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.