My awards ballots for the six major postseason player honors went up this week for ESPN+ subscribers, and I held a Klawchat Thursday to discuss them.

My latest board game review for Paste covers Reiner Knizia’s Blue Lagoon, a light/midweight game that plays very quickly but adds some strategy with complex scoring, and has a cover that might remind you of a certain Disney movie.

And now, the links…

• Long reads first: This Politico piece on on the rise, fall, and change of heart of former hard-right Iowa state rep Kent Sorensen is the best thing I read this week. It speaks once again to the power of exposing bigots to the very people they profess to hate.
• A Boston University doctor and researcher has made a career of testifying that cases of suspected child abuse are actually rare genetic disorders or vitamin deficiencies; in over ten years he’s never examined an abuse case and determined it was the result of actual abuse. This ProPublica piece highlights inaccuracies and inconsistencies in his statements, and details a case where Holick’s testimony resulted in a baby going back to an abusive parent who subsequently put her back in the hospital with a broken leg and bleeding in the brain. Why BU employs a child abuse enabler, or courts and juries find him credible, is not explained.
• A UPenn professor and director of that school’s Annenberg Public Policy Center argues that Russian interference online gave Donald Trump the 2016 election – but she bases her assertion on data, not conjecture, laying out the case in greater length in her upcoming book Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President.
• The Daily Beast looked at Barstool Sports’ history of bullying opponents and encouraging sexual harassment. Founder Dave Portnoy often doxxes critics, such as posting this piece’s author’s phone number on Twitter, a clear violation of their ToS, but was never suspended for doing so.
• Methane trapped in Arctic ice is starting to leak out as the climate warms. A similar event at the end of the Triassic era warmed the planet so much it led to a mass extinction event that wiped out 76% of all species on earth.
• I’ve written before here about how trauma affects the brain, including my review of the seminal book The Body Keeps the Score. In the wake of multiple women stating that Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted them, NPR talked to scientists about how trauma affects memory, something that everyone should be taught in schools. We tend to think of memories the way we think of data storage – that we record the information, accurately, and have it there to be recalled when we run the appropriate mental script – but memories are fallible and malleable, with trauma a major reason why our memories of significant events are often wrong or incomplete.
• Arizona Senator Jeff Flake asked for a vote delay after previously signaling his support for the nominee, and the link there implies it was the result of assault victims confronting him in an elevator just hours before his announcement. I’d like to think this is true, and that Flake, who says lots of good things and then does nothing to back them up, has decided to take a stand, but I’ll believe it when I see it.
• This Twitter thread from a researcher who studies sexual violence includes information, with links to published research, on why we should believe women, including Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who allege they’ve been assaulted.
• Padma Lakshmi explained why she didn’t report her rape at age 16 in the NY Times.
• ThinkProgress’ Lindsay Gibbs writes about Dr. Ford’s bravery, and watching the hearings as a sexual assault survivor herself.
• We excuse young men who assault women because they’re young and their brains are still developing and we don’t want to ruin their lives. We excuse older men who’ve done it because that’s all in the past and they’ve changed since then, of course. Where in this framework do women matter?
• America’s crumbling social infrastructure of libraries, schools, playgrounds, and fields is is hurting our democracy, writes sociologist Eric Klinenberg for The Atlantic.
• In Texas, a state where most politicians think The Handmaid’s Tale is a utopian novel, the state’s attorney general is supporting a school district that expelled a student for refusing to stand for the pledge of allegiance, a clear violation of the student’s First Amendment rights, in a case of blatant pandering for votes before November.
• Professor of English and Cultural History Joe Moran writes in the Guardian about the difficult of writing a ‘perfect’ sentence, or even deciding what a perfect sentence is.
• A new book called Between Hope and Fear: A History of Vaccines and Human Immunity argues that there have always been anti-vaxxers, according to this NPR interview with author Michael Kinch.
• ProPublica also looks at the so-called “Jobs Alliance” in West Virginia where a coal baron is trying to block natural gas expansion that would actually help a growing industry with a viable future.
• A Trump Administration analysis concluded that the planet will warm by 7 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100 so climate change regulations are pointless, bringing a whole new level of cynicism to public discourse.
• Trump’s EPA immediately rolled back rules on coal plant pollution into waterways, raising the risk of heavy metal pollution during flooding like that caused by Hurricane Florence.
• This long-ish excerpt from Michael Lewis’ upcoming book The Fifth Risk covers the tragicomic inside of Trump’s transition team and shows him as a man who didn’t believe he had any chance to be President.
• One new board game Kickstarter of note – Fabio Lopiano’s Ragusa, co-published by Capstone Games, a company that focuses on heavy Euro titles it can translate and import to the U.S.