Thursday, October 31, 2013

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Mike Napoli, 32. Better than Vernon Wells! Better than Frank Francisco! And congrats to the Red Sox...I'll miss having the Giants as World Series Champions, though. But it was fun while it lasted (again).

Before the good stuff, one other note: Thank you, everyone -- record traffic month at Plain Blog!

1. Norm Ornstein on the right to vote.

2. Meanwhile, Arizona will be voting on voting, as Reid Wilson reports.

3. John Sides passes along some new research on the effect of the Fox News original rollout. I'd be very careful about extrapolating too far from this...but it's worth knowing about.

4. Garance Franke-Ruta explains why delaying ACA is impractical at this point -- although I'll note that if the web site doesn't get fixed relatively soon, it may turn out to be the least-bad option.

5. I give Josh Kraushaar a hard time often, but I think his column on VA-GOV is a pretty good example of how to write about single elections in the context of national elections. He doesn't overplay it; instead, he talks about it in the context of national trends and issues, but without making claims about "what this means" that wouldn't hold up.

6. Back to the Red Sox: Dan Drezner teases John Sides.

1 comment:

  1. Drezner was being humorous, but it seems to me there's a little something to his second point (does soft power matter in baseball success?)

    Thinking about how last year's awful Sox team was attributed to ownership's preference for fan-friendly familiar faces over sabermetrically-productive ones; this preference allegedly drove Moneyball golden boy Theo Epstein out of Fenway and over to Wrigley.

    I wouldn't call the Sox' immediate 180-degree flip to WS champs a black mark for sabermetrics, but it does require something of an explanation, no?

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