My one new post for subscribers to The Athletic this week looked at some 2022 draft prospects from last month’s Future Stars Main Event at Citi Field. My ranking of the top 50 free agents on the market this offseason went up last week, also for subscribers.

My latest game review for Paste looks at Brew, a midweight game with incredible art that I couldn’t warm up to – the combination of area control, resource management, worker placement, and take-that mechanics left me feeling more confused than anything. It really does look great, though.

On the Keith Law Show this week, my guest was Sam Ezersky, the digital puzzles editor for the New York Times and the guy you should all yell at when the Spelling Bee doesn’t take ACIDEMIA. You can listen and subscribe on Apple or Spotify. On the Athletic Baseball Show this week, Derek Van Riper and I talked about the Mets’ disastrous GM search, among other things.

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: This Guardian profile of a French expert on serial killers who wasn’t quite what he said he was is riveting.
• As is this New Yorker story on a multi-million dollar fraud in the organic food world, which probably affected every consumer who bought any organic grains in the 2000s and early 2010s.
• A reader suggestion: how two wealthy benefactors tried to save Kalamazoo, and perhaps made the failing city worse in the end.
• From my friend Tim Grierson, in MEL magazine: How Kenneth Branagh has spent much of his career trying to live up to Henry V.
• The University of Florida tried to prevent two of its professors from testifying in a lawsuit against Governor DeSantis. They’re now suing on First Amendment grounds.
• Writer Michele Genthoni tells the story of how she lost two adult siblings to COVID-19 because they were vaccine deniers.
• Getting back to normal is great, until you test positive.
• This 2017 WIRED piece on how false memories work, focusing on researcher Dr. Julia Shaw, is fascinating. People can remember things that absolutely never happened to them, and it’s not even that hard for someone else to convince them.
• The NRA mapped out its 20-year strategy of defiance and opposition to any attempt at gun control in a conference call in the wake of the Columbine massacre. NPR obtained a recording of the 1999 conversation.
• Portugal has made it illegal for your boss to text you outside of work hours.
• I loved the first two Age of Empires games – Civilization in a two-hour package! Although if you play it six times in a row, I suppose you’ve spent the same amount of time not eating or sleeping. Anyway, there’s an Age of Empires IV, and Paste decided to go and call them Dad Games.
• The New York Times asked Daniel Radcliffe and director Chris Columbus to look back at Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone on the film’s 20^th anniversary. I enjoyed it even though I think the film is pretty flawed.
• I’m sure you heard about the latest right-wing grift, the so-called University of Austin, which doesn’t exist, and promises to offer “forbidden courses” but is really just going to sell bigotry in a nice suit. The school’s main obsession appears to be complaining about anything and everything. I’m curious why Harvard has allowed two of its faculty members, Stephen Pinker and Larry Summers, to join its board of advisors, although both men also associated with Jeffrey Epstein and my alma mater didn’t seem to care.
• The same people saying that we need more freedom in classrooms to discuss controversial subjects are also trying to ban – or even burn – books about controversial things.
• Speaking of grifters, J.D. Vance missed a campaign finance filing deadline and is ducking two debates in his dubious effort to win the Republican nomination for Ohio’s upcoming Senate race.
• There’s a growing body of work that shows how women in the workforce fared worse during the peak of the pandemic, and here’s more, this time showing that women leaders took on more ‘invisible work,’ like work supporting employees or fueling DEI initiates.
• The pandemic also drove college-educated mothers out of the workforce because of the added labor required from child care.
• One new survey found that 4 in 5 respondents had fallen for at least one piece of COVID-19 misinformation.
• The Atlantic writer Caitlin Flanagan’s series of self-owns on Twitter this week was something to behold. She is consistently wrong and impervious to correction.
• Two of the women in the group Moms for Liberty, one of the factions leading these silly school board protests over Critical Race Theory and the like, wrote an editorial in the Washington Post explaining why politicians ignore them at their peril. What they do not mention, however, is that Moms for Liberty is an astroturf group almost certainly funded by the Koch Brothers.
• Board game news: Z-Man Games announced Ultimate Railroads, a long-awaited reprint of and update to Russian Railroads, one of the best heavy games I’ve played, in one box that includes all of its expansions.
• Gartenbau returned to Kickstarter for one last go-round.
• If you like super-long, heavy games, like Lisboa and On Mars, the designer of those games, Vital Lacerda, has a new game out called Weather Machine up on Kickstarter and it looks huge and heavy and not really the kind of game I care for.
• The creators of Glen More have a Kickstarter ending in 3 days for a new game called Caral.
• W. Eric Martin, the editor of BoardGameGeek News and the site’s main writer, has a fascinating essay that points out that the site’s rankings aren’t that useful, in which he also admits that he hasn’t played a lot of the very heavy games near the top of the rankings – just 28 of the site’s top 100, fewer than I have (about 38, eyeballing it).