Stick to baseball, 2/2/19.

My ranking of the top 100 prospects in baseball ran this week, with four separate pieces: #1 through #50, #51 through #100, my column of fourteen more guys who just missed, and a ranking of the top 20 prospects just for impact in 2019. I also held a Klawchat on Wednesday and a Periscope video chat on Thursday.

My ranking of all 30 farm systems will run on Monday, February 4th, after which the team by team reports will run, one division per day for the following six days. I’ve written 24 of the 30 team reports so far, if you’re curious.

Many thanks to the White Sox blog SouthSideSox and writer katiesphil for this lovely review of Smart Baseball.

And now, the links…

• The best thing I read this week was the New Yorker‘s profile of Nashville’s iconic Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack and current owner André Prince Jeffries. It’s a wonderful piece that touches on questions of culinary authenticity as well as the intersection of race, food, and access to money.
• A close second is this Atavist story on a nearly-blind man in Texas who robbed a bank so he could get health care, a story that combines a profile of him – he also lost a foot to the effects of type 2 diabetes – and our very broken social safety net.
• A woman attacked by a serial groper in DC found out he was a chef at a popular restaurant she’d visited, so she fought back by spreading word among city restaurants about his history of assaults.
• Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Grimes (D) examined voting records of state employees, job applicants, and political rivals, which may have contributed to her decision not to run for Governor next year. She called the ProPublica report a “sexist smear job.”
• Self-styled activist Kevin Powell nearly ruined a woman’s life over a matter of mistaken identity, running an actual smear campaign against someone who shared the same name as someone who’d send his wife a critical email. Powell, who appeared on the inaugural season of MTV’s The Real World, has faced multiple accusations of assaulting women, and lost a lawsuit in this case during which he plugged his ears with his fingers to avoid hearing the judge’s ruling, and then claimed he was being targeted because of his race.
• Washington state legislators are pushing to end nonmedical exemptions to mandatory vaccination laws – as every damn state should by now – and of course anti-vaxxers are fighting back. These deniers – not skeptics, as I told the author on twitter, because skeptics want evidence, while anti-vaxxers reject evidence – are loud, so those of us on the side of science need to be louder.
• Arizona is backsliding even in the face of measles outbreaks, with Republicans there introducing two bills that will reduce vaccination rates, one making it easier to opt out, one that would force medical professionals to explain vaccination “risks” to parents. (Here’s the main risk: you might be a little sore at the injection site.)
• California did tighten its laws, but now many doctors are selling bogus “medical exemptions” to insane parents who’d rather break the law than protect their children from deadly diseases. This should be grounds to revoke a doctor’s license to practice medicine.
• The Oregonian ran an editorial advocating eliminating nonmedical exemptions there and otherwise pushing pro-vaccination policies. If you live in any of these states, call your state rep and senator and tell them both you favor laws that end all nonmedical exemptions (religious or philosophical) for schoolchildren, and want sanctions against doctors who help parents skirt the rules.
• Police failed to file charges in a 2013 rape case in Eastland, Texas, allowing the rapist to remain free so he could rape and nearly kill an 11-year-old girl. Worse: One of the officers who screwed up the original case, Frank Saylors, won election as city commissioner of Eastland in 2015.
• The mayor of Dearborn, Michigan, didn’t like that the city-funded historical magazine had a piece about Henry Ford’s (well-documented) history of anti-Semitism, so he fired the longtime editor and refused to let the magazine distribute the issue. Of course, it has already backfired, with the story making national news.
• I can’t imagine you missed this but Virginia Governor Ralph Northam needs to step down.
• Top Chef alum Fatima Ali died of Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare bone cancer, last week.
• Is there a connection between gum disease and Alzheimer’s? If you need me, I’ll be flossing my teeth.
• GQ ran a guide to dating someone with serious food allergies.
• A reader passed along this story of members of indie-folk band Murder by Death opening a Neapolitan pizzeria in Louisville.
• The efforts of a single evangelical woman in Virginia just derailed the Equal Rights Amendment again. Of course, she’s white and highly privileged, so she can’t understand why such an amendment would be beneficial.
• The EPA named a climate change denier to its advisory board. John Christy has argued for the repeal of regulations against greenhouse gas emissions because he claims (against all evidence) that their effects will be positive.
• Two St. Louis cops decided to play Russian roulette with one bullet in the revolver, so of course one of them is now dead.
  Also from St. Louis, the Riverfront Times details how the FBI outsmarted the violent cops who beat protesters in the wake of the acquittal of officer Jason Stockley on murder charges.
• Public transport in Vienna has boomed thanks to a broad-based combination of increased geographic coverage, pricing strategies, regulations, and support from the federal level.
• Mohanad Elshieky, who is in the U.S. legally, had a terrifying interaction with overzealous ICE agents, whom Greyhound allows to board its buses for these so-called “checks.”
• My friend Emma Span wrote an advice column for Mother Goose characters over at Slate.
• Matt Leacock, designer of Pandemic and the Forbidden cooperative game series, has a new title coming this year called Era: Medieval Age, a “roll and build” title inspired by Roll Through the Ages.