Stick to baseball, 4/11/20.

I didn’t publish anything this week at the Athletic, but hope to have two pieces up next week, as well as a new review at Paste and possibly new pieces at Ars Technica and Vulture as well. I did hold a short Persicope video chat 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.

My publisher is holding a contest where one winner will get a 30-minute chat with me before the baseball season starts, and several other entrants will win free copies of The Inside Game. You can enter for free here.

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

I appeared on the Big Fly Baseball podcast this week and spoke with WHB’s Soren Petro about the shutdown, the draft, and the Royals for almost a half an hour.

And now, the links…

• Longreads: The New Yorker looks at how cervical cancer is on the rise in the developing nation of Alabama, where sex education and Medicare/Medicaid coverage both lag behind most other states.
• ProPublica finds that white nationalist authors have a haven on Amazon’s self-publishing platform for their racist and anti-Semitic works.
• It’s hardly worth calling it a dilemma. If the President is going to lie and equivocate when talking to the public about COVID-19, the press should not give him a platform to do so. Don’t cover his ‘speeches’ when they contain disinformation or outright bullshit (like his touting of hydroxychloroquine or claims that the virus has ‘outsmarted’ antibiotics).
• Scientific American looks at what developing antibodies to COVID-19 might actually mean – maybe two years of immunity, but perhaps less, and almost certainly not lifelong immunity as with some other, unrelated viruses.
• “A fiasco of incredible proportions:” Epidemiologists tell The Guardian how Trump abdicated his responsibilities as President, dithering for six weeks over testing, a failure that will lead to thousands of needless deaths. Compare the U.S. debacle to the New Zealand government’s swift, decisive actions to shut the country down, thus far avoiding any significant outbreak of the virus.
• Daniel Kahneman spoke to the New Yorker about why the scope of the pandemic is so hard for humans to grasp.
• The Federalist – funded by nobody knows who, although their talking points often mirror those of Koch-funded entities – has engaged in dangerous coronavirus trutherism throughout the pandemic.
• Clay Travis, a football/gambling writer turned meninist conservative heel, has also become a COVID-19 denialist – apparently because doing so is quite profitable.
• Sean Hannity is trying to paint Trump as some sort of heroic leader – but his own statements serve as an indictment of Trump’s botching of the crisis, including multiple moves to undercut his own people.
• Kansas Republicans overturned the Governor’s order to limit religious gatherings to no more than ten people, so that more people can get sick and die this Easter.
• East Asian countries that successfully stopped the first wave of COVID-19 infections have seen new cases pop up as people brought the virus back in from outside countries – a huge warning for the U.S. not to let our guard down whenever we finally do get to a point where we might reopen things.
• Here’s the apology Donald Trump should issue to the American public for his failure to act early enough to slow the pandemic and for his promulgation of false or misleading information as it has spread. I wouldn’t hold my breath for this to happen.
• Helen Rosner explores the ethics of ordering take-out during the pandemic … and concludes that it’s okay to do so, but if you do you should order directly from the restaurant.
• “If there were ever a time to take a few extra moments to order through your local bookstore, it’s now.” Dave Eggers writes for McSweeney’s about the need to save local bookstores.
• Afar.com listed 25 independent bookstores in the U.S. that they love. I’d add Phoenix/Tempe’s Changing Hands and D.C.’s Politics and Prose as well.
• Ars Technica found that 80% of Steam games earn under $5000 in their first two weeks – which certainly doesn’t bode well for developers’ long-term business outlooks.
• The Athletic’s Nando di Fino remembers Glen Waggoner ($), one of the original members of the first Rotisserie Baseball League and the author of several of the books that first described the game.
• Finally, if you’re still confused about the role that our Administration played in making the pandemic more severe in the U.S. than in any other country, well: