My annual top 25 MLB players under age 25 ranking went up this week for Insiders, and please read the intro while you’re there. I also wrote a non-Insider All-Star roster reaction piece, covering five glaring snubs and five guys who made it but shouldn’t have. I also held my usual Klawchat on Thursday.
My latest boardgame review for Paste covers the reissue of the Reiner Knizia game Ra.
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And now, the links…
- U.S. Senior District Judge Henry Coke Morgan ruled this week that the federal government did not require a warrant to hack into a computer to get its IP address. I’m linking to that news story, which takes a broader view of the ruling than I got from reading it (note: I’m not a lawyer), because I’m soliciting your opinions. While I don’t like the ruling, I don’t think this just some idiot judge failing to understand the technology. The ruling instead says that a user has no reasonable expectation of privacy around his/her IP address (fair), and therefore the government did not need a warrant to do what it did here (unfair?).
- Alberta prosecutors are appealing for a longer sentence against the anti-vaxxer parents who let their kid die of meningitis. The father in particular has dug in, failing to comply with a judge’s order to post the ruling on their “prayers for Ezekiel” page.
- A study of 481 pitchers aged 9 to 14 found that pitching more than 100 innings in a year increased injury likelihood by 350%. The same study found no correlation between curveball usage and injury, and a statistically insignificant correlation between playing catcher and suffering injury.
- Remember my post on how Suki Kim’s work of investigative journalism inside North Korea was tabbed a “memoir” over her objections? Well, the NY Times reviewed Hisham Matar’s latest book and wrote “It seems unfair to call Hisham Matar’s extraordinary new book a memoir, since it is so many other things besides.”
- I tweeted about how people use the passive voice to avoid responsibility, at which point a reader sent this 2014 Washington Post story on exactly that topic in discussing police shootings.
- The indie-rock band WAVVES, who appear quite frequently on my music playlists here, made … uh, waves this week when bandleader Nathan Williams banned racists, homophobes, rape apologists, and Trump supporters from their concerts.
- A Jewish writer who works for Donald Trump’s son-in-law at The Observer wrote this open letter on the candidate’s anti-Semitic comments to her boss.
- Macy’s apparently has a history of illegally detaining and extorting suspected shoplifters. This seems like something from a Philip K. Dick novel.
- Some state agencies won’t forgive student loans even if the borrower dies. Our student loan industry is a giant disaster anyway, and it isn’t doing anything to make college more affordable. I’d love to see Sallie Mae and other analogous institutions shut down entirely, at which point colleges won’t be able to hike tuition indiscriminately any more.
- You can be biased but still be right. Maybe I should send this to every whining fan accusing me of bias for or against every team.
- Can organic farms be run on large spaces like so-called Big Ag? The regulatory answer is yes, but the practices of these farms probably don’t match what you think of as “organic.” I’ve been listening to the audio version of Blue Hill executive chef Dan Barber’s new book The Third Plate, and it’s quite clear that “organic” as a food label is quickly losing its meaning.
- A longread from Foreign Policy about the murder of an American woman in Nepal touches on both the legally shady industry of couchsurfing (and similar businesses) and the possibility that an innocent man was tortured into a confession.
- Tweet of the week:
Tell me again how the US improved their water and sanitation in 1995. #vaccines #vaccineswork pic.twitter.com/0CPeI0gnFv
— Doc Bastard (@DocBastard) July 8, 2016