I had one filler post for subscribers to the Athletic this past week to tide us over until we get to my predictions this upcoming week, looking at some possible trends in player development to watch for as games begin next week. I also held a Klawchat on Friday.
At Paste, I reviewed Renature, the latest collaborative design from Wolfgang Kramer and Michael Kiesling, who’ve worked together before on Torres and Tikal. This game has a good bit more oomph to it – it’s less abstract and definitely more fun.
On the Keith Law Show this week I spoke to Julie DiCaro about her new book Sidelined: Sports, Culture, and Being a Woman in America and how sports leagues can do better on matters of gender, race, harassment, and domestic violence. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify.
For more of me, you can subscribe to my free email newsletter. Also, you can still buy The Inside Gameand Smart Baseball anywhere you buy books; the paperback edition of The Inside Game will be out on April 6th, just 10 days from now.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: A professor in the United Kingdom who has spent about a decade trying to defend the Assad regime in the western media thought he was corresponding with a Russian spy, but was actually talking to someone at the very group he was trying to discredit. Prof. Paul McKeigue is also a COVID-19 hoaxer, signatory to the Great Barrington anti-lockdown manifesto, and close pal of a 9/11 hoaxer.
- ProPublica looks at the disastrous state of Maine’s public defense system; the state has no public defenders and farms the work out to private attorneys, many of whom are ineligible to try the cases they’re assigned.
- Just twelve people are responsible for two-thirds of the anti-vaccine content found on social media. The Center for Countering Digital Hate has issued a report on the dirty dozen and is urging social media platforms to crack down before it’s too late. Just days before they released, a dozen state attorney generals told Facebook and Twitter to do a better job against this misinformation. I’m pleased to see our Attorney General here in Delaware, Kathy Jennings, was one of the signatories.
- It’s been lost in the news for understandable reasons, but Aurora, Colorado, police forced an innocent Black family, including a six-year-old girl, to lie on the pavement while the cops had guns drawn – and they’re upset at the angry response to their actions.
- Eric Garcia writes in the Washington Post of the rightward shift of some Latino men, including his father, an avid Trump supporter. It’s the most vulnerable demographic in the Democratic coalition right now.
- Also in the Post, a principal in Indio, California, has had to go looking for students missing since the city’s high school closed to in-person instruction last March.
- USA Today, the same newspaper that rushed to have Bob Nightengale provide a fresh coat of whitewash to Thom Brennaman after the latter uttered a vile homophobic slur on air, fired For the Win’s Hemal Jhaveri for tweeting about mass shooters mostly being white men.
- The story of cascatelli, a new pasta shape designed by podcast host Dan Pashman, is an amazing only-in-2021 kind of tale where a guy who thinks (correctly) that spaghetti (the shape) is boring and nonfunctional can end up engineering a brand new shape and partnering with a manufacturer to produce it.
- The great Dr. Peter Hotez debunks five myths about coronavirus vaccines in a piece he co-wrote with Dr. Maria Elena Bottazzi in the Washington Post.
- Zoom earned $660 million in pre-tax profits in 2020 and paid $0 in taxes on it. It might be cheaper to eliminate the corporate income tax entirely – saving the costs to collect it and freeing up productive capacity dedicated to it – than to perpetuate a system where this happens over and over.
- North Carolina sends six-year-olds to court, as in the case of a boy who faced a hearing for picking a tulip from a neighbor’s yard.
- Arkansas passed a law that would allow doctors to deny medical care to LGBTQ+ patients. The absolute obsession many Republicans have with gay and trans Americans is pathological.
- West Virginia is trying to ban needle exchanges in the midst of the country’s worst HIV outbreak.
- Here in Delaware, a former police officer who shot an unarmed teen and escaped criminal charges has been indicted for lying about the incident and tampering with evidence.
- Illinois State Rep. LaShawn Ford resigned from the board of Loretto Hospital to protest the board’s decision not to suspend or fire the CEO and COO who distributed vaccines to ineligible recipients at Trump Tower and other wealthy enclaves.
- A Missouri Republican state senator has been charged with fraudulently billing the government for over $900,000 in COVID-19 claims, including some services that were never provided.
- Dr. Emily Oster caused a stir recently with a column that had a headline saying your unvaccinated kids were comparable to their vaccinated grandparents. Dr. Tara C. Smith explained why this is misleading and possibly dangerous, one of the critiques that led Dr. Oster to correct herself a day or two later.
- Naia Cucukov, the Executive Producer of the acclaimed 2020 Netflix adaptation of The Babysitter’s Club, wrote a powerful thread in the wake of the shootings of Asians by a deranged white man in Atlanta last week. (Naia is also a personal friend.)
- Matt Leacock, designer of Pandemic and its various offshoots (as well as Era: Medieval Age), is working on a new game about combating climate change.
- A 25-year-old mystery about the sudden deaths of bald eagles in some parts of the south has now been solved. Humans were responsible, of course, but perhaps not in a way you’d expect.
- GQ interviews the priceless Sir Ian McKellen on his remarkable career, including an upcoming film shot entirely on iPhones in London’s mostly empty streets.
- The New York Times’ Bret Stephens, known for so many things but especially (to me) for his climate change denialism, is the editor of a new journal focusing on “Jews and social justice.”
- The BBC profiles Jang Yeong-Jin, the only openly gay North Korean defector. Jang crawled across the DMZ to reach South Korea in 1997, and now, at 62, is about to get married.
- The New Republic argues that the media are manufacturing a crisis at the border to try to prove that they’re balanced in their coverage of President Biden.
- Cymru am byth.