For Insiders, I had four pieces this week (and may have another before the day is out). I wrote about what Shohei Ohtani’s deal with the Angels means for them and the AL West, Seattle’s trade for Dee Gordon, the signings earlier this week of Kevin Maitan, Mike Minor, and Miles Mikolas, and deals involving Welington Castillo, Aledmys Diaz, and Brad Boxberger. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.
For Ars Technica, I looked at the upcoming virtual reality adaptation of the board game Catan.
If you missed them here on the dish, my annual cookbook recommendations, gift guide for cooks, and top 100 board game rankings are all up.
Also, here’s your weekly reminder to buy my book Smart Baseball for everyone on your holiday list.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: The Guardian looks at the ongoing controversy over ‘shaken baby syndrome’, which has sent many parents to jail but probably doesn’t even exist.
- Bloomberg documented the quest of one victim of a debt-collection scam to track down the con artists hounding him, which also brought to light this entire shadow industry of people trying to collect on debts that were either already paid off or weren’t real to begin with. It’s a con that preys on vulnerable people who may not know their rights or understand that the calls might be fraudulent.
- The Virginia Quarterly Review looks at the ‘Slenderman’ attempted murder, when two 12-year-old girls stabbed their friend 19 times and left her to die because they were trying to please that fictional character. The essay compares this crime to the murder of Honorah Parker by her daughter and a friend in New Zealand, the basis for the Peter Jackson movie Heavenly Creatures.
- A VICE writer and provocateur gamed the system to make his backyard shed the top-rated restaurant on TripAdvisor, which led to all kinds of hilarity when people tried to call and make reservations at a restaurant that wasn’t real.
- What do we mean when we speak of “freedom of speech?” The Atlantic looks at two competing definitions of the term as we grapple with the spread of white supremacists on the airwaves and touring college campuses.
- Tim Grierson wrote about how some late-night talk show hosts have come of age by leading the criticism of the current Administration, notably Seth Meyers and Jimmy Kimmel.
- Southeast Asian nations are now dealing with artemisinin-resistant malaria, meaning that the parasite responsible for the illness has evolved resistance to the first treatment option for people with the mosquito-borne disease. Meanwhile, the Administration has proposed a 44% cut to funding for the President’s Malaria Initiative.
- Anti-vaxxer parents are overly concerned with notions of ‘liberty’ and ‘purity’, while pro-vaccine messaging tends to revolve around fairness and the harm of vaccine-preventable diseases. A new study shows that may be a factor in the rise in vaccine denialism: the cranks are hitting the right moral points in their comments, while the truth loses out.
- The New York Times has a photo essay on Norilsk, the northernmost city with over 100,000 inhabitants, home to one of the most significant polluters in the world, MMC Norilsk Nickel. The Atlantic also ran a piece on Norilsk last month, featuring an 11-minute documentary called My Deadly, Beautiful City.
- The Economic Policy Institute, which focuses on issues related to low- and moderate-income Americans, argues that there is no evidence that corporate tax cuts will lead to higher wages and will end up costing lower-income taxpayers more in the long run.
- I found this Ars Technica beginner’s guide to bitcoin useful and well-written without condescending to an audience that might not grasp what “cryptocurrency” means or how a currency can exist without a government behind it. Point 7, about the massive amount of energy consumed by bitcoin’s blockchain, seems to be rising in prominence now that the speculation in the currency has brought its value into five-digit territory. I don’t own any bitcoins, though – my entire 401k is invested in tulips.
- The death toll in Puerto Rico in the aftermath of two category five hurricanes is likely 16 times higher than the official tally, while the Administration tries to claim success in the recovery and restoration efforts there.
- A former Catholic priest has been convicted of killing a young woman who came to him for confession in 1960, while he was still a member of the clergy in McAllen, Texas. The Catholic Church stands accused of helping cover up the murder.
- Facebook is blocking women who call men “scum” under the guise of its policies about hate speech … but they don’t do much, if anything, about men harassing or threatening women on their site, and I’ve found they aren’t even very good or consistent about the hate-speech policy.
- This post about a Newfoundland woman’s bread recipe, which really isn’t much of a recipe at all, was particularly interesting for its description of a touton, a local version of an English muffin where leftover bread dough is fried in butter.
- A biochemistry major at Plymouth State University is now fielding calls from modeling agencies after a random photo of her, taking at Howard University’s homecoming event, went viral on Instagram.
- Native American tribes are banding together to fight an Administration proposal to shrink the Bears Ears national monument by over one million acres, a move encouraged by a Canadian-owned uranium mining firm.
- The teenagers in New Zealand metal band Alien Weaponry sing (or shout) their lyrics in Te Reo Māori to try to encourage listeners to learn the language and more about the Māori culture. There’s a very heavy Bay Area thrash influence to their music too.
- Kim Davis made national news in 2015 for violating a federal judge’s order to issue same-sex marriage licenses. Now one of the men whose license she refused to issue is running against her for her seat as county clerk.
- Boardgame news! Ancestree, one of my favorite games of GenCon 2017, has arrived at the warehouse and is shipping to Kickstarter backers. It should appear in stores shortly afterwards.
- Rather Dashing Games announced a March release of Wakening Lair, a cooperative dungeon-crawl boardgame that promises an RPG-lite experience in under an hour.
- IDW Games announced Masque of the Red Death, a deduction game based on the Edgar Allen Poe story.
- My own ranking of the top ten board games of 2017 will be up this upcoming week at Paste; in the meantime, here’s a solid top ten from Smithsonian magazine, with two titles that’ll appear on my list and one more, Raiders of the North Sea, I would have ranked but found out it was originally released in 2015, so I dq’d it.
- Fantasy Flight Interactive announced this morning that they’re developing a digital version of the Lord of the Rings card game (video), a Living Card Game™ from FFG in the same vein as Android: Netrunner and Arkham Horror.
- Two lighter videos to end this dreadful week of news: An Australian MP proposed to his boyfriend from the House floor during the country’s same-sex marriage debate. Marriage equality was signed into law in that country this week, but the straight couple who said they’d divorce if same-sex marriage was legalized have reneged on that promise.
- Canada’s absolutely true news outlet The Beaverton documents a new way doctors are convincing parents to vaccinate.
Good longread this morning at ESPN, about how the University of Louisville’s athletic department became swimming in cash while the academic side of the school saw drastic budget cuts. There’s a $160M shoe deal, a $250M taxpayer funded basketball arena that is cost the citizens of Louisville even more, an athletic director being paid more than the entire budgets for big academic departments like math and history, and the men’s basketball team is now under investigation by the FBI.
http://www.espn.com/espn/otl/story/_/id/21710106/louisville-athletic-director-tom-jurich-leveraged-big-deals-build-university-sports-powerhouse-only-watch-burn-amid-charges-excess
The Economic Policy Institute has never endorsed an idea that wasn’t also part of the Democratic Party platform, so let’s treat their analysis with a grain of salt. (These corporate cuts probably aren’t terrible in principle but in practice they will be because of other tax law changes & the deficit.)
That said, I’m only commenting to let you know I saw the stealth edit of “won’t” to “will.”
Keep up the great work.
While the EPI is left-leaning, let’s not grossly overstate the point. They have certainly opposed Democratic policies when they perceived them to be problematic (and, in particular, anti-labor). They were leading the charge against the TPP, for example, when Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were both strongly for it, and Bernie Sanders had nothing (yet) to say.
Someone (you?) pointed out the wording mistake on Twitter. I had rewritten the sentence and forgot to flip the verb.
“These corporate cuts probably aren’t terrible in principle but in practice they will be because of other tax law changes & the deficit.”
Corporate tax cuts is they incentivize pulling cash out of companies, so instead of using the companies resources to grow and develop the company, they are taken as profits.
This is terrible in principle.
“pulling cash out of companies”
And…where does the cash go? To shareholders? And what do they do with it? Invest in other companies? (Parts of it, surely.) Spend it so it goes as income to others? (Parts of it, probably.) Money doesn’t disappear just because it’s no longer on a corporate balance sheet. Of all the problems with the tax bill, that is not one of them.