Stick to baseball, 10/28/17.

No new Insider content this week, as I was writing up the top 50 free agents package. That and a look at the offseason trade market will run the week of November 6th. I did hold a Klawchat on Thursday.

I spoke with Arizona’s KJZZ about my book Smart Baseball and the rise of Big Data in the sport. You can find links to buy the book here.

I also run a free email newsletter with personal essays and links to everything I’ve written since the previous newsletter. If you’re already a subscriber, thank you, and yes, I’m overdue to send another one out.

And now, the links, with boardgame stuff at the end as usual…

• I don’t know how anyone could have missed it, but it turns out a tiny Montana firm with ties to the Secretary of the Interior somehow got the biggest contract to restore power in Puerto Rico. Then the Daily Beast‘s Ken Klippenstein got a hold of the contract itself, with some sweetheart clauses to protect this little company from pretty much anything, like, say, getting sued for doing a bad job. And now the White House is slowly backing away from the deal. Drain the swamp, indeed.
• The longread of the week was clearly the New Yorker‘s profile of the Sackler family, who’ve made billions by selling opioids, often to addicts rather than people in pain. I wonder if any institutions, including my own undergrad alma mater, will return the money the family donated or take its name off any buildings.
• The Atlantic goes long on the potential negative impacts of increased personalization of news – that is, limiting what each of us sees based on what each of us seems to want to see. There are some positives from the algorithms behind these feeds, but newsrooms need the right people and technology to profit from them.
• The New York Times looks at how an EPA stacked with former chemical industry officials is rolling back regulations on the use of chemicals where there’s strong evidence of harm to humans. Even more notable is the EPA PR official’s response to a request from the author here, which reads like a Facebook comment.
• As more and more women come out against Harvey Weinstein, the women who’ve accused our current President of sexual harassment wonder why these accusations haven’t affected Trump at all.
• North Carolina’s state legislature might be the most vile in the nation. The Republicans who control it are trying to rig the courts via gerrymandering after multiple judicial defeats.
• Economist Paul Krugman says Trump’s proposed corporate tax cut amounts to $700 billion in foreign aid because of how much of corporate America is foreign-owned – and asks why on earth we would want to do that.
• Media Matters argues that the Clinton/uranium investigation is “bullshit” promulgated by Breitbart and Sean Hannity.
• The Environmental Defense Fund lists five environmental rules that industries have asked Trump to eliminate. As you might expect, they’re rules that attempt to protect consumers and/or the environment, but raise costs for certain industries.
• Millennials are paying for news, contrary to every bit of nonsense you’ve heard about what millennials won’t do or what thing they’re ruining now. I wonder if some of this is a desire to get news from reliable sources given the prevalence of both fake news and highly biased ‘news.’
• A Cornell professor who oversees a $22 million federally-funded program to improve school lunches has been accused of misinterpreting, omitting, and otherwise screwing up the data behind several of his studies, leading to at least three retractions by journals of papers he’s published. The New York Times explains one of those retracted studies, on kids and cookies. What I can’t find, shockingly, is any evidence the USDA might pull his funding.
• Chef Dan Barber, author of The Third Plate, opened a pop-up in London called wastED, selling foods made from ingredients that would normally be discarded. He’s done it in NYC too.
• A new Dark Matter coffee shop in Chicago will give 100% of its proceeds to suicide prevention while also serving as an outreach location that will provide support and training to the community.
• Anthony Bourdain spoke candidly to Slate about his role in encouraging ‘bro culture’ in restaurant kitchens as the industry is dealing with the John Besh scandal (and surely more to come).
• Amazon has been deleting unfavorable reviews for an anti-glyphosate book that has been accused of relying on weak or junk science, while also allowing reviews by associates of the author (a violation of amazon’s terms) to stay up.
• Vulture (for whom I write occasionally) has oral history of the Seinfeld episode “The Contest”, which is particularly interesting for what went on with the network.
• Paste (for whom I write more than occasionally) looks at the inherent violence within Castle Wolfenstein II, including the uncomfortable ‘storyline’ in the game.
• Hillsborough wants to put the new Rays ballpark in Ybor City. Who’s going to pay for it? Are Florida voters dumb enough to fall for this trick yet again?
• A man in Portugal beat his ex-wife with a nail-studded club and avoided jail because the Portuguese judges said his anger was understandable, citing an 1886 ruling and the Bible. A Portuguese politican called it “Sharia law in the Court of Porto,” a fair warning given the rise of hard-right theocrats, including Senate candidate Roy Moore, in the last two years.
• Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has an agreement to develop a quayside neighborhood of Toronto, which a lecturer in the ethics of technology warns is a dangerous precedent.
• Audio link: Richard Thaler, winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Economics, appeared on NPR’s The Hidden Brain to discuss the predictability of our unpredictability.
• Author Patrick Tomlinson presented a thought experiment that he says puts the lie to anti-abortion arguments. Ben Shapiro, himself a pro-lifer, responded on his site, although I think at least two of his four points really miss the mark.
• An Indian researcher and former English professor has worked for years to catalog the nearly 800 languages spoken in India, a number that may have dropped by 50% since 1960.
• Boardgames! The Kickstarter for ROOT, a new asymmetric game from Leder Games, blew past its modest $24K funding goal in the first five days.
• Asmodee announced Fantasy Flight Digital, a new division that will bring FFG titles to tablets and Steam. Fantasy Flight is best known for its Star Wars miniatures and dice games, Netrunner, Game of Thrones, X-COM, and new hit Legend of the Five Rings, but also has some straight Eurogames like Hey That’s My Fish and Ingenious.
• Asmodee also released a teaser for the upcoming app version of the complex strategy boardgame Scythe.
• The New Yorker looks at the ‘resurrection’ of Dungeons & Dragons, although I know the game never really went anywhere, and of course it inspired hundreds of later games, both RPGs and many tabletop games that integrate role-playing or dungeon crawl elements.
• I don’t care for Scrabble or the knockoff Words with Friends, but enjoyed this Vice piece on how WwF essentially hacked the game via its user-generated dictionary.
• Rama.