The MLB winter meetings were a bit slow this year, but I did have five new Insider pieces this week, covering:
• The Dodgers/Atlanta salary swap and the Matt Moore trade
• The Santana and Cozart signings, plus the Galvis trade
• The Piscotty and Kinsler trades, and the Shaw/McGee signings
• The Marcell Ozuna trade
• A quick take on a few interesting Rule 5 picks
• The Giancarlo Stanton trade
My ranking of the top ten new board games of 2017 went up at Paste on Sunday evening. My latest game review for the site covers Ex Libris, a fun, light strategy game that’s extremely well balanced, and made my top ten as well.
The holidays are upon us! Stick a copy of Smart Baseball in every stocking.
And now, the links…
- Longreads: WIRED looks at the three Minecraft-playing entrepreneurs whose DDoS botnet caused the October 2016 Internet outage in the eastern United States.
- ESPN’s Outside the Lines and ESPN The Magazine, an investigation of how adidas money took over the University of Louisville.
- The Boston Globe Spotlight team looks at the evidence behind Boston’s reputation as a racist city and finds that … yep, it’s racist. I lived in the Boston suburbs for about 18 years, including my time in college, and my personal experience was that the city was highly segregated: There was a large black population, but they all lived Somewhere Else. Diversity in whiter neighborhoods was limited to people from east or south Asia, but rarely included African- or Latino-Americans.
- Also from WIRED, a look at the big money effort to build a professional e-sports league around the game Overwatch.
- A former sharecropper in Lowndes County, Alabama, a majority-black county with a population just over 10,000, spends every Election Day encouraging and driving her neighbors to the polls, one of the many great stories emerging after Doug Jones’ surprise victory over the Ayatollah of Alabama on Tuesday.
- Slate argues that the new concealed-carry reciprocity law is unconstitutional. It was also widely opposed by law-enforcement groups, and the inevitable lawsuits to stop it are going to waste a lot of everyone’s time and money.
- The Trump Administration told the Centers for Disease Control they can’t use the words fetus, diversity, transgender, evidence-based, or science-based in upcoming budget request documents. That’s yet another reason to support efforts to elect scientists to public office, such as 314 Action.
- Salon calls the Republican Party the American Taleban in response to the party’s massive rollback of policies of previous administrations, with the goal of keeping a portion of the population “undereducated.”
- New York‘s Jonathan Chait claims that the Mueller investigation is in great peril; I’m just not informed enough to know if this is valid, melodramatic, or a bit of both.
- USA Today‘s editorial board, hardly a bastion of the left, called out Trump’s implication that Senator Kirsten Gillibrand would trade sex for campaign donations, saying “A president who would all but call Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand a whore is not fit to clean the toilets in the Barack Obama Presidential Library or to shine the shoes of George W. Bush.” You’d think Republican women in Congress would be outraged, but nah.
- The New York Times compared the blatant falsehoods told by Presidents Obama and Trump, finding that Trump is offering lies at 60 times the rate of his predecessor, telling more lies in less than a year in office than Obama did in eight. (They list the specific falsehoods, if anyone wants to cry “fake news.”)
- The US Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a hospital worker fired for refusing a flu shot can’t claim religious discrimination, as the court ruled that anti-vaccination beliefs are not religious in nature, and that the scientifically accepted view is that vaccines are not harmful.
- Celebrity chef & Food Network icon Mario Batali has now been outed as a sexual harasser & groper, and has been fired by The Chew as a result. He issued a weak apology that ended with a cinnamon roll recipe.
- Ken Friedman, the co-owner of West Village restaurant The Spotted Pig, has been accused by several former employees of harassment and assault, another great piece of investigative work from the New York Times. The Spotted Pig is co-owned by chef April Bloomfield, who is accused of blowing off complaints from female employees about Friedman.
- Salma Hayek’s piece on how Harvey Weinstein harassed her and nearly derailed her career in retaliation is just brutal to read. Director Peter Jackson revealed that Weinstein forced him to drop Mira Sorvino and Ashley Judd from the Lord of the Rings movies in further retaliation against the women for rejecting his advances.
- Thrillist’s Dan Gentile listed the 21 best coffee roasters in the country, and based on my experience it’s quite a credible list. I’ve tried nine of these, and would probably not have included La Colombe of those on the list, but would vouch for the rest. I’d also add Archetype (Omaha), Cartel (Phoenix), and Bird Rock (San Diego/La Jolla).
- In July, the podcast Startup interviewed the Yemeni-American behind the $16 cup of coffee that made headlines in 2016. His story is remarkable, as he’s had to educate Yemeni farmers and then process and ship the beans out of an active war zone.
- In the wake of the Keaton Jones story (and the milkshake duck epilogue), Teen Vogue looks at how the traumas of young black girls don’t get the same kind of public empathy. She also argues for greater mental health treatment for traumatized young kids, which is a core tenet of the book I reviewed yesterday, The Body Keeps the Score.
- Yet another former Facebook exec has come out against the power and effects of his old employer and social media in general, saying it’s “ripping apart society.” I agree social media is showing some rather pernicious effects, but I also feel like this talking point is a very good way to make money on the speakers’ circuit when you used to work there.
- This New York Times story on the alt-right’s attempts to build a parallel social media world is mostly funny but a bit scary that they could even find funding for all of these failed efforts.
- Paste posted its ranking of the top 30 video games of 2017. I’ve heard of maybe five. I did just buy a new laptop that’s supposed to be quite good for gaming, so maybe I’ll dive in this year.
- Thames and Kosmos has two new titles out just in time for the holiday with Legends of Andor: The Last Hope and the Ken Follett-inspired A Column of Fire. I probably won’t be reviewing these, but do have a stack of games to review to take me well into February; that should include Majesty: For the Realm, the brand-new title from the developer of Splendor.