My lone piece for ESPN+ subscribers this week was a trifle, a look at the top ten players under 25 on this year’s playoff rosters, focusing specifically on potential impact this month. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.
I sent out another edition of my irregularly scheduled but free email newsletter earlier this week. Many thanks to the nearly five thousand of you who’ve subscribed already.
I’ll be at PAX Unplugged, the huge tabletop convention right here in Philadelphia, on November 30th-December 2nd, and the organizers just released their official schedule this week. It’s a great time with a ton of open gaming and many publishers showing off their latest releases.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: Esquire‘s Ryan Lizza looks at the dairy farm owned by the family of anti-immigration zealot Rep. Devin Nunes (R), who has taken pains to conceal the fact that the farm is in Iowa, not California, and appears to run primarily on the labor of undocumented immigrants. Nunes’ family members tailed and attempted to harass Lizza as he investigated the story.
- ProPublica looks at how the negligence Texas hospitals and medical practices allowed an incompetent surgeon to keep practicing until rival doctors finally pushed hard enough to get him investigated and eventually convicted of aggravated assault for the deaths and injuries resulting from his surgeries. His employers appeared to know he had substance abuse problems, but didn’t report him to the appropriate national database.
- The Kavanaugh controversy has provided some useful cover for the President after the New York Times reported on potentially illegal tax schemes he used, including “outright fraud,” that increased how much money he gained or inherited from his father’s real estate empire.
- This memoir-ish post from writer Sarah Miller on how writing a review of The English Patient that she didn’t really believe altered her whole writing career is fascinating, including how it emphasizes the importance of writing for yourself, not to please others.
- Voter rights activist Jason Kander, who had been running for Mayor of Kansas City, announced this week that he’s seeking treatment for his PTSD and depression and thus ending his campaign. He served in Afghanistan in the early 2000s and says he’s been living with the aftereffects ever since.
- The economic data the Administration touts don’t actually tell the story they want you to believe: working Americans are worse off under Trump. Average earnings are rising faster than median earnings, because the gains are flowing to top earners, so those in the middle or below are losing ground relative to inflation.
- The President and his son are pushing a narrative that women everywhere make up sexual assault claims to destroy men. The President and his son are lying, and the pernicious effects go beyond the Kavanaugh nomination: this will only further depress rates of women reporting rapes or assaults to authorities. It’s also worth remembering that a man is more likely to be a victim of an assault himself than to be falsely accused of committing one.
- Here’s the Kavanaugh Corner, with all the links directly related to the case in one bullet point so you can skip them if you’re just exhausted by it all: The Intercept has a piece on how frequently and brazenly the candidate lied to the Senate committee; the dynamic duo of Mayer and Farrow write in the New Yorker how the FBI ignored relevant testimony from former classmates of the candidate, even when those classmates tried to contact the agency; WIRED has a long read on the disinformation network that pushed GamerGate, pizzagate, QAnon, and now is trying to exonerate Kavanaugh, using botnets, sock puppets, and useful idiots like Cernovich and Posobiec; Charles P. Pierce excoriates the vulgar talking yam yet again, this time for Trump openly mocking a sexual assault victim, to a cheering crowd of sycophants; and eight Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee signed a letter to Republican Chuck Grassley accusing him of misleading the public with tweets on the investigations into Brett Kavanaugh.
- The city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, would like you to forget the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre that killed over 300 black residents and left over 10,000 homeless.
- Vulture’s Mark Harris argues the SNL Kavanaugh sketch didn’t work, and that our political moment has made such attempts at comedy too difficult. I thought the sketch had plenty of great moments (starting with “WHAT?”), but at 12 minutes it ran on way too long, much like “The Big Ear Family.”
- Alison Moyet, late of new wave duo Yaz, signed a letter criticizing the LGBT charity Stonewall for supporting trans rights.
- A new study of existing evidence argues that withdrawal from SSRI antidepressants is more severe than commonly believed.
- Anti-vaccine nuts are now trying to tie their irrational claims to the #MeToo movement against rape and sexual harassment.
- Mercury, a bugbear of anti-vax loonies (even though neither elemental mercury nor the toxic methylmercury was ever in vaccines), is about to become more prevalent in our air and water as the Environmental ‘Protection’ Agency loosens rules on mercury emissions. It’s yet another futile attempt to bring back the coal industry even as the world moves beyond it.
- If you missed it among the many worse news items this week, three scholars revealed a nearly year-long hoax where they got seven ridiculous papers published in the field of what they called “grievance studies,” largely journals aimed at gender studies or studies of sexual orientation. The Chronicle of Higher Education offers a balanced look at the controversy, now colloquially called “Sokal Squared,” with academics weighing in on both sides, arguing that this was a worthwhile takedown of fields of study that favor outrage over scholarship, or arguing that the scholars picked worthless targets while ignoring more serious problems in academic publishing (like p-hacking).
- The Athletic’s Marc Carig and Eno Sarris looked at how the Yankees became one of the leading users of analytics in MLB (subscription required). They aren’t often named as such a team – critics love to trot out the A’s and Rays when bashing sabermetrics – but they’ve spent as much or more on the area as anyone.
- A new rule in Scotland forbids mapmakers from putting the island of Shetland in a separate box.
- This editorial cartoon on Kavanaugh and today’s Republican Party speaks volumes without a word.