My top 40 free agents ranking is filed, and will run two days after the end of the World Series, so that could be as soon as Tuesday and no later than Friday. I did hold a Klawchttps://klaw.me/3ogZKgthat on Thursday.
My latest review for Paste covers the legacy game My City, from the prolific designer Reiner Knizia (Samurai, Lost Cities, Tigris & Euphrates), a fun tile-laying game that ramps up the legacy rules slowly enough to keep the game accessible.
My guest on this week’s episode of The Keith Law Show was longtime A’s beat writer Susan Slusser, talking about Billy Beane’s future, the free agency of Liam Hendriks and Marcus Semien, and the playoffs to that point. My podcast is now available on Amazon podcasts as well as iTunes and Spotify.
I sent out another edition of my free email newsletter earlier this week to subscribers. Thank you all for the kind feedback, as always.
As the holiday season approaches, I’ll remind you every week that my books The Inside Game and Smart Baseball make excellent gifts for the baseball fan or avid reader in your life.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: The Verge has the story of how a deal with Taiwanese company Foxconn, touted by Trump and former Gov. Scott Walker, to generate jobs for Wisconsin workers went completely south and will probably not lead to any new jobs or economic development.
- Remember that story a year or two ago about how U.S. agents abroad might have been attacked with some sort of sonic weapon? Julia Ioffe’s piece in GQ looks at the increasing number of cases, evidence that Russia is behind it, and the CIA’s reluctance to investigate.
- The New Yorker tells how Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia, son of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin, has spent his year in the Cabinet working to undermine labor protections. The President of the AFL-CIO even sent Scalia a letter in April accusing the Secretary of forsaking the very mission of the department, which was created in 1913 to defend the rights of workers, job seekers, and retirees, not the employers Scalia seeks to protect.
- Prevagen is a nutritional supplement – that should set off alarm bells right there – that claims it can improve your memory. The FDA has been receiving consumer complaints and notices of adverse events for over a decade, but lax regulations over the supplement market have helped the manufacturer avoid serious consequences.
- Two devastating stories on the decline of local newspapers and how it may harm the towns those papers served: As local news dies out, Republican PR firms are cooking up pay-to-play faux-newspapers that look like the real thing. Meanwhile, a Floyd, Virginia, newspaper fired its only employee, leaving the paper reliant on freelance content and articles from sister publications.
- Will Leitch wrote about the lessons from how baseball held its season during the pandemic, navigating early interruptions to the point where we’re about to finish the World Series.
- James Wagner wrote about the WhatsApp group for women in baseball that has served as an informal support network, spearheaded by Cleveland’s life skills coordinator Jen Wolf. I’ve known Jen a long time and I am not the least bit surprised that she would be behind something like this.
- Stop wiping down your groceries and focus on things that actually reduce the chances of transmission, like washing your hands.
- Sinclair Broadcasting aired an interview with a white nationalist last weekend, conducted by anti-vaxxer Sharyl Atkisson.
- The editorial board of the Washington Post wrote that the Trump administration kidnapped children, and we shouldn’t mince words about it.
- The Atlantic‘s editorial board unequivocally endorsed Joe Biden, imploring readers to vote out Donald Trump.
- Amy Coney Barrett overturned a civil court ruling in favor of a woman raped by a prison guard in Wisconsin “because the sexual assaults fell outside of the guard’s official duties,” and the watchdog group Accountable.US said such “unconscionable cruelty” has no place on the high court.
- A professor who worked at Notre Dame says her experience as a working mother there was very different from Barrett’s. The Catholic university’s “pro-life” policies don’t extend to reasonable resources or time off for pregnant women or working mothers.
- Dr. Craig Spencer was vilified by Trump in 2014 when the director of global health in emergency medicine at Columbia-Presbyterian came home from working with Ebola patients in Guinea with the virus. He hit back at Trump this month over the President’s irresponsible behavior while infected with COVID-19, and called Trump’s lack of empathy “the single greatest threat to the American people.”
- Scientific American debunks the myth that COVID-19 death counts are inflated.
- The BBC has a useful primer on Bolivia’s presidential election.
- BuzzFeed tracked down the “Dunkies” woman who went viral for her emphatic appearance on a local TV station in Boston.
- Tony Lewis, lead singer and bassist for The Outfield, died suddenly this week at 62. The band’s guitarist, John Spinks, died in 2014 of cancer.
- Harvardmagazine profiles Louisa Thomas of the New Yorker, who wrote that magazine’s essay on the return of baseball in a pandemic this summer.
- The diabolical ironclad beetle (Nosoderma diabolicum) can withstand forces of 39,000 times its body weight, which would liquefy almost any other creature.
- From late September: MediaMatters’ Matt Gertz explains how Trump rallies overwhelm media members assigned to cover them with so much bullshit that it’s impossible to discuss it all.
- From 2017: The New York Review of Books has a longish piece on the mystery of the Voynich Manuscript. Is it an undecipherable code, or just medieval nonsense?