outliers too, like pitchers with new pitches or hitters with new swing mechanics, but that’s a different and I think more easily addressed deficiency.)

Even understanding the illusion of knowledge puts scouts in a quandary, as they’re expected to offer strong, even definitive takes on players when it would be more rational to discuss outcomes in probabilistic terms – e.g., I think Joey Bagodonuts has a 60% chance to reach the majors, a 20% chance to be an everyday shortstop, a 30% chance to end up at another position, etc. No one evaluates like that because they’re not asked to do so and they’re not trained to think like that. I’m in a similar boat: I tell readers I think a certain pitcher is a fifth starter, and if he has a few good starts in a row I’ll get some trolling comments, but when I call anyone a fifth starter I’m giving you a most likely outcome (in my opinion, which is affected by all of the above illusions) that doesn’t explicitly describe variance over shorter timeframes.

The illusion of confidence comes into play just as frequently, and to some extent it’s almost a requirement of the job. How could you offer an evaluation of a potential first-round pick or pull the trigger on a trade if you had an accurate view of your own limitations as an evaluator or executive? Would a proper system of safeguards to cover this illusion just lead to “paralysis by analysis?” I don’t know that I could ever have enough information to make me feel properly confident (as opposed to the illusory sense of overconfidence that the authors describe here) to decide who to take with the first overall pick in this year’s draft; I think Houston’s predraft process last year led them to take the right guy, and they still ended up with nothing because of a sort of black swan event with Aiken’s elbow. The authors express the need for readers to recognize their confidence in their own abilities is often exaggerated, but taken to its logical end it seems like a persuasive argument against getting out of bed in the morning, because we’re just going to do the wrong thing. In my position, at least, I’m better off pretending I’m a slightly better evaluator of baseball talent than I actually am, because otherwise my writing would be peppered with conditionals and qualifications that would make it unreadable and probably not very helpful to those of you looking for information on the players I cover.

Simons and Chabris present a very compelling if sobering case that the human mind, while highly evolved, has some serious holes in its approach, and that we need to understand five of the six illusions (or failures of intuition) to make better decisions, whether it’s improving our awareness to avoid hitting a motorcyclist on the road or dismissing misplaced self-confidence in our investing acumen to make better choices with our retirement accounts. It seems applicable to just about any line of work, but reading it from the perspective of my thirteen-plus years working in baseball – perhaps now I’m subject to the illusion of independent thinking – I found it immensely applicable and valuable as a reminder of how easy it is to fall into these traps when trying to evaluate a player or a team.

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→ May 9, 2015
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Saturday five, 5/9/15.

My ranking of the top 100 draft prospects for 2015 is now up for Insiders, and I held a Klawchat afterwards to answer questions about it. I’ll be at UConn’s game today (Saturday) against Cincinnati to see Ian Happ before I head home for Mother’s Day.

And now, the links…

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→ May 5, 2015
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Coup.

My ranking of the top 100 prospects in this year’s draft class is up for Insiders. I’ll chat about it on Wednesday.

The interactive card game Coup is part of the Resistance universe of games, but unlike the game that heads up that family, it doesn’t require five or more players, playing very well with as few as three. (The game plays two, but I’ve found it isn’t a great experience.) In Coup, each player gets two cards randomly drawn from a deck of just fifteen, containing three apiece of five different types, and can take any of the actions prescribed by those card types … but players aren’t required to show their cards when they make moves, so they can flat-out lie about what they have. That introduces the challenge system: If you think someone else is lying, you challenge him/her; if you’re right, s/he loses a card, and if not, you lose a card. The last player with at least one card remaining in his/her hand wins.

The play system in Coup is simple, as there are only seven actions available, five of which are defined by the cards. A player may take one coin as Income, which requires no card and cannot be challenged. Any other move requires a card and is subject to challenge from another player. The Duke allows the player to draw three coins as Tax. The Captain allows the player to steal two coins from another player, or to block another steal attempt. The Ambassador allows the player to exchange one or both cards with two cards from the deck, or to block a steal attempt. The Assassin charges three coins to take out one card from another player. The Contessa can block an assassination attempt. The sixth move is the Coup: For seven coins, a player can force another player to reveal a card, with no block or challenge possible. When a player begins a turn with at least ten coins, s/he must make a Coup against another player.

(The physical game includes an eighth action, drawing “foreign aid,” where the player draws two coins of income rather than one, but can be blocked by the Duke. This isn’t in the app version, which I’ll discuss below.)


The challenge system is what makes the game run, however. If you think another player is trying to make a move using a card s/he doesn’t have, you challenge it. There’s significant risk, since you only have two cards, and if you’re wrong, you lose one of them (and if you’re already down a card, a failed challenge knocks you out of the game). Of course, you can employ a little math, because you know what two cards you have, what other cards have been revealed, and perhaps what cards you’ve put back into the deck via the Ambassador, but the odds are rarely fully in your favor. If another player tries to use the Assassin’s power against you, and you challenge him unsuccessfully, you will be knocked out of the game: you lose one card for the unsuccessful challenge and another to the Assassin. On the flip side, you have nothing to lose by challenging an assassination attempt when you’re already down to your last card. If you make a move, are challenged, but weren’t bluffing, you still lose the card in question, gaining a randomly drawn replacement from the deck.

I’m reviewing Coup now because there’s a free iOS app version available, one with some in-app purchases, fresh graphics, no AI players (that’s coming, I’m told, but I don’t think it’s necessary), and the options to play friends or to participate in ‘ranked’ matches that cost you ‘reputation’ points, with the chance to win points and increase your reputation if you win the match. Aside from some small server glitches such as push notifications not arriving on time or having to submit a move twice, I’ve had a very smooth gameplay experience with the app so far. The server usually responds quickly enough to keep games moving, with moves in ranked matches limited to two minutes, with players getting the boot if they don’t respond quickly enough. (This can screw one of the remaining players, however, if you’ve built a strategy around having that booted player around for a little longer.)

The Coup app impressed most in how seamless it makes the gameplay despite the high interactive component and necessity of having constant communication back and forth to the server. In timed games, each player has two minutes to submit a move, and if it can be challenged, the next player gets a two-minute timer to Challenge or Allow it. (Any other player can challenge before that next player hits either button.) If a player sends the Captain or Assassin after another player, the target gets two minutes to decide to challenge, allow, or respond by claiming to have a counter card in hand. The two-minute limits mean games move quickly, sometimes too quickly for me – a few times when my iPad screen timed out, I couldn’t get back into the game fast enough to submit a move.


I did not win this game.

There’s a limited chat feature that allows players to say some stock phrases, with four expansion chat packs available, two free as well as two for $0.99 each (including a set of taunts, which I don’t think is a particularly sharp idea). You can pay $2.99 to remove any ads from the game (although I’ve barely noticed any), $4.99 for a “spies expansion” that gives you detailed information on your opponents’ tactical patterns, and $3.99 if you want to use alternate graphics, including the images from the physical game. It’s certainly worth the $2.99 price to remove ads and support the development effort, but I’d have a hard time justifying paying for more reputation points – it’s a little too close to the days when I’d lose a whole roll of quarters playing Gauntlet. I’ve played Coup against random opponents in over 50 games so far, which speaks to how addictive it can be and how quickly you can rip through a few games in one sitting.

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→ May 4, 2015
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April 2015 music update.

My latest draft blog post covers Georgia prep catcher Tyler Stephenson and includes lots of gossip on teams’ preferences for their first picks. I’ve got a top 100 draft ranking due to run on Tuesday.

Django Django – Shake and Tremble. Due on Tuesday, Django Django’s sophomore album, Born Under Saturn, marks their first output since their Mercury Prize-nominated debut, an album that likely would have won the award had it not run into the alt-J juggernaut that year. If you liked “Default” and “Hail Bop,” this lead single will be up your alley, with a similar psychedelic/dance beat but more hints of the heyday of pop-rock in the 1970s and ’80s.

The National – Sunshine on My Back. I shouldn’t like this song, an unreleased track from their Trouble Will Find Me sessions that combines two vocalists whose singing styles I dislike, Matt Berninger and Sharon Van Etten. You can understand Berninger’s words here – maybe that’s why they left it on the cutting room floor – and I love the way all of the instruments work together to provide an enormous buildup of tension that calls for a catharsis that never arrives.

Houndmouth – Sedona. Roots-rock that draws from alt-country and american folk traditions. I could see Houndmouth becoming the new Mumford & Sons, a band that crosses over into the mainstream by putting harmonic elements and pop arrangements on top of genres that don’t typically attract top 40 attention.

Drenge – Favourite Son. The most Drenge-like track from their strong sophomore album, Undertow, which I reviewed two weeks back.

Lord Huron – Meet Me in the Woods. I reviewed Strange Trails, the band’s second album, in mid-April; this is one of my two favorite tracks on the album.

Mumford & Sons – The Wolf. Speaking of Mr. Mulligan and friends, they’ve plugged in for their forthcoming album, Wilder Mind, which comes out on Tuesday … but so far I’m not hearing anything remotely new in the singles they’ve released. It sounds like Babel with electric guitars, and, speaking as someone who truly enjoyed their debut album, I am not interested in a rehashing of their somewhat stagnant follow-up.

The Wombats – Emoticons. Their latest album, Glitterbug, feels like it has some breakthrough potential, with more consistent work across the record’s eleven tracks, slightly poppier melodies, and all of the wit and wordplay that has made Matthew Murphy one of my favorite lyricists.

San Cisco – Too Much Time Together. I’ve only given their sophomore album, Gracetown, a couple of spins so far, but I’ve liked most of what I’ve heard; this track is my daughter’s favorite and I think it’s easy to hear why.

Tame Impala – Cause I’m A Man. The lyrics are a step up for Tame Impala front man Kevin Parker, although I find his falsetto a bit cloying; I could see this ballad getting cross-over airplay thanks to the music’s heavy influences from 1960s and 1970s soft-rock artists, without abandoning Tame Impala’s trademark psychedelic sound.

Kero Kero Bonito – Picture This. My pick for the feel-good hit of the summer; KKB’s previous songs are all disposable if not outright embarrassing J-Pop trifles, but this song has an obnoxious edge to its lyrics (mocking folks who photograph every aspect of their lives so they can share the pics on social media) and music that was absent from their previous efforts.

Failure – Hot Traveler. This alternative trio will release their first album in nineteen years in late June, and only their fourth full-length release overall. They suffered a bit from overgenrification in their 1990s heyday, touring with Tool (a much heavier, more prog-rock act) while not quite fitting in with the grunge or post-hardcore movements that were the flavor of the year. If you don’t remember Failure’s work, you probably know of former member Troy Van Leeuwen, who is currently a member of Queens of the Stone Age and played with A Perfect Circle on three albums.

Wild Beasts – Woebegone Wanderers II. An unexpected new release from the British art-rock quartet whose music is only consistent in its weirdness, this song is a sort of sequel to the track of the same name from their 2008 debut album, Limbo, Panto.

Speedy Ortiz – The Graduates. Their second full-length album, Foil Deer, came out on April 20th, with a very similar overall noise-pop vibe to their debut, featuring Sadie Dupuis’ faintly warbling vocals and the band’s heavy use of unexpected chord changes and tritone-based riffs.

Jamie xx with Romy – Loud Places. Both members of the Mercury Prize-winning, highly overrated indie-pop act the xx, Jamie (producer) and Romy (singer) collaborated on this, the only decent song I’ve ever heard from him (Jamie). It’s by turns sad and ecstatic, a pastiche of song scraps that wouldn’t appear to work together until you hear them.

Strange Wilds – Pronoia. Strange Wilds are a power trio from the Pacific Northwest who bear a strong resemblance to pre-Nevermind Nirvana and are signed to Sub Pop, the label that owned grunge before the term went mainstream. Their first album is due this summer.

Ceremony – Your Life In France. Post-punk that derives musically from Wire (whom they covered on a 2011 EP) and Gang of Four, but here skipping the politics for a song about loss and regret. “The Separation,” another promising track from their forthcoming album, is getting some airplay on Sirius XM.

Violent Soho – Fur Eyes. The best track from the Australian alternative band’s album Hungry Ghost, which was released in their home country in September 2013 but didn’t come out here until a year later, and is just now getting a fresh marketing push.

Of Monsters and Men – I Of The Storm. I might be looking forward to this album as much as any due the rest of this year.

Kid Astray – Cornerstone. This Norwegian sextet had a hit on alternative radio in 2013 with “The Mess,” a song that was both catchy and incredibly quirky, sounding at multiple points like the band had cut up several tracks and stitched them back together at random. This track has a much more conventional structure, and the shared male/female vocals have them firmly in Naked & Famous territory.

Torres – Sprinter. I’m not a huge fan of Mackenzie Scott’s solo work (that would be Paul Boyé’s domain), but there’s some promise in the singles from her upcoming second album. I think it’s her voice that keeps me from becoming a bigger fan.

Blur – Lonesome Street. Remember when Blur’s music was cheerful and energetic, even when Damon Albarn’s lyrics were their most biting? “Country House,” “Charmless Man,” “Chemical World,” “Girls and Boys” – these songs were all exuberant in contrast with their satirical nature. Blur’s new album, The Magic Whip, their first since 2003, is positively maudlin in contrast with all of their work from the mid-90s, before their discography took a turn for the worse with 13. Only three tracks from this album could stand up with their Britpop halcyon days – “Go Out,” “I Broadcast,” and the opener “Lonesome Street,” which boasts a shuffling, syncopated guitar line that seems like a lengthy allusion back to Modern Life is Rubbish. It’s good to have a little bit of the old Blur back, but the album as a whole was a disappointment.

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→ May 3, 2015
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The Victorian Internet.

I first encountered Tom Standage’s work when a friend gave me Standage’s A History of the World in Six Glasses, a brief history of a half-dozen fundamental drinks common to most global cuisines. At some point after I wrote about that book, Amazon put Standage’s 1996 book, The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph, on sale for the Kindle for just $1.99, so I picked it up because it seemed – as Paddington Brown might say – very good value, and I like to stash a few ebooks on my iPad in case I’m traveling and am caught without a book. Standage’s book was more than worth that price, as it’s a breezy, enlightening book on the invention, rise, and fall of the telegraph, with many parallels to the invention and rise of the modern Internet – although the latter’s fall has yet to come.

Standage covers a lot of ground in a short book, so he’s rarely bogged down in excessive detail; what detail there is he concentrates toward the front of the book as he describes attempts to invent the first telegrpah and then to improve it. The telegraph was preceded by what now seem comically inept attempts to transmit information over long distances using towers that would send signals using light by moving large panels that were visible from the next station. (Such towers live on in the many places around the world named Telegraph Hill.) It took a couple of crackpots who either didn’t know of the difficulties they faced or simply wished them away to come up with the first real devices that transmitted very simple signals over electrical wires – and then the inventors had to convince others that these things would actually work. Telegraphs first caught on thanks to some basic economic needs, not to actual foresight on anyone’s part: Railways and stock traders were among the leading early customers, and the rapid increase in the demand for immediate information via telegraphy led to attempts to increase what we’d now call the bandwidth of telegraph lines. These efforts eventually led to the fortunate accident, also described in Standage’s book, that led to Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant Watson (as all good assistants are named) discovering that they could transmit sounds over electrical wires, leading them to invent the telephone. Thomas Edison also makes a few appearances, as his first paying job was as a telegraph operator, a task at which he was so adept he quickly raised his pay and status and eventually used his work as leverage to fund his first laboratory.

Once that technical material is out of the way, Standage can focus on the social and economic aspects of the telegraph’s invention and rapid spread and adoption. News agencies were also early adopters, leading to the now-ubiquitous organizations Reuters and the Associated Press. Diplomats made heavy use of such cables for several decades, with the telegraph playing significant roles in the Dreyfuss Affair (which led Emile Zola to pen his “J’accuse!” column) and the Zimmermann Telegram fiasco during World War I. But there were also dreamers who thought the telegraph would lead to world peace and skeptics who thought the telegraph a parlor trick or feared its impact, similar to pronouncements on all sides of the earliest days of the World Wide Web (and the Segway, which didn’t work out quite so well). It’s an instructive look at how new technologies can disrupt entire economies, and how people and businesses react to such disruptive technologies in the first place, with massive investments made as if the telegraph was going to last forever, only to have it supplanted by the telephone within a few decades.

Standage wrote his book in 1997, so even in the short period since then we’ve seen substantial upheaval from the explosion of the Internet around the globe and through new access points unthought of when most people got online via a computer and a 28k modem. He adds an afterword, written in 2007, where he correctly foresees the rise of mobile phones as Internet access devices, and even draws a parallel between the economy of characters in text messaging and the various methods of shorthand used to send cheaper telegraphs. The afterword gives The Victorian Internet the finishing bow it needs to tie together its subject with the subtitle, and to allow Standage to emphasize the broader point about the creative destruction wrought by highly disruptive technologies. It’s a quick, educational read that, if it pops up for $2 again, would even make a bear from darkest Peru smile.

Next up: I finished Anthony Marra’s A Constellation of Vital Phenomena last night and started Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being.

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→ May 2, 2015
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Saturday five, 5/2/15.

My annual ranking of the top 25 MLB players under 25 is up for Insiders, as is another draft blog post on Vanderbilt’s Carson Fulmer and Dansby Swanson. My weekly Klawchat transcript is up.

I also appeared on actor Nate Corddry’s Reading Aloud podcast, talking mostly about books and pizza with a little baseball chatter thrown in.

And now, the links…saturdayfive

  • English college student Ione Wells wrote a letter to her assaulter as a statement of strength for herself and other victims of sexual assault. It’s absolutely worth reading (and re-posting, since I tweeted to it on Wednesday).
  • Anything with David Simon is an auto-link for me; with Baltimore in flames earlier this week, he’s a a natural commentator, and you might say he has some thoughts on the matter. The failed War on Drugs comes up, as you would expect.
  • Hugh Acheson and Empire State South barista Dale Donchey will open a new coffee shop called Spiller Park Coffee in Atlanta’s Ponce City Market, with a projected opening date in September. They’ll use a selection from a small number of the best small/third-wave roasters in the country.
  • Nearly all economists agree free trade is good, so why are some members of Congress fighting renewal of the President’s Trade Promotion Authority? Why is Elizabeth Warren, by all accounts a fairly intelligent person, on the wrong side of the table here – along with a good chunk of her fellow Democrats?
  • The New York Times was strong this week, between that op ed and this investigative report on the deep, unspoken support for the drone program within Washington’s inner circles of power.
  • Chipotle, the most responsible of all national food chains when it comes to sourcing ingredients, will no longer serve food made with GMO ingredients. That’s too bad, as it feeds into FraudBabe-style anti-science woo-woo; GMOs are completely safe to eat and can improve crop yields, although they have negative externalities regarding pesticide use. (I still favor GMO labelling, as it’s the consumer’s right to decide what to consume, even if they want to be stupid about it.)
  • Rubella has been eradicated in the Americas. You know why? Because vaccines. It’s the third virus that infects humans to be wiped out in this hemisphere and the fourth virus in total (including rinderpest, which infected mostly cattle and buffalo).
  • NPR’s Fresh Air dedicated a show to an interview with journalist Mark Arax about California’s water wars, especially the current conflict over almond farms’ use of water.
  • A short but potent piece from Ta-Nehisi Coates on Nonviolence as Compliance in Baltimore.
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→ May 1, 2015
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Nashville eats, 2015 edition.

My annual ranking of the top 25 MLB players under 25 is up for Insiders, as is another draft blog post on Vanderbilt’s Carson Fulmer and Dansby Swanson. My weekly Klawchat transcript is up. I also appeared on actor Nate Corddry’s Reading Aloud podcast, talking mostly about books and pizza with a little baseball chatter thrown in.

Nashville has more great places to eat than I could possibly hit in one scouting trip, even if I stayed five or six nights. And new ones are constantly opening, which was my aim on my two trips there in April since several of them have become so popular either with critics or locals.

The 404 Kitchen (restaurant not found error?) was the best meal I had while in Nashville; it’s a small place, seating about 40, and the menu changes daily depending on what ingredients were available that particular day. When I was there, there was a farm egg starter that was just a yolk served on a plate of al dente farro with mixed wild mushrooms and herbs, with enough of the dark cooking liquid to form a sauce when I mixed the yolk into the grains. Farro is an ancient form of wheat that has long been eaten in southern Italy the way we might eat rice or barley, but since it’s a whole grain it’s more nutritious than white rice, and I greatly prefer its flavor to that of barley. I would have preferred the farro to be a little more cooked – this was Al Dente’s cousin, Trey Dente – but the dark, earthy, lemony sauce was superb in its balance of acid and umami. I made an improvised version of the dish over the weekend using mixed dried mushrooms, reconstituting them for the cooking liquid, and using steel cut oats (a.k.a. groats) because I couldn’t get farro.

The entree was the least successful of the three dishes, a wahoo fillet served with some spring vegetables, but lacking a little punch to spruce up the mildness of the fish itself. (My first experience with wahoo was on my honeymoon in Bermuda twenty years ago, at the White Horse Tavern. They served a fried wahoo sandwich that was so frequently confused with chicken by tourists that they had a sign up saying, “No, the fried wahoo isn’t actually chicken.”) The mixture underneath the fish included some fingerling potatoes and sunchokes, easily my favorite part of the dish. The dessert was a chocolate “budino” that was thicker than most budinos or mousses, semi-sweet with bits of almond and drunken tart cherries; I like darker chocolates but this was close, and it was rich enough that it was best shared.

Two Ten Jack is Nashville’s first izakaya/ramen house, and while I am no judge of ramen or broth at all – I’ve had real ramen maybe three times in my life – I thought the tonkotsu (pork broth) ramen at Two Ten Jack was spectacular. Tonkotsu is made from pork bones, often trotters (yep, that’s pig feet), so the flavor is meatier than any other stock or broth made from chicken or beef. It’s also thicker because the preparation of the stock involves slowly poaching some pork fat and then whisking it into the liquid to form an emulsion. Two Ten Jack’s version has a little pork floating on top as well as the noodles adn aromatics you’d expect to have, but I would gladly drink this stock by the pint. The restaurant also offers sashimi, a few other raw fish preparations (including a tuna poke that I thought needed more acidity), and yakitori skewers you can order by the stick for about $3-5 each. They also serve several cocktails built around the distilled rice spirit shochu, including one that mixes it with their own house-made tonic water.

Several of you have recommended Mas Tacos Por Favor for a while, although it’s much easier now that they have a brick and mortar location right across the street from The Pharmacy, a great burger joint that also serves amazing tater tots. Mas Tacos offers five different taco options that look like they rotate or change frequently; when I was there there were options with beef, pork, chicken, shrimp, and a vegetarian one with sweet potato. The pulled (braised) pork was the easy winner over the chicken, as the pork had the flavor of carnitas without being too heavy, while I thought the chicken was too bland and I mostly got the flavors of the toppings. You can get one elote (grilled seasoned corn on the cob with paprika and cotija cheese) for $3, which I recommend, and a small plate of maduros (fried sweet plantains), which I probably wouldn’t. They also sell aguas frescas in varying flavors, but were out of the one flavor (tamarind) I would have ordered that day.

Desano’s Pizza is a mini-chain of three locations (Nashville, Charleston, LA) serving thin-crust, wood-fired pizzas to diners at long picnic tables in a dining hall in sight of the three ovens. It’s a little above-average for this style of pizza, with the crust a little too thick underneath the toppings and the sauce definitely too garlicky for me, definitely a good spot for a group outing though.

I tried to go to Barista Parlor, the over-the-top coffee emporium on the east side of Nashville, but their espresso machine was down that morning, so I’ll have to save that for another trip. I did make it back to Crema, still the best local roaster I’ve found in Nashville, not quite at the level of direct-trade spots like Intelligentsia or Counter Culture but at the high end of the next tier.

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→ April 29, 2015
→ By

Americanah.

My annual list of the top 25 big leaguers under 25 is up for Insiders, as is a draft blog post on Dansby Swanson and Carson Fulmer, both of Vanderbilt.

Chimamanda Ngoza Adichie is one of my favorite living novelists, and I say that having read only two-thirds of her total output (she’s written three). Her ability to craft realistic characters, especially black female characters, and to have all of her characters engage in thoughtful, intelligent, unpandering dramas built around race and ethnic identities is second to none right now; she’s even passed Toni Morrison, whose recent output hasn’t matched her Beloved/Song of Solomon peak. Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, which won the Bailey’s Prize for Women’s Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize) in 2007, made my last top 100 novels update at #92.

Her most recent novel, 2013’s Americanah, once again begins and ends in Nigeria, but this time follows two people as they emigrate to the west, one legally and one illegally, to escape a limited economic future in their native country, one that deprives them of hope. Ifemelu and Odinze are high school sweethearts, bonded by their intelligence and refusal to submit to a grey future, but the expectation that they’ll marry is lost when Ifemelu is allowed to enter the United States legally but Odinze, a single foreign male from Africa, is rejected due (we assume) to U.S. immigration crackdowns post-9/11. While Ifemelu encounters financial difficulties and humiliations as a student in the U.S. who lacks money or worldliness, even finding that her brand of English isn’t much use in understanding the American idiom, Odinze enters England without papers and aims for a sham marriage with a citizen to allow himself to stay and work. Ifemelu, ashamed by her situation and depressed by her isolation, ceases contact with Odinze and only resumes it when she returns to Nigeria over a decade later, finding the love of her life now married with a daughter.

“Americanah” is a derogatory term in Nigerian slang referring to someone who has moved to America and come back a changed person, especially one affecting an American accent or an excessive affection for American customs and culture. Ifemelu tries to assimilate early in her time in the U.S. because she’s told repeatedly that she won’t receive job offers if she’s too “ethnic,” but eventually sheds her American façade in favor of her own accent, her own hair, and her identity as an African woman. She adapts rather than assimilating, eventually advancing in her education and career thanks to a blog she writes under a pen name, called Raceteenth Or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known As Negroes), that documents her thoughts on the racial divide in the United States from the perspective of someone who was not conscious of race before she arrived in this country. (Adichie has since brought Ifemelu’s second blog, written after the character’s return to Nigeria, to life online as The Small Redemptions of Lagos.) Odinze’s story is shorter, as was his stint abroad, working dicey jobs under someone else’s National Insurance number, before he’s discovered and shipped back to Lagos.

Ifemelu is the star of the book, as Odinze, while a well-defined character, is rarely in the spotlight, while his story in England seems like a plot contrivance to contrast with Ifemelu’s experiences as a legal emigrant from Nigeria. Her story has global aspirations which largely succeed, coming through her series of jobs (including nanny to a definite White Privilege family) and relationships, including one with Progressive White Guy and one with Earnest Black Intellectual. We get some pretentious dialogue along the way, especially when Ifemelu starts to travel in increasingly academic circles, but Adichie avoids turning the book into a sermon by keeping Ifemelu’s emotions at the center of the book rather than driving us toward some Big Conclusion via plot tricks. The book describes the emigrant/immigrant experience, the desire to return home for its own sake (rather than to change the world), the emotional pull of a romance that one can’t fully separate from its environment, instead of trying to tell us one country or culture or path is better. This is Ifemelu’s story, just one tale that has its metaphorical implications but doesn’t feel in any way like Adichie is trying to tell every immigrant’s story at once.

Adichie’s strengths in characterization and avoiding predictable plot lines cover some of her weaknesses in portions of the dialogue and nearly all of the sample blog posts included in the book. The posts she includes are far too short and superficial to garner the kind of audience Ifemelu is supposed to have collected through her writing, not enough in a real world that has Ta-Nehisi Coates and Tanzina Vega and Jamil Smith and too many others to name who produce statement pieces that bring examples and evidence to the table. Ifemelu’s blog posts from the book wouldn’t find an audience because they’re not saying much of anything we haven’t heard hundreds of times before. Adichie says more about race when she’s not talking directly about it, putting characters into situations that force them to confront questions of racism and identity, than she does when she tries to blog through Ifemelu’s lens.

Told through frequent moves back and forth in time and across an ocean, Americanah marks another hugely compelling and intelligent novel from Adichie and her biggest seller to date, even though it lacks the gravity of Half of a Yellow Sun, which was set in Nigeria during the Biafra conflict and resulting genocide. Her eye for detail is sharper in the sections of Americanah where her characters are still in Lagos, growing up among ambitious economic strivers, religious zealots, and co-opted concubines whose fortunes are only secure as long as the current regime stays in power. When she transitions to America and England, Adichie’s writing becomes less nuanced and the stakes are largely lower (especially since we know from the first chapter that Odinze gets back to Nigeria safely). The strongest scenes of Ifemelu’s time in America come in an African hair salon she visits, somewhat resentfully, in Trenton, because she can’t find a place that knows how to braid hair properly in Princeton. The reactions she receives there from women who might share some of her background but clearly want very different things from life – and are largely appalled that she would return to Africa of her own volition – drive not just Ifemelu’s own memories but the overall narrative of the book, as well as its strongest symbol (hair) of race and identity.

Next up: I knocked off The Victorian Internet, Tom Standage’s brief history of the telegraph, over the weekend, and have since started Anthony Marra’s novel A Constellation of Vital Phenomena.

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→ April 25, 2015
→ By

Saturday five, 4/25/15.

My one Insider piece this week was a draft blog post on Donny Everett, Mike Nikorak, and first-round rumors, and I’ll have a similar post up within 24 hours on two Vanderbilt prospects and more gossip. I held my Klawchat on Wednesday, and I have a new boardgame review up for Paste on the X-COM boardgame adaptation, which seems to be true to the spirit of the video game, but which I found excessively complicated.

And now, the links… saturdayfive

  • Yet another study showing vaccines don’t cause autism. How much research time and money has been wasted because of one disgraced doctor’s fraud? And how many children have suffered because their parents bought into the vaccine deniers’ lie?
  • The BBC has a 25-minute Inquiry program on the true causes of the conflict in Yemen, and why it matters for the rest of the world. It’s an essential story that’s barely covered in the U.S. right now, even though we’ve had a hand in it and are poised to come out big losers once again.
  • Does a US child go missing every 90 seconds? No, of course not, but that won’t stop people from repeating a bad statistic that gets clicks.
  • It’s full of spoilers, but I enjoyed the NY Times‘ recap/review of the Broadchurch season finale. My review of season two is mostly spoiler-free.
  • Are hospitals doing all they can to prevent Clostridium difficile infections? Not yet, according to a terrifying new study.
  • How Dodgers fans are using tech tricks to evade the TV blackout. This isn’t a black-and-white issue; viewers getting screwed by a legally sanctioned monopolist are resorting to illegal methods to access content for which they would and do pay. MLB can solve this quickly by ending local blackouts, or Congress could force cable companies to open their infrastructure to competitive carriers, and please stop laughing now.
  • Earlier this month, a federal court upheld New Jersey’s ban on gay “conversion” therapy, leading to calls for a national law doing the same. The Human Rights Commission has some links on the harm such therapy inflicts, as well statements from major medical associations against the practice. It’s abhorrent and cruel.
  • My friend Wendy Thurm waxes on the Islanders’ departure from Nassau Coliseum. I grew up an Islanders fan and still remember hanging the Newsday cover with the headshots of everyone on the Isles’ roster after they won their fourth straight Stanley Cup, as well as the cover the following spring with the headline “Deprived of Five.” (Damn you, Gretzky.) But the Coliseum is a dump and it was never easy to get to in the first place. That said, if you play in Brooklyn, you’re no longer allowed to be called the “Islanders.” You can be the Hipsters, you can be the Tip-Tops, you can even be the Bums, but once you crossed the county line into Queens you ceased to be Islanders.

Finally, apropos of nothing, I’m just going to leave this here:

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