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
Simon Winchester talks with Jim Fleming about the short-sightedness of placing cities where the planet doesn't think they should be.
Here is our Executive Producer Steve Paulson's list of books that have blown his mind recently, with hopes that some of them will expand yours in 2015, if they haven't already.
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.
Tariq Ali is a historian, activist and writer. He talks with Steve Paulson about the history of the Ottoman empire, and the Islamic clergy’s rejection of modernism.
Susan Friedman maintains an e-mail correspondence with a colleague in Iraq whose messages describe the hardships and terror of life in Iraq...
Composer Freddy Knop creates a soundscape to help illustrate Nathan Englander's experience of the muse descending.
Thug Kitchen is a wildly popular, foul-mouthed vegan food blog. The formerly anonymous writers have just come out with a cookbook and revealed their identities. Michelle Davis and Matt Holloway are a white couple from L.A. Now they're fielding questions about the racial politics of the way they write about food.
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