Stick to baseball, 4/16/22.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I had one new post this week, a roundup of top 2022 draft prospects I’ve seen, including Druw Jones, Termarr Johnson, and the now-injured Dylan Lesko.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Cascadia, one of the best new games of 2021, from the same publisher as Calico. It’s another hex tile-laying game but simpler to learn and play, with variable rules you can fine-tune to allow kids to join.

My own podcast returned with the Productive Outs guys – Ian Miller of Kowloon Walled City and Riley Breckenridge of Thrice – as guests. You can subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I’m due for another issue my free email newsletter this upcoming week. You can find both of my books, Smart Baseball and The Inside Game, in paperback anywhere books are sold, including Bookshop.org.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: Child welfare workers in Texas are resigning rather than enforce the state’s hateful law denying medical treatment to trans kids.

• Vanity Fair has a long investigative piece on EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit that has been at the center of the discredited lab-leak hypothesis, showing how EHA’s leader, Peter Daszak, made the situation worse both before the pandemic began and after the search for SARS-CoV-2’s origins began.

• Firearms have surpassed motor vehicle crashes as the leading cause of deaths for U.S. children and adolescents.

• Writing in the New Yorker, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Elizabeth Kolbert writes about how two Florida lakes are suing to stop a development that would destroy nearly 2000 acres of wetlands. The lawsuit includes one actual human, as well as a marsh and a stream, and is the first of its kind in the U.S.

• The CEO of Flutterwave, a Nigerian online payments and financial services company with a $3 billion valuation, may have engaged in fraud and insider trading to enrich himself at the expense of shareholders and employees with stock options.

• The Texas Observer, a progressive investigative journalism magazine that had a particular focus on Indigenous affairs, lost most of its staff in the last six months due to a series of bungled situations and a divide over the periodical’s mission.

• Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) worked to try to overturn the 2020 Presidential election, according to texts he sent to Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.

• Biologist David Sabatini resigned his tenured professorship at MIT after three senior officials at the school recommended revoking it in the wake of sexual harassment allegations against him and concerns over his behavior towards other members of his lab. He is still, however, suing one of the women who has accused him of harassment.

• David French writes in The Atlantic that the American right has “lost the plot” on free speech.

• The British national who killed MP Sir David Amess was a “textbook example of radicalization” who started reading extremist propaganda online during the Syria conflict.

• The cops who shoved a 75-year-old man to the ground for protesting were cleared of all wrongdoing. Because of course they were.

• Meanwhile, a panel on the Fifth Circuit of the US Court of Appeals ruled that police who tortured a teenage girl in custody didn’t violate her rights.

• Former St. Louis police officer Luther Hall, who was beaten by his fellow officers while working undercover during protests in the city in 2017, spoke out about his desire to leave the city and the lack of justice for his attackers.

• There’s very strong evidence that the Epstein-Barr virus causes multiple sclerosis, although why some infected people develop the autoimmune disorder and others don’t isn’t clear.

• Why aren’t Democrats doing anything to combat the GOP’s deranged claims that Democrats are all pedophiles and groomers?

• South Dakota AG Jason Ravsnborg, who killed a man in a hit-and-run accident, may face consequences after all as the Republican-led legislature has voted to impeach him.

• Texas is a shitshow in so many ways. Gov. Greg Abbott’s political stunt at the border has led truckers to demand that he stop inspections of every truck, a move he put in place due to baseless claims about border security. For a party that claims to be pro-business, this is a hell of a way to show it.

• Climate change is contributing to the spread of Japanese encephalitis in Australia.

• Techdirt decries major newspapers’ continuing failure to grasp social media.

• Opinion journalism is beset by structural problems and bad actors. There are ways to fix both of these issues, from better labeling of opinion vs. news pieces to proper editing (in a world where most publications have reduced editorial staff substantiall).

• Ukrainian hackers have published a tremendous amount of personal data on Russian troopse fighting in the current war, as have other activists seeking additional ways to fight back against Russia’s pointless invasion of its neighbor.

• The Titans’ new state-funded stadium will cost about $2 billion, and the economic impact figures the team has given the legislature appear to have been created out of thin air. Great use of public funds in a state that offers below-average education to its citizens.

• A Toronto man amassed a huge cache of guns and killed two men at random before his arrest, which may have prevented a mass shooting given the arsenal he had in his apartment.

• Board game news: Birds of a Feather is back on Kickstarter, and while it’s clearly meant to capitalize on Wingspan’s runaway success, it’s also a much lighter game aimed at a different audience.

• The newest game from publishers Lucky Duck Games (Chronicles of Crime) to hit Kickstarter is The Dark Quarter, a co-op narrative game set in New Orleans.

• Postmark Games has a print-and-play game called Voyages that just requires you to bring your own dice.