Stick to baseball, 11/16/19.

I wrote this week, but nothing has been published quite yet. Some of it will be in bookstores on April 21st of next year, though, as I work on the first edit for The Inside Game, my new book combining baseball decisions and cognitive psychology. I also am tentatively scheduled to appear at Washington, DC’s, Politics & Prose on April 24th, with other events likely in that first week. If you’re with a bookstore and interested in arranging an event, feel free to reach out to me in the comments and I’ll connect you with my publicist.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: The legal battle over a 7-year-old trans girl in Texas could have substantial implication for trans rights of children in that state and across the United States.
• The Guardian looks at the big-data approach to history and projecting the future, a new field of inquiry reminiscent of the psychohistory of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels.
• Vanity Fair details the theft of 550 Bitcoin-mining computers in Iceland. The authorities know who stole the machines, but not where the machines are.
• A New Jersey high school baseball coach ended up sued after he told a kid to slide, and the kid ended up with a horrible leg injury.
• A woman who’s worked in the board game industry came out with her story of how designer/publisher JR Honeycutt manipulated and abused her across a months-long relationship. BoardGameGeek immediately removed him from a panel where he was supposed to speak at BGG.Con this month.
• Deval Patrick wants to run for President. He helped a Republican billionaire make millions through foreclosures while he was Governor of Massachusetts.
• Restaurant critic Adam Platt – you may have heard of his brother, Oliver – writes about what it’s like to be targeted by a chef whose food you’ve reviewed.
• ESPN’s Kevin Arnovitz writes about the silence that follows the NBA’s and Daryl Morey’s China/Hong Kong controversy. I may be showing my age, but can you imagine a similar blowback in the 1970s-1980s if an athlete or GM had voiced support of Solidarity or the Helsinki Watch Groups?
• Dignity Health stuck one of its own employees with a $900,000 bill for medical care for her daughter, born three months premature, by trying to use a loophole around a missed deadline. This ProPublica piece points out that “Dignity is also a religious organization that says its mission is to further ‘the healing ministry of Jesus.'”
• “I was an astrologer – here’s how it really works, and why I had to stop.”
• Anti-vaxxers are now targeting minority groups with their dangerous misinformation.
• The Daily Beast got basic anti-vaccine ads approved by Google and Facebook despite those companies’ claims that they wouldn’t run such false or misleading advertisements.
• A woman who’s active in promoting vaccine safety and accurate vaccine information on Twitter went to a screening of Vaxxed 2 and tweeted her thoughts.
• The head of the Nutrition Department at Harvard’s School of Public Health weighs in on how much meat we should eat and on the new plant-based meat alternatives.
• The founder of a site called NoFap, which is – and I’m not making this up – trying to tell men to stop masturbating, is suing a prominent sex researcher because she said masturbation isn’t bad and that porn addiction isn’t real.
• Health officials fighting the Ebola outbreak in the north Kivu region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo will now have a second vaccine to try in the city of Goma, which hasn’t yet been hit by the outbreak. Over 2000 people have died already in the year-long Ebola flare-up, which has spread rapidly due to locals’ mistrust of government and NGO personnel.
• The current way we use antibiotics to fight routine bacterial infections may be out of date, and contributes to drug resistance.
• The lower house of the Ohiobama legislature passed a bill saying that teachers can’t grade students’ incorrect science answers as wrong if the answers reflect the students’ religious beliefs. Imagine paying your tax money so the public schools in your district could fail to teach kids basic science.
• Deadspin’s last (interim) editor-in-chief Barry Petchesky wrote for the New York Times about being fired for refusing to stick to sports.
• The United States talks about fighting global terrorism, but the country is now seen as a leading exporter of white supremacist terrorism, spreading to violence across the western world.
• The Saudis are not our friends. They hacked into the phones of Twitter users critical of their dictatorial regime and extorted them into tweeting state propaganda.
• A MediaMatters survey found that just 3% of news reports on the California wildfires pointed out the role of climate change in the conflagration.
• Leaked emails show Trump consigliere Stephen Miller empathizes strongly with white nationalists.
• Peter Nicholas writes in the Atlantic that Trump’s strategy of attacking his adversaries may not work given how many people are on the opposite side of the impeachment inquiry.
• President Trump continued to funnel tax dollars to his friends as his administration hired $380-an-hour outside consultants to handle work ordinarily assigned to government employees, leading to nearly $750,000 in gains for Trump’s allies.
• As many as 90% of domestic violence victims report possible traumatic brain injuries, according to two researchers writing for Scientific American.
• A new outpost of Pizzeria Bianco, my #1 pizzeria in the United States, will open in Los Angeles in the space formerly occupied by Tartine Bianco.
• Board game news: The designer and publisher of the role-playing game Gloomhaven, which costs $120 and comes in a 20-pound box, announced a streamlined version called Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion, which should cost around $50 and hit retail in Q3 in 2020.
• Calliope Games is reissuing the 2004 game Station Master (Kickstarter link) with new artwork.
• Next Move announced Azul: Crystal Mosaic, an expansion to the 2018 Spiel des Jahres winner that will include overlays to keep your tiles in place and new double-sided player boards.