One new post for subscribers to the Athletic this week – a fairly quickly-written post on what the Yankees could do this winter to fix their club, notably their offense. I’m about ¾ of the way through the top 50 free agents rankings, which will run the day after the World Series ends.
Over at Paste, I reviewed the trick-taking game Cat in the Box, which takes the Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment as its inspiration. Cards have numbers but no suits until they’re played – as in, when they’re observed. Apparently my review was so positive the game has sold out everywhere!
My guest on the Keith Law Show this week was Joe Posnanski, who helped me preview the World Series, talk a little about the highs and lows of the playoffs so far, and talk a little about free agency. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can sign up for my free email newsletter and at some point I’ll send another one out. Also, you can buy either of my books, Smart Baseball or The Inside Game, via bookshop.org at those links, or at your friendly local independent bookstore. I hear they make great holiday gifts.
And now, the links…
Longreads first: ProPublica has the best story yet on how the couplpe that owns the shipping materials behemoth U-Line uses their profits to fund all kinds of extreme right-wing causes, from election denial to anti-LGBTQ+ laws to anti-abortion laws and more. They oppose anything that might improve workers’ rights or raise taxes on the ultra-rich, too. If you get a box made by U-Line, contact the shipper and ask them to use someone else. I’ve done this many times and only once have I gotten a negative reply – and I won’t do business with that company again.
This Atlantic story about a realtor in Michigan who was convinced he’d cracked the state lottery’s algorithm is a great illustration of our innate tendencies to see patterns in randomness – and how we can convince ourselves of almost anything.
Music journalist and author Caryn Rose ranked all 234 U2 songs for Rolling Stone. I found myself agreeing with most of the top of the list, although as someone who first encountered the band through MTV’s heavy rotation of “New Year’s Day,” I think that one is too low.
MLB.com writer Matthew Monaghan wrote a lovely piece for Travel + Leisure on revisiting his late wife’s favorite vacation spot, Bermuda. It’s a tough but beautiful read.
Texas no longer requires a permit for handguns, leading to more spontaneous shootings. It sounds like police – the blue we’re supposed to back – don’t seem to like this new lawless reality.
The massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, again, a state that decided that anyone can carry a gun without a permit, has made an activist out of one of the 10-year-old survivors.
Why didn’t St. Louis police take the gun from the kid who killed a teacher and another student in a school there last week, since he failed a background check?
At The Verge, Nilay Patel writes how Elon Musk can’t possibly adhere to his stated “free speech” goals and run what was already a “disaster clown car company” profitably. It’s not hard to agree – Twitter hasn’t been growing, its ad revenues lag behind any competitors, it faces a tangle of regulations and pressure from markets where Musk’s Tesla wants to grow, and the site has never figured out how to deal with harassment and abuse. I’m not leaving, but I’ve already been engaging less on the site, and if a viable alternative emerges I’ll gladly check it out.
Meanwhile, conspiracy theories spreading on the farcical social media app Truth Social have led to actual armed idiots “patrolling” around ballot boxes to try to spot voter fraud.
This year’s Nobel Prize for Physics went to three scientists for their work on quantum entanglement, which Albert Einstein once derided as “spooky action at a distance.” Author John Horgan writes of the beauty of this work and how it seems to defy common sense for Scientific American.
Physicist Peter Fisher gave a talk at my alma mater about the search for dark matter and the theory that WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles) are what make up this missing mass.
The Washington Post reports on the network of people helping direct pills to terminate pregnancies to people in states where abortion is now illegal.
Disinformation dealer Dinesh D’Souza’s publisher deleted defamatory details after recalling his new book 2000 Mules, even though he’d promised to name names. What a ding-dong.
As President, Trump had his hotels charge the Secret Service – and thus, all of us who pay taxes – five times the maximum room rate allowed by federal law, and then he lied about it.
I don’t link to the Federalist, a disinformation-spewing site funded by the owners of U-Line, very often, but this piece arguing that conservatives should fight for stronger government and more intervention in all areas of society certainly seems to remove the mask from the extreme right, because that is not conservatism – it’s fascism.
In good Administration news that seems to be flying under the radar, President Biden is moving to cancel a program to develop a new submarine-launched nuclear cruise missile, which wouldn’t have been ready until 2035 and which the administration says is redundant with existing weapons. Some anti-nuclear weapon groups say Biden hasn’t gone far enough. The military, meanwhile, wants all the weapons.
As the parent of a teenager, I often feel like part of my job is try to reduce the stresses she faces in school and life, because we hear so much about how much stress our kids are under and I have a natural instinct to want to protect her. Psychologist Dr. Lisa Damour argues instead that we should teach our teenagers to embrace stress so they’re better equipped to handle it throughout their lives.
Longtime Philly Inquirer writer Stephanie Farr wrote a fun piece on Philadelphia sports fandom.
Over 250 writers signed a letter to Penguin Random House protesting the publisher’s $2 million book deal with Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, given her pivotal role in removing a fundamental right from tens of millions of Americans.
Board game news: Aegean Sea, the newest game from Glory to Rome co-designer Carl Chudyk, is up on Backerkit with 12 days to go.
Oh My Brain!, a new game from Bruno Cathala and Theo Riviere, is now up for pre-order at $5 off on 25th Century’s website.
The Queen’s Dilemma, a standalone sequel game to the Spiel-nominated King’s Dilemma, is closing in on $400K raised on Kickstarter.