Stick to baseball, 10/12/19.

I’ll have an Arizona Fall League scouting post up Monday or possibly Sunday night, covering everything I’ve seen out here in the desert. No chat this week as I was traveling.

I did review Tapestry, the newest game from the mind of designer Jamey Stegmaier (Scythe, Charterstone), for Paste this week; it’s a quick-to-learn strategy game with a ton of potential decisions and paths for players, pitched as a civ-builder but playing more abstract than that.

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 the Harper Collins site and through major retailers. It’s due out in April 2020.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: From The Atlantic, technology is creating a massive noise pollution problem that nobody’s trying to stop, despite decades of research into the harms of excessive or incessant noise, as well as newer research that quiet or the sounds of nature are particularly good for our brains.
• The Guardian asks why American pedestrian fatalities are going back up, and says it’s not just because the victims were distracted by their phones or because of driverless cars.
• For The Athletic ($), Pablo Maurer looks at the broken promises of the soccer stadium in Chester, Pennsylvania, a very disadvantaged exurb of Philly that has seen no benefit from the facility’s existence.
• The same dumb British newspaper ran two columns this week touting diametrically opposed claims on the safety of consuming processed meat. David Speigelhalter explains the three questions readers should ask when confronted with this kind of journalistic malfeasance.
• This is from 2007 but I only saw it this week when Langdon Cook referred to it in The Mushroom Hunters: Those “truffled” dishes at restaurants probably contain no truffles or anything made from truffles, but use truffle oil that gets its flavor from the synthetic flavoring agent 2,4-dithiapentane.
• The Atlantic‘s James Hamblin writes about identity fusion and why it might explain Trump supporters’ irrational devotion to him even as he’s accused of committing further crimes and continues to stoke fear and prejudice.
• John Holdren, professor of environmental science and policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School and at the university’s Department of Planetary and Earth Sciences, says that that recent IPCC report on climate change understates how much danger we’re in, particularly if we ignore this problem long enough to let the permafrost in earth’s polar regions melt, releasing tons of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere.
• The Washington Post‘s Samantha Schmidt examines both sides of the question about dress codes and norms for teenaged girls. Is ‘revealing’ clothing empowering, or playing to harmful societal standards of beauty?
• From the same paper, AirPods aren’t just short-lived, but they can’t be repaired or have their batteries replaced; they’re just trash and Apple needs to do better.
• The Hutchins Center at Harvard hosts The Hip Hop Archive, including a list called 24 albums with annotated lyrics, including entries from Eric B. & Rakim and A Tribe Called Quest, as well as a broader collection of 200 albums deemed seminal to the genre’s history.
• The Atlanta Journal-Constitution‘s Bill Torpy calls for the Braves to get rid of the Tomahawk Chop, a racist, ignorant gesture that has outlived its welcome.
• I love third-wave coffee but didn’t realize the term had a known originator. Trish Rothgeb coined the phrase while working in Oslo in 2002, and is now leading the push to make coffee more inclusive without compromising the new genre’s emphasis on quality.
• Floodgate Games’ Cosmic Colonies is now on Kickstarter.
• James Mickens’ tenure announcement is probably the funniest such piece you’ll ever see.