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…
- 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.
. 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 
, with a foreword by … oh, hey, that’s me. The original came out in 1984, which I know is before many of you were born, but it remains one of the great gateways into understanding the sport on a rational level. I own a copy of the original, but I’m thrilled to get and to be part of this update.