For subscribers to The Athletic, I posted my first mock draft for 2022, and took reader questions in a Q&A on the site that afternoon.
On the Keith Law Show, I spoke with Jonathan Higgs of the band Everything Everything about their new album Raw Data Feel, which came out on Friday. You can subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I do send out a free email newsletter about twice a month, and for those of you who said you would attend an in-person event with me in London, it’s in the works now, so thank you all for responding. Speaking of books, Smart Baseball and The Inside Game are both available in paperback, and you can buy them at your local independent book store or at Bookshop.org.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: A new “war on terror” is the wrong approach to fighting domestic terrorism, but would just further curtail our civil liberties withot making us any safer.
- A politically connected testing lab earned contract after contract for COVID testing in Nevada, but its tests didn’t work.
- In an extra from her memoir, Selma Blair talks about first learning she had multiple sclerosis.
- Miami’s mayor is a crypto advocate, and got the city involved with one such scheme – and the coin’s value has since dropped 95%. The article doesn’t even mention the environmental impact of cryptocurrency mining, which would seem especially important to a city like Miami.
- Texas’s General Land Officer, led by Commissioner George P. Bush, diverted federal hurricane relief funds away from coastal communities to inland ones that are whiter and more likely to vote Republican.
- The New York Times ran a story commemorating the 50th anniversary of Dr. John Fryer’s speech to the American Psychiatric Association, where he revealed he was gay, doing so while wearing a disguise and without revealing his real name. The speech led to the removal of homosexuality from the APA’s Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). The excellent documentary Cured covers this story at greater length.
- Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ed Yong points out that modest hospitalization numbers don’t tell the whole story about how much stress COVID-19 has put on our health care system.
- Why are there gigantic blobs of molten rock and water in the Earth’s lower mantle?
- The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has the inside story on how the Rams’ ownership worked the NFL to secure the team’s move back to Los Angeles.
- Pennsylvania Republicans who helped pass a mail-in voting law are now trying to get it thrown out.
- The deaths of two Ohio State students due to fake Adderall that contained fentanyl gave rise, once again, to the myth that there’s fentanyl-laced cannabis in the wild.
- Police in Highland Park, Michigan, seized a privately-owned building on dubious grounds, and then demanded that the owners buy the department two new police cars for its return. The department did give the building back to its owners without the ransom, but what are the consequences for the officials involved in this extortion?
- Now right-wing politicians and media figures are targeting comedians who mock them, sending a torrent of threats and abuse their way.
- A Twitter exec posted some thoughts on how much spam there actually is on the site, and what the company is doing to combat it.
- The Society for Academic Emergency Medicine held its annual convention in New Orleans, and they posted (and deleted) a tweet from there showing members unmasked at an indoor concert.
- A couple of right-wing nutjobs who also happen to hold office in the Virginia Beach area are suing Barnes and Noble to get specific LGBTQ+ books removed. I’m sure the party of laissez-faire capitalism will put a stop to its own people doing this any minute now!
- These ridiculous laws in the American South that prohibit teachers from discussing racism are now making it very difficult for them to discuss the white nationalist who shot up a grocery store in a majority-Black Buffalo neighborhood.
- The assaults on voting rights and abortion rights are inextricably linked, writes Brandon Tensley at CNN. It’s clear that the theocratic minority is more than happy to subvert the will of the majority if it suits their superstitious purposes.
- The highly polarized public debate over abortion does not accurately reflect the nuanced views of the public, writes Christine Emba at the Washington Post.
- Board game news: I didn’t know that a new version of Can’t Stop!, Sid Sackson’s addictive push-your-luck game, had come out from Eagle-Gryphon.
- I backed the campaign for a new solitaire game called Resist!, based on the rebels who fought the fascist regime in Spain after the Spanish Civil War.