Stick to baseball, 6/4/22.

No new articles from me this week at The Athletic, but that will change over the weekend after I see Kumar Rocker on Saturday night.

On my podcast, I spoke with Sports Illustrated’s Emma Baccellieri about the “sweeper” slider, Brett Phillips, the Mets, and being Italian-American. You can subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Three Sisters, a fantastic new roll-and-write game from the designers of Fleet: The Dice Game.

I do send out a free email newsletter about twice a month. My two 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 fake story about an Illinois high school supposedly using “race-based” grading went viral even though it was generated by a pink-slime news site, getting shared by Josh Kraushaar of National Journal, Andrew Sullivan (who doesn’t seem to have admitted his error), and the abhorrent Libs of TikTok account. This is what the death of local news gives us: planted news stories, just credible enough to fool people who’ll gladly spread them around, and once they’re out of the can you’re never getting them back in.
• My friend Zabe Bent wrote a piece for the Los Angeles Review of Books imploring Americans, especially those of us who are white, to fight more to change the pattern of police murders of unarmed Black people.
• Emily Oster was named to the TIME 100 list of the 100 most influential people in the world, but her writing to the COVID-19 pandemic has not been evidence-based – and has earned her financial support from Charles Koch and Peter Thiel.
• Two great retrospectives on The Wire on the twentieth anniversary of its premiere, from Alan Sepinwall at Rolling Stone and from James Poniewozik at The New York Times.
• Also in Rolling Stone, how director Cary Fukunaga used his power to pursue and harass young women on his film sets.
• Tim Grierson wrote about Al Pacino’s breakout performance in The Godfather for the fiftieth anniversary of that film’s premiere. It’s quite something to see an understated Pacino before his woo-ah! days.
• BBC Food profiles the Kigali, Rwanda restaurant Meza Malonga, whose chef-owner Dieuveil Malonga owns two farms and traveled to 48 African countries to learn about the continent’s many regional cuisines.
• Vladimir Putin is increasingly relying on private mercenaries from The Wagner Group, and the U.S. has had little luck in stopping the company’s spread even after reports of human rights violations in Syria, Ukraine, and the Central African Republic.
• The New Yorker looks at how Uvalde’s local newspaper covered the massacre at their elementary school, where the victims included the daughter of the paper’s receptionist.
• Meanwhile, the town’s police chief, who was sworn in as a city council member in a secret (and probably unconstitutional) ceremony, is refusing to talk to investigators about the cops’ failure to stop the killer.
• If you’re unsure about the need for reforming our gun laws, I strongly recommend you watch this two-minute video.
• Russia has already set up disinformation outlets in Ukraine to push its propaganda, including false claims of Nazi supporters and Ukrainian atrocities.
• The executive producer of the revival of Queer as Folk wrote for Variety about Republicans’ use of trans panic and the need for greater queer representation in media.
• A peer-reviewed journal chose to publish a falsehood-filled editorial written by a COVID-19 denialist. Skeptical Raptor debunks the piece, but we don’t know why the journal’s editors would let such nonsense pass.
• Florida threatened to fine the Special Olympics over $27 millionfor imposing a vaccine requirement on its events this weekend. The organizers backed down.
• Ohio Republicans passed a bill that calls for genital examinations of “suspected” trans athletes. Mad your kid lost in the hurdles? Embarrass the winner by demanding the officials check their gonads!
• The Atlantic’s Katherine Wu writes that we are all likely to get COVID-19 repeatedly now that the virus has become endemic and we’ve pretty much all given up on mitigation methods.
• Reynolds American, the giant tobacco company owned by British American Tobacco, donated nearly $6 million to political candidates, PACs, and ballot initiative committees during 2021, 80% of it to Republicans or conservatives.
• A right-wing militia member shot and killed a retired judge in Wisconsin and had a hit list that included the names of other politicians, including Governor Tony Evers (D).
• Christian nationalism is on the rise, with Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene (R) making it explicit in comments this week (if you oppose Christian nationalism, in her words, you’re a “domestic terrorist”), and the media has been very late to cover and call out these seditionists, even though the movement has been building for decades.
• The Council for Economic Accountability is trying to mobilize to fight public funding for a new stadium for the Washington Commanders.
• The BBC profiled Jessica Cisneros, who may be about to lose her primary challenge to Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX). Cisneros should be part of the future of the party – she’s a woman of color, pro-union, pro-choice, pro-immigrant – but the Democratic powers that be chose to back Cuellar, who opposes abortion rights, labor rights, and immigration reform.
• Board game news: BGG’s Designer Diaries series has an entry from Tom Lehmann, designer of Res Arcana, on his latest game, Dice Realms, which just came out last month from Rio Grande. It clocks in at $120 due to the customizable dice at the heart of the game.