Stick to baseball, 12/8/18.

I had five pieces for ESPN+ subscribers this week, on the Robinson Cano trade, the Paul Goldschmidt trade, Washington signing Pat Corbin, the Yan Gomes trade, and the Jean Segura trade. I did not hold a chat this week due to other demands on my time.

I have updated my annual posts of recommendations of cookbooks and gifts for the cooks in your life. My top board games of the year columns for Paste and Vulture should both go up next week; I’ll post my year-end music rankings here the week of the 17th.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: The New York Review of Books looks at the plight of undocumented farm workers in California, under the increased pressure to deport them going back more than ten years, even though these workers are the reason we have affordable (or, more accurate, artificially underpriced) food on our tables.
• The Guardian ran an excerpt from a 2016 book called The Spy Who Couldn’t Spell, a fascinating story of a master sergeant in the Air Force who decided to try to sell thousands of pages of classified documents to the governments of Iraq and Libya.
• GQ ran a long tribute to the late Anthony Bourdain.
• The New York Times‘ Ross Douthat wrote a column lamenting the loss of our ruling class of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant men that would have been funny were it not so utterly ignorant; Splinter’s Libby Watson had the best excoriation of the column I saw.
• As bad as the Times‘ regular editorial writers are, their investigative journalists continue to churn out good work, like the revelation that Trump employs illegal immigrants at his golf course in New Jersey, including the Guatemalan woman who made Trump’s bed.
• Jane Coaston explains the Jeffrey Epstein case, and how he got away with serial rapes of underage girls, over at Vox.
• Jennifer Rubin writes in the Washington Post that we’re now seeing the “Trump economy,” and it ain’t good. The President inherited a strong economy, and his advocacy of protectionist policies in particular is helping to weaken it.
• There’s an actual voter fraud case going on in North Carolina right now, and the perpetrators are – in a shocking twist! – Republicans. The Washington Post has pieces on the operative with a criminal history at the heart of the scandal and on the old-fashioned investigative reporting that has helped uncover it.
• Slate’s Jamelle Bouie looks at Republicans’ lame-duck power grabs in Wisconsin, Michigan, and North Carolina. The national party’s tacit support of these moves should tell you all you need to know about its moral rot.
• Author David Neiwert posted a long Twitter thread on the history of the Aryan Nations and related white supremacist groups, in part a response to convicted felon Dinesh D’Souza’s regular claims that “liberals are the real Nazis.”
• New York has a piece arguing that Uber’s business model is unsustainable and probably unfixable.
• Adminstrators and faculty members at Temple University wanted tenured professor Marc Lamont Hill fired for his advocacy of statehood for Palestine, specifically for using the phrase “free Palestine from the river to the sea,” which some groups use as a code for the destruction of Israel.
• The Philippines may be on the verge of a measles outbreak, the result of anti-vaxxer disinformation and conflict between the state and Islamist rebels in the archipelago.
• Italy’s pseudoscience-spouting health minister sacked the board of the country’s main committee of scientists, who advised the government on health policy. Giulia Grillo has opposed mandatory vaccination laws and supports the “Five-Star Movement,” which also opposes those laws and has pushed quack ‘cures’ for cancer.
• The Weekly Standard‘s David Shabtai argues that vaccine denialists are hurting efforts to protect ‘religious freedom’ by using it as a backdoor way to avoid mandatory vaccinations. There’s a simple solution to this: Ban all nonmedical exemptions to childhood vaccination requirements.
• The simplest way individuals can fight climate change is to stop wasting so much food. Food waste is the #1 contributor to landfills, and landfills contribute 14% of U.S. methane emissions. (Methane is a far more potent contributor to climate change than carbon dioxide.)
• Climate scientist Michael Mann pre-empted an attempt by a coal industry front group to obtain his emails from the six years he spent at the University of Virginia by releasing them all himself.
• New Jersey taxpayers paid $18 million to build a beautiful minor-league ballpark in Camden that was supposed to host an independent league team, which folded a few years later after they couldn’t agree to a new lease. Now taxpayers will spend another $1 million to tear the stadium down.
• Parker Molloy explains in the New York Times why Twitter’s ban on deadnaming trans people will promote free speech rather than hindering it.
• Utah Representative Chris Stewart (guess) defended the state-sponsored murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by saying “journalists disappear all the time,” which is a hell of a way to encourage people and governments to kill or just ‘disappear’ reporters who are bothering them.
• This won’t make anyone mad: A Yale psychiatry professor says Trump supporters exhibit emotional patterns most children outgrow by age five, notably the “might makes right” mentality, which I’d argue also defines most of U.S. foreign policy of the last hundred years. There’s actually a lot more in this piece about how demagogues like Trump manipulate their bases to attain and hold on to power.
• A man thought he would put one over on advice columnist Amy Dickinson and the #MeToo movement in general, but he forgot that Dickinson would get the final say, and she drags him appropriately.
• The Good Place‘s Jameela Jamil wrote an op ed for the BBC arguing that airbrushing in adverts should be illegal.
• The Cut’s “I Think About This a Lot” series is back with a piece by Karen Geier on the parody account PrinceTweets2U’s epic response to Time Warner Cable.
• Board game news: Dire Wolf announced the fall 2019 release of Clank! Legacy Acquisitions Incorporated, a joint development with Renegade (publishers of Clank!) and Penny Arcade.
• CMON announced a seven-day Kickstarter for a digital adaptation of their game Blood Rage, and it has funded at 1000% already through day five.