My big news this week was the formal announcement of my upcoming book, Smart Baseball, which will be released in April of 2017. I have gotten many requests from readers over the years for a recommendation of a book to let them get up to speed on ‘new’ stats, and since the book on that topic didn’t exist, I decided to try to write it. You can pre-order it via amazon and other sites already; it will be out in hardcover and as an e-book, but Harper Collins has not decided on an audio version yet. I also do not yet know what appearances I’ll be making or if there will be any sort of tour.

I held my regular Klawchat on Friday this past week, and my latest boardgame review for Paste covers the Hanabi-like deduction game Beyond Baker Street, where you can’t see the cards in your own hand and must give clues to other players on what cards they hold.

My email newsletter has now passed 2500 subscribers; thank you to everyone who’s already signed up. If you haven’t, what are you waiting for?

And now, the links…

• The LA Times has an outstanding investigative piece on alleged corruption in the development of an LA apartment complex. Congresswoman Janice Hahn, a Democrat from LA, took $200,000 in “donations” from people connected to the project, many of which appear to have been submitted under different names to skirt individual donation limits.
• If you care in the least about American democracy, you should be outraged over ongoing voter suppression – especially of the black vote in states like North Carolina.
• And, again, if you care in the least about our democracy and don’t want to see the GOP follow through on its promise to block any Hillary nominees for the Supreme Court vacancy, well, get out and vote to give Democrats control of the Senate. If the Republicans lose enough power, they will have to change their message (and pick a better candidate next time).
• Top Chef alum Kwame Onwuachi’s new DC restaurant, Shaw Bijou, has garnered mediocre reviews for its $185 tasting menu, a price that doesn’t include wine pairings, tax, or tip, which can bring the total to $500 per person.
• An Alberta judge ruled that a four-year-old boy who insists that he’s a girl cannot wear girls’ clothes, part of an ongoing custody battle where the child’s father refuses to even consider that his child is transgender. The risk of suicide or other self-harm in this case is through the roof and the judge’s actions are indefensible.
• The New York Times ran a lengthy piece saying GM crops don’t deliver promised results, but the American Council on Science and Health immediately called bullshit on the article.
• Deadspin has another fascinating longread this week, this time on con artist and self-styled foreign policy “expert” Robert Caruso, who’s scammed his way into numerous TV appearances and writing gigs, including one for the Council on Foreign Relations.
• If you want to fight climate change, stopping deforestation is an essential step and probably the easiest large-scale move we can make to reduce global warming and ocean acidification. Some advocates have gotten pledges from major food manufacturers to help, but do these pledges actually mean or do anything?
• Two states have major energy/climate change-related ballot questions this year. Washington is proposing a carbon emissions tax, while Florida has a tricky question pushed by traditional utilities that would make solar panels less cost-effective for homeowners.
• Subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, a measles complication that is nearly always fatal and occurs up to ten years after infection, may be more common than we thought. Imagine watching your nine-year-old kid get something akin to ALS or multiple systems atrophy. The only way to prevent it is to not get measles in the first place, which means vaccination.
• Meanwhile, a bunch of deranged parents in southern California are trying to cure their autistic kids with bleach. The scam artists peddling this crap claim to be part of a “church,” and they’re under investigation in Texas as well for selling what is essentially bleach as a miracle cure.
• Alton Brown is bringing back Good Eats as an online show, although the title may change and he says the format will allow him to do some things he couldn’t do on TV for legal reasons. (Maybe that means using lye in the pretzel-cooking water?)
• I mentioned those “Around the Web” ads in chat this week, and they were already on my mind because of this article explaining how some publishers are moving away from them anyway. They’re all clickbait, never really tied to the article I’m reading or any data that might indicate my real interests, and often the images used with them are disturbing or provocative (like a pic of Jose Fernandez) just to get you to click.
• A 24-year-old Saudi Arabian student at the University of Wisconsin-Stout was beaten to death by an unidentified white man this past week. The suspect remains at large. While it’s not known if this was specifically a hate crime, the circumstances and timing point that way.
• Liberal Muslim activist Maajid Nawaz writes that the Southern Poverty Law Center is wrong to label him “anti-Muslim,” pointing out that critics of Islam often say that the religion needs people to try to reform the religion from within and stop Islamist fundamentalism. The SPLC’s listing on Nawaz calls into doubt some of his motivations and details of his background, but also called him “anti-Muslim” for publishing a cartoon depicting Jesus and Mohammed.
• The downfall of South Korean President Park Geun-hye is totally bonkers, tied to a forty-year connection with the daughter of a cult leader.
• Land reclamation is increasingly popular as small city-states like Singapore and Monaco try to find more space for their people, or wealthy nations like Dubai (in the UAE) try to … do whatever it is they’re doing, but there are substantial environmental costs to these projects.
• In response to an ongoing sexual harassment scandal, where male soccer players were writing and emailing sexually-charged “scouting reports” on female soccer recruits, Harvard did the right thing and canceled the rest of the men’s soccer season. Several of the women targeted in one of those documents wrote a powerful, indignant response to the men who objectified and degraded them.
• Hillary Clinton faces intense animosity, often expressed in vulgar terms as she approaches the election. While some of it is clearly connected to her actions, much of it is about her husband and even more is because she’s a woman.
• All right, let’s do this… The NY Times details how Trump used a legally “dubious” method to avoid paying taxes for so many years. Newsweek explains how his companies destroyed emails and documents in defiance of court orders. If you question Hillary’s ethics, how could you possibly think more of Trump?
• Thomas Friedman points out that Trump’s stated policy goals will hurt, not help, his core voters. If you vote for him, you’re probably going to end up worse off economically if he wins. (I think we’ll all end up worse off as our economy contracts, but his base, less-educated white male voters, seem especially likely to suffer.) A Vox piece from a few weeks ago reached the same conclusion about Trump’s tax plans, which favor the highest-income bracket.
• David Frum makes the conservative case for voting for Hillary, and against Trump, who is in no way a classical conservative. I disagree with Frum on one key point: I think as President, Trump would have plenty of help in trying to silence opposing media.
• Ross Douthat points out the dangers of a Trump victory, from civil unrest (which we may see even if he loses) to global destabilization.
• Prof. Nicholas O’Shaughnessy, who wrote a book on Hitler’s use of propaganda, compares Trump’s use of the same to Hitler’s and claims to find similarities.
• The Guardian has a piece arguing the real reveal in the Podesta emails is how the American power elite protects and helps itself by retaining power. Whether you’re voting for Hillary (as I am) or not, the emails should disturb you for their demonstration of how money and back-room deals subvert the ostensibly open nature of our republic. Esquire details how Russia pulled off this hack, the biggest in U.S. election history (so far).
• From May, Adam Gopnik’s excellent and prescient New Yorker piece on the dangerous acceptance of Donald Trump.
• Scientific American, which does not normally take stands on political races, has pointed out several times that Trump’s lack of respect for and ignorance of science is alarming. That piece is from September 1st, but I think if anything he’s shown the issue is worse than we thought at the time, given his increasingly distant relationship with the truth.
• Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter lays waste to Trump, whom he’s known for over twenty years.
• Because we all need some levity right now, here’s a hilarious BBC video of a clever honey badger who is a master escape artist.