Stick to baseball, 1/2/21.

I had three pieces this week for subscribers to the Athletic: breaking down the Yu Darvish trade, breaking down the Blake Snell trade, and one piece on both the Josh Bell trade and Kohei Arihara signing. I revealed my Hall of Fame ballot in another post that included several other Athletic writers’ ballots, with each of us explaining one particular vote for a player. I also held a video chat via Periscope on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the wonderful game for younger kids Dragomino, a reimagining of the Spiel-winning game Kingdomino, and ranked the five best games I’ve played for kids in the 3-6 range.

At Ars Technica, I ranked the best new board game apps of 2020. I didn’t include Spirit Island, which is a gorgeous app, but the tutorial is so inscrutable that I just couldn’t figure out how to play the game at a reasonable level.

A new edition of my free email newsletter is on my to-do list for the weekend. My thanks to all of you who bought – or asked for – either of my books this holiday season. You can still buy The Inside Game and Smart Baseball anywhere you buy books.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: Is the new mutation of SARS-CoV-2 a ticking time bomb, or merely worrying but not terrifying? It’s more infectious, and that’s going to mean it spreads faster, so our botched vaccine rollout – just 18 more days until the adults take over again – is even more problematic than it already was.
• Bookshop.org has positioned itself as the alternative to Amazon for independent booksellers, giving those shops an easy way to set up an online storefront, and consumers a place to buy books that supports local shops, but the calculus is quite different for individual shops, as they earn far less from a sale through bookshop.org than in their own physical stores. I use bookshop.org for affiliate links on the dish, and buy books there now because we have few options here in Wilmington beyond big-box stores.
• Cartoon Saloon, whose Wolfwalkers is a likely nominee for this year’s Academy Award for Best Animated Feature (and is only on apple TV+), offers a different approach to children’s animation from big studios using CGI. Even Studio Ghibli has gone to computer animation for its newest film. I haven’t seen Wolfwalkers, but enjoyed two of their previous films, The Breadwinner and The Secret of Kells.
• Grub Street looks at the great bucatini shortage of 2020, and the very weird, surprising cause of it.
• The Daily Beast looks at the plan by neo-Nazi groups to stoke anti-vaccine sentiment, especially among white Americans, to create conflict with authorities that these racists can then exploit.
• Just as they did in the 2017 GOP tax bill, the top 1% came out the big winners in December’s COVID-19 relief bill too.
• The Sackler family, owners of Oxycontin producer Purdue Pharmaceuticals, refused to apologize for their role in creating and spreading America’s opioid crisis.
• The BBC has a good primer on the Ethiopian conflict in Tigray and how Eritrea, a repressive dictatorship that fought a border war with Ethiopia in the late 1990s, has become an unexpected ally of its former nemesis.
• Also on the BBC: the district attorney in San Francisco has an unusual background, as his parents were members of the terrorist group Weather Underground and went to jail when he was still just a year old.
• And one more from the BBC – Spain is going to keep a registry of people who refuse the COVID-19 vaccine. At that point, just make the vaccine mandatory. A registry just feeds into the fears of the cranks and conspiracy theorists.
• The Washington Post spoke to Steve McQueen about his five Small Axe films, and how his own experiences helped inform them.
• A Chesterfield County (Missouri) Councilman was banned from a local Best Buy for refusing to wear a mask. In December, nine months after the pandemic began, this jackass is still fighting mask mandates, and it sounds like the local police aren’t helping enforce anything.
• An interesting opinion column submitted by one of you – we have to let teenagers make mistakes, rather than ruining their lives forever for a bad moment caught on video when they were still children. There’s a limit to this, in my opinion; Madison Cawthorn’s mistakes should have followed him, but the former high school freshman named Mimi whom this writer mentions deserves a chance to move beyond her error.
• The KLF is going to rock you again, as their biggest hits are finally available on streaming sites.