My lone Insider piece this week was on the Tigers’ deal with Justin Upton. I’ve been sick pretty much since noon on Monday and am still down with disease, trying to do as little as possible this weekend.
And now, the links…
- J. Kenji Lopez-Alt is back with another great post on 22 things you should never buy at the supermarket, meaning you should make them at home instead. I’d add mayonnaise to the list myself, because store jars are huge and I never finish them.
- Ruhlman weighs in too, by pointing out that no food is actually “healthy,” not even kale. Some of this is semantics; people are healthy, but food, by virtue of being already dead, is not. Food can be healthful – full, or not, of nutrients – but not healthy. The bigger problem, however, is the rush to categorize foods as good or bad for you when there’s a huge range in between, something that depends on what else you eat and your individual genetics.
- Most of you have likely seen this, but the BBC/Buzzfeed joint investigation on possible match-fixing in tennis is damning, even though it seems like much of this will be difficult to prove to an extent where we’ll see suspensions or expulsions.
- Ted Cruz isn’t up to speed on the Flint water crisis, even though Flint officials knew about the tainted water over a year ago, per this New Yorker editorial on politicians’ “contempt” for their constituents. Al-Jazeera America, which is about to shut down, ran a damning exposé on Flint water an entire year ago … and still Flint did nothing. And Michigan did nothing. Flint’s Director of Public Works, Howard Croft, refused to admit that there’d been any mistake made whatsoever in that piece; he resigned his post in November.
- EDBDS’s Spencer Hall gets a bit personal about his own depression.
- The Atavist has the story of Jewish-American lawyer who successfully sued the government of Iran for funding terrorism, including the attack that killed his daughter in 1995.
- The half-billion-dollar battle over the toy rights to Disney’s princess characters saw Disney (my employer) pull a license Mattel had held for twenty years and hand it to Hasbro. The reasons are complicated and fascinating.
- You can become a math person, mostly because the whole “math person” thing is bullshit. Point #4, about teaching math as a language, is the most important in my view – math is like the world’s easiest language because it lacks the irregularities and colloquialisms that trip up most language learners.
- A heartbreaking story of fetal alcohol syndrome in a 43-year-old woman.
- Liz Finnegan, erstwhile video game writer for The Escapist, explores the unbalanced nature of “consent” on college campuses, especially once alcohol is involved. I don’t see how you can say that an inebriated person (the woman, in these examples) is incapable of giving consent, but that the other inebriated person (the man) is capable of determining whether the first person is capable of giving consent – that is, not so drunk that clear, affirmative consent is still not sufficient. You couldn’t use that standard in court, but colleges play by their own rules when policing student behavior on campus.
- Loved Melinda Gates calling out Donald Trump on his anti-science vaccine denial views. Of course, I don’t think he’s got much of a shot with the intellectual crowd anyway, but it would be nice to get this particular lie out of the press for now.