For subscribers to the Athletic, I named my Prospect of the Year for 2021, going through a number of the top candidates this year (and there were too many to include), and two weeks ago I profiled Austin Riley’s transformation from a low-OBP hitter with exploitable holes to a downballot MVP candidate. I also held a Klawchat on Friday.

I spoke to Joe Posnanski on my podcast this week, talking about his new book, The Baseball 100, which comes out on Tuesday. You can buy it here. And you can subscribe to my podcast on iTunes and Spotify.

Over at Paste, I ranked the ten best games that are currently out of print, and my Gen Con wrapup should be up today or maybe on Monday.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter this week. And, as the holidays approach, I’ll remind you all every week that I have two books out, The Inside Game and Smart Baseball, that would make great gifts for the readers (especially baseball fans) on your lists.

• Longreads first: The Guardian looks at how outside investors bought into Appalachian coal companies, bled them dry, wiped out pensions, and poisoned the local water supplies.
• Jelani Cobb profiles Derrick Bell, one of the … of critical race theory, for the New Yorker.
• Why did Comedy Central give Charlamagne tha God, a rapist who said on air that he drugged women and raped them, his own late night show? Because he’s friends with the network’s president. He also has made anti-Semitic comments and peddles conspiracy theories, although that’s secondary here.
• Tim Grierson looked back on Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters” and the black album as a whole.
• Tucker Carlson is overtly preaching white supremacy on his show by espousing the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, first delineated by French white nationalist writer Renaud Camus.
• The Biden administration has declassified a number of documents related to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, including one FBI report detailing links between the hijackers and Saudi religious authorities within the U.S.
• At the University of Iowa, faculty members can’t even ask students to wear masks, let alone require it. Isaac Chotiner interviewed Prof. Silvia Secchi at that university about the dystopian hellscape in which she works.
• Here’s a shocker: The so-called studies that claimed to show a reduction in mortality from COVID-19 after ivermectin use? They’re junk. The main one had faked data. The second most-prominent one’s authors won’t give anyone else their data.
• Dr. Jen Gunter explains why “Dr.” Christiane Northrup is the pandemic’s worst woman, a grifter who pushes pseudoscience and vaccine misinformation.
• As if wellness influencers weren’t already a scourge on society, now they’re taking the anti-vaccine movement mainstream.
• Alaska has joined Idaho and parts of Montana in rationing hospital care due to COVID-19 patients flooding ICUs. This was preventable, if any of those states, which all have Republican governors and Republican control of both houses of their legislatures, had taken evidence-based steps to stop the pandemic, but they didn’t.
• Two Black men in Minneapolis wrote an editorial on how they’ve helped reduce violence in their communities simply by sitting down.
• Video: A man with 40 compost bins. My wife said I can’t do this.
• Dr. Nadia Chaudhri is dying of ovarian cancer at age 44, but her inspirational, life-affirming tweets have earned her a devoted following even as she documents the ravages of the disease.
• L’Événement, a French film about abortion, won the top prize in Venice.
• The Canadian alt-right site The Post Millennial is losing advertisers because it employs the grifter Andy Ngo. Ngo has enjoyed close ties with groups like the Proud Boys and encouraged followers to dox his critics.
• In key battleground states, corporate PAC money goes overwhelmingly to anti-abortion legislators.
• The finance chairman of the Nevada Republican Party is hosting a major QAnon conference at his hotel.
• The BBC talks to people who’ve lost close family members to the QAnon hoax.
• Mark Appel’s twitter thread on lessons he’s learned from his experiences from high school to his current comeback is well worth reading.
• The Philadelphia Inquirer is refusing to call these election recount shams “audits.” The Washington Post‘s Margaret Sullivan explains why.
• Board game news: Flatout Games, one of the publishers behind Calico and Cascadia, now has a Kickstarter up for a new game, Verdant.
• Jeff Bergren, owner of the publisher/game store chain The Gaming Goat, was kicked out of Gen Con last week, and now GAMA, the organizer of the gaming con Origins, has banned him and his company from the event. Bergren has a history of harassing other members of the community, and a recent Kickstarter for one of his company’s games included the white power ‘ok’ symbol in one of the images.