Stick to baseball , 5/8/21.

I got back out to a minor league game last week and wrote about the prospects I saw for subscribers to the Athletic, focusing on Jackson Rutledge (Nationals) and Grayson Rodriguez (Orioles). I’ll have a post up Sunday or Monday on Kumar Rocker and Jack Leiter, followed by a ranking of draft prospects later in the week.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the new card game Flourish, co-designed by the person behind the outstanding 2018 game Everdell.

On the Keith Law Show this week, my guest was Louisville catcher Henry Davis, one of the top prospects in this year’s MLB Draft; I also answered a number of your questions, mostly about the draft but also one about my three-legged cat. 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.

If you’d like to buy The Inside Game and support my board game habit, Midtown Scholar has a few 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.

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And now, the links…

• Longreads first: And I do mean long, as this piece from WIRED‘s June 2020 issue – which I don’t remember seeing last year – on the rise, fall, and rise again of white-hat hacker Marcus Hutchins, who played the biggest role in stopping the WannaCry ransomware worm, is exceptionally well-written and well-reported, and it runs nearly 15,000 words.
• Almost as good is this New Yorker profile of legendary yet reclusive Simpsons writer turned self-published detective novelist John Swartzwelder, who is responsible for “Homer At the Bat” and one of my favorite SNL sketches, “Those Unlucky Andersons.”
• A small number of wealthy donors to Trump now wield outsized influence within the GOP – and potentially over our government, too – just by virtue of their seven- and eight-figure donations.
• Four L.A. cops coerced a 13-year-old boy into confessing to a crime he didn’t commit. A court ruled they get qualified immunity on some of the potential charges against them, because they didn’t coerce him for a long enough period of time. What if – stay with me here – we just ended qualified immunity for cops?
• The controversy over the University of Texas’ racist fight song continues, as a perfectly normal person brought a gun to a Zoom discussion on the topic. I assume he shot his computer to own the libs.
• Anti-diversity activists won big in a school board election outside Dallas, because, you know, Texas has no history of racism you might want to teach to schoolchildren.
• Teachers in Rockwood, Missouri, are now facing threats and harassment over that school district’s diversity curriculum. In a state where you stand on your porch with semi-automatic weapons to face peaceful protesters, this fits.
• An Idaho legislative intern alleges her boss, Aaron von Ehlinger (who has since resigned in disgrace), raped her, and in return, several other members of the Idaho legislature – all Republicans – doxxed her, harassed her, and tried to get her charged with filing a false report. Two of those other legislators are women.
• It’s time to start shunning the vaccine hesitant, says USA Today editorial writer and former federal prosecutor Michael Stern.
• Centner Academy, a private primary school in Miami, has become a “beacon” for anti-vaxxers, as the school is turning away vaccinated students and staff because of the bogus idea that they can “shed” the virus. (The vaccine does not contain the live SARS-CoV-2 virus, and thus vaccinated people have nothing to “shed.” This is sheer ignorance.) Linda Centner, who founded and runs the school, has espoused all sorts of anti-science conspiracy theories, including anti-mask views and baseless fears of 5G cell towers.
• Meanwhile, one former anti-vaccine influencer in Texas got her COVID-19 shot and is talking about it publicly.
• Is some anti-vaccine loon in your life claiming there are hundreds of reports of adverse reactions to the COVID-19 jab? Well, here’s a thread explaining why those reports, from VAERS, don’t actually mean any of these reactions were to the vaccines – if they happened at all.
• Is there some hope on the horizon for a vaccine against HIV? It’s still a ways off, but a new breakthrough at least means there’s the possibility of such an inoculation, although retroviruses are extremely difficult to treat with antivirals or prevent via vaccines.
• Regardless of your opinion of the filibuster, it’s not the thing preventing Democrats from enacting major legislation right now.
• Speaking of which, President Biden wants to create a family leave plan that would put the U.S. in line with other developed nations. We are far worse off than our peers in Europe and parts of eastern Asia when it comes to quality-of-life laws.
• Hold your surprise, but white authorities in Arkansas executed a Black man who may very well have been innocent. The death penalty is barbaric and should be abolished everywhere.
• A Black homeowner in Indianapolis found the appraisal of her house went up for $100,000 when she removed items that might have hinted at her race, and had a white friend pose as the homeowner.
• An Israeli man visiting relatives in Baltimore was shot and killed, possibly because he was Jewish.
• Eleven Madison Park, one of the most acclaimed (and expensive) restaurants in the world, will reopen with a completely plant-based menu, at $335 a person.
• Signal tried to place ads on Instagram showing just how much the social-media site (owned by Facebook) knows about you, but Instagram banned the ads instead.
• This BBC story of a stranded sailor who couldn’t leave his ship for four years is fascinating and a little horrifying.
• Stars, they’re just like us! Kate Winslet loves Wawa. As a non-native who has been converted to the cult of Wawa, I say to Kate, welcome.
• Google Doodle celebrated Teacher Appreciation Week by animating some StoryCorps stories of teachers who made a difference in specific students’ lives, such as this wonderful one from Dr. William Lynn Weaver.
• The Guardian explains why the Carters looked so tiny in that photo with the Bidens. (I mean Pres. Jimmy and Rosalynn, not Jay-Z and Beyoncé.)
• Board game news: The Kickstarter for Floodgate Games’ upcoming title Vivid Memories has 13 days to go.
• Michael Luu, designer of the upcoming cooperative game Mission ISS, wrote a designer diary about his experience.