Stick to baseball, 8/29/20.

I had one column this week for subscribers to The Athletic, with scouting notes on Triston McKenzie, Sixto Sanchez, Wil Crowe, and Joey Bart. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

For Paste this week, I reviewed Succulent, a solid new game of tile-laying and set collection, and would have given it an even higher grade had I not had issues with some of the art and graphics.

My guest on this week’s episode of The Keith Law Show was Orioles reliever Dillon Tate, talking about youth baseball and overcoming the obstacles he faced on his path to the majors. You can also subscribe on iTunes – and if you do, please leave a rating and review.

You can still get my book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, where fine books are sold, like on bookshop.org. I’m also planning to send out another edition of my free email newsletter this weekend.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: The Guardian looks at the case of one Nigerian woman who fought back against the sex traffickers who enslaved her in Italy, and how difficult it is for authorities to prosecute such cases.
• Harvard magazine has an excerpt from Prof. Daniel Lieberman’s new book Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding, looking at how exercise might help reduce the odds of age-related maladies from senescence to diabetes to Alzheimer’s, even cutting your chances of dying relative to others your age. One key message is that no matter how old you are it isn’t too late to gain these benefits from regular exercise.
• Blockchain is “an amazing solution for almost nothing,” a widely-lauded technology that combines horrendous energy inefficiency with a lack of apparent benefits to end users.
• The CTC Sentinel, published by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, has a long explanation of QAnon as an emerging domestic terror threat. I have recently tried to explain the QAnon conspiracy theory to two different people who are not extremely online, and even trying to say it out loud makes me feel crazy. It’s like Scientology and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion had some sort of demon offspring. Anyway, this paper argues that “QAnon has contributed to the radicalization of ideologically motivated violent extremists,” which should make you a lot more nervous than the imagined threat of ISIS or similar terrorist groups infiltrating the United States.
• If someone tries to argue with you that masks don’t work, here are 70 studies showing that they do.
• A new case report published in the Lancet describes an 11-year-old girl who died one day after admission to the hospital of COVID-19-related cardiac failure. The condition is called multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS), and while rare, it is killing a very small number of children who contract COVID-19.
• Several people who survived COVID-19 infections but continue to feel aftereffects are connecting online to try to gather data on and study their conditions so they can provide more information to others suffering the same problems.
• There’s a surge in COVID-19 cases in Paris, so the French Prime Minister has mandated masks and stepped up testing. This is what a competent leader and evidence-based policymaking look like, in case you’d forgotten and were thinking about staying home on November 3^rd.
• “Gullible” White House negotiators overpaid by up to $500 million for ventilators from the Dutch conglomerate Royal Philips N.V., paying about four times what the Obama Administration had contracted to pay. I thought that Trump was supposed to get the best deals.
• Harvard Professor of Anthropology Gary Urton was effectively forced into retirement after multiple students accused him of sexual harassment.
• A Florida couple who believed that COVID-19 was some sort of hoax ignored advice to observe distancing guidelines and wear masks. They caught the virus; both ended up in the ICU, and one of them died of complications from the disease. The lesson here isn’t that they’re stupid, but that they fell victim to all of the misinformation spread online by hoaxers, trolls, and by people speaking at this week’s RNC.
• Speaking of the RNC, Madison Cawthorn, a Republican candidate for the state house in North Carolina, has a long history of fabrications and multiple accusations of sexual assault. He was lauded on Twitter by right-wing blue checkmarks as the future of the GOP.
• The FDA ruled that all distilled spirits are gluten-free, because science.
• Hardly surprising, but this New York Times piece finds evidence of discrimination against Black homeowners in the home appraisal process.
• A Washington Post editorial asks where the sympathy is for Megan Thee Stallion after the rapper was shot by another rapper, Tory Lanez, pointing out that if a black man had shot a white woman the outrage would probably be much louder.
• A new study from Ohio State researchers says that the Greenland ice shelf will melt due to climate change regardless of what we do to try to stop the warming trend.
• Another book excerpt, this time from Reverend William Barber’s Winning the Green New Deal: Why We Must, How We Can, on the history and roots of environmental racism.
• Why 2020 will be the death of the working mother.
• Board game news: I have seen the game Maracaibo at PAX Unplugged but never played it, given its weight and time required, which meant it wasn’t going to get much play in my house. I’m thrilled to see it’s coming to digital next year.