The section about the lightning and the pain killers at https://christophm.github.io/interpretable-ml-book/storytime.html#lightning-never-strikes-twice does not ignore the newlines. My guess is that this is a Pandoc bug caused by the fact that for bold text newlines shouldn't be ignored. Adding an empty line might solve it since the next section does have an empty line between the subsection and the bold font text. I haven't tested this locally
The section about the lightning and the pain killers at https://christophm.github.io/interpretable-ml-book/storytime.html#lightning-never-strikes-twice does not ignore the newlines. My guess is that this is a Pandoc bug caused by the fact that for bold text newlines shouldn't be ignored. Adding an empty line might solve it since the next section does have an empty line between the subsection and the bold font text. I haven't tested this locally