I had two posts this week for subscribers to the Athletic: my first mock draft of 2021, and a scouting post on high school pitchers Chase Petty and Frank Mozzicato, both of whom will be day-one picks. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.
Over at Paste last week, I reviewed Cryo, a really engaging new worker-placement game from the designers of Manhattan Project: Energy Empire, where resources are always limited and you have to build your board to maximize your resource collection.
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.
And now, the links:
- Longreads first: This New York Times story on Andrea Smith, a professor at UC Riverside who has been falsely claiming Cherokee ancestry for at least 20 years, is one of the best-reported pieces I’ve read this year – and maddening.
- The Berglas Effect, an amazing card trick created by the magician David Berglas, still fascinates and mystifies even other magicians decades after he invented it.
- A New York law firm is behind most of the lawsuits against workplace vaccine mandates and other efforts driven by anti-vaccine grifter Del Bigtree.
- From April 2019: Matthew Salesses wrote about grief and how it distorts our sense of time after the passing of his wife.
- A former employee of the Chaplain’s Office at a small ‘elite’ college writes of the disconnect between progressive values and western religions on campus. I’m not sure the piece led mew to the conclusion the author intended.
- Rosella, a NYC restaurant that only serves sustainable fish, might be the future of sushi. I’ve wondered for at least a decade now how there could possibly be enough fish in the oceans to keep all of these sushi places – they’re everywhere in the country, in the suburbs now, far too many for a dwindling supply of fish – in business.
- Delaware Democrats have introduced a bill to make it harder for police to use force against citizens, and to make any materials in misconduct complaints and hearings public. The bill would also require that authorities collect data on the races of all people involved when officers use deadly force. No Delaware cop has been charged for shooting a citizen in at least the last 16 years.
- The United States has a strong history of ethnic cleansing of its own. Teen Vogue looks at how our government used the 1830 Indian Removal Act to displace hundreds of thousands of Native Americans, with thousands dying as a result.
- The Associated Press fired a young writer, Emily Wilder, after conservative trolls complained about her social media activity from when she was in college (before she was hired), but AP employees have mutinied and their leadership is on the defensive.
- Texas will allow the unlicensed carrying of handguns. We won’t just see a rise in suicides there if this lasts, but I would bet we’ll see a surge in random shootings in situations like this road rage incident in DC.
- Florida Republicans are ripping power away from local authorities to try to keep the state red.
- Oklahoma Republicans are pushing a bill that would ban the teaching of critical race theory in public schools, and one community college has already cancelled such a class before the bill has even become law. If you live in Oklahoma, anywhere, call your state rep and Senator – no matter how right-wing crazy they might be – and tell them you oppose this bill.
- Pennsylvania Republicans, meanwhile, have introduced three bills aimed at punishing women who have miscarriages or try to get abortions. The Democratic Governor has promised to veto them.
- An Islamophobic ‘vlogger’ in Canada was arrested for punching a store employee and trying to make a citizen’s arrest.
- COVID-19 isn’t spread through fomite transmission (by touching a surface that an infected person touched), so it’s time to end the hygiene theater.
- A shady advertising agency offered to pay a bunch of French social media influencers to spread fake news against the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines.
- A new coronavirus – not a variant, but a different virus from SARS-CoV-2 – is making people sick in Malaysia, and it appears to have jumped species from dogs.
- Seth Rogen had some smart comments on comedians and so-called ‘cancel culture.’
- Eric Carle, whose book The Mixed-Up Chameleon was the first book I ever read by myself, died this week at age 91.
- Board game news: Heroes of Barcadia, a “pun-tastic” dungeon crawler, is coming soon to Kickstarter.
- Capstone Games announced the new Kiesling/Kramer title Savannah Park, available at Gen Con and Origins in September.