Stick to baseball, 10/5/19.

Nothing new from me this week other than a Klawchat and a Periscope video as I try to finish off the first draft of my upcoming book The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, now available for pre-order. My next ESPN+ column will be a dispatch from the Arizona Fall League.

And now, the links – fewer than usual, for the same reasons, but these should get back to normal by the end of the month:

• Longreads first: This New York Review of Books review of Tim Alberta’s book American Carnage doubles as a look at how the Republican Party was heading for this Trumpian moment for a half-century.
• Haruki Murakami writes about memories of his father and their declining relationship for the New Yorker.
• Deadspin has the inside scoop on how TheMaven plans to gut Sports Illustrated by turning it into a lousier version of SBNation or SI‘s own FanSided.
• GQ takes readers inside the brutal dictatorship ruling Burundi, a tiny country in the heart of Africa, the southern neighbor of Rwanda. Burundi’s sectarian violence hasn’t become a global story like the Rwandan civil war and genocide did, but that doesn’t make its current regime’s crimes any less heinous.
• The American Prospect looks at the novel campaign of West Virginia gubernatorial candidate Stephen Smith, which focuses more on philosophy than the candidate himself.
• The BBC has a not-quite longread on the international heist of Saudi jewels, including the “blue diamond,” that has caused a rift between Saudi Arabia and Thailand, and that ultimately involved multiple murders.
• Nestlé, whose products you should already think about avoiding given their exploitation of water resources, is now complaining that they don’t want to comply with Australian requirements to report on whether they rely on slavery in their chocolate supply chain, claiming it would cost consumers more money in the end. I mean, I’m good paying another dime for chocolate if it means the cacao wasn’t harvested by an eight-year-old slave in Côte d’Ivoire.
• Susanna Clarke, author of one of my all-time favorite novels in Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, will release her second novel in September of 2020, sixteen years after her bestselling, critically-acclaimed, Hugo-winning debut.
• Plastic tea bags release billions of plastic microparticles into your tea. I’ll stick with loose leaf teas at home, thanks.
• Two women in New Zealand lost their pregnancies because they contracted measles. Remember that when someone tells you that measles is a benign childhood illness.
• From 2017, the chief of the Guardian‘s Melbourne bureau, Melissa Davey, wrote that we need to teach science and health literacy in schools so those kids don’t grow up into gullible adults who fall for pseudoscience and anti-science myths they read online.
• An “Actually Disabled” person penned an open letter to Andy Richter about the dangers of assuming someone who looks able-bodied is feigning a disability.
• Why are Customs and Border Protection agents harassing journalists as they re-enter the United States? Probably for the same reason the U.S. has fallen to “problematic” on the World Press Freedom index.
• Board game news: Reiner Knizia’s Yellow & Yangtze, which he calls his “spiritual successor” to Tigris & Euphrates, is coming to digital platforms and just hit Early Access on Steam. It’s from Dire Wolf, who did such great work on digital ports of Raiders of the North Sea and Lanterns.