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
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.
Journalist Thomas Ricks talks with Jim Fleming about how close the U.S. came to losing the war in Iraq on November 19, 2004 in a town called Haditha, 150 miles north of Baghdad.
Tariq Ramadan tells Steve Paulson that Islam should be viewed as a religion in its own right and not compared to the history of Christianity.
We know a lot about how slaves looked at books because of the hundreds of slave narratives they wrote. Scholar Cherene Sherrard-Johnson says a fundamental trope in those narratives is what’s called “the Talking Book.”
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.
Steven Kaplan is a historian of bread. He’s famous in France as the American who told them their bread wasn’t good enough.
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.
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