Stick to baseball, 12/29/18.

I’ve had several ESPN+ pieces in the last two weeks, including my Hall of Fame ballot and explanation, my analyses of the Jurickson Profar trade and that huge Reds-Dodgers trade, and a post that covered the Michael Brantley and Wilson Ramos signings. I held a Klawchat here on the 20th.

On the board game front, my year-end articles went up two weeks ago – my top ten games of 2018 for Paste and my best games by category for Vulture.

Here on the dish, I posted my top 100 songs of 2018 and top 18 albums of 2018 that same week.

My free email newsletter will resume next week. Join the five thousand other satisfied customers who’ve already signed up for occasional goodness.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first, as always: Marc Randazza, a lawyer who represents or has represented several major neo-Nazi and white nationalist figures in lawsuits, has a very long history of legal misconduct, much of it dating from his time working for gay porn producers, but has only received a slap on the wrist from the Nevada Bar for his misdeeds, detailed in this lengthy Huffington Post piece.

• Former U.S. Marine Lyle Jeremy Rubin writes in the Guardian about what he learned about America while serving in Afghanistan. “For me the empire is rooted in the barbarism it pretends to oppose.”
• Amazon’s Marketplace is enormous and part of why the company controls half of the U.S. retail market, but The Verge reports on the byzantine process of suspensions and how sellers use it to attack rivals on the site.
• The Athletic looks at the disastrous two-year reign of Mike Piazza in Reggio Emilia, where he bought a Serie C soccer club and ran it into the ground (subscription required).
• Katie Prout writes about her brother’s longtime alcoholism and her own mental health struggles over at Longreads.
• ProPublica investigates the banana republic that is Louisiana, where former legislators turn into lobbyists or take jobs in the executive branch and continue to wield outsized power to line their own pockets, often in ways that harm the populace.
• A study published in the Journal of Science Communication found that scientists who engage in debates with deniers may do more harm than good (PDF link) to the causes they support, such as climate change or evolution, because such beliefs are immovable especially when founded in religious beliefs.
• Natalie Wood’s final film, Brainstorm, deserves a better legacy than it’s received, according to Popular Mechanics. I’d never heard of the movie before this piece, and I am old enough to remember Wood’s death and thus the time this film hit theaters.
• Shirley Wang’s piece on her late father’s surprising friendship with Charles Barkley went viral last week for good reason.
• This unrolled Twitter thread highlights one investigative journalism piece from each of the 50 states this year, including an item in the Delaware News-Journal about courts banning people from entering the city of Wilmington for trivial infractions like loitering or panhandling.
• An Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigation found that Bryan Kemp (guess) used a real warning of voting database vulnerability into a political attack against Stacey Abrams that may have tipped the Georgia gubernatorial election into his favor.
• Detained migrants are being used as slave labor in private prisons funded by taxpayer dollars.
• Texas is one of many states that has ignored the First Amendment and passed laws prohibiting state employees from supporting Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) efforts against Israel – similar to efforts used, perhaps with some success, against the apartheid regime in South Africa in the 1970s to early 1990s. A Palestinian-American speech pathologist in Texas lost her job for refusing to sign a pro-Israel oath, which, if I may say so, is utterly fucking terrifying: You should never have to sign an oath to hold a job in the United States. She’s suing, and I hope Texans realize they’ll foot the bill for this lawsuit with their taxes.
• The University of Utah and local police were warned six times in ten days by Lauren McCluskey that her ex-boyfriend was threatening her, but they did nothing. He killed her on October 22nd.
• Eater has an excerpt from the forthcoming book You and I Eat the Same on how just about all of us love fried chicken.
• New York‘s Intelligencer has two great pieces on the awful state of online right now: how so much of what happens on the Internet is fake, and why Youtube star PewDiePie can make anti-Semitic/pro-Nazi jokes and still thrive. It’s all generally bad news for society in general, and for those of us who make our livings online in particular.
• The Obama Administration tried to ban the pesticide chlorpyrifos, exposure to which leads to serious neuromuscular problems in humans and may lead to cancer over time, but former EPA head Scott Pruitt denied the application to ban it; the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in August that the EPA must ban all sales of the chemical within 60 days of its ruling. In the interim, however, millions of pounds of chlorpyrifos were dumped on U.S. crops, one of many examples of how the Trump Administration’s rollbacks of environmental regulations have harmed U.S. workers.
• OUT looks at Ruth Coker Burks, who helped care for hundreds of gay men dying of AIDS in a piece from 2016.
• The Cut points out that the attacks on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez derive from fear that women of color might start to wield real power, the kind only white men have had in our country’s history to date.
• New Jersey Democrats tried to gerrymander the state to protect incumbents and thus the party’s control of the legislature, but pressure from their own supporters led them to drop the plan. It’s funny how that hasn’t happened in other states, like Wisconsin or Michigan, where Republicans have similarly tried anti-democratic efforts to retain power.
• You’ve likely seen by now that Michael Cohen’s cell phone was in Prague around the time of a meeting with the Russians, yet more circumstantial evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Putin government – plus more hard evidence Cohen lied. But what I found most notable is who broke the story: McClatchy Washington Bureau, the DC arm of former Pirates owner Kevin McClatchy’s publishing empire.
• An award-winning German reporter who garnered praise and hardware for his dispatches from Trump-voting areas of the United States fabricated nearly all of his stories.
• The news that a federal judge in Texas ruled the ACA’s mandate unconstitutional, a ruling widely criticized by legal experts across the political spectrum, was symptomatic of a larger problem: Our federal judiciary has been packed with arch-conservative judges, and removing or replacing them will be difficult if not impossible.
• An Australian woman whose 32-day-old infant died of pertussis has some things to say to anti-vaccine lunatics. Australia cracked down on vaccine denialists with its “No Jab, No Play” policy, ending all non-medical exemptions for schoolchildren; it’s high time the United States does the same.
• Scientists may have discovered the brain circuit that causes seasonal depression in 20% of people, a discovery that also supports the use of light therapy as a treatment.
• The Atlantic‘s Amanda Mull looks at the rising popularity of “anxiety baking,” although I tend to think of it as just “baking,” where the anxiety dictates how much I eat afterwards.
• The Washington Post‘s media columnist Margaret Sullivan writes that news outlets need to stop booking Kellyanne Conway.
• Sinclair Broadcast Group fired a reporter who was on sick leave with bone cancer, although the company disputes that version of events.
• The cold season in Arizona has warmed by 3.5 degrees in 50 years due to climate change, one of many facts in this Arizona Republic wrapup that should disturb residents of the state. Phoenix experienced a 119-day dry spell this year, and in mid-July 97% of the state was experiencing “severe drought” conditions.
• The New York Times investigates claims that Planned Parenthood has discriminated against pregnant employees. The headline likely overstates the case, since one issue is failing to offer benefits that the company says they can’t afford, but other aspects are definitely troubling.
• Former Runaways bassist and sexual assault survivor Jackie Fuchs (f.k.a. Jackie Fox) recently had a five-day winning streak as a Jeopardy! contestant. She’s also a fan of heavy Eurogames.
• Your 30-day trial with Black Patience has expired.
• Deepwater Gaming announced the early 2019 release of Claim, a two-player trick-taking game that is already out in Europe.