I had three new posts this week for subscribers to the Athletic – my hypothetical ballots for the six major postseason awards, my annual look at some players I was wrong about, and a look at the future of the White Sox based on what’s in their system and their recent development successes and failures.
Over at Paste, I reviewed the board game Let’s Go to Japan, a fantastic game that is about … exactly what it sounds like: planning a trip to Japan, based on the designer’s own yearslong plans to visit the country only to have it postponed for several years by the pandemic.
I sent another issue of my free email newsletter out on Monday. That’s two weeks in a row, so clearly I have the hot hand.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: The seas are rising and encroaching on the barrier islands off the coast of Galveston, Texas, but developers there are building new condos right on the shore, according to this interactive piece from the Washington Post.
- The French cement company Lafarge paid millions to ISIS to keep its plant operating in Syrian territory held by the terror group. The Guardian has the full story, including the $778 million judgment against Lafarge in the U.S., lawsuits from people victimized by ISIS, and now a criminal trial in French accusing Lafarge executives of abetting crimes against humanity.
- Both USAID and the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration independently concluded that Israel blocked humanitarian aid to Gazans. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken ignored them and told Congress the opposite was true. Had he told the truth, existing U.S. law would have forced us to stop sending weapons to Israel. Related: The pager attack didn’t just affect Hezbollah members, as pagers belonging to ordinary people went off in hospitals and schools.
- Luke Winkie’s story in Slate on the absolutely bonkers email exchanges he had with Jeopardy! champion Yogesh Raut offers a window into what seems to be the very disturbed mind of a very, very smart person.
- Josh Kraushaar is the editor-in-chief of Jewish Insider, and this past week, he started a false rumor that Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D) accused Michigan AG Dana Nessel of filing charges against pro-Palestinian campus protestors because Nessel is Jewish. Steve Neavling, the Metro Times writer whose interview with Rep. Tlaib was the supposed source of the quote, says the claim is false and she never referred to Nessel’s religion. Kraushaar’s tweet and story are still up, and it’s been picked up by Nessel, by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, and others. The New Republic weighed in as well.
- Republicans are trying to use the practice of some women changing their names upon marriage as a way to strike them from voting rolls.
- Seeing a lot of AI spam on Facebook? It’s the “zombie internet,” says 404 Media’s Jason Koebler, with bots interacting with bots in a facsimile of the old web.
- Judge Aileen Cannon, under fire from other judges and legal experts for her rulings favoring the guy who appointed her, has failed to disclose junkets paid for by right-wing groups, violating judicial ethics rules.
- Thomas Chatterton Williams writes in the Atlantic that Elon Musk is debasing American society by endorsing and amplifying the views of trolls and extremists.
- Several women accuse a “homeopathic” midwife of giving them misoprostol without their knowledge, leading to the death of at least one baby. Just a reminder that homeopathy is woo, and it’s unregulated, making it a great place for scammers and grifters to operate.
- Parker Molloy has about the only thing you really need to read on the Olivia Nuzzi/RFK Jr. scandal, as she points out how way too many media members are rushing to defend Nuzzi in the face of a dead-clear ethics violation.
- Neo-Nazis are panicking now that European authorities are cracking down on Telegram and the site’s founder, recently arrested in France, is promising to comply with demands for user information. Of course they’ll just move somewhere else.
- The Delaware Drug Overdose Fatality Review Commission released a new report with suggested policies to try to reduce drug overdoses in the state, especially among those recently released from prison.
- New FBI data show that violent crime in the United States is decreasing, no matter what your racist uncle claims on Facebook, and yes, major cities are contributing their data once again.
- Republican Senate candidate Bernie Moreno, running in Ohio against incumbent Sherrod Brown, said in a town hall that suburban women are “a little crazy” for being “single-issue” voters around abortion. Really beating the “weird” tag here, Bernie.
- Rep. Anthony D’Esposito (R-NY) had an affair and then put his lover and his fiancée’s daughter on his Congressional payroll. He’s from Nassau County, because of course he is.
- One of the folks behind Project 2025 has been accused of creeping on teenagers online. Another, Kevin Roberts, apparently told people he killed a neighbor’s dog with a shovel because it was barking too loudly.
- The Guardian has a story on how Codenames became what they call “the board game of the decade.” I don’t know if I agree with the hyperbole in the piece, but it is a good story on one of the best party games out there in the wake of the release of a Codenames app.
- Kurt Vonnegut designed a board game in the 1950s, before his literary career took off. It’s about to get its first commercial release, and the board game blog Space-Biff got to play a pre-release copy.
- We’re in crowdfunding season for board games, so expect to see a bunch of links for them here the next few weeks. Floodgate Games has one up for Hedge Maze, from the designer of 2021’s Umbra Via.
- Eagle-Gryphon has a Kickstarter up for Speakeasy, the newest game from Vital Lacerda, designer of such heavy, complex games as Lisboa, Kanban, and On Mars.
- North Star Games, publishers of Evolution, has a Kickstarter live for Nature, a new, standalone, modular game in the Evolution series that streamlines a lot of the rules of the original.
- Inside Up has a Kickstarter up for Ice and Idols, from the designer of a game I’ve never heard of called Reality Shift.