I took a month or so off from these Saturday posts, mostly because I was busy just about every weekend in December – PAX Unplugged, hosting two holiday parties, getting ready for Christmas, then traveling. I do plan to return these to their normal format, but for now I’m doing a briefer one just to get one posted after I was out of town for the weekend (we went to NYC to see friends and to watch SIX).
I did have one story up this week for subscribers to The Athletic, covering the Gavin Lux trade and associated signing by the Dodgers of Hyeseong Kim.
Over at Paste, my review of the excellent board game Tower Up went up this past week; that game appeared on my list of the top ten games of 2024.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: Defector’s exhaustive history of the barely-a-company Color Star, which first appeared on anyone’s radar when they signed a partnership deal with the 76ers in 2021 that the team quickly rescinded, is completely bizarre and an amazing piece of investigative work. The short version is that the company looks like it’s been running some kind of stock scam for at least five years, and has never produced any actual product or service.
- The New Yorker has the story of one author’s copyright infringement lawsuit alleging another author, an editor, and a publisher stole the plot and many key details from of one of her unpublished novels, which delves into the question of how far you can copy an idea before it might cross into infringement, but also explains the anti-literary world of “romantasy” and other fast-fashion books that are written to chase trends on TikTok and other social media.
- ProPublica published an exposé from and about a man who, on his own, infilitrated multiple right-wing militias, collecting data on members and recording conversations with leaders. He believes they’ll take the country down if they’re not stopped soon.
- Dogs who press buttons to ‘talk’ to their owners are all the rage on Instagram and TikTok. Is there any science behind this? I’m a strong skeptic here, and I think the experts quoted in this New York Times Magazine piece lean that way as well, although there are experiments underway to try to understand better what dogs really can understand and express.
- Some idiot flew a drone into forbidden airspace over the Palisades wildfire last week, and it crashed into a Super Scooper firefighting plane, disabling it.
- Greg Sargent & Kyle Cheney discuss Rep. Jamie Raskin’s (D) pointed and very accurate criticism of the phone call between SCOTUS Justice Samuel Alito and President-Elect Donald Trump.
- Editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes quit the Washington Post after the paper refused to run a cartoon she drew that depicted billionaires bending the knee to the incoming President. She explained why on her Substack.
- Coffee futures prices hit record highs in December and haven’t come down much thanks to below-average rainfall in Brazil and bad weather in Vietnam, the two largest coffee producers in the world. Between weather, climate change, and rising demand, coffee futures prices are up over 75% in the last year.
- Are we ready for the next pandemic? Of course not!
- This story is a bit out of date, but I’m going to share it anyway because it touches on two topics of particular interest to me, board games and the enshittification of social media: Facebook banned ads for the Kickstarter for an upcoming board game called First Monday in October, which is about the Supreme Court, claiming the ads’ content could somehow influence how people voted in elections.
- The now-fired fact checker group that worked with Facebook for the past nine years published an open letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg about the likely consequences of his decision to end fact-checking on the site. Do not comply in advance.
That fact-checker open letter was scathing. As if we needed more evidence of the tech bro fecklessness Zuckerberg, Musk, Thiel and Andreessen are currently propagating.