Nothing new from me at the Athletic as I wait for some real news, a trade or signing, that I can break down. I’ve also begun the offseason prospect work, although those rankings won’t run until late January or early February.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the wonderful game Fit to Print, which has a real-time aspect like Galaxy Trucker where players grab various tiles, then some tile-laying like Patchwork, as players try to fill out their woodland newspapers – with some hilarious text and art on the tiles – with articles, photos, and ads, playing over three rounds to represent three days of issues.

On the Keith Law Show, I spoke with Robert Kolker, author of Hidden Valley Road and The Lost Girls, primarily about the first book, which deals with a family where six of their twelve children developed schizophrenia, although we touched on his update to the latter since the case may have been solved. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I also appeared on NPR’s Marketplace, talking about Moneyball and the data revolution in baseball in the last twenty years. You can catch it on iTunes on the Marketplace Tech podcast.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter last Saturday and will do another this weekend as I try to make this a weekly thing, although I might shift to Monday since that tends to be the slowest day of my week (in more ways than one).

• Two longreads from ProPublica: The first is an appalling story of how white Louisiana judges on the 5^th Circuit decided to deny all petitions from prisoners who couldn’t afford attorneys, many of them Black men who claimed they were unjustly convicted – over 5000 such petitions in total, over a period of 12 years. It first became public when the staff director for the court wrote a confessional note before killing himself, but the judiciary managed to clamp down on the story and there have been no consequences for any of the judges or others involved. Oh, those prisoners still had to pay the $300 fee to file those petitions that judges wouldn’t even read. Many of the affected prisoners are still incarcerated.
• The second looks at the twenty farming families who use more than half of the water taken from the Colorado River by farms, and 1/7 of all of the water that flows through the river’s Lower Basin each year.
• Climate change is pushing the insects that spread tropical diseases further north, into Europe and the United States. Europe had as many cases of dengue in 2022 as they did in 2010 through 2021 combined. California just reported two cases of local transmission last week.
• Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian wrote the best piece I read this week on the Israel-Hamas war, arguing that both sides have to fight their own extremists to get us to a sustainable peace.
• BlueTriton, the company that owns Poland Spring, quashed a bill in Maine’s legislature to cap the length of water-pumping contracts at seven years. A lobbyist for BlueTriton wrote an amendment that friendly legislators introduced, killing the bill.
• Just a day before they got spanked in school board elections in Iowa and Pennsylvania, the pro-censorship group Moms for Liberty demanded that Florida cops arrest a school librarian because there was a fantasy novel that they alleged had risqué content available in the school library.
• Hold your surprise: Nine of the 12 members of a Congressional committee that advises the nation on its nuclear strategy have financial ties to weapons manufacturers.
• Wounded Falling Bird Ron DeSantis (R) removed commissioner Oren Miller from office in The Villages from office in 2021 after Miller fought a property tax that benefited a local developer, then forced a bogus perjury charge against Miller as well. A three-person panel of Republican judges not only threw out the conviction, they ordered the lower court to find Miller “not guilty.”
• Also in Governor WFB’s Florida, the plan to remake the tiny, once-liberal New School into a bastion of conservative something will cost taxpayers $600,000 per student.
• The NY Times’s Katherine Miller looks at Nikki Haley’s campaign, and how her fight against Trump may turn “brutal.”
• Did anyone else notice that Trump threatened to call in troops to put down protests and arrest dissenters if he wins the Presidency next November?
• A student at the University of Pennsylvania who had Long QT syndrome, a form of cardiac arrythmia, died after having a Charged Lemonade at Panera, as she was unaware that it contained as much caffeine as four cups of coffee. Her family is suing, and Panera has added new warning language around the drinks. I go to Panera probably 4-5 times a year, and I’ve seen those drinks, but I had no idea they had that much caffeine, which is more than I have ever had in a single day in my life as far as I know.
• Parents demanding that their kids skip once-mandatory childhood vaccinations are doing so at the highest rate ever, raising the risk of outbreaks of preventable diseases like measles and mumps.
• Yusef Salaam, one of the falsely accused Central Park Five who was arrested at age 15 and served nearly seven years in prison before his exoneration, was elected to the New York City Council on Tuesday.
• Your second COVID-19 infection increases your risk of getting long COVID, and it appears to also increase the odds that you never fully recover. Less than 10% of Americans have gotten a COVID-19 vaccine booster this fall. I did, and you should too. Also, now I’m magnetic wheeee!
• Paper straws are everywhere in the UK, but they’re not clearly better for the environment than plastic ones. How about you just skip the straw if you’re able and we save them for folks who require them?
• Israel has killed yet another Palestinian journalist, appearing to target Mohammad Abu Hasira this week, running the count of journalists killed in Gaza to at least 37.
• Director of the National Counterterrorism Center Christine Abizaid used Hamas’ terrorist attacks on October 7^th as an argument to urge Congress to renew FISA Section 702, which allows our government to spy on us if the purpose is to gather “foreign information.”
• The Last Dinner Party have been anointed a Next Big Thing by many critics. The BBC talked to the quintet about what that’s been like, including weird accusations that they were a fabricated band like a K-Pop act.
• Board game news: There’s a new site devoted to video and board game content called Aftermath. It’s a writer-owned subscription site that hopes to follow the Defector model, and includes Luke Plunkett, who spent many years at Kotaku, and whom I met on the Shelf Stories podcast this summer.
• The Kickstarter for Undergrove, the newest game from Wingspan designer Elizabeth Hargrave (co-designed with Mark Wootton), is already over $250K in just three days.
• Alley Cat Games has a Kickstarter for a fresh printing of the 2017 game Calimala, designed by Fabio Lopiano (3 Ring Circus, Merv).