Stick to baseball, 6/17/17.

I recapped the drafts for all 15 NL teams and all 15 AL teams on Friday and Thursday, respectively, and previously had reactions to day one and day two of the draft, as well as a Klawchat during day two.

I did manage to squeeze in a boardgame review for Paste, breaking down the family-level tile-laying game Bärenpark, which has a Tetris/Patchwork-like mechanic and plays well with four but needs a few rules tweaks to keep it fair.

Smart Baseball continues to sell well, according to my editors, so thank you all for buying, reading, and talking it up. I have signings coming up in Toronto (6/26), Miami (7/8), Harrisburg (7/15), Berkeley (7/19), Chicago (7/28, details to come), and at GenCon 50 in Indianapolis (August 17-20).

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I was a bit busy this week, and was offline most of the day Thursday as we went strawberry picking, which means we now have jam and strawberry-rhubarb pie, so the list of links is pretty short. I should be back to normal next week.

• Longread of the week: Ars Technica looks at the guy who says he invented email and is suing everyone who says he didn’t. No serious outlet agrees with his claim, but he has access to enough cash to fund these suits, one of which is threatening to shut down the site Techdirt because of the ruinous cost of defending itself against the suit. The soi-disant inventor is also a Trump supporter and announced that he’s running for the Massachusetts Senate seat occupied by Elizabeth Warren.
• Two pieces this week found that baseball’s home run spike is at least partly the result of changes to the baseball. The first came from Ben Lindbergh and Mitchel Lichtman at The Ringer, and the second from Rob Arthur at FiveThirtyEight.
• Want to get more done in a day? Manage your energy, not your time. That means embracing moments of “unfocus,” and ending the futile effort to be productive every minute of your workday. I wouldn’t say this is how I planned to work, but it is definitely how I do work.
• Farhad Manjoo makes a rational argument against using Uber, at least until the company cleans up its act. I’ve switched to Lyft and taxis when I need a ride somewhere.
• My adopted home state of Delaware took a major step to ensure a woman’s right to choose in the face of threats to abortion rights at the federal level, to say nothing of efforts in states with right-wing governments like Texas and Missouri to enact end-runs around Roe v. Wade.
• Meanwhile, in Ohio, women protested that state’s bill to restrict abortion rights by appearing in costumes from The Handmaid’s Tale. I haven’t seen the series, but the book is a must-read.
• Have you seen the list of doctors who claim to be vaccine skeptics? If you argue with anti-vaxers at all, this list inevitably comes up. SkepticalRaptor goes through the list and finds they’re not immunologists, and often aren’t doctors at all. What a shock. I’m in favor of any medical board pulling the license of a doctor who advises parents not to vaccinate their kids.
• This GQ profile of LA chef Jordan Kahn and his new restaurant Vespertine seems extremely unflattering to me – not because the writer aimed to take down the subject, but because the entire undertaking seems so out of place. The friend who sent me this link called it “pretentious” and I’d go even farther; the article makes Vespertine sound like a chef’s ego trip around the world.
• Puerto Rico voted for statehood, sort of, with an opposition boycott resulting in just 23% of voters casting ballots in the nonbinding referendum. The BBC looks at what statehood would mean for the commonwealth.
• A lobbyist who represents “Russian interests” in Washington told the Guardian that he can contradict Jeff Sessions’ claims before Congress that the Attorney General never had contacts with any such people during the 2016 campaign.
• Maryland and D.C. have sued the President, alleging a breach of the Constitution’s emoluments clause.