Stick to baseball, 8/31/24.

I’m back to work this week, having gone to Delmarva on Wednesday night to catch Boston’s latest teenaged phenom, Franklin Arias, and will have a long scouting notebook up in a day or two covering that and three other games I haven’t written up yet. I’m a little at odds and ends for next week, as it looks like the schedules of the local teams are pretty unfavorable, and I may have to wait and see on the playoffs.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the board game Rock Hard 1977, designed by Jackie Fuchs, a four-time Jeopardy! champion who happened to be the bassist for the influential rock band the Runaways under the name Jackie Fox. It’s fantastic, and spurred me to rank my five favorite thematic board games (meaning games where the theme is great and well-integrated with game play).

I’ve been holding off on a newsletter until that review went up, so I’ll try to get one out this weekend. You can sign up for free in eager anticipation.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: Brandon Anderson founded a group dedicated to abolishing the police, only to siphon funds from it to pay for luxury travel and clothing for himself. The employee who caught him was faced with a dilemma: Report her boss to the very police they were trying to abolish, or let him continue to defraud supporters?

• “The truth is that Staten Island kind of sucks.” I’d argue that’s half-right; Staten Island just sucks. It’s the worst of the five boroughs, lacking the culture or diversity of the other four – and it doesn’t have the subway. New York should just hand it to New Jersey. The two states should build a bridge from Jersey City straight to Brooklyn. But this Baffler longread argues that it sucks because it’s Trumpy and xenophobic, and that there are other “little Staten Islands” around the rest of the city, too. And now they’re talking about seceding from the rest of the city on which they depend for their financial existence.

• Here’s more on Trump’s plans for a second term as detailed by Project 2025, with notes on the just-released videotapes that describe how Trump has been to the organization’s offices and “blessed” the project, and vaccine developer Paul Offit’s piece on how damaging Project 2025 would be to public health.   

• A new pre-print found that sports betting led to higher credit card balances, reduced net investment, and more spending on the lottery, with the effects stronger among “financially constrained households.” That is, introducing sports betting in a state/city disproportionately impacts the poor – those who can least afford the losses and negative externalities associated with gambling.

• The City of Philadelphia released a farcical economic “study” that purports to show that building a new sports arena in Chinatown will benefit the city even though the 76ers already play in a perfectly usable facility that doesn’t require destroying a historic neighborhood and displacing residents.

• The city of St. Petersburg suspended its HR director for approving $250,000 in bonuses for city employees involving in the boondoggle of helping fund a new stadium for the Rays. The city has since rescinded the bonuses.

• Defector has an excellent piece on the toxic nature of modern fandom and how it has already driven Chappell Roan to threaten to quit music.

• Falun Gong, the Chinese cult that produces the right-wing fountain of false information known as the Epoch Times, has gradually taken over a small town in upstate New York … and the residents aren’t exactly up in arms about it.

• Once upon a time, Chipotle was the “good” fast-food outlet, trying to use better quality ingredients and cultivate relationships with farmers, but ultimately, the profit motive has won out – they’ve been accused of denying raises to unionized workers at a Michigan location in violation of federal law.

• Lionsgate put out a trailer for the new Francis Ford Coppola film Megalopolis that included a bunch of fake quotes from movie critics blasting some of the director’s older and more acclaimed movies. Megalopolis looks like it’s going to be a giant disaster, after mostly bad reviews at Cannes and multiple stumbles already from the studio and the director.

• Turning Point, the right-wing group headed by Christian nationalist Charlie Kirk, is spending millions of dollars in swing state Wisconsin to support Donald Trump.

• The Observer’s Carole Cadwalladr writes of how Elon Musk helped incite the racist riots in the U.K. – and may very well plan to do the same here this fall. At their sister publication, the Guardian, Robert Reich suggests six ways to try to reduce Musk’s power.

• Dozens of fake accounts on Twitter used photos of real women in Europe to pose as Trump supporters and post right-wing propaganda, according to a study from CNN.

• Meanwhile, Judge J. Michael Luttig, a conservative jurist appointed by President George H.W. Bush, endorsed Kamala Harris for President while calling Trump’s candidacy an existential threat to our democracy.

• Tom Nichols excoriates the ongoing decline of the conservatives who threw in their lot with Trump – including Rich Lowry, who published an editorial in the New York Times claiming Trump could win the election on “character.”

• Ohio Republicans, who have repeatedly shown themselves to be some of the worst enemies of democracy, have approved language for an anti-gerrymandering ballot question that is designed to confuse voters into voting their way. Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who voted seven times to use district maps that were ruled unconstitutional by courts, drafted the confusing language.

• Why is Missouri using taxpayer money to subsidize an anti-abortion group that operates in Illinois and beyond? Missourians have helped fund Coalition for Life and similar nonprofits with over $11 million in tax credits, much of which now flows out of state.

• Arkansas banned abortion and touts itself as “pro-life,” but has some of the highest maternal and infant mortality rates in the country, which sure sounds like a preventable problem if life was something they actually cared about.

• A cop in Massachusetts raped a girl he met through the state’s program for kids interested in law enforcement careers and then murdered her when she became pregnant, according to charges filed last week. The article I linked refers to “sex acts” before the victim, Sandra Birchmore, was 16 years old, but doesn’t use the correct word for it: rape. This is statutory rape and we need to stop normalizing it by avoiding the term.

• A Republican judge in North Carolina is refusing to recuse himself from two cases involving his father. That ought to be an impeachable offense.

• Fox News is touting RFK Jr’s endorsement of Trump despite his history of lying about vaccines, which helped kill 83, mostly kids, and sicken thousands in a measles outbreak in Samoa in 2018.

• Mainstream news outlets complaining about the DNC’s credentialing of over 200 content creators are authoring their own extinction, according to Mark Jacob, whose newsletter covers the way right-wing propagandists have run rings around the MSM. Jacob argues that journalists need to refocus on real journalism, like investigative pieces, now that the subjects can often go around them to talk directly to their audiences/customers.

• For example, the New York Times’s Edgar Sandoval reports on dubious “voter fraud raids” conducted in Texas against Latino Democrats, an apparent attempt at voter intimidation by Texas AG Ken Paxton.

• A conservative alumni group at the University of Virginia has pressured the school into suspending campus tours given by a student-run service because they talked about how Thomas Jefferson owned slaves and raped them. Really.
  
• The denialist group Biosafety Now, which continues to push the debunked lab-leak theory and includes a wide number of prominent anti-vaxxers, has added economist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, whose advice to then-President Trump on the pandemic was disastrous, to its board. This same group has worked closely with Republicans in Congress to push false claims that China is responsible for creating SARS-CoV-2 and should be held responsible for damages.

• Bhattacharya is also organizing a forum at Stanford for COVID minimizers and denialists, including those who called for wide infection to achieve herd immunity and architects of other fiascos like Sweden’s hands-off approach. Stanford’s new President will even speak at the event.

• The Kickstarter for Everdell Duo, a two-player version of one of my favorite games of all time, has 12 days left to run and has already raised over $280,000.