People who like baseball call it "the thinking person’s game," but for the first 100 years, baseball was governed by a surprisingly limited range of critical thinking. Decisions were made by insiders, the current and former players who spent a lifetime around the diamond, and did things mostly one way: the way they've always been done. But in the last 3 or 4 years, that storehouse of common knowledge—much of which was kept guarded in a true "old boy's club"—has been cracked wide open. Now the game isn't driven by intuition, it's driven by data. And the math nerds who rode the bench in Little League—if they played at all—are now telling pro ballplayers what to do. Journalist Travis Sawchik tells Steve Paulson the story.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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Science writer Jennifer Ouellette spent a year confronting her math phobia straight on. She taught herself calculus. It helped her win at Vegas, get a good mortgage, and might just save her from a zombie apocalypse.
Thomas Glave is a young, Black, gay writer who’s lived in New York and Jamaica. Glave tells Jim Fleming that he tries to understand and identify with all of his characters.
Sara Nelson tells Anne Strainchamps what publishers can do to make a book a best-seller and why the actual number of copies sold is a state secret.
Did you know plants see, smell and communicate with neighboring plants? And have both long and short term memory? Plant geneticist Daniel Chamovitz describes the complex world of plant life.
Seymour Hersh broke the My Lai massacre story during the Vietnam War and he was among the first to document the extent of the abuses and the cover-up at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
What do the NSA disclosures really tell us? Ben Wizner should know. When he's not directing the ACLU's Speech Privacy and Technology Project, he doubles as Edward Snowden's legal adviser. He explains why we should be worried about the agency's push to expand its surveillance programs.
Mississippian Charlotte Hays is co-author of a cookbook called, “Being Dead is No Excuse: The Official Southern Ladies Guide to Hosting the Perfect Funeral.”
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