We had a busy weekend of decorating the house, including acquiring the largest tree I’ve ever owned (since we have one room with exceptionally high ceilings, it seemed irresponsible to fail to take advantage of it), which means this post is late. I had a whole slew of posts for subscribers to The Athletic last week, however, including
- the Starling Marte and Steven Matz signings
- the Rangers’ signings of Jon Gray and Marcus Semien
- Toronto’s signing of Kevin Gausman
- the Rangers’ signing of Corey Seager
- the Max Scherzer and Robbie Ray signings
- Detroit’s signing of Javier Báez
- and the Cubs’ signing of Marcus Stroman.
Over at Paste, I reviewed The Crew: Mission Deep Sea, the sequel to the 2019 Kennerspiel winner, and I think a small but significant improvement over the original. At Ars Technica, I contributed twenty new entries to their Ars Technica’s ultimate board game gift guide.
I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter last week, with a story about being too judgmental and learning to get past it. And finally, with Christmas just three weeks away, here’s another reminder that I have two books out, The Inside Game and Smart Baseball, that would make great gifts for the readers (especially baseball fans) on your lists.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: This Columbia Journalism Review report on the hazards of social media for journalists is spot-on, and I wish the people running major social-media outlets would read and internalize its lessons. I can also say that ESPN’s ill-conceived, ambiguous, and inconsistently enforced social media policy ranks as the #1 reason I left the company. The straw that broke the camel’s back isn’t even public, but it related to this.
- Utah, a state run by conservatives at all levels, makes it so hard to get public aid that some people join the Mormon Church to qualify, even if they don’t believe in the tenets of that sect.
- This August piece in Science on how variants emerge and change the way the pandemic goes seems just as important now.
- The longrunning debate over whether you can plagiarize a recipe has reared its head again, after a published recently pulled a book from circulation after discovering that the author had copied recipes and stories from another book. (The short answer here is that you can’t plagiarize – or copyright – a recipe, but you can plagiarize or copyright the text around it.)
- The BBC Three spoke to multiple victims of sexual assalt about rape culture in British schools and authorities failing to do enough about it.
- We are witnessing the end of “Roe v. Wade,” writes Elie Mystal in the Nation. Elections have consequences.
- The New York Times ran two powerful editorials about abortion this week: one from a woman who was raped by her father and had an abortion, and another from a woman who didn’t have an abortion but “erased” the future she’d planned for herself, speaking very plainly about a life-altering decision from when she was 19.
- Once again, for the people in the pack: Pregnancy is not a riskless, health-neutral event.
- Anti-mask lunatics outed the trans child of the local school board chair, so now the family is moving out of the district.
- Men who get COVID-19 have a sixfold risk of experiencing erectile dysfunction after the infection.
- Many self-styled “experts” who minimize or deny the effects of COVID-19, or who soft-deny the vaccines’ efficacy, or push fake treatments, are now trying to brand themselves as “medical conservatives.”
- With the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor coming up tomorrow, it’s good to remember that army leaders rejected evidence that the naval base was vulnerable to just such an attack, demonstrated during a simulation (that sure sounds like a board game) by one of its own officers. It’s a cool blend of cognitive dissonance and old-fashioned racism.
- A county judge told the Alabama coal miners union currently on strike against Warrior Met Coal they can’t protest outside the company’s offices. I am not a lawyer, but this seems questionable on First Amendment grounds, no?
- Scientific American explains how the brain switches between languages.
- Is there simply too much culture – film, TV, music, video games, podcasts, and more – for us to consume?
- Former Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Grimes (D) now faces charges of misusing her office for political and personal gain from the state ethics commission.
- A defense industry worker says we need to cut the defense budget.
- Cleveland is asking taxpayers to pony up for improvements to the Guardians’ statement. Don’t fall for their nonsense about “economic impact.”
- There’s a fight brewing in St. Louis over who gets how much of the $500 million payday from their lawsuit against the Rams and the NFL.
- The same government ding-dongs in Missouri who accused the Post-Dispatch of hacking for discovering a huge security flaw in a state website were originally going to thank the paper for it.
- The media treats President Biden worse than it treated Trump, and that’s a huge problem.
- Longtime Montréal chef and co-founder of Joe Beef David McMillan has retired from cooking at age 50.
- I enjoyed this comic video explanation of how the west allowed omicron to happen (even if he does misspell it in his caption).