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What’s New in 2018? Something Old: The Bullpen Cart - The New York Times By Tyler Kepner March 26, 2018

“I’ve never thought of being driven into a game, so it’s a little weird concept, but I think it’s pretty cool,” said Archie Bradley, the Diamondbacks’ ace reliever. “We have some creative minds out in the bullpen. We’re already talking about tricking this thing out — subwoofers, underglow lights. And I definitely want to drive guys in. That would be sick.” 

The relatively small-scale dispute gained international notoriety last year when the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit ruled that the missing comma created enough uncertainty to side with the drivers, granting those who love the Oxford comma a chance to run a victory lap across the internet. 

 But the resolution means there will be no ruling from the land’s highest courts on whether the Oxford comma — the often-skipped second comma in a series like “A, B, and C” — is an unnecessary nuisance or a sacred defender of clarity, as its fans and detractors endlessly debate. (In most cases, The Times stylebook discourages the serial comma, often called the Oxford comma because it was traditionally used by the Oxford University Press.) 

The Rays Are Playing a Traditional Doubleheader. By Choice. - The New York Times By Pat Borzi June 7, 2017

In September, when the Tampa Bay Rays announced their 2017 home schedule, it included something so unusual that some of their players didn’t quite grasp the concept. There would be, on Saturday, June 10, an old-fashioned, conventional doubleheader, two games for a single-admission price. 

A common practice in Major League Baseball for a good part of the 20th century, traditional doubleheaders fell out of favor by the late 1980s, when rising attendance and escalating salaries led baseball owners to abandon them as an unnecessary giveaway since it amounted to a game’s being played free of charge. 

Outsourcing knowledge to Google keeps you from learning things the right way.

By Daniel T. Willingham May 19, 2017

Google is good at finding information, but the brain beats it in two essential ways. Champions of Google underestimate how much the meaning of words and sentences changes with context. Consider vocabulary . . . With the right knowledge in memory, your brain deftly puts words in context . . . The meaning of [a word] depends on context, but dictionaries, including internet dictionaries, necessarily offer context-free meanings . . . 

What best distinguishes human beings from other animals is our foresight, as scientists are just beginning to recognize.

By Martin E. P. Seligman and John Tierney May 21, 2017

We are misnamed. We call ourselves Homo sapiens, the “wise man,” but that’s more of a boast than a description. What makes us wise? What sets us apart from other animals? . . . 

A more apt name for our species would be Homo prospectus, because we thrive by considering our prospects. The power of prospection is what makes us wise. Looking into the future, consciously and unconsciously, is a central function of our large brain . . . It is increasingly clear that the mind is mainly drawn to the future, not driven by the past. Behavior, memory and perception can’t be understood without appreciating the central role of prospection. We learn not by storing static records but by continually retouching memories and imagining future possibilities. Our brain sees the world not by processing every pixel in a scene but by focusing on the unexpected. 

By Lauren Collister July 19, 2016