Links for July 24th
Olympic softball, the science of flavor, the Michigan kidnapping plot, hot vax summer, Netflix, Min Jin Lee's Pachinko
It’s time, time for the Olympics (even if they’re a mess) (but the athletes did look pretty excited during the opening ceremonies even if they were in an empty stadium). Actually have a number of links here, but they’re good ones.
Links
“There are, by most estimates, only about 500 flavorists in the U.S., and if you have eaten food from a box in America, you have certainly tasted their work.” Cool, short story about the people behind the ingredient lists.
My colleagues took a sharp and surprising look back at the Michigan kidnapping plot that’s worth checking out.
This is an absolutely horrifying story that digs into the German study in the 20th century that placed foster children with pedophiles; it is very well written and reported.
To lighten things up, in the second section here, Sonny Bunch raises a good point about how flimsy Netflix’s data releases are.
(But if you’ve watched Never Have I Ever on Netflix, this is a great short read about Poorna Jagannathan’s Nalini, the highlight of the show, in my opinion.)
This is a very well reported story about the, it turns out, sort of… myth of Hot Vax Summer.
Old but new to me (and still funny to me, though I never once read a Babysitters Club book): Hemingway writes the Babysitters Club.
Cat Osterman — who was on the Olympic softball team when I was in high school — is still pitching in Tokyo at age 38! How? Sports Illustrated answers:
Osterman has such precise control of [her drop ball, which is like a 12-6 curve] that she can easily keep hitters on their toes with subtle variations. She might start with just a slight drop, keeping the ball in the strike zone, perhaps more like falling off a step stool than falling off a table. Then she might do an intermediate version that’s more like falling off a chair. Then comes a pitch tumbling off the table. Maybe the first one was hittable. Maybe the second one was, too. But when they all start out looking the same, and a hitter can’t tell which one is coming, it can feel impossible to know just when to lay off.
“It’s not only its movement, it’s her ability to locate it, in and out, and to climb down the ladder,” Svekis says of Osterman’s drop ball. “So she can start with a pitch at the hips, she can put one at the knees, and then she can put one down at your ankles—and make them all look pretty similar so that you’re chasing them.”
And lastly…
…more goofy baseball players.
Light book commentary
Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko is great! The basic synopsis is pretty straight forward: A girl gets pregnant in the 1930s in Korea, then occupied by Japan, and moves to Osaka, setting off a series of mostly painful but occasionally warm family events over the next half century. The principal concern here is what the Korean experience in Japan was like in the 20th century, with an element of fairly universal immigrant loss and triumph. But the straight-forward style and time frame of decades are such that Pachinko has that hypnotic, propulsive vibe of you get that Little Women aspect of “who will so and so marry” and “will that kind boy always be kind, or will something bad happen to him.” There’s also an interesting element of, when the family’s economic conditions improve, things actually become much more painful in this book. I really tore through it, though.
A note on all this
Thanks for subscribing. Hope you enjoy. The goal here is just to offer up some links you may have missed, and maybe the occasional commentary on something in politics or a book I may have read that you, the reader, might enjoy. If you have thoughts on any of this, hit me up at katherinemillernyc@gmail.com or just tweet at me.