Nothing new from me at the Athletic this week as I’ve been working on my top 50 free agents rankings, which will run on Wednesday. My only new content outside of this site was a review of the game Forest Shuffle over at Paste Magazine; it’s got some lovely art but it’s a heavy thinker for a game that’s entirely made up of a large deck of cards. I do like it, though.

My guest on the Keith Law Show this week was Dr. Lee McIntyre, a philosopher at Boston University who discussed his new book On Disinformation: How to Fight for Truth and Protect Democracy. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: Robert Kolker, author of Lost Girls and Hidden Valley Road, revisits the topic of the former book, the recently-solved Long Island serial killer case, in a long story on how Suffolk County police botched the investigation for over a decade thanks to infighting, corruption, and incompetence. The story mentions the murder of John Pius, which happened in my hometown when I was about five. Kolker is going to appear on my podcast in November to discuss Hidden Valley Road, about a family with ten sons, six of whom developed schizophrenia.
• The CBC has a long investigative piece on singer Buffy Sainte-Marie’s claims to indigenous heritage, which appear to be false based on her birth certificate showing two white European-descended parents. Sainte-Marie’s public and commercial image were very closely tied to her claimed native identity, including a much-loved appearance on Sesame Street in1975.
• Vermont’s Woodside Juvenile Rehabilition Center was closed in 2020 after years of allegations of abuse and neglect of the young people in the center’s care. Seven Days has the harrowing story of one young woman whose life was destroyed by her time at the facility.
• Another police misconduct story, this one from Dallas, where a Black man who had the same name as a suspect at large found himself assaulted by cops and then arrested on a bogus charge, triggering a cascade of events that cost him his job and his house. He’s suing the police department and the city, neither of which has compensated him in any way for the actions of their officers.
• I’d never heard of the pop artist Devon Rodriguez, but I have now, after an art critic who reviewed his work found himself the target of an online mob stirred up by Rodriguez himself, who appears to have skin thinner than tengujo paper.
• A site aimed at helping people commit suicide, even connecting them with people who’d sell them the drugs to do it, was ignored for years by UK authorities, leading to 50 or more preventable deaths.
• CVS revealed it won’t sell cold medicines with phenylephrine, since the so-called decongestant doesn’t actually work. So why are they still selling so-called “homeopathic” remedies that also don’t work?
• My editor at Paste, Garrett Martin, visited Dubrovnik, Croatia, recently, and writes that it’s lovely and is being strangled by tourism.
• Clarence Thomas took a loan from a friend for $267,230, and then the friend just flat-out forgave it before Thomas paid down any principal. Thomas, of course, never reported this on financial disclosure reports.
• Dr. Hala Alyan, a Palestinian writer and clinical psychologist, writes in the New York Times on how Palestinians are, in her words, expected to “audition” for empathy and compassion.
• Also in the Times, Jamelle Bouie writes that the rightward shift as voters get older is happening less with each succeeding generation. One effect of making it harder for people to buy houses (and thus get mortgages) is that they don’t experience the drift towards fiscal conservatism/desire to pull up the ladder behind them. Oh well!
• The skin disease leishmaniasis is now endemic in the United States. It’s spread by sandflies, and their habitats are expanding thanks to climate change.
• Speaker of the House Mike Johnson wants to ban no-fault divorce. This is disastrous for people in abusive marriages, but also, my marriage is none of your fucking business.
• Historian Kevin Kruse is leaving Twitter, which matters because he was one of the more prominent voices countering political disinformation on the site, which, as he says, is undergoing enshittification and becoming a white nationalist utopia like Truth Social and Gab. NBC has a story on how LGBTQ+ people are leaving Twitter as well, citing the site’s increasingly toxic atmosphere and Musk’s decisions to allow deadnaming, misinformation, and hate speech to run rampant on the platform. I’ll be there as long as many of you are, but I’m on Bluesky (@keithlaw.bsky.social), Threads (@mrkeithlaw, same as Instagram), and Spoutible (@keithlaw) as well.
• The Times had a good story on how sports Twitter is still hanging in there, relatively speaking.
• Dr. Peter Hotez, author of the new book The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science, received the inaugural Anthony Fauci Courage in Leadership Award from the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
• Board game news: The Kickstarter for Nocturne, the latest game from the publishers of Cascadia and Fit to Print, is live now and already at $64K with 41 days to go.