Stick to baseball, 6/26/20.

I had one new piece for The Athletic subscribers this week, talking to player development execs about what they plan to do this summer and fall with minor leaguers who may not get to play in any games this year. (I’m extremely pessimistic about instructional league or the Arizona Fall League, given those states’ incompetent responses to the ongoing pandemic.) I also held a Klawchat on Thursday, and a Periscope video chat on Wednesday.

At Paste, I reviewed Santa Monica, a really cute, mostly clever new game that just doesn’t quite work because there aren’t enough ways to use one of the most important mechanics in the game.

The Boston Globe recently 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, although I took this week off since I didn’t have much to say. You can sign up for free here.

And now, the links…

• Elizabeth Kolbert, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction for her book The Sixth Extinction, looks at how Iceland beat COVID-19, with virtually no cases and one of the world’s lowest fatality rates, for the New Yorker.

• ProPublica looks at how an Alaska school district allowed a superintendent to keep his job for three years after he was caught sending lewd texts to a 14-year-old girl.

• Harvard magazine looks at the realities and challenges of developing vaccines against COVID-19.

• MEL‘s Isabelle Kohn looks at police officers who commit domestic violence – how it ties to violence against unarmed black citizens, and how often these officers get away with it, even to the point of killing their partners.

• Henry Abbott of TrueHoop added his thoughts on the Bill Simmons situation, explaining how much ESPN catered to Simmons during the time they were both there. I saw some of this firsthand around Grantland, which always had resources that should have gone to the main site. I never had any negative interactions with Simmons myself.

• Scientific American has an animated depiction of how the SARS-CoV-2 virus attacks our cells, how the immune system responds, and how a vaccine might work.

• Public officials trying to fight outbreaks of COVID-19, measles, and other infectious diseases are facing increasingly hostile, violent responses from anti-vaxxers and other fringe groups. All public officials, regardless of party or policy, need to stand against these tactics, and Facebook and Twitter need to do far more to stop them.

• Those same anti-vaxxers are increasingly aligned with far-right groups who preach the same opposition to authority and denial of science.

• Georgia Governor Brian Kemp – elected by a slim margin amidst serious voter suppression efforts in 2018 – has given up in the fight against COVID-19 in his state, saying he won’t impose new restrictions even as cases rise.

• A viral immunologist explains just what tests for COVID-19 antibodies can tell us.

• Far-right snowflakes are threatening to leave Twitter for Parler, a safe space for racist, anti-Semitic, and other bigoted voices like Laura Loomer.

• Rapper Little Simz talked to NME about her new EP Drop 6, her work on Top Boy, and racism in the music industry.

• What exactly is Facebook’s arrangement with Donald Trump?

• Astronomers may have discovered a black neutron star, which would fill in the ‘mass gap’ between lighter neutron stars and heavier, denser black holes.

• Three Wilmington, North Carolina, police officers were fired for stating that they’d like to kill all Black people and making other racist comments. The comments only came to light because one of their cameras was activated inadvertently; otherwise, they’d still be on the job, armed, planning to kill as many Black people as they could.

• Colorado Governor Jared Polis is appointing a special prosecutor to investigate the police killing of Elijah McClain, a year after his death while unarmed. It only took about a million online signatures and a huge social media outcry.

• No link yet, but Ravensburger announced the five villains that will be available in the upcoming Marvel Villainous: Infinite Power game, a standalone expansion that will be available for preorders on July 6th: Thanos, Hela, Ultron, Killmonger, and Taskmaster.