I had two columns this week for subscribers to the Athletic – one on the Puerto Rican Winter League, and how MLB needs to support the league more; and one on the Starling Marte, Mark Canha, and Steven Matz signings.
My guest this week on the Keith Law Show was Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. You can subscribe and listen on iTunes and Spotify.
I appeared on the Five Games for Doomsday podcast, talking mostly about boardgames – my favorites, my interest in them, writing about games and about baseball, and more.
I’ll send out a new edition of my free email newsletter Monday or Tuesday this week. And, 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: An investigation by local TV channel 11-WXIA in Atlanta revealed corruption and sexual harassment among Johns Creek police officers, leading to the termination of three of the department’s officers – although others involved haven’t been sanctioned and remain on the force.
- This seems especially vile, preying on truly vulnerable people: scammers are using fake job ads to defraud would-be applicants.
- Over 200 American academics, researchers in history and political science in related fields, signed an open letter in support of the Freedom to Vote Act.
- Two conservative commentators quit lucrative roles at Fox News in protest of Tucker Carlson’s program that pushed false narratives and outright misinformation about the January 6th insurrection. One of them, Jonah Goldberg, explained his decision in an editorial for the L.A. Times.
- The QAnon JFK Cult in Dallas is tearing families apart. Did you know “Q” hasn’t posted in a year? Yet the hoax’s adherents still can’t let it go. The cognitive dissonance is strong with them.
- The Kenosha protests were not violent or deadly until Kyle Rittenhouse showed up. Media coverage of his acquittal is revising history.
- One of the co-creators of the game Oregon Trail says he never made any money off the game, but that was never his goal anyway.
- The USFL is coming back! I’ll believe it when we get the first kickoff, but I’ll wash my Tampa Bay Bandits jersey just in case.
- An epidemiologist wrote a lengthy overview of what the omicron variant of COVID-19 might mean. Dr. Peter Hotez says it’s a concern, but “the sky isn’t falling.” Our bodies aren’t helpless against new variants, though. The emergence of new variants is an inevitable outcome of rich countries hoarding vaccines (or destroying them).
- COVID denialists like to say that Japan used ivermectin to stop the virus’s spread there. They are wrong.
- It’s better than nothing, I guess: A St. Louis cop who assaulted an undercover colleague posing as a protestor was sentenced to a year in jail.
- The superintendent of Alachua County Public Schools in Florida wrote an op ed in the Washington Post saying that the state’s new ban on any future mask mandates or quarantines robs schools of critical tools to fight the virus and keep kids in school. DeSantis’s pandering is going to kill people.
- South Carolina Republicans are trying to cancel tenure, replacing it with five-year contracts and requiring at least a 2/2 course load, which will go a long way towards killing research at universities there.
- Civil Liberties International added the United States to its list of “backsliding” democracies for the first time.
- A Tory MP in the UK claims that having a woman play the main character in Doctor Who is hurting boys by removing a role model for them, and contributing to young boys turning to crime, never mind that the Doctor is a genderless alien who takes human form. He obviously doesn’t even watch the show, since the main character is not named “Doctor Who.”
- Jared Leto is unrecognizable in House of Gucci under prosthetics and a bald cap, part of a growing trend toward physical verisimilitude on screen. Is that a good thing for actors or viewers?
- A new paper published in Nature describes superionic ice, a newly-discovered phase of water that might resemble what’s found deep inside outer planets like Neptune.
- A “good guy with a gun” took down a mass shooter, and then was shot and killed by a cop who mistook him for the bad guy. That cop will not face charges.
- There will also be no charges for the man who “accidentally discharged” his gun and killed a 10-year-old boy the other day.
- Ark Nova, an upcoming heavy game from Capstone, is available for pre-order. The description and images make me think it’s at least inspired by Wingspan but more complex.