My one Insider piece this week covers my breakout player picks for 2016. I also reviewed the simple abstract strategy game Circular Reasoning for Paste. I was unable to chat this week due to travel and attending games in Florida.
And now, the links…
- Well this is some bullshit: The Tribeca film festival is screening a vaccine-denial “documentary” directed by Andrew Wakefield. Yes, Wakefield, the guy who faked the MMR/autism study that helped land us in this mess in the first place. Fuck you, Robert Deniro, for being a denialist and spreading this garbage.
- Meanwhile, Uganda will jail parents who refuse to vaccinate their kids.
- Drew Magary on why he’ll never quit Twitter. It’s the same reason I probably won’t either: We have audiences there, and tweeting to those audiences gets people to read our writing.
- Patrick Saunders of the Denver Post wrote a piece on Tyler Matzek and how they’re both battling anxiety disorder.
- Under Crazy Scott Walker, the state of Wisconsin gutted tenure at public universities, which led to foreseeable yet unforeseen consequences at UW-Madison. Tenure is a bad system, but Wisconsin replaced it with something worse.
- The Atlantic points out how the Republican party, which professes to be the party of business, passed a law businesses hate this week, just to screw with gay people. If your bigotry runs that deep, then you’re not the party of business – and you’re going to let the Democrats, long seen as the party of higher taxes and more regulations, seize some of that reputation.
- There might be a vaccine for dengue fever – which kills over 10,000 people each year – on the horizon, and that in turn could lead to a vaccine for the related Zika virus.
- I loved this NY Times profile of both Natasha Gregson-Wagner and her mother Natalie Wood. I remember watching the atrocious Two Girls and a Guy and finding it totally ridiculous that Gregson-Wagner was supposed to be playing the unattractive (or at least less attractive) girlfriend.
- Reader Reggie passed along this interesting piece on our brains’ evolution may be related to anxiety, in that our brains evolved (he uses the “were designed for” phrasing, which isn’t scientifically accurate) to handle a different type of stress than we typically face today. I also recommend the site Sick Not Weak, founded by TSN personality Michael Lansberg to promote understanding of mental illness, including depression and anxiety.