Stick to baseball, 3/5/16.

My one Insider piece this week covered the Ian Desmond deal with Texas. I also held my regular Klawchat.

I have two pieces up on Paste this week too: my review of the cool, quick-playing deckbuilder Xenon Profiteer, plus a recap of games I saw at Toyfair. The price has varied a bit, but Xenon Profiteer is $26.49 right now on amazon.

And now, the links…

• A reader sent this along – an interview with Boston Globe reporter Sacha Pfeiffer, who worked on the Spotlight team that uncovered the Catholic Church’s cover-up of priests sexually abusing children.
• The EPA is catching flak from industry for trying to pull a pesticide from the market over environmental concerns – that is, doing their fucking jobs. This should only be the start, given what neonics appear to be doing to the bee population.
• Julie Dicaro had an excellent breakdown of Erin Andrews’ testimony about ESPN’s treatment of her after she was the victim of a stalker.
• Turns out many doctors can’t tell a spider bite from a hole in the ground. If you got bitten, odds are good it wasn’t a spider.
• Julieanne Smolinski, a popular comedienne who tweeted as @boobsradley, wrote an excellent op ed on why she quit Twitter. The short answer – Twitter still won’t do jack about the rampant harassment of women on the site.
• What does it say about Donald Trump that white supremacists are coming out to endorse him? A lot, I’d say, at least about the xenophobic policies he’s espousing.
• The Oscar-winning film A Girl in the River, which won for best short documentary, may be spurring a long-overdue change in Pakistani law. What does it say about your country if you have any way for a family that commits an honor killing to escape judgment.
• Could cutting the price of produce save 200,000 lives? That’s a start, surely, but you have to get people to eat them, which may require time that many folks don’t have.
• A podcast episode I highly recommend: The BBC looks at America’s “angry cowboys”, the ranchers in eastern Oregon whose grazing rights on federal lands may disappear if that territory is declared a national monument. It’s a nuanced, balanced look that was absent in the coverage of those idiots who took over a federal building late last year.