Stick to baseball, 9/7/19.

I had one ESPN+ piece this week, looking at the best or most interesting September prospect callups. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

For Paste, I reviewed Planet, a simple tile-laying game where you place those tiles on your own polyhedron planet, so you get to hold the whole world in your hands.

Now that this piece is done and I’ve already filed my ESPN column for next week (Prospect of the Year), I’ll work on my next email newsletter. You can sign up for free any time.

I’m selling off some of my board games, and once again I’m donating all proceeds to the Food Bank of Delaware. You can see the games I’m selling here. Thanks to those of you who’ve already bought some of my games, I’ve donated over $330 to the Food Bank.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: Dan Piepenbring, writing in the New Yorker, describes the time he spent with Prince just before the singer’s death as the two collaborated on what would have been Prince’s autobiography.
• Amazon’s private delivery network has led to accidents and fatalities, but the retailer hides behind its use of third parties to avoid any liability.
• The Guardian‘s Nesrine Malik argues that there is no free speech crisis – there’s a hate speech crisis, and she puts particular blame on social media sites that do little to nothing to stop it.
• Scientific American looks at how misinformation spreads and why we fall for it, using a model from economics called the network epistemology framework and discussing the human tendency towards conformism. The piece also puts some blame on social media.
• Also from the New Yorker, emails from longtime GOP operative Thomas Hofeller show just how racially-motivated the Republican Party’s gerrymandering was across the country.
• The New York Times examines the role Youtube’s algorithms played in helping radicalize Brazil, aiding the rise of their Trump-like, far-right leader Jair Bolsonaro.
• STAT News describes the new effort to create and market a vaccine against Lyme disease and asks if the public will be more open to it than it was 20 years ago.
• Saveur profiles the families that make L’Etivaz cheese in Switzerland, a sort of spinoff from Gruyère cheese that preserves older methods and is now protected by a national law.
• Last month, the FDA approved a new, novel antiobiotic that can defeat extensively- and multi-drug resistant tuberculosis caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis.
• School dress codes are a nightmare for parents and for educators, and they often directly or indirectly disfavor girls, especially girls of color. Now some young girls of color in Washington, D.C., are fighting back against rules that discriminate against them.
• Adele Lim, co-writer of the script for Crazy Rich Asians, has left the project for the sequel after discovering that her white male counterpart was offered eight to ten times her pay. Warner Brothers explained to Lim’s representatives that making an exception to the standard industry pay scales “would set a troubling precedent in the business,” which ignores how those pay scales were first set (and by whom) or the disadvantages women writers or writers of color have from the start in an industry that has tended not to utilize them.
• NPR looks at the ongoing fallout from the “shitty media men” list, including author Stephen Elliott, who wants everyone to know that he’s not a shitty media man who has assaulted women and is suing the list’s creator to ensure that nobody finds out that he was on it.
• James Smyth has a great Twitter thread explaining how Mike Minor is leading AL pitchers in Baseball-Reference’s WAR.
• A St. Louis police officer pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and a grand jury about an assault by cops on an undercover officer in the wake of the 2017 protests after the acquittal of officer Jason Stockley on a murder charge.
• David Karpf responds to Bret “Bedbug” Stephens’ screed, published on the editorial pages of the New York Fucking Times, to say that Stephens has merely proved Karpf’s own point by comparing him to Nazi propagandists. Karpf’s best question is why the Times’ editorial page editor James Bennet allowed Stephens’ garbage column to see the light of day.
• The third Azul game, called Azul: Summer Pavilion, is now available to pre-order. It’s a must for me given how much I loved the original Azul and the second game in the series, Stained Glass of Sintra.
• Tapestry, the new civilization-building game from Scythe and Charterstone designer Jamey Stegmaier, sold out its first printing pre-orders in just a few days, but you can still reserve a copy from your Friendly Local Game Store.
• And finally, happy 51st anniversary to my parents. I wouldn’t be the person I am without you two.