We had a busy weekend of decorating the house, including acquiring the largest tree I’ve ever owned (since we have one room with exceptionally high ceilings, it seemed irresponsible to fail to take advantage of it), which means this post is late. I had a whole slew of posts for subscribers to The Athletic last week, however, including
- the Starling Marte and Steven Matz signings
- the Rangers’ signings of Jon Gray and Marcus Semien
- Toronto’s signing of Kevin Gausman
- the Rangers’ signing of Corey Seager
- the Max Scherzer and Robbie Ray signings
- Detroit’s signing of Javier Báez
- and the Cubs’ signing of Marcus Stroman.
Over at Paste, I reviewed The Crew: Mission Deep Sea, the sequel to the 2019 Kennerspiel winner, and I think a small but significant improvement over the original. At Ars Technica, I contributed twenty new entries to their Ars Technica’s ultimate board game gift guide.
I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter last week, with a story about being too judgmental and learning to get past it. And finally, with Christmas just three weeks away, here’s another reminder 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: This Columbia Journalism Review report on the hazards of social media for journalists is spot-on, and I wish the people running major social-media outlets would read and internalize its lessons. I can also say that ESPN’s ill-conceived, ambiguous, and inconsistently enforced social media policy ranks as the #1 reason I left the company. The straw that broke the camel’s back isn’t even public, but it related to this.
- Utah, a state run by conservatives at all levels, makes it so hard to get public aid that some people join the Mormon Church to qualify, even if they don’t believe in the tenets of that sect.
- This August piece in Science on how variants emerge and change the way the pandemic goes seems just as important now.
- The longrunning debate over whether you can plagiarize a recipe has reared its head again, after a published recently pulled a book from circulation after discovering that the author had copied recipes and stories from another book. (The short answer here is that you can’t plagiarize – or copyright – a recipe, but you can plagiarize or copyright the text around it.)
- The BBC Three spoke to multiple victims of sexual assalt about rape culture in British schools and authorities failing to do enough about it.
- We are witnessing the end of “Roe v. Wade,” writes Elie Mystal in the Nation. Elections have consequences.
- The New York Times ran two powerful editorials about abortion this week: one from a woman who was raped by her father and had an abortion, and another from a woman who didn’t have an abortion but “erased” the future she’d planned for herself, speaking very plainly about a life-altering decision from when she was 19.
- Once again, for the people in the pack: Pregnancy is not a riskless, health-neutral event.
- Anti-mask lunatics outed the trans child of the local school board chair, so now the family is moving out of the district.
- Men who get COVID-19 have a sixfold risk of experiencing erectile dysfunction after the infection.
- Many self-styled “experts” who minimize or deny the effects of COVID-19, or who soft-deny the vaccines’ efficacy, or push fake treatments, are now trying to brand themselves as “medical conservatives.”
- With the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor coming up tomorrow, it’s good to remember that army leaders rejected evidence that the naval base was vulnerable to just such an attack, demonstrated during a simulation (that sure sounds like a board game) by one of its own officers. It’s a cool blend of cognitive dissonance and old-fashioned racism.
- A county judge told the Alabama coal miners union currently on strike against Warrior Met Coal they can’t protest outside the company’s offices. I am not a lawyer, but this seems questionable on First Amendment grounds, no?
- Scientific American explains how the brain switches between languages.
- Is there simply too much culture – film, TV, music, video games, podcasts, and more – for us to consume?
- Former Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Grimes (D) now faces charges of misusing her office for political and personal gain from the state ethics commission.
- A defense industry worker says we need to cut the defense budget.
- Cleveland is asking taxpayers to pony up for improvements to the Guardians’ statement. Don’t fall for their nonsense about “economic impact.”
- There’s a fight brewing in St. Louis over who gets how much of the $500 million payday from their lawsuit against the Rams and the NFL.
- The same government ding-dongs in Missouri who accused the Post-Dispatch of hacking for discovering a huge security flaw in a state website were originally going to thank the paper for it.
- The media treats President Biden worse than it treated Trump, and that’s a huge problem.
- Longtime Montréal chef and co-founder of Joe Beef David McMillan has retired from cooking at age 50.
- I enjoyed this comic video explanation of how the west allowed omicron to happen (even if he does misspell it in his caption).
I’m fully behind Cleveland ponying up to improve the Guardians’ statement. Improving the stadium, on the other hand … 🙂
The Alabama strike order seems to be pretty fact specific. If, as management has alleged, there is significant violence instigated by the union directed at non-unionized workers entering the mine, some type of restraining order moving them about a quarter mile away seems to balance the harms. The union’s response that the acts were only in retaliation for management trying to drive across the strike line doesn’t seem like a legitimate defense unless the video of the cars with the windows being smashed out was accelerating much faster immediately before the filming where there could be a self defense claim.
Re: Media treatment of Biden. I had read, years ago at an ESPN chat, and I think it was you, that journalists don’t write their own headlines. Probably in response to someone saying that a headline unfairly characterized one athlete as “slamming” or “blasting” another athlete or their coach, when that really didn’t come through in the article itself. This has stuck with me, even if I have the details wrong, but I sure feel like *headlines*, in general, are doing us a collective disservice, even while the underlying journalism may be sound. A lot of questions wrapped up here, but basically wondering if that holds today, or whether there’s anything we can do with our wallets or eyeballs to push back against the obvious incentive media outlets have to get clicks and get a lot of people riled up on either side of an issue.
There is definitely too much culture to consume…..
I read 80-90 books a year and still have 200+ books on my “want to read” list, and my wife and I have 20+ shows on just our Netflix queue waiting to be watched….
Read the newsletter…kudos on your realizations about being judgmental. I realized this same thing about myself, only after I found myself doing (and loving) a couple of hobbies that I absolutely made fun of a decade earlier..
It’s not a new phenomenon (after all, Mick Jagger sang “He can’t be a man ’cause he doesn’t smoke the same cigarettes as me”), but I do think the internet has vastly enhanced the ability to feel justified in being judgmental and believing that anyone who does something different than you is flat out wrong.
I don’t see how anyone can objectively say the media treats Biden worse than Trump. First of all, Biden doesn’t face the media on most days like Trump did at the podium in the West Wing (loving every min of it). And it was always contentious. Just on volume alone, Trump was a 7 inn starter and Biden is a lefty specialist facing the press. This article only addresses print, so….sample size. And…. no daily 3AM tweets causing an uproar. I’m no Trump fan.
Biden seemingly is facing more crisis all at once than I can remember any leader facing. Afghanistan, Virus, Ukraine, border, China, etc which also doesn’t help and can make everything seem more negative. I’m not buying the AI derived argument.
There is a whole article that you dismissed by just simply saying you don’t buy its argument, so not sure you are actually open to the idea.
But one thing I’ll say is your list of crisis is really flawed. It sure what “China” even means in terms of a crisis but the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Russian build up on the Ukranian border are months apart from one another so it feels like you’re just tossing off whatever to suggest there are more crisis than there really are. Not sure how you could argue 2021 is a year of greater crisis than 2020 was.
r.e. the Biden vs. Trump press coverage article: look at the graph included in the article. Taking into account separation of the Joe Curve from the Donald Curve at any one point, the data clearly shows that Biden have gotten much more favorable treatment in the press, though his advantage has dissipated over the last half year.
Hello Tony. I didn’t distinguish between 2020 or 2021. Wasn’t meant to be an in exhaustive list, just pointing out that Biden has dealt with a bunch of tough issues. More than any president in recent memory- some of his own doing, for sure.
As for China, where do you want to start? Hostilities in South China Sea, trade, humanitarian atrocities, Taiwan, espionage, hypersonic missiles, etc.
Again, with China almost everything you named has been an issue for years, not a 2021 crisis. Your statement that Biden is facing an unprecedented number of crisis, which makes coverage seem more negative, doesn’t really make sense to me.
Even with those tough issues for Biden, I don’t see any good argument that Trump’s issues were not worse. The press has a chronic problem with bothsidesism, which is a huge problem when one side is assaulting democracy.