Stick to baseball, 7/31/21.

I had a lot of content this week around the trade deadline for subscribers to The Athletic, including:

• The Cubs’ four main deals on Friday (Báez, Bryant, Kimbrel, Marisnick)
• The Phillies/Rangers trade
• The Toronto trade for José Bérrios
• The Max Scherzer/Trea Turner trade
• The Yankees’ trade for Anthony Rizzo
• The Yankees’ trade for Joey Gallo
• The Starling Marte/Jesús Luzardo trade (also includes three Pirates trades and the Andrew Chafin deal)

I also wrote up my notes from a game between the Yankees’ and Pirates’ AA affiliates. I was planning to do a chat but the pace of trades made that impossible.

My guest on the Keith Law Show this week was Slate‘s Josh Levin, talking about his One Year: 1977 podcast episode about baseball broadcaster Mary Shane and his book The Queen. You can subscribe on iTunes and Spotify.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Whistle Mountain, a medium-heavy worker placement game from the designer of the train game Whistle Stop.

I returned to my email newsletter, with a note on why I’ve been absent from there and largely from here over the last six weeks. Also, my second book The Inside Game is out in paperback and available from bookshop.org or wherever you buy books.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: Olympian Emily Infeld’s three-year nightmare with a stalker highlights just how poorly our society handles this kind of threat.
• An anti-trans Instagram account posted a fabricated story about a spa in Los Angeles, leading to weeks of death threats and real violence.
• Ed Yong detailed the incredible results of an experiment to make mosquitoes immune to the dengue virus by using the Wolbachia bacterium.
• The critical race theory non-troversy has caused a huge schism in a Michigan town where high school students conducted a “slave auction” of their Black classmates.
• The preprint that COVID deniers like to tout that claims that ivermectin is effective against the virus? It’s been withdrawn due to a major data integrity issue.
• The home of a fraudster who has been pushing a bleach “cure” for autism has been raided by German authorities.
• A marketing agency tried to pay YouTubers to spread anti-vaccine propaganda, but the influencers wouldn’t play ball. No one knows who was actually behind the plot.
• I know you’re shocked, but the Trump Administration handed out big federal contracts to its political allies during the pandemic, often breaching the rules to do so.
• The man who owned the @tennessee Twitter handle refused to sell it, so a 20-year-old who wanted the handle ‘swatted’ the man, who then had a fatal heart attack during the incident.
• A survivor of the Parkland high school shooting wrote about how his own father thinks the massacre was a hoax, thanks to the QAnon community.
• A state inquiry ruled that the Maltese government was responsible for the death of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, who exposed corruption in the island nation that went all the way up to the Prime Minister. Galizia was murdered in 2017 when someone set off a bomb in her car.
• Why is the Biden Administration allowing a pilot program where federal prisoners would only receive scans of personal mail, rather than the originals? Several states use this program and also charge prisoners a fee for each scan.
• Missouri has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the country right now, and the effects of the right-wing disinformation campaign are evident in area hospitals.
• A Houston Chronicle editorial said aspects of a new Texas anti-abortion law “are what we might expect from the lowest intellects in the Taliban.”
• Virginia’s pro-Trump Republican party has gone after a University of Virginia professor for his tweets criticizing Trump.
• The BBC explains how Hall & Oates’ 1980 pop song “You Make My Dreams” became a streaming hit.