For subscribers to The Athletic, I wrote my annual column with my ballots for the awards I don’t have this year. A record number of people didn’t read the intro this year.
At Endless Mode, I reviewed the two-player game Naishi, which is a solid enough game, but which is yet another example of white European designers & illustrators using Japanese culture and history as a theme, and in this case they really misused it in a way that I couldn’t get past.
I sent out another edition of my free email newsletter on Friday, touching on (waves hands pathetically) all of this happening around us.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: A team of Bloomberg reporters gained access to 18,000 emails from Jeffrey Epstein’s Yahoo account, and found that a number of prominent lawyers and academics continued to help him even after his crimes against children were first exposed.
- For Pioneer Works, Lauren Markham describes how climate change is already making parts of Greece uninhabitable in the summers, with fires and temperatures topping 110 degrees.
- Texas Monthly examines the water wars in the eastern part of Texas, as politicians, residents, and carpetbagging investors try to claim the increasingly scarce resource.
- ProPublica exposes how a Florida donor got Kristi Noem to fast-track disaster aid for a tourist pier in Naples. Drain the swamp!
- Jamelle Bouie calls out the MAGA movement’s complete disinterest in debate, despite the disingenuous claims to the contrary in the last two weeks.
- The Stranger reports on the rise in attacks on trans women in the Seattle area, part of a larger increase in attacks on LGBT people in general.
- Writing in Stat News, Arthur Caplan, head of the Division of Medical Ethics at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, says that Americans can no longer trust their government’s so-called health advice.
- As you may have seen already, White House border czar Tom Homan accepted $50,000 in a CAVA bag from FBI agents posing as business executives in 2024, but Trump’s DOJ and FBI shut the investigation down. Drain the swamp!
- Antibiotic-resistant Enterobacteles infections rose 461% in U.S. hospitals from 2019 to 2023; while still rare overall, it’s a “nightmare” bacterium due to the lack of treatments and high fatality rate.
- Bill Berrien, a Republican candidate for Governor in Wisconsin, followed a number of sexually explicit accounts on social media until reporters from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel asked him about it. He has, of course, taken up the party line in attacking trans people.
- Ryan Walters, the Republican superintendent of public instruction in Oklahoma, resigned to take a job with a reactionary nonprofit that he says is going to “destroy the teachers’ unions.” Walters tried to force Oklahoma teachers to teach the Bible in public classrooms, but all he really did was drive Oklahoma’s national education ranking down even further, while also facing allegations that he was watching porn in his office.
- ICE agents held a five-year-old girl hostage to try to get her father to surrender to them.
- A Los Angeles-area woman with bipolar disorder gave her life savings to scammers, even selling her house to send them money, because she fell for their AI videos showing a soap opera actor saying he was in love with her.
- After The Guardian revealed that Israel was using Microsoft cloud and AI services to conduct mass surveillance on Palestinians, the software company blocked the country from using at least some of those services. Meanwhile, more experts have come out to call Israel’s actions in Gaza genocide.
- The Concho Observer reports on the fear and confusion at Angelo State University due to Texas’s transphobic law that prohibits faculty from mentioning the fact that there are more than two genders, discussing anything relating to transgender people, or using trans students’ correct names.
- Meanwhile, an anonymous Texas A&M professor wrote an open letter to students there, asking them to be agents of change and fight the state and federal governments’ attempts to bowdlerize their education.
- Task & Purpose tracked down the flag-bearing marine in this viral photo at the protests outside of ICE’s Chicago facility last week.
- The Trump Administration is gutting the Fair Housing Act in addition to all of the other havoc and harm they’re causing.
- Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) voted against the resolution to “honor” Charlie Kirk last week, saying that Kirk “resurrected dangerous prejudices of a dark past” and that the activist’s “rhetoric was divisive, disparaging, and too often rooted in grievance.”
- The Dean of Harvard’s School of Public Health took $150,000 to lie under oath by claiming that Tylenol causes autism.
- Slovakia’s right-wing leader pulled the country further from the west with a constitutional amendment that only ‘recognizes’ two genders, putting EU aid at risk and earning condemnation from Amnesty International.
- Chicago will pay $90 million to victims of one crooked cop, Sgt. Ronald Watts, who planted drugs on suspects, falsified reports, and threatened to charge people with drug-related crimes if they weren’t paid off. The city faced over 170 lawsuits related to Watts’ conduct and those of officers who served under him.
- Three really exciting board game Kickstarters launched this week. Container is a ‘grail game’ that’s been out of print for years; it’s an economic game about shipping containers and people freaking love it. The Voynich Puzzle is a heavy-ish Eurogame from the designer of Barcelona and Windmill Valley. Kalypso is a midweight tile-laying game from a first-time designer and from the publisher of Earth.