Stick to baseball, 6/1/19.

My second mock first round for Monday’s MLB draft went up this past Tuesday for ESPN+ subscribers; my Big Board, ranking the top 100 prospects in the class, went up the previous week. I held a Klawchat on Thursday, and will hold another Monday afternoon, plus a Periscope live chat Monday night after the draft starts.

My latest board game review for Paste covers Aerion, a fun little solo game from the designer of Onirim, but that might be a bit too easy to beat. I won every single time I played; it was often close, but I still could find a way to win even with various included expansions.

I finally got back to my email newsletter yesterday, talking about why this was such a weird draft class to cover.

And now, the links…

• One of those viral videos that purported to depict racism against African-Americans, this one involving a Chipotle employee (herself a person of color), turned out to get the story backwards; CNN has a long piece breaking down how the ‘internet mob’ got the story wrong and how it affected the woman targeted by the online outrage.
• The BBC relates the history of British colonial authorities trying to erase hijras, India’s “third gender.” India recognized transgender people as an official third gender in 2014.
• Jonathan Mayo polled 22 MLB scouts and executives asking who they’d take #1 in this draft class.
• Waldorf Schools in California form major clusters of unvaccinated children; parents of these kids interviewed in this Guardian article voice the appeal to nature fallacy or the false conflict of interest claims. As much as anti-science is associated today with fundamentalist religion, you can also find wide swaths of anti-vaccine sentiment on the left in communities like these.
• A German father wrote about losing his son to SSPE, a rare but invariably fatal side effect of measles infections. Max caught measles at six months, too young to be vaccinated, and SSPE put him into a vegetative state at the age of 12, after he’d suffered seizures and lost most of his memories. He died at 20.
• Maine became the fourth state to eliminate non-medical exemptions to mandatory childhood vaccination rules, with the law passing the state’s Senate by a single vote. State Sen. James Dill (D), who voted for the bill, still raised bogus arguments about genetic conditions that might exempt children from the schedule, despite a total lack of evidence to support the existence of any such conditions. He’s listed as a scientist in that article, but his specialty is pest management, not immunology.
• Fox News host Laura Ingraham defended white supremacist Paul Nehlen as a “prominent voice” who was “censored” (not what that word means) by social media.
• Elizabeth Warren’s explanation of why she won’t do a town hall on Fox News is perfect (although I have no idea what Whoopi Goldberg is talking about at the end).
• Why is the Administration referring to fossil fuels as “molecules of freedom?”
• A science professor at Williams College writes about how students are rejecting science that challenges their worldviews, such as discussions of genetic differences between males and females, or across different geographic groups.
• This New York Post article asserting that some students are avoiding colleges in states that are trying to outlaw abortion seems incredibly anecdotal, even if it’s sort of plausible. I’d like to see actual data on whether this affects applications or enrollment at any such schools before we claim this is a thing.
• The Good Men Project tracks Sean Doolittle’s tour of MLB cities’ independent bookstores.
• I loved Gabriel Garcia-Marquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, so I enjoyed this mental floss piece with some facts and trivia about the novel.
• A University of Alabama-Birmingham study of spectator injuries at sporting events pointed to the need for more netting to protect fans from “ballistic” injuries – something flying from the field of play into the seats.
• There’s a new, micro-game on Kickstarter from Wingspan designer Elizabeth Hargrave called Tussie Mussie.
• Tweet of the week:

  The people who belittle @AOC for being a former waitress are the same faulting @ewarren for billing out at $675/hr. So how much exactly should world-changing women make?

  — Katherine M. Gordon (@katgordon) May 28, 2019