Stick to baseball, 11/20/16.

I spent the last week on vacation with my family, in the Bahamas, which was lovely due to the weather, the friendly people, and the rum. Before I left, I filed four offseason buyers’ guides, to the markets for starting pitchers, relief pitchers, infielders & catchers, and outfielders. I also participated in a ’roundtable’ piece with Dan Szymborski where we discussed our NL ROY ballots.

I reviewed the family boardgame Legendary Inventors for Paste; it’s cute but feels a bit unfinished given the imbalance across the various scoring methods. Earlier this month, I updated my all-time favorite boardgame rankings, which now runs to 100 titles.

You can preorder my upcoming book, Smart Baseball, on amazon. Also, please sign up for my more-or-less weekly email newsletter.

And now, the links…

• A Tribe Called Quest dropped its final album, We Got It From Here, Thank You for Your Service last Friday, and the New York Times has the definitive backstory on the album, which came about due to a thaw in the long estrangement between Q-Tip and Phife, only to have the latter pass away due to complications from diabetes in March.
• We can’t let the bullies win. That’s psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, who won the 2016 John Maddox Prize for her defense of science against denialists, but it could apply to any aspect of our public discourse on climate change, evolution, vaccines, or, now, civil rights.
• Fear of science drove opposition to a plan to release genetically modified mosquitos in the Florida Keys, but the plan is going ahead to try to prevent a Zika outbreak there. This isn’t straight science denial, but ignorance and fear, and it comes with the same arguments about unknown and unstated “risks” that simply aren’t consistent with an understanding of the technology at play here.
• The murder of three elderly nuns in Burundi touched off an ongoing political crisis that has led to over 300,000 refugees fleeing the country, the President violating the constitution, and his government killing the son and son-in-law of the country’s leading human rights figure, who survived an assassination attempt himself. The global community, meanwhile, does nothing but watch, as we did twenty years ago.
• If you live in North Carolina, it appears that the state Republican Party is trying to steal the gubernatorial election, even though the state was already among the biggest offenders in enacting voter-suppression tactics.
• With food allergies still on the rise, there’s a rise in startups providing products that try to detect hidden allergens in food.
• Vaccination refusals are up in Texas, a state that is rapidly becoming a gigantic experiment in rolling back civilization by a hundred years, and parents of at-risk kids are asking why. The answer is simple: End non-medical exemptions. In Delaware, I worked with my state rep to make it harder to get a so-called religious exemption, and philosophical exemptions were already prohibited.
• If you’re wondering why I’m saying this about Texas, a state rep there has introduced a bill to ban local ordinances that protect LGBTQ residents from discrimination, along with the usual “bathroom privacy” bullshit (again, I ask, which bathroom should intersex people use?). If you live in Texas, call your state reps and tell them you oppose this bill, which business leaders in Texas have said could cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenues.
• A hospital staffer in the UK came down with whooping cough (pertussis) and may have exposed newborns to the virus.
  Pertussis can kill an infant, and they’re typically not vaccinated against it until they’re two months old.
• A British woman who ended up comatose due to a flu infection in 2014 and nearly died is now urging others not to skip the flu vaccination as she did that year.
• The proposed new head of the EPA under Donald Trump has called climate change ‘nothing to worry about’ and has called the Paris climate agreement ‘potentially a disaster for humankind.’
• The attempts to intimidate and silence the Theranos whistleblower would be disturbing enough if they didn’t include his own grandfather, Theranos board member and former Secretary of State George Shultz.
• Twitter has booted a few of the most virulent white-supremacist and alt-right figures on the service, including white nationalist (and UVA alum!) Richard Spencer. The Ringer has a piece arguing that the move means Twitter has finally started to follow its stated policies on hate speech.
• A researcher programmed bot accounts to fight racism on twitter and found that they were somewhat effective … especially when the bot appeared to be a white male with a few hundred followers (as opposed to one or two).
• Facebook’s fake news problem isn’t really the main reason the site reinforces false beliefs; it’s a more fundamental issue with how we receive and process such information. In other words, we seek out what we want to hear, and we believe what we want to believe.
• Speaking of fake news sites, if you use Chrome, here’s a browser extension to let you know if you’re visiting one.
• The American Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan praised Trump’s hiring of Stephen Bannon as his “chief strategist,” in case you’re still kidding yourself about the direction of this cabal.
• “We need to talk about the online radicalisation of young, white men” was the best headline of the week, and also touches on a very real concern for anyone who, say, views women as actual people.
• Donald Trump’s tax plan strongly resembles the tax plan that has bankrupted Kansas. The Fed recently ranked Kansas last among all 50 states for employment growth, unemployment rate, and wage growth. This is the type of economic thinking – thunking? – we’ve now given the reins of our federal government.
• Salmonella bacteria and other pathogens that cause food poisoning thrive in packaged salad bags. One solution is to just not buy these bags in the first place, but if you don’t have a better alternative, avoid bags where any leaves have started to turn mushy and dark green, avoid bags that appear tight and swollen (indicating bacterial growth that’s producing gases that expand the bag), and wash and pick over the leaves when you open the bag.
• United Airlines is establishing a new lower class of service to make air travel more insufferable than usual. I’m a dedicated and happy Southwest customer and frequent flier, in large part because they don’t do this stuff.
• Pete Wells gave a very positive review to a Japanese ramen/noodle-shop chain’s first outpost in the U.S.. He praised TsuruTonTan Udon Noodle Brasserie’s noodle dishes but says rather plainly to avoid their other offerings.
• Deadspin suggests that we boo Mike Pence whenever possible. I find the right’s claims that the audience’s actions at Hamilton disrespectful absolutely ludicrous, given how the President-Elect publicly mocked a disabled reporter during the campaign.
• Oxford English Dictionaries named post-truth its word of the year.
• The agony and the irony: Mike Pence fighting a lawsuit, trying to keep his emails private. The plaintiff is trying to find out how much Pence cost Indiana taxpayers when he joined other states in a 2014 lawsuit against the Obama administration over an order to defer the deportation of some illegal immigrants.
• Investing in infrastructure was one of the few aspects of Trump’s vague platform that I could support, but Paul Krugman argues its proposed implementation appears to be a financial scam, and won’t focus on the kinds of public works we need – which, unfortunately, don’t generate revenues.
• The Federal Election Commission declined to investigate a dark-money group that spent all its funds on an election, even though it claims to be a social-welfare charity. At this point, we might as well shut the FEC down completely.
• Area Man Considers Self Ally To Women Unless They Threaten His Status In Literally Any Way.