Stick to baseball, 9/26/20.

Nothing new this week at the Athletic, but I’m hoping to write two pieces this upcoming week to make up for it.

I reviewed the light resource-management and tile-placement game Cosmic Colonies for Paste this week; it’s a fine enough game, but I was left a little underwhelmed because it didn’t offer anything I hadn’t seen before in other games.

My guest on The Keith Law Show this week was my colleague at the Athletic Kaitlyn McGrath, talking about what it’s been like covering a team (the Blue Jays) she can’t see in person because they’re playing in the U.S. You can also subscribe to my podcast on Amazon,  iTunes, and Spotify.

I’ve been keeping up with my free email newsletter better recently; my thanks to those of you who’ve signed up and who’ve sent kind notes in response to some recent editions. That said, I didn’t send one this week since … well, I haven’t had the muse much at all lately.

The holidays approach! My books The Inside Game and Smart Baseball make excellent gifts, or so I’m told by my editor and publicists.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: A new paper in the Annals of Internal Medicine details what we know about coronavirus transmission. The dominant route is respiratory; proximity is an extremely important variable; and proper ventilation appears to play a huge role in decreasing transmission. Also, “there is currently no conclusive evidence for fomite or direct contact transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in humans.” That topic came up in a few places recently, as the CDC posted and almost immediately deleted language that said that the virus could spread over distances of more than six feet.
• My colleagues Britt Ghiroli and C. Trent Rosecrans wrote about MLB’s long-damaged relationship with the LGBTQ+ community in the wake of Reds announcer Thom Brennaman using a vile homophobic slur on air.
• Authors David Mitchell (Utopia Avenue) and Jasper Fforde (The Constant Rabbit) appeared together on the Book Off! podcast to discuss their latest books and to recommend one book apiece for the show’s title segment.
• The New York Times style magazine’s Ligaya Mishan looks at mushrooms, the “last survivors,” an increasingly popular source of food and raw material and, unfortunately, useless dietary supplements.
• Scott Gottlieb and Mark McClellan, both former FDA Commissioners, wrote for the Wall Street Journal that the public can still trust an FDA-approved vaccine – as long as the agency isn’t bowing to political pressure in the approval process.
• Dr. Paul Sax, who was a guest on my podcast back in the spring, wrote about the success of pro sports leagues in containing COVID-19 and what we can learn from them.
• On the eve of the release of a trove of material from the recording sessions, the BBC has an oral history of Prince’s album Sign O’ The Times.
• This is from May, but I hadn’t seen it before: the founder of JetBlue funded the highly dubious study out of Stanford that claimed that the infected rate in California was 85 times higher than reported. Prof. John Ioannidis failed to acknowledge that potential conflict of interest – and he continues to discourage governments, most recently Greece’s, from taking steps to control the pandemic.
• Speaking of Stanford, new Trump adviser Dr. Scott Atlas was denounced in a public letter signed by roughly 100 of his former colleagues at Stanford’s School of Medicine. The letter calls out his “falsehoods and misrepresentations of science” regarding the COVID-19 pandemic. (Atlas is still at Stanford, now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute.)
• MLB.com’s Alexis Brudnicki profiled Tom Burns, a scout for the Blue Jays, discussing his 30-year career in baseball. I worked with Tom at the end of my time in Toronto and he’s one of the best and kindest people I have met in this business.
• Australian indie singer/songwriter Gordi had her spring tour with Bon Iver cancelled, so she returned to her previous career as a physician, offering her services to hospitals around Melbourne as they fight the pandemic.
• Oliver Burkeman, author of The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking, writes about telling the difference between what you want and what you need.
• Even before we had the likely name of the new SCOTUS nominee, Harvard Kennedy School political scientist Maya Sen indicated that the appointment would likely move the court far to the right.
• Some small bit of good news on the electoral front: Four Delaware progressives defeated Democratic incumbents in this month’s primaries, and that doesn’t include Sarah McBride, who is likely to become the highest-ranking transgender elected official in the country, or Kyle Evans Gay, who won the Senate primary in my district and for whose campaign I have volunteered. What’s most interesting about the primary upsets is the common theme that the incumbent Democrats were out of touch with the will of their constituents.
• Multiple publicly traded companies used PPP funds, given out so firms hit hard by the pandemic would retain and pay employees, to buy back stock and/or pay out dividends to shareholders.
• Mike Doughty is back with a new band, Ghost of Vroom 2, and just released an EP under that name. It’s definitely the most Soul Coughing-like stuff he’s recorded since that group broke up after El Oso. He spoke to Stereogum about the new project.
• Board game news: There’s one Kickstarter for two new games from Pandasaurus, Dinosaur World and Dinosaur World: Rawr ‘n Write. It’s already at over 18 times its goal as of Thursday night.
• The app version of the asymmetrical game Root is now available on iTunes, Android, and Steam.
• The Kickstarter for Embarcadero has another week to go.
• No link yet, but I got a review copy of the Princess Bride Adventure Game, which will go on sale on October 4th exclusively at Target.