I wrote a bunch of stuff this week to cover all the major transactions before and during the winter meetings, including:
• The Cardinals signing Dexter Fowler
• The Yankees signing Aroldis Chapman
• The Nationals’ trade for Adam Eaton
• The Cubs/Royals trade with Wade Davis and Jorge Soler
• The Rockies signing Ian Desmond
• The Rays signing Wilson Ramos
• The Red Sox trading for Chris Sale
• The Red Sox trading for Tyler Thornburg
• The Giants signing Mark Melancon
• The Yankees signing Matt Holliday
• The Astros signing Carlos Beltran
I also held a Klawchat on Friday afternoon.
Over at Paste, I reviewed Terraforming Mars, one of the best new boardgames of 2016, and one that will place high on my ranking of the top ten games of the year when that’s published in the next few days.
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…
- I doubt there’s been a more important story in the U.S. this past week than the CIA’s conclusion that Russia tried to help Trump win the election, providing hacked DNC emails to Wikileaks while apparently keeping hacked RNC emails to themselves. I truly don’t know where this goes from here.
- Meanwhile, North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory conceded defeat in this year’s election, ending fears that state Republicans would use a special legislative session and court-packing trick to try to overturn the popular vote. McCrory’s loss appears to have been at least in part due to his support of state HB2, the so-called ‘bathroom bill’ that also banned local ordinances that protected LGBT citizens from discrimination. Texas, learning nothing from this, is trying to pass the same sort of bill in its quest to roll back the clock a hundred years.
- Trump’s continued refusal to sell his businesses creates an unprecedented tangle for him and his family, with evidence already mounting that he’s misusing his status as President-Elect to secure new deals for his business.
- Mayors of the world’s biggest cities pledged at the recent C40 summit to act against climate change even if Trump won’t.
- Does Trump’s pick for Secretary of Defense harbor a decades-old grudge against Iran?
- Carrier’s labor union leader said Trump “lied his ass off” about his role in keeping the manufacturer’s plant in Indiana.
- Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich had a few things to say to Trump in a CNN appearance this week.
- The man behind Ohio’s bill to essentially ban abortion in the state was accused in 2011 by his wife of abusing her.
- A deranged man who believes everything he reads on the Internet brought a gun to a DC pizza shop and fired it, claiming he was “self-investigating” the lunatic conspiracy theory that the shop, Comet Ping-Pong, is a front for … I can’t even say it. These people are too fucking stupid for words.
- Actress Sofia Vergara is facing a lawsuit from her own embryos, in effect saying she’s denying their right to be born. It’s really a money grab by her ex-husband, but the consequences of a successful suit here are chilling.
- South Korea’s legislature has impeached the country’s President over a corruption scandal; she’s suspended from office now while the case goes to the country’s high court.
- MTV News has a great profile of the nephew of defeated Gambian dictator Yahya Jammeh; Jammeh’s nephew is gay and spoke out against his uncle’s policies against LGBT Gambians and statements like his 2015 promise to “slit the throats” of gay men in Gambia.
- Is the key to boosting Nicaragua’s economy getting more women into the labor force?
- A Pentagon study showed how the agency could save $25 billion a year by reducing wasteful administrative costs, so the agency buried it.
- A study by the American Automobile Association found that drivers who drive on less than seven hours of sleep are much more likely to crash, with the probability doubling from seven hours of sleep to the range from five to six.
- What’s the difference between speaking a language and being fluent in it?
- For decades physicists have assumed dark matter exists and accounts for much of the universe’s missing mass, but a new theory holds that it’s not real and that its place in physics is replaced by “dark energy,” which produces the gravity (via quantum interactions) that we attribute to the invisible matter.
- The New Yorker has a profile of A Tribe Called Quest and their final album, which debuted at #1 on the Billboard 200 and is still in the top 15 three weeks later.
- Author Ann Patchett, whose Bel Canto is one of my 50 favorite novels ever, gave the New York Times her guide to independent bookstores for folks who visit such shrines the way many tourists seek out museums or old churches.
- Former professional blackjack and poker player Cat Hulbert told the BBC her life story of beating male gamblers who underestimated her in a rambling but still fascinating narrative that explains some of the many lows she hit while playing cards for a living.
- You can watch evolution happen in a giant Petri dish in a lab at Harvard where scientists are studying bacteria to see how antibiotic resistance occurs and how we might fight it. (Link includes a five-minute video.)
- Tim Grierson and Will Leitch give movie-fan dilettantes like me a viewers’ guide to what movies might earn Oscar nominations. I need to get to the theater.
- Give money to food banks, not canned goods. We have a local food bank in Delaware with a rating of 95% or so on Charity Navigator, and they’ve been my main target for charitable giving lately for the same reasons this article lays out.
- Doctors at Yale New Haven Hospital saved a man’s life using an old but still novel approach to fighting a bacterial infection called “phage therapy,” where the patient gets a dose of bacteriophages, virii that specifically infect bacteria.
- An artist or group of artists calling themselves Anonymouse made a tiny art installation of shops for mice on a street in Sweden.