My one Insider/ESPN+ piece this week ranked the best tools among MLB players, which is probably my least favorite piece to write each year. And I held a Klawchat this week.
I reviewed the incredible new board game Everdell for Paste this week. It’s got a Stone Age vibe, but adds so much more to that worker placement framework, and the artwork is some of the best I have ever seen.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: There’s a new health scam out there, targeting desperate people like cancer patients, that claims that food-grade hydrogen peroxide can cure many ailments. There is no such thing as food grade hydrogen peroxide, which has never been proven to treat any disease and is very, very dangerous to consume at even moderate doses.
- Esquire looks at the imminent global water crisis, caused by overuse, pollution, climate change, and unwise or even deleterious government policies. This, not Islamist terrorism, is the greatest threat to global stability for this century.
- Alan Rusbridger, former editor-in-chief of the Guardian, has a new book coming out titled Breaking News, on how the business of news has broken the concept of news; his old paper has a lengthy excerpt that focuses on a major phone-hacking scandal within Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.
- Recode’s Kara Swisher interviewed OB/GYN and GOOP debunker Dr. Jen Gunter, which you listen to as a podcast or read in a transcript. It’s funny and also very telling about how patients use “Dr. Google,” and how people like Gwyneth Paltrow take advantage of the gullible and the desperate to line their own pockets.
- Mother Jones investigates the broken federal student loan forgiveness program, which has had problems for years but has taken a bigger dive off a cliff under Betsy DeVos.
- A few weeks ago I posted a story about a female NYU professor accused of harassing a male graduate student, after which many women stood up for her, the predator, not the victim. A graduate student who studied with that professor writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education that she believes the accuser, saying that Professor Avital Ronell is a bully while questioning her academic and feminist bona fides.
- Conservative writer, evangelical Christian, and Iraq War veteran David French and his wife adopted a two-year old girl from Ethiopia in 2010. He writes for the Atlantic how he has seen attitudes of Americans shift towards hate against his daughter, his wife, and himself for daring to cross racial lines in the name of love. He also covers some policy changes from the current and previous Administrations that have discouraged such adoptions from outside of the United States.
- BlacKkKlansman includes a line from David Duke where he mentions being a friend of technology pioneer and Nobel laureate William Shockley, one of the inventors of the transistor and founder of Shockley Semiconductor (from which the Traitorous Eight left to found Fairchild Semiconductor). I had no idea that Shockley became an inveterate racist shitstain and eugenics proponent.
- The “age of privacy nihilism” is upon us, although I’d argue nothing has really changed – we’ve given away our data for decades, in exchange for the occasional coupon for 50 cents off Nutter Butters.
- Mollie Tibbetts was murdered by a man because she dared to say no; that man was Latino, possibly in the U.S. illegally, so within hours of her murder, the white supremacists in power chose to politicize her death (which, I was told, we’re not supposed to do when a white man shoots up a school or a church). Her family is having none of it, and her father came out to show his gratitude for and support of the Iowan Latino community.
- The Nordic countries’ economies are often held up, with good reason, as exemplars of Western democracies that use broad social safety nets and other progressive policies to produce high employment rates with low rates of poverty, homelessness, and crime. They also tend to score very high on economic “happiness indices,” but the BBC points out that such rankings obscure increasing mental health issues in those countries, especially among younger citizens.
- The collapse of the Venezuelan state and economy has led to a growing refugee crisis in neighboring countries, with this Washington Post article focusing on the Brazilian town of Boa Vista.
- The ongoing European measles epidemic has killed 37 people and sickened 41,000 – and remember, children can survive measles only to die of the virus a decade later due to an incurable condition called subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE).
- Roland’s Market, the new Phoenix restaurant and collaboration of Chris Bianco and the Holguins (Tacos Chiwas), earned a very positive review from the Arizona Republic.
- The Arizona Republican Party packed its Supreme Court, and just got a big win from their efforts, as the Court blocked a ballot measure that could have funded state schools with an extra $690 million. The proposed question had over a quarter of a million signatures. The governor who stuffed the Supreme Court is facing a challenge this November from David Garcia, a Democrat, a veteran, and an education professor at Arizona State. If he wins, he’ll be the first Latinx governor of Arizona in 44 years.
- A neuroscientist discusses how skimming rather than deep reading can alter our brains for the worse.
- This is simply perfect.
Give Him a Shot pic.twitter.com/RVtd7tVY3L
— Light Roast Comics (@lr_comics) August 27, 2018