tv — Page 2

→ July 5, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/4/20.

For subscribers to The Athletic, I looked at the prospects who made their teams’ 60-player pools – and some notable prospect omissions as well. I held a Klawchat on Friday.

My latest podcast episode was one of my favorites so far. Dr. Akilah Carter-Francique of the Institute for the Study of Sport, Society, and Social Change at San Jose State University joined me to discuss her research on Black athletes’ experiences, their obstacles to playing and becoming coaches after playing, and what leagues and universities can do to break down structural barriers these athletes face.

My thanks to all of you who’ve already bought The Inside Game. If you’re looking to pick up a copy, you can get it at bookshop.org or perhaps at a local bookstore if they’re reopening near you.

I’m due for another issue my my email newsletter. You can sign up for free here.

And now, the links…

“We have been the Republican Party’s useful idiots,” say social conservatives who voted for Trump, thinking that he’d deliver judges who’d overturn Roe v. Wade and otherwise push through policies the evangelical right favors.
Also at Vox, why Hamilton is so compelling and stirs up so much critical commentary. Having now seen the film, at least, I would agree with Minister Darrick Jackson’s comments near the end of this piece – and I think anyone who thinks that the play lionizes Hamilton isn’t paying enough attention to the story.
What the U.S. asks of working parents is impossible. This is very much a function of American capitalism, and our lack of support (like subsidized day care) for working parents.
Khruangbin’s third album, Mordechai, is one of the best new records of 2020. NME interviewed the trio for their latest cover story.
SELF has tips for how to deal with friends or family members who won’t let go of conspiracy theories about COVID-19 or anything else. Most valuable: “Know when to walk away.”
The Washington Post‘s Ashley Spencer has a wonderful story about the progressive nature of the new Netflix series The Babysitters Club, which was produced by my friend Naia Cucukov (quoted in the article).
The Texas Tribune reports on what it’s like right now inside hospitals overrun with COVID-19 cases in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley.
Springfield, Massachusetts, fired a police officer within days for posting something on social media that supported BLM protesters. It’s just weird that they fired an officer without waiting or massive street protests.
COVID-19 parties are not a thing. Every journalist who shared that obviously bogus story about a party at the University of Alabama where students competed to catch the virus first should read this – and make it very clear that the story they shared was false.
The BBC has a video on “doughnut economics” and how Amsterdam city leaders are trying to redevelop their urban center around this new model of circles in which residents can live and work and reduce their impact on the environment.
Fans of apocalyptic films may be more emotionally prepared for the present pandemic.
There’s a monument to Confederate soldiers, including a Confederate flag, in southern Delaware (“slower Lower”). You can sign a petition to call upon the Georgetown Historical Society and the Museum for Nutters – excuse me, the Nutter Marvel Carriage Museum – to remove this shameful monument to slavery and men who fought for it.
Netflix and Hulu pulled a Community episode that showed Ken Jeong in black facepaint while playing Dungeons & Dragons. He was supposed to be a member of the Drow race, who are extremely dark-skinned. I never made a connection between the Drow and Black people, or any actual race, really; I’m curious if any D&D players among you felt the fictional race was offensive in any way.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: amsterdam, coronavirus, delaware, links, Music, texas, tv

→ March 6, 2019
→ By keith

Leaving Neverland.

Leaving Neverland, the new, four-hour documentary airing exclusively on HBO, is a difficult watch. Two men who say that Michael Jackson sexually molested them repeatedly over a period of many years repeat those claims on camera in unsparing detail, which in and of itself would be a painful and infuriating scene to see and hear, but that’s only a small part of what makes this film both powerful and very uncomfortable. It’s far more than a new indictment of Jackson, whose status as a serial sexual abuser is beyond doubt (and beyond remedy) at this point, but serves more as a portrait of the spiraling, exponential damage wrought on their victims and their families years after the abuse has stopped.

Wade Robson and James Safechuck both say in Leaving Neverland that Jackson began abusing them when they were very young – Robson from age 7, Safechuck around the same age – and that it continued for many years, accompanied by all of the behavior we now associate with serial abusers: grooming, co-opting, and above all threatening. Robson says many times that Jackson convinced him that they would both go to jail if they were caught. Both Robson’s and Safechuck’s mothers appear in the documentary as well, as both were there when Jackson met the boys and fell under the singer’s spell, becoming unwitting accomplices to the abuse, agreeing to let their sons spend many nights sleeping at Jackson’s Neverland Ranch and accepting their sons’ answers at the time that no abuse was taking place.

While the documentary tells the history of the abuse and the public accusations of Jackson while the singer was still alive, including the 1993 accusation by Jordy Chandler, settled out of court for $23 million, and the 2003-04 accusations by Gavin Arvizo, which led to a criminal trial and an acquittal on all charges, it’s far more about the victims here than the pedophile at its center. (That said, there are some shocking moments from historical footage, including one of Jackson’s lawyers standing before the media in 2003, threatening to ruin the lives of anyone who might come forward to accuse Jackson of further crimes.) Robson was born in Brisbane, and won a dance contest that allowed him to meet Jackson, who thoroughly bamboozled Robson’s mother to the point that she left Australia and her husband, taking Wade and his sister Chantal to California in the belief that Jackson would help develop her son’s career as a dancer. Safechuck, who was the boy in the dressing room in that famous Pepsi commercial with Jackson (if you’re old enough, you almost certainly remember it), is an only child, but Jackson’s ‘interest’ in him led his mother to similarly turn their lives upside down to try to further James’ career, driving a wedge between her and his father that persists today. (His father doesn’t appear in the film.)

There’s too much commentary out there already about the mothers’ culpability in allowing the abuse to begin and continue, as well as a comment from one of the jurors in the 2003 trial that Gavin’s parents were idiots for letting the boy sleep with Jackson, but Leaving Neverland documents how well-meaning, loving parents can be hoodwinked by a sociopathic, determined pedophile who has the means to assuage any doubts or, unfortunately, buy them away. He showered the families with gifts, flew them places first-class, gave the boys unforgettable experiences on stage, while also presenting himself to the families as a lonely, misunderstood adult whose childhood was stolen from him by the pressures of global stardom. The way that the victims and their families describe the early stages of Jackson’s grooming of the boys, you can see how someone in the moment might have felt sorry for the singer, whose childhood was obviously difficult and who said he was beaten by his father, but it also becomes clear that Jackson used his past as a wedge he could drive between his victims and their parents – and that he did so with the help of enabling assistants who probably should have long ago been called to account for their actions.

Part one of the documentary delivers a lot of prologue, explaining how the two boys met Jackson and ended up victims, but part two is where the point of the story lies, as we hear, in their own words and those of family members, about the permanent damage wreaked upon them all by Jackson’s abuse. Both men speak of mental health issues, never saying PTSD but clearly suffering from it, and are still coping with their effects, while their relationships with family members are all fractured, some likely beyond any repair. Both mothers are themselves wracked with guilt that will never fade, because the damage cannot be undone, to their sons and to their families, and to other victims who might have been spared had anyone picked up on the signs of abuse and put a stop to Jackson’s ‘sleepovers’ sooner.

Both men describe the molestation in specific terms, which is a potential trigger for some viewers and worth bearing in mind before you watch Leaving Neverland. I was not personally triggered by that, but the part of the documentary – and the online response – I’ve found profoundly unsettling is the support for the abusive pedophile at the heart of the story. We see scenes of supporters outside the courthouse with signs proclaiming Jackson’s innocence (really, how could you know?), including some dingbat releasing white doves when the not guilty charges come through. We see videos of people attacking Robson online from when he went public with his abuse story, contradicting testimony he’d given in the 2003 trial that Jackson had never molested him. And if you’ve been on Twitter at all the last few nights and clicked on the #LeavingNeverland hashtag or searched for names involved in the documentary, you’ve seen all manner of support for the singer, saying he was innocent and attacking the victims and their families. You have to be deeply deluded to think that all four of the accusers we know about have lied about everything, even though these two men tell stories that are highly specific and show a pattern of behavior, to still think Jackson is the real victim here.

Director Dan Reed largely stays out of the way of the story here – aside from some drone shots of LA that don’t add much except some running time – but there is also a clear subtext to Leaving Neverland about the allure of celebrity, and how Jackson used it to seduce the families of both boys, and then to seduce the boys themselves. Both mothers, interviewed very extensively on camera, speak of Jackson’s interest in their sons’ careers and in their families as immensely flattering, and the combination of power and money led them to choose to upend their personal lives and helped blind them to what, in hindsight, should have been blindingly obvious.

Robson’s sister and Safechuck both say that they’re not asking people to forget Jackson’s artistry, but to remember the whole person – that this incredibly talented human was also a pedophile and sexual predator. I don’t see how we can continue to separate the art from the artist in this case, not now that I’ve seen the movie. You can’t simply “cancel” a musician of his importance and influence; we can stop playing Jackson’s music, and certainly Capital One should stop playing its commercial with “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” now, but Jackson has directly and indirectly influenced multiple generations of pop musicians since “I Want You Back” was their first hit in 1969. There is no erasure here, only a time for an overdue reckoning with his legacy as a talented person who did unspeakable things and ruined many lives. Leaving Neverland won’t convince people who don’t want to hear it, but it is a devastating portrait of grooming, sexual abuse, and the cascading ramifications that come years after it ends.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 2019 in tv, documentaries, highly recommended, ptsd, tv

→ November 4, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/4/18.

For ESPN+ subscribers, I ranked the top 50 free agents this offseason. I also held a Klawchat on Wednesday, before a brief vacation to Disneyworld to help my parents celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary.

I’ve been better about sending out my free email newsletter, which isn’t to say the content is better, just that I’m sending it more often.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Washington Post has a long investigation by writer Radley Balko into the rot inside the Little Rock, Arkansas, Police Department that led to an incompetent, racist cop shooting an unarmed 15-year-old black kid, lying about it, and escaping conviction in two trials. The cop in question, Terry Hastings, was hired over the objections of another officer, who pointed out that Hastings had attended a Ku Klux Klan meeting – normally a disqualifying event, but Hastings’ father was also on the LRPD force.
This Atlantic longread by a writer whose grandfather was ostracized for a failed attempt to solve a major physics problem also delves into deeper questions of what drives geniuses and how orthodox institutions treat apostasy.
A Harvard researcher has a new theory of mitochondrial function and evolution that may help lead to new treatments for diseases of mitochondrial dysfunction, including many fatal muscular diseases.
Stalwart indie bookstore The Strand is unionized, making it a bit unusual in the bookstore world, but the store’s very wealthy owners have fought modest pay raises and benefits increases. The Strand is a wonderful store with knowledgeable employees and an enormous selection of new, used, and rare books, but this column says much of its revenue comes from renting out its space rather than the sale of books.
The Washington Monthly has a longread accusing writer Salena Zito, whose pieces cover Trump voters out in rural America, of fabricating quotes and stories and manipulating quotes, as well as other journalistic sins, even as her conservative employers look the other way. She has taught at least one seminar at Harvard’s Kennedy School, but the school hasn’t responded to my request for comment yet.
Was Friends homophobic, ahead of its time, or both? This essay on LitHub argues both sides of it, and explains why the show was too cautious on LGBT issues even as it gently expanded the boundaries of what was shown on network television.
Facebook ignored warnings about Russian interference in Ukraine via troll farms, part of the company’s general unwillingness to look at information warfare outside the U.S. that could have tipped the company off to what Russia did here in 2016.
The white man who shot up a Tallahassee yoga studio, killing two women, was an ‘incel’ who had twice been charged with assaulting women as well as a history of posting misogynistic and homophobic content online. He was still able to buy an AR-15.
President Trump barely works at all, high irony after years of the right criticizing Obama, by all accounts a workaholic, if he dared to take an afternoon to play golf.
The self-immolation of white nationalist Twitter troll Jacob Wohl to smear Robert Mueller is lovingly detailed by The Cut.
Many western billionaires have invested in ‘doomsday’ properties in New Zealand, arguing that its isolation makes it ideal in case of a global pandemic, war, or other apocalypse. They don’t all sound terribly sane to me.
CRISPR gene editing has been long on promise but light on results so far, but a new research effort found it might help treat Duchenne muscular dystrophy.
Transgender neurobiologist Ben Barres died last year of cancer; his autobiography just came out and Nature has a very positive review.
The Supreme Court refused to block a lawsuit demanding that the US government act on climate change. You know my views on the subject, but do we have a constitutional right to a clean environment?
Fourteen teachers at a Middleton, Idaho, elementary school are on paid administrative leave after wearing racist Halloween costumes, as well as dressing up as the border wall with the MAGA slogan on it. I don’t have much hope under this administration, but it seems like a federal civil rights violation took place here.
A pediatrician in California rails against bogus vaccine exemption letters written by doctors who rely on genetic quackery. There is no such thing as a genetic predisposition to vaccine injury. Doctors who claim they have found these cases in children are merely profiteering and should lose their licenses to practice medicine.
The Daily Beast writes that vaccine denial is now a Republican epidemic. Voting for science increasingly means voting Democrat./
ThinkProgress talked to experts who explained that the claims about Bitcoin’s future energy consumption are bogus.
Ethiopia now has a female President, its first in the country’s history. The position is ceremonial, but she is still the sole female head of state in Africa right now, and her selection is more evidence that Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who set up a cabinet where half the posts were filled by women, is a great progressive hope for a country that has lived under tyrants since World War II.
The President sputtered out a false claim that he could revoke birthright citizenship by … I don’t know, tweeting about it, which is ironic since his Florida property does big business with Russians who want to give birth on U.S. soil to secure American citizenship.
Haaretz details Trump’s lengthy history of using anti-Semitic rhetoric and tropes to stir up his base, and how that contributed to last weekend’s massacre at a Pittsburgh synagogue.
Jewish leaders there told Trump he wasn’t welcome in their city until he disavowed white nationalism. He showed up anyway, and of course has blamed the deaths of eleven Jews in the shooting on the lack of armed guards at the temple.
The Atlantic‘s Adam Serwer points out that the inane story of the migrant caravan contributed to the shooting, part of yet another bullshit campaign from the GOP (“but her emails”), this time with anti-Semitic underpinning and violent consequences. As Serwer points out, this caravan is a threat to exactly nobody, and is still weeks away from reaching our border – if it even gets that far.
One other reason the caravan story is codswallop? There aren’t enough people in Central America to matter to U.S. immigration numbers.
Indiana Law Professor Ian Samuel writes in the Guardian that Republicans are close to an invincible grip on power, even as a clear minority party, thanks to vote-rigging, voter suppression, and some favorable SCOTUS rulings. The money quote: “For the first time, a president who lost the popular vote had a supreme court nominee confirmed by senators who received fewer votes – nearly 22 million fewer – than the senators that voted against him.”
Need another reason to vote blue on Tuesday? Global warming is more advanced than we thought, as the oceans have absorbed far more heat than we realized. The oceans absorb that heat, and carbon dioxide, and become more acidic, which leads to the deaths of coral reefs, and that in turn ripples up the food chain and threatens human diets.
The Arizona Board of Education rejected outgoing Superintendent Diane Douglas’ plan to push creationism in public schools, which was just going to lose in court anyway, but what a waste of everyone’s time.
Proof that evolution is real is right before us in antibiotic resistance, which British Chief Medical Officer Dame Sally Davies said last week threatens to take us back to the dark ages.
In a bit of good news, residents of Southampton, England, formed a human chain to help a small community book store relocate, with 250 volunteers passing the 2000 books person to person from the old location to the new one.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-semitism, arizona, arkansas, biology, bookstores, climate change, evolution, frauds, idaho, links, longreads, physics, racism, science, social media, stick to baseball, the swamp, tv, vaccines

→ June 11, 2018
→ By keith

The Tale.

Documentary filmmaker Jennifer Fox won the Grand Jury Documentary Prize at Sundance in 1987, when she was just 28 years old, for her debut feature Beirut: The Last Home Movie, about a Lebanese family living in a mansion in the country’s capital during its extensive civil war. She returned to Sundance this year with her first traditional (non-documentary) feature, The Tale, which received rave reviews and was picked up by HBO, which debuted the movie at the end of May. Telling the story of how Fox’s track coach groomed and molested her when she was just 13, it stars Laura Dern as the adult Fox, whose memories around that summer mislead her into thinking of it as a romantic relationship, and who tries to uncover the truth of what happened to her, thirty years later, when her mother discovers a story Fox had written at the time that described the predatory “relationship.”

Rather than simply using flashbacks, Fox tells the story as if she (as Dern) were traveling through her own memories, not just witnessing them but interacting with them, including conversations with her younger self (played by Isabelle Nélisse) and interrogations of her equestrian teacher Mrs. G (Elizabeth Debicki) within the memories. Fox arrived at Mrs. G’s for a summer of horseback riding lessons, and is immediately introduced to the charming forty-ish neighbor Bill Allens (Jason Ritter), who is Mrs. G’s lover and who quickly turns the charm on for Jenny, then gradually grooms her for rape.

Nearly every revelation in Fox’s memory begins with a false start, some detail rendered inaccurately (including her own age at the time of the assaults) or person not remembered, so that The Tale becomes not just a story about a young girl sexually assaulted by an older man, but about how we respond to trauma within our minds – how our brains can try to protect us by creating a fictional shell around the more difficult truth. Thus the movie plays out as a true-life detective story, where the culprit is known but the crime is hazy, and Fox has to navigate her own memories by uncovering clues in the present day – talking to her fellow students at the time and visiting Mrs. G, who goes from helpful to stonewalling in the blink of an eye – so that she can peel away the fictional outer layer on those memories and show us the truth. The technique is jarring, as it should be given the subject matter, because any scene showing the past may subsequently be rewound and rewritten so we can see it as it actually happened, not as present-day Fox recalled it. It’s most striking when she discovers another young girl (older than she was) in photographs from that summer whom she hadn’t remembered at all.

Dern is riveting as Fox, carrying us through the stages of denial, anger, and eventually something like acceptance – she confronts Bill in the present day, in a scene that is truly fictional but also pivotal to resolving the film – and making her seem understandably irrational in her worst moments. There’s a fight with her fiancé, played by Common, that is anguishing to watch because it’s clear that he’s right and willing to help, but she’s incapable of even discussing what happened with the person who is, in theory, closest to her. And Ritter is so creepy in the grooming moments – let alone the utterly harrowing, barely watchable scenes of statutory rape (filmed with a body double for Nélisse) – that it’ll be hard to see him in anything else in the future. (It also doesn’t help that he looks so much like his dad, the late John Ritter of Three’s Company fame.)

There’s a recurring refrain in The Tale that’s used to hand-wave away any violations of social norms or boundaries, including the whole idea that a 40-year-old man shouldn’t have sex with a 13-year-old girl: “It was the seventies.” There’s such a note of dismissiveness in the quote, uttered by at least three different characters, that you feel how uphill Fox’s battle to get at the truth might have been for her. People don’t like to dig up the past in any unpleasant circumstances, even less so when they might feel some complicity in someone else’s crimes, and pointing to the sexual permissiveness of the era – which was used to try to whitewash the story of David Bowie sleeping with teenaged groupies after his passing – only adds another wall for the victims to scale as they try to grapple with their histories of trauma.

The Tale uses Jennifer Fox’s real name for her character, but changed the names of the real-life Mrs. G and Bill Allens, as both are still alive. There is no indication whether Allens ever faced any charges or even repercussions for what is later implied to be dozens of assaults on various underaged girls, or if the various buildings or wings of buildings named for him still bear his name. I understand the legal ramifications of using his real name in the film, but if he’s still alive, he may still be a threat, and there are likely may other surviving victims who would like answers, even if justice is still beyond them.

Because it hasn’t received a theatrical release, The Tale isn’t eligible for Oscar or other annual awards for movies, but should earn Emmy consideration this fall for the movie itself and for Dern, Ritter, and Fox both as director and writer. I’ll still rank it along movies that did go to theaters at some point, and I’ll guess even before the halfway point that it’ll end up in my top ten for 2018. It’s powerful without ever manipulating its audience, and the novel way it walks us down the false starts of memory gives the viewer such a sense of Fox’s confusion that you’ll crave the catharsis that Fox can never really receive.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 2018 movies, highly recommended, metoo, movies, tv

→ May 26, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/26/18.

My ranking of the top 100 prospects for this year’s MLB draft is up for Insiders. I held a Klawchat on Friday.

Over at Vulture, my ranking of the 25 best mobile board game apps went up last week.

Smart Baseball is now out in paperback! I’ll be at Politics & Prose in DC on July 14th and am shooting for an event in the Boston suburbs on July 28th. Throw a comment below if you think you could make the latter event.

And now, the links…

Longreads: the New Yorker looks at corrupt Chicago cop Ronald Watts, whose reign of terror in the city’s projects was ended by an FBI investigation and helped by a woman herself wrongfully charged with drug possession. Thirty-two convictions have already been vacated because of Watts’ own crimes, but he was involved in something like 500 in total.
The Guardian goes long on how a small group of dissidents ended the 23-year reign of Gambian dictator Yahya Jammeh last year. The BBC’s Inquiry podcast from last week covered similar ground, asking why some revolutions succeed, starting with the recent peaceful regime change in Armenia.
60 Minutes investigates how the media fell for the story peddled by Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, who talked a good game about her company’s medical products that never worked. She defrauded investors and put patients at risk, but hasn’t even been charged with a crime. You’ll get more jail time for a second arrest for marijuana possession (the federal mandatory minimum is 15 days) than Holmes did for a nearly billion-dollar fraud.
The New York Times‘ Sopan Deb sat down with the cast of Arrested Development for an interview with some very unsatisfying answers on Jeffrey Tambor’s on-set behavior. The men seem to be handwaving away whatever happened, while Jessica Walter (his victim here) and Alia Shawkat, the only women in the room, are outnumbered while standing up for themselves.
This SABR article by Pete Palmer is from 2017, but just crossed my timeline this week: Palmer looks at how big luck/randomness can be in individual year-to-year stats. One big takeaway is that for NOPS (similar to OPS+), “five percent of the players can change 40 or more points from year to year due to luck alone.”
Basketball writer Bo Churney took his own life at age 31 last week. His brother set up a fundraising page to benefit at-risk LGBTQ youth in Atlanta in Churney’s memory, and it has already passed $20,000 in just a few days.
A 30-year-old manchild living with his parents fought them in court over their demand that he move out, claiming he was entitled to six months’ notice of eviction. He lost, but of course he’s now some sort of folk hero, appearing on InfoWars on Friday.
A (now former) doctor spiked his girlfriend’s tea with an abortifacient and was sentenced to three years in prison after she asked the judge for leniency in his case.
Harley-Davidson took its tax cut from the Republican-led tax bill, closed a manufacturing facility in Kansas City, then bought back $700 million in stock.
Arizona’s Secretary of Education, a dingbat creationist, wants to weaken or delete references to evolution in state educational standards.
Who on earth told Jameela Jamil, who plays Tehani on NBC’s The Good Place, that she was “too ethnic” for Hollywood? She also discusses #MeToo in the embedded video interview. I’m halfway through Season 2 of The Good Place, which really hit its stride near the end of season one after a sluggish start.
Deadspin’s Tim Burke points out, yet again, that the claim that ESPN is losing subscribers over ‘politics’ is bogus.
From The Onion: ‘The Onion’ Has Finally Read Michael Cohen’s 2013 Email Regarding His Client Donald Trump And Would Like To Discuss The Matter Further At His Convenience.
The BBC revealed that Cohen received $400K from Ukraine’s government to arrange talks with President Trump.
An Associated Press investigation found that Trump fundraiser Elliott Broidy used his connections to enrich himself by trying to shift U.S. policy in the Middle East against Qatar.
Center-right Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin excoriates Devin Nunes for burning a source to save the President’s skin. Lawfareblog’s Benjamin Wittes writes on the same subject that Trump has ‘all the power’ through his unfettered interference with the FBI and DoJ.
The Kentucky congressional candidate who was told, when she was 13, by her congressperson that she could never be a fighter pilot beat the moderate candidate in the Democratic primary despite national party support for the latter candidate.
You’ve probably seen the story that the feds have lost track of nearly 1500 migrant children forcibly separated from their parents. The collective non-response by our politicians is reminiscent of the pattern in pre-WWI Germany described by Hannah Arendt in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism.
Two Montana residents detained by a Border Patrol agent for speaking Spanish are now talking to the ACLU about legal options.
Sweden distributed a ‘prepare for war’ leaflet to homes in anticipation of a cyber or terror attack.
There’s an Ebola outbreak in sub-Saharan Africa again, and while the new vaccine will help, it won’t stop the epidemic without changes in behavior.
Maine is dealing with increasing vaccination refusals from stupid parents. The answer is simple – change the law to eliminate nonmedical exemptions, especially the “philosophical exemption,” which amounts to “I’m an idiot and don’t like vaccines.” Get on it, Mainers.
There’s a new Kickstarter for a co-op zombie survival board game, Z First Impact, just out from WYSIWYGames.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, baseball, board games, chicago, frauds, links, longreads, metoo, stick to baseball, the swamp, tv, vaccines

→ April 29, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/28/18.

My one Insider post this week looked at four pitchers who could go in the first round of this year’s draft, led by Florida RHP Carter Stewart, who was second on my latest ranking of draft prospects. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the board game Ancestree, a light, filler game from the designer of Blood Rage and Rising Sun, but one that I think borrows too heavily from other titles.

Smart Baseball is now out in paperback, and it’s a bestseller … (checks notes) in Sonoma, California. I’ll be at Washington, DC’s legendary bookstore Politics and Prose at 6 pm on July 14th to discuss & sign the book.

And now, the links…

The Guardian had three superb longreads this week, so I’m including them all. The first calls for universities to ‘bulldoze’ their business schools, as the author, a B-school prof himself, argues they do more harm than good. I have an MBA, and I agree with many of his points, as well as the additional evidence that expensive full-time MBAs do not provide sufficient ROIs to students. But some MBA programs include useful material, including accounting and operations research. There’s a worthwhile course of study in there somewhere, but perhaps under a new name.
The second looks at the challenge in updating the Oxford English Dictionary, producing a third edition in the digital era when language appears to be changing faster than ever. A good read for fellow fans of The Professor and the Madman.
The third is a bit weird, as it documents people who pretend to be wealthy influences on Instagram as a way to make money, somehow, although the main subject is more poseur than profiteer.
The Atlantic has a longread that argues that American democracy no longer accurately represents the will of the people. The anecdote that opens this story, in Oxford, Massachusetts, is absolutely infuriating.
Black students nationally are several times more likely to be suspended or disciplined than white students are for the same infractions. The Obama Administration had begun civil rights investigations into the practice in Texas, but this ProPublica/Mother Jones longread explains how Besty DeVos is ending the effort. If you can’t re-segregate the schools by law, do it by fact.
BuzzFeed investigates Facebook’s role in recent anti-Muslim violence in Sri Lanka, where the government temporarily blocked access to the site because Facebook wouldn’t take down bigoted posts and videos calling for Sinhalese Buddhists (!) to attack Muslims and Muslim-owned businesses.
The British morning show Good Morning Britain, hosted by Susanna Reid (who seems to be sharp) and Piers Morgan (a pile of wilted romaine lettuce in an expensive suit) ran a feature on people who didn’t vaccinate their pets for fear their pets would get autism. No, that isn’t actually possible, and some people are just really fucking stupid.
More and more research on behavior shows that changing attitudes isn’t enough to get people to do the right or smart thing, nor is giving them more information: If you want to change someone’s behavior, you need to convince them that everyone else is already doing what they should be. That’s why vaccine denialism is contagious, and why drowning out these cranks and charlatans with reminders that the vast, vast majority of parents still vaccinate their kids is so important.
Canadian fraudsters (they call themselves “homeopaths,” but homeopathy is just bullshit) are telling parents of autistic children they can ‘cure’ autism with diluted doses of vaccines. This nonsense, called CEASE, is just stealing money from desperate parents, and anyone who offers it should be tried for fraud.
A new study shows evidence that Trump’s election was driven by white racism, not by economic anxiety.
The Alfie Evans tragedy has been co-opted by grifters and vultures, looking to score political points off bogus claims of liberty that ignore the sad fact that there is no hope of recovery for the severely brain-damaged child.
Finland will not continue its Universal Basic Income trial after it reaches its scheduled end in 2019.
A former reporter for a Sinclair-owned station says she was pressured to include climate change denialism In her reporting on climate change itself.
Kansas gubernatorial candidate Kris Kodachrome mocked students protesting for reforming gun laws, and later in the week a law reporter found a huge gaffe in Kobach’s filings in the ACLU’s ongoing suit against his voter suppression law, which has done a great job of eliminating the voter fraud that didn’t exist in the first place.
Some Delaware news: a recent attempt to raise the state’s minimum wage to $9.25/hour failed, but it looks like a “red flag” gun bill will be signed into law soon.
Writer Rebecca Solnit, a contributing editor at Harper’s, asks who gets to control the narrative in a country that claims to want equality but is awfully abstemious about handing it out.
A fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School talked to the university’s alumni magazine about better ways to detect and fight the spread of disinformation online as we head towards another round of elections this fall.
Sacramento DA Anne Marie Schubert, who is up for re-election on June 5th, has a history of declining to prosecute police officers who injure black civilians or suspects in the line of duty. The Intercept reveals that she took $420,000 in donations from police organizations across her three campaigns. She may soon be handed evidence that would support charging the officers who killed Stephon Clark, an unarmed black man, in his own backyard.
Senator Marco Rubio writes for CNN.com that it is time to force Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro from power. I agree, but how? Sanctions, Rubio’s main solution, are unlikely to work in isolation. Maduro is planning to abolish more voting rights soon and has been raising capital by selling the “petro,” a new cryptocurrency that I’m sure is an excellent investment.
My employer ran a fairly favorable profile of Cleveland pitcher and climate change denier Trevor Bauer this week; Deadspin offered a rebuttal.
The EU is set to ban neonics, pesticides suspected of contributing to bee colony collapses worldwide. Meanwhile, here in the U.S., EPA chief Scott Pruitt proposed adding neonics to drinking water.
This essay on Theness.com makes a good point about GMO labeling: The government can’t regulate what it doesn’t understand, and in the case of GMOs, a functional definition of what O’s are GM and require labels may not be feasible.
Texas Monthly looks at the Texas gerrymandering case headed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The 2014 suicide of a student-athlete at the University of Pennsylvania has spurred an ongoing focus on mental health among Ivy League athletes, including the “success culture” that may have contributed to her death.
Protests in Armenia against a power grab by the country’s outgoing President have led to his resignation, although the protests have continued as the ruling Republican Party refuses to relinquish power.
Ali Noorani, the Executive Director of the National Immigration Forum and the son of Pakistani immigrants to the U.S., writes for CNN about the controversy over the Simpsons character Apu.
The alt-right front group Turning Point USA has hired numerous employees with histories of racist and/or bigoted tweets. I wonder why that is.
Could a postal banking system help ‘unbanked’ Americans while also providing much-needed revenue for the US Postal Service? Lack of access to capital is a huge obstacle to the upward economic mobility that is, or at least was, a hallmark of capitalist economies.
The Ringer examines Netflix’ strategy of buying or funding original movies no one can find on its service. Grierson and Leitch have discussed this as well on their podcast – the Netflix algorithm doesn’t even seem to effectively push this content to viewers whose own histories would indicate interest in these indie films.
A study funded by the U.S. military on climate change and sea level rise found that nearly a thousand islands risk becoming uninhabitable this century as a result of man’s effects on the global climate.
Citing low sales and supply chain problems, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson is discontinuing production of a pump used by cancer patients that extends their lives by two years. The headline makes it seem like this is just an evil corporate decision, but the story is more involved than that.
A British activist with cerebral palsy is asking the government to rethink a proposed ban on plastic drinking straws, saying for people with movement disorders, straws are critical to help them drink. (Perhaps reusable, more durable plastic straws, or straws made from paper, would work?)
The CJR interviews Steve Fishman about his podcast, Empire Of Blood, the story of how he helped exonerate a man who served 22 years for a murder he didn’t commit.
The Guardian looks at how the Michael Cohen case has exposed the extent of Sean Hannity’s real estate holdings, which is now in turn leading to stories on substandard living conditions and poor treatment of tenants in his buildings.
Jeet Heer’s Twitter thread on Kevin Williamson and the “troll three-step” move resembles all too well how opinion writers with extremist views try to both appeal to their base and dance around valid criticism from the center or the opposite end of the spectrum.
Alexandra Petri follows this by writing about how she’s been silenced In a column for a small paper in Washington called the Post.
Asmodee Digital announced an upcoming adaptation of the Lovecraftian board game Mansions of Madness, due out on Steam early in 2019.
I loved the Bard’s Tale PC RPGs when I was a teenager, eventually finishing the first two (I never tried the third), so I’m stoked to see inXile is developing a new sequel/update more than 30 years after the series appeared to be finished.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Armenia, board games, climate change, Economics, gmo, guns, history of language, links, longreads, mental health, pseudoscience, racism, rpgs, social media, Sri Lanka, stick to baseball, texas, tv, vaccines, Venezuela, voter suppression

→ October 28, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/28/17.

No new Insider content this week, as I was writing up the top 50 free agents package. That and a look at the offseason trade market will run the week of November 6th. I did hold a Klawchat on Thursday.

I spoke with Arizona’s KJZZ about my book Smart Baseball and the rise of Big Data in the sport. You can find links to buy the book here.

I also run a free email newsletter with personal essays and links to everything I’ve written since the previous newsletter. If you’re already a subscriber, thank you, and yes, I’m overdue to send another one out.

And now, the links, with boardgame stuff at the end as usual…

I don’t know how anyone could have missed it, but it turns out a tiny Montana firm with ties to the Secretary of the Interior somehow got the biggest contract to restore power in Puerto Rico. Then the Daily Beast‘s Ken Klippenstein got a hold of the contract itself, with some sweetheart clauses to protect this little company from pretty much anything, like, say, getting sued for doing a bad job. And now the White House is slowly backing away from the deal. Drain the swamp, indeed.
The longread of the week was clearly the New Yorker‘s profile of the Sackler family, who’ve made billions by selling opioids, often to addicts rather than people in pain. I wonder if any institutions, including my own undergrad alma mater, will return the money the family donated or take its name off any buildings.
The Atlantic goes long on the potential negative impacts of increased personalization of news – that is, limiting what each of us sees based on what each of us seems to want to see. There are some positives from the algorithms behind these feeds, but newsrooms need the right people and technology to profit from them.
The New York Times looks at how an EPA stacked with former chemical industry officials is rolling back regulations on the use of chemicals where there’s strong evidence of harm to humans. Even more notable is the EPA PR official’s response to a request from the author here, which reads like a Facebook comment.
As more and more women come out against Harvey Weinstein, the women who’ve accused our current President of sexual harassment wonder why these accusations haven’t affected Trump at all.
North Carolina’s state legislature might be the most vile in the nation. The Republicans who control it are trying to rig the courts via gerrymandering after multiple judicial defeats.
Economist Paul Krugman says Trump’s proposed corporate tax cut amounts to $700 billion in foreign aid because of how much of corporate America is foreign-owned – and asks why on earth we would want to do that.
Media Matters argues that the Clinton/uranium investigation is “bullshit” promulgated by Breitbart and Sean Hannity.
The Environmental Defense Fund lists five environmental rules that industries have asked Trump to eliminate. As you might expect, they’re rules that attempt to protect consumers and/or the environment, but raise costs for certain industries.
Millennials are paying for news, contrary to every bit of nonsense you’ve heard about what millennials won’t do or what thing they’re ruining now. I wonder if some of this is a desire to get news from reliable sources given the prevalence of both fake news and highly biased ‘news.’
A Cornell professor who oversees a $22 million federally-funded program to improve school lunches has been accused of misinterpreting, omitting, and otherwise screwing up the data behind several of his studies, leading to at least three retractions by journals of papers he’s published. The New York Times explains one of those retracted studies, on kids and cookies. What I can’t find, shockingly, is any evidence the USDA might pull his funding.
Chef Dan Barber, author of The Third Plate, opened a pop-up in London called wastED, selling foods made from ingredients that would normally be discarded. He’s done it in NYC too.
A new Dark Matter coffee shop in Chicago will give 100% of its proceeds to suicide prevention while also serving as an outreach location that will provide support and training to the community.
Anthony Bourdain spoke candidly to Slate about his role in encouraging ‘bro culture’ in restaurant kitchens as the industry is dealing with the John Besh scandal (and surely more to come).
Amazon has been deleting unfavorable reviews for an anti-glyphosate book that has been accused of relying on weak or junk science, while also allowing reviews by associates of the author (a violation of amazon’s terms) to stay up.
Vulture (for whom I write occasionally) has oral history of the Seinfeld episode “The Contest”, which is particularly interesting for what went on with the network.
Paste (for whom I write more than occasionally) looks at the inherent violence within Castle Wolfenstein II, including the uncomfortable ‘storyline’ in the game.
Hillsborough wants to put the new Rays ballpark in Ybor City. Who’s going to pay for it? Are Florida voters dumb enough to fall for this trick yet again?
A man in Portugal beat his ex-wife with a nail-studded club and avoided jail because the Portuguese judges said his anger was understandable, citing an 1886 ruling and the Bible. A Portuguese politican called it “Sharia law in the Court of Porto,” a fair warning given the rise of hard-right theocrats, including Senate candidate Roy Moore, in the last two years.
Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has an agreement to develop a quayside neighborhood of Toronto, which a lecturer in the ethics of technology warns is a dangerous precedent.
Audio link: Richard Thaler, winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Economics, appeared on NPR’s The Hidden Brain to discuss the predictability of our unpredictability.
Author Patrick Tomlinson presented a thought experiment that he says puts the lie to anti-abortion arguments. Ben Shapiro, himself a pro-lifer, responded on his site, although I think at least two of his four points really miss the mark.
An Indian researcher and former English professor has worked for years to catalog the nearly 800 languages spoken in India, a number that may have dropped by 50% since 1960.
Boardgames! The Kickstarter for ROOT, a new asymmetric game from Leder Games, blew past its modest $24K funding goal in the first five days.
Asmodee announced Fantasy Flight Digital, a new division that will bring FFG titles to tablets and Steam. Fantasy Flight is best known for its Star Wars miniatures and dice games, Netrunner, Game of Thrones, X-COM, and new hit Legend of the Five Rings, but also has some straight Eurogames like Hey That’s My Fish and Ingenious.
Asmodee also released a teaser for the upcoming app version of the complex strategy boardgame Scythe.
The New Yorker looks at the ‘resurrection’ of Dungeons & Dragons, although I know the game never really went anywhere, and of course it inspired hundreds of later games, both RPGs and many tabletop games that integrate role-playing or dungeon crawl elements.
I don’t care for Scrabble or the knockoff Words with Friends, but enjoyed this Vice piece on how WwF essentially hacked the game via its user-generated dictionary.
Rama.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, boardgames, food waste, gmo, Languages, links, longreads, stick to baseball, taxes, the swamp, tv

→ June 10, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/10/17.

I’ve been busy this week, with a top 100 draft prospects “Big Board” up for Insiders, and a free article profiling top draft prospect Hunter Greene, who gave me some really thoughtful answers on the topics of preparation, being a two-way player, and baseball’s declining African-American audience. I also held a Klawchat on Friday afternoon.

I’ll have a new mock draft up tomorrow (Sunday) and my editors and I will update that file until the draft begins Monday evening. I’m also planning to do a chat Monday afternoon as the draft gets closer.

In non-baseball content, BBC America asked me to to rank the main clones on the show Orphan Black, which returns for its fifth and final season tonight on the cable channel. The first four seasons are all available on Amazon Prime, and I highly recommend it.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the cooperative puzzle game Unlock!, which is actually a series of modules that mimic the escape-room experience by asking players to solve riddles on cards and enter codes into a free app on their phones. The publisher sent me four of the modules; I played three before the review, and they’re all difficult but worth playing. The fourth, The Island of Dr. Goorse, was too abstruse, and that’s not just my opinion but the opinion of all five of us who played, including my father, the (retired) electrical engineer and one of the smartest people I’ve ever met.

And now, the links…

Two longreads from the Atlantic: One on a new approach to treating psychopathy in children; and an educational if meandering longread on bitcoin, blockchain, and the myth of anarcho-currency.
The Royals have partnered with an anti-abortion group that’s known for misleading pregnant women who are considering terminating their pregnancies.
Venezuelan MLB players are facing retaliation for speaking out against their country’s failing government.
The Guardian agrees with me: Orphan Black is television’s smartest show.
mental_floss tells the story of how Monty Python sued ABC to prevent the network from airing their shows.
Bon Appetit looks at where we get all that firewood in restaurant kitchens as cooking over open flame has become trendy again. Two of my favorite meals in the last few years, at Cincinnati’s Sotto and San Francisco’s Cotogna, included food cooked in an open wood-fired-hearth – and in both cases I sat at the counter watching the whole process.
We waste a lot of food, and a huge portion of it is fresh produce. The article suggests buying frozen rather than fresh, which is fine, but we also need to think more about how to preserve what we buy – freezing, pickling, canning, or cooking. Got some firm veg about to turn? Slice it and pour a hot vinegar solution over it for quick pickles. Fruit on the verge? Make jam, or even bake it into a pie. Roast those red peppers and oven-dry those tomatoes. Slice the cabbage and make kimchi, which keeps for months. Most of these techniques are centuries old, but have been lost in the age of convenience and refrigeration.
A reader in my chat this week mentioned the Kooks Burrito controversy in Portland over whether food can be subject to cultural appropriation; Willamette Week asked local chefs, mostly non-white, for their opinions.
Vaccines aren’t just for kids; here are five vaccines adults should get.
Caffeine is showing up in California waterways, which is entirely the result of human activity.
A German think tank argues that climate change will fuel terrorism recruitment, because food and water shortages will create a vulnerable pool of young candidates.
NPR reports that two of its reporters killed in Afghanistan last year were specifically targeted, rather than victims of a random attack.
Massachusetts’ legislature is considering a bill banning schools from using Native American names and symbols as mascots.
Harvard withdrew acceptance offers for ten incoming students for sharing offensive memes in a group chat. I’m fine with this decision, but I understand the argument against such a hardline response, articulated towards the end of the piece.
If you live in North Carolina, well, you live in a state with a legislature as corrupt as those of African pseudo-democracies.
Into the swamp: Esquire‘s Charles Pierce writes that it’s time for Donald Trump to resign – or be forced out.
The President’s “raging” against Jeff Sessions resembles patterns common to autocratic leaders, according to history professors who’ve studied despots from around the world.
Meanwhile, the President and his son Eric appear to have funneled donations to their children’s cancer charity into the Trump business itself, which I kind of thought wasn’t legal.
A beautiful time-waster: Mic.com looks at the 101 most ‘influential’ tweets in history. Most of the tweets I expected to be there were on the list; two more I’d submit were dril’s budget tweet and David J. Roth’s things of that nature tweet. Sadly, eppur si muove didn’t make the cut.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: climate change, environment, food waste, harvard, links, tv, vaccines

→ 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

→ March 3, 2017
→ By keith

Top Chef, S14E14.

This episode was called “Comida Final.” It’s Brooke versus Shirley, no mas.

* I could be reading way too much into facial expressions and body language, but I don’t think these two like each other. Either they’re really just sick of being so close to each other all the time, or they are just not mutual fans. It happens.

* They’re facing the classic Top Chef finale challenge: Prepare a progressive four-course meal. They pick their sous-chefs from the season’s contestants to date, with Shirley choosing Casey (because she thinks Brooke will take her), Brooke taking Sheldon (who would have been my first pick), Shirley taking Katsuji (who deadpans “because I’m Mexican?”), and Brooke taking Sam. I think Brooke won that draft.

* The third sous-chefs turn out to be the two contestants’ chefs de cuisine, which is kind of cool for those guys – they tend to be a little anonymous below their famous bosses.

* Shirley is clearly crafting a story across her four dishes, basing it on food memories with her family. Brooke’s seems less focused on a narrative, but says her theme is “definitely local ingredients.” I don’t think the story matters unless the judges can’t decide who won. Has anyone in a Top Chef finale lost after clearly outcooking his or her opponent?

* They’re shopping at some sort of open-air market – more like a grocery store than last week’s farmers’ market – with 10,000 pesos, about US$500.

* Brooke says “There’s a lot of Shirley yelling … and there has been for months now.” Yeah, I don’t think they like each other. Oh well.

* So it sounds like Brooke forgot to order pork belly. Then it gets really weird: She asks to use Shirley’s, which is awkward enough, but then it turns out Shirley ordered it for a ‘backup’ dish in case she doesn’t like the suckling pigs (piglets) she bought. Doesn’t Shirley have every right to say no? Granted, Brooke has short ribs as her backup plan, but ultimately ordering the correct items is the chef’s responsibility.

* They’re having a pre-finale dinner at Dreams Resort in Tulum. I really want to take a very long vacation down there. They’re surprised by their families at the dinner table – Shirley’s husband, Brooke’s husband and son Hudson (who, by the way, has gotten so much bigger since her last season on the show). I can’t imagine being away from my daughter for the amount of time this show requires – and she’s done this twice!

* I’m always surprised when I see how much ink Brooke has. Not that I think anything of it, but for whatever reason it doesn’t line up for me.

* When they walked in the kitchen, I was reminded again how much stronger I think Team Brooke is.

* Shirley, to her great credit, ends up giving the pork belly to Brooke. Meanwhile, Katsuji is butchering the piglets – and he’s a kosher chef, so he probably never cooks with pork at his restaurant.

* You don’t see whole red snapper very often as a consumer, but those fish Shirley has look amazing – and particularly fresh.

* Shirley’s making broth for her ramen, and I think she’s trying to make a pork broth, which is a long process, probably not something you can simulate in a couple of hours.

* Brooke asks Sheldon how he cooked his octopus “the other day,” in case you were wondering how compressed the filming schedule was. She’s got Sam making three garlic items to go with it – a garlic oil in which they’ll sear the octopus, garlic chips, and a garlic puree.

* Shirley’s also making noodles by hand for the ramen, and is using an old-fashioned hand-crank that won’t stay clamped to the countertop. This is the main reason I own the overpriced KitchenAid pasta-roller attachment. It works.

* Brooke is making chamomile flan, which turns out to be a problem because of some oven issue, but I just want to say that chamomile is gross. It’s related to ragweed (to which I’m very allergic) and tastes like some sort of grass. I like tea-flavored desserts, but, you know, how about Earl Grey?

* Anyway, the flan takes a lot longer to cook than anticipated (she says “it’s like the oven just took a shit”), so there’s a good chance it’s going to end up eggy and a little dense, rather than the silky texture of good flan.

* Shirlye’s mom and sister are there along with her husband. Her sister is adorable. Brooke’s folks are there; her dad has some strong mustache game going.

* First course: Shirley does snapper crudo with chili soy vinegar and crispy shallot. She calls it “Let me take you to Lijiang.” Brooke does a raw, warm oyster with grilled swiss chard and bacon. Daniel Boulud praises the presence of bacon flavor without fat, while Jonathan Waxman loves the amount of liquid in the shell.

* Jonathan Sawyer, who has the most metal hair we’ve ever seen on Top Chef, thinks Shirley’s dish was beautiful, but the elements weren’t balanced – Tom points out that you can’t get all three elements in one bite. Tesar is there too, and says Shirley’s dish was nice but calls Brooke’s “soigné.” I know that’s a compliment, but that word was tired the moment it moved out of the fashion world.

* Second course: Shirley serves top ramen with egg, kimchi, purslane, rendered pork fat. I’m not bothering with her goofy dish names. Brooke serves charred octopus with orange annatto broth, radishes, garlic puree, garlic chips. The octopus is an enormous hit; Padma calls it “finale food,” and Sawyer says he’d put it on any menu, anywhere, and would recommend it to anyone. Boulud praises the two presentations of garlic, and how it still doesn’t dominate the dish. I’m having a hard time imagining that much garlic in a dish without that becoming the predominant note.

* Joachaim Splichal says Shirley’s broth was very flat, and Tom thinks the rise of ramen in the last decade makes it look worse in comparison. Sawyer also doesn’t care for the noodles.

* Third course: Shirley made braised piglet shanks with wild rice, lentils, blanched spinach, and habanero onions. Brooke made braised pork belly and beans with charred onion and purslane, with a reduction of the bean braising liquid over the top. It’s all rich, comfort food. Tom loves the wild rice; Joachim says, “being German, I haven’t had pork like this since I left Germany.” Graham Elliott likes the choice of cut too.

* Brooke’s dish is just as much of a hit. Boulud “cleaned ny plate.” Sawyer praises the proteins and the sauce; Martha Ortiz there thinks the beans were the star and reminded her of Mexican cuisine. That’s high praise.

* If you can read Spanish, Ortiz’s biography on her official site is something to behold. It makes her sound more like she founded a country than two restaurants.

* Fourth course: Brooke’s dessert is an chamomile and aged rum flan with candied cashews. Shirley’s dessert is rice pudding with tropical fruit (I see dragonfruit, mango, and passion fruit), lemon-lime snow, and some sort of brittle. Joachim says it’s one of the best desserts he’s ever had.

* Brooke’s mom won her neighborhood’s second annual flan cookoff, earning her an ovation from the diners. That was cute.

* You can tell right away that the texture of the flan is off from the diners’ reactions, and everyone says the chamomile and rum flavors aren’t there. (You’d have to infuse the chamomile leaves in the dairy for a while.) Meanwhile, they’re all inhaling the rice pudding.

* We see Shirley’s mom asking her daughter how to say “I’m proud of you in English,” shortly before Shirley and Brooke return to the room. Shirley goes to see her mom and asks “haochi ma?” meaning “how did it taste?” (literally, “delicious?” as a question), to which her mom says “very delicious,” and then says in English, “Beautiful Shirley, I am happy Shirley, I am proud.” It got a little dusty in my living room at that point.

* Judges’ table: Tom calls out Shirley for the lack of enough chili or mint to go with each bite of the fish in her snapper crudo. Gail thinks it was smart to “set the stage” with the light first course. Graham claims Brooke’s first dish was “too much right out of the gate,” but Tom doesn’t find it too acidic and likes the “smack in the face” to start off. Shirley says for her ramen she was trying to mimic the big flavors of the taste of the packet you’d get in instant ramen, but the judges all seem to agree the broth came up short. Brooke credits Sam for the garlic chips, and overall her octopus dish gets perfect marks (that we see). Tom is still raving about the wild rice in Shirley’s pork shank. Graham says that the diners were debating whether Brooke’s was a pork dish or a bean dish, but that I think is a sign of its success. Tom says “everyone here can attest that I like rum,” but neither that flavor nor that of chamomile weren’t in Brooke’s dish. Gail notes the inferior texture of the flan itself. Padma says Shirley’s dessert was her favorite dish of the night; Graham says it was creative and provocative, and Tom loved the textures and flavors.

* Tom says Brooke won the first course, and when Gail says the octopus was her favorite dish of the night, Tom seems to agree. There’s some fake drama here when they discuss the dessert, but I think this was a rout: two dishes for Brooke, one for Shirley, and one toss-up. Tom even acknowledges this when he says that if he looks head-to-head, he “can make a really clear argument for who I think should win.” Yes.

* And there’s little surprise here. Brooke is Top Chef. I had her ranked at the top after episode one, and she never budged. Shirley ending up second over Sheldon or Sylva was the big upset, but Brooke came pretty close to running the table. She’s also now the second chef to come back via Last Chance Kitchen to win, after Kristen, who beat Brooke in the latter’s first time around.

* I’ve criticized this season of Top Chef more than any other season I’ve covered here with recaps, and I think everything I said still holds, but this was a strong finale in every respect. I wanted to eat all of that food. I got ideas for dishes or twists on dishes from the last three courses. (I never prepare shellfish at home, and I’ll leave crudo to folks who source better fish than I can.) One chef cooked well, the other cooked like a champion. And the emotional moments in the finale felt genuine.

* That said, I sincerely hope we are done with the mixed veterans/rookies format, and that wherever the next season takes place, only a few challenges will focus on regional cuisine. I always want fewer gimmicks – you can fire your sudden-death quickfires into the sun, guys – and would like to never see any of these “you can only cook with one hand behind your back, and we’re pumping half the oxygen out of the kitchen” challenges again. I’m truly just here for the food, even if I never get to taste any of it. And, hey, if they want to do Top Chef: Philadelphia next season, I’m just saying the baseball offseasons give me a lot of room in my schedule.

* EDIT: Vulture interviewed the two finalists, where they at least contradict some of my speculations above.

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