I had one post this past week for subscribers to the Athletic, breaking down the four-player trade between Milwaukee and Tampa Bay along with the implications for Wander Franco, Taylor Walls, and Luis Urías. I also held a Klawchat on Friday.
Over at Paste, I reviewed Cryo, a really engaging new worker-placement game from the designers of Manhattan Project: Energy Empire, where resources are always limited and you have to build your board to maximize your resource collection.
If you’d like to buy The Inside Game and support my board game habit, Midtown Scholar has a few signed copies still available. You can also buy it from any of the indie stores in this twitter thread, all of whom at least had the book in stock earlier this month. If none of those works, you can find it on Bookshop.org and at Amazon.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul, & Mary received a Presidential pardon from Jimmy Carter for a charge of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl. It turns out that she was far from his only victim.
- There’s a tradition in Alabama where sheriffs who lose elections waste a whole shitload of taxpayer money to make things harder for their successors, because Alabama is apparently some sort of developing-world dictatorship.
- The BBC looks at “infinite plastic,” efforts to use chemistry to break down plastics back into a form of oil, which would make any plastic materials recyclable – even things like sandwich bags that contain multiple different types of plastic and can’t be recycled directly into new plastics.
- Nik Sharma looks at the science behind vegan meringues, made from the liquid in canned chickpeas, for Serious Eats.
- If staying at home with the kids (rather than working) is so wonderful, why don’t more men do it? Jessica Valenti explores the manipulation going on in the wake of a pandemic that has disproportionately hurt women in the workforce.
- Saturday Night Live‘s sketch parodying the Muppets was embarassingly bad. A bunch of people thought the actual Muppets were part of the sketch.
- COVID denialists have pounced on a CDC data set that they claim shows an increased incidence of suicides under age 18 during lockdowns. They are being disingenuous, at best, or are outright lying.
- Justice Elena Kagan has had about enough of Brett Kavanaugh’s judicial activism. I still want to know who paid off his credit card debts.
- A Missouri lawyer, who represented the gun-toting bigots who got famous for standing courageously on their front porch, drew fire this week for derogatory comments about people with autism and people with disabilities.
- In Texas, where The Cruelty Is the Point, it is about to become almost impossible for a woman to exercise her right to abort a pregnancy. This Twitter thread elucidates just how cruel that law will be in practice.
- Ethiopia expelled a New York Times reporter who’d written about the regime’s extensive human rights abuses in Tigray.
- The BBC World Service looks at Africans who were forced to speak English growing up and now face an identity crisis of sorts when they find themselves unable to speak their native languages.
- Two great pieces on the Yankees’ Corey Kluber in the wake of his no-hitter this week: my colleague Lindsey Adler on the development of his arsenal, and the New York Post‘s Dan Martin on what Yankees’ scouts saw in Kluber to convince the team to sign him.
- The Onion, always on point.
- Board game news: Brew is now available for pre-order from Pandasaurus Games.