Stick to baseball, 1/19/19.

Nothing new from me this week, between prospect writing and a trip to NYC the last two days to attend a MEL magazine event. The prospect rankings will start to run on ESPN.com on January 28th and will roll out over two weeks.

And now, the links…

• The best piece I saw this week was a research paper, with the glorious title “Extreme opponents of genetically modified foods know the least but think they know the most.”
• Ashley Feinberg of the Huffington Post interviewed Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who comes off extremely poorly on a variety of topics, including the site’s enabling of the far right, its inconsistent enforcement of its own policies, and his bizarre apology to far-right provocateur Candace Owens.
• GQ interviewed numerous musicians who are also recovering alcoholics or substance abusers about creating while clean, with a wide range of questions that allow them to attack the longstanding myth that connects drug use or drink to creativity.
• Vulture‘s Nate Jones looks at how Green Book and Bohemian Rhapsody became this year’s Oscar villains. He makes good points, although I’d submit that the biggest issue is that they’re both bad films.
• MEL‘s Hussein Kesvani speaks to women whose former partners were “redpilled” by online misogyny communities that argue that women secretly control the world and men can’t even complain about it. (Yes, if there’s a real tragedy in modern gender relations, it’s that we men aren’t given enough outlets for complaints.)
• At Media Matters, Parker Molloy details how right-wing media have made Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez into a star through their weird obsession with her, playing right into her hands and making her very popular among young progressives (and older ones too).
• At the Athletic (subscription required), Lindsey Adler spoke to new Yankees minor league coordinator Dillon Lawson, whose focus is on helping hitters recognize pitches better. I’m not sure there’s a major prospect more in need of what Lawson brings than Yankees outfielder Estevan Florial, who has multiple plus tools but truly atrocious pitch recognition skills for his age.
• Was there really a backlash against the Gillette ad on toxic masculinity? This Twitter thread shows how even the BBC was duped by tweets from dubious accounts. I thought the ad was sweet and that you’d have to be the tenderest snowflake to take offense in it.
• The last glacier in Venezuela is vanishing, thanks to anthropogenic climate change. It will become the first country to lose all of its glaciers, and since the government is barely functioning, it’s not as if this is a priority for the authorities there, who are barely holding on to power in the failed state.
• The World Health Organization listed anti-vaxxers as one of the ten greatest threats to world health for 2019.
• Another fake “investigative journalist” has been running around claiming there’s a vaccine-autism link that the authorities are suppressing, and The Hill fell for it and let her write an editorial pushing it. You can’t unring the bell but the site did let Dr. Peter Hotez write a rebuttal that is clear and unequivocal: vaccines can’t cause autism.
• Kamau Bobb writes about being pulled over by white police officers for what turned out to be an administrative error.
• George Will writes how the Brexit vote and subsequent fiasco shows how direct democracy can, at times, be dangerous. If we were to hold a similar plebiscite here on a major policy question, I’d be concerned that a majority would simply trample the rights of a minority (think transphobic bathroom bills), or that the results of the vote wouldn’t reflect the popular will as a whole, but the will of people who are sufficiently motivated to vote and mobilize others to do so.
• The upcoming film The Red Sea Diving Resort will be based on the true story of how Israel took a disused Sudanese village, made a fake tourist destination, and used it to evacuate 6000 Ethopian Jews. Oh, and some tourists really did show up.
• The three actresses who star in The Favourite spoke to IndieWire editor Anne Thompson about how Yorgis Lanthimos created an environment that allowed them to thrive in their roles. It’s the one major 2018 film that has only women at its center – there are men in the film, but they exist at the periphery (and occasionally have oranges thrown at them).
• Pastor and activist John Pavlovitz writes in an open letter to white evangelicals that their behavior is why they’re being marginalized, as they demonized President Obama for nothing but forgive President Trump for serious transgressions.
• Michigan State President John Engler stepped down this week, but the list of his misdeeds calls into question the entire process of his hiring. They’d have had to work hard to find someone more ill-suited to that job in the wake of the series of crimes that took place at the school to protect serial sexual abuser Larry Nassar.
• Boardgames! Dire Wolf Digital announced a whole slate of upcoming digital adaptations of popular games, including Sagrada, Root, and Mage Knight. I got a preview of their adaptation of Raiders of the North Sea back at PAX Unplugged and it looked phenomenal. Dire Wolf generally does great stuff – their port of Lanterns is fantastic – and this one has similar tweaks and animations that make the experience of playing the game on a tablet even better.
• It’s just in the prototype/print-and-play stage but a PhD student, Célia Souque, has created a board game called Bugs in Bangkok to try to teach kids about antibiotic resistance, targeting kids in Thailand, where she spent three months as part of her PhD program.