Stick to baseball, 9/2/23.

Nothing new this week at the Athletic beyond contributing notes on the callups of Jasson Dominguez and Ceddanne Rafaela.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the board game Bamboo, a cute medium-box game that’s a pretty meaty game at heart.

I appeared on two podcasts this week, talking to Jim Margalus of Sox Machine about the White Sox’ front office turmoil and to Chris Crawford about eight prospects who’ve had surprising years, four positive and four negative.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: The writer Naomi Klein writes in the Guardian about being confused with the crackpot Naomi Wolf and how people fall for conspiracy theories online, part of her upcoming book Doppelganger.
• Albanian youths bought into the hype of influencers who claimed they’d found riches elsewhere, leading to a shortage of young people staying in the town of Kukes.
• The Atlantic profiles the latest Presidential candidate/grifter, Vivek Ramaswamy, who seems to think January 6^th was something other than an insurrection of idiots and might be a 9/11 truther. He also claims he’s not “bought and paid for” but is a major investor in companies fighting climate change policies.
• Florida state officials sought opposing viewpoints on slavery while reviewing the AP African-American Studies curriculum. The Tampa Bay Times has more details on how Gov. Ron DeSantis’s “anti-woke” policies have led to this embarrassing situation.
• In the late 1950s, Spain built a dam that should have flooded the thousand-year-old town of Granadilla, leading authorities to evacuate it. Sixty-odd years later, the town remains above water, but residents and their descendants still can’t return.
• ProPublica exposes a Chicago cop who’s lied under oath at least 44 times, putting dozens more cases at risk.
• Do you follow a doctor or scientist on social media who’s always promoting their subscription newsletter? The BMJ ran an opinion piece on how those pose a conflict of interest.
• The San Francisco Chronicle looks at how the New York Times has covered (badly) the national assault on trans rights.
• Try to contain your surprise, but Republicans blocked a bill that would have required dark money groups to reveal their donors’ identities.
• The Katy ISD in Texas has halted all new book purchases for its schools because of objections to any books with LGBTQ+ themes.
• Disgraced Spanish soccer official Luis Rubiales is facing a national inquiry over his forced kiss of a Spanish women’s national team player; meanwhile, his mother is going on a hunger strike over what she claims is unfair treatment of her creep son.
• Atlanta magazine has lost much of its editorial staff after its publisher and editor-in-chief told writers to cut back on “woke” coverage of one of the south’s most diverse cities.
• Azerbaijani forces have blocked food shipments to the Armenian exclave of Nagorno-Karabach, leading to a massive humanitarian disaster.
• The Gabonese military overthrew the country’s latest leader, the third in the line of the Bongo family that had ruled the country for 55 rules. Is it a real change in power or more of the same?
• Big Gay Ice Cream was one of the hottest brands in the company before the pandemic hit, but mismanagement and a fight for control have reduced the brand to just one NYC outpost and left the future of the company in doubt.
• Billy Bragg tore apart country singer Oliver Anthony’s faux working class song “Rich Men North of Richmond” for the Guardian and recorded his own response track calling on people to join and support labor unions if they actually care about the plight of blue collar workers.
• Saudi Arabia has sentenced a critic of the regime to death for his tweets. Very nice for an ally of the United States and a primary owner of the site formerly known as Twitter.
• When VICE declared bankruptcy, its executives still got paid even when its employees didn’t.
• I missed this in June but a unique Magic: the Gathering card representing the One Ring from the Lord of the Rings trilogy was valued at over $2 million by companies offering a bounty for whoever pulled the card.
• If you’re having trouble falling asleep, cognitive behavioral therapy may help.