Friday Recap: Aggregation Hell, Vikings Blitz Rates and Urine Energy Drinks

Weird week! There's a lot in this Friday's recap, which covers the Vikings, some WNBA and MLB. There's Middle East stuff and a weird Amazon story about urine energy drinks.

I’m glad I have more to share this week, I’ve been able to read some phenomenal and bizarre stories. I was able to finally finish my piece discussing the Vikings blitz defense, too.

Once again, I’ve tried to be more diligent letting people know when a link is a video or a podcast. The non-sports stories are split between the heavier stuff on the Middle East and stories outside of that purview. As always, media behind a paywall is denoted with a ($).

My Work

• My piece after the Vikings game against the Bears ($)

• And my piece on the Vikings and their defensive turnaround ($), led by the most blitz-happy unit the modern NFL has seen.

• Podcast: Norse Code Podcast previews the 49ers game, right after we reviewed the Bears game

• Podcast/Video: I was also on the Minnesota Football Party, where we talked about the revival of the defense, how to fix the Vikings offense and Nerdy Stats

Work I Liked (Sports)

• Bears players definitely don’t seem upset that they might have roll with Tyson Bagent ($).

• Who cares if the viral Chargers fan is (or was) a Vikings fan?

• Neil Paine was the sports editor at 538 before it was bought by ABC and brought in to do exclusively political analysis. So, he started a substack. His NFL Elo ratings and projections are here and his most recent story on the Las Vegas Aces being the WNBA goats is good, too.

• ESPN’s story on general manager Kim Ng leaving the Marlins after they tried to undercut her

• Sports aggregating misinformation is a plague. A.J. Perez wrote about it a little bit here.

• Arab athletes across the world have been receiving death threats

Work I Liked (Non-Sports, non-Middle East)

• Video: There’d’nt’ve (Tom Scott)

• Erin Reed on what’s next for Trans Rights in America

• School Vouchers Are Even Worse Than You Think

• Amazon let its drivers urine be sold as an energy drink (not the Onion)

• Video: We’ve erased 40 years of progress on pedestrian safety. How did it happen?

Work I Liked (Non-Sports, Middle East)

• Doomsday Diaries by Sarah Aziza, a Palestinian Gazan recounting her experiences from October 7 to October 17.

  • “What does it feel like to stand at the edge of annihilation? I can only speak from my vantage of a few degrees from the epicenter of war. Here, it feels like falling through an endless throat. It is disbelief mingled with the feeling that this day has already come. It is knowing that any possible survival will live inside the knowledge that this planet is one where your extermination was called for, and millions welcomed it.”

• Video: The Channel 4 investigation on the hospital bombing in Gaza is one of the only ones that felt capable of being credibly skeptical of Israel’s claims.

• Upday, the largest news aggregator in Europe, stands accused of manipulating their aggregation in favor of pro-Israel coverage — including burying stories, managing headlines and changing the balance of stories in coverage.

• None of this is to suggest that there isn’t worthwhile coverage from that perspective. There has been significant evidence of Hamas’ atrocities.

• It is just important to remember that alongside those inexcusable atrocities comes an extraordinary imbalance of power. For example, Israel has destroyed a quarter of the northern Gaza Strip and the death toll has exceeded 4,000.