Stick to baseball, 5/16/21.

I’ve had three posts up in the last week for subscribers to the Athletic: my ranking of the top 100 prospects for this year’s MLB Draft; a special Q&A about that ranking; and a post on my trip to see Vanderbilt and Alabama, when Jack Leiter was a very late scratch for his start. He did pitch yesterday and his velocity was completely normal.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Flourish, a new, quick-playing card game from the designers of Everdell.

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.

For more of me, you can subscribe to my free email newsletter, which will return this week (tomorrow, I hope).

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: The Dyatlov Pass mystery may have a very mundane, anti-climactic solution.
• The headline here doesn’t really summarize the article, but musicians are organizing to try to fight the vice grip Spotify has on the industry.
• Policymakers ignored the United States’ near-total lack of child care infrastructure until the pandemic exposed this massive economic weakness. If you want to grow the economy, you need affordable child care.
• The CDC’s statistic that “less than 10 percent” of COVID-19 transmission occurred outdoors is probably wildly misleading. The actual rate might be 1/100^th of that.
• Adolescents can finally get their COVID-19 vaccines! My daughter got her first dose less than 24 hours after the approval came through. Her only complaint afterwards was two days of a sore shoulder. Go get your kids the shot.
• Facebook deplatformed an Ohio-based anti-vaccine group, and then did the same to Erin Elizabeth, a major anti-vaccine wacko who is partners with longtime quack Joseph Mercola.
• Activists opposed to syringe exchanges are just bizarre, but their work may lead a major success story in Indiana, which helped end an HIV outbreak, to close.
• If the West Antarctic Ice Shelf collapses, the rise in sea levels will be 30% higher than originally thought.
• The Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth may be misusing data from students’ electronic devices to accuse those students of cheating.
• Frank Abagnale authored a best-selling memoir that became the movie Catch Me If You Can. It turns out that his story is probably a big hoax.
• The cicadas are coming, so of course some folks suggest eating them.
• Former UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s defence against a charge of improper lobbying is that he was undone by autocorrect. The lede here is spectacular.
• Bari Weiss really took off her mask in a substack post that justified the killing of Palestinian children.
• Two good op eds from the Washington Post this week on our current quaqmire: how two men named Joe (Biden & Manchin) hold the future of our democracy in their hands, and why democracy and cults of personality don’t mix.
• I know Jonathan Chait’s reputation is … not great, perhaps, but I agree with him on the subject of Rep. Liz Cheney. She can be wrong on many issues, but she is right on Trumpism and the direction of the GOP, and we can acknowledge or even praise the latter without somehow tacitly supporting the former.
• The bloated U.S. military budget isn’t just wasteful – its consequences disproportionately harm people of color.
• Board game news: Board & Dice, publisher of some of really heavy Euro titles like Teotihuacan and Tekhenu, explained how and under what terms they’re continuing their relationship with designer Daniele Tascini, who made some insensitive comments on race last year. I think it’s a good blueprint for working with someone who might be too quickly ‘cancelled.’