Stick to baseball, 4/10/21.

The Inside Game is now out in paperback! Midtown Scholar has several signed copies available, and you can also buy it from any of the indie stores in this twitter thread, all of whom at least had the book in stock as of Wednesday. If none of those works, you can find it on Bookshop.org and at Amazon.

I had two posts this week for subscribers to the Athletic, a draft notebook with some notes on the top of the draft, and a look at prospects from my top 100 who are currently on MLB rosters. I also held a Klawchat on Friday.

My latest review for Paste covers the pickup-and-delivery train game Maglev Metro, from the designer of Suburbia and One Night Ultimate Werewolf. I have some quibbles with the art choices but the underlying game is pretty great.

On this week’s episode of the Keith Law Show, I spoke to White Sox right-hander Lucas Giolito about his transformation as a pitcher, from reworking his delivery to developing one of the game’s best changeups. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify.

I spoke to Chris Phillips, Associate Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon CMU, about my second book, The Inside Game, in a half-hour conversation for the CMU Alumni Association. For more of me, you can subscribe to my free email newsletter.

• Longreads first: The best thing I’ve read in the last two weeks was Prof. Simukai Chigudu’s essay on growing up in the shadow of Cecil Rhodes, the repressive, murderous, racist colonizer for whom Chigudu’s native Zimbabwe was once named, and who is still honored with a statue at Oxford.
• Derek Thompson writes at the Atlantic about Alex Berenson, the “pandemic’s wrongest man,” who wrote a very wrong book about cannabis and has now spent the last year being wrong about COVID-19 and, more recently, the vaccines against it. Berenson also bullies and harasses people on Twitter, name-searching himself and encouraging his followers to pile on.
• “VC Lives Matter?” That quote from a venture capitalist trying to oust San Francisco’s reformer District Attorney is the most tone-deaf thing I’ve heard in some time. The story is really about a moneyed few trying to buy the government they want – the United States in miniature.
• I’m not a huge fan of Brandi Carlile’s music, but this New York Times profile of her and partial review of her new memoir Broken Horses is excellent.
• Delaware’s Representative Lisa Blunt Rochester (D) features prominently in this article on how websites use deceptive techniques called “dark patterns” to fool users, as she has introduced legislation to crack down on the practice.
• The Journal of the American Medical Association is embroiled in a scandal of its own making, as one of their podcast hosts dismissed the possibility that there might be racist doctors or racism within medicine, and they responded poorly to the backlash, too.
• There’s a genocide going on in northern Ethiopia, led by the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Ethiopian President Abiy Ahmed.
• The NYPD has a “goon squad” manual that explains how police officers can violate citizens’ rights to freedom of assembly, according to an investigative report from the Intercept.
• Physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory announced a new finding around the wobbliness of muons that appeared to be the death knell of the Standard Model – but another new paper might explain it within the Standard Model. Physics is fun!
• The Anti-Defamation League has called for Fox to fire Tucker Carlson after he espoused the white supremacist dogma called the Great Replacement during his show on Thursday.
• Dr. Peter Hotez writes that the anti-science movement is going global and thousands of people will die needlessly as a result.
• And, shocker, white evangelical Americans are saying they won’t get vaccinated.
• A gun in the house increases that someone living there will commit suicide – like 11-year-old Tyler Paxton did with his dad’s gun.
• The economic impact of sporting events, like the MLB All-Star Game, is usually wildly overstated.
• Prof. John Ioannidis had a significant, positive impact on the world of science in 2005 when he argued that most published research was wrong, as researchers only had to find statistical significance to be published, resulting in many false positives and conclusions that couldn’t be replicated. He has since become a COVID-19 denialist, and wrote an unhinged personal attack against two experts who dared question him, publishing it in the journal of which he was previously the editor in chief.
• A bunch of right-wing grifters and pundits were tweeting at length about a Pakistani Muslim immigrant killed in a robbery by two Black teenagers, but Wajahat Ali explains why this was all done in bad faith.
• A new neurological disease that resembles Creutzfeldt-Jakob Syndrome (the prion disease that you could get from eating beef from ‘mad’ cows) has emerged in the Canadian province of New Brunswick, killing 6 and sickening up to 38 others.
• A longtime bartender at St. Elmo’s Steakhouse in Indianapolis died of COVID-19 after an outbreak at the restaurant. St. Elmo’s has been an annual stop for me during Gen Con, and I know it’s a favorite of many during the NFL combine.