I wrote one Insider piece this week, a World Series preview, although I also spent some time working on the upcoming free agents ranking. I also held my regular Klawchat on Thursday.
For Paste, my latest boardgame review covers Arcane Academy, a wizard-themed game that isn’t aimed at kids specifically but that I think is a much better game for young players than for adults.
You can preorder my upcoming book, Smart Baseball, on amazon, which now shows the correct cover. Also, please sign up for my more-or-less weekly email newsletter.
And now, the links…
- Let’s start with the longreads of the week. This Deadspin profile of the late sportswriter Jennifer Frey, a former wunderkind who died this February of long-term alcohol abuse, is on the very short list of the best things I’ve read all year.
- Annie Apple, a domestic abuse survivor and mother of a NY Giants player, wrote an emotional piece on why she couldn’t stay silent about Josh Brown.
- Harvard magazine covers the quiet fight to end the death penalty in the United States. Californians will vote on whether to keep the death penalty next month.
- The Washingtonian looks at how Donald Trump’s comments on Mexicans cost his new DC hotel its main two celebrity chef tenants.
- Sid Meier’s Civilization was one of my favorite videogames ever; I spent a good chunk of the fall of 1992 playing it whenever I had time to spare and even when I didn’t. Author Kanishk Tharoor looks back at the game’s impact and its flaws.
- Author Emily St. John, who wrote the wonderful, haunting novel Station Eleven, wrote a piece for FiveThirtyEight on the rise of books with “girl” in the title, which looks more generally at how books are named and marketed.
- The members of the hip-hop duo Black Sheep look back at the making of their debut album, A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing. Here they come, yo.
- The NY Times‘ op ed page looks at Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s habit of overreaching on regulatory issues.
- Drugmaker Purdue, which is coming under substantial scrutiny lately for its role in pushing oxycontin, helped stop regulations in West Virginia that would have limited prescriptions. West Virginia has been hit particularly hard by the ongoing epidemic of opioid addictions and overdoses, as Last Week Tonight covered in a recent episode.
- ESPN ran a great piece by Sterling HolyWhiteMountain, a member of the Blackfeet Reservation, on what the debate over the Cleveland baseball mascot misses.
- Researchers at Harvard are a new method to search for new antibiotics, building molecules called macrolides from the ground up and then testing them against a spectrum of bacteria to look for the most effective candidates.
- SCOTUS agreed to review a case from Virginia on a school that wants to prevent a transgender boy from using the boys’ bathroom. The school’s policy isn’t protecting anyone’s rights, only restricting the plaintiff’s. Also, as I’ve said before, these policies and laws that refer to someone’s sex at birth ignore the existence of intersex people.
- Researchers at Argonne National Laboratory believe they’ve found conditions where the Second Law of Thermodynamics may break down at a microscopic level – that is, where entropy may temporarily decrease in violation of that law. I’m sure Lisa Simpson would be relieved to hear this.
- Fellow Trader Joes fans may enjoy this BBC video on the Canadian store Pirate Joes and the mild-manner man who runs it by smuggling Trader Joes items he purchases in Washington back across the border to sell at huge markups.
- The emails, the emails, what what the emails … Kurt Eichenwald provides some clarity on what a non-issue yesterday’s FBI letter was, while Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution offers a memo to the press on what the letter does and doesn’t mean, including the most reasonable defense of FBI director Comey’s actions I’ve seen.
- If you want to know what Trump’s economic proposals might do to the U.S. economy, look no further than Kansas, where the economic news is so bad the state isn’t reporting it.
- More video from the BBC, this time on Trump’s appeal in Ohio, straight from his supporters’ mouths.
- The BBC has also been running a series on online blackmail using sexual images in conservative parts of the world from the Middle East to south Asia, including a video that reenacts the story of a woman jailed in Tunisia for killing the man who raped her repeatedly.
- The implosion of Chris Christie has gone largely unnoticed during the Presidential campaign, but for a one-time rising star within the Republican party, it’s been a swift and ugly fall from grace.
- Why are rainbow sprinkles suddenly everywhere? I think it’s an odd thing to feel nostalgic over, since they don’t exactly have any taste.
- Is a vaccine for the common cold finally within reach? I hate being sick like everyone, but I feel like this is a real First World Problem. There are illnesses that kill people in the developing world that should take priority over the sniffles.
- The Saudi Arabian attack on Yemen has caused an enormous humanitarian disaster, including mass starvation. Those are our “friends” the Saudis, you know.
- Canada has been holding a 23-year-old native Canadian man without trial, in solitary confinement, for over four years. Under UN definitions, he has been tortured. He was finally moved to a new cell this week after public criticism, but how did this happen in the first place?
- NPR looks at whether a 20-something male should still consider getting the HPV vaccine. The short answer is yes.
- NPR also has a useful guide to buying and using winter squash. I didn’t know that certain types are better at different points in the winter.
- Brazil and Colombia are releasing populations of mosquitos infected with a bacterium that may slow the spread of Zika and dengue.
- Paste has a review of a new D&D manual, which I include here because the book is written as if it’s from the perspective of the character Volo. Fellow Baldur’s Gate fans may remember Volo as a sort of amusing ass who kept showing up and telling you stuff you already knew, or just making shit up as he went along.
- Finally, Funny or Die has a message for would-be protest voters.