No new Insider content this week as I was mostly busy with phone calls for the top 100 prospects package, which will run the week immediately following the Super Bowl. I did hold a Klawchat on Thursday, and I have another new game review up at Paste, for the family-oriented game Skyliners, which I thought was kind of mediocre overall.

And now, the links…

• That TV show about a “special victims unit” is hot garbage, but this NY Times piece on a real-world sex-crimes police unit is gripping, if disheartening, reading.
• Rakim discusses how John Coltrane influenced his vocal flow in a brief clip with KRS-One.
• Remember that whole “CDC Whistleblower” meme that the vaccine deniers liked to throw around? Well, a review of the actual documents from that scientist showed there’s no whistle to blow because there’s nothing scandalous or untoward here.
• A harrowing first-person piece from the brother of the Unabomber, on realizing that the mail-bomber terrorist was actually his sibling.
• Kevin Folta, who was hounded offline by anti-GMO and anti-science shills claiming the scientist was secretly in the pocket of Big Ag, is resuming his biotech podcast next month.
• Bill Gates has a blog! Okay, it’s a blog where he posts book reviews and only a total dork would do that.
• Sports Illustrated ran a puff piece on child-abuser Adrian Peterson, who seems to want no part of the redemption effort.
• Why the U.S. – and other countries, of course – should stop bidding to host the Olympics. I wouldn’t be opposed to a law that prohibits any U.S. jurisdiction from paying an international organization (like the IOC or FIFA) for the “rights” to host a global sporting event. They’re negative-ROI deals that tend to be boondoggles for the organizers.
• Eater covers how Texas restaurants are dealing with the state’s open carry law. In a related story, I’m very glad I don’t live in a state with an open carry law. If I’m eating dinner in a place where there’s even a moderate chance I’ll need a gun during the course of the meal, I probably should eat somewhere else.

Happy New Year! I’d say it’ll be a great one, but there’s an election coming up so damn it all to hell.

I wrote two Insider pieces this week, one on the ethically-challenged Yankees trading for Aroldis Chapman and one on how obvious it should be that Trevor Hoffman is not a Hall of Famer.

My latest boardgame review for Paste covers the complex strategy game Orleans, which was one of two runners-up for the 2015 Kennerspiel des Jahres award.

And now, the links…

• Used bookstores are making an “unlikely” comeback. Were they ever really gone? I think the age of the independent new-book bookseller is over, but the used bookstore and the hybrid new-used model (like the wonderful Changing Hands in Tempe) are here to stay.
• Eater had Alton Brown on its podcast, with a transcript included in that link as well. I particularly enjoyed his comments on the way Starbucks changed the food game, and on how just loving food isn’t really enough to make it a career (as you could say the same about loving baseball).
• The moral of this story of a rather severe cooking injury is don’t grill in bare feet.
• Notes from reporting on the vaccine wars. I like the fundamental message: Good information can win out, even in the face of obstinate ignorance.
• A very powerful New Yorker profile of a female Iranian journalist and activist who has dared fight pockets of Sharia law in the Islamic theocracy, including sentences of stoning.
• This is wild but worth reading: should we cover the Sahara desert in solar panels?
• I always read everything I post here before I include a link, but I will admit that I couldn’t finish the highly-recommended ProPublica piece An Unbelievable Story of Rape, because it was so difficult and in parts so infuriating.
• Speaking of infuriating, hoops writer Chris Haynes writes about getting racially profiled by cops while standing across the street from his house. This bias is systemic – I don’t think it’s personal, where police departments are just hiring racists – and getting rid of it requires systemic solutions, like nation-wide training.
• A strong but too-short piece from Dave Zirin on the year of the woman in sports.
• Did you know there’s been a massive natural gas (which is mostly methane) leak going on outside Los Angeles for ten weeks now? Since methane is a potent contributor to climate change – the Environmental Defense Fund claims it’s 84 times as powerful as carbon dioxide – you’d think this would be 1) bigger news and 2) a national disaster.
• Boardgames in the classroom? It’s happening in some charter schools in New York.
• Goofy fun for geography nuts like me: mental_floss lists nine of the most isolated towns on the planet.

Paste published my ranking of the top ten new boardgames of 2015 this week, as well as my review of 7 Wonders Duel, the new two-player game based on 7 Wonders.

I wrote a lot for Insider this week, reviewing signings and trades. Here’s the full list:

• Jason Heyward to the Cubs
• The Bethancourt/Kelly trade
• The Brett Lawrie trade
• The Walker/Niese trade
• The Kenny Giles trade
• The Adam Lind trade
• The Cubs’ moves with Zobrist and Castro
• The Shelby Miller trade
• The Jay/Gyorko trade
• The Carson Smith/Wade Miley trade
• Hisashi Iwakuma to the Dodgers
• Jeff Samardzija to the Giants
• Zack Greinke to the Diamondbacks

And of course, there was a Klawchat this week.

And now, the links…

• In a series on America’s most violent police department, the Guardian details deals made to buy off women sexually assaulted by police, often for as little as $1500.
• One woman details how she nearly died of the flu after childbirth and didn’t get to hold her infant for over a month, all because she fell for a vaccine denier hoax and didn’t get her flu shot.
• An Australian vaccine-denier’s baby was hospitalized with whooping cough. Do you think that scared the mom straight? Her delusion even trumped her desire to protect her child.
• We love all things Hugh Acheson around here, and the James Beard winner for Best Chef (Southeast) gave a presentation recently for the Beard Foundation, making his sweet onion soup with caraway and croutons (with a brief video). And oh, hey, that recipe is in his newest cookbook, The Broad Fork, which made my annual cookbook recommendations list.
• People who are gluten-sensitive but not celiac or allergic to wheat may have a valid medical explanation – their bodies produce a protein called zonulin in response to gluten in the body, according to a new research study out of Europe. That still makes your hipster gluten-free diet a dumb idea, though.
• On Stockholm’s rise as a “unicorn factory,” an incubator for a disproportionate number of tech startups. I think it offers a lot of lessons for other cities looking to boost such entrepreneurship, although the fact that university educations are free in Sweden is a huge part of their success.
• A July op ed piece from Al-Jazeera America argued that anti-abortion extremists are domestic terrorists. And, like Islamist terrorists, anti-abortion extremists are driven by an ideology that convinces them that their violence and murder are justified.
• Can Chipotle recover from food poisoning? I think the answer is more clearly “yes” than this author does, but also, I don’t agree with the premise that buying local or from small farmers reduces the risk of such food-borne infections.
• Spring training-relevant link: The ten best new restaurants in metro Phoenix according to the Phoenix New Times.
• The longread of the week comes from the Washington Post, which profiled one of the survivors of the mass shooting in Oregon. You know, the one this October, not the one in December 2012 or the one in June 2014 or the one in May 1998.
• Two links (provided by readers) coming from somewhat different sides of the gun-control debate. Sam Harris, better known for his writings on atheism and morality without religion, has a long, scientific look at the “riddle” of gun control. The Guardian debunks the NRA’s oft-repeated claim that guns make us safer, when the evidence says they don’t.
• Former radical Islamist Maajid Nawaz has a long op ed in the Wall Street Journal on how to defeat IS and end Islamism, one that calls for engagement across multiple spheres.
• An all-girl K-Pop group called “Oh My Girl” (get it? OMG?) was detained at LAX on suspicion of being sex workers.
• I’m old enough to remember when SNL’s commercial spoofs were a near-weekly highlight – Colon Blow, Quarry, First Citywide Change Bank, and of course, Bad Idea Jeans – so their tone-perfect parody of those pompous Nespresso commercials was a big hit with me. (Also, there’s no way those guys drink such shitty coffee.)
• Tweet of the week:
  

  um? pic.twitter.com/tYFIRR0GN2

  — jennifer magdalene (@someofmybest) December 4, 2015

  Man, I just don’t remember that book well at all.

I have written three Insider pieces this week, one on David Price and Chris Young, one on Zack Greinke and John Lackey, and one on Jordan Zimmermann and J.A. Happ. I also held my weekly Klawchat on Thursday.

Top Chef recaps began this week with episode one and episode two.

And now, the links…

• Anyone else remember Sideshow Bob running for Mayor as a Republican in a 1994 Simpsons episode? The Daily Beast points out some similarities to a current Presidential candidate.
• Quietly underlying the multiple rape accusations against porn actor James Deen is the pervasiveness of the idea that any sex worker – porn actress, prostitute, whatever – has less of a right of consent than any other woman.
• Of course, if I’m linking to the Daily Beast twice, I should also include this takedown of their embarrassing journalistic fails in identifying the wrong Syed Farook in the San Bernardino attack, including photos and the wrong home address.
• Speaking of San Bernardino, a day later “every Senate Republican except Mark Kirk of Illinois voted against legislation to prevent people on the F.B.I.’s consolidated terrorist watchlist from purchasing guns or explosives,” per the New York Times. How this is a partisan issue is beyond my limited cognitive capabilities. The paper followed up today with their first front-page editorial since 1920, calling on an end to the gun epidemic in the U.S.
• The New Yorker weighed in too, along the same lines: The average person does not need these guns.
• Those crap viral sites that steal other people’s content grabbed this one in the last week or two, so here’s the original: The Battle, a fantastic comic on having depression and anxiety.
• Charles Pierce drops some fire in an op ed for Esquire subtitled “nowhere is Idiot America more at work than in the Climate Change ‘debate.’ This is yet another topic where we are likely to have one Presidential candidate actively denying settled science. I can vote a lot of ways on the various issues that matter to me, but I can’t vote for someone who thinks science is a matter of who yells loudest.
• In case you were concerned, no, the universe is not merely a 3-D hologram. I don’t think any reasonable scientists thought it was, though.
• Earth – you know, this one – has one-third of its arable land in the last four decades. You know what they say: you can feed all of the people some of the time, or some of the people all of the time, but you can’t feed all of the people all of the time.
• The Useless Department of Agriculture said something right, for a change, with a brief post on alternatives to antibiotic use in livestock. Of course, they could just ban such use as a major public health threat, but, you know, why be so drastic?
• Oh, maybe because of the rise in carbapanem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, the “phantom menace” bacterium that can transfer its resistance to nearby bacteria.
• This story’s a few weeks old, but it seems to be getting relatively little mainstream coverage: The singer known as Kesha (or Ke$ha) has alleged that her producer Dr. Luke sexually abused her, and is now suing Sony for the right to record music without him. While I understand the allegations are unproven, why would Sony appear to ignore the allegations, and potentially force an abuse victim into continued contact with her abuser?
• Mars’ larger moon, Phobos, has been a key part of many works of fiction that explore colonizing the red planet, and appears as a territory in the game Mission: Red Planet, but it’s slowly falling toward the planet and will fall apart in 20-40 million years, becoming a ring around the god of war. So we’d better get there fast.
• The Hollywood Reporter talks about the process behind its annual actors/actresses roundtables and the pre-Oscar nominations machine in explaining why its actress roundtable has no women of color this year. It’s an ugly reason.