The 2018 MLB Rule 4 draft has come and gone and I have recaps up for all National League teams and all American League teams. I also wrote my reactions to day one on Monday night, and held a Klawchat on Tuesday after the fourth round, while teams continued drafting.
You can find more details on my top 100 prospects for the draft on my Big Board, and can see my final first-round mock from Monday afternoon, which had 9 picks on the dot and flipped Arizona’s first two picks.
Over at Paste, I recapped what I saw at Paradox Interactive’s PDXCON in Stockholm last month, where they announced tabletop versions of four of their popular video game titles: Crusader Kings, Cities Skylines, Europa Universalis, and Hearts of Iron.
My free email newsletter is back and I hope it’ll be more or less weekly again now that the draft is over; I’m planning to send the next issue this afternoon or tomorrow morning.
Smart Baseball is now out in paperback! I will be at Politics and Prose in Washington, DC, on July 14th, joined by my friend Jay Jaffe (The Cooperstown Casebook), and hope to announce a signing in the Boston area for the weekend of July 28th shortly.
And now, the links…
- Kat Kinsman had the best piece I read on his suicide & what it means for the industry and society overall. (I’m sure there were many great pieces I didn’t read, too.)
- Bourdain’s 1999 piece for the New Yorker on the dirty secrets of restaurant kitchens is what launched his career as a writer and eventually a celebrity (ex-)chef.
- WIRED gives us a hybrid profile/book review around former DNI James Clapper, who just wrote a memoir that is highly critical of the current Administration and the societal trends that enabled it.
- As a lifelong fan of the Muppets, I greatly enjoyed Slate’s group interview with several Muppeteers and execs as well as a TV critic and even a therapist who offers insights on the Kermit/Miss Piggy relationship.
- The California judge who sentenced Stanford rapist Brock Turner to just six months in jail – reduced to three months for good behavior – has been recalled by voters, the first judge to be recalled in that state in 86 years. Julia Ioffe wrote a long piece for the Huffington Post on how Stanford law professor Michelle Dauber led the recall effort, citing the judge’s history of considering the needs of the rapists and abusers in his court over the impact of their crimes. Dauber also identifies Stanford as “one of the most unfriendly, if not the most unfriendly school to victims of sexual assault.”
- Alia Shawkat (Maeby on Arrested Development) spoke to Vanity Fair about her disappointment in her co-stars’ comments in a recent New York Times interview that broached Jeffrey Tambor’s inappropriate behavior on set.
- South Dakota Rep. Michael Clark said businesses should be able to turn away customers of color if they want. He later apologized and admitted the comment was racist, although Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. compared the moment to a hood being removed.”
- Florida gubernatorial candidate Adam Putnam likes to brag about being an “NRA Sellout.” While he was Commissioner of the state’s Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, his office stopped running background checks for concealed carry permits for nearly a year … because an employee couldn’t log on to the national database to run the checks. Thirty-odd other states, including Delaware, honor these permits under reciprocal agreements.
- Florida is also one of the states that denies voting rights to convicted felons, and Governor Rick Scott, also a Republican, has made it even harder than ever for those citizens to regain that Constitutional right, often dismissing petitioners’ applications in mere minutes.
- Thousands of Poles demonstrated against mandatory vaccination laws. A measles outbreak in Romania has already killed dozens of children, with 200 new cases a week. Some cretin named Kat Von D announced to the world she won’t vaccinate her as yet unborn child. We all deserve to die in a plague for creating this world.
- Jess McHugh wrote about the societal expectation that women should smile, which is both very American and relatively new.
- Kansas gubernatorial candidate Kris Kobach rode in a local parade with a replica .50 caliber gun in the car alongside him. It didn’t go over well.
- You’ve probably seen coverage of the increased numbers of scientists running for political office this year; the Washington Post documents a new wave of teachers doing the same, and they’re not all running as Democrats (as just about all scientists are).
- The Guardian interviewed first-time author Elaine Castillo about her debut novel America is Not the Heart and issues of race and cultural appropriation.
- The UN’s human rights investigator on extreme poverty has found that America’s poor are becoming even worse off under Trump. I’d like to see what portion of that underclass voted for Trump and/or other Republicans in 2016.
- The Harvard Business Review offers some brief tips on how to be a more productive learner.
- This NPR piece on raising better eaters by skipping the kids’ menu is generally good advice, even acknowledging that cost and time become factors in what we feed our kids. My daughter is an adventurous eater with a broad palate. When servers in restaurants compliment me on her taste, I tell them I can only take so much credit; I introduced her to lots of foods, but she was willing to try everything.
- A rare bit of positive news in the fight against climate change: the cost of removing CO2 from the atmosphere has plummeted. Now we just need to devote more public funds to the effort.
- Doctor/scientist Edzard Ernst writes about realizing that homeopathy isn’t just useless, but actively harmful in the way it misleads patients and can steer them away from effective medical treatment. It’s not just that homeopathy has failed every test of whether it works, but it isn’t chemically possible for it to work.
- Board game news: Game Salute’s new Kickstarter for A War of Whispers is nearing its $30,000 goal.
- Asmodee Digital announced it’s going to bring some of its board game titles to Nintendo Switch.
- Acram Digital released a new 30-second trailer for the Istanbul app, due by the end of the month for iOS and Android.