Stick to baseball, 2/27/21.

Nothing new for subscribers to the Athletic this week now that my entire offseason prospects package has run. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Canvas, a new card-drafting and card-crafting game with some of the best artwork I’ve ever seen on a board game. It’s so visually appealing that you’ll want to play it more.

On this week’s episode of the Keith Law Show, I spoke with Blue Jays VP of International Scouting Andrew Tinnish about their loaded farm system and what it’s like to scout players in Latin America, including ones as young as 13. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify.

For more of me, you can subscribe to my free email newsletter. Also, you can still buy The Inside Game and Smart Baseball anywhere you buy books; the paperback edition of The Inside Game will be out in April.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: BuzzFeed has the inside story of how Mark Zuckerberg and other Facebook execs enable and encourage right-wing demagogues who push misinformation and hate on their site. Facebook is really trash.
• Texas regulators served electricity providers rather than Texas, leaving the state’s grid vulnerable to the type of disaster that left most of the state in darkness and freezing temperatures last week.
• An LA Times investigation reveals corruption and self-dealing inside the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the organization that runs and votes for the Golden Globes (coming up tomorrow night). Of note is that more than half of the electorate was flown to visit the set of Emily in Paris at the studio’s expense, and the frivolous show ended up with two nominations. Speaking of which, my friend Tim Grierson, whose new book This is How You Make a Movie comes out on March 9^th, listed the worst Golden Globe nomination in each of the last twenty years.
• Sports Illustrated‘s Steph Apstein examines whether the baseball was juiced in 2020.
• Also from BuzzFeed, Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) has a long history of sexually and verbally harassing women. Here’s my prediction: It won’t matter. His party will close ranks around him.
• This 2009 piece from author Simon Winchester, “Take Nothing, Leave Nothing,” the story of how and why he has been banned for life from returning to the island of Tristan da Cunha, is weird and lovely and speaks to a certain type of wanderlust that I feel like I truly understand.
• I discussed optimism bias in The Inside Game, and ProPublica has a piece on why it impeded pandemic response plans.
• If you live in Delaware, please consider signing this petition asking our state government to enact paid medical and family leave.
• The Washington Post profiles the doctors and nurses who spend their limited non-work time fighting coronavirus and anti-vaccine disinformation online.
• The Republican Party has started a fresh round of voter suppression efforts across the country.
• The opposition leader in Georgia was arrested in a “violent raid” on his party’s headquarters. I’m referring to the small nation in the Caucasus, but would you be surprised if Gov. Brian Kemp authorized this?
• Judas and the Black Messiah is getting some well-deserved Oscar buzz. The film adheres to the true story of how the FBI and the Chicago Police assassinated Fred Hampton, including how Hampton rallied a group of white southerners who carried the Confederate flag to work with the Black Panthers.
• A Pennsylvania bird-watcher snapped a now-viral photo of a cardinal that is intersex, meaning that it has physical characteristics of both male and female birds. The condition, called bilateral gynandromorphism, means that the cardinal is male on one side of its body, from red feathers to one testis, and female on the other. I wonder which bathroom Marjorie Taylor Greene thinks it should use.
• My editor at Paste, Garrett Martin, ranked the five best episodes of the Muppet Show. I’d agree with three (Moreno, Martin, and Burnett), and don’t remember the other two that well, but would include John Cleese and Zero Mostel.
• I linked to this in chat this week but it’s worth reposting: The reopening of a detention center for migrant children is not a return to Trump’s xenophobic, inhuman immigration policies. We still shouldn’t be bombing in the Middle East, though.
• The IceCube neutrino detector in Antarctica picked up a neutrino from a star that was destroyed 700 million years ago.
• Illinois became the first state to eliminate cash bail.
• CPAC, with a slate full of voter-fraud charlatans and seditionists, cancelled a scheduled appearance by the anti-Semitic QAnon adherent Young Pharaoh. The convention’s actual theme this year is “America Uncancelled.”
• Smith College found itself embroiled in a conservative-fueled nontroversy last week, but they issued a scathing, evidence-based response that their critics, like Bari Weiss, have ignored.
• George Will wrote of the tough choices facing Pres. Biden as he tries to hold a hard line with China, including continuing the policy that began under Trump of labeling the Chinese genocide of Uighur Muslims as such.
• Board game news: Cryptozoic has a Kickstarter up for a board game based on Batman: The Dark Knight Returns.
• Another Kickstarter is up for a second edition of Orconomics, itself a reimplementation of an earlier, self-published game called Economicus.
• I don’t know much about the game itself but Brew, coming in June from Pandasaurus, looks amazing.