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.
I could never get to an open table of Rats of Wistar at Pax, so I’m glad to hear I didn’t miss anything.
My favorite this year was Kunta Hora, an excellent medium weight city builder with an interesting dynamic economy.
My ten year old son came to Pax for the first time just for the last day, but he lived it. He walked away with Trio, a card game that is like someone got bored of playing Go Fish with their kids and decided to add some fun mechanics to it. He also got Knights of the Hound Table, a two person card battle that punched above its weight.
My hardened group of gamers and I also fell for Dragon Keepers, a card game that is very simple and quick but had a surprising amount of strategy.
A lot of the games in First Looks were also available in the freeplay library – that’s how my son and I played Rats of Wistar (which we enjoyed but didn’t love), and Dragon Keepers (which we really enjoyed). I was hoping to get a chance to try Apiary, but no such luck.
I’ve found Barista Parlor to be hit and miss. I was at one of their locations earlier this year and the service was not very good. My preference in Nashville has always been Crema.
I think the article on the block button is spot on. I am a big fan of that feature- and mute.
Apparently the union-busting wasn’t enough to dissuade Warby Parker from featuring one of those clowns…
https://blog.warbyparker.com/andy-mumma-of-barista-parlor/
To answer the question you posed for the UN-Reno Prof, the answer is an easy yes. From the story, their official policy “prohibits romantic or sexual relations in circumstances in which one of the individuals is in a position of direct professional power over the other.” It potentially would have been okay via Uni policies if he has disclosed prior to beginning the relationship and had arranged for the student to have a different research advisor (which is still problematic because the student would likely have had to change labs and lose progress on her thesis, and beyond that, it’s still gross). He didn’t do this because he wanted to keep the relationship a secret from his wife (who he also apparently started a relationship with when she was his student). So yes, he should be fired for egregiously flaunting university policy. Whether or not the relationship was consensual is a separate legal and civil matter.
“Flaunt” does not mean the same thing as “flout.”
Yes, that should be flout, and your semantic pedantry is duly noted.
Was it pedantry? The sentence is nonsense with the incorrect “flaunting” instead of the correct “flouting.”
I do find it pedantry if you can infer the correct meaning despite the typo. Considering the context from the rest of the paragraph, it’s a moo point.
Well, I think of a typo as a keyboard slip in which an adjacent key is pressed by accident. For example, typing “inly” when one meant to type “only.” (This happens to me a lot.)
One would not accidentally type “flaunting” when one intended to write “flouting.” That’s not a typo; that’s incorrect word usage, and such incorrect usage no doubt contributes to the highly prevalent problem of people not actually knowing the difference between the two words.
Someone pointing out the error, especially when the error is made by a scientist (who people would probably expect to know the difference between such words and therefore might become further confused about which word is which), hardly seems like “semantic pedantry”.
Using incorrect words that have no similarity in meaning to the correct word is a bad idea and dismissing it as a minor semantic issue because “the meaning is clear from context” seems like a questionable path forward.
Students in this country already have enough difficulty reading and writing properly. The best educated among us should strive to write correctly to educate and lead by example.
A similar example is the singer Jewel using the word “casualty” when the correct word was casualness. The word “casualty” was 100% wrong in context, and it’s irrelevant whether the intended meaning was clear from context. She was passing herself off as a poet and didn’t know the definition of “casualty.” It was not a typo. She dismissed the error with the same kind of reasoning you’re using here. Meanwhile, who knows how many of her fans became confused about what “casualty” means?
(Another good example of a typo is typing “moo point” when one intends to type “moot point.” )
An example of “semantic pedantry” would be to point out that most people, including you, do not use the phrase “moot point” correctly.
Lighten up, Francis. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iObtPBh3NXs
Keith, unfortunate typo in description of the Mississippi Today story. That should be “goon squad” not “good squad” (though I’m sure their local FOP would say it’s correct).
!?
I read that and I thought it said “good squad” – then I took another look and said to myself, “No, I’m imagining things, it says ‘goon squad’ “.
Obviously, it does actually say “good squad”; my first read was correct. I need to keep my reading glasses near the computer !
How does an “n” get mistyped as a “d”? They’re far apart on the keyboard. 🙂
Fixed. Might have been autocorrect, might have been muscle memory.