Stick to baseball, 9/4/22.

One new post for subscribers to The Athletic this week, looking at some of the more significant or interesting September callups from the last seven days. Some other good names, like Triston Casas, came up after I wrote it.

My podcast returned this week with Dan Pfeiffer, former senior adviser to President Barack Obama and author of the new book Battling the Big Lie: How Fox, Facebook, and the MAGA Media Are Destroying America. You can subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: The New Yorker looks at the roots of Justice Samuel Alito’s crusade to make America an explicitly Christian nation, regardless of the Constitution’s protections against this.
• Multiple women have accused Arcade Fire co-leader Win Butler of sexual misconduct, as reported by Pitchfork.
• This long Vanity Fair profile of Washington Post executive editor Sally Buzbee sure makes it sound like she’s going to both-sides our political moment.
• Not sure if I linked this previously, but this study in Science should be (have been) the final nail in the “lab-leak” hypothesis, which is now just a conspiracy theory pushed by cranks and grifters in the face of such strong evidence for a zoonotic origin.
• NBC News’ Ben Collins pulls back the curtain on Kiwi Farms, a message board where trolls dox their targets, mostly LGBTQ+ people and women, leading to at least two suicides and substantial real-world harassment, including swatting attacks. After the article ran, Kiwi Farms’ trolls doxxed Collins and threatened further attacks and even violence, so Cloudflare, their caching and DDoS protection provider, finally dropped them as a free client.
• Dialectical behavior therapy, or DBT, is the best tool we have to help self-harming and suicidal teens, but it’s widely underused, in part because it’s expensive and insurance carriers often deny coverage.
• A secular activist sent signs saying “In God We Trust” in Arabic to Carroll ISD in Texas, because the theocratic state has a policy saying any such signs must be displayed in a “conspicuous” place, but of course the district is refusing to display them, as well as signs that say it in rainbow-colored letters.
• Having a miscarriage or stillbirth in Alabama can land you 18 years in prison if a jury decides that you used drugs and those caused the loss of the pregnancy.
• Ginni Thomas, the wife of a sitting Supreme Court justice, tried to get lawmakers in both Arizona and Wisconsin to nullify Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 Presidential election.
• The Council for National Policy has long operated in secret while helping conservatives try to take over multiple levels of the U.S., state, and local governments, but a recent leak has given us a glimpse at how the clandestine group works.
• Philadelphia chef Jim Burke died early last month at 49 due to a rare lung cancer. He’d previously worked at James and Wm. Mulherin & Sons. I met him briefly last winter, as he was involved in several projects down here in Wilmington as well.
• The Houston Chronicle’s editorial board writes that the U.S. had eradicated polio, but anti-vaxxers have brought it back.
• Here’s yet another study showing that COVID-19 vaccines reduce infectiousness – that is, if you’re vaccinated and still get the virus, you are less likely to spread it.
• California lawmakers approved funding to keep the state’s only nuclear reactor running well into the future, a key component of reducing our emissions of CO2 and other gases that contribute to climate change.
• Mississippi, a state so poorly run it can’t even provide running water to residents of its capital and largest city, also may have paid $70 million in federal welfare funds to various cronies do things like give motivational speeches, including over $1 million to Brett Favre – who never even made the speeches for which he was paid. One party has controlled every aspect of the state government of Mississippi since 2012.
• New Hampshire libertarians calling themselves Free Staters are trying to dismantle the state government from within, notably attacking public schools, as part of their goal of forming an independent “libertarian utopia.”
• The New York Times is running nine editorials asking ‘what are schools for?’ Guess how many slots went to teachers.
• The ridiculous but still concerning lawsuit that tried to stop bookstores from selling the YA book Gender Queer has been dismissed. The plaintiffs, a couple of homophobic men from Virginia, claimed the book met the definition of obscenity.
• If you’re seeing book bans enacted or proposed in your area, here’s an editorial on how to fight back from the Washington Post.
• Florida, meanwhile, is trying to force public-school teachers to indoctrinate students with conservative ideology (video).
• Brock Turner, who sexually assaulted an unconscious woman but got just six months in prison (and served only three) because the judge didn’t want to ruin his life, is now running around bars in Ohio.
• Brittany Aldean, the wife of country music singer Jason Aldean, posted a shitty transphobic joke on her Instagram page, and now claims she was taken out of context.
• Candace Buckner, also of the Washington Post, writes about John Wall’s recent comments about his depression and thoughts of suicide.
• Board game news: You can pre-order Clank! Catacombs, a new version of Clank! with a modular board and some new elements brought over from the legacy game, and read some of the designer diaries.
• The Kickstarter closed but you can still download the free version of the print-and-play game Sunshine City (and I’m sure there will be a way to just buy the whole $5 package).
• Cartouche, a game from the co-designer of the upcoming game The Fox Experiment (alongside Wingspan designer Elizabeth Hargrave), is on Pledgemanager for $39 and up, although I don’t see an end date for the campaign.