Stick to baseball, 8/12/23.

I’m back, in more ways than one – I took some PTO right after the deadline to go to Gen Con, get some downtime, and just generally focus on myself for once. I’ll be back at work on Monday, although my next article probably won’t run until later in the week.

I was quite busy leading up to the trade deadline. I started with my midseason re-ranking of the top 60 prospects in the minors. Then I started breaking down trades as they happened:

• Lucas Giolito and Reynaldo Lopez to the Angels
• Lance Lynn and Joe Kelly to the Dodgers
• Max Scherzer to Texas for Luisangel Acuña
• Jordan Montgomery to Texas & Jordan Hicks to Toronto
• Aaron Civale to Tampa Bay for Kyle Manzardo
• Jeimer Candelario back to the Cubs
• Justin Verlander to Houston for two 2022 draftees
• Jack Flaherty to Baltimore
• And a bunch of other smaller deals

Plus a brief look at some of the teams that did the best and the worst at the deadline.

Meanwhile, I wrapped up everything I saw and played at Gen Con, including my top ten games of the convention (which saw a record 70,000 unique attendees), and reviewed the family cooperative game Miller Zoo.

I’ve had two great guests on the Keith Law Show from the music world – Susanna Hoffs, talking about her debut novel This Bird Has Flown and her new album The Deep End; and Joe Casey of Protomartyr, talking about their new album Formal Growth in the Desert and his beloved Tigers. You can listen & subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links, gathered over the last four weeks…

• Longreads first: The best thing I’ve read in the last month was this lengthy New York Times story on how one family has dealt with the discovery that frontotemporal dementia, an inherited condition with no cure or treatment, is in their genes. It’s wonderfully written and centers the people without ever leering at or patronizing them.
• The Washington Post looks at how a Saudi company is draining scarce water resources in Arizona.
• The New Yorker profiled Sudan Archives, whose album Natural Brown Prom Queen was my #2 LP of 2022.
• Ed Yong announced he’s leaving The Atlantic (not my employer), but he did file a long piece on the shattering effects of long COVID.
• ProPublica continues to show how Harlan Crow bought himself a Supreme Court vote by treating Clarence Thomas to cruises on his yacht, securing Thomas’ support in cases that affected Crow’s tax bill.
• Ohio voters rejected the state Republican party’s bid to make it harder for voters to pass constitutional amendments. That ballot question, which lost badly in the election this past Tuesday, was boosted by about $4 million from the U-Line company’s owners. If you own or work at a company that’s shipping any kind of goods, don’t buy your boxes and materials from U-Line. And if you get a package from anyone in a box made by U-Line, ask them to find another vendor.
• Texas A&M suspended a professor for criticizing the state’s Lt. Governor, Dan Patrick (R). Which is the party of freedom and liberty? And which supports cancel culture?
• The President of Stanford has resigned after an investigation found manipulated research in three papers he co-authored.
• Also from the Post, a moving story about a missing persons case from 13 years ago that the reporter who covered it couldn’t shake, and what it meant when the criminal case was finally solved.
• Cory Doctorow points out how Tesla used its proprietary, DRM-protected software to tell drivers their cars had longer ranges than they actually did.
• Efforts to reduce the population of the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which spreads numerous diseases including malaria and dengue, may end up thwarted by climate change. Several groups have released mosquitos infected with the Wolbachia bacterium, which makes the mosquitos’ offspring nonviable, but that bacterium can’t survive when temperatures are regularly 95 degrees and above.
• This still seems so hard to believe, but scientists at the Livermore lab have used lasers to start a fusion reaction that created more energy than it required, which, in theory, could solve the looming energy crisis. I’m old enough to remember the “cold fusion” hoax, though, so I’d like to see a lot more of this.
• Scientific American looks at how the four-color map problem was solved via brute force.
• Donanemab may finally offer a huge step forward in the treatment of Alzheimer’s, with trials showing it can reduce cognitive decline in early-stage patients.
• RFK Jr’s conspiracy theory-laden campaign promises to make it easier for doctors to spread medical misinformation. Meanwhile, Sherri Tenpenny, who’s been pushing anti-vax garbage for probably twenty years now and claimed that COVID-19 vaccines would make people magnetic, had her medical license suspended by the state of Ohio for her failure to comply with an investigation.
• Meanwhile, an independent reporter unveils who’s funding the COVID-19 misinformation outfit the Brownstone Institute.
• This is almost a month old but it still holds up: Ron DeSantis has a Ron DeSantis problem.
• Texas took over the Houston Independent School District and is now closing the libraries at 28 schools there to convert them into jails discipline centers.
• WBEZ in Chicago published video showing Waukegan cops coercing a false confession from a 15-year-old.
• Footage emerged in Los Angeles of a sheriff’s department deputy punching a mother who was holding her baby.
• NPR examines the rising number of people without housing in this country and offers four reasons why we can’t solve this issue, although I think they ignored the reason that most voters won’t actually give up anything to help. Homelessness is someone else’s problem to way too many people.
• As every media entity on earth tries to be cool by celebrating hip-hop’s 50^th birthday, the BBC notes several pioneers who’ve been “written out of (rap) history,” including the Last Poets, the Watts Brothers, and Gil Scott-Heron, the last of whom you might at least know as the author of the poem “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.”
• San Diego’s Juniper and Ivy might be my favorite restaurant in the country, and I was just there again in April. They’ve switched to a prix fixe menu for August that may be temporary, although I wonder if this is a trial balloon of sorts. I’ll still go there any time I’m in the best city in the country.
• I’m not a big Starbucks customer; I don’t care for their coffee, although they do have good tea, and they offer a decent place to sit and work for a bit while I’m on the road. I’m going to have to rethink that as long as they’re engaging in a massive, dirty war against their own employees’ attempts to assert their right to organize.
• Board game news: The Kickstarter for Wizards & Co. is complete but you can still pre-order the game, which comes from the designers of games like Egizia, Coimbra, Lorenzo il Magnifico, and Alma Mater.
• Mistwind, designed by Daryl Andrews and Adrian Adamescu (Sagrada), is already about six times past its funding goal on Kickstarter.
• The fourth Iron Rail game, Age of Rail: South Africa, has just three days to go on its Kickstarter. I have to admit I was not a fan of Iberian Gauge, the second in the series.
• The next game from Elizabeth Hargrave (Wingspan) is Undergrove, which I believe is going to Kickstarter this fall. You can sign up here for updates from Alderac, the publisher.
• You can also sign up to be notified when the Kickstarter for Perch, an area-control game with a modular board, launches in a few weeks.