My ranking of the top 50 free agents this winter went up on Monday for ESPN+ subscribers, before the actual start of free agency and thus the deadline for some player options, so a few players are on there who ended up staying with their teams (J.D. Martinez, for one). I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Silver, the new deduction/take-that card game from designer Ted Alspach, who set this new game in the same ‘universe’ (loosely speaking) as his One Night Ultimate Werewolf games.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, will be released on April 21, 2020, and you can pre-order it now. We’re working on some bookstore events for late April as well, with Boston, New York, DC, and Harrisburg likely in that first week after release.

I also have this free email newsletter, you may have heard about it, it’s kind of cool.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: This Atlantic story on a San Francisco woman who repeatedly stole packages from porches in an affluent neighborhood, despite multiple warnings, arrests, and eventually the loss of of custody of her daughter, is something to behold. It’s a story about technology, including how customers are using video-camera doorbells without considering the loss of civil liberties that may come with it. It’s a story about race, certainly. But the one theme I felt the author understated was that it’s a story about mental illness: The ‘porch pirate’ is ill-served by the prison system, especially since she continues to steal packages even while out on bail, and is not getting the help she probably needs.
• A Louisiana parish DA lets defendants pay his foundation to get out of doing community service, according to this investigative report from Radley Balko in the Washington Post. The article appeared on Sunday; since then, I see zero coverage of this in any Louisiana publication.
• This episode of the podcast Citations Needed looks at ‘pundit brain’ and the increasingly less data-driven Nate Silver, whose track record of predictions has tapered off since 2008 and who has had to walk back numerous statements on Twitter. Jacob Bacharach covers similar ground in a post on Common Dreams.
• Alex Pareene writes about the death of what he calls ‘rude media’, including two entities for whom he used to work, Splinter and Gawker Media.
• The New Yorker‘s Louisa Thomas weighed in on the killings of Deadspin and Sports Illustrated by private equity bros.
• A new study in Nature (journal access required) found that many ICU patients who received probiotic capsules developed bacteremia as a direct result, using DNA comparisons to show that the bacteria in the patients’ blood came from the same bacteria in those probiotic pills. There’s also zero evidence that probiotic pills are helpful; the acid in your stomach destroys bacteria in those pills, or in fermented foods we consume like yogurt or kombucha.
• Aaron Calvin was fired by the Des Moines Register because, in short, the Twitter mob demanded it; he wrote his side of the story for the Columbia Journalism Review.
• Clark University dismissed a graduate student who had complained about possible gender discrimination and mishandling of data. This is her side of this story, but Clark issued a general statement, saying that federal law prevents them from commenting on a specific student’s case.
• Youngstown State disciplined a student-athlete who sexually assaulted a classmate by (checks notes) letting him serve as a volunteer coach on both the men’s and women’s tennis teams (blinking guy GIF).
• Anti-vaxxers use a strategy called ‘firehosing,’ repeating the same lies over and over to drown out the facts and those who try to speak the truth. Fighting these tactics involves more than just debunking falsehoods, but disrupting them by removing their podiums and forewarning people about how these propagandists manipulate them.
• A white judge in Virginia sentenced a black woman to ten days in jail because he didn’t like that she slammed the courtroom door.
• This is America: A San Diego man brutally assaulted a Syrian teen for speaking Arabic. He has since pleaded guilty and will serve five years in prison.
• This is America: A white Milwaukee man threw acid in the face of a Peruvian-born U.S. citizen after asking “why did you come here and invade my country?” Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett blamed President Trump for feeding and encouraging anti-immigrant sentiment.
• A new book that fawns over President Trump claimed that the Obama Adminstration held regular “PC (political correctness) meetings.” The author didn’t realize those were NSC Principals Committee meetings, and obviously didn’t bother to confirm it, nor did Fox News before promoting the book and this claim on its site.
• If you’ve seen the surprise hit film Parasite, which will pass the $10 million mark for U.S. box office this weekend and is by far the highest-grossing Korean-language film ever in the U.S., you know the use of basements is key to the movie’s story. NPR has snippets from writer/director Bong Joon-hoexplaining a bit more about why basements are so critical in South Korean society.
• Martin Scorcese’s explanation of why he doesn’t care for comic-book movies is worth reading, as it’s far more nuanced than the quote that got MCU fanpeople all up in arms. (I tend to agree with him. Comic book movies are entertainment, but I would not say they rise to the level of great cinema.)
• I reviewed Gary Smith’s book Standard Deviations this week; he emailed me to point to a post he wrote on October 22nd explaining the role of luck in short series in baseball.
• Twitter’s Jack Dorsey announced a plan to ban political ads, but the plan is toothless and misunderstands the nature of free expression.
• A tweet asking people to RT if they were spanked as children but didn’t become violent later in life went viral this week, but it misses the point: Corporal punishment is ineffective and harmful, while other methods of discipline, including positive reinforcement and setting clear expectations, do work, without the negative consequences of spanking.
• Alison Turkos writes about how her Lyft driver raped her and the company took no action. The driver continued to work for Lyft, and the company even charged her for the trip.
• I agree with Cass Marshall: I do not have time for or interest in video games with hundreds of hours of material. Pre-parenthood, I played the Baldur’s Gate trilogy all the way through, hitting almost every side quest, and I’m sure I put over 100 hours into it. I doubt I’ll ever have the time for that again or the attention span.
• Board game news: A reader of mine, Kevin Bertram, has designed a game called The Shores of Tripoli now on Kickstarter. This was on my BGG wishlist before I even knew Kevin was a reader.
• A digital adaptation of the acclaimed co-op game Spirit Island is also on Kickstarter, and just got funded this week.
• PAX Unplugged takes place in Philadelphia on December 6-8 this year. The convention schedule is now up and badges are on sale. I’ll be there as usual.