I had one piece this week for subscribers to the Athletic, on the Reds-Rockies trade and Atlanta’s two free agent signings, as well as a piece last week on what we can learn from the various pro leagues’ approaches to the pandemic. I held a Periscope video chat on Thanksgiving day while I spatchcocked the turkey.
Over at Paste, I ranked the ten best deduction board games, including Coup and this year’s The Search for Planet X.
I held off on sending the next issue of my free email newsletter until after the holiday so I could write up the trade and signings, but I’ll get one out in the next 48 hours. You can sign up for free here.
My first book, Smart Baseball, got a glowing review from SIAM News, a publication of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics. You can buy Smart Baseball and my second book, The Inside Game, at any bookstore, including bookshop.org via those links, although Smart Baseball has been backordered there for a while. You can check your local indie bookstore or buy it on amazon.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: This GQ article, about the author’s parents and a promise each made to never put the other spouse in a nursing home, is just heartbreaking.
- The New Yorker details the underground network (with many Korean-Americans) trying to topple the North Korean government.
- NiemanLab details the moral and business cases for increasing diversity in the newsroom, although with newspapers dying it may be a bit of a lost cause.
- The Justice Department is now looking into the questionable stock trades by Sen. David Perdue (R-GA) that I mentioned in a link last week. If you’re still voting for this crook – who still refuses to debate Jon Ossoff, his Democrat opponent – I really don’t know what to tell you.
- The logic of COVID-19 restrictions is falling apart, because they’re determined by economic factors, not by science.
- SCOTUS’ decision last week on COVID-19 restrictions, written by “scientifically illiterate judges,” will cost Americans’ lives, writes economist Dr. Jeffrey Sachs.
- YouTube finally suspended the feed of the nationalist One American News Network for spreading bogus information on the pandemic – not for spreading bullshit about the election.
- A coffee brand that had capitalized on its conservative political leanings ran into trouble when it (rightfully) declined to support accused murderer Kyle Rittenhouse.
- Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Anti-Racist, discussed how to make higher education less overtly racist in an online talk with Radcliffe and Harvard College Everywhere.
- From 2010, Ed Yong, who has written some essential pieces on the COVID-19 pandemic for The Atlantic this year, wrote about a woman whose amygdala was so damaged that she can no longer experience fear.
- The Wall Street Journal profiled the conservative social media network Parler, but the real revelation here is that it’s backed by the Mercer family, whose views are about as neo-Nazi and white nationalist as it gets.
- Anti-lockdown twits like to point to Sweden as some sort of success story, but so far there’s no evidence herd immunity is working there – and they’re faring much worse than their Nordic neighbors.
- Greg Burton writes for the Arizona Republic about how the modern environment has made it more dangerous for journalists to do the most routine tasks for their jobs.
- On Tuesday, December 1st, the Welsh Rugby Union is hosting a free community talk on autism and the autism community in Wales. (I’m friends with one of the scheduled speakers.)
- Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff locked students out of remote class sessions if they failed to get required COVID-19 tests. Getting tested isn’t just about you, but it’s a responsibility to your community.
- Several board game publishers have Black Friday sales going on right now, including Renegade, Capstone, Floodgate, and Japanime.