I had three posts for subscribers to the Athletic this week, one column on what’s going on each day over at teams’ alternate sites; and two scouting notebooks, one on Casey Mize, Dane Dunning, and Alec Bohm, and the other on Tarik Skubal, Dylan Carlson, and the Nats’ Luis García.
My guest on the Keith Law Show this week was my friend Craig Calcaterra, late of NBC Sports’ Hardball Talk and now the author of his own subscription newsletter Cup of Coffee. I also appeared on Blue Jays broadcaster Dan Shulman’s podcast Swingand a Belt, talking about what this lost minor league season means for prospects and the teams that employ them; and on the U.S. Army’s Mad Scientist program podcast The Convergence, talking about my new book, The Inside Game, and what might help people become better analysts in a world awash in data.
For Paste, I previewed many of the major board game titles due out for the rest of 2020, including the follow-up to Wingspan from Elizabeth Hargrave and a new game inspired by New Jersey’s infamous Action Park.
My free email newsletter returned this week, with thoughts on just how exhausting this science-denying, homophobic slur-using world has become.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: One reason why many of us feel so awful is that our cognitive ‘surge capacity’ is depleted, writes science journalist Tara Haelle, who provides suggestions to help us rebuild it.
- The Washington Post profiles Tim Scott, the only Black Republican in the Senate, although in some ways I think it still let him off the hook for his decision to support a party and President that have both acted strongly against racial equality and justice in the last four years.
- One reason so many people still fail to understand the seriousness of the pandemic’s spread is exponential growth bias, where we have a hard time intuitively understanding how that mathematical function works.
- COVID deniers love to point to Sweden as a success story, since the country didn’t lock down yet seemed to have the pandemic under control. Sweden just reported its highest death toll for the first six months of a year since 1869. Their case fatality rate is also double that of neighboring Norway.
- The rush to reopen bars and restaurants is a major reason why we can’t get this pandemic under control.
- The CDC said we could likely control it in 12 weeks if most Americans wore masks and adhered to physical distancing guidelines.
- Dr. Jen Gunter wrote in praise of “WAP” while criticizing longstanding, misogynistic taboos on the subjects of female sexuality and, er, natural lubrication.
- Writing for Slate, Ray Suarez says that the NRA might not survive the New York state’s lawsuit to dissolve it. We should only be so lucky, after the NRA was a major reason the Violence Against Women Act was allowed to lapse in 2019.
- Rush Limbaugh’s descent continued this week as he mocked Joe Biden for having lost multiple family members to tragic, early deaths, and then referred to Kamala Harris as a ‘ho’ and claimed she slept her way to various political offices.
- The Atlantic‘s John Hendrickson looks at how 13-year-old Brayden delivered the best speech of this week’s Democratic National Convention. You can see the video of when Brayden first met Joe Biden, and how Biden encouraged Brayden not to let his stutter define or limit him.
- A pilot project to release genetically modified mosquitoes that produce female eggs that die as larvae in the Florida Keys has received final approval. It could be a major step in controlling mosquito-borne diseases from malaria to Zika to dengue.
- Writer Shakeia Taylor told the CBC that MLB isn’t doing enough to combat the structural racism within the industry.
- Two Detroit police officers who coerced a 14-year-old boy into confessing to two murders who didn’t commit and who fabricated evidence in that case are still on the job and aren’t on the county’s do-not-call list of police officers who’ve committed crimes or other forms of misconduct.
- Board game news: A few games were announced in the days after I filed my second-half preview, including Anno 1800, an adaptation of an Ubisoft video game by longtime designer Martin Wallace (Steam, Brass).
- Meeple Mountain is giving away a copy of Fairy Trails, the new two-player game from Uwe Rosenberg.