Stick to baseball, 9/22/17.

I wrote three pieces for Insiders this week: scouting notes on Yu Darvish, more notes on Aaron Nola and some young Phillies hitters, and my annual look at players I was wrong about. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I’m down to biweekly game reviews for Paste, so the most recent one is from last week, covering the great Days of Wonder-published title Yamataï, by the same designer who won the Spiel des Jahres (game of the year) this year for his game Kingdomino.

My book, Smart Baseball, is out and still selling well (or so I’m told); thanks to all of you who’ve already picked up a copy. And please sign up for my free email newsletter, which is back to more or less weekly at this point now that I’m not traveling for a bit.

And now, the links…

• Our federal government and many state governments continue to deny that anthropogenic climate change exists, even as multiple U.S. states and territories are battered by hurricanes (possibly) made worse by warming oceans. Our military, however, has accepted climate change for over 25 years and is planning around it, given its attendant security risks and operational challenges.
• The New York Times reports that a massive drop in international travel to the U.S. cost our economy $2.7 billion just in the first quarter of this year. This kind of economic contraction hits everyone, including lower-income people in the service industries that gain directly from tourism spending.
• Longreads: Indy Week, a North Carolina alternative newspaper, ran a three-part investigative series this July on the environmental and quality-of-life damage wrought by industrial pig farms in that state. I reviewed Barry Estabrook’s book Pig Tales, on the rise of Big Pig, this summer; he detailed how the North Carolina state government bent over backwards to remove regulations on industrial pork producers. This is the result: The swamp you want to drain is actually full of pig feces.
• The Guardian offers a long, deep look at Luxembourg’s attempt to move from tax haven to space-mining haven, courting investors who wish to privatize celestial assets like asteroids. The piece touches on many subjects, including the tiny European duchy’s odd history and questions of sovereignty.
• The Verge looks at climate change, India, and the war against heat. Climate change will affect the entire planet, but heavily populated tropical countries may take the worst hit.
• And my last longread of the week is on Longreads itself: a thorough look at the history, purpose, and problems with the federal Freedom of Information Act. Among other notable bits: why are fourteen federal ‘food boards,’ like the American Egg Board, now exempt from open records requests? (Because they might be breaking the law, of course.)
• If you have kids, you need to ensure they get vaccinated against meningitis. A mother in England whose daughter died of meningitis type W shares her story; the girl came home from school very sick, but the telltale MenW symptoms weren’t there, and she died the next day.
• Florida Power & Light has written – literally – state regulations that helped it to $1.7 billion in profits in 2016, including rules that forbid homeowners from powering their own houses with solar panels. And if the power grid goes out, you have to turn your solar panels off. In one of the sunniest states in the country, you can’t power your own goddamned house because the power company said no. I wonder if FPL is okay with candles.
• The classic real-time strategy videogame series Age of Empires will return this fall with a new edition, and Ars Technica has a very long look at the history of the genre, including a lot of obscure titles I didn’t know. I loved the original AoE and AoE II but never could beat the thing on Emperor level.
• Roy Moore is running for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Jeff Sessions, and has a real chance of winning, despite a total disregard for the doctrine of the separation of church and state, and such views on people of color as referring to Native Americans and Asians as “reds and yellows”.
• A similar reactionary conservative is running in Arizona against incumbent Republican Senator Jeff Flake, who was a critic of Trump prior to the election but has cheerleaded many of the President’s nominations and orders, including that of Betsy DeVos, as Flake and DeVos share an antipathy towards public education.
• Meanwhile, the swamp is rank: Health & Human Services Secretary Tom Price, a member of a fringe, anti-science doctor’s group, was caught billing taxpayers for expensive charter flights when commercial routes would have saved tens of thousands of dollars. Then he got caught doing it more. Vox has an overview of how he bilked taxpayers out of $300,000 by doing so.
• And it’s getting ranker: the President has nominated a lobbyist who fought regulations to keep certain chemicals out of consumer goods to lead that regulatory program in the EPA.
• Oh, I’m not done: he’s also nominated unqualified campaign workers to fill science-oriented positions at the US Department of Agriculture. The USDA is often useless, but this practice might gut the little it does to help ensure a modicum of safety in our food supply, or to stop rampant pollution from food producers like the pig slaughterhouses mentioned in the longread above.
• The coalition governing Iceland collapsed last week due to revelations of pardons its leaders were giving to convicted child molesters.
• Tim Grierson looks at the fabricated mystique of “unplugged” concerts and albums.
• A Royals fan in southern California donated a kidney to a Giants fan, and the donor told the recipient (they were friends already) with some help from the Giants and AT&T Park.
• If you didn’t see this when I tweeted it last week, this story on the research grant that led to BRCA1 is absolutely remarkable and it too has a baseball connection.
• Also from last weekend, Amber Tamblyn is done with men refusing to believe women, retelling the story of how James Woods tried to pick her up when she was just 16 years old.
• This sounds like abuse, not love: actor Ian Somerhalder, whom I’d never heard of till Friday, threw out his wife’s birth control pills so she would get pregnant.
• The rehabilitation of Sean Spicer is already well underway, according to Lauren Duca, with his Emmy appearance and tour of the talkshow circuit. Maybe we should pump the brakes, says Jay Willis at GQ.
• Garrett Martin, my editor at Paste, asks Jimmy Kimmel to keep up the righteous anger and dispense with the jocular asides that detract from his very real, important message.
• Gwyneth Paltrow’s Store Full of Bullshit is now selling psychic vampire repellent. At least they’ve moved on from selling things for women to stick up their vaginas.
• Should a restaurant that’s been awarded 3 stars by the Michelin Guide be allowed to withdraw its entry from the critical publication? The chef-owners say they want to cook their style of food without worrying about meeting someone else’s standard or maintaining the rating.
• A neo-Nazi was walking around Seattle wearing a swastika armband and screaming at people on the street; various people, some of whom identify themselves as “antifa,” used social media to spread the word and find him, after which one of the activists knocked him unconscious with one punch.
• Pete Wells of the New York Times named Razza in Jersey City as New York’s best pizza, which resulted, according to my sources, in a three-hour wait this past Wednesday night.
• The late John Saunders, also of ESPN, wrote in his memoir of how his abusive father turned his best day into one of his worst.
• Is The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness author Nassem Taleb a racist using flawed beliefs to justify investing in the Syrian regime? There’s some background to this, including links from within that piece, that was new to me; I thought Taleb was still a darling of pop-intellectual circles since his first two books became bestsellers. (I read The Black Swan and enjoyed it.)
• Some white dude on Facebook, a friend of a friend of mine, posted a meme about how blacks owned slaves in antebellum America, so stop claiming it’s all racism or some such nonsense. The thing is it’s a lot more complicated than that, as Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates wrote in a 2013 post at the Root. Even better was the other white dude who responded that “slavery ended 150 years ago. Get over it!” Easy when those weren’t your ancestors in chains, I suppose.