My annual look at players I got wrong went up for Insiders on Thursday, and the list starts with the amazing season Kyle Hendricks has had. Earlier this week I wrote about the increasing production coming from MLB’s youngest position players, although I admit I don’t have a great explanation for the trend. I held my regular Klawchat here on Thursday.
Over at Paste, I reviewed 7 Ronin, a fantastic two-player game with a Seven Samurai theme that plays in under a half hour. It’s ninjas versus samurai for control of a small village, and even though the rules are asymmetrical the game is extremely balanced.
You can also preorder my upcoming book, Smart Baseball, on amazon. Also, please sign up for my more-or-less weekly email newsletter.
And now, the links…
- USA Today, which had never endorsed or disendorsed a candidate before this week, declared Trump “unfit” for the Presidency. So did the Arizona Republic, endorsing a Democrat for the first time in its 126-year history, after which the paper received death threats from brownshirts. The New York Times endorsed Clinton, as did The Cincinnati Enquirer, its first endorsement of a Democrat in over a century. The Detroit News endorsed Libertarian Gary Johnson, the first time in its 143-year history that it has endorsed someone other than the Republican candidate for President. The El Paso Times did too, saying that “Trump’s shortcomings are in a different galaxy than Clinton’s.”
- The LA Times says the scope of Trump’s lies is unprecedented.
- Scientific American asked the four remaining candidates 20 questions on major topics in science policy, and graded their results. Clinton got the highest score, and Trump received the lowest score by a substantial margin, as the editors said “Trump says ‘science is science and facts are facts,’ and yet his campaign has repeatedly demonstrated an utter disregard for facts.”
- This New York piece on what it’s like for women covering the Trump campaign is more about the awful people supporting him and attending his rallies than the candidate himself, although he has some responsibility for this.
- This Michiko Kakutani review of a new biography of Hitler is the greatest subtweet of all time.
- Kurt Eichenwald has been doing outstanding work investigating the misdeeds of Trump the businessman, including this new piece on how Trump’s companies violated the U.S. embargo on doing business with Cuba.
- When Trump tweeted about Jose Fernandez’s death, I pointed out that Fernandez was an immigrant, after which a bunch of people well-actually’d me by saying Fernandez came here legally. (I never said he came illegally; the word “immigrant” doesn’t imply legal status.) One, Fernandez was a refugee, and two, Trump has proposed a huge reduction in immigrants allowed into the U.S., and that’s after he backed off earlier proposals of a moratorium.
- Trump has apparently chosen open climate-change denier Myron Bell to lead the EPA transition if he’s elected, a clear sign he intends to roll back regulations designed to reduce our impact on climate change and ocean acidification.
- Speaking of climate change, if you live in Florida and care about this issue, please vote no on Amendment 1, which the Koch Brothers have placed on the ballot to protect their fossil-fuel utility investments by making solar panels a terrible deal for consumers.
- A piano-store owner from New Jersey explains how Trump stiffed him for $30,000 using the same story we keep hearing over and over again – he tells vendors it’ll be more expensive to sue him than to take their reduced payment.
- Trump is fond of saying that Rust Belt states have lost manufacturing jobs due to badly negotiated trade deals, but economists strongly disagree with those claims.
- When Esquire‘s Charles Pierce isn’t spitting hot fire over the “vulgar talking yam,” he’s doing the same about Baylor’s intense coverup of sexual assault by its football players, notably Ken Starr’s claims that my employer did Art Briles a disservice by, well, stating the facts.
- Anti-vaxxer mom comes to her senses after her whole family gets sick. Thank goodness it was only rotavirus, which can kill infants but usually just makes older kids sick, instead of something worse like pertussis.
- Or measles, now no longer endemic in the Americas, thanks to widespread vaccination. All existing cases have come into the U.S. from overseas.
- The New York Times looks at Rep. Jim Himes, the Connecticut Democrat who was the lone ‘no’ vote on a bill that gave Olympic medalists a tax break on their bonuses. He’s right, though – why do they get special treatment that other working Americans don’t? If you’re concerned Olympians are undercompensated, then talk to the IOC, which pockets billions off the players’ efforts.
- The BBC looks at the trend of small coffeeshops turning off or limiting wifi. They’re talking about London shops, but I’ve seen the same in Blue Bottle and Four Barrel shops in California and NYC.
- Fans – er, “fans” – told Nebraska football players they deserved to be lynched for kneeling during the anthem. The player who led the quiet protest, Michael Rose-Ivey, will meet with Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts (R), who criticized the players in a manner unbecoming of his office … and yes, the Cubs’ owners are his brothers and sister.
- Women put a lot of energy into avoiding unwanted attention, from catcalls to outright assault. This column came in response to some manbaby who advised men on how to get the attention of a woman wearing headphones so you can hit on her. This response is more articulate, but I might have gone with “Die in a fire, pal.”
- It’s a little bit behind the curve, but the Guardian wrote about the rise of tabletop boardgaming.
- A CTV News investigation found that an offshore firm has taken over Canadian research journals to publish junk studies.
- Krebs on Security was taken down in a massive DDoS attack last week in apparent retaliation for some recent articles he’d written. This is the new censorship: silence someone via a torrent of lawsuits or via a torrent of data. Google is developing a tool to try to fight it.
- Why telling people to “just Google it yourself” is a bad argument (it invokes the burden of proof fallacy) and no way to convince anyone of anything. Of course, vaccine denialists use this all the time.
- Skeptical Raptor answers nine (ignorant) questions from a self-styled “anti-vaccine activist,” although I’m not sure how you can be an “activist” for something that is proven false. I guess it’s an ethos.
- An American chess champion is boycotting an event in Iran rather than wear a hijab, since in Iran women cannot appear in public without covering their hair. (The group sponsoring the tournament has responded.) This seems to me like the IOC’s decision to give the 2014 Olympics to Russia after that country passed anti-gay laws: Don’t send the damn events there and you won’t have these problems.
- Hey, a nice story for a change! A white cop who pulled over a black man for speeding ended up driving the man 100 miles to get to his sister’s funeral.