I’m pretty stoked about the game I reviewed this week for Paste: Charterstone, a competitive, legacy game that incorporates so many great things from other games, plays in just an hour, and changes the board, cards, and rules in each play.
I had Insider posts on this week’s three-team trade (AZ, NYY, TB) and the JD Martinez signing. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.
Smart Baseball comes out in paperback on March 13th! More details on the HarperCollins page for the book. List price is $16.99 but I imagine it’ll be less than that at many retailers.
And now, the links…
- I posted this last Saturday night on Twitter, but it’s important enough to repost here: The BBC Inquiry podcast asks why is Cape Town running out of water? The reasons are obvious, yet authorities didn’t see this crisis coming, and the story has serious implications for cities in arid, warm regions around the world, including our own Phoenix and Tucson.
- The Guardian‘s longread of the week looks at the rise of Italy’s proto-fascist movement CasaPound. The country is expected to lurch to the right in elections in two weeks; incumbent leader Silvio Berlusconi, a corrupt lecher with endless political lives, has embraced the far-right to try to stay in office.
- The Washington Post has a long article about Rachel Crooks, whom Trump sexually assaulted in a Trump Tower elevator in 2006.
- Ben Lindbergh wrote a great profile of sabermetrics pioneer Sherri Nichols, whose Defensive Average was the first great public defensive metric (and changed the way I thought about how we discuss defensive values).
- Twitter cracked down on a bunch of alt-right trolls, including hoaxers claiming the Parkland kids were ‘crisis actors,’ and their general counsel explained the moves in a thread that deserves more attention. Yes, Twitter needs to do more, but this sweep was a big step.
- One of the kids targeted by these hoaxers directly responded to his accusers.
- My alma mater’s alumni magazine interviewed Tom Nichols on the death of expertise and the public’s rising refusal to listen to people who actually know things.
- Digg has a piece on a disease I’d never heard of, one that causes thousands of deaths each year with just a 50% survival rate: melioidosis, a.k.a. Whitmore’s disease, a bacterial infection endemic in southeast Asia and northern Australia.
- Author, astronomer, and atheism advocate Lawrence Krauss has been accused of sexual harassment by multiple women, something that seems to be too common in the skeptic community (where Michael Shermer has also been accused of sexually harassing or assaulting multiple women). In a movement that prides itself on demanding and then accepting evidence, you’d think these women would find more support.
- Pennsylvania Republicans are willing to dismantle the state’s democracy to retain power, moving towards impeaching the state judges who ruled against their gerrymandered map. They’re also suing yet again to stop the redistricting. One wonders what they’re so afraid of.
- The great ProPublica gets a profile of how it’s taking its watchdog approach to Facebook, Google, and other tech giants.
- Some good news on the vaccine front: Trump appears to have abandoned his vaccine-autism commission idea. The UK is having its own vaccine-denial problem, prompting the Guardian to also issue this editorial on how we need to hear parents’ fears, and make them immunize their kids anyway.
- An Idaho group brought 183 small coffins to the Boise state house, one for each kid who died in the state because their parents were ‘faith healers,’ going back to 1970. You have a right to practice your religion, but you do not have the right to let your kids die for your faith. The latter is something you get with so-called “religious freedom” laws.
- Kyle Lobner, formerly of BrewCrewBall, is starting a newsletter version of his Frosty Mug daily links roundups, aimed mostly at Brewers fans, and you can support his efforts via Patreon.
- Sorry, but it turns out that Nigerians just don’t care about their bobsled team.
- A brief post from the founder of the Environmental Voter Project argues that the NRA is effective because its voters show up, not because of money. The answer, of course, is to boost turnout of people opposed to the NRA’s agenda.