Stick to baseball, 9/17/22.

My one new post this week for The Athletic is a scouting notebook looking at some Yankees and Red Sox prospects, including Jasson Dominguez, Yoendrys Gomez, and Cedanne Rafaela. I’ve had to push some things off, as I got sick on Tuesday and it turns out that my COVID number is finally up.

My guest on The Keith Law Show this week was Dr. Justin E.H. Smith, author of the book The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, A Philosophy, A Warning, which you can buy here on Bookshop.org. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

My free email newsletter returned today after a long hiatus, describing my COVID experience so far and linking to a lot of the stuff I’ve written over the last few weeks.

And now, the links…

• Hasidic private schools in New York City fail to provide even the most basic secular education to students, but have taken in $1 billion in taxpayer money, according to an extensive New York Times investigation. It would appear that various Mayors and Governors have declined to fully examine the issue for fear of alienating the Hasidic voting bloc.

• “Satanic panic” is back, thanks to QAnon, right-wing influencers, and major media members like Fox News hosts.

• The chairman of the Alabama GOP refused to show his photo ID to vote, and then had the poll worker who asked him to show it fired. It appears this is part of a larger pattern of behavior for John Wahl and his family, who hold substantial power through their Anabaptist sect.

• Marcus Mumford spoke to the L.A. Times about his new album and its discussion of the abuse he suffered as a child.

• The Denver Post argues that Rep. Lauren Boebert is a Christian nationalist, and part of a dangerous movement that threatens American democracy..

• Years of investigations by the Kansas City Star and other outlets appear to have resulted in the arrest this week of a former Kansas City, Kansas, detective who stands accused of raping two women, taking money from drug dealers, and framing innocent people. It’s unbelievable how long people were aware of what Roger Golubski was allegedly doing, yet he was able to continue to do it, and even retired from one department and got a job with another.

• Portland, Oregon, police had evidence two years ago in the case of the 2019 killing of a prominent anti-fascist activist, but sat on it for two years before making an arrest in August.

• Why on earth are some Gen-Z folks starting to talk up the Unabomber’s manifesto?

• People pushing the lab-leak conspiracy theory, including Jeffrey Sachs (an economist with no background in science), are doing great harm by advocating a belief that is contrary to all available evidence.

• A Black protester in South Carolina is likely to give birth in jail, where she’s serving a four-year sentence for being mean to cops. She was convicted of “breaching the peace in a high and aggravated manner.”

• The man accused of killing Eliza Fletcher was investigated for a 2021 rape, but the Memphis DA’s rape kit backlog is so long that the results didn’t come back until September 5^th. You would think this would lead to calls for increased funding to process rape kits.

• A Detroit-area man who killed his wife and shot his adult daughter had fallen into a QAnon rabbit hole, according to other members of his family.

• …as international experts warn that right-wing extremism is becoming more mainstream.

• A lawsuit against the state of Texas includes evidence from a mother whose 13-year-old trans son was pulled out of class and questioned for over an hour by state “investigators.”

• The co-chair of the Michigan state GOP referred to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg as “a weak little girl.”

• The Uihlein family, owners of the U-Line shipping materials company, have helped pay for fake-newspaper mailers blasting Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker while trafficking in transphobic and homophobic rhetoric. Don’t buy from U-Line.

• Fred Franzia, the winemaker behind the popular $2 wines known as Two Buck Chucks, died this week at 79.

• Candace Owens claimed that British colonization of Africa was actually a good thing for the colonized people.

• An Iowa law on restitution for victims of violence means that a woman who, at age 15, killed the man who raped and trafficked her, owes his family $150,000. It is, literally, a law of unintended consequences. A GoFundMe for the woman has raised nearly three times that amount already.

• Students and staff at Seattle Pacific University are suing the school over its anti-LGBTQ+ hiring policies.

• Jennifer Rubin writes in the Washington Post that the Christian right is ignoring the biggest threat to their existence: Declining religiosity in younger generations. The younger you are, the less likely you are to identify as Christian, or as religious at all.

• There’s a campaign afoot on the right to penalize businesses that work towards environmental or social goals, much like Florida is trying to penalize businesses that don’t support Gov. DeSantis’s agenda. The party that claims to support free enterprise isn’t adhering to the “free” part of it.

• Noted liberal rag (checks notes) Bloomberg has an op ed arguing that the Texas judicial ruling that companies could decline to cover PrEP treatment for employees takes religious freedom too far.

• Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp said he’d be open to banning contraception in the next legislative session.

• The American Library Association reported a huge increase in book-banning efforts across the country so far in 2022.

• Khruangbin’s new album is a collaboration with Vieux Farka Touré, reimagining the songs of his father, the legendary Malian musician Ali Farka Touré.

• Board game news: You can pre-order the latest game in the Unmatched series, Houdini vs. The Genie.

• Sagrada: Artisans, the legacy version of the great dice-drafting game Sagrada, is now on Kickstarter and already funded.

• Age of Inventors, an economic/resource management game from a small Greek publisher, is also on Kickstarter and also funded this week.

• Dune: War for Arrakis, an asymmetrical area-control game pitting the houses Atreides and Harkonnen against each other, is also on Kickstarter, and fully funded even with a higher goal. It seems like it’s designed primarily for two players, but with 3 or 4 the extra players control “sub-factions” loyal to one house or the other.