Stick to baseball, 1/25/20.

I had one piece for the Athletic this week, on Atlanta’s signing of Marcell Ozuna. I held a Klawchat on Friday.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, is due out on April 21^st from Harper Collins, and you can pre-order it now via their site or wherever fine books are sold. I also sent out a fresh edition of my free email newsletter this week, revealing my Hall of Fame ballot.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: Vox looks at how the Netherlands makes universal, private health insurance work, resulting in some of the world’s best health outcomes.
• “We live in a world where supply-side economics, which was always a fraud, became a religion.” The New Yorker looks at the Patriotic Millionaires, a group of ultra-wealthy Americans who fight for higher taxes, higher minimum wages, and other policies that would help the other 99%.
• ProPublica and the New York Times reveal what we know about the longstanding FBI attempt to downplay Saudi Arabia’s involvement in the 9/11 attacks.
• I read Kassia St. Clair’s enjoyable The Secret Lives of Color recently, and she mentioned the Bahia emerald, a giant rock that contains the largest emerald shard ever found and that has been valued, allegedly, at nearly a billion dollars. That led me to this 2017 WIRED story on the neverending legal battles over its ownership, which still seems to be unresolved.
• David Schmidt, writing for the Huffington Post, crystallizes the problem with American Dirt – that it erases authentic Latinx voices by borrowing passages and language, then passing them off as authentic.
• The Trump administration repealed a set of major clean-water regulations, continuing its push to make our environment dirtier and more dangerous so that businesses (like Koch Industries) can make more money.
• Amanda Marcotte writes for Slate that Democrats need to stop buying the myth of the ‘reasonable’ Republican. Nothing Trump does or did matters, as long as he and the GOP cling to power.
• A Republican activist in Georgia smeared a black Democratic Congresswoman by saying her son, who was shot and killed by a white man who didn’t like the music her son was playing in his car, was killed in “a drug deal gone bad.” Nothing matters to these people except power.
• An Ohio pediatrician went viral after posting a pro-vaccine clip on TikTok, so, of course, anti-vaccine lunatics have threatened her person and her practice while also flooding her business’s Google and Yelp pages with fake negative reviews.
• Politicans from the far right to the center-left love to frame family policies as promoting ‘choices’ for working mothers, but many of those aren’t choices at all, and they’re always ‘choices’ for women who must balance work and family, rarely if ever for men. When I discuss balancing my work schedule with my desire to spend time with my daughter, I’m praised, because the world doesn’t expect men to consider this.
• Isabel dos Santos became Africa’s richest woman while her father was President of Angola. This BBC report examines over 700,000 leaked documents to show how she exploited her position to rob the oil-rich country, where 30% of the population lives on under $1.90 a day, of around $2 billion.
• George Will writes about the right-wing Spanish Party Vox and its leader Santiago Abascal, who is peddling messages similar to Trump’s in a country that has, so far, not lurched so far to the right.
• The title of this piece is a bit misleading, but a recent study compared ‘rational’ behavior against ‘reasonable’ behavior, showing evidence that doing what is in your best economic interest may not be in your best overall interest if it violates social norms.
• Thanks in part to a ProPublica investigation, Illinois is restoring driver’s licenses to residents whose licenses were suspended for unpaid parking tickets.
• A new study out of Cardiff University found a type of T-cell that may be useful in targeting multiple cancers, although the study is extremely preliminary and hasn’t been tested in humans at all.
• I’ve recommended the iOS port of Carcassonne as the best digital adaptation of any board game for close to a decade now, but that’s about to change. Coding Monkeys’ license for the game is expiring, so if you want their version – which is now on sale for $4.99 – go buy it before March 1^st.
• One last chance to back AlderQuest on Kickstarter, as the campaign ends on Thursday. Also, if you wanted Irish Gauge (like me!) but missed the first printing, Capstone Games is taking pre-orders for a bundle of that game and Ride the Rails.