Category Archives: The Evidentialism Files

The Monday Night Miracle


I hesitated writing this column out of fear it may jinx his chances. But since a dead man spoke Saturday, it’s okay for me to. And even if, fates forbid, Damar Hamlin’s condition were to worsen, the unbelievable should still be noted.

And believed. Because Monday night was nothing short of miraculous — if science didn’t do it so on the regular.

Hamlin, a safety for the Buffalo Bills, took a helmet to the chest that was so precise — a YouTubing cardiologist called it the kind of blow “you only see in medical textbooks” — that Hamlin had a cardiac arrest on field.

My brethren in the news media have done a poor job of explaining cardiac arrest, so let me attempt one.

Hamlin dropped dead. For 13 seconds, an NFL player was dead in midfield Cincinnati. And science, in the form of Bills assistant coach Denny Kellington, manually pumped blood through that dead man. Not unconscious; not woozy; not paralyzed. Dead. That’s why the players were weeping. They’d never seen a man killed. Few have.

Seconds after that, more science, this time in the form of a defibrillator that re-triggered his heart.

At the University of Cincinnati, neurologists said Hamlin’s early brain function may be fully intact.

The New York Times obtained audio of the Bills medical crew the moment Hamlin died. A supervisor ordered a gurney immediately after seeing the collision because he didn’t “like how he went down.”

And today, Hamlin is tweeting: “When you put real love out into the world it comes back to you 3x’s as much,” he wrote in his first Instagram post since his collapse Monday. “The Love has been overwhelming, but I’m thankful for every single person that prayed for me and reached out. If you know me you know this only gone make me stronger. On a long road keep praying for me!”

Indeed, the nation surely will. The Bills — a team that once went to four straight Super Bows but has never won one — is my new favorite this playoffs.

But, should this long road bring Hamlin back to the sidelines, in any capacity, I hope Kellington and the UofC crew are equally hailed.

After all, it’s not often you see a resurrection.

And Walnuts Can Sulk

Pistachios can spontaneously combust.

It turns out there’s a price to pay for how good pistachios are: Under the right circumstances, they can spontaneously combust. Everyone’s favorite shelled nut is especially rich in fat, which is highly flammable. Thankfully, that only becomes a problem when pistachios are packed too tightly during shipping or storage. It’s important to keep the nuts dry lest they become moldy — but if they’re kept too dry and there are too many of them bunched together, they can self-heat and catch fire without an external heat source. 

Though exceedingly rare and easy to avoid if the proper instructions are followed, pistachio self-combustion is a real enough concern that the German Transport Information Service specifically advises that pistachios “not be stowed together with fibers/fibrous materials as oil-soaked fibers may promote self-heating/spontaneous combustion of the cargo.” Don’t worry, though: It won’t happen in your pantry with just a few bags, which means you can indulge in the nut of your dreams without worrying about their flavor becoming unexpectedly smoky.

Happy Gobble Gobble!


Evidentialism factslap: Sweet potatoes aren’t actually potatoes.

Sweet potatoes and common potatoes share part of a name and the spotlight at Thanksgiving meals, but the two are entirely different plants — and sweet potatoes aren’t even potatoes. While both root vegetable species are native to Central and South America, they’re classified as unrelated. Sweet potatoes belong to the Convolvulaceae family, a group of flowering plants that’s also called the morning glory family. Potatoes belong to the nightshade (Solanaceae) family, and are cousins to peppers, tomatoes, and eggplants. 

Both species get their name from an Indigenous Caribbean term, batata, which eventually morphed into the English “potato.” By the 1740s, “sweet” was added to the orange-fleshed tuber’s name to differentiate the two root crops.

Then there are yams. Although they’re often served interchangeably with sweet potatoes at Thanksgiving dinners, this third root crop is biologically unrelated to either sweet potatoes or common potatoes. These tubers belong to the Dioscoreacea family, a group of flowering plants usually cultivated in tropical areas. Luckily, you don’t have to know their scientific classification to distinguish between the two non-spuds at the grocery store: Sweet potatoes have tapered ends and relatively smooth skin, while true yams are generally larger with rough bark and a more cylindrical shape. At most U.S. grocery stores, what you’re seeing labeled as a yam is probably actually a sweet potato.