Stick to baseball, 10/5/24.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I ranked the top rookies on postseason rosters, based on their likely impact; my top pick looks pretty good so far. I also held a Q&A on the Athletic’s site on Friday, which was almost entirely baseball questions (unlike the typical Klawchat over here).

We’ve got two family birthdays this weekend, so it’s birthdaypalooza around here, but I’m hoping to do another issue of my free email newsletter once we get through Sunday.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: The BBC managed to get a journalist to Diego Garcia, one of the hardest to access inhabited places in the world, and she wrote about what she saw. There are currently a number of Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka who are seeking asylum but have been held on the island for several years. Later this week, the United Kingdom announced it would return control of Diego Garcia and the other Chagos islands to Mauritius, but the United States would maintain its naval base there.

• ProPublica has the inside story on how the Biden Administration went above and beyond to send weapons to Israel that the state has used in its yearlong assault on Gaza, which has led to over 40,000 deaths of Gazans and a massive humanitarian crisis. Meanwhile, Americans in Lebanon say they feel abandoned by the U.S. government, which took swift steps to evacuate Americans in Israel last October.

• Writing for Slate, Katie McBride explains how Silent Spring kicked off the American environmental movement but also demonized chemicals in a way that continues to hurt us today.

• Dr. Eliezer Masliah was the director of neuroscience at the National Institute of Aging until researchers discovered evidence of data manipulation and fabrication in “scores” of his published papers. He was fired on Monday.

• A global lead-poisoning mystery that affected people in Bangladesh and New York City came down to a surprising culprit: A dye used to make turmeric more appealing to buyers.

• High Country News looks at how the 2014 Bundy standoff paved the way for January 6^th and helped boost the idea of “white oppression” on the right.

• The New Yorker looks at the small coalition of evangelicals backing Kamala Harris, a group that could prove pivotal in several swing states.

• The Washington Post covered a rambling, incoherent Trump speech accurately, without “sanewashing” it. There have been a lot of clips this week of Trump appearing to forget where he was or what he was talking about. Too many media outlets continue to dance around this.

• Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R-) called out Trump & Vance’s lies on Springfield and the Haitian community there. This shouldn’t be newsworthy, but so few Republicans in office are willing to push back against the convicted felon/Presidential candidate that it is remarkable when one does so.

• A new study of Scottish women found that those who received the HPV vaccine before age 14 had zero cases of cervical cancer. Yes, there is a vaccine your kids can get that may completely prevent several types of cancer, including cervical and anal cancers. There is so much misinformation about this vaccine online, and the cost of this will be human lives.

• The data from Texas show how abortion bans are killing women, writes Michael Hiltzik for the LA Times, with the maternal death rate in Texas rising in 2022 to 26% above the national average.

• A tenured, Jewish professor at Muhlenberg College says she was fired for her pro-Palestinian comments. She is appealing the decision and for now continues to be paid.

• New York magazine reports on the clandestine alliance between the right-wing rag the New York Post and Mayor Eric Adams, currently under indictment on corruption charges. The Post ran point for Adams’s mayoral campaign, backing him, trashing his rivals, and doing what appeared to be PR work for him, according to Noah Schachtman, and now the paper is trying to prop him up amidst the scandal.

• ProPublica ran an expose on the EPA’s approval of plastic-based fuels despite evidence that they contained one chemical with a cancer risk one million times the usual ‘acceptable’ limit. This week the EPA announced they’re withdrawing that approval.

• Oklahoma is already violating the First Amendment by mandating the teaching of the Bible in public schools, but the state’s strict rules around what Bible they can use point exclusively to the Trump-branded version of the book. I don’t think there’s been a lawsuit yet, but the ACLU and Americans United for Separation of Church and State appear to be preparing for one.

• Board game news: To commemorate the 50^th anniversary of the release of the first Dungeons & Dragons set, NPR asked readers to contribute their memories of playing the game. Here are five of their stories.

• Rock Manor Games has a Gamefound campaign up for StarDriven: Gateway, a pickup-and-delivery game on a modular board. I’m friends with the publisher and got to try a prototype last week; we played the shortest version, and I think it needs the extra rounds, but I like the fact that there’s no conflict and that the economic aspects are easy to keep straight in your head.

• Shem Phillips’s Garphill Games has a Kickstarter up for two new titles, Skara Brae and The Anarchy. Phillips is best known for his series of worker-placement games that started with Raiders of the North Sea. I don’t think Skara Brae has anything to do with The Bard’s Tale, though.