I jumped right back into the minor league thing this week, and have a new scouting notebook for subscribers to the Athletic, with notes on Anthony Volpe, Ricky Tiedeman, Orelvis Martinez, Everson Pereira, Quinn Priester, Jackson Holliday, and many more players.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the 2021 Kennerspiel des Jahres finalist Lost Ruins of Arnak, a great midweight game that looks like it’s going to be complex but plays simpler than that, combining a lot of common mechanics for a game that’s more than the sum of its parts.

My podcast will return on Monday, and my newsletter will return this week as well.

And now, the links..

• Longreads first: I know you’re shocked, but a former Twitter exec revealed the company’s security policies are so lax that not only is the personal information of users at risk, but there are even broader national security concerns as a result.
• A growing theocratic movement that includes disgraced General Michael Flynn and disgraced political operative Roger Stone called the New Apostolic Reformation is pushing to place more members or adherents in government roles, including Pennsylvania gubernational candidate Doug Mastriano.
• When a private investment firm, Portopiccolo Group, bought a nursing home, the quality of care began to drop as they cut costs, leading to a COVID-19 outbreak and an increase in deaths.
• Three longreads from ProPublica this week that are worth reading: The Colorado River is drying up and it threatens our nation’s food supply; billionaire Barre Seid has donated $1.6 billion to a new archconservative advocacy group led by the architect of the Republicans’ takeover of the Supreme Court and national judiciary; and Republican officials in Florida may have entrapped  Floridians with felony convictions by helping them register to vote, which led to the men facing voter fraud charges.
• The Guardian looks at the two men who have helped expose how England and Wales allowed their rivers to become polluted with sewage, devastating marine life, thanks to privatization and reduced regulations from the British government.
• The global food crisis this summer was years in the making, and evident to many people whose attempts to sound the alarm went for naught.
• High school students in southern states that refuse to offer basic sex education are now organizing groups to teach themselves and their peers. Sex education doesn’t increase sexual activity, but it does decrease pregnancy and STI rates, while so called “abstinence-only” education doesn’t work at all.
• The famous political magazine … uh, Science published an editorial calling out Tucker Carlson for his misleading comments and outright falsehoods about Anthony Fauci. What’s next? IEEE Spectrum goes after Jordan Peterson?
• Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett is a member of a fringe religious group that preaches women’s subservience to their husbands.
• This summer, Germany offered a 9 euro all-you-can-ride monthly train ticket. People used it, a lot, and air pollution went down.
• The Nepalese language Kusunda is down to just one native speaker, leading to a rush to try to save this language isolate, meaning it has no known linguistic relatives, before it dies out. The BBC also had a post last month about what happens in the brains of people speak multiple languages.
• The mother of a nonbinary child explains why they moved from Arizona to New York, citing the former’s hostility to anyone who isn’t straight and cisgender.
• The Chicago Tribune’s Shakeia Taylor looks at minor league players’ fight to end MLB’s antitrust exemption. (A subscription might be required.)
• Facebook and Instagram finally, years after the horse left the barn, kicked RFK Jr’s false information factory Children’s Health Defense off their sites, citing the group’s history of spreading anti-vaccine lies. I have no idea why it took this long. Well, I can offer a gue$$.
• Susan Demas, a longtime political journalist in Michigan, wrote about how normalcy bias has led us to believe things aren’t that bad when, in face, they’re terrible. It’s a real cognitive bias that leads people to dismiss or diminish the odds of disasters, such as the global food crisis I mentioned above.
• Board game news: A fellow Gen Con attendee wrote an editorial for the Washington Post because he’s mad that the convention might move in response to Indiana’s abortion ban. It’s the least self-aware thing you’ll read all week. Abortion bans, same-sex marriage bans, “bathroom bills,” laws that target LGBTQ+ people … he doesn’t have to worry about these, because he’s a straight cis white guy. He’s ten pounds of privilege in a five-pound bag, but the worst part is that he doesn’t realize it.
• Sea of Legends: Vengeance of the Empires, a narrative game for 1-4 players, has fully funded on Kickstarter with about two and a half weeks to go.
• Two big crowdfunding efforts are coming up: The Fox Experiment, a game about the Russian experiment to domesticate the silver fox, co-designed by Wingspan designer Elizabeth Hargrave; and Daybreak, a cooperative game about fighting climate change co-designed by Pandemic creator Matt Leacock.