My one piece for subscribers to the Athletic this week looked at which MLB teams just drafted their new #1 or #2 prospects. No chat this week as I was busy with work calls or family commitments every afternoon.
Over at Paste, I reviewed the Kennerspiel des Jahres-nominated game The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine, a cooperative trick-taking game that plays out over a series of 50 missions, like a legacy game but without asking you to change or destroy any components.
The Boston Globe just named my second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, one of its recommended sports reads for the summer. The book has garnered similar plaudits from major publications as a Father’s Day gift or for summer reading, including from Forbes, The New York Times, and Raise. My thanks to all of you who’ve already bought it; if you’re looking to pick up a copy, you can get it at bookshop.org or perhaps at a local bookstore if they’re reopening near you.
I’m sending out my free email newsletter a bit more regularly lately, which is a good sign for my mental health, I think. You can sign up for free here.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: USA Today has the story of the late scout Rudy Santin’s attempts to expose MLB’s broken system for signing international amateur free agents, which can include verbal (and thus unenforceable) agreements between teams and 12-year-old players. The system doesn’t really work for either side – players can, and do, walk away from these agreements as late as the day before the signing period opens – but the likely alternative, a draft, will just result in less money flowing to players from teams.
- Vanity Fair‘s Jeff Sharlet goes deep inside the cult of Trump, talking to his diehard supporters and their beliefs in some of the most bizarre, antifactual conspiracy theories you could ever imagine. These are people who think Q is real, that leading Democrats are literal demons who eat children, and that Trump was sent by God to save us all.
- One way to craft a response to a pandemic is to look at successful responses to past pandemics. STAT News explains how the pornography industry dealt with the HIV epidemic, successfully, and what lessons countries might take away from their strategy.
- The New York Times looks at two major failures in the peer-review process this year, asking why this happened and if the process itself is flawed (or, as some of the quoted sources say, simply overtaxed).
- Also in the Times, what exactly is a Twitter bot, and are they as numerous as many recent headlines have claimed? I shared a story a few weeks ago about research at Carnegie Mellon that claimed as many as half of the tweets about COVID-19 in the study sample were from bots, but multiple sources here say that conclusion was not supported by the data.
- My friend Alex Speier looked at unconscious racial bias in baseball scouting, including the language used in scouting reports. I’m quoted in the article.
- Arizona’s COVID-19 pandemic might be even worse than the official data indicate. The state’s Rt remains well above 1, there’s barely any contact tracing, and the current trend has the state on its way to running out of ICU beds. This is what happens when you elect anti-science people to run your state.
- Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts has told counties that if they require citizens to wear masks in county buildings, they will not receive any of the state’s COVID-19 relief funds. This is what happens when you elect anti-science people to run your state.
- Stefan Fatsis, author of the entertaining Word Freak, writes about the debate within the competitive Scrabble world over whether to prohibit racial and other hateful slurs.
- Expecting college students to behave prudently if they return to campus this fall is a fantasy, because people in that age range tend to engage in more risky and impulsive behaviors.
- Troy Amen, who is entering his fifth year of a joint MD-MBA program at Harvard Medical School (and, I assume, Harvard Business School), writes about systemic racism at HMS and the school’s apparent refusal to hire a more diverse faculty.
- Prosecutors allege that 18-year-old Chicago man murdered a trans woman after going home with her and learning she was transgender. According to the prosecution, he left, got a gun, returned to shoot her, left, and then went back to shoot her again.
- Facebook Groups are fountains of disinformation and crackpot conspiracy theories, according to this editorial in WIRED by two authors who research disinformation and fake news. This isn’t shocking to anyone who follows anti-vaccine activity online, as Facebook is ground zero for so much of their bullshit.
- Civil rights groups are asking big advertisers to pause spending on Facebook ads for the month of July, citing the platform’s failure to police hate groups on the site, as part of the #StopHateforProfit campaign.
- Two Virginia lawyers pleaded guilty to attempting to extort $200 million from Monsanto by threatening to file false legal claims around Roundup (glyphosate). This is notable because the two lawyers work with scaremonger Carey Gilliam and her anti-GMO organization U.S. Right to Know.
- Plenty of bad actors are spreading bogus stories of service workers tampering with the food ordered by police officers, but now the police unions are doing the same, disparaging Shake Shack with a false claim that workers there had “poisoned” several cops’ milkshakes. The NYC Detectives’ Endowment Association didn’t admit their error or apologize for spreading the lie.
- Writer and book critic Carolyn Kellogg revealed on Twitter why she quit the National Book Critics Circle’s board – the group’s refusal to issue a statement on Black Lives Matter and the verbal abuse directed at another board member who led the working group trying to craft a statement.
- Zimbabwe may be on the verge of collapse yet again, and they’ve resumed arresting and torturing opposition activists.
- Board game news: roll20 announced the upcoming release and pre-order availability for Burn Bryte, a new tabletop RPG that’s been three years in the making.
- Asmodee Digital announced an upcoming port of the Game of Thrones board game, a big, complex, long game that might really benefit from a digital adaptation.
- Bézier Games announced pre-orders for Maglev Metro, the newest game from the designer of Suburbia and the Castles of Mad King Ludwig.