Stick to baseball, 8/10/24.

I’ve been tied up the last few Saturdays with other things, so here’s a quick rundown of what you might have missed.

I wrote 14 different trade-deadline reaction pieces at the Athletic but there isn’t a single link to all of them beyond my author page, so if you missed anything that’s the place to start.

You can see my annual Gen Con recap post, which covers every game I saw at the convention plus my top ten games from the show and which this year ran over 10,000 words, over at Paste. I also reviewed the light family game Biomos, which I kind of liked when I first played it but eventually decided had too much randomness for me.

Stadium has changed its programming schedule and I’ll no longer be going to Chicago, but instead will be doing remote video work for them that will appear before their broadcasts of minor-league games (it’s all AAA games this month) or will show up on Amazon Echo devices and MSN. Unfortunately, I know several people lost their jobs in the changeover there, with some resources moving to the new Chicago Sports Network.

And now, the links – just some of the ones I saved over the last three weeks:

• Longreads first: ProPublica obtained several training videos from Project 2025, the Trump-linked plan from the right-wing Heritage Foundation to largely dismantle the federal government, advising people on how to skirt judicial review, to remove any references to climate change, and to avoid creating any kind of evidence through open records. You can read more about the details of the GOP’s plans in the Boston Review. The Atlantic dove into the Project 2025 plan to end free weather information by shutting down the NOAA.
• A massive new study published in Nature found that COVID-19 vaccinations reduced the incidence of common cardiovascular events.
• A study published in the BMJ showed that wearing surgical face masks reduced the incidence of respiratory symptoms consistent with infection.
• New York City gave a subsidy running to the hundreds of millions to the Yankees and to the UAE’s Prime Minister for the Willets Point soccer stadium project.
• Also from ProPublica: Washington state’s policy of giving tax breaks to data centers is now conflicting with the state’s attempt to shift towards green energy. First it was crypto; now it’s AI. Regardless of the reason, we need to make tech companies pay for this kind of excessive energy usage – and if that means I don’t get AI-generated summaries and search results that I didn’t ask for, oh well.
• Two rational explanations for the non-troversy over the Olympic women’s boxers Imane Khelif and Lin Y-ting: The BBC goes into the scientific differences between genotype and phenotype, and why chromosomes aren’t the final answer on gender; and RTÉ points out that the so-called “controversy” all stems from a discredited source whose test results were never explained. I’d add to this that the whole thing reeks of transphobia, and somehow trans folks were roped into the attacks despite actually having nothing to do with the matter, because the right sees them as popular scapegoats.
• A dozen scientists authored a letter to Rutgers asking them to open a formal investigation into two professors who have been harassing and attacking researchers who have studied SARS-CoV-2’s zoonotic origins, comparing them to Pol Pot and referring to some as “murderers.” Richard Ebright is a lab-leak conspiracy theorist who has been particularly virulent (pun intended) on Twitter for years now, and the university has appeared to do nothing whatsoever about his behavior.
• The Journal of Virology published an editorial that points out the harms that come from continuing to promote the debunked lab-leak theory. In the spirit of full disclosure, my employer published an editorial that pushed this failed hypothesis two months ago.
• Why is there so little coverage of Egypt’s attempt to bribe President-elect Donald Trump in 2016 with a $10 million ‘donation’? The Philly Inquirer’s Will Bunch argues that a large part of it is that bribery has become tacitly accepted in America, all the way up to the Supreme Court.
• J.D. Vance endorsed a book authored by one of the main pushers of the insane Pizzagate conspiracy theory, far-right influencer Jack Posobiec, that argues that anyone who doesn’t agree with their right-wing views is “unhuman” and “vermin,” mirroring the language Adolf Hitler used to demonize Jews before the Holocaust.
• The Bulwark dove into Vance’s dog-whistling comments about “cat ladies.”
• Pro-school voucher groups dumped $4.5 million into primaries in Tennessee last week, some backed by Charles Koch and Betsy DeVos, both strong opponents of public education.
• Through the end of July, the U.S. had seen three times as many measles cases in 2024 as it did in all of 2023, thanks entirely to anti-vaxxers and the credulous fools who listen to them.
• I’m not sure how this didn’t get get more coverage – far-right protesters in Israel stormed military bases hosting Hamas militants and the IDF’s military court. Meanwhile, just yesterday video emerged of IDF forces raping a Palestinian detainee, and Israel’s National Security Minister and Finance Minister both appeared to defend the accused rapists.
• Gojira’s awesome performance at the Olympics’ Opening Ceremonies earned them a brief writeup in the New York Times.
• A pastor in Florida who is the father of nine children was arrested on charges of raping his 15-year-old niece. No trans people or drag queens were involved.
• Elon Musk shared a deepfake of Kamala Harris through his Twitter account, which violates the policies of his own site.
• The Hugo Awards almost had a second huge scandal in as many years, but this time they got in front of it, revealing that someone had spent thousands of dollars to try to buy 377 votes for a particular finalist in one of its categories. Last year’s Hugos were undermined by the revelation that the organizing committee disqualified several nominees that ran afoul of the Chinese government’s preferences.