Stick to baseball, 11/4/18.

For ESPN+ subscribers, I ranked the top 50 free agents this offseason. I also held a Klawchat on Wednesday, before a brief vacation to Disneyworld to help my parents celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary.

I’ve been better about sending out my free email newsletter, which isn’t to say the content is better, just that I’m sending it more often.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: The Washington Post has a long investigation by writer Radley Balko into the rot inside the Little Rock, Arkansas, Police Department that led to an incompetent, racist cop shooting an unarmed 15-year-old black kid, lying about it, and escaping conviction in two trials. The cop in question, Terry Hastings, was hired over the objections of another officer, who pointed out that Hastings had attended a Ku Klux Klan meeting – normally a disqualifying event, but Hastings’ father was also on the LRPD force.
• This Atlantic longread by a writer whose grandfather was ostracized for a failed attempt to solve a major physics problem also delves into deeper questions of what drives geniuses and how orthodox institutions treat apostasy.
• A Harvard researcher has a new theory of mitochondrial function and evolution that may help lead to new treatments for diseases of mitochondrial dysfunction, including many fatal muscular diseases.
• Stalwart indie bookstore The Strand is unionized, making it a bit unusual in the bookstore world, but the store’s very wealthy owners have fought modest pay raises and benefits increases. The Strand is a wonderful store with knowledgeable employees and an enormous selection of new, used, and rare books, but this column says much of its revenue comes from renting out its space rather than the sale of books.
• The Washington Monthly has a longread accusing writer Salena Zito, whose pieces cover Trump voters out in rural America, of fabricating quotes and stories and manipulating quotes, as well as other journalistic sins, even as her conservative employers look the other way. She has taught at least one seminar at Harvard’s Kennedy School, but the school hasn’t responded to my request for comment yet.
• Was Friends homophobic, ahead of its time, or both? This essay on LitHub argues both sides of it, and explains why the show was too cautious on LGBT issues even as it gently expanded the boundaries of what was shown on network television.
• Facebook ignored warnings about Russian interference in Ukraine via troll farms, part of the company’s general unwillingness to look at information warfare outside the U.S. that could have tipped the company off to what Russia did here in 2016.
• The white man who shot up a Tallahassee yoga studio, killing two women, was an ‘incel’ who had twice been charged with assaulting women as well as a history of posting misogynistic and homophobic content online. He was still able to buy an AR-15.
• President Trump barely works at all, high irony after years of the right criticizing Obama, by all accounts a workaholic, if he dared to take an afternoon to play golf.
• The self-immolation of white nationalist Twitter troll Jacob Wohl to smear Robert Mueller is lovingly detailed by The Cut.
• Many western billionaires have invested in ‘doomsday’ properties in New Zealand, arguing that its isolation makes it ideal in case of a global pandemic, war, or other apocalypse. They don’t all sound terribly sane to me.
• CRISPR gene editing has been long on promise but light on results so far, but a new research effort found it might help treat Duchenne muscular dystrophy.
• Transgender neurobiologist Ben Barres died last year of cancer; his autobiography just came out and Nature has a very positive review.
• The Supreme Court refused to block a lawsuit demanding that the US government act on climate change. You know my views on the subject, but do we have a constitutional right to a clean environment?
• Fourteen teachers at a Middleton, Idaho, elementary school are on paid administrative leave after wearing racist Halloween costumes, as well as dressing up as the border wall with the MAGA slogan on it. I don’t have much hope under this administration, but it seems like a federal civil rights violation took place here.
• A pediatrician in California rails against bogus vaccine exemption letters written by doctors who rely on genetic quackery. There is no such thing as a genetic predisposition to vaccine injury. Doctors who claim they have found these cases in children are merely profiteering and should lose their licenses to practice medicine.
• The Daily Beast writes that vaccine denial is now a Republican epidemic. Voting for science increasingly means voting Democrat./
• ThinkProgress talked to experts who explained that the claims about Bitcoin’s future energy consumption are bogus.
• Ethiopia now has a female President, its first in the country’s history. The position is ceremonial, but she is still the sole female head of state in Africa right now, and her selection is more evidence that Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who set up a cabinet where half the posts were filled by women, is a great progressive hope for a country that has lived under tyrants since World War II.
• The President sputtered out a false claim that he could revoke birthright citizenship by … I don’t know, tweeting about it, which is ironic since his Florida property does big business with Russians who want to give birth on U.S. soil to secure American citizenship.
• Haaretz details Trump’s lengthy history of using anti-Semitic rhetoric and tropes to stir up his base, and how that contributed to last weekend’s massacre at a Pittsburgh synagogue.
• Jewish leaders there told Trump he wasn’t welcome in their city until he disavowed white nationalism. He showed up anyway, and of course has blamed the deaths of eleven Jews in the shooting on the lack of armed guards at the temple.
• The Atlantic‘s Adam Serwer points out that the inane story of the migrant caravan contributed to the shooting, part of yet another bullshit campaign from the GOP (“but her emails”), this time with anti-Semitic underpinning and violent consequences. As Serwer points out, this caravan is a threat to exactly nobody, and is still weeks away from reaching our border – if it even gets that far.
• One other reason the caravan story is codswallop? There aren’t enough people in Central America to matter to U.S. immigration numbers.
• Indiana Law Professor Ian Samuel writes in the Guardian that Republicans are close to an invincible grip on power, even as a clear minority party, thanks to vote-rigging, voter suppression, and some favorable SCOTUS rulings. The money quote: “For the first time, a president who lost the popular vote had a supreme court nominee confirmed by senators who received fewer votes – nearly 22 million fewer – than the senators that voted against him.”
• Need another reason to vote blue on Tuesday? Global warming is more advanced than we thought, as the oceans have absorbed far more heat than we realized. The oceans absorb that heat, and carbon dioxide, and become more acidic, which leads to the deaths of coral reefs, and that in turn ripples up the food chain and threatens human diets.
• The Arizona Board of Education rejected outgoing Superintendent Diane Douglas’ plan to push creationism in public schools, which was just going to lose in court anyway, but what a waste of everyone’s time.
• Proof that evolution is real is right before us in antibiotic resistance, which British Chief Medical Officer Dame Sally Davies said last week threatens to take us back to the dark ages.
• In a bit of good news, residents of Southampton, England, formed a human chain to help a small community book store relocate, with 250 volunteers passing the 2000 books person to person from the old location to the new one.