Over at Endless Mode, I wrote about how educators are using off-the-shelf board games in their classrooms for all sorts of didactic purposes.
I held a Klawchat on Thursday. I also appeared on The Menschwarmers podcast, which (obviously) is about the intersection of Judaism and sports, to talk about the Core Jackson story.
I moved my free email newsletter over to Kit this week, and the transition seems to have gone smoothly. If you were already signed up on Substack before Wednesday, you should have received the new edition. If you haven’t signed up, or signed up on Substack after that, you can sign up on my new site at Kit.
And now, the links…
- Long(ish) reads first: A BBC investigation found that images and videos of child sexual abuse are easily found on X/Twitter, including those of a woman who is one of those victims and has directly asked Elon Musk to stop it. Third parties based overseas are using X to advertise the images for sale, then switching to other platforms to exchange them.
- Bolts magazine looks at how two neighboring cities in Arizona have taken opposite approaches to tackling homelessness.
- Israel struck Nasser Hospital in Gaza four times, killing at least 20 people, including 5 journalists. I’m really sick of western media blindly accepting the IDF’s claims that they’re not targeting civilians.
- Taylor Lorenz wrote this investigative piece for WIRED about a dark-money group funding Democratic influencers to spread their messages on social media, although there’s already a correction and at least one of the people she named, Elizabeth Booker Houston, has pointed out what she believes are several errors in the story (example).
- The Trump Administration is ending funding of a pediatric brain cancer treatment network dedicated to early trials of new medications.
- Harvard has removed support titles for proctors and tutors who were designated as support specifically for LGBTQ+ or first-generation students.
- Josephine Riesman ’08 wrote in the Harvard Independent, for which I wrote while I was there, that we should avoid the building that bears her family’s name, the Riesman Center for Harvard Hillel, because that organization has ignored the genocide happening in Gaza and said nothing about the Administration’s attacks against the university.
- Anti-vaxx loons are making excuses for the CDC shooter while their idol RFK Jr. pours more gasoline on the fire.
- The Philly Inquirer’s Will Bunch writes that a politician is finally doing what they promised: Trump is acting just like an authoritarian, raiding the house of critic John Bolton and using the military on his own people.
- Political scientist Don Moynihan writes that the United States is no longer a functioning democracy.
- A “voodoo plan” presented to Georgia’s Republican-dominated legislature claims, against pretty much all of economic history, that cutting 40% of the state’s revenues by ending its income tax will somehow make the state’s revenues grow. We’re on about year 45 of this experiment, and it doesn’t work. If you really want to cut taxes and grow an economy, raise the threshold below which people pay zero taxes. Those taxpayers are much more likely to put that money right back into the economy through consumption.
- ICE detained a mother in Massachusetts for 10 days over a 2003 cannabis charge for which she’d been pardoned. The woman is here legally, and the offense is no longer even a crime in Massachusetts. She was released on August 20th.
- The handpicked chairman of the Surry County (North Carolina) Board of Elections was arrested for putting drugs in his granddaughters’ ice cream. James Edwin Yokeley Jr., a Republican, resigned the day after his arrest.
- A Republican candidate for Arizona Attorney General claimed that the Yuma sheriff endorsed him … and the sheriff says that’s not true.
- Alderac’s Kickstarter for Into the Machine has a novel structure – there are all sorts of expansions for their other titles here as well, and the more items you pledge, the greater the discount you get.
- I’m intrigued by the game Le Vent Rouge, with a relaunched Kickstarter up now, as it looks like a dice-rolling and bag-building game, but a heavier one, with a play time listed at 60-120 minutes.