I’m returning from a long vacation to England and Wales, one in which I was barely online and enjoyed this tremendously. A couple of folks reached out to see if my absence from the internet was due to something unfortunate, and I appreciate that you checked in.
Before I started this break, I had a slew of articles for subscribers to The Athletic, including a ranking of the top 60 prospects in the minors that included recent draftees; some thoughts on which teams did best and worst at the trade deadline; and breakdowns of the Juan Soto trade, the Frankie Montas trade; the Josh Hader trade; and some smaller deals from that final day. I held a Q&A at the Athletic on August 1st.
Before this vacation, I took a few days to head to Indianapolis to go to Gen Con, the largest board game convention in North or South America, and wrote about it in two posts for Paste – one ranking the ten best games I played there, and another discussing everything else I tried or saw. I also reviewed the very disappointing new Stranger Things game, Attack of the Mind Flayer.
My podcast will return this upcoming week, as will my newsletter.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: The New York Times details the numerous allegations against former Gravity Payments CEO Dan Price, who had become a media darling for his decision to raise his company’s minimum salary to $70K a year (which, to be clear, is still good!) and his tweets about excessive CEO pay and living wages.
- Bob Nutting, owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates, bought the Aspen Times newspaper, and in what appears to be a concerted effort with a Russian oligarch, suppressed negative coverage in the 140-year-old paper, according to a former editor.
- Climate change is causing a mass movement of people from the worst-hit areas, and we need to prepare for it.
- NBC News has the story of a Texas mom campaigning to ban LGBTQ+ themed books from school libraries – even though her own son is gay.
- Texas’ abortion law made one woman’s wanted pregnancy a medical nightmare. Republicans trying to ban abortion are worse at failing to anticipate consequences than Bud Selig was.
- The BBC looks back at the failure of Disney and Miramax to sell Hayao Miyazaki’s film Princess Mononoke to American audiences.
- Dr. Angela Rasmussen, one of the authors of the recent studies that showed that COVID-19 almost certainly had a natural origin, discussed the toxic “lab-leak” discource on social media, one pushed by bad actors, including people with books to sell.
- Dan Szymborski wrote about how the Fernando Tatis suspension is a loss for baseball, not just for Padres fans.
- Two billionaires, Jeff Yass and Dick Uihlein, are funding a far-right election denier in Nevada’s Senate race. Uihlein’s money comes from U-Line, his closely held packaging company. If I get a package in an U-Line box, I ask the shipper or vendor to use someone else for their packaging needs.
- A Nigerian doctor tried to warn the world about monkeypox back in 2016, but nobody listened.
- President Biden has almost completely stopped drone attacks in Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, and Syria, compared not just to his immediate predecessor but to President Obama as well.
- This was inevitable: some sore-loser parents used Utah’s anti-trans law to question the gender of the girl who beat their daughters in a track event.
- Meanwhile, far-right transphobes are harassing Boston Children’s Hospital employees over false claims that the hospital is conducting gender-affirming surgeries on trans kids.
- Reader Dr. Paul Sax wrote a personal piece about why abortions are medical care.
- The Washington Post wrote about how Indy Star reporters showed that the story of a pregnant 10-year-old who had to travel out of Ohio to Indiana for an abortion was, in fact, not a hoax. (And then Indiana banned all abortions, because that state is also a theocracy.)
- Board game news: The Kickstarter for Trailblazers, a short, portable family game about hiking and kayaking, funded in less than two hours.
- Level Up Dice made custom polyhedral dice from metal melted down from a German WWII tank, and then had to apologize for it.
Welcome back, KLaw. We missed you.
I don’t personally use Twitter but I actually did check yours last night to see if you were okay. Baseball writing isn’t the same without your smart ass self.
“worse at failing to anticipate consequences than Bud Selig was.”
I’m really interested in which examples are your favorites!
Welcome back!
Keith, thank you so much for sharing my family’s story. My wife and I hope that by publishing this experience, we can remind everyone that reproductive options are a human right, and cannot be taken for granted.
Paul
p.s. hope you had a good time in the UK
Hope you had a great vacation, and glad to see your posts again.
The story about the guy whose family cut him off because of his sexual orientation is so sad. The lack of self-awareness on the part of his father when he said, “Have you ever considered the pain you have put your mother and I through?,” is pretty staggering.
I’m genuinely curious if the mother, who has worked so hard to remove a handful of books from the library, is aware that the internet is awash in actual pornography.
Sounds like you enjoyed your vacation. I hope you had Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch on your itinerary, or spent enough time in Wales that you can flawlessly pronounce it on an upcoming podcast episode.
Welcome back, Keith. If your website stats show an IP address in Illinois hitting refresh a handful of times per day since you left, that was me.
I’m willing to bet all the money in my wallet (13 whole dollars as of this writing) that the parents who questioned the gender of a track athlete are also “not everybody gets a trophy” folks without recognizing a hint of the irony.
Thank you for returning and your explanation Keith. Hopefully we will get additional (free) content for subscribers to make up for the lost time.
So weird that you post as Steve and then as John. Maybe because you’re just a troll?