Five new pieces for subscribers to the Athletic this week, breaking down the Jarred Kelenic trade, the Alex Verdugo trade, the Juan Soto trade, the Eduardo Rodríguez/Jeimer Candelario/Craig Kimbrel signings, and the Tyler O’Neill trade.
At Paste, I recapped everything I played at this year’s PAX Unplugged board game convention here in Philly. My time there was a little shorter than normal for various reasons, but I still sneaked in a whole bunch of great new games. I also got Apiary to the table here last night.
My free email newsletter has moved over to Substack. If you got an issue from me on Monday, then you’re all set. Mailchimp is sunsetting their free Tinyletter product, so I had to move it to a different site.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: Joel Anderson, who overlapped with me at ESPN for a few years, writes in Slate about ESPN’s abortive attempts to “stick to sports” and the company’s uncertain future.
- Mississippi Today exposes a “goon squad” of violent, law-breaking police deputies in Rankin County, home of the state’s capital and largest city, Jackson. The report describes beatings of suspects in petty drug crimes – or no crimes at all – and long prison sentences based on coerced confessions.
- A professor at Nevada-Reno began a sexual relationship with one of his students. She’s now accusing him of rape and extortion; he says the relationship was consensual and that she has threatened him and his wife since he ended it. The Chronicle of Higher Education tries to tell the whole story, but isn’t the fact that he had a relationship with a student he oversaw enough to cost him his job? There is no consent with such an imbalance of power.
- King Charles is taking the assets of dead Britons and using the money to upgrade properties he owns in his commercial portfolio.
- I spent some time this week at the Barista Parlor in East Nashville, but I won’t be back after a reader pointed out that the owners have engaged in union-busting, including closing a shop where workers tried to unionize.
- Trump’s lawyers have brought an internet conspiracy theory into one of their filings, accusing a Wisconsin reporter of being a plant at the January 6th insurrection.
- The United States has broken its record for the most mass shootings in a single calendar year, and we still have over three weeks to go.
- In defense of the block button.
- Young Fathers gave an incredible performance on KEXP, playing four songs from their latest album, Heavy Heavy.
- A woman who threw a bowl of hot food in the face of a worker at a Chipotle will serve 30 days in prison and have to work 60 days in fast food. It’s a showy sentence, but I think it’s better than more prison time, and maybe it will build some empathy in the perpetrator.
- The executive committee of the Texas Republican Party rejected a proposal to ban associations with Nazi sympathizers and Holocaust deniers.