Stick to baseball, 9/22/18.

For ESPN+ subscribers, my annual list of players I was wrong about went up on Thursday, including Matt Chapman and Harrison Bader. I also held a Klawchat this week.

Over at Ars Technica, I reviewed the new digital adaptation of the complex board game Scythe, available now on Steam. I don’t love the underlying game of Scythe but the implementation here is spectacular.

Here on the dish, I’ve set up a new index page for all my board game reviews in alphabetical order; there are 160 there now and I’ll continue to update it as I post new reviews here or on other sites. I reviewed two more games here this week: Mesozooic and Founders of Gloomhaven.

I sent out a new issue of my free email newsletter earlier this week; it’s irregular in timing and content, but hey, it’s free.

And now, the links. I do want to warn anyone who might be triggered by such stories that there are quite a few links here relating to sexual assault.

• Longreads first: Molly Ringwald writes in the New Yorker about John Hughes’ problematic treatment of women in his movies, notably The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles.
• The Washington Post‘s Elizabeth Bruenig has a very long, devastating read on a clearcut rape case in Texas that prosecutors dismissed as he-said/she-said, even though there was concrete evidence to support her claims, she reported right away (another #WhyIDidntReport case), and statements from her assailants that were quickly proven false. The rapists were never charged.
• Mari Uyehara writes for GQ on the unending apologia for bad men.
• Craig Calcaterra exposes how UNC Chapel Hill’s football stadium is named for a man who led a white supremacist massacre in 1898. The school didn’t answer his requests for comment, probably while they came up with bullshit excuses for the name.
• Writer-author Joe Moran writes for the Guardian about the pleasures of ‘slow reading’, which I get, although I am still a very fast reader.
• Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux operating system (and part of its name – Linux is a portmanteau of Linus and Unix, on which Linux was based), has stepped aside as head of the Linux Foundation after years of abusive behavior aimed at his colleagues.
• Alyssa Leader sued Harvard over its mishandling over the sexual assault case where she was the victim and has since become an advocate for victims, especially those on campus. She responded to one of the women defending Brett Kavanaugh with a thread that dismantles that so-called defense.
• Deborah Copaken was raped at Harvard in 1988. In the wake of the Kavanaugh revelations, she reached out to her attacker this week – and got an apology. Her sisters were in my college class, but I don’t know the author. (This article may contain triggers for victims of sexual assault.)
• The Washington Post asked a former sex crimes prosecutor to look at the victim’s claims against Kavanaugh; the former prosecutor deems the accusations credible, and explains why, answering questions like why the victim didn’t report sooner.
• Whitney McIntosh wrote for SBNation why Melisa Reidy had every right to publish her accusations against Addison Russell now, rather than right away or on anyone’s timeline but her own.
• A white man in Washington is suing the state, claiming that a DNA test shows he’s (slightly) black and thus should be treated as such. For what it’s worth, one of those tests said I’m 1% Nigerian.
• Minor league baseball players are exporing unionization in response to the clause in the Republicans’ (very unpopular) tax law from last year that exempted MLB and MiLB from minimum wage laws.
• The Senate passed the Music Modernization Act this week, fixing the salmagundi of state copyright laws for songs written before 1972 while making it easier for artists to get paid by streaming services.
• The NRA and their Russian allies on social media often copied each other’s tweets and commentary, according to this NPR article.
• Arizona’s State Superintendent of schools appointed a young-earth creationist to review the state’s science education standards, and he already pushed word changes into the curriculum. The dingbat in question, Joseph Kezele, claims that there is “scientific evidence” to support creationism. Call your state reps, Arizonans.
• Cornell professor Brian Wansink’s research on eating habits and obesity led the USDA to tab him to lead a $22 million program to improve school lunches. This week, JAMA announced they were retracting six of his articles, the culmination of a year-long look into Wansink’s history of p-hacking, manipulating data, and even plagiarism. Wansink resigned from Cornell effective June of 2019.
• Two pieces of note for subscribers to The Athletic: Meredith Wills looks at the thicker laces on MLB baseballs, which explains much of the home run surge; and Jamey Newberg remembers the late Don Welke, who passed away this week at age 76. I knew Don from seeing him at games over the years and truly enjoyed talking to him.
• Lee Zeldin, a Republican Congressman from Long Island whose seat is in jeopardy in this year’s elections, used a picture of an Estonian lighthouse in an ad that was supposed to show the Montauk lighthouse. He’s being challenged by Democrat Perry Gershon.
• Deadspin’s Albert Burnenko tears apart a terrible New Yorker piece that asks, disingenuously, whether we should keep politics out of sports.
• More than a dozen people who were injured by the police “kettle” action during protests and riots last year in St. Louis are suing the city over their injuries. Many of the tactics the police used have since been prohibited by a preliminary injunction.
• Arizona Republican Paul Gosar is a conspiracy theory-spouting Congressman who has accused the FBI and DOJ of “treason,” so now, in a new political ad, his siblings are endorsing his opponent.
• My friend Tim Grierson writes for am New York about Paul Simon’s return to New York for his final concerts.
• Reason looks at the truth behind the TIME cover about teachers not getting by. It turns out that the initial TIME story omitted mention of the teacher’s base salary of $55,000.
• The Atlantic looks at the chicken industry as it enters an antibiotic-free era.
• Patrick Hruby writes in the Washington Post how ridiculous the NCAA’s claim that paying athletes would ruin their educations is.
• Women’s March Minnesota assembled a poster of Republican politicians’ quotes on rape.
• An ‘international pizza consultant’ claims that Portland, Oregon, is America’s best pizza city. I haven’t been to Portland since 1999, but I’m going to try to get there in the spring to check some of these places out.
• Board games: Greater than Games opened a Kickstarter for a new game called Homebrewers.
• Asmodee Digital quietly released a free-to-play (with in-app purchases) version of the abstract strategy game Onitama.