Stick to baseball, 10/23/21.

My second (and final) Arizona Fall League notebook went up for subscribers to the Athletic on Monday; the prior one, with notes on MacKenzie Gore, Zach Thompson, and more, went up last Thursday. I held a Klawchat on Friday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed The Hunger, the newest game from designer Richard Garfield (King of Tokyo, Magic: the Gathering).

On my podcast this week, I spoke to Trevor Strunk (@hegelbon) about his new book Story Mode: Blah Video Games and the Interplay Between Consoles and Culture, which you can pre-order here. And you can subscribe to my podcast on Spotify or iTunes.

As the holidays approach, I’ll remind you all every week that I have two books out, The Inside Game and Smart Baseball, that would make great gifts for the readers (especially baseball fans) on your lists.

• Longreads first: Nature spoke to scientists who say they’ve been subjected to the most vicious attacks ever during the pandemic, including death wishes and death threats.
• A con artist scammed would-be adoptive families out of over a million dollars before she was finally caught. She preyed on their desire to have children, often taking thousands of dollars in “expenses” for pregnant women who placed their babies with other families or who never actually existed at all.
• Tara Smith wrote about how to eradicate diseases back in December of 2019, just as SARS-CoV-2 was emerging. She tweeted this link this week to say that we’re not eradicating this virus as long as it has numerous, unknown animal reservoirs.
• My colleague Adam Crafton wrote about the horrendous treatment of LGBTQ+ people in Saudi Arabia, the government of which now owns 80% of Newcastle United.
• If we want to stop climate change, we have to stop burning things.
• Normalize quitting, says Lindsay Crouse in a New York Times video.
• There’s a real debate to be had over how powerful natural immunity from a COVID-19 infection is, but politics is derailing it. People screaming that it means they don’t need a vaccine cause those on the other side to dismiss the point entirely.
• OK, Joy Pullman. You go first.
• Why is Judge William Pryor advancing the career of a law student who has made blatantly racist statements?
• Trump supporters in a north Texas county that TFG won by a 4-1 ratio still hounded an election administrator out of office, accusing her of having a liberal agenda.
• The Trump Administration used its food aid program to give millions to connected firms and to promote the then-President. No one will ever be held accountable for this.
• Netflix fired the organizer of the employee walkout to protest the transphobic content in the recent Dave Chappelle comedy special, claiming the employee leaked confidential data.
• A white cop in Louisiana grabbed a Black woman by her hair and slammed her to the ground multiple times. ProPublica also has the story. The incident, of which there is video, occurred five weeks ago, and the officer has not been identified or, as far as anyone has reported, disciplined in any way.
• Minneapolis schools using online survelliance software called Gaggle are outing LGBTQ+ students to their parents.
• Sen. Bernie Sanders wrote an op ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail, calling out fellow Democrat Joe Manchin’s obstructionism and refusal to support climate-change mitigation policies that would benefit his constituents.
• Paris Hilton (!) wrote an op ed in the Washington Post calling for regulation and reform of the “troubled teen” industry, which she says generates $50 billion in revenue per year.
• St. Helena, one of the few places in the world that has yet to report a single COVID-19 case, is hoping to use that status to lure more tourists to the remote South Atlantic island.
• Something’s rotten in Dover: Two Democratic state Senators here in Delaware are facing calls for their resignation, but the party is treating them differently. Gerald Brady used a horrible ethnic slur referring to people of east Asian descent in an email, while Darius Brown was arrested and charged with “offensive touching” and disorderly conduct after allegedly punching a woman in the face during an argument. Both need to go.
• Evolution in action: Elephants in Africa evolved tusklessness when poachers targeted them for their ivory.