I’ve got notes stored up for an ESPN+ piece but it probably won’t run until Monday. My daughter returns to school this week too, which will mean the return of Klawchat on Thursday.
My massive article on all the games I saw at Gen Con 2019, including my ten favorites, went up at Paste this week.
My free email newsletter will also return this week once I’ve written a few more things around the interwebs.
I’m selling off a number of my superfluous board games again this year, so if you’re interested, check out my inventory page on Boardgamegeek. Thanks to Sean Lopolito of Lops Brewing in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, who just bought eight games from me last week. I’ll be donating the $150 proceeds to the Food Bank of Delaware.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: The Guardian long read looks at how an online community devoted to the Columbine murderers fed a murder plot in Halifax, Nova Scotia. A tip to police stopped a potential massacre.
- The New Yorker‘s Isaac Chotiner interviewed Penn Law professor Amy Wax, who espouses what certainly sound like white nationalist talking points, dressed up in finer clothing.
- This piece in Palladium by a recent Yale grad saying that free speech isn’t the problem at that school, that the behaviors of elites are the real issue, is all over the place, and kind of hard to stay with to the end, but along the way Natalia Dashan raises a lot of good points, many of which ring true even based on my own experience at a similar college over 25 years ago.
- Afghanistan veteran and sometime political candidate Jason Kander, writing with his wife, Diana, addresses five lies people tell themselves about trauma and PTSD.
- Activists on the Greek island of Paros are fighting to make the island plastics-free, citing the massive damage plastics, which break down into microplastic particles that end up in the bodies of marine life and eventually us, are doing to their environment. This article claims that 95% of waste in the Mediterranean Sea is plastic.
- Evgeny Morozov writes in the New Republic how his literary agent, John Brockman, helped connect Jeffrey Epstein with scientists and other intellectuals, many of whom are now, belatedly, being called to account for their relationships with the deceased pedophile.
- Speaking of Epstein, it’s time to kill the phrase “underage woman.” Epstein didn’t prey on underage women; he raped children.
- Loretta Ross, a black feminist, writes in the New York Times that call-out and cancel culture are themselves toxic, arguing that there are better ways to address most public displays of prejudice or ignorance.
- India’s Constitution has protections aimed at ending the country’s longstanding caste system, with a 1989 law aiming to prevent atrocities against those born into ‘lower’ castes, but it hasn’t prevented the perpetuation of some parts of the caste system; the parents of a bride who married a man from the so-called “untouchables” caste hired an assassin and had her husband killed.
- UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson ordered steps to try to stop the spread of measles in that country, which lost its measles-free status three years after eradicating the virus. Researchers there have discovered a new link between children getting measles and their parents being ‘morons.’
- The President’s Chief Economic Adviser, Larry Kudlow, says he doesn’t see a recession coming, but he has a long history of making predictions that turn out completely wrong, including numerous public statements and articles leading up to the 2008-09 downturn where he dismissed any possibility of an economic slowdown.
- Trump nominated a lawyer who has argued for ethnic homogeneity and written screeds against LGBT rights groups for a seat on a federal appeals court.
- In response to our bloviating leader’s claims that he wants to buy Greenland from Denmark, Denmark has inquired about buying the United States from Russia.
- Board game news: Wavelength, now on Kickstarter, is an upcoming game co-designed by Wolfgang Warsch, the brains behind The Mind, That’s So Clever, and The Quacks of Quedlinburg.
- Jamey Stegmaier, designer of Scythe and Charterstone, has a new civilization-building game coming out this fall called Tapestry. His designer blog has a ton of information on the game, including that the rulebook is just four pages, and that there’s very little luck or randomness involved.
- Stronghold Games opened pre-orders for fall titles, including Amul and the re-issue of Coffee Roaster, a solitaire game I just reviewed this week.
- This Twitter thread about a D&D player who taught his grandmother the game when she was 75, only to have her get incredibly into it, was very sweet.
- Brilliant, highly nerdy board game tweet:
Someone placed their first tile in Terraforming Mars. @StrongholdGames https://t.co/b680qwgiRn
— Jess (The Valkyrie of Gameosity) (@miniktty) August 22, 2019
My favorite sentence from Kudlow’s Wikipedia article. From the Economy sub-section to the Political Views section…
“Kudlow has no formal economics qualifications.” His only degree is in history.
And of course that nominee will be approved.
That’s one of the myriad of reasons defeating Trump next year is essential for the country’s future. Trouble is that I can’t quite figure out where exactly it ranks on the list.
I don’t know what to make of the Yale article. In many ways it suggests that the leaders of society are born through privilege and now there is a rejection of that by those with the privilege. The article seems to suggest that Yale and similar institutions are uniquely positioned to churn out societies leadership. It’s almost suggesting that the very institutions are at odds for what is best going forward and that is being rejected by the population actually attending Yale.
It’s strange because I don’t find value in many of the most prominent Yale graduates (ahem…bush…ahem) and perhaps a change away from that is best for society at large. Good article and thanks for sharing
Whew, Amy Wax really making her case for the Nobel Prize for Obfuscation. Her intellectual dishonesty and creepy nostalgia for a world that never existed is entirely in keeping with the strain of white nationalism that continues to pervade the Right.
Her thinking me reminded me a great deal of Ayn Rand and not in any positive sense.
Wax even got simple facts wrong. Trump has fathered a child out of wedlock. Tiffany Trump was born 2 months before Trump married her mother.
I appreciate the satire links… nice to break up the gloom on occasion.
The Dashan piece certainly is all over the place, but this jumped out at me:
“Current Yale administrators have a sense of self-preservation for themselves and their corporation, but not for what made them great in the first place….”
It could have come from a better (and much, much more succinct) piece on the subject by Ross Douthat. I know what you think of him, but I still read him because in spite of his politics he sometimes produces great columns, and when asked for an example I usually cite “A Crisis Our Universities Deserve” first:
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/15/opinion/sunday/a-crisis-our-universities-deserve.html
I just read the column with an open mind, and while there are some good points here and there, it n the end it doesn’t go anywhere. What, ultimately, is Douthat’s thesis, and what is his solution? It seems to be just another “get off my own” eulogy to a time when white men ruled the world.
In regards to your article last week about how men using reusable bags makes them appear more homosexual:
Perhaps I am doing the right thing for the wrong reasons but the two biggest reasons I started using reusable bags were 1. So I didn’t have a whole drawer of plastic bags in my kitchen. 2. less trips from my car to my apartment after shopping.