My one new piece for Insiders this week covers the Cubs signing Yu Darvish to a six-year deal. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.
I reviewed the new, light strategy board game Majesty: For the Realm for Paste this week.
I’ve been sending out my free email newsletter a bit more regularly now that the prospect work is over. Also, Smart Baseball will be out in paperback on March 13th; you can pre-order it on amazon or elsewhere, although at the moment the hardcover version is about $1 cheaper.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: This New Orleans Times-Picayune story on a photographer’s friendship with former NFL player Jackie Wallace, who has intermittently gone missing due to his ongoing substance abuse problems, is beautifully written and devastating at the same time.
- This 20,000-word piece profiling the Resnicks, the biggest farmers in the United States, manages to touch on water shortages & fights, how companies treat their employees, and the marketing of food in a wide-ranging and brilliant article that doesn’t directly take sides.
- A Georgia con artist failed to fulfill a FEMA contract to deliver hot meals to Puerto Rico and is now suing the agency for $70 million. Tiffany Brown had no disaster relief experience, but got the contract anyway, even though you can see on Yelp that she’s been accused of small-scale fraud.
- The New Yorker looks at SHIFT, a massive, ongoing research project on sexual behavior on campus located at and funded by Columbia. The goal is to find small, structural changes they can make to student life to reduce the incidence of unwanted sexual contact.
- Michael Lewis looks at the Trump Presidency from inside and without, including spending time with a thoroughly unchastened Steve Bannon, in a long piece for Bloomberg News.
- Can technology help reduce the sugar in gelato and other desserts? More importantly, why would we want to?
- The Asheville Citizen-Times reports on the huge rise in children entering foster care because their parents are hooked on opioids, a problem particularly affecting western North Carolina and other parts of the Appalachian Highlands. The issues range from infants born with up to eight different drugs in their systems to older children dealing with untreated or undertreated post-traumatic stress disorder.
- Climate change may release tons of mercury into the atmosphere, well beyond previous projections, because permafrost soil – which may not be so “perma” after all – contains more of the metal than earlier estimates held.
- A record number of scientists are running for office this year, spurred by the federal government’s unconscionable, irrational lurch towards denialist policies on everything from climate change to clean water.
- Geothermal energy is gaining increased attention as a renewable energy source, which means the current Administration will likely target it with tax hikes and tell us more about “clean, beautiful coal.”
- A Pennsylvania Republican is trying to impeach state Supreme Court justices who struck down the state’s gerrymandered map for Congressional seats. Cris Dush, who represents a rural part of western PA, says it’s not about their ruling, but their process. The state’s Democrat governor discussed the gerrymandering ruling with the Washington Post.
- Pennsylvania is no isolated case; the Republican Party is benefiting from a long-range, planned effort to gerrymander states across the country to try to hold power in Congress even though they consistently lose the popular vote.
- Want to hear a Polish joke? The country passed a law making it illegal to say Polish people collaborated with the Nazis, part of a rising tide of anti-Semitism across Eastern Europe. The country’s president signed the law, drawing a rebuke from Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
- An Alabama high school teacher compared Obama to Hitler and assigned an overwhelmingly conservative summer reading list, including Liberalism is a Mental Disorder.
- Over 100,000 people protested in Athens … because they don’t like the name of the country Macedonia. I suppose in a country with a 21% unemployment rate, it’s not like these people have anything better to do.
- Paul Ryan’s office tweeted about a woman thanking him for a tax cut that gave her an $1.50 a week … and then deleted it in the face of widespread criticism and mockery. The tax cut gave a disproportionate benefit to higher-income earners, even though it’s far from clear that this will do anything to stimulate the economy; there’s a competing school of thought that savings and/or consumption do more to drive growth.
- Slate ran a junk-science article claiming backpackers don’t need to filter or treat stream water before drinking it; Discover had one of the best rebuttals of this nonsense, although it still wasn’t enough to convince Slate to correct or take down its post and the dangerous advice therein.
- A publicly-funded college in Ontario is launching a diploma program in the pseudoscience homeopathy.
- My current home state of Delaware reported its fourth flu death of the season last week, as new flu cases for the last full week of January were double those of the same week last year.
- A Colorado man whose rape conviction was overturned after he spent 28 years in prison is suing the state … and the state’s Attorney General is fighting his $1.9 million request.
- A new Kickstarter for the board game CO2: Second Chance, an update and reissue of a climate-change themed game from 2012, blew past its funding goal in the first few days last week.
- Asmodee’s acquisition binge continued this week with the announcement that they’re acquiring Mayfair Games and Lookout Games. Mayfair, which announced it was shutting its doors after 36 years in business, was the longtime publisher of Catan, while Lookout published Uwe Rosenberg’s biggest titles, including Agricola and Patchwork.