Stick to baseball, 9/14/19.

For ESPN+ subscribers, my annual Prospect of the Year column went up this week, with Wander Franco, Luis Robert, and Gavin Lux the three finalists. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday and a Periscope video chat on Tuesday.

My latest game review for Paste covers Realm of Sand from Deep Water, a mashup of Patchwork and Splendor with incredible artwork by the same artist behind Hanamikoji and Shadows of Kyoto.

My latest email newsletter went out on Wednesday. You can sign up for free to get whatever topic is on my mind when I feel like I’ve gone too long without sending one.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: This Washingtonian story about a hoarder, a would be tech bro, and a murder is really out there.
• Lead poisoning may be the real explanation for the rise and fall of violent crime from the 1960s to the 1990s, and the problem isn’t gone because so much of lead belched out by cars burning leaded gasoline is still in our environment. (Small world department: I worked with Prof. Reyes for about a year at a consulting firm before I went into baseball and she returned to academia.) Of course, the Trump administration is rolling back regulations to keep lead and other pollutants out of our water supply.
• In the New Yorker, Michael Schulman looks at the rise of the “superfan” and what it means for content creators, especially when those fans don’t agree with creative choices in books, films, or TV shows.
• Garrett Graff, author of the new book The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11, ponders how much sheer luck or randomness determined who survived the 9/11 attacks in an essay for the Atlantic.
• Vox looks at what “a Hurricane Katrina of heat,” caused by climate change, would look like for Phoenix, the second-fastest growing metropolitan area in the country, which already had 128 days over 100 degrees in 2018. Beyond the obvious strains on the power and water supplies, such extended heat waves would lead to substantial emergency room visits and deaths from heat stroke.
• Panama disease is a fungus that attacks banana plantations and destroys entire crops; since the Cavendish bananas we see in every store are all genetically identical, the plants have no way to develop immunity through natural selection. Two gene-editing efforts are racing to create a new banana plant that can resist the fungus before the Cavendish goes the way of its predecessor, the Gros Michel, which disappeared in the 1950s for a similar reason. If you like that link, check out the book Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World, which I reviewed in 2013.
• If you thought anti-abortion advocates were about anything other than subjugating women, look at this utterly absurd, anti-science ‘debate’ over surgery to treat ectopic pregnancies, operations that save the lives of the women while removing pregnancies that are nonviable by definition. Several anti-abortion zealots are claiming this surgery is abortion, and that ectopic pregnancies can magically relocate to the uterus (wrong), and that doctors should employ “watchful waiting” to see if the pregnancies miscarry on their own (risking the woman’s life in the process).
• Florida’s race to codify woo into the state’s regular operations has gone from schools to medicine now, as a new law forces doctors to endorse nonmedical, ineffective pseudoscience as ‘alternatives’ to opioids. Remember, there is no such thing as “alternative medicine.” If something works, it’s medicine.
• New Zealand is creating a firearm registry and increasing penalties for illegal gun sales, while we have a sitting Texas state representative threatening to use an assault rifle against a Presidential candidate. It took one mass shooting to galvanize their public and their government to take action on guns.
• A woman frustrated by receiving unsolicited dick pics created her own filter to block them … which, I don’t know, Twitter and Facebook and most dating apps could buy and use?
• A judge in Florida ruled that a four-year-old leukemia patient will remain with his grandparents because his own parents refuse to get him chemotherapy, instead claiming they’ll use “natural” treatments (i.e., they’ll let him die). This has important implications in the vaccine mandate debates: Your right to parent your children does not extend to denying them medical care.
• Lee Salem was an influential comic strip editor who helped find or develop strips as diverse as “Doonesbury,” “Calvin and Hobbes,” and “For Better or Worse.” He died earlier this month at age 73.
• Preorders for the latest game in the Azul series, Azul Summer Pavilion, are now available.