My one new post this week for subscribers to The Athletic is a long scouting notebook with my observations on players from the Nats, Rays, Orioles, and Tigers’ systems, including five former first-round picks. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

On The Keith Law Show this week, I spoke to Dr. Katy Milkman, author of the new book How to Change, about we can use psychology and knowledge of how our brains work to enact real, lasting behavior change in ourselves. You can subscribe via iTunes or Spotify. And on the Athletic Baseball Show, I got back together with my old Baseball Today partner in crime Eric Karabell (also on Spotify).

My email newsletter will return this week, and I’m going to give away a copy of a new board game (the publisher sent me two copies, so I offered to do a giveaway and they were on board, get it?) to one random subscriber.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: The Columbia Journalism-Review looks at how casinos and other sports-betting entities are taking over sports media. My employer is mentioned in passing.
• In the New Yorker, Jane Mayer reveals all the giant dark money groups funding the Big Lie, including the archconservative Bradley Foundation.
• People who argue in bad faith that the vaccine isn’t FDA-approved are also ignoring that the FDA itself is no guarantee of anything, as they ignored years of evidence that HeartWare heart pumps were prone to serious defects and allowed the company to continue selling them.
• The unvaccinated are not a single, homogenous group that refuses to get the shot because they’re ignorant, selfish, or dumb. (Some of them are, certainly.) Many lack easy access to the vaccine, even now, seven months after the first approvals.
• There’s a lot of conflicting information about the COVID-19 vaccines and the Delta variant. One new study from the UK showed that vaccinated people were only 1/3 as likely to contract the Delta variant as unvaccinated people – including asymptomatic infections.
• North Carolina’s legislature doesn’t want to vote to end child marriage because too many legislators themselves married as minors or married spouses who were minors. Is that “Dueling Banjos” I hear in the background?
• This New York Times Wirecutter guide to cleaning your grill is very thorough and useful. It could even save you from a preventable grease fire.
• Phoenix Union High School District is mandating masks for students, flouting the fucking moronic state law banning mask mandates. How Republicans can preach a belief in local government and self-determination while passing state laws that tell cities, counties, and school districts what they can’t do just breaks my brain.
• Meanwhile, several attorneys and parents in Florida are suing their wingnut governor over that state’s ban on mask mandates.
• QAnon supporters are running for school boards across the country while trying to shed the label associated with that batshit conspiracy theory.
• Twitter is taking more steps to try to fight disinformation by working with Reuters and the AP, although the best thing they could do is ban the biggest spreaders of disinformation, like RFK Jr.
• A writer for TripOut took two Italians to an Olive Garden. Hilarity ensued, sort of.
• The climate change news is about to get a whole lot worse.
• Your sunscreen might be killing coral reefs and other marine life, and “reef safe” lotions are not verified as actually safe for the ocean’s ecosystem by anybody. Of course, climate change may kill all the coral off first.
• Nancy Pelosi flipped her view on student debt cancellation, opposing it in public, to cater to two of her biggest donors. The Swigs didn’t even learn about the student debt crisis until 2018, according to this piece in the Intercept, but that didn’t stop them from throwing their weight around here.
• Journalists need to stop covering anti-democracy efforts as if they were politics as usual. Call voter-suppression efforts, bogus claims of voter fraud, and the like for what they are.
• If you subscribe to the Washingtonian, well, its CEO has gone all out to fight a unionization effort at the magazine. Maybe let them know how you feel about that.
• Former Welsh rugby star Terry Davies, who also happened to be my mother-in-law’s cousin, died this week at age 88.
• Board game news: We have some fresh Kickstarters up, including Cartouche, a light tile-laying game with an ancient Egyptian theme.
• Then there’s Mixology, a cocktail-themed game from a publisher based in Bangkok.
• I was going to highlight the Kickstarter for Henry’s Feast, a game based around building a menu of Indian cuisine designed by people of Indian descent, and with an emphasis on the vegetarian dishes of the subcontinent … but the organizers cancelled the Kickstarter before I could share the link here. I’ll post it when it goes live again.