My only new content this week at the Athletic was a breakdown of the final Mookie Betts trade, as I continue to work on the prospect rankings, which will run the week of February 24th. I’ll be working through the weekend to stay on schedule for that release date.
I do have a new game review up at Paste, covering Genius Games’ new title Ecosystem, a card-drafting, tableau-building game that moves very quickly but has intricate interactions among the cards you place. The deck has cards for two habitats and nine different species of animals, birds, fish, and insects, and where and how you place those cards in your 4×5 grid affects your ultimate scoring.
My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, is due out on April 21st from Harper Collins, and you can pre-order it now via their site or wherever fine books are sold. Also, check out my free email newsletter, which I say I’ll write more often than I actually write it.
I’ve also got at least five signings scheduled at independent bookstores already, with two announced on the stores’ pages: April 24th at Politics & Prose in DC and April 25th at Midtown Scholar in Harrisburg.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: The New Yorker has a giant profile of N.K. Jemisin on the eve of the release of her first novel since her Broken Earth trilogy won three straight Hugo awards.
- The Guardian has an excerpt from Andrew Marantz’s forthcoming book Antisocial that looks at how far-right trolls took over social media, with a lot of help from Silicon Valley execs who view news as merely another commodity to be sold.
- Melissa Clark has a buyer’s guide to chocolate, including explanations of some key terms and a discussion of the ethics of buying chocolate, in the New York Times.
- A new federal lawsuit alleges that children held at Chicago Lakeshore Hospital were drugged and/or sexually abused while Cook County officials covered it up, according to ProPublica.
- Shipt, the home-delivery company now owned by Target, has taken on some strongly anti-worker practices and encouraged its delivery folks to spend their own money to try to butter up customers.
- From last March, Quinnipiac women’s rugby coach Becky Carlson looks at how colleges get rid of female coaches who dare to speak out against systemic sexism and other abuses of power.
- A pediatrician in Illinois left a suicide note that implied that he’d been faking vaccination records, either to help anti-vaccine parents, or because he himself was anti-vaccine and simply lied to parents about vaccinating their kids.
- If you live in Connecticut, call your state rep and your state Senator to tell them you support the bill eliminating all non-medical exemptions to childhood vaccination requirements. The claim that such a bill violates “religious liberties” is bullshit; no major religion opposes vaccinations, and anti-vaxxers use this as a cover story for their own ignorance.
- MIT Technology Review looks at how the ‘manosphere’ of angry men, including so-called ‘incels,’ is become more radicalized on sites like Reddit and Gab. The Texas Department of Public Safety called incels “an emerging domestic terrorism threat.” Maybe we should ban men from immigrating out of Texas?
- Also in Texas, a 16-year-old boy who came to the aid of another student who was being bullied was himself shot to death by the bully, who was no older than 15 but still somehow had a handgun.
- In 2018, Rep. Jim Jordan (guess) begged a former Ohio State wrestler to deny reports of sexual abuse while Jordan was an assistant coach on the team.
- Islamophobe Laura Loomer is probably going to be the Republican nominee for Florida’s 21st district.
- An abnormality in cells that produce myelin may be connected to how and why autism spectrum disorder affects so many parts of the brain’s functioning.
- A Utah legislator has introduced a bill to stop usurious lenders from jailing borrowers and seizing their bail money. Does Utah send these people to Newgate?