My ranking of the top 50 free agents available this offseason is now up for subscribers to the Athletic; we’ve updated it now to reflect two players on the list coming off the board as their clubs picked up their options, adding two new players to keep it at 50. I also held a Q&A on the Athletic site on Friday to talk about the list.
For Paste, I reviewed Stamp Swap, a light new game from Stonemaier Games, whose products always have excellent components and art. The game play was meh for me – it was mostly stuff I’ve seen before, and in one case I think a mechanic just makes the game worse/slower.
I need to get another issue of my free email newsletter out soon, but got held up by the FA rankings and the relative lack of sleep I had thanks to the World Series.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: ProPublica has two stories about pregnant women who died because of Texas’s draconian abortion ban, which led hospitals to refuse to treat the women for life-threatening issues. Josseli Barnica died of a bacterial infection, leaving behind a one-year-old daughter. Neveah Crain died of sepsis; she was 18.
- A baseball coach in Nyack, New York, abused multiple boys playing on his teams, and the school district that employed him never reported any of the allegations to authorities. Peter Recla has never been arrested or charged with any crime, thanks in large part to the complicity of his bosses. One victim did sue the district and reached a settlement that included a non-disclosure agreement. Some of the survivors have established a scholarship fund to honor one baseball player and one softball player from Nyack High School each year.
- The Guardian profiled Gazan journalist Wael al-Dahdouh, whose wife, two children, and grandson were killed by an Israeli strike in October of 2023.
- More from ProPublica – Project 2025 co-architect Russell Vought, who ran the OMB under Trump, plans to put civil servants “in trauma” and use the military to quash dissent.
- Vogue has a short but powerful story on Gisèle Pelicot, the Frenchwoman whose husband is now on trial for orchestrating serial sexual assaults against her, and how she has become a symbol of hope and strength for victims across France.
- A Republican party leader and former Congressional candidate in Indiana has been arrested and charged with stealing ballots during a public test of voting machines. Larry Savage Jr. was caught on camera taking two ballots and slipping them in his pocket. Maybe he saw Election.
- The Washington Post’s decision – made by owner Jeff Bezos, CEO & Publisher Will Lewis, or a magic 8-ball – to endorse no candidate for President led over 200,000 people to cancel their subscriptions to the paper. I’m torn on this; yes, it hurts the many people there trying to produce good journalism, whether it’s reporting or opinion, but on the other hand, voting with your wallet is the clearest way to tell any company you don’t agree with something they’re doing. I cancelled my subscription a few years ago because they ran too many anti-science editorials.
- The family-owned Seattle Times, however, enthusiastically endorsed VP Kamala Harris for President. I subscribed.
- A “tradwife” influencer who has a rare type of ectopic pregnancy intends to carry it to term despite the very high risk that it will kill her, because she opposes abortion. She has seven other kids and has been told that the pregnancy is not viable because the embryo has implanted in scar tissue.
- The Israeli Knesset passed a bill that bans the UNRWA from operating in Gaza starting in 90 days. This will cripple aid efforts, as nearly all 2.2 million Gazans have been displaced and many face starvation as a result of Israel’s year-plus war on the territory, with the UNRWA the main conduit for aid.
- More on terrible Texas: The city of Odessa passed an ordinance that not only bans trans people from using the bathroom that matches their gender identity, but provides a $10,000 bounty for anyone who reports a trans person using the correct bathroom.
- Meanwhile, a youth leader at a church in Abilene, Texas, was charged with possessing child pornography, after he solicited nude pictures from girls through social media. There is no bounty in Texas for turning in a pedophile.
- South Carolina executed Richard Moore over the objections of the sentencing judge, three trial jurors, and the former director of the state’s corrections department. Moore is Black and was convicted by an all-white jury, because it’s apparently still 1923 there.
- The New York Times profiled Robert Smith of The Cure, as the band released its 14th album, Songs of a Lost World, on Friday.
- Board game news: Druid City Games has a Kickstarter up for Madcala, a new game in the same ‘universe’ as their very highly-rated (and hard to find) game Wonderland’s War.
- I met Amber Cook at Gen Con a few years before the pandemic hit, while she was freelancing for Asmodee; she was a marketer and publicist and very passionate about games and gaming. She introduced me to Silver & Gold, still one of my favorite games and one of the first games that my wife really loved. Amber died last week, leaving behind her partner and a young son. Game designer and publisher Mike Selinker wrote a short piece in her memory.
I honestly feel sorry for the tradwife’s children. This woman is playing russian roulette with her life and will eventually lose which will force one of the remaining daughters will have to take responsibility for rearing their siblings. Also her line about hearing from people who have survived ectopic pregnancies but none who died has to be the biggest case of survivor bias ever. There are also people who survived 9/11 and the holocaust. You don’t hear from those who didn’t make it because they fucking died as a result.
so what should israel do about unrwa (and the un in general), keith? the evidence is overwhelming that unrwa has been and is an active partner of hamas. should israel continue to allow terrorist actors into a war zone?
dozens of unrwa officials and staffers directly participated in last year’s 10/7 attack in southern Israel, when 1,200 were murdered and more than 250 kidnapped. abu itiwi, who led the murder and kidnapping of israelis hiding in a roadside bomb shelter on that day, and who was killed by the idf last week in gaza, had been employed ***by unrwa*** since july 2022 while serving as a commander in hamas! abu el-amin, who led hamas in lebanon and was killed in september, doubled as the head of lebanon’s unrwa teachers’ union and oversaw 65 schools and roughly 40,000 students, while also coordinating terror activities between hamas and hezbollah; procuring weapons and recruiting terrorists; and using social media to incite attacks.
so: what should israel do, keith? you’ve repeatedly parroted easily disproven mis- and dis-information since 10/7/23, relying on casualty counts and reporting from hamas controlled media arms like al jazeera, so i’m entirely certain this post will never see the light of day, given keith never tolerates rational discussion on his pet topics, but if it does so please to illumunate us with your solution to this problem.
“should israel continue to allow terrorist actors into a war zone?”
Why should Israel get to determine who gets to go in and out of Gaza?
As far as I can see, I blocked one comment from you, where you denied that a genocide is even taking place and made many false claims about the death toll, even though reliable, unaffiliated outlets like The Lancet have found the death toll estimates to be valid. Your accusations of bias and your language in general reveal the bias here is on your end.
What should Israel do? Stop killing civilians and allow humanitarian aid through to Gaza. That is my position. Civilian deaths are bad. It doesn’t matter where the civilians live, what their skin color may be, what god(s) they worship.
You are partially correct about one thing. I have no interest in discussion of whether civilian deaths are bad. Israel’s war on Gaza, a sovereign state outside of Israel’s borders, has resulted in at least 35,000 civilian deaths, according to the source I cited above, which is not affiliated with Hamas or anyone else you accuse me of supporting. I am not interested in discussing some “other side” to any action that has led to 35,000+ civilian deaths.
In case it wasn’t clear: If you deny a genocide – any genocide, whether it’s the one in Gaza or the Holocaust or the Armenian genocide or the Rwandan one – I will not post your comment or will delete it if it’s through. And yes, what we are seeing in Gaza is a genocide, according to The Guardian, the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights, multiple scholars cited in this Vox story, Israeli historian Amos Goldberg, the University Network for Human Rights, and more.
Israel isn’t allowing any foreign journalists into Gaza to report on what they’re doing there, to potentially provide more accurate estimates of the civilian death toll or damage to property and infrastructure. Perhaps doing so would allow them to rebut the charges of genocide. We can only speculate on why they are choosing to exclude them.
Brian in NoVa – I suppose we only trust women with choice over their reproductive health if it conforms to our own beliefs and standards.
Notably, Brian is not advocating forcing her to not make the choices she’s making, a key difference. But you knew that, of course.
It’s perfectly fine to criticize people for making what we perceive to be uninformed or stupid decisions, even if we don’t want to make those decisions illegal. Indeed, if that was all the pro-“life” movement did, I think most of us on the other side would have little problem with that movement.
Kevin and Salty hit on it. Yes, she should have the choice to do this. I’m also allowed to point out the stupidity (as in using one of the worst logical fallacies I’ve seen) and the horrific potential consequences of it. Just like I’m allowed to criticize Ken Paxton and his ilk for putting hospitals in the worst position of being forced to decide how close to death a pregnant woman is before they give her lifesaving treatment. We’re getting the worst of both worlds right now.