I wrote two Insider pieces this week, naming ESPN’s 2017 Prospect of the Year (hint: it’s Vlad Jr.) and covering and on the strange saga of Juan Nicasio over the last ten days. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.
Last week, I wrote about the major Game of Thrones-themed boardgames for Vulture. My next boardgame review for Paste will come this week.
My book, Smart Baseball, is out and still selling well (or so I’m told); thanks to all of you who’ve already picked up a copy. And please sign up for my free email newsletter, which is back to more or less weekly at this point now that I’m not traveling for a bit.
And now, the links…
- This week’s top longread is one of the longest I’ve posted, and it seems likely to garner a slew of awards for the Houston Chronicle: They told the stories of five Houston residents through Hurricane Harvey, from prelude to aftermath as the storm dropped over 51 inches of rain on the country’s fourth-largest city.
- Jacobin forecasts a Republican-led attempt to remake state government, schools, and the social support system in Texas in the wake of Harvey, and they don’t like what they see.
- That article discusses Betsy DeVos’ war on public schools, and the Atlantic looks deeper at myths that poison our view of public education in America.
- At the other end of the spectrum, New York City public schools will now offer free lunch for all students. Given the connection of adequate nutrition and caloric intake to students’ long-term success, this isn’t just compassionate – it’s sound educational and social policy. We should see enough savings and/or economic growth in the long run to more than pay for this program.
- Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The First White President” piece was deservedly trending this week. Our President is a de facto white supremacist, and one of our two major political parties is going along with it so they can get the tax breaks they want.
- A two-decade campaign by “conservative” science-denial groups fueled the U.S. exit from the Paris climate accord earlier this year.
- Richard Branson owns Necker Island in the British Virgin Islands, and his home there was completely destroyed by Hurricane Irma. If a luxury home, likely built with top-end materials and to a sophisticated design, gets wiped out by the storm, what chance did lesser structures on other islands stand?
- I tweeted this link last night, but it’s worth repeating: Tim Duncan wrote asking Americans not to forget the U.S. Virgin Islands, two of which (St. Thomas and St. John) were devastated by the storm. (St. Croix is far enough south that it escaped the worst impact.)
- I linked to Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah’s profile of Dylan Roof a few weeks ago, and this week she appeared on the Longform podcast to discuss it. The conversation is enlightening for the first 2/3 but loses some speed, and I was surprised to hear Ghansah misuse or mispronounce so many words.
- From May, Jalopnik posted this hard-to-believe story about a man who became “addicted” to buying BMWs, to the point that he embezzled money from his employers and lost his job, house, family, and freedom.
- A youth hockey coach who stood accused of raping one of his former players is going free after the player in question died of a drug overdose. This story is more about the former player, David Gove, and how the abuse led him into a descent of heroin addiction and homelessness, but the world needs to know that this accused predator remains at large.
- A former Florida State professor who lost her job for blowing the whistle on favoritism granted to football players in their so-called “classes” died of an accidental drug overdose, the result of a mix of medications for pain after back surgery and anti-depressants she was taking in the wake of FSU officials damaging her career.
- FiveThirtyEight looks at the U.S./North Korea war of tweets (and missiles) and decides it’s time for some game theory.
- New York is about to vote on whether to hold a Constitutional Convention. If they don’t do so, their next chance to hold one will come in 2037.
- Two House Republicans say they only signed an anti-gerrymandering amicus brief by mistake and later removed their signatures from it. How bad is our climate when a politician can endorse gerrymandering like that and suffer no consequences?
- Eater profiles Milk Bar CEO and mastermind Christina Tosi as she and David Chang try to take the dessert-bar brand to other markets.
- Forbes profiles a 23-year-old woman who makes $60K a month as an online consultant and claims she has advice to help others do the same. The counsel she offers is trite, she almost certainly started life with some huge advantages, and the whole thing reads like unintentional comedy to me.
- The Nib gives us a graphic essay in defense of Twitter. I agree with the positives the author identifies here; Twitter has been tremendous for my career, and several people I now consider close friends were originally Twitter acquaintances.
- Malaria had been considered eradicated in Italy, but a four-year-old girl died there from malaria last week. The biggest concern here is that climate change may allow the spread of disease-bearing insects to latitudes previously unaffected by those pathogens.
- Chaldean-Americans in Michigan, who voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump, are now at risk of deportation due to his policies.
- Aeon goes into the information-theory work of polymath Claude Shannon, whose insights on the probabilistic nature of much information paved the way for modern data-compression techniques.
- The Broward County Republican Party Secretary refuses to resign even after officials discovered he tried to kill a girl in 2007. I’d love to know how he managed to plead out to a misdemeanor on this. Maybe because his grandfather was rich and well-connected?
- Chinese law says that a woman can’t have a C-section without her family’s permission; when one very pregnant woman didn’t get that permission, she killed herself in the hospital. The U.S. hasn’t been tough on China’s human rights violations in decades; it’s certainly not going to get any better under the current Administration, given the Trump family’s business dealings in the autocratic state.
- The Economist looks at the toxic relationship between Angola and the D.R. Congo, where the smaller, oil-rich former Portuguese colony can’t stop meddling in the larger, failed state that separates Angola from its main oil-producing region of Cabinda.
- I linked last week to a story about Google pulling funding from a think tank that published opinions contrary to Google’s interests in European antitrust matters; Gizmodo ran a related piece after that, from a writer who says Google pressured her to pull a critical column, saying she had violated an NDA her bosses had signed before the meeting. She claims the NDA didn’t exist. It’s unclear what the whole story is here, but the subject of her original article doesn’t reflect well on the company regardless of whether it should have been published.
- The New Yorker managed to dig up Jared Kushner’s Harvard admissions essay!
Boardgame news will return next week; I know of two significant Kickstarters to launch on Tuesday, but at least one of them is currently covered by an embargo so I can’t talk about it just yet.