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.
Audio
"I can't remember a time when I wasn't drawing," says Molly Crabapple. "I can't not draw. It's how I relate to the world." And Crabapple's art - her drawings, paintings and posters - have ignited various political causes, from the Occupy Movement to protests against the treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo. She tells Anne Strainchamps how art can be a political tool.
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.
Paul Koudounaris has spent the past decade traveling around the world, climbing into church crypts and bone chambers and taking photos at over 250 burial sites in 30 countries. He's discovered chapels decorared with skeletons and underground caves filled with skulls—among other things. In this interview, he tells us how he began his obsession with displays of death.
Composer Freddy Knop creates a soundscape to help illustrate Nathan Englander's experience of the muse descending.
What turns you on?
Sure, there are the obvious answers: beauty, brains, braun. But human sexuality is a complicated business. Studying it is more complicated still. That was, until the internet came along.
Steve Almond tells Steve Paulson some of his favorite candy bars are the regional specialities, and remembers the pop rocks craze.
Ted Steinberg tells Jim Fleming that Americans love perfect mono-cultures and are willing to over-water and freely use chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides to achieve them.
Pages
