I was on vacation with my girlfriend last weekend, taking a few days to go offline while at a resort in Jamaica (my first trip there, so $countries_visited++;), and while I did go see a game right after I got back, I haven’t written this week. My parents also came to visit for a few days, so I had to skip the chat this week. I’ll do one either Tuesday or Wednesday of this upcoming week instead.

I did an interview a few weeks back with a site called the Good Men Project which ran while I was away. I don’t think that makes me a Good Man but I can hope.

Thank you to everyone who has signed up for my free email newsletter and sent kind, thoughtful replies to my last few editions. I’ll send another one later this week after I’ve written some more content around the interwebs.

And now, the links…

• Before I get to the longreads, I’ll start with this wonderful piece on the Saturday Evening Post about the culture of inclusion evident at Gen Con, North America’s largest convention dedicated to tabletop gaming. I’ve gone for four years now, speaking and moderating panels at the associated writers’ symposium for the last two, and can’t get over how open and friendly the environment is. I went from thinking “have a good con!” was a vaguely ridiculous salutation (I hear “con” and I think The Sting) to saying it as a matter of course. My Gen Con wrapup should be up any day now for Paste.
• Now, the longreads: the New Yorker‘s Jelani Cobb profiles Stacey Abrams and her fight for voting rights, while also detailing why so many people, myself included, believe Georgia Governor Brian Kemp stole the election last year – such as their policy of cancelling registrations of voters who hadn’t voted in seven years, even though such registrations may still have been valid.
• The Guardian‘s Long Read describes the pointless fretting over the “decline” of the English language. I’m more prescriptivist than descriptivist, I think, but arguing that language should be static flies in the face of linguistic history.
• “For all our careful sorting, less than 5 percent of plastic in the U.S. gets recycled. That’s not a typo.” There are over 75 million metric tons of plastic in the world’s marine environments and it’s only getting worse. Outside‘s Rowan Jacobsen went on an ocean summit between environmentalists and corporate executives designed to help find solutions to address our global plastics problem.
• The New York Times has a series of columns on the origins and lasting effects of Gamergate, a massive campaign of cyberharassment dressed up to look like it was a bunch of (mostly) men who cared about ‘ethics in gaming journalism.’
• Speaking of the Grey Lady, The Daily Beast has the scoop on a New York Times internal town hall meeting about the paper’s repeated missteps in covering the President and issues of race.
• Dr. Jill Emanuele of the Child Mind Institute went on NY1 to talk about how to discuss mass shootings with your kids. Jill’s also my cousin.
• My editor at Paste, Garrett Martin, wrote about the absurdity of Wal-Mart discontinuing sales of ‘violent’ video games while the chain still sells guns.
• In the midst of a spreading Ebola outbreak in the northeastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo, there’s been some good news on scientific front between an effective vaccine and a new treatment for those infected, but that won’t be enough to stop the disease, caused by a filovirus that is highly infectious and easily transmitted.
• Women are not better at multitasking than men; we just ask women to do more.
• The Washington Post‘s Anne Applebaum looks at two Italian pro-vaccine activists who took different tacks in their fight against denialists and conspiracy theorists.
• Two Italian researchers used endometriosis as a cover for a funded, peer-reviewed paper where they examined patients for their physical attractiveness, asking the patients to disrobe without explaining why. It was published in 2013 in Fertility and Sterility; the editors who published it have yet to so much as acknowledge that it might have been problematic.
• Jeff Bezos’ $150 billion fortune is a policy failure, or, rather, a series of policy failures that took place over decades. The article does not mention a political party or faction behind those failures, but one party is behind nearly all of them.
• Guardian football writer Nicky Bandini came out as transgender this week, explaining in her column how long it took her to accept that this is who she is.
• There’s a new ‘lost’ album from John Coltrane coming out on September 27th.
• Michael Chen, a current Harvard student from Honolulu, created a computer program that can predict drug resistance in a tuberculosis strain in under a second.
• Board game news: Dire Wolf Digital released a trailer for its upcoming digital port of the dice-drafting game Sagrada.
• Martin Wallace’s Struggle of Empires Deluxe Edition is on Kickstarter.
• Renegade/Dire Wolf announced a new expansion for Clank! In Space! called Cyber Station 11.