Stick to baseball, 9/28/19.

My one piece for ESPN+ subscribers this week had my six postseason player award ballots, all hypothetical as I didn’t have any vote this year. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday and another Periscope video chat on Tuesday.

At Paste, I reviewed Silver and Gold, a tremendous new flip-and-write game from the designer of Gizmos and Bärenpark, where players fill in polyomino shapes on their own cards, trying to complete as many cards as possible while racking up various bonuses. It’s due out in late October.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, is now available for pre-order on all the usual sites. The release date is April 21, 2020.

You can also get more updates from my free email newsletter; the next edition will go out some time this week, before I head to Arizona for an abbreviated trip to the Fall League.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: Royals pitcher Danny Duffy opened up to the Kansas City Star about his anxiety, depression, and panic disorder, with a little about what he has done to combat it.
• Texas Monthly has the story of the hunt for a serial killer in Laredo last year; the culprit was actually a member of the Border Patrol.
• The backlash against so-called “cancel culture” among comedians is nothing but a big con. Most figures in entertainment who’ve supposedly been “cancelled” continue to perform or publish, and to make money, while other comedians have found an audience by railing against minority groups and “cancel culture” itself.
• Writer Prachi Gupta remembers her brilliant, late brother, who had become red-pilled and died under hard to fathom circumstances in Italy two years ago.
• Amid an apparent rise in suicides and cases of mental illness at British universities, the Guardian‘s Samira Shackle asks why it’s happening, what can be done, and if it’s the schools’ jobs to fix it at all.
• Author Matt Goulding examines the culture of Neapolitan pizzas in Tokyo, where multiple pizzaioli pursue pizza perfection, even if they’ve never been to Italy themselves.
• Anti-vaxxer groups are targeting moms who lost children and convincing them vaccines killed their kids, then turning the moms into “crusaders” and the kids into talking points. Dorit Reiss takes a closer look at the newest such case, a baby who suffocated while sleeping in her parents’ bed.
• The Atlantic looks at a proposal to make 988 the suicide prevention hotline number, and some of what we know about how and why such lifelines work.
• Rakim has a new book out on creativity and NPR excerpted a portion of it.
• A new study found that gluten doesn’t make you sick if you don’t have celiac or a wheat allergy. “Gluten sensitivity,” “leaky gut,” and other pseudoscience diagnoses are just that – pseudoscience.
• The New York Times has really had a bad week. They published key details on the Ukraine whistleblower. Opinion columnist Bari Weiss’s new book on anti-Semitism got a damning review in Jewish Currents. And the New Republic exposed the haughty history of Bret “Bedbug” Stephens, who likes to write as if he knows what “ordinary” (his word, and his quotes) Americans are thinking.
• The World Health Organization is holding back doses of the one existing Ebola vaccine during the ongoing epidemic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, spurring criticism from Doctors Without Borders.
• Ravensburger just announced an upcoming Minecraft board game called Minecraft: Builders and Biomes, due out worldwide on November 15th.
• (chef’s kiss)

pic.twitter.com/lURLRFJhR9

— ed (@macaulaybalkan) September 26, 2019