One ESPN+ post this week, a scouting blog entry on Luis Robert, Nick Madrigal, Deivi Garcia, Triston Casas, and more. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.
Over at Paste, I reviewed the delightfully named card game Point Salad, which mocks the trend towards complicated scoring by giving you over a hundred different ways to earn points as you collect vegetable cards from the table.
My latest email newsletter edition went out on Tuesday, after I returned from Gen Con. You can sign up here for free to get more of my personal writing.
And now, the links … I assembled this on Thursday night before leaving for vacation, so it’s shorter than usual and anything that happened on Friday won’t be reflected here.
- Longreads first: This piece in Rolling Stone describes some of the history behind Prince’s new album of original versions of songs he gave to other artists. At least four songs he wrote became massive hits for others: Chaka Khan’s cover of “I Feel 4 U,” which hit #1 on the U.S. R&B and dance charts; Sinead O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” which spent four weeks at #1 on the U.S. singles chart; the Bangles’ “Manic Monday,” which reached #2 on the singles chart; and Sheila E’s “The Glamourous Life,” which hit #1 on the dance chart and the top ten on the pop and R&B charts.
- The Guardian Long Read has an excerpt from Caroline Fraser’s upcoming book on the cult known as Christian Science, which eschews all modern medicine, including vaccines, claiming that illness is merely a manifestation of bad thoughts and the real world is an illusion. Her father died in agony as a result of the cult’s practices, which are still legal in most of the U.S. and can even be covered by Medicare.
- The creator of the anarchic forum site 8chan told the New York Times the site should be shut down given its prominence among white nationalist shooters.
- Marianne Williamson is an anti-science crank who doesn’t belong anywhere near the Democratic nomination for President, or any office that has influence on science policy. She’s expressed bogus doubts about vaccines, claimed clinical depression is a “scam” diagnosis, and said the AIDS virus “is not more powerful than God.” She needs to leave the stage to the adults.
- I saw a game called Ceylon, where players compete to build tea plantations on that island after the coffee crop has been wiped out by disease, last week at Gen Con. A little googling led me to this NPR piece on how coffee leaf rust devastated the island’s main export back in the 19th century, and how it could happen elsewhere.
- My friend Tim Grierson wrote about The Sixth Sense and how the real twist is Bruce Willis’ character’s workaholism.
- Jumia is trying to be “the Amazon of Africa,” but faces challenges on a continent without western-style infrastructure.
- Ohio representative Candice Keller (guess) blamed recent mass shootings on “drag queen advocates” and open borders, even though the perpetrators have nearly always been straight, angry white men.
- The Foxconn con just keeps getting worse for Wisconsin, as attempts to ‘fix’ the deal for the state still won’t solve its fundamental problem: It’s a giant boondoggle for the company at state taxpayer expense.
- This made me embarrassed to be a male human: several studies have found that pro-environment behavior is seen as more feminine, so men who do things like bringing reusable bags to the grocery store are more likely to be seen as gay. This is so fucking dumb (and yes, I bring my own bags, call me whatever orientation you like).
- Harvard biologist George Church has apologized for his contacts with pedophile Jeffrey Epstein even after the latter’s conviction and prison sentence in 2008 for soliciting a minor for prostitution.
- The Guardian looks at Cosmo Park, a village built on top of a mall in Jakarta.
- Fans of N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, which made her the first author to win three straight Hugo Awards for Best Novel, may be excited to hear that Green Ronin Publishing is turning it into a role-playing game, due out in the fall of 2020.
- I made the Wigan Today‘s post on Wigan Athletic’s new mascot.