Stick to baseball, 12/10/22.

I’ve written a lot for the Athletic over the last two weeks, reacting to:

• José Abreu signing with Houston
• Zach Eflin signing with Tampa Bay
• Jacob deGrom signing with Texas
• Justin Verlander signing with the Mets
• Trea Turner signing with the Phillies
• The Andrew Heaney and Josh Bell signings
• Aaron Judge re-signing with the Yankees
• Willson Contreras signing with St. Louis
• Five signings in one: Masataka Yoshida, Kenley Jansen, Jameson Taillon, Cody Bellinger, José Quintana
• The Xander Bogaerts and Brandon Nimmo signings
• Fred McGriff’s selection to the Hall of Fame

Over at Paste, I wrapped up everything I played or saw at PAX Unplugged last weekend. That board game convention is why I didn’t run this post last week, of course. I’ll have my best new games of 2022 post up this upcoming week.

On my podcast, I spoke to Prof. Scott Hershovitz, author of Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Adventures in Philosophy with My Kids, about his book and some of the big themes in it. You can buy the book here, and you can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: The New Yorker has a truly remarkable profile of Metallica as they finish up their eleventh album, 72 Seasons, which comes out in April.

• Esquire has the story of Robert Telles, former Clark County Public Administrator, now charged with murdering the Las Vegas Review-Journal reporter who exposed his misdeeds in public office.

• Mississippi, a backwater region in the American South that ranks 50^th among all states for health care, 43^rd in education, and 49^th for its economy, took funds from a federal program aimed at helping poor families with children and used them to pay for volleyball practice facility at Southern Miss that Brett Favre had promised to pay for. They also paid $1.1 million from the same program to pay Favre for services never performed. In a functioning democracy, there’d be at least an investigation in the legislature into current Gov. Tate Reeves (R), but Mississippi is gerrymandered into oblivion and has disenfranchised 15% of Black residents, giving Republicans a supermajority in both houses, so nothing will happen.

• ProPublica exposes the abuses at a private school in Washington state that took taxpayer money while failing to protect or educate high-risk kids.

• ProPublica normally does great work, but they ran a garbage story about the debunked lab-leak hypothesis for COVID-19’s origins, and it was rife with obvious mistakes.

• There’s a ridiculous anti-vax film circulating online, called Died Suddenly, which is so shoddy that it claims that people who are indisputably alive actually died from the COVID-19 vaccine. Other anti-vaxxers are attacking it, saying it’s hurting their (bogus) cause. If you want more information on the various lies of Died Suddenly, much of which focuses on false claims of blood clots, you can find a lengthy takedown here on Science-Based Medicine.

• Grant Wahl, an acclaimed and respected soccer writer who has been an outspoken critic of the World Cup and the human rights abuses taking place in Qatar, died last night at a World Cup game. He was 48.

• Even as the Biden Administration tries to get major social media sites like Facebook to curb COVID misinformation, it’s thriving on fringe sites like Gab.

• Elon Musk has claimed protecting children is one of his top priorities as the owner of Twitter, but he’s laid off a huge chunk of the site’s child safety team.

• Ads appear on the pages of white nationalists Musk has unbanned from Twitter. I really don’t understand why any company would keep buying ads on the site right now.

• Meanwhile, Musk’s advisers appear to include a bunch of right-wing trolls, and the site has been banning a number of left-wing activists’ accounts.

• DonorsTrust, a dark-money, right-wing PAC, took in $425 million in anonymous contributions from just two donors in 2021. Not sure how this is compatible with democracy over the long term.

• A lobbyist for a Saudi alfalfa company that has been has been elected to the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, where he would have influence over a dispute about water usage in the state. Thomas Galvin’s employer grows alfalfa with scarce water in Arizona and ships it to Saudi Arabia to feed livestock there.

• Michael Harriot dismantled the defenses of Jerry Jones after a photo emerged of the Cowboys’ owner, who has never hired a Black coach, at the door of a school in 1957 where white students blocked Black kids from integrating.

• FIRE, which often defends conservatives on college campuses who feel their free speech rights have been abrogated, has an editorial calling out Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act” as a violation of the First Amendment.

• A naturopath claiming to be a doctor has been sentenced to three years in prison for selling fake vaccine cards. An ND is not a real doctor and naturopathy is woo.

• New Zealand took guardianship of a baby who needed a life-saving blood transfusion because the parents refused to allow it unless the blood were “unvaccinated,” which isn’t even a thing. This is what misinformation about vaccines gets us.

• A number of mainstream outlets have posted “just asking questions” pieces about gender-affirming care, including the New York Times. This Teen Vogue piece gets at what’s wrong with them. Science-Based Medicine has a longer read on everything that was wrong in that Times piece that attacked puberty blockers. Meanwhile, the Telegraph ran five anti-trans pieces on a single page last week.

• Hardly still news at this point, but it’s worth reiterating that Trump hosted white supremacist Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago, and most Republicans couldn’t even muster the courage to say this was bad.

• Have American right-wing candidates gotten too weird?

• The Uihleins, owners of the packaging supplies company U-Line, have partnered with an election denial organization in Arizona called Restoration Action, Inc. You should not buy anything from U-Line, ever.

• The 20-year-old son of Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt (R), who claimed the entire territory of the state “for Jesus,” was stopped by police while drinking, with gun case, in a vehicle, although he wasn’t driving. He pulled the “my dad’s the governor” card.

• Why does the media continue to take billionaires at their word? Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Sam Bankman-Fried … they promise things that the media just accepts without question, and then don’t deliver, or it turns out they were lying.

• Speaking of which, the forces trying to get public funding for a new stadium for the Titans have made a lot of big promises of economic returns. Turns out they’re probably exaggerating.  

• Back in high school, Frank LaRose, Ohio’s Secretary of State (R), “willed” a classmate “a rope and a tree” as part of a series of racist jokes he and friends made in the class yearbook.

• The Brevard County Sheriff seems to be planning to impose corporal discipline in the county’s schools, with the help of the school board and new superintendent.

• HarperCollins, publisher of both of my books, issued a response to the ongoing strike by the HCP Guild, which is asking for better pay, better diversity initiatives, and more security for union members.

• National Geographic has some of the details scientists have learned about the massive 2021 volcanic explosion on the Pacific island nation of Tonga.

• Board game news: Mapping the World, a new game about cartography, is only halfway to its goal with just two days to go on Kickstarter.

• Empire’s End, a new citybuilder from John D. Clair (Mystic Vale, Space Base), is 4x funded with five days to go on Kickstarter.

• Aelderman, a resource-management Euro game that looks like it’s in the Orléans mold, just passed its funding goal on Kickstarter this week.

• Shake that City!, a sort of roll-and-place puzzle game from Alderac, is also fully funded with four days to go. You shake a device with nine cubes in it and they come out in a random pattern that tells you how to place the related tiles on your board.