For Insiders this week, I posted my first batch of scouting notes from the Arizona Fall League, covering prospects from the Cardinals, Yankees, Brewers, Orioles, Padres, Cubs, Rockies, and Twins. I also held a Klawchat on Friday.
Later today (Saturday) I will be at Changing Hands in Phoenix, at 2 pm, to talk about and sign copies of Smart Baseball. I’ll also be signing books at PAX Unplugged, a new boardgaming convention that takes place in Philadelphia the weekend before Thanksgiving.
And now, the links…
- Longread of the week: The New York Times on the rise of severe anxiety among American teenagers. The piece doesn’t really get at the question of why we’re seeing more cases, but does explore various treatment options and explain various signs of anxiety for parents to know.
- As Puerto Rico’s humanitarian crisis deepens, with hospitals still without power and short of medicine and clean water, the President is threatening to pull FEMA and military support from the U.S. territory. Meanwhile, the 100,000 American citizens on the Virgin Islands are also largely without power and water several weeks after Hurricane Maria.
- The New Yorker asks how many Puerto Ricans will move to the mainland given the awful conditions and awful federal response on their island. The money quote, from a Puerto Rican man whose house was destroyed by a Maria-induced mudslide: “All (Trump) brought to Puerto Rico were those napkins. And you know what everyone’s wondering? What we’re expected to wipe with them: our asses, or our tears.”
- And the President, whose own Secretary of State called him “a fucking moron,” may be mentally unraveling, according to Gabriel Sherman for Vanity Fair.
- DeAndre Harris, who was beaten by white supremacists in Charlottesville in August, was himself arrested on a dubious charge, as one of the racists did an end-run around police and convinced a (white) magistrate to issue an arrest warrant for Harris. The Washington Post has more on this story.
- An Indiana lawmaker introduced a bill requiring journalists to be licensed by the state police. If you live there, maybe call your state reps and remind them of the existence of the First Amendment.
- Video: A Connecticut man, angry after the Paris attacks of 2015, shot up a local mosque (after dark, while it was empty). Then he met the Muslims who worshipped there, and everything changed.
- A terrorist tried to blow up the Asheville airport last week, but the media coverage has been virtually nonexistent.
- A new study from the Food Climate Research Network at the University of Oxford found that grass-fed cattle don’t fight or reduce climate change. Previous theories held that grazing cattle would encourage carbon sequestration in the soil, but this study found the cows still … um … toot too much for that to matter. (Of course, grass-fed beef may taste better, may be more healthful for us to eat, and might be nicer to the cows themselves, since they’ve evolved to eat grass, not corn or soybeans or, worst of all, animal flesh.)
- The Journal of Inorganic Biochemistry is retracting a junk-science anti-vaccine study mere weeks after publishing it. The study’s authors are familiar with the retraction process, having submitted a similar pseudoscientific paper to Vaccine in 2016, only to find it pulled back.
- Gene therapy was hailed as the next great advance in medicine in the mid-1990s, but couldn’t delivery on its promises in that timeframe. Now its time might have arrived, as an FDA panel endorsed a gene therapy protocol to treat a rare form of retinal dystrophy, an inherited disorder that causes blindness in children.
- Senate candidate Roy Moore, the Ayatollah of Alabama, claimed for years he wasn’t compensated for his work for a local non-profit when in fact he was receiving $180K a year for part-time work for the organization.
- The University of Wisconsin has passed a new student conduct rule that threatens students who disrupt or interfere with others’ free expression with explusion. In other words, if a UW student group were to invite, say, white nationalist Richard Spencer to speak on campus, and a student disrupted his speech, that student could be suspended or expelled for it. The ACLU opposes the policy.
- Shake Shack is introducing automated kiosks to take orders, possibly a response to rising minimum wage laws. I hate seeing low-wage jobs eliminated for automation, but as a fan of Shake Shack, I would say my #1 issue with the chain is the frequency of incorrect orders.
- Bananas have been under threat for decades from a fungus that causes fusarium wilt (also called Panama Disease), which renders entire plantations incapable of producing fruit. Australian scientists might have a new banana that resists the fungus – but it’s genetically modified, which many people believe, incorrectly, is a Very Bad Thing.
- Asmodee Digital just released an app version of the boardgame Smash Up, which is available for iOS devices, Android, and Steam.
- Videogame developers are increasingly including pay-to-play loot boxes in games to try to counteract the industry’s punishing economics. The tabletop industry hasn’t had that problem yet, as consumers in that space seem more willing to pay $40-plus, even $100, months after a game has been released.
- Sony plans to make a Settlers of Catan movie, which sounds like a really terrible idea.