My one ESPN+ piece this week covered the possibility of realigning the minor leagues, possibly contracting several dozen teams or demoting them to nonaffiliated leagues. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Era: The Medieval Age, the new game from Pandemic designer Matt Leacock. It’s a roll-and-build game that reimplements his own Roll Through the Ages: The Bronze Age, but gives it better components and a spatial aspect absent from the first game.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, will be out on April 21st, 2020, from HarperCollins. You can pre-order it now through that link (and please do so!).

You should also subscribe to my my free email newsletter, because I said so.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: Shane Mitchell writes for Bitter Southerner about the long transatlantic history of okra, a global plant that came to the west a few hundred years ago from Africa and that is now essential to the cuisines of the American south. I love it dipped in cornmeal and fried, or in a deep brown gumbo.
• Why do people hate vegans? They’re a convenient punchline, says George Reynolds of the Guardian, but their dietary choices force us to confront harsh environmental and medical realities about the meat-centric diet of the west while also running up against a longstanding association of meat with prosperity.
• Psychologist Hans Eysenck’s work has been highly influential but also criticized on multiple grounds, including his dubious support of work that claimed there was a link between race and IQ. Cosmos details a bigger scandal, that Eysenck and a longtime collaborator may have faked data and conclusions, including studies that claimed your personality could influence your chances of getting cancer or heart disease. If all 61 papers co-authored by Eysenck are eventually retracted, he would become, per Retraction Watch, the most retracted psychology researcher of all time.
• Jerome Groopman writes in the New Yorker about brain science and successful ways to break bad habits. I don’t think these are panaceas, but they’re more likely to work than negative reinforcement, self-shaming, or just trying to beat bad habits with willpower. Excuse me, I feel like I need some Oreos after typing that…
• Since Prince’s death in 2016, his estate has been releasing some of the trove of unreleased material the singer and multi-instrumentalist left behind – even though he was very protective of the same music while he was alive. Paste‘s Richard Aaron looks at the ethics and implications of listening to this music, some of which has been quite good, while some was clearly never intended to see the light of day.
• In my chat this week, a reader sent a link arguing that wealth taxes failed in Europe. This is at least misleading, if not outright false, according to this editorial from the Washington Post, which highlights how much easier it is in Europe to evade taxes, how loophole-ridden their wealth taxes were, and how competition across the borderless EU made it easier to just pick up and move.
• Philly magazine looks at the rise of food co-ops in the city, asking how well they actually serve the communities in which they’re located.
• Amazon has spent nearly $1.5 million to defeat a socialist incumbent on Seattle’s city council. Kshama Sawant led the push for Seattle’s higher minimum wage, but lost (in the end) a battle to tax large corporations on a per-employee basis and use the funds to serve the city’s large population of homeless people.
• Gun sellers at a show on the Iowa State fairgrounds used Nazi symbols and racist/anti-Semitic imagery to sell guns and explosives. The state fair’s CEO passed the buck, saying that they don’t control what independent companies that rent the space do once they use it.
• Author Alex Berenson name-searched himself and showed up in my replies to harass one of my longtime readers on Twitter this week. I wasn’t familiar with him or his work before, but it appears that the scientific consensus on his book about cannabis is that it’s alarmist and highly misleading.
• A new California law designed to curb abuses in the so-called ‘gig economy’ appears to hurt freelance writers more than anyone else because it would set such a low bar for the number of pieces someone could write before they’d have to be considered a full-time employee.
• “Prime editing” could correct up to 89% of disease-causing errors in our genes, although the research and techniques are in their infancy. As someone with an inborn error of metabolism, I’m intrigued, but can we ‘fix’ one gene (two, in my case, since it’s autosomal recessive) without causing any other unforeseen consequences?
• California’s state medical board has now targeted a second doctor accused of writing bogus vaccine exemptions for schoolchildren, asking that her license be suspended or revoked entirely.
• Residents of Newtok, Alaska, are moving – yes, all of them – to a new village as climate change has eroded much of the land in Newtok and threatens to make the entire town unlivable.
• Antibiotic resistance – and evolution – in real time: It took just three weeks for a ‘superbug’ to evolve resistance to the drug of last resort.
• Board game news: Cities Skylines, the tabletop version of the popular citybuilder video game from Paradox Interactive, is now out from Thames & Kosmos. It’s a cooperative game, whereas I believe the video game version is competitive. I saw an early prototype last year, but at that point the game wasn’t co-op yet.