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Compared to Drake, most other rappers take their time releasing music and making career moves. And if that’s how you operate, “in no time” it’ll be a new year, and you’ll still be in the same place, doing the same shit.

In particular, this is a reference to how long it took Meek Mill to come back with a response to “Charged Up” and “Back to Back”. As he said in an interview with The FADER:

This is a discussion about music, and no one’s putting forth any music? You guys are gonna leave this for me to do?

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This is the only Drake solo track on What a Time to Be Alive, and sports some of the album’s most quotable lines. Over a beat by Noah “40” Shebib that Spin called “one of the most gorgeous 40 productions yet, a pitched-down, flanged sample breathing to life on top of 40’s trademark piano twinkles and crisp thump,” Drake aims to silence his critics:

What happened to the things you niggas said was supposed to happen? / Are we just supposed to ignore the fact that it never happened?

He makes particular reference to a recent beef with Meek Mill, which started when Meek accused him of not writing his own lyrics. The Toronto superstar got the better of Meek on “Charged Up” and “Back to Back”, and here he keeps firing.

The track is named for the critically acclaimed 30 for 30 series of sports documentaries produced by ESPN. In his closing remarks, Drake alludes to Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar, who received his own 30 for 30, The Two Escobars.

Drake’s “Closer to My Dreams” from 2007’s Comeback Season is sampled.

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If you put your money where your mouth is, and “money on the wood make the game go good”… is Nitt saying that your mouth is on the wood?

A little oral sex wordplay.

But here’s the double meaning: “wood” refers to “hardwood”, the basketball court surface: to say “money on the wood make the game go good” means that a team of high-paid players does well. Nitt’s bankrolling the best team in the game.

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some folks who thought my opinion piece was glib and simplistic might enjoy this thoughtful rebuttal

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This is why biology is such a wonderful discipline: there is so much complexity, so many intricate systems, so much vocabulary and prior work to wade through – and yet you can tell just how new we still are at it.

Like here, what’s going on is that West Nile virus can either be no big deal (you end up with no symptoms or with a fever) or it can kill you (because your brain swells), and the difference, it turns out, has to do with the patient’s own genes. And the way we found out which genes in particular mattered was basically, I think, by guess and check: we “turned off” one gene at a time and watched what happened to the resulting cells.

This happens all the time in biology. We don’t have anything close to a complete sense of how the body works. If we did, we wouldn’t have to do experiments like the one mentioned here, which is like trying to find out how your car’s radio works by pressing every button on the dash one button at a time. We’d just go to the manual and push exactly the right buttons.

We don’t have a manual yet. But we can slowly feel our way around in the dark, and learn e.g. that the Endoplasmic-Reticulum Associated protein Degradation pathway, which we sort of knew stuff about, is involved in something we didn’t expect, namely, the reaction of neuronal cells to West Nile virus.

It’s just neat to look from the outside in at a discipline that is so fancy and yet still so immature.

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Why is Wikipedia discouraged?

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There are two reasons that all magazine articles should include citations: first, so we can verify that your source actually supports what you’ve written, and second, so that we can hear stuff like this for ourselves! Citations make your claims credible and let us explore the topic further.

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It’s strange: magazine and newspaper articles hardly ever include citations, even though they’re carefully fact-checked; and most nonfiction books catalogue their sources with extensive endnotes, but are rarely fact-checked.

When your article is being checked, the easiest thing on the checker is to produce a document that maps every statement of fact to the place where you got it: the page of the book you found it in, the interview you’re quoting from, etc. So you are already footnoting your articles.

Journalists should get in the habit of footnoting their stuff, and readers should get in the habit of asking for footnotes. It’s absurd to not know where a fact came from. Facts are often the composite of many sources; the reader should be able to know how thorough or how thin those sources turn out to be. If you say (to borrow from the NYRB’s challenge to the Times’s nail salons story; and not quoting verbatim) “these newspapers are rife with classified ads for $10-a-day jobs at nail salons in Manhattan,” and this turns out to be based on, say, a single ad, or 10 ads, or 100 ads, well, the reader should know which it was! In order to write a sentence like that you have to have seen specific ads; in order to have it get past an editor or fact-checker, you have to be able to produce specific ads; why shouldn’t the reader see the same evidence? Is it just a matter of convention?

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