Stick to baseball, 3/28/20.

One new article this week for subscribers to The Athletic, looking at what the agreement between MLB and the players’ union might mean for this year’s draft. It’s not very good for the draft prospects themselves, unfortunately. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday and a Periscope (where my voice gave out!) on Tuesday.

On the gaming front, I had four new pieces this week. For Paste, I reviewed ClipCut Parks, a new “flip-and-cut” game that is great for younger kids who love using scissors but not much of a game for older players. For Vulture, I updated my ranking of the top 25 board game apps available on mobile platforms. For Ars Technica, I reviewed the new app version of the legacy game Charterstone.

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. Also, check out my free email newsletter, which I say I’ll write more often than I actually write it.

And now, the links…

• Matt Leacock, the game designer behind Pandemic, wrote an op ed for the New York Times about how no one can win this real-life pandemic ‘game’ by themselves.
• Who funds the Federalist? It would be nice to know that, after the extremist site ran a column from an unlicensed dermatologist calling for people to hold ‘coronavirus parties,’ as VICE’s Laura Wagner writes. Twitter briefly locked the site’s account for posting the link.
• The preacher who leads Bible study for members of Trump’s Cabinet claims that coronavirus is God’s wrath on people for allowing homosexuality and environmentalism to exist. His fans in government include Vice-President Mike Pence and Senator Joni Ernst. I wonder how much of our tax dollars go to enabling this hatemongering.
• Delusional politicians and right-wing media members are making scientists developing statistical models of coronavirus’s spread harder by implying or outright claiming such models are hoaxes.
• The Trump Administration has been citing a retracted paper to defend its early opposition to expanding COVID-19 testing, a policy that will likely lead to tens of thousands of needless deaths. Meanwhile, their plan involves blaming China for a ‘cover-up’ that never happened rather than coming up with a viable plan for slowing the pandemic.
• Surgeons are increasingly reluctant to perform operations in this environment, due to equipment shortages, fear of infection from asymptomatic patients, and the possibility that doctors might be at higher risk for the most serious form of the disease.
• “Mothers are held responsible for every detail — large and small — of their children’s well-being.” Jess Grose explains how coronavirus has exposed the ‘great lie’ of modern motherhood.
• The owner of a Philadelphia hospital – who shuttered the facility last year – demanded $6 million in rent for the city to use it for six months to house COVID-19 patients.
• Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey (guess) voiced opposition to the $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus bill because sending the unemployed or underemployed money “creates incentives not to work.” Toomey is repeating a popular conservative myth, probably because it sells.
• Longreads: The Ford Motor Company purchased the Michigan Central train station in downtown Detroit, part of that city’s ongoing revitalization, the story of which is the subject of this BBC longread.
• A ProPublica investigation found that the Chinese government is using tens of thousands of hacked or fake Twitter accounts to spread pro-Beijing propaganda on issues ranging from the Hong Kong protests to the government’s COVID-19 response.
• Texas Monthly looks at how the H-E-B supermarket chain prepared for the pandemic several weeks ahead of just about any other company or government authority.
• Writing for Billboard, Natalie Weiner looks at how two hits from 2000 that told of women getting revenge on their abusers elicited entirely different public reactions. My real issue with “Goodbye Earl” is that there is no “midnight redeye flight” from Atlanta that would put you anywhere in the United States.
• Ann Forsyth, director of Harvard’s Healthy Places Design Lab, writes about how COVID-19 may alter the future of urban and home life.
• Harvard finally reversed course and will pay its furloughed dining-hall workers. The University has a miserable history of failing to reasonably compensate the people who keep the place running.
• Americans are stocking up on various dry goods, but also on jigsaw puzzles. I have quite a few in the house but never seem to choose them over a board game or a movie.
• I didn’t realize that gay marriage is still illegal in South Korea, where there’s still a terrible social stigma around homosexuality in some parts of the country.
• This ad, lambasting Trump for his late and inadequate response to this crisis, is superb.