I wrote three pieces for Insiders this week, on the death of September callups, on Yoan Moncada, and on Alec Hansen (White Sox) and Alberto Tirado (Phillies). I also held a Klawchat on Thursday afternoon.
For Paste, I’m going to be reviewing a game a week for the rest of 2016. The latest review is of Mysterium, a fun cooperative game where one player is the ghost and must deliver clues in the form of “vision” cards to the other players. The base game is $36 on amazon, and there’s a new expansion called Hidden Signs that adds more cards.
And now, the links…
- Donald Trump bribed the Florida AG to stop an investigation into Trump University, paying the IRS a penalty earlier this year for violating its rules on donations from charitable groups to political campaigns.
- Forty years after questions first arose about its safety, triclosan (and similar antibacterial ingredients) have finally been banned by the FDA. How much damage have they already done in increasing antibiotic resistance or harming natural ecosystems that depend on bacterial activity?
- The longread of the week is the L.A. Times‘ six-part series (part six runs tomorrow) on the absolutely bonkers story of the framing of a PTA mom. It has to be read to be believed.
- Let’s talk Colin Kaepernick, shall we? The NY Times looked into the unnatural marriage of sports and patriotism. The Undefeated’s Domonique Foxworth argued such protests are inherently American. Bay Area sports columnist Marcus Thompson asks what Kaepernick’s critics have done to help veterans beyond standing? It’s a fair question; standing for an anthem or another song is as empty a gesture as you’ll find. And now the Santa Clara Police Union is threatening to stop working 49ers games unless the team puts Kaepernick in his place (my words, not theirs).
- If you’ve played Pandemic: Legacy or Risk: Legacy, you have game designer Rob Daviau to thank for the new format. His latest game, Seafall, is the first standalone legacy game he’s designed, and it comes out next month. I met Rob at GenCon – he’s a Red Sox fan, by the way – and am hoping to get a longer demo from him at WashingCon next weekend if my schedule permits. The game looks stunning.
- The Ringer is running a lot of content – I think a lot more than Grantland ever did – and quite a bit of it is must-reading. My favorite this week was the profile of deaf model, activist, and DWTS winner Nyle DiMarco, who is using his surprising fame to totally change the way deaf people interact with the rest of society (from both sides, that is).
- I’ve enjoyed a lot of the content coming out of VICE lately too, but the Columbia Journalism Review wrote a scathing piece on VICE mistreating its freelancers, including a lot of not paying them.
- WrkRiot, a Silicon Valley startup, has collapsed amid serious allegations that its founder committed fraud. What I find interesting about this is that anyone thought Silicon Valley would be immune to the kind of mountebanks that have populated startup-land since the internet bubble began twenty years ago.
- I knew none of the history of California City, a planned metropolis that never came to be, before reading mental floss‘ article on the state of the never-lived-in town north of Lancaster and east of Bakersfield.
- The College of St. Scholastica, a small Benedictine school in Minnesota, forbade one of its students to talk about her rape to classmates even though – or perhaps because – it happened in Ireland during a study abroad. The school also refused to help her deal with the Irish police. I’d like to know why her attacker wasn’t charged, something that isn’t mentioned in the article, which just implies that the Irish police dropped the ball (and maybe they did).
- Massachusetts prosecutors gave 19-year-old Ryan Crochetiere a plea deal where he’ll only get probation for sexually abusing an 11-year-old girl for a year. This came a day after another teenager in western Massachusetts got probation for sexually assaulting two unconscious classmates. What the fuck is wrong with prosecutors there? And is there any chance on earth that Crochetiere doesn’t reoffend?
- Gabon, which has been ruled by one family since 1967 (first the father, now the son), rigged an election and bombed opposition headquarters this week. This matters because those are real people getting killed, and, fine, because Gabon produces a lot of oil.
- That’s not the only African country in crisis; Burundi, located just south of Rwanda, is experiencing one of its own crises as its President is trying to turn himself into a dictator by evading term limits and violently suppressing the media. Not surprisingly, nearly 3% of the population has already fled to neighboring countries that are ill-equipped to handle the refugees.
- The trends on vaccine refusal are terrifying, and now the American Academy for Pediatrics support doctors who refuse to treat such kids. I’m good with this, because I don’t want my daughter near kids who aren’t vaccinated. The simplest solution remains for more states to follow California’s lead and require all schoolkids to be vaccinated unless they have valid medical exemptions.
- Bexar County – in Texas, of course – DA Nico LaHood outed himself as a vaccine-denier this week, citing Andrew Wakefield’s debunked study and fakeumentary Vaxxed in a rant LaHood posted on Facebook. It’s not LaHood’s first dive into conspiracy-theory bullshit as he had an even worse rant against Islam two months ago, calling it a “horrifically violent” religion and repeating the hoax that some Muslims tried to set up a “Sharia court” in Irving.
- China’s military buildup in the South China Sea, including building artificial islands to enhance their claim of sovereignty, has caused significant environmental damage, especially to coral reefs already suffering from global ocean acidification.
- Former NFL kicker Bjorn Nittmo has brain trauma from one devastating hit he suffered on the field, and is showing signs of CTE, living as a vagrant, abandoning his family years ago, and otherwise behaving irrationally. The NFL continues to deny the link between their sport and these traumatic brain injuries; NFL players suffered 199 concussions in 2015, and I assume NCAA and high school players suffered many more.
- Donald Trump’s political stances led multiple chefs to withdraw from or avoid putting a restaurant in his DC hotel.
- Trump spoke this past week about his desire to revive a program of mass deportation from the 1950s that was known – seriously – as Operation Wetback. He mentioned this in November as well, and at the time NPR broke down the real history of the deadly program, while Fusion gave even more grisly details. The New Republic‘s Jeet HEer went deeper on the topic in April. A subsequent Congressional investigation of the operation called conditions on the deportation vessels comparable to “an eighteenth-century slave ship.” I don’t agree with the call for mass deportations, but arguing for tighter immigration policies is a legitimate political stance. Wanting to starve, torture, or kill them, however, is not.
- An academic and trauma survivor wrote an eloquent defense of trigger warnings in the classroom.
- A McDonald’s employee in Needham, Massachusetts, got a wonderful sendoff after 32 years of working the fry station.