I traveled to Puerto Rico this week to see the MLB draft showcase in Cayey, featuring likely top-5 pick Delvin Perez, so I haven’t written much anywhere, with just one Insider post, on the Wei-Yin Chen and Gerardo Parra signings. Klawchats will resume this upcoming week, and no, I haven’t seen this week’s episode of Top Chef yet. I did finish The Executioner’s Song on the flight home, and that has to be one of the most addictive books I’ve ever read.
And now, the links…
- I tweeted this earlier in the week but it’s worth a repost: How one lawyer uncovered a massive Dupont chemical-dumping scheme, one that has poisoned waterways all around the Ohio River basin and more. That chemical, PFOA, is in your bloodstream right now, even if you’re reading this from the South Georgia Islands.
- Lots of good pieces this week on the awfulness of state lotteries, although I thought ThinkProgress at least got right to the meat of it by pointing out, as John Oliver did in 2014, that the money lotteries raise doesn’t even necessarily go where they claim it does.
- FiveThirtyEight chimes up in defense of MSG. You may know it better as one of the quickest ways to add umami, the “fifth taste,” to a dish.
- It hasn’t been the best week for Ted Cruz – or maybe it has, if you feel like any publicity is indeed good publicity – starting with this striking editorial from the New York Times on his “brutal” policies that seem at odds with the principles of his evangelical base.
- I would love to hear from the lawyers in the crowd about this piece from CNN that argues that Ted Cruz is indeed a “natural-born” citizen and thus eligible to be President, because he was a citizen at birth under the law of the U.S. on the day when he was born.
- Dave Zirin weighs in on the violent life and death of Lawrence Phillips, with special ire for all of the enablers who sought only to profit from his football abilities.
- A “regulatory logjam” at the FDA is the likely cause of generic drug shortages and price-gouging.
- A congresswoman has made public the cover-up of an astronomy professor’s history of sexual harassment, asking why his previous employer did not disclose this to his current one.
- Top Chef winner Kevin Sbraga is holding a fundraising dinner on January 19th for a Southampton, New Jersey, family whose children were struck by a motorist, killing two of them.
- Rapper and actor Mos Def appears to have lost his marbles, trying to leave South Africa, where he was staying on an expired visa, with something he called a “world passport.” I bet you can buy those from the same people who sell you the naming rights to stars.
- The University of Maryland absolutely shat all over its credibility with this corporate-sponsored “study” that claimed that a particular brand of chocolate milk could help heal concussions.
- Ridiculous story of the week: A Rhode Island official has resigned after having a man dress up as a senior woman at a press conference.
, both for background and for the sheer pleasure of the experience. The novel has much dry wit that can’t translate to the screen, as well as copious footnotes that mostly add humor to the story, and Clarke’s prose sparkles in ways that will never come through on film. But the adaptation here is so thorough that I believe any viewer could approach it without the background of the book and still follow the entire story without any trouble, which, for a work this dense, is a major achievement. I know in the time of “peak TV” there’s tremendous competition for your eyeballs and nowhere near enough time to watch everything you want – I might see a tenth of the series I’d like to see – but if you’re going to binge anything this offseason, put Jonathan Strange on your list.
, a high fantasy work that seemed to me to have an extraordinarily strong religious or spiritual component, but one that was fully integrated into the story rather than one that beats you about the head like a certain large feline, sorceress, and armoire may have done.
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(co-authored by Jennifer Thompson) for half price at Changing Hands in Tempe during my annual AFL trip, I picked it up without a second thought. The book covers a little of the same ground as the Einstein bio, but is primarily a history of superstring theory and the search for a “grand unified theory” (up to 1995, of course) that would bring together the four fundamental forces of physics, building the reader up from the mid-19th century forward through various stops and starts that included the proposal, discarding, and resurrection of string theory from the 1950s to the 1980s. 
for that – but it gave me more than just a superficial explanation along with plenty of the mind-bending stuff that makes theoretical physics seem fun to someone like me.
, winner of the Hugo in 1989. 