Stick to baseball, 1/19/18.

I only wrote three things this week that you can see anywhere right now: Two posts for Insiders on the Andrew McCutchen trade and the Gerrit Cole trade; and a review of the movie Call Me By Your Name.

Everything else I wrote will go up next week as part of the top 100 prospects package. The top 100 itself is scheduled to run on Monday and Tuesday – I’m still working on the order – followed by the “just missed” column on Thursday and one page ranking all 30 farm systems on Friday, which means that last writeup will be more concise than last year’s. The org reports will run the week after. If you’re curious, I haven’t written anything besides the top 100 capsules yet. So, yeah, things are just great.

And now, the links…

• Longreads: The Guardian looks at a Youtube host who fought back against revenge porn posted by her ex and eventually won.
• The Detroit News has a lengthy investigation into Michigan State’s role in covering up Larry Nassar’s serial abuse. It is quite clear that MSU President Lou Anna Simon needs to step down. ThinkProgress has a shorter piece identifying his enablers, many of whom are still in the jobs where they protected a known child molester.
• ESPN’s Outside the Lines and ESPN the Magazine also published a detailed report on the many institutional failures that allowed Nassar to prey on teenaged and preteen girls for decades.
• Aly Raisman gave a victim impact statement on Friday and she took no prisoners.
• WIRED looks at the search for new antibiotics in a drug-resistant age, combining old searches in the soil with new techniques from metagenomics.
• Also from the Guardian: A profile of Social Chain, a British “meme factory” that advises firms on creating content that will spread across social networks.
• Business Insider goes into depth on Yale’s failures to handle sexual misconduct cases, with an assist in incompetence from the New Haven Police Department.
• Tom Nichols writes for the Washington Post that the Trump presidency is damaging our entire democracy, including aiding extremists on the left who wish to control the Democratic party.
• A Boston Globe investigation argues that the Maine Republican Party is behind anonymous attacks on opposing candidates, pushing fake and misleading stories that cost at least one candidate a likely electoral victory.
• Some alt-right trolls clipped a talk given by psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker to make it appear that he was praising the people in that cesspool, and the edited video quickly spread through social media, a new example of the harm that such networks can do to our collective intelligence.
• A new rule proposed by the Department of Health and Human Services would allow doctors to refuse to treat transgender patients and to otherwise hide behind claims of religion.
• A supposedly “independent” watchdog group in Chicago called Project Six is actually bankrolled by the far right according to a joint investigation by ProPublica and the Chicago Sun-Times.
• The accusation against Aziz Ansari has spurred lots of thinkpieces, many of them terrible. I thought Vox’s piece gave a balanced, nuanced take on the story, which doesn’t fit neatly into the “sexual assault” or “harassment” buckets we’ve been filling to surfeit of late.
• Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid’s Tale, asks in an essay on the #MeToo movement, “Am I a Bad Feminist?“
• Barbara Kingsolver, author of The Poisonwood Bible, argues in the other direction that women need to ‘get ugly’ and voice their anger, asserting their rights and continuing to force these uncomfortable conversations about how men treat women in our society.
• NPR looks at Italy’s disappointing response to the #MeToo movement, as the largely Catholic country still adheres to the idea that victims must have deserved or provoked their assaults.
• Somaliland, a self-declared independent country in the northern part of what the international community still recognizes as Somalia, passed a law outlawing rape and banning rapists from marrying their victims as a way to escape punishment, while also giving life sentences to rapists who give their victims HIV.
• The NCAA answers to nobody, so this story shouldn’t surprise anyone: A college basketball player player who was expelled from Findlay College after a false rape accusation was denied a waiver to play for Duquesne because the NCAA rules by divine right.
• Billboard looks at the legal questions behind Radiohead’s copyright infringement claims against Lana del Rey.
• The Four Barrel Coffee saga continues to twist, as the owners announced a name change and plans to become an employee-owned company, then a decision to keep the Four Barrel name, and a settlement to the harassment lawsuit that brought the company’s unacceptable environment to the light.
• A Tempe “naturopath” (a practitioner of pseudoscience) is suing a blogger who called out her bogus claims about healing cancer, which include injecting cancer patients with vitamin C and baking soda, telling them to go sugar-free, and other stuff that won’t work … while also telling them not to undergo chemo or radiation therapy. The lawsuit is clearly a SLAPP attempt, and you can donate to the blogger’s defense fund set up by the Australian Skeptics. Noted debunker Orac calls the naturopath’s suit “legal thuggery.”
• Greater than Games is running a series of raffles and promotions for their Multiverse Month. The publisher’s main titles include Bottom of the 9th, Sentinels of the Multiverse, and Spirit Island.
• I can’t figure out if food writer Tamara Adler’s diary is real or satire, because if it’s real, it’s the most pretentious thing I’ve read in years.
• At the Gates, one of the founding acts of the Gothenburg school of melodic death metal, announced its new album will be released in May. To Drink from the Night Itself will be the band’s first record without founding guitarist Anders Björler.
• And finally, a video I rather enjoyed from Twitter:
  

  ?#PositiveNewsWeekend

  I love these Strandbeests: wind-propelled kinetic sculptures created by Dutchman Theo Jansen. #art #beach #animals #fun pic.twitter.com/0fIsmpVnQx

  — Alexander Verbeek ? (@Alex_Verbeek) January 13, 2018