Stick to baseball, 5/12/18.

This week brought the return of the redraft columns, where I go back ten years and ‘redraft’ the first round with full hindsight. This year’s edition redrafted the first round of 2008, led by Buster Posey and with several guys taken after the tenth round (one in the 42nd!) making the final 30; as well as an accompanying look at the 20 first-rounders who didn’t pan out. Both are Insider pieces, as is my column of scouting notes on Yankees, Phillies, Nats, and Royals prospects.

My review of the new Civilization board game is up at Paste this week. Civilization: A New Dawn takes the theme of the legendary Sid Meier video game franchise and simplifies it to play in about an hour to an hour and a half, but I felt like some of the better world-building aspects were lost in the streamlining.

Smart Baseball is now out in paperback! I’ll be at DC’s famed bookstore Politics & Prose on July 14th to flaunt the fruits of noble birth and, perhaps, sign copies of the book. I’m also working on a signing in greater Boston for later that month, so stay tuned for details. Also, please consider signing up for my free email newsletter.

I also wanted to mention a few new baseball books by folks I know that have come out in the last six weeks: Russell Carleton’s The Shift: The Next Evolution in Baseball Thinking, which I think goes well with my own book without covering much of the same ground; and two books on the Dodgers, Michael Schiavone’s The Dodgers: 60 Years in Los Angeles and Jon Weisman’s Brothers in Arms: Koufax, Kershaw, and the Dodgers’ Extraordinary Pitching Tradition, even though Jon liked the movie Moneyball and therefore was wrong about it.

And now, the links…

• The authors of the forthcoming book A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things write for the Guardian‘s Long Read about how the chicken nugget is the true symbol of modern capitalism, a cheap, highly processed foodstuff that fuels inexpensive labor without regard for the cost on the environment or the people consuming them. The authors make many good points along the way, but I think none is more important than understanding that the meat we buy at supermarkets is already “processed.” The claim that “processed” foods are killing us ignores how much processing happens even in foods billed as “natural,” including meats, milk, yogurt, even some types of produce.
• A junk study claiming the HPV vaccine caused neurological damage has been retracted by the journal that published it, two years after its release. The original publication led to a near total collapse of HPV vaccination rates in Japan.
• The Washington Post‘s Michael Gerson argues that if you’re anti-GMO, then you’re anti-science.
• The New Yorker published a lengthy investigative piece on New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s history of domestic violence, which led to his resignation within days. Contrast that to Missouri Governor Eric Greitens, a Republican, who has been accused of sexual assault and blackmail, and been indicted on felony invasion of privacy charges, but remains in office.
• North Carolina is a ‘purple’ state, split fairly evenly between the two parties, but horrendous gerrymandering has given the Republicans a stranglehold on the state legislature. Meanwhile, Republicans in Michigan, Arizona, and Pennsylvania continue to push pro-gerrymandering cases and legislation to try to retain control of the legislatures in those states.
• Mass shootings inevitably lead to calls for mental health policy reform, but there’s scant evidence linking these events to mental illness.
• The Anti-Defamation League sent out a release saying that Twitter users sent over 4 million anti-Semitic tweets last year.
• Weeks of protests in Armenia pushed Parliament to elect opposition leader Nikol Pashinyan as Prime Minister.
• The Guardian‘s Kieran Devlin wrote about the songcraft of Frightened Rabbit’s Scott Hutchison in the wake of the singer’s death, presumably a suicide, at age 36.
• In the last week, three teenaged girls in India have been raped and burned, one of whom was killed after threatening to report her attacker to her family.
• Writing for the Hardball Times, Rachael McDaniel describes growing up queer and finding inclusion in baseball.
• Young Turks are increasingly rejecting Islam, turning to deism or even atheism in the face of a repressive, pro-Islam dictatorship. Turkey had been a secular republic since 1928, but President Recep Tayyip Erdo?an has embraced Islamism as a way to strengthen his grip on power.
• George Will writes that Trump is no longer the worst person in government; that title belongs to Mike Pence.
• A Moroccan woman who was married to a Libyan dissident wrote about being kidnapped and tortured at a CIA “black-ops” site that might have been run by CIA director nominee Gina Haspel.
• A student at James Madison University who was raped, reported it, and told her attacker did nothing wrong was also told speaking out about the incident could violate university policies. The school’s lawyer later apologized.
• There’s a ‘crab crisis’ in Maryland due to a lack of workers for the seasonal industry, a result of the Administration’s hard line on immigration, but the affected fishermen refuse to make that connection. Cognitive dissonance is a real motherhecker.
• Fordham Law professor Jed Shugerman explains how the Russian payments to Michael Cohen may prove collusion, at least enough to enable Mueller to obtain probable cause for further warrants.
• California has once again surpassed Great Britain to be the world’s 5th-largest economy (if we treat California as independent of the rest of the U.S.), despite progressive policies like higher minimum wages and taxes or bans on certain types of pollution. The growth has brought other negative externalities that the state will have to face, including rising homelessness and the pollution and economic losses of traffic.
• Z-Man Games, now an imprint of Asmodee, acquired the great little social game Love Letter, which takes a 16-card deck and makes for a fun deduction game with lots of interaction that you can play in five minutes with three or four people.
• Two new board game Kickstarters of note: Darwin’s Choice, another evolution-themed game (hi, Curt!) that has already funded but is open through June 5th; and Last One Standing, a battle royale-style tabletop game that’s past the halfway mark to its goal.