Stick to baseball, 10/7/23.

I’ve had one post up for subscribers to the Athletic since the last roundup, with my hypothetical postseason awards ballots for 2023. I do have another story filed for Sunday, so keep an eye skinned for that.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Votes for Women, a (mostly) two-player, asymmetrical game about the fight for women’s suffrage. It’s fantastic, and I also love that this review went up the week that Glynis Johns turned 100.

On the Keith Law Show this week, my guest was MLB’s Sarah Langs, talking about the season that was, who she would vote for in the various awards, and what excited her about this year’s playoff teams. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: Rolling Stone’s Sean Williams writes about being conned by a con artist who tried to get the journalist to write a long profile/feature on him to further a movie deal, only for Williams to discover that the fraudster had as many as 200 victims of various romance and other scams over the last forty years.
• The Washington Post looks at how climate change increases the demand and need for air conditioning, which in turn contributes more to climate change. Cooling a world that’s getting hotter requires increasing levels of energy, and we still rely far too much on energy-production methods that pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
• An effective vaccine against tuberculosis would save millions of lives; it’s the deadliest infectious disease in the world, killing 1.6 million people a year. When pharmaceutical company GSK developed a vaccine for it, they chose instead to use the technology for a shingles vaccine, keeping the TB vaccine off the market for years.
• Workers in California who cut stone countertops are coming down with silicosis, an incurable and terminal disease.
• Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull gave a very candid interview to the San Diego Union-Tribune ahead of the band’s concert last month in that city.
• Dr. Peter Hotez warns that antiscience conspiracy theorists are growing in power and organization, threatening public health and the scientists working on projects like new vaccines – such as the brand-new vaccine against malaria, potentially one of the biggest global health breakthroughs in decades.
• SARS-CoV-2 infects coronary arteries and arterial plaque, which increases the risk of heart attack and stroke in people who have or had COVID-19.
• NBC News’s Ben Collins may have found a clue to why Elon Musk bought Twitter only to destroy it. Musk also wiped out the company’s election integrity team and cut the group targeting disinformation on the site.
• Rumble host Stew Peters called for the execution of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. Media Matters found ads for the NFL appearing on Peters’ Twitter account, including one near a link to the video of his death threat.
• Fact-checking had a big moment between the 2020 election and the pandemic, with news organizations hiring more fact-checkers and more independent groups combating misinformation online, but nothing has really changed and now the effort has stalled.
• Italy’s right-wing government has moved to erase LGBTQ+ people, especially parents, from their society.
• Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has spent millions of taxpayer dollars defending his “anti-woke” laws targeting LGBTQ+ rights, public education, Disney, and more, only to lose repeatedly in the courts.
• Harris County, Texas, taxpayers are in a similar boat, having paid over $1 million to people roped into County DA Kim Ogg’s (D) prosecutions of public officials with whom she’s feuded.
• Republicans in North Carolina passed a bill to grab power from the Governor so they can control elections in the state, which already has a gerrymandered legislative map. Gov. Roy Cooper (D) vetoed Senate Bill 749, but the body is set to override his veto on Tuesday.
• Delaware became the 17^th state to ban the “gay panic” defense, where a defendant accused of a violent act claims the act is justified because their victim was LGBTQ+.
• A city commissioner in Anchorage, Alaska, who had a previous history of fraud, has been indicted for fraudulently taking $1.6 million in COVID-19 relief funds. She and her husband are accused of using the money to buy cryptocurrency, pay taxes, and for other personal matters.
• The mayoral race in Franklin, Tennessee, got even more bizarre last week when a bunch of self-proclaimed white nationalists showed up to support candidate Gabrielle Hanson at a campaign event.
• People of Praise, the extreme Catholic group that counts SCOTUS Justice Amy Coney Barrett as a member, is facing an FBI investigation into a cover-up of sexual abuse in the sect.
• A rare bit of good news on the environment – Antigua & Barbuda has transformed the nation’s uninhabited third island, Redonda, from a lifeless rock into a thriving fountain of biodiversity.
• An activist group is suing the EPA on behalf of a largely Black community in West Virginia’s “Chemical Valley,” arguing that the agency hasn’t done enough to protect residents from ethylene oxide pollution from a Union Carbide plant there.
• The capitalists will let you drown. There’s money for cops and sports stadiums, but not for housing, or for infrastructure that might have prevented the flooding that plagued New York City eight days ago.
• Speaking of which, just ten New York City cops were responsible for $68 million in payouts to victims of their misconduct, yet all ten are still on the public payroll.
• A cop in Pennsylvania tried to strangle his ex-girlfriend and then used his authority to have her involuntarily committed.
• The conservative newsletter/site The Dispatch argues that Trump and his supporters in office are devoid of moral leadership, and as Trump’s rhetoric worsens, too few people in his party seem to notice or care. Indeed, Trump called for the execution of General Mark Milley, and it barely made a ripple.
• Did Hasan Minhaj go too far in fabricating autobiographical details in his standup routine? Brian Logan, comedy critic for the Guardian, says he did. The controversy seems likely to cost Minhaj a shot at the hosting job for the Daily Show.
• Your brain sees winning streaks everywhere, even in random sequences. Scientific American looks at why.
• Did the James Webb Telescope discover galaxies older than the projected age of the universe? Maybe, explains astrophysicist Katie Mack.
• Some board game Kickstarters of note: Diatom is a tile-laying, pattern-making game based on an old Victorian art form.
• And there’s a Kickstarter for the roll-and-write Merchants of Magick game, which is in the same universe as Set a Watch, along with two new expansions.