I had a weird lull over at The Athletic, as I didn’t really have games to hit or travel planned, so my scouting notebook from this week on Gerrit Cole, Franklin Arias, Ronny Cruz, and more was my first post in a couple of weeks. I’ll be back with at two pieces next week, including my first mock draft of 2026, tentatively scheduled to run on May 7th.
Over at AV Club, I reviewed the game Catan on the Road, and then spoke to designer Josh Wood about his upcoming game Let’s Go! To France, the sequel to the delightful Let’s Go! To Japan. The site shuttered its games section on Friday, so my regular reviews and writing there are done. I loved writing about games, so I’m open to freelance board game writing opportunities elsewhere.
I’m on Bluesky more than anything else right now. I’ve also been posting longer videos to Instagram and TikTok, talking about players I see or reacting to news.
I also appeared on 92.3 The Fan in Cleveland to talk about Travis Bazzana, Chase Delauter, and other Guardians prospects/players.
I’ll work on another free email newsletter next.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: North Carolina cop Scott Collins shot and killed Brandon Webster, a Black man, in 2019, and claimed self-defense. The Marshall Project finally got the truth, which includes the state never even bothering to investigate Collins’ rendition of events.
- What will it take to get rid of RFK Jr. as Secretary of “Health” and Human Services? Laura Weiss goes long on the topic for The New Republic, with quotes from Colette Delawalla, founder of Stand Up for Science and the subject of this profile. Meanwhile, Gregg Gonsalves writes in The Nation about “Vichy scientists” like Jay Bhattacharya who have chosen to collaborate with the anti-science Administration.
- Streetsblog found that Staten Island cop James Giovansanti racked up 547 speeding tickets and hasn’t been disciplined once. The Times picked up the story on Thursday in a longer piece on a bill aimed at stopping these so-called “super-speeders.”
- Residents of Roxbury, New Jersey, are fighting ICE’s efforts to build a concentration camp in their town.
- Is Jimmy Fallon accelerating the death of culture? I guess the question really is whether he’s a cause or a symptom.
- The President of Cornell ran his car over the foot of a protesting student and bumped another, then claimed they had attacked his car and blocked his exit. Student journalists at The Cornell Daily Sun obtained video of the incident and found that he made up that excuse.
- The University of Iowa created the Orwellian-titled Center for Intellectual Freedom, which just creates the problem it claims it’s trying to solve.
- A mother whose daughter died of SSPE, an incurable, fatal disorder caused by a past measles infection, wrote about the tragedy in The New York Times. The Times’ editorial board ran this editorial a few days later about how RFK Jr. and the Trump Republicans have created a terrifying new reality of preventable infectious diseases.
- This Administration is going after all kinds of rights. The FTC is ramping up to go after gender-affirming care in the continuing war on trans people. Trump and RFK Jr. are threatening the availability of contraception.
- The London Review of Books notes that the genocide in Gaza continues, and those who still live there face appalling conditions, with over 70,000 cases of rodent and ectoparasitic infestations just this year.
- Israel continues to attack journalists in Gaza and now Lebanon, killing Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil and injuring her colleague last week in what appears to have been a deliberate act of murder – when the first airstrike didn’t kill her, they fired again.
- I posted this in the last roundup but I’m re-upping here after the sanitizing biopic Michael made so much money last weekend: Tim Grierson writes about the now-unavailable documentary Leaving Neverland and how impossible it is to forget the clear accusations against Michael Jackson that documentary laid out.
- Janet Mills’ withdrawal from the Maine Senate race makes Graham Platner the presumptive Democratic nominee. A Maine reporter and former classmate of Platner’s writes about his appeal.
- Texas Tech, a public university, has issued a ban on any discussion of LGBTQ+ topics by professors or even by students in their work. The American Historical Association announced their opposition to the policy, which, in a normal world, would be thrown out as a clear violation of the First Amendment. In Inside Higher Ed, Prof. Ben Wright at the University of Texas-Dallas writes that people need to stop criticizing professors who stay at these schools to fight the crackdown.
- It’s not a normal world, of course, as six judicial activists on the Supreme Court sounded the death knell for American democracy, writes Moira Donegan in The Guardian.
- Louisiana Republicans aren’t just trying to gerrymander Black citizens out of their franchise – they’re also trying to eliminate an elected position so a Black man can’t take office.
- In more free-speech-for-me-not-for-thee news, Utah State caved to a right-wing political campaign that included Senator Mike Lee (R, of course) to disinvite speaker Sharon McMahon … over McMahon quoting Charlie Kirk’s own words after his death.
- New gas-powered data centers could dump more climate-warming gases into the air than entire nations.
- The Verge looked at how tech bros have lost touch with what people actually want.
- The U.S. government is running fake-news sites in Arabic and Farsi to push pro-American views in the Middle East.
- I missed this from last fall, but Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC), currently running for Governor of South Carolina, tweeted at a Jewish Congresswoman “I have a good surgeon if you ever want to get your nose done.”
- Republicans in Indiana have succeeded again in making it harder for college students to vote.
- We love Quince in this house, for their cashmere sweaters (my god they are warm) and many other things. Bloomberg looked at why they’ve been so successful.
- A reader passed along this Times story on the hot resale market for La Marzocco espresso machines.
- A tiny bit of good news: Over 400 new independent bookstores opened in the U.S. in 2025, an increase of 31% from 2024.
- Mixed-use complexes are the hot new(ish) stadium funding scam that built the Battery in not-Atlanta. The Rays’ new owner is trying to run the same playbook, but economist J.C. Bradbury writes that Cobb County hasn’t seen the promised benefits.
- I had no idea that English used to have pronouns to refer to exactly two people, whether it was in the sense of us, you, or them.
- Allplay has a new Kickstarter up for River Valley Jewelcraft, a ‘spiritual sequel’ to River Valley Glassworks and Things in Rings.
- I’ve never played Kohaku, but there’s a Kickstarter up for a reprint and new expansion.
- MENSA does some annual board game awards that are probably the only thing MENSA does that’s worth noting; you can see this year’s winners here over on Board Game Wire.