I had two posts this week for subscribers to the Athletic. I wrote a draft scouting notebook that focused on Louisville catcher Henry Davis, who might be the best prospect in this class. I also collaborated with Britt Ghiroli to look at the MLB Draft League, which sent out its initial rosters this week and earned negative reviews from scouts and executives. I also held a Klawchat this week.
Over at Paste, I reviewed the Princess Bride Adventure Book Game, a slight but fun co-operative game you can play with your kids or just because you love the movie, to which the game is very faithful.
On the Keith Law Show this week, my guest was our White Sox writer James Fegan, talking about Carlos Rodón, the Yerminator, and more. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify. I also appeared on the Athletic Baseball Show on Friday, which will be my regular slot for most of the year; and on the Sports-Casters podcast, talking about the draft and my second book.
If you’d like to buy The Inside Game and support my board game habit, Midtown Scholar has about a dozen signed copies still available. 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 earlier this month. If none of those works, you can find it on Bookshop.org and at Amazon.
For more of me, you can subscribe to my free email newsletter.
And now, the links…
- Longreads: Vietnam has beaten COVID-19, with just 35 deaths in a country of over 96 million people. They did it with strict travel restrictions even as health experts said those were the wrong policy response.
- There’s a movie coming out about Tim Ballard, former CEO of the anti-trafficking group Operation Underground Railroad, but he and his group have a history of exaggerating their feats as well as their (limited) links with law enforcement.
- Cops who break the law in New Jersey often avoid prison, even when the crimes they commit should result in time.
- Harvard profiled Professor Sandra Susan Smith and her work on the relationship between urban poverty and the prison-industrial complex.
- NPR tells the story of the SolarWinds hack, one of the most extensive corporate hacks in history, which went undiscovered for nearly a year even as the company’s compromised software went out to customers.
- With vaccination cards come frauds selling (and buying) fake vaccination cards, a crime made easier by sites like eBay refusing to crack down on their sale.
- That “Stanford” study saying masks don’t work? Yeah, it’s not a real study, and the author has nothing to do with Stanford. Anti-mask loons lapped it up, though.
- An editorial in Nature argues that social media sites should remove accounts that spread anti-vaccine misinformation or face stricter regulation.
- A threatened advertiser boycott over Tucker Carlson’s embrace of white supremacist rhetoric hasn’t cooled Fox’s commitment to him.
- Republicans who don’t believe in the First Amendment are introducing and passing bills that limit protestors’ rights and remove sanctions for people who hit protestors with their cars. We had a right to peaceable assembly, once.
- Minor Figures, a London-based producer of coffee-related products, plastered ads for its new oat milk product all over existing street art in Philadelphia, spurring a backlash from artists and people in those communities.
- Shock G, the main MC of Digital Underground who also played the character of Humpty Hump, died this week at age 57. He might be best known for “The Humpty Dance,” but Digital Underground was responsible for many better songs, including their first single, “Doowutchyalike,” and the track “Same Song,” which introduced the world to a 19-year-old rapper named 2Pac.
- Jonathan Capeheart wrote in the wake of the Derek Chauvin verdict that being Black in America is exhausting.
- President Biden appears to be on the verge of calling the Turkish massacre of Armenians in 1915 a genocide. Here’s what that means in practical terms.
- A former producer of deceptively edited right-wing videos explains how he gamed the YouTube algorithm to rack up views and followers.
- Board game news: Z-Man Games is putting out a new Carcassonne Big Box to celebrate the game’s 20th anniversary.
The thing about SolarWinds that I always wondered about was the initial event that the hacked sent to the IP address that indicated if the processor was 32 or 64 bit. Was this event flagged as an anomaly? I would think this IP address would be different than the other IP addresses called by that server. Maybe because it only happened once, at that time, it wasn’t investigated. This could be where machine learning comes in to flag these anomalies. The other interesting thing, that I didn’t see discussed in this article but I did see in others, is that it detected if it was on a test or production server.
Probably unpopular and political impossible take. When (not if) the next airborne pandemic begins, the US should halt all non-essential international travel at the first sign of transmission outside of the epicenter country’s borders. And non-essential interstate travel should be halted once the first case hits the US mainland.
I see the reasoning why but as you mentioned, there is just no political atmosphere where that happens. As Fauci described early on, success for him means it’ll look like we overreacted. That’s not something I see this country being able to do and the first overreaction will prevent us ever doing it again. Honestly, we’re currently fighting with 25% or so of the country that thinks what we did do was an incredible overreaction already.
But I hope we can do better next time and actually apply what we’ve learned.
If we had waited for those markers, we’d have been too late last year.
And Jim Caviezel, who is apparently crazy, is playing Ballard.
Hard. Pass.