Stick to baseball, 11/4/17.

My one ESPN piece this week is not Insider: I spoke to Jharel Cotton and Jabari Blash about the hurricane damage and recovery efforts in their home territory, the US Virgin Islands. It’s bad, yet it’s getting virtually none of the attention here that Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico are getting. If you’d like to help, you can donate to the Community Foundation of the Virgin Islands, St John Rescue, or Family Resource Center, all of which are heavily involved on the ground on the islands.

I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Smart Baseball makes a great holiday gift, or at least I think it will, since this is actually the first holiday season since its publication. Also, please sign up for my free email newsletter, which is sort of weekly, and includes some mini-essays that don’t appear elsewhere plus links to all my writing.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: The Atlantic looks at how children who have to parent younger siblings carry the effects into adulthood.
• Also from the Atlantic, a writer went to live in a Norwegian town that gets no sun for two months each winter yet has low rates of depression despite the long darkness.
• ProPublica looks at leftists who work to dox neo-Nazis & white supremacists. Read it until the end.
• The Boston Globe looks at a number of former Patriots players now living with dementia or who’ve died of CTE-related causes.
• The Guardian examines the failed history and new potential for a vaccine against the common cold.
• A ShareBlue reporter was violently arrested while asking a question of the GOP nominee for Virginia governor. The Fairfax County police chief has defended the officers’ actions, in part because the reporter violated the county law against swearing in public.
• A judge at Gitmo sentenced a Marine general lawyer to 21 days in confinement for “disobeying” the judge’s orders. What did the lawyer do? He excused three civilian lawyers from the case on ethical grounds.
• The Trump Administration has shelved a planned ban on the brain-damaging pesticide chlorpyrifos, an organophosphate that is already banned for residential use but is persistent enough in the environment that it’s found in most of our bodies. There are multiple studies showing potential evidence of harm from chlorpyrifos, including one that shows a possible link to autism.
• I’d love the opinions of the scientists in the audience on this one: is fear of a sixth mass extinction overrated? I understand what the scientist in question is saying – there will be new speciation – but I can’t see how what we gain could possibly make up what we’ll lose.
• Another piece that left me with questions: Is organic farming actually worse for climate change?
• Thirteen federal agencies issued a joint report on Friday, saying that the activities of man are causing climate change. You’d like to think that this would be the end of this stupid, brainless debate, but we all know it’s not.
• This came after President Trump nominated a thoroughly unqualified candidate to be the USDA’s top scientist, Sam Clovis, who admitted he lacked any credentials and then withdrew after his name appeared in the probe into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.
• He was hardly alone; Trump’s pick to lead NASA doesn’t understand how science works.
• Yet another junk science article appeared, claiming a link between mercury (in processed foods this time) and autism, even though all the evidence says there is no link whatsoever between the two.
• Doctors and scientists in New Zealand blame Andrew Wakefield’s bullshit documentary for declining vaccination rates. They should take a tip from Australia and stop allowing vaccine deniers into the country.
• Another great podcast episode from The Hidden Brain, on the power of checklists, featuring Dr. Atul Gawande, author of The Checklist Manifesto.
• LawFareBlog breaks down the so-called Uranium One scandal, separating the actual legal questions from the hype being sowed by you-know-who.
• This story hasn’t seen much ink here in the U.S., but the Guardian looks at how a British analytics firm connects Trump, Assange, Bannon, and Farage. The company may have made an “impermissible donation of services” to Farage’s Leave (“Brexit”) campaign.
• Three Republican Congressmen have introduced a bill demanding that Robert Mueller recuse himself from the Russia probe, based on a specious argument around that Uranium One story.
• Vox asks what if Mueller proves collusion and the right just ignores it?
• The Wall Street Journal editorial page’s coordinated attacks on Mueller have led to internal divisions at the paper, which shares a parent with Fox News, and may hasten the ongoing exodus of top journalists. It’s a shame; I remember when the WSJ‘s editorial page was home to some of the best op eds in American journalism.
• The Republicans’ tax bill has gotten poor reviews from many economists and many individual sectors of the economy. American higher education officials oppose it, as the bill would make attending college and graduate school more expensive while reducing charitable donations. College is too expensive as it is, but the deductions they’re targeting here may only be making it more expensive, just like student loans do, by allowing colleges to raise tuition.
• George Will writes how the tax proposal contradicts the Republicans’ self-proclaimed goals of fiscal responsibility. Their “reform” proposal is anything but, and won’t do anything to reduce deficits or the debt.
• The BBC’s America First series looks at the American adults who can’t read (video).
• The LA Times reported that Walt Disney won’t give it advance screenings of holiday movies in response to a piece the newspaper ran covering the company’s relationship with the city of Anaheim.
• Twitter unveiled some new policies on removing tweets or suspending users; while most of the focus was on the policy covering non-consensual nudity, it covers quite a bit more, including sexual harassment on the site, and at least hints at a crackdown on hate tweets and hate groups there.
• Joe Ricketts, patriarch of the family that owns the Chicago Cubs, shut down a set of news sites he owned after the writers voted to unionize.
• Racist flyers accusing immigrants of “taking over” the New Jersey town of Edison appeared in voters’ mailboxes this past week. The fliers don’t indicate who funded them, which violates state election law.
• A judge in Mississippi banned a mother from seeing her newborn because she couldn’t pay court fees. Although the judge resigned from the family court where he made the ruling, he still serves on the Rankin County court, where all four justices are white men.
• The liberal Center for American Progress made word clouds for Trump’s responses to terrorist attacks, split by the races of the attackers.
• Liberty University kicked an anti-Trump Christian author off campus, with armed officers removing him and warning him he’d be trespassing if he set foot on the campus again.
• The New York Times‘ Health section looks at what men who rape or sexually assault women have in common, including research done by asking such men directly about their crimes.
• A Twitter troll who spouted pro-Trump nonsense was actually a fabrication of the Russian government’s ‘troll farm’, yet was quoted widely in American and British news outlets.
• Okra, a consistent recommendation on my Arizona dining guides, has closed, as one of the co-owners is moving to California. Crudo, Okra’s sister restaurant, remains open and under the reins of Chef Cullen Campbell.
• A Kickstarter for a new printing of the boardgame Folklore: The Affliction blew past its $30,000 goal in the first week.