My one column this week for subscribers to The Athletic ranks the top 50 free agents in this winter’s class. I also held a Zoom Q&A via The Athletic’s Twitter account. I feel like those don’t get as many questions as my old Periscopes did, so please let me know how I can make it easier for you to ask questions when I do them.
Over at Paste, I reviewed Terraforming Mars Ares Expedition, the shorter, streamlined version of the massive Terraforming Mars board game. I think it’s better than the original, which is a heavy (physically and in terms of complexity) two-hour affair that just doesn’t benefit enough from the difficulty or length it entails.
My podcast was off this past week, but will return this Tuesday with a new episode. I was on the Athletic Baseball Show again on Friday, which you can catch on Apple or Spotify.
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.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: How two BBC journalists risked their careers to expose Jimmy Savile’s decades-long history of child molestation, and how various people in power tried to squash the story.
- Insider’s Julia Black has a damning exposé of Barstool founder Dave Portnoy, with multiple women accusing him of engaging in nonconsensual violent behavor during sex. Much of the subsequent coverage focused on the stock price of Penn National Gaming, which owns 36% of Barstool, rather than the actual substance of the allegations. The Cut has a summary if you’re not an Insider subscriber.
- A cheating scandal rocked the bridge world, leading to mass forfeits at a recent European championship.
- In 1994, Rodney Wilson, a high school teacher in Mehlville, Missouri, came out to his students, and nearly lost his job. Things in Missouri aren’t really much better 27 years later, as a gay teacher in Neosho was forced to resign because parents said he was going to “teach their kids to be gay.”
- ProPublica exposes how Gov. Jim Justice (R), Gov. Jared Polis (D), former Secretary of Edumucation Betsy DeVos (R), Sen. Rick Scott (R), and other wealthy Americans avoid paying most or all income taxes, using loopholes around philanthropy, family trusts, the SALT deduction, and other forms of chicanery.
- Via Craig Calcaterra, who posted this link in his newsletter this week, a story from Bitter Southerner on what exactly is “Braves Country,” and the lies Atlanta fans are telling themselves about the team’s name, imagery, and chop.
- Dr. Aaron T. Beck, the developer of cognitive behavioral therapy (itself a rejoinder to Freudian analysis), died this week at age 100.
- There’s been some real-world fallout at GrubStreet from the Bad Art Friend story.
- Whether the non-troversy over Critical Race Theory caused the Virginia gubernatorial race outcome or not, it is a non-troversy and the guy stoking it admitted as much on Twitter. He’s funded by dark-money titan Charles Koch, of the Koch Brothers. Don’t fall for it.
- The HPV vaccine is cutting cervical cancer cases by nearly 90%. Can your horse deworming paste do that?
- A new wave of COVID-19 cases, mostly among unvaccinated people, has overwhelmed Colorado ICUs. Gov. Polis (D), mentioned above, has refused to reinstate any sort of mask mandates or restrictions on capacity.
- The Harvard Gazette asked a pediatrician about vaccinations for 5- to 11-year-olds.
- Dr. Sheri Tenpenny, the quack who testified before the Ohio legislature that COVID-19 vaccines would make you magnetic, bragged about traveling on airplanes while sick with COVID-like symptoms. Ohio still hasn’t yanked her medical license.
- The so-called ivermectin meta-analysis preprint that claimed to show evidence the anti-parasitic drug worked against COVID-19 has completely fallen apart now that three of the studies it used have been retracted (or otherwise shown to be bogus).
- A great thread on the value of mentorship, in this case in academia, but applicable to all fields.
- Senator Tom Carper (D), one of our two Senators from Delaware, wrote an editorial in the Delaware News-Journal indicating that he has finally come around to supporting ending the filibuster. Here’s hoping he can convince Sen. Chris Coons (D) of the same.
- And the grift goes on till the break of dawn: Trump’s DC hotel cashed in big-time on the January 6th insurrection.
- Do you want to be better at recycling? And sometimes you put stuff in the yellow (or green) bin that belongs in the trash? You’re wishcycling, and might actually be making the situation worse. Here’s a guide to doing recycling better. Did you know you can recycle pizza boxes after all? I had always read that the grease stains on them made them unsuitable for recycling, but it turns out that that is incorrect.