Baseball, Gender In India, Sex Offenders, Frank Stanford, Pinterest, Drug Side-Effects
Statcast: The New Moneyball
Sports Technology | The Economist | 30th April 2015
A video platform called Statcast takes baseball analytics to the next level by recording every movement on the pitch and crunching every action into numbers. Statcast could fuel an arms race among the next generation of Billy Beanes by giving every analyst the raw material to model every trait of every player and every team. But will everyone get the data — or will the richest teams buy it up for themselves? (845 words)
A Brief Guide To Gender In India
Minal Hajratwala | Granta | 30th April 2015
"If you have acid thrown in your face, go to the hospital, then later to the police. The doctors will do something. The police will not. Consider suicide, although it is a crime to commit suicide. If you do not commit suicide, start an NGO for women who have had acid thrown in their faces. Teach them to make craft items such as wallets from colorful recycled Tetrapak. Speak internationally to audiences who will feel revulsion and pity" (1,920 words)
Welcome To Pariahville
Jay Kirk | GQ | 30th April 2015
The City of Refuge in Pahokee, Florida, shelters 120 registered sex offenders, many of whom are interviewed here. Assume every possible trigger warning before reading. "After a while, you say: Wait a second, hold it. People have done things as bad if not worse and they're not being punished any more. I did twelve years. We've paid our debt to society. Let us live our life. You know? Let me tell you, if I screw up again, hang me" (7,400 words)
What About Frank Stanford?
Dean Kuipers | LA Times | 24th April 2015
Review. "Frank Stanford didn't live long. He shot himself three times in the heart with a pistol at age 29. But you come through a Frank Stanford poem, you know you've lived. Rabbit blood under your nails. The snake handler showing you the fang marks. Now a monster compilation, What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford, has assembled more than 700 pages of poetry and a little prose like a moon-spattered Bible" (636 words)
The Acquisitive Gaze
Rob Horning | New Inquiry | 29th April 2015
If you are allergic to cultural studies go no further; but these notes on Pinterest are perceptive. "Pinterest lets users shop for images over the sprawl of the internet, turning it into a endless visual shopping mall in which one never runs out of money. Because it is virtual, no one has to wastefully consume products that they want merely for the status implications. It allows for consumerism without consumption” (2,300 words)
Nefarious Nefazodone
Scott Alexander | Slate Star Codex | 25th April 2015
Psychotherapist discusses the trade-offs between benefits and side-effects in anti-depressants and other drugs: "Which is worse – ruining ten million people’s sex lives for one year, or making one hundred people’s livers explode? This is a real question that I deal with on a daily basis. In that spirit, which would you rather have – a million people addicted to amphetamines, or ten people with Toxic Epidermal Necrolysis?" (2,265 words)
Video of the day: The Backward Bicycle
What to expect: You never forget how to ride a bicycle. But nor can you learn a new way to do it (7'57")
Thought for the day
Appeals to rationality are mostly bluff. There is no good theory of what it is nor of how to recognise it
D.H. Mellor