Chris Crawford and I ranked and wrote up the top 30 prospects for the 2017 draft, with Vandy outfielder Jeren Kendall at #1. I also wrote posts for Insiders on the Segura/Walker trade, on the Brett Cecil & Andrew Cashner contracts and other moves, and on the Astros’ moves last week. I also held a Klawchat on Tuesday, in advance of the holiday.
Over at Paste I reviewed the new Martin Wallace game Via Nebula, a great, family-level route-building game that we found simple to learn and quick to play.
You can preorder my upcoming book, Smart Baseball, on amazon. Also, please sign up for my more-or-less weekly email newsletter.
And now, the links…
- Some great longreads this week, including this New Republic piece on the ten-year odyssey to identify an amnesiac man.
- Another one comes from Bleacher Report, on Aly Dia, who played one infamous game for Southampton FC and has long been suspected of deceiving club officials about his experience to get that spot.
- One from VICE, a report exploring the connection between the drug Propecia and serious neurological side effects, with some patients committing suicide after taking the hair-restoration medicine.
- And the BBC explores how British police let a serial killer slip through their fingers, likely because the victims were young gay men with drugs in their systems.
- In “depressed rural Kentucky,” residents are worrying about Medicaid cutbacks under the GOP-dominated government. Trump carried Kentucky with nearly double Clinton’s vote total, and five of their six Representatives are Republican, with the lone exception coming from the district around Louisville.
- Democrat Roy Cooper continues to lead the vote count in North Carolina’s gubernatorial election, but Roy McCrory and Republicans are trying to steal it. If you live in NC, call your state reps, regardless of party, and make sure they know you oppose any attempt to subvert the results of the state’s popular vote.
- A Boston Globe op ed urges Washington to get out of regulating organic food, in essence because there’s no clear defintion of “organic.” I’m about 90% in agreement here, but I do think consumers deserve the protection of truth in labeling laws, regardless of which agency is in charge of it.
- London has become a leader in cutting food waste via apps that connect people with extra food – restaurants or even individuals – with people and charities who need it.
- Chef Tom Colicchio talked to Mother Jones about food policy, hunger, and the incoming GOP government.
- An 18-year-old college student in Tennessee has been charged with shooting and murdering his 16-year-old ex-girlfriend while she slept, because she’d ended their relationship. I’m surprised the story hasn’t gotten more coverage – pretty white girl gets killed equals headlines – but perhaps no one wants to ask 1) why he had access to a gun and 2) what this says about our male privilege problem.
- SNL Weekend Update anchors Michael Che and Colin Jost have come under fire for some tasteless (and unfunny) jokes about gender identity, and Paste‘s Seth Simons says they should be replaced.
- NASA’s notorious paper on the EM Drive has finally been published, and claims that the propulsion system – which appears to break Newton’s Third Law – actually works.
- Scientific American wrote in the wake of Trump’s election that he’s as anti-science a President as we could possibly have. Money quote: “A mandate is what you can get away with.”
- Jeb Lund (aka Mobute) has a great piece at Esquire on surviving Thanksgiving by actually going out of your comfort zone and talking to people who maybe don’t see the world the way you do.
- Dementia rates in the U.S. are dropping as the country ages but researchers don’t understand why.
- Why did many Canadian writers, including the ostensible feminist Margaret Atwood, speak out in support of a professor fired for sexual harassment and bullying? You can find more details on the case and the backlash in the Toronto Star.
- FBI data show a rise in hate crimes against Muslims and Jews in 2016.
- Slate argues that Facebook’s problem runs deeper than fake news, which is that Facebook itself is a media company but Mark Zuckerberg won’t admit or accept it.
- Journalist and writer Farai Chideya has a long, thoughtful, somewhat rambling essay on this year’s “call to whiteness,” those who answered the call, and those who chose not to speak out against it.
- Trump won because college-educated whites supported him. Ultimately, that is the question Democrats will have to answer: why they couldn’t capture a segment of the electorate that tends to be more liberal (higher education correlates with more liberal/progressive political views).
- Trump reportedly pledged support to vaccine denialists at an event in August, in case you weren’t sufficiently horrified yet.
- He also once asked a reporter if it was wrong to be more attracted to his 13-year-old daughter than to his wife, in case you weren’t sufficiently horrified yet.
- This Philly Daily News op ed explains how Trump & Co. will distract America while looting the country and breaking all manner of rules, in case you weren’t sufficiently horrified yet.
- Trump continues to piss and moan about press coverage of him, including personally dressing down several reporters in a meeting last week, in case you weren’t sufficiently horrified yet. But at least New York Times columnist Charles Blow called him out on it.