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…
- The illusion of memory in action: The New York Times shows two false eyewitness accounts of a shooting in New York City. This is one of the six cognitive illusions discussed in The Invisible Gorilla, which I reviewed this week.
- Chef Hugh Acheson stars in the first episode of Eater’s Real Chefs Cook Dumb Recipes. This one, for chicken nachos, is really dumb: It’s from Kris Jenner’s cookbook, but it’s Nicole Brown Simpson’s recipe. Actually, it’s not so much dumb as totally tacky. Also, Acheson’s newest cookbook, The Broad Fork
, just came out last week – it’s all about cooking with vegetables and fruits.
- Why did Rehoboth Beach reject Dogfish Head’s expansion plans? Do they not like jobs? And beer? In fact, that’s my campaign platform. Keith Law for Governor of Delaware: Jobs and Beer.
- Are seed libraries legal in your state? You won’t believe the bullshit reason some state governments are using to shut such seed-exchange programs down.
- Good news on the vaccine front: California’s Senate is trying to end non-medical waivers. There are no good non-medical reasons to eschew vaccinations. None.
- Frontline had a great series of reports on food-borne illnesses in raw chicken.
- The Amtrak derailment this week brought out some regrettable social media behavior, including massive attacks on a music professor and violinist who sent an angry tweet to Amtrak about retrieving her instrument.
- A cute followup on the Israeli professor who calmed a student’s crying baby. Apparently this is par for the course for him. (Pun intended.)
- More bad news on the environmental front: NPR reports on the 42% drop in honeybee colonies from 2014. This comes on the heels of two more studies blaming pesticides known as “neonics” for their role in colony collapse disorder.
- Also from NPR’s Science Desk, why would a fish have gained (through evolution) the ability to make its own sunscreen?
- The BBC reports on ideas for improving how you learn and/or memorize new material.
. My daughter, who doesn’t have much interest in the actual baseball thing, even asked me last night if we could play it again this weekend.
today in honor of International Tabletop Day, with almost half off Splendor, 7 Wonders, Five Tribes, and King of Tokyo.
on 
, which takes a very narrow look at its topic and lacks enough prescriptive measures for readers who want to correct their own biases. The authors focus on implicit biases, truly just subconscious prejudices based on race, gender, or age, without expanding in any way to discuss such unknown (to ourselves) biases in all aspects of our lives. While I understand that their research was limited to those interpersonal prejudices, the cognitive processes behind those and behind other biases – entrenched opinions on groups or classes that skew the decisions we make – are probably related, if not identical, and I would have appreciated a broader take on how to identify and correct biases in my own thinking.
, edited by Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket). The book runs the gamut of writing, from essays to short stories to poetry (most of it terrible) to comics, with many of the works amazing and creative and unlikely to have come across my desk (or lap) in any other form. My favorite piece was Nathaniel Rich’s “The Man Who Saves You From Yourself,” about cult deprogrammer David Sullivan, who died one day after the piece was first published in Harper’s. The anthology also includes a superb interview with Mona Eltahawy, a clever and haunting short story from Pulitzer Prize-winner Adam Johnson, and the delightful comic “Have Tea and Cake with Your Demons” from Yumi Sakaguwa.
, which included far too many ponderous pieces that put the author ahead of the subject or the destination. The two standouts were Amanda Lindhout’s