At the Athletic this week, I wrote my annual Prospect of the Year column, giving the nod to the Pirates’ Konnor Griffin and mentioning a handful of other prospects who had great years.
For Endless Mode, I reviewed the cooperative card game Beasts, another limited-communication game that I thought was perfectly fine, but not novel or interesting enough to unseat better games in this genre for me.
I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter on Friday. I feel like that’s going to be the best place for my thoughts on the state of things for now.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: WIRED’s Katie Drummond interviewed Cloudflare CEO Matt Prince, who has some wildly progressive views on content, AI, and the future of the Internet.
- In Vanity Fair, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote how pundits and politicians are sanitizing the legacy of Charlie Kirk.
- The Times reported on two deals that allowed the Trumps to pocket billions from their cryptocurrency while giving the U.A.E. access to computer chips.
- Guardian columnist Helen Pidd attended the far-right rally in the UK led by white nationalist Tommy Robinson and wrote that this dangerous movement is only going to grow from here.
- Quanta explains an unsolved problem in computer science for the longest-running six-rule computer program, known as the Busy Beaver Challenge.
- Defector reports on the sketchy goings-on at the Savannah Bananas’ charity arm.
- NY Times reporter Michael Wilson details how he nearly fell for a phone scam, where the caller purported to be from Wilson’s bank, spoofing the bank’s phone number, with other plausible details.
- The Washington Post, formerly a great American newspaper, fired editor and columnist Karen Attiah for speaking out about gun violence in the wake of the shooting of Kirk.
- Israel has committed genocide in the Gaza Strip, according to a UN Commission report released this week. Undeterred, Israel continued moving ground forces into Gaza City, displacing thousands more Palestinians.
- Former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan was a Republican who refused to go along with Trump’s attempts to steal the 2020 election. He left the party entirely due to the harassment that ensued, and now he’s running for Governor as a Democrat.
- Disney’s decision to bow to the Trump Administration and take Jimmy Kimmel off the air is further evidence of the assault on the First Amendment. So are the dozens of teachers and professors fired for their comments on Kirk and his death.
- Meanwhile, even though Kirk’s (alleged) murderer was a white man, Black Americans are receiving death threats over it, writes Elie Mystal in The Nation.
- Chicago Public Media’s WBEZ reached out to all 48 Illinois college instructors on Turning Point USA’s “watchlist” and detailed the harassment they’ve received as a result, including death threats.
- The Department of Education is ending discretionary funding to multiple grant programs for colleges that primarily serve minority students, because DEI.
- The attorneys general of nine blue states have joined the National Women’s Law Center to pledge to fight to protect the rights of trans students, just as the ultra-right Heritage Foundation wants the Administration to brand trans activistists as terrorists.
- Physicists at the University of Colorado-Boulder published a paper about how they managed to create visible time crystals, a strange state of matter that was only proposed in 2012 and had never been seen at the macroscopic level until now.
- Board game Kickstarters: Disco Heist Laundry is indeed a heist game, set in the early ‘80s; full disclosure: I know the publisher pretty well, as our kids go to the same school … Dinosaur Island: Fully Charged is an upgraded version of the 2017 tile & worker placement game, with better components and some rules tweaks to improve the game’s balance … I don’t know anything about this publisher but I’m intrigued by the game, Smallfolk, a “cozy” tableau-builder … I can’t remember if I linked this one before, but Bézier is publishing a new title called The Game Makers, featuring the images and names of 300 actual board games that you’ll compete to make.