Vox Sentences: Russia’s “accidentally” flying fighter jets over a NATO member

Russian planes keep "buzzing" Turkey; is daily fantasy sports just legalized gambling?; and your update on the first two 2015 Nobel Prizes.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

Russia's getting chippy with Turkey now

Stringer/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

• As Russia continues to escalate its role in the Syrian civil war, it's now made at least two incursions into Turkish airspace, as NATO confirmed today.

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

• Russia says the incursions were accidents. NATO does not think that's terribly likely.

  [Al Jazeera ]

• Deliberate fly-overs would be consistent with what Russia's strategy in Syria: making it clear to the West that it may have less of an army, but it also has less to lose.

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

• Meanwhile, Russia's sending of ground forces into Syria also poses a challenge to Turkey, which wants to establish a "safe zone" along the Turkish border.

  [New York Times / Andrew E. Kramer, Helene Cooper and Ceylan Yeginsu]

• Before the fly-overs this weekend, Turkey was a relatively strong ally of Russia's. But now, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Erdogan is hinting that the "friendship" could be in jeopardy.

  [Robin Emmott and Daren Butler]

• This matters because an attack on Turkey is an attack on NATO, and an attack on NATO is an attack on the US — making a Turkey/Russia confrontation one of many ways the US and Russia could end up in direct conflict over Syria.

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

The very gray area between sports betting and fantasy

Stephen Brashear/Getty Images

• The popular "daily fantasy" sites DraftKings and FanDuel are under scrutiny after a DraftKings employee leaked data about how often players were selected for fantasy teams — on the same day he happened to win a large cash prize on FanDuel.

  [Vox / Timothy Lee]

• The leak — as well as the evidence suggesting possible insider trading (which both sites deny) — has attracted Congressional attention, with members including Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) calling for more oversight of the daily sites.

  [Huffington Post / Travis Waldron]

• Sen. Reid's interest in the issue isn't coincidental. He's been a key player in restricting internet gambling (which may or may not be related to the fact that he used to be Nevada gaming commissioner).

  [Las Vegas Sun / Amber Phillips]

• In theory, fantasy sports isn't gambling. In fact — as Joseph Stromberg explained for Vox earlier this year — it's something sports leagues have embraced as an alternative to gambling.

  [Vox / Joseph Stromberg]

• Sports leagues were actually responsible for getting fantasy sports exempted from an anti-gambling law in 2006.

  [Washington Post / Shailagh Murray and James V. Grimaldi]

• And the leagues, as well as team owners, have been key investors in the new wave of daily fantasy sports, which require less time and immersion than the traditional season-long ones.

  [New York Times / Joe Drape and Jacqueline Williams]

• They also, arguably, don't actually require people to know or care about the sport to make money.

  [New Yorker / Ben McGrath]

• That could bring daily fantasy dangerously close to gambling. And the real danger of the new congressional attention is that they'll decide the fantasy sites are crossing that fuzzy line.

  [Fortune / Daniel Roberts]

"The microbes deserve it more than I do"

Chris McGrath/Getty Images

• The 2015 Physics Nobel has gone to two scientists for discovering that the ubiquitous subatomic particles called neutrinos actually do have mass.

  [The Guardian / James Randerson and Ian Sample]

• Yesterday's 2015 Medicine Nobel, meanwhile, was split between a pair of scientists who discovered a cure for the parasitic disease elephantiasis...

  [Boston Globe / Eric Boodman and Helen Branswell]

• ...and a Chinese woman who synthesized Western and Chinese medicine to discover a malaria cure over 40 years ago. (The discovery was kept a secret by the Chinese government under Mao Zedong.)

  [New Scientist / Phil McKenna]

• All the scientists, of course, were helped by colleagues and predecessors — which is why some philanthropists argue the "winner-take-all" structure of the Nobels doesn't make sense.

  [Wellcome Trust]

• One of the winners for the anti-elephantiasis remedy went one step further still: "The microbes deserve it more than I do."

  [The Atlantic / Olga Khazan]

• Others argue that big prizes for scientific discoveries are a bad idea, period — because the money and recognition they grant would be better served going to younger and lesser-known scientists.

  [New York Times / Vinay Prasad]

• Without the big award, on the other hand, you wouldn't have the genre of the How-The-Winner-Reacted-To-The-Phone-Call story.

  [The Baffler / Thomas Frank]

• One of today's Physics Nobelists, a Canadian, contributed an instant classic to that genre: upon being called up by the Swedish scientist to announce he'd won, the two got to talking about the Toronto Maple Leafs.

  [Ottawa Citizen / Tom Spears]

MISCELLANEOUS

You can now fight holographic robots in your living room because we live in the goddamn future. [Gizmodo / Bryan Lufkin]

• Pick-your-own-apple orchards are a goddamn scam.

  [Slate / Daniel Gross]

• The left-wing case against free college.

  [Dissent / Matt Bruenig]

• German-Americans are America’s largest ethnic group. How come we never hear about them?

  [The Economist]

• No, Mississippi is not poor because China is getting richer. And trying to take jobs from China and bring them back here would only make everyone poorer.

  [NY Mag / Annie Lowrey]

VERBATIM

"I’m going to stop and say something heretical: Times Square is kind of fun." [NY Mag / Adam Sternbergh]

• "In cities across the country, victims of crime increasingly pay a terrible but little-known price for calling 911: eviction from their homes. Domestic violence victims are prime targets."

  [USA Today / Sandra Park]

• "Early on one of the white writers on the show pitched a very hacky Asian joke and I threw a fit."

  [Ken Jeong to Slate / Jeff Yang]

• "A la­bel reads: 'Por­tions of brain of Charles Guiteau, as­sas­sin of Pres­id­ent Gar­field.'"

  [National Journal / Brian Resnick]

• "In this paper, I take the position that a large portion of contemporary academic work is an appalling waste of human intelligence that cannot be justified under any mainstream normative ethics."

  [SSRN / Nathan J. Robinson]

WATCH THIS

11 fascinating bills from other currencies [YouTube / Estelle Caswell]

Vox / Estelle Caswell

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