The weird way Lenin is kept fresh

Sport | Stat cast – The new moneyball

A video platform called Statcast takes baseball analytics to the next level by recording every movement on the pitch from every angle and crunching every action into numbers. Statcast promises to give every analyst the raw material to model every trait of every player and every team. But will everyone get the data – or will the richest teams buy it up for themselves? (The Economist, 845 words)

Profile | The life of Oliver Sacks

After Oliver Sacks’s disclosure that he is dying of cancer, here are notes on his life in New York in the early 1980s, when he was “something of a recluse, living alone in a modest clapboard house in the Bronx” practising psychiatry in state hospitals and nursing homes. His life of druggy hedonism in California was behind him. His fame as a writer was about to begin with the publication of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat”. (Lawrence Weschler, Vanity Fair, 7,100 words)

Drugs | Nefarious nefazodone

Psychotherapist discusses the trade-offs between benefits and side-effects in anti-depressants and other drugs: “Which is worse – ruining 10 million people’s sex lives for one year, or making one hundred people’s livers explode? This is a real question that I deal with on a daily basis. In that spirit, which would you rather have – a million people addicted to amphetamines, or 10 people with toxic epidermal necrolysis?” (Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex, 2,265 words)

Death | Lenin’s body improves with age

Generations of Russian scientists have worked for 90 years to maintain the “look, feel and flexibility” of Lenin’s body in its Red Square tomb. When body parts cannot be adequately preserved, they are replaced. “Researchers developed artificial skin patches when a piece of skin on Lenin’s foot went missing in 1945. A mouldable material made of paraffin, glycerin and carotene has replaced much of the skin fat.” (Jeremy Hsu, Scientific American, 1,220 words)

Trade | The great unraveling of globalisation

Everybody said globalisation was the future of industry. Everybody was wrong. Globalisation “is proving a barely-profitable and perplexing strategy for most companies”. Markets are closing, profit margins are falling, cost-savings are being competed away. “What was until recently a taboo topic inside multinationals – to wit, should we reconsider, even rein in, our global growth strategy? ‒  has become an urgent, if still hushed, discussion”. (Jeffrey Rothfeder, Washington Post, 2,530 words)

Future transport | The flying car takes off

They promised us flying cars – and they kept the promise; a flying car comes to market, built by two Slovaks who hatched the idea in communist times as a means for escaping to the West. “No longer or wider than a standard five-door Bentley, it drives along the road like a space-age roadster. It flies through the skies like a private jet. And if everything goes to plan, it could be in customers’ garages within two years”. (Henry Foy, Financial Times, 2,025 words)

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