FiveThirtyEight’s top stories this week

A [FiveThirtyEight]( email [Popular This Week] Sunday, June 12, 2022 [1. Yordan Álvarez Might Just Be Baseball’s Best Hitter. (Look Out, Mike Trout.)]( [Texas Rangers v Houston Astros]( Yordan Álvarez has been every bit as advertised since his major league debut with the Houston Astros in 2019. The Cuban-born outfielder and designated hitter is an intimidating presence in the batter’s box — he’s listed at 6-foot-5 and 225 pounds, but it would be reasonable to take the over on both of those figures. Álvarez did nothing but hit as a minor leaguer, despite being younger than his competition at every level. [Read more]( [2. The Jan. 6 Committee Hosted A Hearing For The 21st Century]( [US-POLITICS-CAPITOL-UNREST]( The carnage was impossible to deny. As the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol laid out its evidence that former President Donald Trump was the catalyst of the assault on American democracy, a 12-minute video showed the full consequences of Trump’s willful lie that the election was stolen. It was perhaps the committee’s most compelling argument. [Read more]( [3. Golden State’s Half-Court Defense Is Good, But Boston’s Half-Court Offense Has Been Better]( [Jayson Tatum of the Boston Celtics drives to the basket]( Late in the third quarter of Game 2 of the NBA Finals, Jayson Tatum came off a screen from Al Horford and walked himself right into a wide-open three pointer that splashed through the net. As he did so, his defender on the play, Andrew Wiggins, was several steps below the 3-point arc, with his feet nearly at the free-throw line as Tatum rose up to fire. [Read more]( [4. Everything You Need To Know About the Special Election In Alaska]( [former Alaska governor Sarah Palin speaking into a microphone]( UPDATE (June 12, 2022, 11:35 a.m.): With 108,981 ballots counted so far, Sarah Palin (30 percent), Nick Begich (19 percent) and Al Gross (13 percent) are the top vote-getters so far in Alaska’s special U.S. House election. Mary Peltola currently leads for the fourth and final slot in the August general election with 8 percent, followed closely by Tara Sweeney with 5 percent. Additional batches of results are expected to be released on June 15, June 17 and June 21. [Read more]( [5. Partly Cloudy With A 75 Percent Chance Of COVID Exposure]( [A photo illustration of meteorologist in front of a map of the United States covered in Coronavirus molecules of various sizes]( It’s 6:30 a.m. and your third alarm is blaring. Another 10 minutes and you’ll have to miss breakfast before going to work. You get up, brush your teeth, shower and start a pot of coffee while watching the morning news. After the station’s meteorologist tells you it’s sunny with a high of 70 degrees, a health reporter follows up with the COVID-19 forecast: red-alert level today, with a 75 percent chance of exposure in spaces with at least 50 people. [Read more]( [6. Start Spreading The News, We Could Get Another Subway Series]( [World Series – New York Yankees v New York Mets – Game Five]( The New York Yankees and New York Mets have both had their moments of glory over the years — OK, fine, the Yankees have had just a few more of those — but seldom have both teams been great at the exact same time. The birth of the expansion Mets made that hard from the start, given their reputation for boundless failure early on. But even after the 1969 Miracle Mets finally shed that losing label, the Yankees and Mets were mostly ships passing in the night: Whether it was the 1970s, ’80s or early ’90s, whenever one was up, the other seemed to be down. It wasn’t until 1999 that both teams made the playoffs in the same season, which laid the groundwork for the first and only Yankees-Mets Subway Series the following postseason. After that, though, it was back to missed connections, and we haven’t been particularly close to getting another all-NYC Fall Classic since. [Read more]( [7. Mass Shootings Can Traumatize People Who Weren’t Even There]( [A woman embraces a child outside Willie de Leon Civic Center in Uvalde, Texas]( At the end of the day on May 24, more than 400 children walked away from Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas as survivors. That single day of grade school will follow them for years, a formative trauma that increases their risks of experiencing depression, missing school days and even earning less money over their lifetimes. Research shows that violence in the classroom harms kids regardless of whether it physically injures them. [Read more]( [8. Over 40 Percent Of Americans Now Rate Gun Violence As A Top Issue]( [IPSOS-ISSUES-0609-4×3]( There have already been 248 mass shootings this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive. At this point in 2021, there had been 258 mass shootings; in 2020, 173. Mass shootings are defined by the Gun Violence Archive as incidents in which at least four people — not including the shooter — are injured or killed, and they have been on the rise in recent years. [Read more]( [9. How To Host A Congressional Hearing That Actually, Like, Does Something]( [Televisions at a Sears store air Lt. Col. Oliver North's testimony during the Iran-Contra hearings]( There are certain moments in congressional history that have lived on even longer than the octogenarians who stalk the halls of Capitol Hill. They are the scenes that feel torn from the pages of a political drama: Sen. Howard Baker Jr. repeatedly asking during the Watergate hearings, “What did the president know, and when did he know it?” Army lawyer Joseph Welch excoriating Sen. Joseph McCarthy with a rhetorical question during the Army-McCarthy hearings: “Have you no sense of decency?” A panel of tobacco executives testifying one by one before Congress, incredulously, that nicotine is not addictive. [Read more]( [10. The Datasets We’re Looking At This Week]( [The words "data Is plural" written in red on a white background]( You’re reading Data Is Plural, a weekly newsletter of useful/curious datasets. Below you’ll find the June 8, 2022, edition, reprinted with permission at FiveThirtyEight. 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