I’m returning from a long vacation to England and Wales, one in which I was barely online and enjoyed this tremendously. A couple of folks reached out to see if my absence from the internet was due to something unfortunate, and I appreciate that you checked in.

Before I started this break, I had a slew of articles for subscribers to The Athletic, including a ranking of the top 60 prospects in the minors that included recent draftees; some thoughts on which teams did best and worst at the trade deadline; and breakdowns of the Juan Soto trade, the Frankie Montas trade; the Josh Hader trade; and some smaller deals from that final day. I held a Q&A at the Athletic on August 1st.

Before this vacation, I took a few days to head to Indianapolis to go to Gen Con, the largest board game convention in North or South America, and wrote about it in two posts for Paste – one ranking the ten best games I played there, and another discussing everything else I tried or saw. I also reviewed the very disappointing new Stranger Things game, Attack of the Mind Flayer.

My podcast will return this upcoming week, as will my newsletter.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: The New York Times details the numerous allegations against former Gravity Payments CEO Dan Price, who had become a media darling for his decision to raise his company’s minimum salary to $70K a year (which, to be clear, is still good!) and his tweets about excessive CEO pay and living wages.
• Bob Nutting, owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates, bought the Aspen Times newspaper, and in what appears to be a concerted effort with a Russian oligarch, suppressed negative coverage in the 140-year-old paper, according to a former editor.
• Climate change is causing a mass movement of people from the worst-hit areas, and we need to prepare for it.
• NBC News has the story of a Texas mom campaigning to ban LGBTQ+ themed books from school libraries – even though her own son is gay.
• Texas’ abortion law made one woman’s wanted pregnancy a medical nightmare. Republicans trying to ban abortion are worse at failing to anticipate consequences than Bud Selig was.
• The BBC looks back at the failure of Disney and Miramax to sell Hayao Miyazaki’s film Princess Mononoke to American audiences.
• Dr. Angela Rasmussen, one of the authors of the recent studies that showed that COVID-19 almost certainly had a natural origin, discussed the toxic “lab-leak” discource on social media, one pushed by bad actors, including people with books to sell.
• Dan Szymborski wrote about how the Fernando Tatis suspension is a loss for baseball, not just for Padres fans.
• Two billionaires, Jeff Yass and Dick Uihlein, are funding a far-right election denier in Nevada’s Senate race. Uihlein’s money comes from U-Line, his closely held packaging company. If I get a package in an U-Line box, I ask the shipper or vendor to use someone else for their packaging needs.
• A Nigerian doctor tried to warn the world about monkeypox back in 2016, but nobody listened.
• President Biden has almost completely stopped drone attacks in Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, and Syria, compared not just to his immediate predecessor but to President Obama as well.
• This was inevitable: some sore-loser parents used Utah’s anti-trans law to question the gender of the girl who beat their daughters in a track event.
• Meanwhile, far-right transphobes are harassing Boston Children’s Hospital employees over false claims that the hospital is conducting gender-affirming surgeries on trans kids.
• Reader Dr. Paul Sax wrote a personal piece about why abortions are medical care.
• The Washington Post wrote about how Indy Star reporters showed that the story of a pregnant 10-year-old who had to travel out of Ohio to Indiana for an abortion was, in fact, not a hoax. (And then Indiana banned all abortions, because that state is also a theocracy.)
• Board game news: The Kickstarter for Trailblazers, a short, portable family game about hiking and kayaking, funded in less than two hours.
• Level Up Dice made custom polyhedral dice from metal melted down from a German WWII tank, and then had to apologize for it.