My one ESPN+/Insider piece this week named my Prospect of the Year for 2018, with a number of other players who were worthy of the title but couldn’t unseat the incumbent. I answered questions on that and other topics in a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the new game Disney’s Villainous, a card game that resembles deckbuilders (like Dominion) in mechanics, but gives you your entire deck at the start of the game. Each player plays as a specific villain, with a unique deck and victory conditions, so you learn each deck’s intricacies as you play.

And now, the links…

• The best thing you’ll read this week is my friend Anthony del Broccolo’s letter to his late wife, who died unexpectedly in childbirth in June.
• Now some longreads: Bleacher Report’s Mina Fader looks at whether concussions from playing football contributed to a 13-year-old’s suicide.
• One of Osama bin Laden’s goals was to mire the west in endless, unwinnable wars in the Middle East. The Nation‘s Tom Engelhardt argues that we have given bin Laden his wish.
• The use of WhatsApp to spread false rumors led to five killings of innocent men in India when those stories told users that there were child murderers on the loose.
• The BBC’s The Inquiry podcast asks is women’s sport in ‘trouble’ as the divide between men’s and women’s sports becomes blurred by scientific advances showing that the split isn’t binary. The podcast rather deftly considers the science of intersex individuals and testosterone production as well as the moral and philosophical questions of fairness and identity, and the ethics of so-called ‘sex verification.’ Castor Semenya, who appears in a new Nike ad just released last month, appears prominently in these discussions, as the IAAF has introduced rule changes that seem to specifically target her.
• The New York Review of Books chose to run a self-exonerating essay by Jian Ghomeshi, a Canadian commentator who has been accused by more than 20 women of sexually assaulting and/or physically abusing them. Their editor spoke to Slate about the decision and, in my opinion, absolutely embarrassed himself in the process.
• Matthew Desmond, author of the incredible Pulitzer Prize-winning book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, writes in the New York Times that Americans’ belief that jobs are the solution to poverty is wrong. There are structural obstacles to escaping poverty that we must address at the state and federal levels.
• Economist Andrew Zimbalist was a longtime opponent of public funding for sports stadiums, but he changed his tune when he was paid $225 an hour by the city of Worcester for its funding efforts for a stadium to house the Pawtucket Red Sox.
• I reviewed Maryn McKenna’s new book Big Chicken in July, and she wrote on the same topic – the connection between factory-farming of chickens and the rise of antibiotic resistance – in a long read for WIRED.
• Probiotic products – those containing bacteria believed to be beneficial to our digestive systems – are everywhere in the supermarket, the drugstore, the health food store, and more, but they’re probably useless when it comes to boosting your microbiome.
• Salon/Rolling Stone looks at how Jimmy Page assembled the original Led Zeppelin lineup.
• The Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky asks why Sen. Dianne Feinstein sat on the Brett Kavanaugh sexual assault allegations for two months.
• Brian Buelter writes that Kavanaugh’s repeated attempts to mislead Congress, now and in the early 2000s, are reason enough to reject his nomination.
• The Wall Street Journal keeps misreporting the facts and research on gender dysphoria.
• Arizona lawmaker Eddie Farnsworth (guess which party) is about to land a $30 million windfall thanks to a state board of education ruling allowing him to profit off converting his state-funded charter schools to nonprofit status. He’s running for the state Senate this November, and I guess he’ll have lots of cash for more campaign ads now.
• The Guardian looks at how the Koch Brothers support laws like Arizona’s as part of their effort to undermine public education across the country.
• South Carolina did not evacuate prisons in the path of Hurricane Florence, and you can draw your own conclusions why.
• The mayor of a South Carolina town just outside of the state capital of Columbia posted anti-Islam memes and comments on Facebook, but then he met Muslim residents of his town and changed his views. Nothing beats intolerance and bigotry like exposure to members of the targeted groups.
• A Texas school district is pushing ‘Judeo-Christian values’ in a new curriculum that omits Hillary Clinton but remembers the Alamo. I doubt any single-year curriculum could ever satisfy everyone on what is included or excluded, but no public school district should be pushing religious values in its classrooms.
• The Rio Grande, America’s second-longest river, is drying up, and nobody is doing a whole lot to protect it.
• Facebook’s “fact-checking” protocols led a right-wing outlet to censor content from ThinkProgress.
• Iowa’s favorite white nationalist Congressperson Steve King once again retweeted something from another white nationalist.
• The Fix, a site dedicated to stories of addiction and recovery, interviewed comedian and former radio host Jake Fogelnest about his 12 years of sobriety.
• The Athletic has a subscriber-only piece on Dustin Ackley, the #2 pick in the 2009 draft whose career may be over at age 30, with some great comments from Ackley on his own raging against the dying of the baseball light. If this is it for Ackley, who was the consensus #2 prospect in the draft after Stephen Strasburg, he’ll probably end up outside of the top 30 players in that draft class by WAR – he’s at #26 now and I see several guys behind him who will probably pass him within five years.
• If you have the dungeon-crawl board game Clank! In Space!, the Apocalypse! Expansion is now available at retail.
• Asmodee Digital announced they’re porting several popular board game adaptations to Nintendo Switch, including Catan, Carcassonne, and Pandemic.