Stick to baseball, 1/4/20.

Happy New Year! I skipped last week since it was the holidays and I was offline quite a bit, but in the last couple of weeks I had a bunch of year-end board game posts, including my top 10 games of 2019 for Paste, my best games of the year by category for Vulture, and the top 8 board game apps of 2019 for Ars Technica.

My free email newsletter will return on Monday, time and health (I’m sick yet again) permitting. My second book, The Inside Game, will be out on April 21st and is available for pre-order.

And now, the links…

• One longread this week, from the Guardian‘s best longreads of the year: Time management is making us miserable.
• Figure skater Gracie Gold is working her way back to competition after a long fight with depression and an eating disorder.
• One of the biggest funders of anti-vaccine groups has made millions selling “natural” health products. Joseph Mercola has also been fined by the FDA for making false health claims, and has promoted all kinds of pseudoscience on his site for over 20 years.
• Joan Walsh writes about “this fucking decade” for The Nation: “The last decade showed that the United States can be dramatically changed by a minority of people seized by grievance, convinced that they’re the real victims, and determined to get revenge.”
• The rivers and beaches of Guatemala are filling with trash, especially plastic, emblematic of a global problem with plastic waste.
• An Alabama woman murdered by her former partner is another example why the NRA’s choice to kill the Violence Against Women Act will have deadly real-world consequences.
• A study found that 39% of respondents in eight European countries would like to live in a world where chemical substances don’t exist. Good luck with that.
• The search for new antibiotic drugs is hitting another roadblock: startups trying to develop these compounds are going bankrupt.
• Congress appears on the verge of letting a program designed to help stop the next pandemic expire, likely because the GOP doesn’t want to spend money on anything but war.
• I was obsessed with the periodic table when I was a kid, so of course I enjoyed this New Yorker piece on the search for larger and larger (and yet incredibly unstable) elements.
• GQ interviewed Michael Caine about The Muppet Christmas Carol.
• Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy signed letters authored by the Pebble Mining Company favorable to the company’s mining efforts in his state.
• The U.S. held off on punitive tariffs against Argentina while the country reviewed two trademarks for Trump’s personal business.
• Sacha Baron Cohen gave an incredible speech to the Anti-Defamation League on the failure of social media giants to regulate hate speech and fake news on their sites.
• Capstone Games has really carved out a niche for itself for high-end games, many of them imported from Europe, including the popular train game Irish Gauge, which they imported and released in the U.S. in 2019. They just announced the follow-up game, Ride the Rails, will be released on July 1st, when Irish Gauge will also return to stores.