I had two new pieces up this week for subscribers to The Athletic, my second minor league scouting notebook from the Cactus League and a draft blog post on a few potential first-rounders I saw in Arizona. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday. I’m down with some sort of cold right now, though, so I’ll be away from the stadium for a bit.
My first column for Wirecutter on board games, giving recommendations for five great roll-and-write games for different age/skill levels, ran this week.
My podcast will return this week, now that I’m off the road (and even if I’m still not 100% on Monday). I am about to send out a new issue of my free email newsletter today, though.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: The Atavist has the story of Lesley Hu, whose ex-husband was so brainwashed by anti-vaxxers whose content he found online that he killed their son rather than allow him to be vaccinated. It’s a horrifying story of misinformation, mental illness, and a court system unprepared to deal with these cases.
- You’ve probably seen the ProPublica story about the conservative billionaire who’s been lavishing gifts on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for twenty-plus years. The most important thing to remember – and, if you’re outraged, to keep telling your Representative and Senators – is that it’s fairly clear that Thomas broke the law by failing to disclose these gifts.
- BMC Infectious Diseases is set to retract a paper published last year that claimed, with insufficient evidence (to put it mildly), that COVID-19 vaccines had caused up to 278,000 deaths. How did such a terrible study get through peer review? The problem is with the process, not just this particular paper.
- I linked to a story a few months back about a U.S. Marine who used the courts to kidnap an Afghan baby whose parents had been killed but who had living relatives willing to take her in. This past week, a different U.S judge voided the adoption. It’s not over, but this is a step in the right direction. The Marine and his wife used their Christianity as a justification for taking the child, who is now 4 years old.
- Mississippi is about to create a separate, state-appointed court to oversee the city of Jackson, meaning white state officials will determine the judges who rule over the 80% Black municipality.
- Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and his handpicked, denialist Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo omitted key data from a flawed COVID vaccine report that claimed that young men should not get these safe, effective immunizations. Infection with COVID-19 carries a much greater risk of cardiac-related deaths than the vaccines do, but the report left out data showing this.
- A writer who used to cover the Tennessee State House says the legislature has been trending in the direction of autocracy for years now.
- Iowa is increasing its funding to the so-called Field of Dreams stadium, which will run between $52 million and $57 million in public support.
- Republicans are mad that young voters keep tipping elections to Democrats, often progressive ones, so now they’re trying to make it harder for college students to vote.
- Why do so many of the people on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list of entrepreneurs and business leaders end up in prison?
- There’s a shortage of the wonderful French herbal liqueur known as Chartreuse, but it’s not because of supply-chain issues: The monks decided not to make as much of it.
- I wasn’t familiar with the Indian metal band Bloodywood, who fuse Western styles from thrash to death metal to rap-metal with Indian folk music, but they’ve become a breakout act in a country that has never embraced the metal genre the way other nations with comparable arts scenes have.
- An atheist prisoner in West Virginia has sued the state for making Christian-affiliated programming a required part of his release conditions.
- Board game news: Klaus Teuber, the designer of the game now known simply as Catan, died this week at age 70. The New York Times, Washington Post, and Boardgamegeek all published worthwhile obituaries, honoring the man whose creation has sold over 40 million copies and divided board game history into Before and After. Catan and Ticket to Ride are the two games that did the most to turn me into a board gamer, and in turn into something of a board game writer, too.
- Inside Up Games has a huge hit on its hands with Earth, which I’ll be reviewing this month or in early May and which I think is the favorite right now to win the Kennerspiel des Jahres. Their next big release, the route-building and resource management game Terminus, is on Kickstarter now.
- Alderac’s Kickstarter for Let’s Go to Japan ends in just over two more days.
The Atavist story on Lesley Hu and her poor son is devastating. It especially hits home with me, as just a couple weeks ago, a mother in my neighborhood was executed in her front yard in broad daylight by her ex-husband. The woman had filed multiple DV complaints and was in the process of getting a restraining order while living in hiding with her two young children. But the ex-husband followed her home from school drop-off one morning to do the unthinkable.
This is an area where our society and court system have to do better. Of course there are no easy solutions, but tolerating the feeling of complete helplessness while just hoping that disaster doesn’t strike is just not good enough.