I’ve got notes stored up for an ESPN+ piece but it probably won’t run until Monday. My daughter returns to school this week too, which will mean the return of Klawchat on Thursday.
My massive article on all the games I saw at Gen Con 2019, including my ten favorites, went up at Paste this week.
My free email newsletter will also return this week once I’ve written a few more things around the interwebs.
I’m selling off a number of my superfluous board games again this year, so if you’re interested, check out my inventory page on Boardgamegeek. Thanks to Sean Lopolito of Lops Brewing in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, who just bought eight games from me last week. I’ll be donating the $150 proceeds to the Food Bank of Delaware.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: The Guardian long read looks at how an online community devoted to the Columbine murderers fed a murder plot in Halifax, Nova Scotia. A tip to police stopped a potential massacre.
- The New Yorker‘s Isaac Chotiner interviewed Penn Law professor Amy Wax, who espouses what certainly sound like white nationalist talking points, dressed up in finer clothing.
- This piece in Palladium by a recent Yale grad saying that free speech isn’t the problem at that school, that the behaviors of elites are the real issue, is all over the place, and kind of hard to stay with to the end, but along the way Natalia Dashan raises a lot of good points, many of which ring true even based on my own experience at a similar college over 25 years ago.
- Afghanistan veteran and sometime political candidate Jason Kander, writing with his wife, Diana, addresses five lies people tell themselves about trauma and PTSD.
- Activists on the Greek island of Paros are fighting to make the island plastics-free, citing the massive damage plastics, which break down into microplastic particles that end up in the bodies of marine life and eventually us, are doing to their environment. This article claims that 95% of waste in the Mediterranean Sea is plastic.
- Evgeny Morozov writes in the New Republic how his literary agent, John Brockman, helped connect Jeffrey Epstein with scientists and other intellectuals, many of whom are now, belatedly, being called to account for their relationships with the deceased pedophile.
- Speaking of Epstein, it’s time to kill the phrase “underage woman.” Epstein didn’t prey on underage women; he raped children.
- Loretta Ross, a black feminist, writes in the New York Times that call-out and cancel culture are themselves toxic, arguing that there are better ways to address most public displays of prejudice or ignorance.
- India’s Constitution has protections aimed at ending the country’s longstanding caste system, with a 1989 law aiming to prevent atrocities against those born into ‘lower’ castes, but it hasn’t prevented the perpetuation of some parts of the caste system; the parents of a bride who married a man from the so-called “untouchables” caste hired an assassin and had her husband killed.
- UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson ordered steps to try to stop the spread of measles in that country, which lost its measles-free status three years after eradicating the virus. Researchers there have discovered a new link between children getting measles and their parents being ‘morons.’
- The President’s Chief Economic Adviser, Larry Kudlow, says he doesn’t see a recession coming, but he has a long history of making predictions that turn out completely wrong, including numerous public statements and articles leading up to the 2008-09 downturn where he dismissed any possibility of an economic slowdown.
- Trump nominated a lawyer who has argued for ethnic homogeneity and written screeds against LGBT rights groups for a seat on a federal appeals court.
- In response to our bloviating leader’s claims that he wants to buy Greenland from Denmark, Denmark has inquired about buying the United States from Russia.
- Board game news: Wavelength, now on Kickstarter, is an upcoming game co-designed by Wolfgang Warsch, the brains behind The Mind, That’s So Clever, and The Quacks of Quedlinburg.
- Jamey Stegmaier, designer of Scythe and Charterstone, has a new civilization-building game coming out this fall called Tapestry. His designer blog has a ton of information on the game, including that the rulebook is just four pages, and that there’s very little luck or randomness involved.
- Stronghold Games opened pre-orders for fall titles, including Amul and the re-issue of Coffee Roaster, a solitaire game I just reviewed this week.
- This Twitter thread about a D&D player who taught his grandmother the game when she was 75, only to have her get incredibly into it, was very sweet.
- Brilliant, highly nerdy board game tweet:
Someone placed their first tile in Terraforming Mars. @StrongholdGames https://t.co/b680qwgiRn
— Jess (The Valkyrie of Gameosity) (@miniktty) August 22, 2019