Stick to baseball, 12/2/17.

My Insider post on Shohei Ohtani is finally up, with a scouting report compiled from aggregating opinions of multiple scouts who’ve seen him hit and pitch, and thoughts on what MLB’s rigging of the rules against him really signals. Between the lack of significant activity in the hot stove and the fact that I got quite sick in the middle of the week, that’s been my only baseball content since Thanksgiving. I did hold a Klawchat on Thursday.

For Paste, I reviewed the train game Whistle Stop, a mid-weight title that’s among the best new board games I’ve played this year. My ranking of the top ten games of 2017 will go up the week of December 10th. EDIT: My first piece for Ars Technica is up now – a look at a beta version of Catan VR, an upcoming digital port of the global bestseller from Asmodee Digital.

I’ve taken an unintentional hiatus from my free email newsletter, but will resume this week. The holiday, PAX Unplugged, and that virus I had have all conspired against me, I swear.

Smart Baseball is out now in hardcover, e-book, and audio formats, perfect for your holiday shopping! Buy one or forty copies, your call.

And now, the links…

• Longreads: The Cut has a piece from a woman who wasn’t told her unborn child would have cystic fibrosis, and thus wasn’t given the opportunity to even consider an abortion.
• A video, not a longread, but worth the twelve minutes: The New York Times went to hurricane-ravaged Barbuda, which was completely evacuated before the second of the two category five hurricanes hit in September. There’s a rising fear now that the government in Antigua will use the evacuation as an excuse to overturn the Barbudan way of life, which has not included private ownership of land over 300 years of settlement.
• I am old, because I don’t really understand why a person of no apparent talent would be a “Youtube star,” but that is where we are as a culture today, and the fans of one particular persona, Alissa Violet, caused serious real-world consequences for a Cleveland business and several individuals they doxxed.
• A scare campaign by science deniers, aided by credulous Japanese media, has all but eliminated HPV vaccinations in Japan, ostensibly an educated nation. A Japanese doctor who spoke out against these anti-vaxxers and faced death threats for it has won this year’s Maddox Prize for her work.
• If you live in Florida and have school-aged children, well, I agree with this Tampa Bay Times piece decrying a Republican-supported bill to block ‘objectionable’ topics from curricula. If a parent complains – say, an evangelical Young Earth creationist dad – then material like the theory of evolution could be knocked out of a high school biology class.
• Vanity Fair asks if we will soon see the end of the social media era. I doubt it; they’re too pervasive to just go away, but as with every wave of technology, they will likely be superseded by something (or things) that borrow elements of social media and add new features or capabilities to pull people away. None of this will address the biggest concern around social media – the speed with which they allow falsehoods, from fake political news to anti-science bullshit, to spread around a country or even the world. To stop that, we need more education to protect us from ourselves.
• The Deseret News points out that advocates of so-called “religious freedom” should look at the prevalence of laws against blasphemy, which derive (in Judeo-Christian countries) from a Biblical commandment.
• Should Lauri Love, a Finnish-British hacker with a lengthy list of mental and physical health problems, including depression and Asperger’s syndrome, face extradition to the US for stealing confidential data during a lengthy (and obviously planned) campaign of intrusions into American government systems? It’s not quite as clear cut as it might sound, even though I still think he should be extradited after reading this piece.
• ProPublica looked at a $1900 ear piercing at a Colorado hospital as part of a longer story on why health care costs so much.
• Roy Moore, who still seems very likely to win this month’s special election for the open Alabama Senate seat, wrote in a textbook that women shouldn’t be allowed to hold office. As much as the news cycle has focused on his history of sexual misconduct, his history of anti-gay, anti-Muslim, and anti-women positions and statements are a more direct concern for how he would act as a legislator.
• Meanwhile, here’s the Washington Post‘s original story on a right-wing group’s fraudulent story on Moore, attempting to trick the paper into running a false accusation against him.
• More Moore: One of the Alabama evangelical ministers loudly supporting him was himself convicted of blocking an investigation that his son molested orphans in Honduras. And the New Yorker interviewed Alabama women for their thoughts on Moore’s behavior and comments on women, including their unworthiness for public office.
• Republican Thomas Kean, who served two terms as New Jersey’s governor and now heads up the Environmental Defense Fund, argues that Trump needs to fire EPA head Scott Pruitt.
• John Kennedy, a Republican and the junior Senator from Louisiana, has come out against several unqualified nominees for the federal judiciary. This isn’t about policy positions, but about pure qualifications. I do not expect to agree with this administration’s nominees on questions like strict or loose constructionism, but I think it is reasonable to still expect the nominees to hold sufficient experience and to pass established ethical standards.
• A woman I went to high school with questioned why Matt Lauer’s first accuser waited so long to come forward. The NY Times has an explanation from psychologists about why that and other myths used to doubt victims are false.
• One of my Senators, Chris Coons, wrote an op ed on the benefits of bipartisan tax reform, a few weeks ago. It doesn’t mention anything about small-hours votes on unread, handwritten bills, though.
• More Delaware news: the 76ers are teaming up to build a new facility for their developmental league affiliate … with unspecified funding from the state and the city of Wilmington. I’ve already contacted one of my two legislators to voice my total opposition to any use of public money for a private sports facility.
• A new treatment for migraines, using antibodies to alter the brain chemicals thought responsible for the crippling headaches, has shown tremendous promise in early tests.
• This Washington Post piece provides a solid, balanced look at net neutrality, which has become a bit of a catchphrase. I favor net neutrality, but there are reasonable arguments that the companies making last-mile investments are more than just dumb pipes. Meanwhile, FCC chairman Ajit Pai is mad that people are mean to him on social media and seems to be arguing for regulating such sites.
• Cities are lining up to hand power over to Amazon to land the company’s second US headquarters. Dave Zirin argues that this is the consequence of publicly funded sports stadiums becoming the norm over the last thirty years.
• The BBC has a piece authored by two women who were both ‘gaslit’ by the same psychologically abusive boyfriend.
• I reviewed the film Lady Bird on Thursday; actress Beanie Feldstein, who played Juliet, wrote asking people to stop complimenting her on her weight loss, given how hard she worked before that to learn to accept her body as it was.
• Will Leitch asks in New York magazine if we are looking at the end of the NFL.
• A hate group calling itself the Alliance Defending Freedom is fighting transgender student rights across the U.S.. The link lists specific states where the group has been active, often via filings in court cases, if you’d like to oppose a group of people who refer to a young transgender student as “a girl who perceives herself to be a boy.”
• UPROXX’s Brian Grubb argues that The Muppet Christmas Carol is the best adaptation of the Charles Dickens story. I tend to agree, but for many different reasons, and I don’t share Grubb’s perturbation/obsession with the process or results of Muppet sex.
• Asmodee Digital has been busy, releasing Carcassonne for Android and Steam this week, and announcing a port of the new-ish game Gloom (not related to Gloomhaven) due out in March.