Happy New Year! I’d say it’ll be a great one, but there’s an election coming up so damn it all to hell.
I wrote two Insider pieces this week, one on the ethically-challenged Yankees trading for Aroldis Chapman and one on how obvious it should be that Trevor Hoffman is not a Hall of Famer.
My latest boardgame review for Paste covers the complex strategy game Orleans, which was one of two runners-up for the 2015 Kennerspiel des Jahres award.
And now, the links…
- Used bookstores are making an “unlikely” comeback. Were they ever really gone? I think the age of the independent new-book bookseller is over, but the used bookstore and the hybrid new-used model (like the wonderful Changing Hands in Tempe) are here to stay.
- Eater had Alton Brown on its podcast, with a transcript included in that link as well. I particularly enjoyed his comments on the way Starbucks changed the food game, and on how just loving food isn’t really enough to make it a career (as you could say the same about loving baseball).
- The moral of this story of a rather severe cooking injury is don’t grill in bare feet.
- Notes from reporting on the vaccine wars. I like the fundamental message: Good information can win out, even in the face of obstinate ignorance.
- A very powerful New Yorker profile of a female Iranian journalist and activist who has dared fight pockets of Sharia law in the Islamic theocracy, including sentences of stoning.
- This is wild but worth reading: should we cover the Sahara desert in solar panels?
- I always read everything I post here before I include a link, but I will admit that I couldn’t finish the highly-recommended ProPublica piece An Unbelievable Story of Rape, because it was so difficult and in parts so infuriating.
- Speaking of infuriating, hoops writer Chris Haynes writes about getting racially profiled by cops while standing across the street from his house. This bias is systemic – I don’t think it’s personal, where police departments are just hiring racists – and getting rid of it requires systemic solutions, like nation-wide training.
- A strong but too-short piece from Dave Zirin on the year of the woman in sports.
- Did you know there’s been a massive natural gas (which is mostly methane) leak going on outside Los Angeles for ten weeks now? Since methane is a potent contributor to climate change – the Environmental Defense Fund claims it’s 84 times as powerful as carbon dioxide – you’d think this would be 1) bigger news and 2) a national disaster.
- Boardgames in the classroom? It’s happening in some charter schools in New York.
- Goofy fun for geography nuts like me: mental_floss lists nine of the most isolated towns on the planet.