Stick to baseball, 6/18/22.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I updated my Big Board, ranking the top 100 prospects in this year’s draft class. I also held a Q&A on the site to answer questions about it, in which I was accused of “not doing my homework,” of course. Look for a mock draft this upcoming week, most likely Tuesday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the game Fantastic Factories, a fun engine-builder very similar to the great game Gizmos, but with the added twist of dice-rolling.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter last weekend, talking about going back to the Cape League for the first time in years, only to have a travel fiasco in multiple parts keep me from getting there. Also, 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 Black educator was hired by a Georgia school district to be its first DEI officer. White parents decided she was implementing critical race theory, forced her out of the job, and then harassed her out of her next job elsewhere. This ties into efforts by anti-CRT people to run  for school boards across the country (as detailed in the article).
• The Southern Poverty Law Center has added Jack Posobiec, the primary source for the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, to its list of extremists.
• The federal prison in Thomson, Illinois, is one of the deadliest such facilities in the country – after the feds moved it from Pennsylvania, where similar violence against inmates occurred.
• A 1977 memo to President Jimmy Carter outlined the risk of climate change from CO₂ emissions. Its predictions have largely come true so far.
• Former NFL and USFL star Herschel Walker, who is now running against Sen. Rafael Warnock in Georgia for that state’s Senate seat, has acknowledged having two ‘secret’ sons, even though he has made criticizing absentee fathers a core point in his platform.
• Meghan Stabile, a music promoter who was known for her work in both the jazz and hip-hop genres (and bringing the two together), died by suicide this week at age 39.
• The New Republic documents the rise in Pizzagate-like conspiracies, mostly targeting LGBTQ+ people, across the United States, with the threat of violence to follow. One example occurred in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, this past week, at a Pride event that the Patriot Front targeted. Ben Collins has a story on several such threats to LGBTQ+ events over at NBCNews.com.
• Texas agencies are fighting records release requests related to the mass shooting at an Uvalde elementary school. They’re also refusing to release bodycam footage because it “could expose law enforcement weakness.”
• A police detective in Miami stole $1300 during a drug bust, and wasn’t sentenced to any jail time.
• Simone Gold has been spreading COVID-19 misinformation for two years, and founded the group America’s Frontline Doctors, which has pushed HCQ and ivermectin despite the complete lack of any evidence that they do anything against the virus. She also was in the Capitol on January 6^th, and after pleading guilty, argued that her medical credentials should exempt her from prison. The judge didn’t buy it; he gave her 60 days.
• A Wisconsin school district investigated a Title IX complaint that several middle school students were harassing a nonbinary classmate by using the wrong pronouns, which led to national coverage of the investigation by right-wing outlets and a bomb threat that led the district to move to virtual learning for the last two months of its school year.
• Jamelle Bouie writes in the New York Times that the complacency of the Democratic “gerontocracy” is alienating younger, more progressive voters.
• The governing commission in Otero County, New Mexico, refused to certify local election results, citing the disproven claims about Dominion voting machines from the 2020 election.
• The Washington Post profiles a woman in Georgia also pushing claims of electoral fraud, known online as “Burnitdown.”
• An Alaska salmon processor has been fined nearly half a million dollars for repeated environmental violations.
• USA Today retracted 23 articles written by Gabriela Miranda after finding she misattributed quotes and might have fabricated sources. She has also resigned from the paper.
• A Pennsylvania court vacated a murder charge from 1931. Alexander McClay Williams, a Black teenager in Glen Mills, was convicted by an all-white jury of stabbing his teacher, and was executed six months later.
• Michele Catalano, whose now-defunct blog asmallvictory was one of the first I ever read regularly, wrote on her Substack about her current experiences with depression.
• Board game news: Cheese Factory, a quirky, light engine-builder, is already funded on Kickstarter.
• Bot Factory, a midweight game from designer Vital Lacerda (known for long, complex games like Lisboa and Kanban), is about halfway to its $100,000 goal.
• Return to Dark Tower was a huge success on Kickstarter and has been met with acclaim on its release. There’s now a licensed RPG based on the game that’s already 400 funded.
• Board game designer (Continuo) and “eccentric bridge player” Maureen Hiron died this week at age 80.