stick to baseball

→ April 30, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/30/17.

My book is out! You can find Smart Baseball absolutely everywhere – online, in bookstores, and even in some libraries. HarperCollins has links to various online vendors, but if you prefer to walk into a bookstore like it’s 1947 and buy the book directly, well, I like to do that too. I know thousands of you have already bought it, so my thanks to all of you.

I went to MLB Network on Friday and appeared on MLB Now, the show hosted by my friend and former ESPN colleague Brian Kenny. You can watch our discussion of the book. I talked to SI’s Richard Deitsch about baseball on TV and about not sticking to sports on social media. I also appeared on my good friend Will Leitch’s podcast to talk about the book and mock his hatred of Fletch.

I also discussed the book on over 50 radio shows this week; highlights included a long chat with WNYC’s Leonard Lopate, talking to Connell McShane on the Don Imus show, appearing on the Felske Files podcast, appearing on the Fantasy Focus Baseball podcast (with Karabell! But no bias cat), talking to WBAL’s Brett Hollander, and talking to WABC’s Sid Rosenberg.

I do have some upcoming appearances as well: May 8th at Pitch Talks Philadelphia, May 16th at The Georgia Center for the Book (in Decatur), and May 18th at Moon Palace Books in Minneapolis. There are further readings/events scheduled in Toronto, Miami, and Brooklyn for June and July.

My other writing from the past week included ranking the top 50 prospects for this year’s draft for ESPN Insiders, a list I’ll eventually expand to 100. It wasn’t easy getting to 50, though. For Paste I ran through the best new boardgames of 2017, including a few titles from the tail end of last year.

OK, finally, let’s get to some links:

Longread of the week: Nathan Fenno of the LA Times looks at how Rays prospect Brandon Martin went from first-rounder to accused murderer. Martin was a legit prospect, briefly, but cocaine use and what sounds like undiagnosed mental illness led him to murder three people, including his own father.
Another great longread: Buzzfeed looks at the twice-convicted fraudster who has access to Trump via Mar-a-Lago because the con artist’s wife is the guest reception manager there.
The Senate Intelligence Committee investigation into Russian interference in our 2016 election is an understaffed, underequipped joke.
I’ll be watching the STARZ adaptation of American Gods tonight; in advance of that, Pacific Standard interviewed author Neil Gaiman about the series and its unexpected political relevance.
SNL insiders consider Kenan Thompson, now in his 14th year on the show, its most important cast member. I thought the quotes from castmates, writers, and producers were interesting given Thompson’s limited profile beyond the show.
A woman who briefly worked for Fyre Festival says it was always going to be a disaster.
Scientists claim to have created a fluid with “negative mass.” What I, a non-scientist, couldn’t grasp here is whether they actually did that, or created a supercooled fluid that behaved the way we would expect a fluid with negative mass to behave. Those aren’t the same thing, I think.
Mina Caputo, the longtime lead singer of metal band Life of Agony (with some interruptions), discussed coming out as transgender in the metal community with Rolling Stone.
I know you’re shocked, but our dear leader didn’t think through that whole border wall plan, since the land on which it would be built can’t support it.
Mother Jones proposes an alternate, “ecotopia” wall zone between the countries, which is really a rather witty troll job.
Under President Turnip’s tax plan, most of us would be better off becoming LLCs rather than individuals. The plan to cut the tax rate on corporations would allow the highest earners to register (and work) as LLCs and drop their marginal rate from 39% to 15%. Also, the real money quote: “After Kansas eliminated its state tax on pass-through income, the number of people taking advantage of the exemption soared, leading to hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue for state coffers.” Kansas is run by idiots, which doesn’t say much for the people who voted them into office.
North Carolina Republicans, not satisfied with blocking legal protections for LGBT residents, have pushed through multiple bills aimed at suppressing the vote. If you live there, and any of your state reps are Republicans, you should be calling them daily.
Meanwhile, in Virginia, Governor Terry McAuliffe has restored the voting rights of over 150,000 felons – rights they would never have lost in many other states.
The governor of Kentucky won’t say who owns the house where he lives, a property that was sold in March for a price below its assessed value. The lack of disclosure mirrors the current federal Administration’s refusal to reveal potential conflicts of interest.
I won’t even pretend I followed this entire argument/spat over the “hot hand” theory in sports, although I think the 49/99 argument therein is merely a fancier application of the gambler’s fallacy. (The argument goes, if we expect a coin to turn up heads on 50 out of 100 flips, and the first flip is heads, then the expectation for the remaining 99 flips should be 49, not 49.5. I don’t agree with this, but given the behavior of some of this spat’s participants, I’m staying right here in my safe space.)
My alma mater’s Harvard Business Review has a strange piece arguing everyone should have at least two careers. On the one hand, yes, you can build and use your network to find untapped applications for your skills or even develop new ones. On the other hand, how many people have this kind of free time?
If you’ve ever used the site or app unroll.me, stop immediately because they’re selling your private data to Uber.
PBS Frontline aired a new documentary on what fish you should eat if you care about both your health and eating sustainable species. It’s not an easy question, and as the author and star of the documentary says, we need to find an answer if we expect to feed the planet.
The UN named Saudi Arabia, a country where women can’t drive and have fewer civil rights than a field mouse, the chair of its Women’s Rights Commission.
This is from 2013, but I stumbled across it last week: Allen Barra, who has also written quite a bit about baseball, wrote a piece in The Atlantic in praise of the novel At Swim-Two-Birds, one of my favorite novels ever.
Fortune profiles a startup that uses a spray made from discarded food that claims to keep fresh produce from spoiling, at least long enough to get it to distant markets. I would think that, if it works, this could also allow farmers in areas with less access to modern transportation to sell to export markets.
This tweet from a climate researcher went viral this past week:

Why I cancelled my @nytimes subscription. @BretStephensNYT pic.twitter.com/A3lFZNJdhY

— Stefan Rahmstorf (@rahmstorf) April 27, 2017

I am a NY Times digital subscriber, but I can’t say I see any value in including a science-denier in the name of “balance.” The Washington Post‘s Erik Wemple is similarly unimpressed.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, fish, links, metal, physics, smart baseball, stick to baseball, tv

→ April 22, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/22/17.

Smart Baseball comes out on Tuesday, so this is the last stick to baseball post before its official release. If you haven’t preordered yet, you can still do so here, or by, you know, walking into a bookstore and asking them to preorder it for you.

The media push for Smart Baseball has begun, with my hourlong chat with Joe Posnanski on his podcast, including talk about the book, boardgames, and how Mike Schur is dead wrong about pies. The Baltimore County Public Library interviewed me about the book and asked about time management. I also answered some questions in an interview for AM New York.

I currently have signings/appearances scheduled for Philadelphia (May 8th), Atlanta (May 16th), Minneapolis (May 18th), Toronto (June 26th), and Miami (July 8th). There are a few more in the works, including a likely signing at GenCon in Indianapolis, but if you don’t see your city on there, contact your local bookstore and ask them to contact HarperCollins. It’ll depend on my travel schedule, of course, but I do have time for a few more of these.

I wrote one draft blog post this week on Vandy’s Kyle Wright and Jeren Kendall, with notes on some Florida players as well. For Paste, I reviewed the epic boardgame The Colonists, which is actually a good game but punishingly intricate.

As always, you can get even more Klaw by signing up for my email newsletter.

And now, the links…

The best longread of the week was the Guardian‘s remembrance of comedian and writer Harris Wittels, who coined the term “humblebrag” and was a writer on Parks & Recreation who appeared a few times as Harris the idiot animal control guy.
Also great if somewhat hard to swallow: The Stranger‘s Ijeoma Oluo interviews Rachel Dolezal, the white woman who says she “identifies” as black, and comes off here as, to be kind, nuts.
I also enjoyed this look at F. Scott Fitzgerald and his unfinished novel The Last Tycoon.
Worth remembering: in 2015, Mother Jones revealed that Bill O’Reilly had lied about his experiences reporting on the Falkland Islands War.
Most of the world’s greatest restaurants rely on unpaid labor in the form of “stagiaires,” essentially interns who work grueling hours for no pay just to get the experience of working in a prestigious restaurant for an acclaimed chef.
You probably saw the brouhaha over the $400 Juicero juicer that can be replaced by a pair of hands. Also worth pointing out: Juice isn’t that good for you, because you get all the sugar and none of the fiber.
A licensed naturopathic “doctor” in California killed a patient with an injection of turmeric. Important lessons here: Turmeric is not a panacea – in fact, it probably doesn’t work at all – and naturopathy is bullshit.
Anti-vax nutjobs are claiming Sesame Street is ‘normalizing’ autism by introducing a muppet character on the spectrum. What the hell is wrong with these people?
Herd immunity is a big part of why making sure everyone who can be vaccinated gets vaccinated is important. Here’s a post with some useful graphics showing why that matters. You know parents who aren’t vaccinating? Don’t just avoid the subject. What they’re doing hurts their own kids and puts the whole community at risk.
Frog snot kills flu viruses. Really, it does, at least if it’s from this one frog species found in South India (which I’m sure will die off soon from chytrid disease anyway).
Alabama’s legislature voted to repeal permit requirements for residents to carry concealed weapons in the state. In a related story, I’ll skip the SEC tournament, held annually in Hoover, Alabama, this year, and will probably head to the ACC instead.
If you live in Florida and believe that people convicted of nonviolent felonies should be allowed to vote after they have served their sentences, there’s a petition to get a question on the 2018 ballot to make that change. Florida’s current rules are unusually draconian, and this amendment to the state’s constitution would still prohibit those convicted of murder or sex crimes from regaining their right to vote.
An LA Times editorial claims the American right is bringing back an old attack on Rachel Carson that says her anti-DDT activism cost millions of people their lives, a response to a Paul Offit piece from The Daily Beast that I linked here a few weeks ago. Skeptical Raptor looks at this in much greater, evidence-based depth, concluding that Offit’s take, that Carson’s writings and work had the unintended consequence of costing many people (mostly in developing countries) their lives, is largely accurate.
Advances in technology mean fake news is going to get worse, with the potential arising for faked audio recordings and video clips.
Racism was a major motivation for Trump voters, according to research by Ohio State assistant professor Thomas Wood.
Trump’s appointments appear to be violating ethics rules left and right, with “no transparency” on these hires and the elimination of a provision designed to limit such conflicts of interest.
A new Washington Post poll found that fewer people believe Trump’s lies, which may be a major reason Trump is making the Republican party “heinously unpopular” (according to New York magazine). But will it matter in 2018?
Oklahoma, which is dealing with earthquakes and drinking water pollution from fracking in the state, ended a state subsidy on wind power generation four years before originally planned.
Historian Aaron O’Connell argues that our ongoing efforts in Afghanistan are failing (audio link), and that we’re losing “hearts and minds” in addition to losing ground to the Taliban. He has edited a new book of essays on the subject, called Our Latest Longest War.
The Pacific Island nation of Palau is seeing clear, positive results from establishing an offshore marine sanctuary to restore the declining ecosystem in its waters. The irony of this is that Palau was previously a U.S. Trust Territory, becoming independent in 1994, and had that not happened their environmental efforts would likely be undergoing a reversal now (probably death by funding cuts) under our current Administration.
Comedian Ian Abramson did a standup set on Conan while wearing a dog’s shock collar, with an audience member holding the control. I’m including it because 1) the idea itself is kind of funny and 2) there’s a hilarious math joke in the set.
Extra Crispy tells us where to get a great croissant in fifteen US cities. This is very important information.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: appearances, environment, fitzgerald, links, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ April 15, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/15/17.

I updated my ranking of the top 50 prospects in the minors this week; there’s minimal reranking in there, just status notes on players, with guys moving up to replace those already in the majors. (Jesse Winker was promoted after the piece ran.) I wrote a long draft blog post on Hunter Greene, Brian McKay, and other draft prospects I’ve seen so far. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

You can preorder my upcoming book, Smart Baseball, on amazon, or from other sites via the Harper-Collins page for the book. Also, please sign up for my more-or-less weekly email newsletter.

And now, the links…

The one great longread I saw this week was from Backchannel on what’s happened to Google Books, the tech giant’s stated effort to scan every book, ever, to make them all searchable. I’ve used this feature quite a few times, including during the research for Smart Baseball, where I could search for certain terms or keywords in books I couldn’t get my hands on.
California passed a tougher law on childhood vaccinations, and, lo and behold, inoculation rates went up about 3 percentage points.
The handful of loonies who opposed the law largely claimed “parental choice” as a reason why they should be allowed to deny their children a safe, effective treatment that can prevent debilitating and sometimes fatal diseases. It’s a terrible argument, because those “choices” affect everyone, not just your children. (Also, that choice isn’t for you – it’s for your child, who can’t choose for him/herself, and depends on you to take care of his/her medical needs.)
If you’ve seen a vaccine denier point to measles outbreaks in China as evidence the MMR vaccine doesn’t work, well, the outbreaks occurred among unvaccinated groups. Facts may not carry the day with deniers, but it is on the rational among us to make sure the truth is still out there for people who might be on the fence.
A Utah judge praised a convicted sexual abuser during sentencing, with at least one of the victims present. This kind of behavior will only discourage victims from coming forward in the future. Utah judges may be removed from the bench via a judicial conduct commission censure or a 2/3 vote of the legislature, so if you live in that state, get on the phone.
I think my new least favorite food buzzword is “clean.” Panera, which is a decent chain choice if you want something vegetarian while traveling, claims its food is 100% “clean,” which means absolutely nothing unless previously they were rolling their bread dough out on the floor. It’s also a buzzword for people who eat weird, ultra-restricted diets that probably don’t provide enough nutrition because so-called “clean eaters” often skip dairy or wheat, foods that are often demonized without scientific basis. I’ll keep eatin’ dirty, thanks.
Dr. David Dao, the passenger beaten and dragged off a United flight last week, has filed court papers in preparation for a lawsuit and compared his treatment to what he experienced while fighting in the Vietnam War. Tim Wu of the New Yorker wrote about why he stopped flying United after it merged with Continental. Deadspin’s Albert Burneko discussed the absurdity of backing the corporation in such cases.
An American doctor has been charged with mutilating the genitalia of two girls under the age of 10, a barbaric practice common in eastern African countries and in Indonesia known as female genital mutilation.
New Mexico has banned “lunch shaming,” the cruel practice of embarrassing children whose parents have unpaid school meal debts.
I listened to the entire seven episodes of the podcast S-Town, and I’m not sure if I think the time was well spent. Did I really get anything out of it? Was John B. McLemore, who was most likely a manic depressive on top of the later medical issues revealed in the final episode, someone worthy of a seven-hour biography? The Atlantic also asks about the ethics of revealing so much of his life after his death, and the details of other characters in the play. The Guardian went to Woodstock, Alabama, to interview the locals about their sudden bit of fame, and most didn’t seem to mind the portrayals.
I was apparently behind the times, as I was unfamiliar with the Twitter replies-to-retweets ratio until this past week.
Paul Krugman wrote that publicity stunts aren’t policy and then Trump ordered (or simply handwaved along) the dropping of the ‘mother of all bombs’ on Afghanistan. It’s working, though: Compare media coverage of the Russian connection, or of GOP rollbacks of Obama policies, to coverage of the Syria and Afghanistan bombings and now our taunting of North Korea. (For what it’s worth, the North Korean government has always been the one that worried me, because it’s essentially sociopathy in government form, and they’re well-funded enough to do mass damage to someone, South Korea or Japan or us. But I would prefer to see a long-term policy solution to the issue, not threatening to Pyongyang to wag the dog.)
There can be no beatings and imprisoning of gays in Chechnya because there are no gays in Chechnya, say Chechnyan authorities. This Guardian report says otherwise.
I enjoyed this interview with Dana Cree, pastry chef for Chicago’s Publican restaurant group and author of the new cookbook Hello, My Name Is Ice Cream: The Art and Science of the Scoop. Within the Q&A she discusses which ingredients serve as stabilizers to minimize the size of ice crystals in ice cream, providing a smoother texture. I personally do not like the eggless ice cream known as Philadelphia-style, which is just dairy, sugar, and flavors, for that very reason. I prefer frozen custard, sometimes called New York ice cream, which includes egg yolks – often a lot – and less butterfat, because the yolks contain lecithin, which emulsifies the fat and the water in the base and thus prevents large crystals from forming. Lecithin can break down at subzero temperatures, however, so vegetable gums may be better if you’re going super-cold, if you can’t eat eggs, or if you don’t want that slight eggnog note in a delicate flavor like vanilla bean.
The first part of this NPR Fresh Air interview with author David Owen, about the Colorado River, is interesting and particularly relevant to me, because one of the main reasons I did not want to remain a long-term resident of Arizona was that the state has no strategy for dealing with the coming water crisis in the region. The Colorado River is overtaxed, badly, and Arizona’s idea of coping is storing a few years of water in underground reserves. He has a new book out on the topic, Where the Water Goes, and discusses some of it in the Q&A. Then he talks about golfing with Donald Trump and I moved on with my life.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, environment, food science, ice cream, links, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ April 8, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/8/17.

I had one Insider post this week, on the most prospect-packed minor league rosters to open the season. I have already filed a draft blog post on last night’s outing by Hunter Greene, with additional notes on a half-dozen other draft prospects, including Brendan McKay and Austin Beck. (EDIT: It’s up now.) I held my regular Klawchat on Thursday.

I resumed boardgame reviews for Paste this week with a look at the reissue of Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, specifically the Jack the Ripper & West End Cases set, but found it more like a solitaire puzzle than a cooperative game.

You can preorder my upcoming book, Smart Baseball, on amazon, or from other sites via the Harper-Collins page for the book. The book now has two positive reviews out, one from Kirkus Reviews and one from Publishers Weekly.

Also, please sign up for my more-or-less weekly email newsletter.

And now, the links…

Long reads first: “It is the obligation of every person born in a safer room to open the door when someone in danger knocks.” That’s from this must-read piece from Iranian-born professor Dina Nayeri, writing in The Guardian about the folly and danger of demanding that refugees be “grateful.”
How about the history of Pearl Jam to commemorate the band’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? I was glad to see the band’s predecessor, Mother Love Bone, get a mention; Apple was an album ahead of its time lyrically and was full of great hooks.
From October: the New Yorker profiled Frauke Petry, the new star of Germany’s neo-Nazi right.
Delaware’s own Dogfish Head brewery has been aggressively suing competitors over trademark violations, incurring the wrath of smaller craft brewers and craft beer aficionados. While the owner is technically right that he has to defend the trademarks to protect them, why couldn’t he license certain terms, like Namaste, for a nominal fee instead?
What is Bashar al-Assad thinking by using chemical weapons in Syria’s civil war? I don’t know, but I would guess what he’s thinking now is that he’s discovered how far he can go without provoking a response. He can kill as many civilians as he likes, any way he wants, as long as he doesn’t use chemical weapons to do so.
Texas Republican Lamar Smith heads the House Committee on Science even though he’s among the worst science deniers in Washington. Now ER doctor Ryan Allen is trying to run against the popular Congressman.
With the ongoing call for reducing regulations as a whole, and specifically speeding new medications to market, NPR ran an editorial pointing out the drawbacks of this approach.
Why are Americans so in love with their own ignorance? Professor Tom Nichols attempts to answer this question in a Q&A with Maclean’s and in his new book, The Death of Expertise.
Parents goes for science in an op ed that explains Why I don’t feed my family organic food. I’m with the author on every point but the antibiotics: The concern about them isn’t that they end up on the plate, but that they’re used at all, and the organic label is one of the few ways to ensure that you’re not supporting the overuse of antibiotics by factory farming outfits.
There’s a new theory behind the cause of celiac disease – a group of scientists claims a virus is triggering it in people already genetically predisposed to the autoimmune disease. The real upshot: Eating processed, hybridized wheat is not what causes celiac, no matter what your local quack tells you.
An unvaccinated Laguna Beach High School student contracted measles and may have exposed other students. I hope they make his parents pay any associated medical costs if the highly contagious, dangerous disease spreads at all. You make that choice, you face the consequences.
Another consequence? Getting measles may weaken your immune system for up to three years after the infection. So, survive measles, die of something else!
A British court has ordered a loony-toon vegan “all-natural” mother to vaccinate her damn kids. Given the description of her parenting, she shouldn’t have custody at all.
An early fish biologist gives the case against eating fish. I would argue that this is the case for eating fish (and meat) far more judiciously than we do – knowing where it comes from, how it was raised or caught, and paying more attention to pollution and ocean acidification.
I got thrown out of a bar in New York City … but now a new one is opening, called Coup, with proceeds going to fight Donald Trump’s agenda. One of the bartenders/co-owners is Sother Teague of Amor & Amargo, a bitters-focused cocktail bar I enjoyed tremendously the one time I visited (including a chat with Mr. Teague himself).
Solar power is becoming cost-competitive with nonrenewable fuel sources in many markets, but hey, keep propping dirty coal, you fucking idiots.
The Kentucky Coal Museum is installing solar panels to reduce its energy costs.
Fox News has its moments of clarity, like when Chris Wallace just emasculated EPA chief and climate change denialist Scott Pruitt on air. Wallace did what journalists should do: set party aside and stick to the truth in the face of someone who continues to lie.
Spanish scientists have developed a new way of measuring a particle’s spin that appears to soften the limits set out in Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.
Some Kansas high school students started asking questions about their new principals’ resume, eventually uncovering a fraud that led to her resignation.
A Washington Post editorial calls Mitch McConnell the man who broke America. Whatever he is, the people of Kentucky keep electing him and the GOP keeps giving him power.
An Iowa legislator has proposed a bill that would fine men for masturbating and require rectal exams before doctors could prescribe erectile dysfunction medications.
One in five Oklahoma school districts operates a four-day week for budgetary reasons. It’s hardly surprising that that state, which has produced some of the worst science-denying and anti-woman legislation in the last few years, puts education at the bottom of the priority list.
A woman writes about calling out the creep who took her picture in a bar without her permission. It’s on all of us to say something when we see this kind of behavior from men.
Jared Kushner went to Iraq and someone added children’s-book text to the pictures.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, beer, cocktails, denialism, food safety, Music, organic agriculture, physics, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ March 26, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/26/17.

My annual column of breakout player picks went up on Thursday for Insiders, and I held a Klawchat that same day. I had one other Insider post since the last roundup, on four prospects I saw in Arizona, one Cub, one Royal, and two Padres.

Also, please sign up for my more-or-less weekly email newsletter.

And now, the links…

Call your Representatives ASAP if you oppose the stripping of online privacy rights, not that I think anything’s going to stop the Republicans from helping the ISPs here.
Why don’t we have a Lyme disease vaccine for humans, even though there’s one for dogs? Blame the anti-vaxxers.
You can also blame them if rubella, which causes autism, makes a comeback.
Venezuelan’s spiraling economic crisis means there’s a severe shortage of critical drugs for the mentally ill.
Thank goodness the Administration is trying to save us from such dangerous people as the Syrian refugees who’ve started a booming chocolate company in Canada. I feel so much safer already.
Is the Admin’s ban on the use of laptops and tablets on certain Middle Eastern airlines actually just retaliation in an ongoing trade war?
I don’t complain about the amount I pay in federal income taxes, but I do think it’s ridiculous how difficult and complicated it is. (I have used an accountant for the last five years, since my work contracts became more involved.) Why is filing still so difficult? Because Intuit and H&R Block spend millions in lobbying to keep it that way.
An independent group that monitors civilian deaths from airstrikes (including those by drones) says they are overwhelmed by the uptick in such claims since the new Administration took office. The drone program was one of the worst of Obama’s policies, but it appears it’s been cranked up since the regime change. This is a very good way to make a whole new generation of terrorists who hate the United States.
You should be horrified by the “advice” a Homeland Security official gave Gizmodo staffers on workplace violence.
The New England Journal of Medicine has an op ed suggesting some better answers for HHS Secretary Tom Price on mandatory immunizations.
If you live in Florida, call your state reps to tell them you oppose the new bill to allow the teaching of creationism in public schools. It’s a violation of the separation of church and state anyway, but still, let’s not go down that particular toilet.
The gluten-free craze is driven by anti-science and opportunism. A lot of pseudo-doctors (like “naturopaths” or chiropractors) sell a bunch of tests and treatments to people who don’t need any of this, using consumer misperceptions about things like gluten.
Chiropractors like this one, accused of practicing medicine without a license. If your chiropractor starts claiming s/he can cure or treat various diseases, call your state licensing board.
A company that takes advantage of consumer ignorance about science had to recall one of its products because it contained peanuts. So much of organic/non-GM marketing is about the claim that consumers of other products don’t know what’s in their food. The irony is thick here.
Julie DiCaro asks Indiana basketball to reconsider considering Steve Alford for its open head coaching position.
I particularly enjoyed Will Leitch’s look at the biggest droughts in various pro and college sports because I’m pretty team-agnostic in any sport, so my rooting interest is often determined by who’s gone the longest without a title/playoff appearance/whatever, or who’s never had one in franchise or school history.
There’s supposed to be a ruling in the Roman Polanski rape case due within the next 90 days. He’s 83, and spent 40 years outside the U.S., fighting extradition and avoiding jail time for drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl. Why the fuck would we let this creep back into the country?
New York Times food critic Pete Wells visited Austin’s Franklin BBQ.
Tacos Chiwas, one of the hottest new restaurants in Phoenix from 2016, was burglarized earlier this month. I ate there in October and was a big fan of their Chihuahuan-style tacos, which were an absolute bargain too. There’s a GoFundMe page to try to help the restaurant’s owners recover some of what they lost.
I gave Leitch a link, so now I have to give one to Grierson. Here’s Tim’s rundown of the documentaries at the annual True/False film festival, held in Columbia, Missouri.
I was unfamiliar with the annual Disability Day of Mourning until reading this editorial on the unnoticed crimes of caregivers killing their disabled charges.
The Texas state alcohol licensing board spent tends of thousands of public dollars partying, traveling to expensive resorts to drink with industry lobbyists. The state government of Texas is a septic tank.
White supremacists have created a “guide” to posing as black people while operating troll accounts on social media.
High Street on Market is one of my favorite restaurants in Philly, maybe my favorite, period. I didn’t realize that chef-owner Eli Kulp was left paralyzed by the May 2015 Amtrak derailment until I saw this week about a new wine from his restaurant group. They’ll donate $25 from every bottle to spinal cord research.
I’m sure you’ve seen one or both of these, but in the Schadenfreude Department, we have the idiot woman who voted for Trump, only to see her husband arrested and likely deported, and rural Trump voters about to lose their development programs if his proposed budget passes. I want to feel bad, but these people each bear some tiny sliver of responsibility for this mess we’re in. Voting matters, and voting incorrectly has consequences.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: bbq, documentaries, evolution, food safety, links, rape culture, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ March 19, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/18/17.

Two Insider posts this week from Arizona, one on Padres and Dodgers prospects and one on Dodgers, Reds, and Rangers prospects. I’ll have one more post coming from this trip. I did not chat this week because I was out at games every day. The trip also meant I didn’t get to review a boardgame this week either.

Also, please sign up for my more-or-less weekly email newsletter.

And now, the links…

The best longread of the week comes from Patrick Hruby of Vice, on Wisconsin forward Nigel Hayes and his lawsuit against the NCAA, challenging the college cartel’s rules on amateurism.
Also great, although with some caveats: what is the fate of the critic in the “clickbait” age? There’s an underlying argument here about quality of content versus that clickbait mentality, but I think the author lapses into cultural elitism enough to undermine his point.
The world’s only grass-eating monkeys survive in one protected savannah in Ethiopia, but their habitat is under threat from humans and climate change. The photography in this National Geographic piece is stunning.
Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price, who belongs to a crackpot evangelical medical association called AAPS, said that states should decide on mandatory vaccination laws, and the Washington Post showed why this is a terrible idea, in graphical form. They also wrote about the AAPS’ “unorthodox” (read: bullshit) positions on science a month ago. It is absolutely insane that someone so virulently anti-science is running HHS.
An algal bloom in the Gulf of Oman is growing thanks to climate change, which our Clueless Leader says doesn’t exist and/or is a Chinese hoax.
Trump fired US Attorney Preet Bharara earlier this month, perhaps because Bharara was investigating Secretary Price’s stock trades for evidence of insider trading. The move may also benefit Friend of Trump Rupert Murdoch, whose Fox News was facing multiple investigations from Bharara’s office.
If you live in Georgia’s sixth district, formerly represented by Price, and are as outraged as I am over the anti-science, anti-civil liberties policies of the current administration, consider supporting Jon Ossoff in the upcoming special election on April 18th.
Congress is threatening to pass a national right-to-work law, which would deal the most serious blow to American unions since the Wagner Act guaranteed workers’ basic rights to organize. There is a legitimate debate to be had on unionization; closed shops can artificially restrict employment, and unionized labor forces can increase prices for consumers, to pick two issues that arise in industries with strong unions. Right-to-work laws circumvent the debate entirely, and serve no purpose but to help enrich employers.
Meanwhile, in Australia, the Rational United States, the Prime Minister has proposed banning unvaccinated children from childcare facilities.
The gluten-free fad may be a symptom of a bigger problem of patients forum-shopping and falling for quacks, like “naturopaths” or “allopathic” practitioners who con patients into submitting to expensive tests for conditions that can only be cured by those charlatans’ treatments.
Gwyneth Paltrow, who has become an expert of pseudoscience and woo, proposed a “goat milk therapy” for parasites that is both stupid and dangerous. Paltrow appears to have the biology knowledge of very small rocks, but that hasn’t stopped her from recommending all kinds of fake “treatments.”
The rise of Elijah Quashie, an amateur food critic in the UK known as the Chicken Connoisseur, led to this Eater piece asking who gets to be a food critic? Is it true, as Quashie said in this interview, that once you start being a critic, then you’re a critic, with no further credentials required? If not, then is criticism of food, art, fashion, etc., inherently elitist, available only to those who can afford the proper background or training?
A basketball player in Maryland was prevented from playing in the team’s first regional final game because she was wearing a hijab. The error was the referees’, not the district or state authorities.
The Guardian did an update and profile of Rachel Dolezal, the NAACP chapter head who was posing as a black woman until she was outed by her parents as white. The piece includes an excerpt from her upcoming memoir. I might have found a shred of sympathy for her after reading this, although I still think posing as a person of color and then comparing herself to transgender people was inexcusable.
Reader Stephanie K. passed along this Modern Farmer link from last June on how cold-pressed juice is bad for you and for the environment. Pro tip: eat whole fruit, rather than just drinking juice.
Reader Larry passed along this link from Vice on how lax regulations allow shady used-car dealers to sell cars they don’t own, which in turn become legal nightmares for the buyers.
I’d mentioned a few weeks ago that Kurt Eichenwald had gone after trolls who’d sent him images with the goal of triggering his epilepsy. One of them was just charged with cyberstalking in Texas.
Remember Srebrenica? The Bosnian town just elected a Serb mayor, reigniting long-simmering ethnic tensions in the village and in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina as a whole, where the three main ethnic groups are threatening to divide the country into yet smaller states along religious and linguistic lines.
Another reader recommendation (I apologize, I can’t find your tweet): Ars Technica explores some of the boardgames the CIA uses to train officers. I don’t think I’ll be reviewing Collection or Kingpin any time soon.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, boardgames, links, ncaa, pseudoscience, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ March 11, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/11/17.

I had one piece for Insiders this week, covering four players who look different in the early going this spring – Jason Heyward, Tyler Glasnow, Taijuan Walker, and Tim Anderson – although it’s not all positive news. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Also, please sign up for my more-or-less weekly email newsletter.

And now, the links…

Ryan Leaf might be the biggest bust in NFL draft history, but he’s made a second act for himself after serving a prison term, and told the LA Times his story in his own words.
An ophthalmologist in Oklahoma posted an anti-vaccine screed to his Facebook page, but SkepticalRaptor is here to dissect and debunk this bullshit. If you live in Oklahoma, contact the state medical licensing board and ask them to investigate the doctor, James Meehan (license #21256), for posting these dangerous, false claims, which happen to be outside of any area of medicine for which he’s licensed.
A reader sent along this National Geographic article on science’s evolving understanding of sex, gender, and identity. It led me into a series of clicks and searches that got me to this 2014 piece on sex ‘testing’ by the IOC, arguing that if you say you’re a woman, that should be enough for athletics officials.
Another week, another article on why we fall for fake news, this one giving some cognitive-science explanations.
Georgia Republicans are trying to further gerrymander the state to protect their majority. Full disclosure: I have donated to the campaign of Democrat Jon Ossoff, who is running in the April 18th special election to fill GA-6, the House seat vacated by new HHS Secretary Tom Price.
Former (and maybe still?) Trump advisor Roger Stone went on a tirade of sexist, harassing tweets, but Twitter never suspended or deleted his account, so their claims about clamping down on this kind of hostile environment are so much bullshit. Meanwhile, the director of the Netflix documentary on Stone has said on Twitter that it’s a critical expose of the cretin, and that Stone isn’t getting paid for his participation. Should he even get this sort of publicity?
On February 2nd, forty-eight US university and college presidents wrote this letter urging President Trump to rescind the Muslim ban, citing its threat to higher education. My undergraduate alma mater’s president is on there. I’ve reached out to Carnegie Mellon but haven’t had a response.
Charles Blow of the New York Times called on Trump to pause this presidency, but he’s tilting at windmills, I think. I believe the Repulicans are going to try to slam through as much legislation and as many executive orders as they can, fearing a blowback in 2018 or more likely 2020.
Ben Carson may have developed a method of separating conjoined twins, but he doesn’t seem to know how memory storage in the brain works.
Also, Carson called slaves “immigrants,” as if they all left Ghana in search of a better life being worked, starved, and beaten to death in the American south. That linked piece, from the New Yorker‘s Jelani Cobb, puts Carson’s gaffe in the broader context of the misuse of American history to further political agendas.
One likely candidate to head the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division is a Republican Sikh trial lawyer, born to Indian immigrants, who once worked for the ACLU. The article says she’s hard to “pigeonhole,” although I left with the distinct impression that she’s further to the right than the head of the CRD ought to be.
ProPublica has compiled over 400 Trump appointees across the country, which includes a recent high school graduate, many Trump supports, some alt-right figures, and the former massage therapist who got fired from his Department of Energy on Friday when Buzzfeed ‘uncovered’ his tweets calling for the extermination of Muslims. If they can’t even vet their own employees properly, why do we think their so-called “extreme vetting” will be worth anything at all?
The Washington Post says Trumpism is a monumental fraud. Is it, though? I think he’s doing pretty much what he promised. The fraud was in the minds of people who thought he’d say one thing and do another.
Former NSA analyst John Schindler says that Trump’s claims that he was wiretapped are a “kooky fantasy,” and that the Jeff Sessions-Russia link creates even more awkward questions for 45. Stephen Hayes summarized the wiretapping nonsense for the Weekly Standard, although he’s a bit kinder to the President than the circumstances appear to warrant.
Trump signed an executive order that will help his own golf courses. All hail the kleptocracy.
The same Missouri legislature who praised overdoses from “removing (victims) from the gene pool” has repeatedly blocked attempts to set up a statewide prescription database to help track patients who abuse prescription drugs and use multiple doctors to obtain them. Missouri is the only state without such a program. I think I’m supposed to say “#BFIB” here.
Right-wing nutjobs love to claim that the debunking site snopes is some sort of left-wing blog, which I find puzzling because they’re about as rational as it gets. CNN did a great profile of the site, one of its founders, and its growth plans, including the desire to get into more first-person news reporting, which I don’t quite see as part of their core competency.
Alex Jones, the batshit-crazy conspiracy theorist who claims those twenty kids killed at Sandy Hook weren’t really killed, is really just comedian Bill Hicks, who faked his own death and returned as the hero to the delusional and gullible masses.
The defense attorneys for two San Antonio cops accused of sexually assaulting multiple women claimed it wasn’t a crime because the women were sexually experienced, and that the victims were wrong to have sex outside of marriage. Slut-shaming in 2016? God bless Texas!
This Harvard Business Review article explains that how consumers view prices may matter more than the actual prices. For example, everyone thinks Whole Foods is expensive. If they lower their prices on some items, it may not actually boost sales, because consumers may still perceive Whole Foods as more expensive than competitors.
HBR also weighed in on blockchains, bitcoin, and the future of currency, with a cautionary note about the venture capital being poured into startups that probably don’t offer anything new.
I loved the subtitle on this ThinkProgress piece on the House GOP’s Trumpcare proposal: “These guys have no idea what they’re doing.”
Should junk food be sold in plain packages to discourage their purchase? I find their claims a bit hard to believe – are adults truly that susceptible to brightly colored wrappers? – but would also characterize this proposed regulation as an overreach. I’m much more concerned with ensuring that packaging is clear and accurate.
This BBC editorial comments on how women are treated differently if they have big breasts. This is another of those “I can’t believe we’re still doing this in 2017” topics.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: football, gender issues, links, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ February 25, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/25/17.

I wrote one Insider piece this week, on how the Mets should handle their rotation, with six capable major-league starters right now, but five of them coming off of some kind of injury last year, from Thor’s bone spurs to Harvey’s TOS repair surgery. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

My latest boardgame review for Paste covers the worker-placement game Ulm, which works fine mechanically but has a theme that’s just so overdone for me.

You can preorder my upcoming book, Smart Baseball, on amazon, or from other sites via the Harper-Collins page for the book. The book just got its first official positive review, from Kirkus Reviews.

Also, please sign up for my more-or-less weekly email newsletter.

And now, the links…

An oral history of Homestar Runner? An oral history of Homestar Runner! Thanks to my longtime friend Pete for finding this Q&A with the Brothers Chaps.
NPR’s Linda Holmes disagrees with me, saying this season of Top Chef has been especially satisfying. Link doesn’t contain any spoilers for this most recent episode.
Is I Am Not Your Negro the the target of racist vote brigading on user-generated ratings sites like IMDB? I think the answer is pretty obvious given how hard it is to see that movie in theaters.
This September 2015 article gives some background on the making of the Oscar-nominated film Tanna, one of my top ten films of last year.
My former home state of Arizona has decided the First Amendment rights to freedom of assembly and speech are no longer valid, as the state Senate has voted for a bill that criminalizes peaceful protests if those protests eventually turn violent. It’s based on a false premise of paid protesters, but really, it’s a sign that the state is run by white-nationalist extremists, as it was when I lived there.
A Muslim woman who worked for the National Security Council quit after eight days in the Trump White House. A ten-year CIA analyst and NSC spokesman quit after less than a month under the Trump Administration. Neither could stand working for this anti-democratic regime.
The “Blacks for Trump” guy behind the President at various rallies is a former member of a murderous cult with a more recent history of gay-bashing commentary.
A good first-person longread from Pacific Standard‘s Laurie Penny, who spent time on the Milo Yiannopoulos tour bus with the clueless alt-right kids who followed him.
The House Judiciary Committee’s Republican majority plans to bury the Democrats’ resolution to force Trump to reveal his entanglements with Russia, including any conflicts of interest. That Committee includes some of the worst humans in Congress, including outright racist Steve King of Iowa and anti-science Science Committee head Lamar Smith. Check and see if your representative is on the committee and perhaps make a call on Monday about this resolution.
The vaccine-denial movement in Texas has been energized by the election of Trump and other anti-science politicians. Every day I hear political news out of that state, I’m glad I didn’t take a job I was offered there a few years ago.
A math professor at Tufts is trying to fight gerrymandering by arming mathematicians to testify against it, using geometry as the alternative.
I’ve mentioned Universal Basic Income here before, but Finland’s experiment with giving UBI to 2000 citizens is the first I’ve seen of a real-world implementation.
Most of you saw this, I assume, but I’ll pass it on just in case: Hall of Famer Mike Piazza now owns a professional soccer team in Italy, in the region where Parmiggiano-Reggiano is made.
Fortune looks at the search for the perfect sugar substitute, and why artificial sweeteners, sugar alcohols, and stevia have all fallen short.
Speaking of sweeteners, here’s Stella Parks of Serious Eats on why you shouldn’t buy blackstrap molasses unless the recipe specifically calls for it.
If you want a preview of what’s in store for us, Zimbabwe’s longtime dictator Robert Mugabe is now 92, and his wife said when he dies his corpse would still win re-election.
I can’t even do “tweet of the week” any more because there are too many good ones, but this was the one I saved to include here:

I wish i could credit the artist on this. pic.twitter.com/Ao2teFan1U

— Greg Britton (@gmbritton) February 20, 2017

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, Cooking, links, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ February 18, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/18/17.

For Insiders, I ranked the top prospects for 2017 impact, although we later removed Alex Reyes from the list now that he’s out for the year. I held my regular Klawchat on Thursday.

On the boardgame front, I reviewed the light family-friendly game Imhotep for Paste this week; it was one of the runners-up for the Spiel des Jahres last year, losing to Isle of Skye. Last week, over at Vulture, I wrote about some of the best games for couples.

You can preorder my upcoming book, Smart Baseball, on amazon, or from other sites via the Harper-Collins page for the book. Also, please sign up for my more-or-less weekly email newsletter.

And now, the links…

Two great investigative reads this week from the New York Times. First, the already disastrous legacy of the Rio Olympics, which should serve as a warning to future bidders (but won’t). Brazil is still a poor country, and they’re poorer for the huge investments they made in now-useless infrastructure for the Games. Second, the growing water crisis in Mexico City, one of the world’s largest cities, which also happens to be sinking (as is the other contender for largest city, Shanghai).
Baseball and depression collide in this story on the life and suicide of Jake Eliopoulos, a former day-one draft pick of the Blue Jays who struggled with mental illness and took his own life on his fifth attempt.
Speaking of depression, is it possible that it has an actual purpose in evolutionary terms?
Thanks in part to decriminalizing many drug offenses, the Netherlands has a lot of empty prison cells, so they’re using some to help provide temporary housing to migrants and refugees. Our draconian drug laws and privatized prisons have done far more harm than good, and the Dutch and Portuguese present strong models if we ever want to change our policies.
Austin has a new boardgame bar and restaurant called Vigilante, and I need to visit this place, stat.
Phoenix eats news! The folks behind the wonderful Tacos Chiwas are opening a new tamale place right next door. They’re hoping to have it open around March 4th, just in time for spring training.
Claims about yogurt and other probiotic foods are likely overblown, as research indicates that consuming these foods doesn’t alter the makeup of your body’s microbiome. (They may still be good for you in other ways, of course.)
There’s a coffee shop in Brooklyn that sells an $18 cup of gesha coffee, sparking faux outrage over the price. The coffee costs that much because the beans themselves are hard to grow and of especially high quality. If you don’t want to spend that much, you have plenty of other options, from $4 pour-over cups of still-great coffee on down.
This story is from four months ago, but highlights how climate change seems to be causing a rise in ciguatera toxins’ presence in fish. The toxin can be fatal to humans, as it was in this case, and isn’t removed by cooking.
Meanwhile, a woman in Texas is suing Popeye’s, claiming she got a debilitating screwworm infection from their food. The suit may be baseless – as the article points out, food served at 165 or higher wouldn’t have the live parasites – but I posted it to point out that screwworm infections are almost unheard of in the U.S. now because of a government-run program of eradication using synthetic pesticides in the 1950s.
We might be getting closer to a dengue vaccine, according to that editorial by one of the scientists overseeing some of the trials, where he also explains why vaccine development takes so long. (Hint: One reason is that vaccines have to be incredibly safe to be approved.)
Unfortunately, the vaccine-denial movement is gaining traction, spurred on by President This-is-fine-dog’s open embrace of the debunked vaccine/autism claim. The same writer, Vox’s Julia Belluz, also exposed the bullshit agenda of RFK Jr. and Robert Deniro, who promised $100K to anyone who could prove vaccines are safe, which has already been proven. I’d like to see people skip Deniro’s film festival this year as long as he’s making public health threats like this one. (And, Bob, I’m sorry, but the most likely reason your son has autism is that the DNA in your old-man sperm was degraded.)
A new group called 314 Action is trying to get more scientists to run for elected office, because politicians who think they know more than scientists are dangerous. Remember that Republican Congressman Lamar Smith (Texas, where else?), chair of the House Committee on Science is a raging science denier, notably on climate change.
Texas is really pushing hard to turn the clock back a century or more, but their fight with the NFL over so-called “bathroom bills” that strip protections from LGBTQ citizens looks like a battle they can’t win. I’d like to see MLB step up on this one now that a state with major league teams is trying to pull the same crap North Carolina and Mississippi did.
Get ready for a nationwide, GOP-led assault on voting rights. If the majority won’t support your party – as demographic trends indicate is likely – then the way to retain power is to make it harder for opposing voters to cast their ballots. It’s on all of us to make sure that doesn’t happen.
Trump’s assault on the free press included credentialing a pro-Trump/white nationalist blog whose 28-year-old founder has promised to “troll” other media.
It appears that the White House’s failed travel ban, which they’re promising to reinstate, has already hurt American businesses by deterring international travel to the U.S.. Trump promised to create jobs, but his biggest move to date will likely destroy them.
Haaretz argues that Trump is an anti-Semite, and no Jewish person should support him.
Activist Attorneys General in left-leaning states represent one of the strongest arms of the anti-Trump movement, one that this Vanity Fair editorial argues he underestimated.
Author Kevin Birmingham, whose book The Most Dangerous Book, about the writing and publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses, was one of my favorite reads from 2016, spoke at length about the great shame of universities abusing “adjunct” professorships, using such de facto freelancers to keep costs down (even as tuition keeps rising, so where’s that money going?).
There was a very strange heist in London last week – thieves broke into a storage facility and stole over £2 million worth of rare books, including one of the original copies of Copernicus’ treatise on the movement of the sun and planets. No one can figure out why they did it, since such books would be impossible to fence, but there’s fascination over their daring way of getting into the building.
This BBC audio segment explores left-handedness’ prevalence and reasons it exists, as well as debunking “ambidextrousness” and explaining how we can be right-footed or left-eyed (like Lisa Lopes).
Alabama is embroiled in its own scandal, as the corrupt Governor appointed the Attorney General who was supposed to investigate him to Jeff Sessions’ vacated Senate seat.
The Oroville Dam evacuations created a temporary surge in refugees, and a local Sikh temple opened its doors to them, building new connections with their neighbors in the process.
Finally, this piece about why liberals are wrong about Trump is a must-read regardless of where you fall on the political spectrum.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: boardgames, climate change, coffee, food safety, links, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ February 11, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/11/17.

No Insider content this week – you’ve had plenty, so don’t get greedy. I did hold a Klawchat on Thursday.

For Paste, I reviewed the asymmetrical two-player game The Blood of an Englishman, which is based on Jack and the Beanstalk. I also returned to Vulture with a post on eight great boardgames for couples, in honor of Valentine’s Day.

You can preorder my upcoming book, Smart Baseball, on amazon, or from other sites via the Harper-Collins page for the book. Also, please sign up for my more-or-less weekly email newsletter.

And now, the links…

Detroit Tigers owner and Little Caesars founder Mike Ilitch passed away yesterday. Here’s a 2016 piece on the hidden cost of cheap pizza, where reducing prices often means taking it out of workers’ pockets.
One of the best longreads of the week covered how a Huntington, West Virginia, school official improved school lunches contrary to the meddling efforts of celebrity chef Jamie Oliver.
Another great longread: how a young Wikipedia editor/admin is fighting back against misogynist trolls on the site.
Eater has a longread, more a collection of shorter pieces than a single story, on the things people will do to hunt and pick rare mushrooms.
As much as I crush the NCAA for some of its policies, they’re leading the fight against anti-LGBT discrimination right now, including a threatened six-year boycott of North Carolina that would cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars in lost business over that state’s hate bill HB2, which prevents local governments from passing laws or ordinances protecting LGBT citizens from discrimination.
There’s a potential famine brewing in sub-Saharan Africa thanks to the spread of the fall armyworm, which is devastating crops in Zimbabwe already and may be present in six other African countries. We can talk about organic agriculture all we want, but if a synthetic pesticide stops this worm, it’ll save millions of lives.
Speaking of which, Dr. Paul Offit wrote about how Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring cost millions of lives too, because DDT, while clearly bad for the environment as a broad-use pesticide, is extremely effective at stopping the spread of mosquito-borne illnesses like malaria.
Betsy DeVos was confirmed this week as Secretary of Education, but let’s recall the damage she did in Michigan with her charter-school endeavors. I’ve said on here before that I favor at least some school choice, but school choice is not a panacea for underperforming public schools, and her appointment is a potential disaster for public education in this country.
TIME became (I think) the first major publication to run an editorial arguing that it’s time to impeach President Trump. Meanwhile, good journalism keeps coming from unexpected outlets, like Vogue highlighting five things Trump is doing now but for which he attacked Hillary Clinton during the campaign.
Buy stock in telecom giants? The new FCC is going to kill off net neutrality, opening those quasi-monopolies up for greater power to squeeze money from content providers and consumers.
Meanwhile, Republicans across the country are fighting to restrict voting rights, moves that are likely to help their candidates in 2018 and beyond. If you live in such a state, make your voice heard now, before it’s silenced.
Why did House Republicans block a vote on a resolution stating that the Holocaust targeted Jews? Are they so beholden to party that they wouldn’t even vote on a fact?
John Yoo, who was Justice Department official under President George W. Bush and advocated heavy use of executive orders, wrote that President Trump has taken executive power too far. This is like Tony Larussa saying a manager uses too many relievers. And a former National Security Council member also wrote for the New York Times that Steve Bannon shouldn’t be on the NSC.
Are Trump’s opponents falling into his ‘trap’ with their outrage? I don’t know that I agree with this National Review piece’s conclusions, but it’s worth considering that there are still many voters who will nod their heads at his populist moves without considering their consequences.
Is Trump’s fight against the judiciary his Watergate? I doubt it, although there are some parallels.
Marco Rubio has moments where he appears to be one of the few GOP leaders willing to oppose the President or stake out a position near the center, including a little-heard speech he gave this week on the demise of civil disagreements. That’s great, Marco; now vote against your party’s President on something that matters.
Meanwhile, the GOP continues to use the term “fake news” to keep up its attacks on respected, objective journalism outlets, such as Alabama representative Mo Brooks calling the Washington Post fact-checkers “fake news” for pointing out that his voter fraud claims were, well, fraudulent.
Ah, North Dakota, where two Republican legislators said in session that women should spend Sundays taking care of their husbands. Will they face any electoral consequences for this? I doubt it.
Vaccines! There are over 400 mumps cases in Washington State’s outbreak. That’s why Peter Hotez, Ddirector of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, can say that the anti-vaxxers are “winning” in another NYT editorial. (I subscribed to the Times online in the fall, mostly to keep these posts going, because they are producing some tremendous content across the board right now.)
If you saw the Daily Mail piece claiming that politicians had been hoodwinked by falsified climate-change data, well, don’t read the Daily Mail, as it’s become an unreliable source on any economic, political, or scientific topic. And the story was utter nonsense.
Former Top Chef contestant Mark Simmons of NYC’s Kiwiana made his feelings on the Muslim ban quite clear with a pro-immigration message printed on his restaurant’s receipts.
Is artisanal chocolate the next big food trend along the lines of craft beer and coffee? I’m a little skeptical, and this piece glosses over chocolate’s big sourcing issue (there’s a lot of child labor and de facto slavery in the cacao supply chain), but I think there’s a market here for better chocolate that can make consumers feel better about what they’re eating.
An Intelligentsia Coffee staffer wrote this informative post on why we steep tea but brew coffee.
The British Academy of Film and Television Arts has published research on how to help women and people of color in the film industry, a sort of response to the #OscarsSoWhite criticisms we’ve heard the last few years. (The Oscar nominees are much more diverse this year, quelling such complaints for the moment.) It gets more at the root of the problem than the attacks on the Academy Awards do – you won’t see women nominated for Best Director if women are rarely hired as directors or if their films struggle to find funding or distribution. There were few acclaimed movies in 2016 directed by women; I think the best-reviewed was Certain Women, which received very little distribution at all.
Is mining asteroids an essential part of our future? I think it is, in some sense, although I’m surprised this piece doesn’t mention iridium, a critical element in manufacturing electronics; it’s believed most of the iridium on earth came from the meteor or comet that caused the K/T extinction event.
Vice’s Noisey asked a person with synaesthesia what several songs “taste” like to him. Synaesthesia is a rare brain function where senses ‘cross;’ Vladimir Nabokov had it. I don’t have this, but I do associate all twelve months with certain colors, because when I was maybe five my mom had a Peanuts calendar hanging in our laundry room where January, May, and September were colored in red; February, June, and October in blue; March, July, and November in green; and April, August, and December in yellow. Those months still have those colors to me today.
Humor: This New Yorker fake-dialogue post called “I Work from Home” hit a little close, especially as I’m writing this post at 10:30 am on Saturday while still in my pajamas.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: chocolate, climate change, coffee, links, organic agriculture, pizza, stick to baseball, vaccines

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