I had one new post for subscribers to The Athletic this week, looking at the free-agent signings of Sonny Gray and Kenta Maeda plus some thoughts on what the Twins might do next. Some readers got very mad that I don’t think Chris Paddack will be a mid-rotation starter when he hasn’t been anything close to that since 2019.
Over at Paste, I ran through eight new board games that would be great stocking stuffers. I’ll do my year-end post for them the week of December 11th. Also, here on the dish, I updated my ranking of my top 100 games all-time.
On the Keith Law Show this week, I spoke with Nik Sharma, author of the new cookbook Veg-Table and the also wonderful cookbooks Season and The Flavor Equation. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
My free email newsletter is moving from Tinyletter (which Mailchimp is shutting down) to Substack. If you already subscribed as of Tuesday of this past week, you’re fine – I was able to export the subscriber list and import it to Substack with no issues.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: The best headline of the week, and maybe the best obituary of the year, comes from Rolling Stone: “Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies.”
- Republican state laws targeting LGBT people, pushing book bans, and wiping out reproductive rights are already leading to a brain drain from their jurisdictions.
- The New York Times had a fascinating profile of Stephanie Courtney, the actress who plays Flo in Progressive’s commercials.
- Tim Grierson interviewed the directors of the three seminal nuclear war films of 1983-84: Testament, The Day After, and Threads.
- The Harvard Law Review asked a human rights attorney getting his doctorate at the school to write about the ongoing massacre happening in Gaza for the review’s blog, then refused to run the piece, for what seems to be fear of a backlash from faculty and members of the public sympathetic to Israel. The Nation ran the column instead.
- Conspiracy theories around health and wellness ran rampant during the pandemic, and the far right and the far left have found common ground in them.
- You probably saw this, but Futurism caught Sports Illustrated running AI-generated articles under fake bylines with stock AI-generated photos of the writers.
- Paul Lynch won the Booker Prize this year for his novel Prophet Song, which I have not yet read, but I found this commentary on how the book is dismal and a sign of the Booker’s decline quite interesting – many literary awards seem to overvalue factors like the social importance of the subject, rather than just awarding it to the best book.
- The head of the Florida GOP has been charged with sexual battery by a woman who claims she was involved in a threesome with him and his wife, who was part of the state’s Moms for Liberty chapter and worked to support the state’s “Don’t Say Gay” anti-LGBT bill.
- Oh, and the (male) outreach director for the Philadelphia Moms for Liberty chapter served time in prison for sexually abusing a 14-year-old boy.
- Meanwhile, a failed candidate for the school board in Downingtown, Pennsylvania, posed as the non-existent “Society of College Medicine” to challenge books in the district.
- Americans’ desire for avocados is driving deforestation and violence in Mexico.
- Penguin Random House, the largest teachers’ union in Iowa, and four authors (including Jodi Picoult, who went to the same elementary school I attended) are suing to overturn Iowa’s book-banning law, on the heels of another lawsuit over the law filed by the ACLU.
- Meanwhile, Ohio Republicans are threatening to target judges, possibly with impeachment, who rule in favor of voters’ choice to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution.
- Teen girls targeted by AI deepfakes have little recourse through the law beyond ordinary cyberharassment complaints, which do little to address the lasting damage these pictures and videos can do.
- The Columbia Journalism Review looked at how two major newspapers covered political races and issues in 2016 and 2022.
- Measles cases are rising around the world thanks to anti-vaxxers and the online proliferation of false information about vaccines.
- A woman in Texas who claimed reading one book with a “a single kiss” when she was 11 years old led to her to become a pornography addict actually works for a right-wing publisher that’s trying to compete with Scholastic to sell books to schools.