I had two new pieces this week for subscribers to the Athletic, my annual ranking of the top 50 free agents (which I’ve updated to reflect option decisions and the probable return of Cody Ponce from the KBO) and a column on why the Contemporary Era Committee should put Dale Murphy in the Hall of Fame. I also held a Q&A on Monday after the rankings went live.
At Endless Mode, I looked at the massive board game Luthier, which has its own soundtrack to reflect the composers depicted within the game.
I’ll do another newsletter any day now, I swear.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: ProPublica investigates what was really happening in Portland before Trump illegally sent the National Guard to the Oregon city. The short answer: not much, just peaceful protests and a whopping three people charged with crimes.
- The Atlantic has the unbelievable story of a Wisconsin man who appeared to have drowned while fishing, but when police couldn’t find his body, the story started to get very weird.
- The Guardian examines Tucson residents’ fight against a data center that is going to put a huge strain on the region’s water and energy supplies. It doesn’t help that the center’s developers have been sketchy about who’s going to use the facility – but it’s probably Amazon.
- One major lesson from Tuesday night’s decisive victories by Democrats is that supporting trans rights is a winning issue – or, I suppose, at least not a losing one. California Gov. Gavin Newsom has been rushing to throw trans rights out the window as he lines up to run for President in 2028, and it’s both cruel and unnecessary.
- In The Nation, Gillian Branstetter goes further, pointing out that so-called centrist Democrats need to stop blaming trans people for the party’s failures in 2024.
- Democrats can be sketchy too! Rep. Chuy Garcia (D-IL) is withdrawing his reelection papers to try to gift the seat to his chief of staff, which critics are calling a “coronation.”
- The stochastic terrorists of the online right, especially on Twitter, directed death threats to Arizona teachers who wore the same Halloween costumes they wear every year, because the right-wing loons assumed without evidence that the costumes were mocking the death of Charlie Kirk.
- Speaking of Kirk, his death left a void in the white-nationalist wing of the Republican Party that Nick Fuentes is happily trying to fill.
- An 18-year-old man in Oklahoma was convicted of raping two girls, including strangling one until she fell unconscious, but the judge approved a plea deal that charged him as a minor and turned a minimum of 10 years in prison to counseling with no prison time. Jesse Mack Butler was 16 at the time of at least one of the assaults. The linked story implies that he received favorable treatment because his father was the football director at Oklahoma State, where the ADA went to school; I think he got favorable treatment because he’s a white man.
- Australia is generating so much electricity from renewables that they’re offering consumers three free hours of solar energy in the middle of the day, when demand is lower and generation is highest. This could be us, but you playin’ (taking fossil fuel money to prop up a dying, suicidal industry).
- The north African country Mali may be about to fall to a rebel group affiliated with al-Qaeda. America’s influence in the Sahel was already waning before January, and it appears to be diminishing even further.
- A couple of Philadelphia restaurants found their Google pages spammed with fake 1-star reviews … plus a “review” offering to remove those for a fee.
- Astronomers detected the longest-lasting gamma-ray burst on record, so now they’re trying to figure out what caused it.
- Bluesky’s official blog noted the huge traffic surge during the World Series, with a 30% bump for Saturday’s game 7, and in doing so they used a post from yours truly.
- Board game news: The Gamefound campaign for The Mix, a midweight game about making cocktails, funded in just an hour and is approaching C$60,000 as I write this.
- And the campaign for Movers & Shakers, a railway game of building routes and completing contracts, also funded inside of a day. It’s looks a bit lighter than the typical title from Quined, who specialize in heavier Euros and have a great reputation.
- Damion Schubert looked at 365 board game rankings, condensed the games by game families (e.g., putting all Ticket to Ride games into one bucket), and then compiled the top 100 families based on those individual rankings. The list skews towards medium-heavy games, but not the heaviest, which I appreciate, and there are three families in this top ten that appeared in my own top ten last November. (Damion confirmed my list was one of the 365.)