Jesus Creed
Cubs win! JJ Bailey, a pro-Cards St Louis reporter, has a wonderful summary that reveals quality writing about two quality baseball programs:
ST. LOUIS — And that’s how it ends: not with a whimper, but with a series of increasingly thunderous bangs. The 2015 season closed for the Cardinals in Chicago, after a young and wildly talented Cubs team launched ball after ball over the Wrigley Field walls.
Chicago finished the series with 10 home runs, bombarding Cardinal pitching and overwhelming the offense whenever it sought to reclaim ground. It was a brutal defeat for St. Louis fans, who watched their club lead baseball pretty much gate to gate this season, only to be felled by their most-hated division rivals….
Yes, an NLDS exit for baseball’s best team will leave a bruise, but for every club but one, the season ends in tears. The absence of utter success shouldn’t preclude enjoyment, and it certainly shouldn’t inhibit appreciation.
That elimination came at the hands of the Cubs adds a layer of misery for most, but the truth is Chicago earned their place in the next round. They didn’t cheat or get favorable calls, they played better, pitched better and, at times, were better coached. The Cubs exerted their will in the series and won on raw talent and a belief in October manifest destiny. They have fun playing baseball and are fun to watch playing it. They are driven by young stars and impressive arms. It might be tough to listen to long-suffering Cubs fan revel in their success, but the exuberance is earned and their wins weren’t cheap. If that doesn’t comfort fans, then they should work on building up that callous quickly, because Chicago’s 2015 is not an anomaly. They will be an excellent team for many years, and these types of celebrations will be a lot more frequent.
But that’s a good thing. The NL Central is more fun when there’s tight competition, and rivalries carry more weight when both teams are on equal ground.
The future is bright for the Cubs, but St. Louis showed the light isn’t confined to Chicago. Both of these teams have open road ahead, and watching them race each other will be a delight for baseball fans in the coming seasons. This moment is a clearly defined chapter break in the story of these two franchises, and many Cardinal fans who lived it don’t know what it feels like to be on the losing side of the narrative. That’s not a bad thing. Success triggers the most profound euphoria when it’s been tempered with failure. The Cubs and their fans are experiencing that firsthand. The Cardinals will have a winter to reflect on their loss and return hungry once more, and their fans will be rabid again. In the meantime, hats must be tipped toward Chicago and appreciative applause directed at St. Louis.
Next season will see two teams ready to hand the rivalry off to a new generation of players. It’s going to be fun.
Baseball is fun.
The Guardians are one of two indigenous groups on this eastern fringe of the Amazon that have taken radical action to reduce illegal logging. They have tied up loggers, torched their trucks and tractors, and kicked them off the reserves.
As a result, such logging has sharply declined in these territories. But the indigenous groups have faced reprisal attacks and death threats for their actions, raising fears of more violence in an area known for its lawlessness.
The clashes highlight the continuing grave threat to the Amazon, the world’s biggest remaining rain forest, which plays a crucial role in maintaining the world’s climate and biodiversity. From 2005 to 2012, deforestation plunged in Brazil, as the government increased its conservation efforts and cracked down on illegal loggers. But since then, the numbers have begun to creep up again. In 2014 alone, almost 2,000 square miles of Amazon rain forest were cleared by farmers, loggers and others.
Nightengale is right, but he’s got himself in a gas-bag of an article: get ‘er done, buddy.
CHICAGO – It will forever be known as the Chase Utley Rule.
Or, perhaps. the Ruben Tejada Rule.
Utley has had a wonderful career and will be revered in Philadelphia for helping the Phillies win a World Series, but all he’ll be remembered for – in the minds of casual fans, certainly- will be that slide on the night of Oct. 10.
It will be the night baseball changed forever.
The moment this postseason ends, the takeout slide at second base will be declared illegal.
Amy X. Wang, on Sweden going cashless:
There’s a conspicuous lack of cash on Sweden’s streets.
So ubiquitous are digital payments in the country that attempting a paper money transaction at a Swedish bank might provoke a suspicious stare or a report to the police. That’s according to Niklas Arvidsson, a professor at Stockholm’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology.
Arvidsson, who specializes in industrial economics and management, found in a recent study that Sweden is on its way to becoming the world’s first cash-free society. He attributed the disappearance of Swedish banknotes to the country’s embrace of new technologies, the growth of mobile payment systems, and a governmental crackdown on corruption, which helps citizens feel safe about electronic money.
“Our use of cash is small, and it’s disappearing rapidly,” Arvidsson says. Circulation figures from the Riksbank, Sweden’s central bank, back up his assertion. [HT: LNMM]
Our President interviews our best novelist, Marilynne Robinson.
Kyle Schwarber: “I really don’t look at them as young guys. We’re good baseball players, that’s why we’re here,” said Schwarber, who has three homers and five RBI in the postseason. “You can’t look at it as young. We’re baseball players. We know what needs to be done.”
Smartphone addictions photographed: [check out the images]
This is the world under the influence of electronic devices.
It is an eerie place, filled with people who seemingly look past each other and into empty space. In reality, they are staring into their cellphones, tablets and other screens.
In a series of images for a project called “Removed,” photographer Eric Pickersgill captured that imaginary world, in which the devices we are tethered to have seemingly disappeared, leaving us unmoored and disconnected.
The images are jarring: a family at the dinner table, a couple just married on their wedding day.
What’s wrong with Twitter? Abuse. By Umair Haque:
Here’s my tiny theory, in a word. Abuse. And further, I’m going to suggest in this short essay that abuse — not making money — is the great problem tech and media have. The problem of abuse is the greatest challenge the web faces today. It is greater than censorship, regulation, or (ugh) monetization. It is a problem of staggering magnitude and epic scale, and worse still, it is expensive: it is a problem that can’t be fixed with the cheap, simple fixes beloved by tech: patching up code, pushing out updates.
To explain, let me be clear what I mean by abuse. I don’t just mean the obvious: violent threats. I also mean the endless bickering, the predictable snark, the general atmosphere of little violences that permeate the social web…and the fact that the average person can’t do anything about it.
We once glorified Twitter as a great global town square, a shining agora where everyone could come together to converse. But I’ve never been to a town square where people can shove, push, taunt, bully, shout, harass, threaten, stalk, creep, and mob you…for eavesdropping on a conversation that they weren’t a part of…to alleviate their own existential rage…at their shattered dreams…and you can’t even call a cop. What does that particular social phenomenon sound like to you? Twitter could have been a town square. But now it’s more like a drunken, heaving mosh pit. And while thereare people who love to dive into mosh pits, they’re probably not the audience you want to try to build a billion dollar publicly listed company that changes the world upon.
The social web became a nasty, brutish place. And that’s because the companies that make it up simply do not not just take abuse seriously…they don’t really consider it at all. Can you remember the last time you heard the CEO of a major tech company talking about…abuse…not ads? Why not? Here’s the harsh truth: they see it as peripheral to their “business models”, a minor nuisance, certainly nothing worth investing in, for theirs is the great endeavor of…selling more ads.
They’re wrong. Nothing could be further from the truth. Abuse is killing the social web, and hence it isn’t peripheral to internet business models — it’s central. [HT: JS]
Is this a better model or not? For the waiter staff or for the customer or for the owner?
If you happen to have a late-November reservation at the Modern, Danny Meyer’s two-Michelin-star restaurant in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, here’s some good news: When the bill comes, you’ll no longer have to do any fuzzy math on a full stomach and a few glasses of champagne. Meyer, head of the Union Square Hospitality Group, announced Wednesday that he is eliminating tipping at his fullservice restaurants, beginning late next month.
Unfortunately, there’s some bad news, too: Meyer’s initiative, which he is calling Hospitality Included, will raise prices 20 to 35 percent. So that $138 tasting menu could soon cost about $170.
The new policy will be rolled out at all of Meyer’s restaurants in the next year; Shake Shack, his fast-food chain — and his only D.C. presence — will not be affected by the change. But as the restaurant industry begins to rethink the way its employees are compensated, the no-gratuity business model — which has already been implemented in two local restaurants — may catch hold in Washington.
Though Meyer certainly isn’t the first restaurateur to eliminate tipping — restaurants such as New York’s Dirt Candy and Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., have already instituted service charges instead — his 13 restaurants will set a high-profile example for others in the industry struggling to retain an often low-paid staff.
Technological change, as we know very well, tends to provoke linguistic and cultural change, too. It’s the reason why, several times a year, dictionaries trumpet the addition of new and typically very trendy words.
But more interesting than the new words, I think, are the old words that have gotten new meanings: words such as “cloud” and “tablet” and “catfish,” with very long pre-Internet histories. The reappropriation is rarely random; in most cases, the original meaning of the word is a metaphor for the new one. Our data is as remote as a cloud, for instance; catfish are just as tricky and unpredictable as an online love interest.
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