Stick to baseball, 7/8/17.

For Insiders this week, I previewed the Futures Game and broke down some of the worst omissions from the All-Star rosters. I held a Klawchat on Friday.

On the non-baseball front, I reviewed the high-strategy boardgame Great Western Trail for Paste this week. I also have a new piece up at Vulture looking at how the TV show Orphan Black has used boardgames as an integral part of several episodes.

Thanks to everyone who’s already bought Smart Baseball; sales spiked this month between Father’s Day and the positive review in the Wall Street Journal. I’ve got book signings coming up:

* Miami, Books and Books, today at 3 pm
* Harrisburg, Midtown Scholar, July 15th
* Berkeley, Books Inc., July 19th
* Chicago, Volumes, July 28th, 7:30 pm
* GenCon (Indianapolis), August 17th-20th

If you’re with an independent bookstore and would like to host a signing, please contact Danielle Bartlett at HarperCollins; we’re trying to accommodate everyone we can within my work schedule. I’m talking to one store about a signing/talk in Brooklyn (along with another author) in August or early September.

And now, the links…

• The headline may be salacious, but the problem is serious: Antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea is spreading, due in large part to unprotected sex (including oral sex), resulting in some patients with untreatable cases. And given what we know about horizontal gene transfer in bacteria, this should terrify you even if you aren’t at risk of contracting this particular disease.
• Longread of the week: Nathan Fenno, who wrote the definitive piece on Rays prospect turned accused murderer Brandon Martin, has another, similar piece, on former NFL player De’von Hall, who killed his mother during an argument, apparently after a quick decline into mental illness and homelessness.
• Digg has a riveting first-person account of post-partum psychosis. The girl who grew up next door to me, two years my senior, took her own life about a decade ago a few days after giving birth, the result of post-partum psychosis.
• James Beard winner Sean Brock, the celebrity chef behind Husk (Charleston, Nashville, and soon two more locations), opened up to the New York Times about getting sober after friends staged an intervention around his drinking.
• Bloomberg profiled a strange, remote, popular hotel on Newfoundland’s Fogo Island in a piece from May of 2016. The photos are as incredible as the story.
• WIRED looks at the unlikely rise of mathematician June Huh, who didn’t come to mathematics until college and is doing his best work now at age 34, well past the typical peak years of most mathematicians. Clearly we should be testing him for Proof Enhancing Drugs.
• From Gizmodo, why people with implanted medical devices should fear automatic doors and the general rise of devices operating in the same frequency ranges as, say, brain implants or pacemakers.
• Austin is a rare bastion of progressive thought and policy in Texas, a state with one of the country’s most reactionary governments, leading to conflict between the citizens of the state’s capital and the politicians working in it, particularly over “preemption laws,” whereby states tell cities and counties they can’t pass certain ordinances or enact policies that might run counter to what the state governments want.
• A white man shot and killed an 18-year-old black woman in a road rage incident in Pennsylvania last week. It doesn’t appear their races played a role in the crime, but they seem to have affected the news coverage of the incident. David Desper had a permit for the 40-caliber semi-automatic he (is alleged to have) used to kill Bianca Robertson.
• A Kenyan woman told the BBC how she missed her own wedding because she’d been abducted and gang-raped outside of Nairobi.
• Flights in the southern US (and beyond) are increasingly facing high-heat delays due to climate change, which our current federal Administration still denies even exists.
• John Le Carré gave a speech, transcribed in the Guardian, extolling the virtues of learning German in a post-Brexit world, although I think his points can apply to anyone learning any foreign language. Not only does it facilitate communication, but different languages can express different concepts and can give the speaker new perspectives.
• Are humans insignificant in the cosmos, and if so, does life have meaning? A fellow of philosophy and epistemology examines a question often reserved for clergy and theologians.
• Eighteen states are suing the Department of Education for delaying implementation of a rule aimed at helping students conned by for-profit universities. For-profit colleges aren’t necessarily bad, but the field is certainly ripe for scams, particularly since federal aid is so easy to come by.
• The Guardian‘s editorial page also came out in favor of mandatory childhood vaccinations, while accurately comparing modern anti-vaccine movements to the religious fundamentalists – the article mentions the Taleban, but Christian Scientists have the same bad beliefs – who also oppose vaccinations.
• Lindy West, who deleted her Twitter account in January due to the service’s refusal to deal with abusive trolls, writes about how the same class of trolls threatens free speech rights.