Stick to baseball, 3/24/18.

My column identifying some potential breakout players for 2018 is up for Insiders. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Reiner Knizia’s Sakura, a light, quick-playing game where players all chase the lead ’emperor’ token, but where you can move your opponents as well and try to push them into the emperor, costing them points and sending them to the back of the queue.

Smart Baseball is out in paperback! U.S. Residents can enter a sweepstakes from HarperCollins to win a copy of the book and a phone call with me.

And now, the links…

• Former Utah State basketball player Jalen Moore explains in an essay on the Players’ Tribune why he walked away from the NBA to deal with what sounds like crippling panic disorder.
• Writing for the New Yorker, Andrew Marantz went inside to see how Reddit is coping with trolls, abuse, and harassment while also considering the need to allow users to express themselves (or else they might not have a business). My personal experiences on Reddit have been largely negative, so while I have an account there, I rarely even open the site.
• The Guardian looks at “joint enterprise” laws in the U.K., which led to eleven people earning jail sentences for one murder, even though only one of the eleven actually participated in the killing. The piece argues that the laws’ application particularly targets young black men.
• Mari Uyehara writes for GQ about the ‘free speech’ grifters decrying so-called “PC culture” on campuses.
• This longread on a snake-oil saleswoman pushing fermented cabbage juice belongs in an April Fool’s joke post.
• Here’s an easy tip on how to turn off “platform sharing” on Facebook, now that we all have some evidence that Facebook never bothered to protect users’ data from illicit use.
• Brian Wansink, the Cornell food “scientist” who has been repeatedly accused of p-hacking and otherwise manipulating data to produce misleading reports and headlines, appears to have fraudulently accused Joy of Cooking of promoting unhealthy eating.
• FEMA ignored requests for fuel from Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands after Hurricanes Irma and Maria, so thousands of tons of food went to waste for lack of refrigeration.
• The New York Times sent travel writers to five islands devastated by the pair of hurricanes to see how their tourism industries have rebounded, if at all. Most hotels and restaurants have yet to reopen on St. John, St. Martin, and other islands that were hit by both storms.
• The newest nominee to lead the Centers for Disease Control is a virologist with a long track record of research into HIV and AIDS … and accusations of scientific misconduct as well as support for abstinence-only sex education, writes Ed Yong for the Atlantic. Robert Redfield also has virtually no public health experience, unprecedented for a CDC director.
• The San Luis Obispo Tribune investigates the death in police custody of a schizophrenic man who was restrained, tortured, and who then died while officers watched. An FBI investigation appears to be ongoing.
• Will Leitch looks back at baseball’s “tepid” offseason for New York and asks if we’re leaded for labor strife after 2021.
• Former Congressman Joe Walsh, now a conservative talk radio host/provocateur, has become one of Trump’s most vocal critics from the hard right. Walsh has defended the Mueller investigation, argued against selling the 2017 tax bill to voters (saying it won’t have any impact for most people), and criticized Trump’s attacks on the press.
• Pennsylvania Republicans are trying to impeach the state’s Supreme Court in retaliation for the latter’s ruling against the GOP’s gerrymandering the state’s Congressional districts. I feel like PA residents should send diapers to these clowns’ offices. Pennsylvania had repeatedly shown up in analyses of the most gerrymandered states, as the Republican Party there split up the heavily Democratic southeastern portion of the state to tilt those seats to themselves.
• Michigan State Senator and now Republican gubernatorial candidate Patrick Corbeck is a pseudoscience-spouting loon, a creationist anti-vaxxer who is now touting baseless conspiracy theories about electromagnetic radiation.
• Harvard Professor Jorge Dominguez, accused by ten women of sexual harassment who also say the school knew about Dominguez’s transgressions and did little or nothing, is retiring, although the investigation continues. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
• An Alabama sheriff *legally* siphoned off $750,000 in public money meant to feed prisoners in his jurisdiction and used it to buy a beach house – and then he retaliated against the source behind a local newspaper’s investigation. Maybe this is just me, but I think any locale where this is legal and supported would qualify as a “shithole.”
• I’ve criticized Arizona’s government many times for its general lack of urgency on issues related to the environment, including water usage and climate change, but the state’s utility regulatory commission did something very good, demanding that utility APS stop new natural gas projects and boost renewable energy sources. The commission, which comprises five Republicans, has long been a mere rubber-stamp group for the companies it regulates. The state is now in a drought that has been going on since 1996.
• France is experiencing an uptick in measles again, yet more damage wrought by Andrew Wakefield’s debunked, fraudulent paper and the various idiots who still think vaccines cause autism. France made MMR vaccination for infants mandatory as of January 1st, so let’s hope that puts an end to this outbreak.
• The House passed “right to try” legislation this week, even though it’s not going to help anyone and may just spread false hope while reducing patient access to these drugs through existing, more realistic programs.
• The open-access journal Scientific Reports, published by the same group behind Nature, finally retracted a paper nearly two years after they learned parts of it were plagiarized — and after a dozen of its board members resigned in protest that it wasn’t retracted a year ago.
• Biohacking is bullshit and probably dangerous too.
• Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker lost a lawsuit over his refusal to call special elections to fill vacated legislature seats in his state, a policy that would have left some residents without representation in at least one body for over a year.
• Georgia Republicans are pushing a bill to restrict voting hours in heavily Democratic Atlanta. I assume next they’ll introduce literacy tests and a poll tax.
• Opponents of abortion rights like to claim that the procedure is dangerous so they can pass laws that require doctors who provide abortions to have admitting privileges at a hospital or even to perform the procedures at hospitals or surgical centers. Five states require doctors to contradict known science and tell women there’s a link between breast cancer and abortions. (There isn’t, in case that wasn’t clear.) A new study finds that abortion in the United States is safe, which underscores that these laws are about religion, not about protecting women.
• I just discovered that Elena Ferrante, the pseudonymous Italian author behind the bestselling Neapolitan Quartet, writes a weekly column for the Guardian. Her latest entry argues that everything in women’s lives has been “codified by male needs.”
• No, there was not a Ku Klux Klan rally at the 1924 Democratic Convention. That didn’t stop people from spreading the lie on social media – or Breitbart from repeating it.
• Gateway Pundit, another far-right blog – with White House press credentials – repeated a different lie, this one libeling the Democratic Sheriff Scott Israel of Broward County after the Parkland massacre.
• If you own a VR device like Oculus Rift, you can now play the board game Catan on the platform. I tried a beta version back in November and it was novel, but still the same game.
• Please enjoy this delightful Miyazaki-inspired tourism ad for the lovely state of Oregon: