climate change

→ May 18, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/17/19.

For ESPN+ subscribers this week, my look back at the 2009 draft went up, with a redraft of the first round and a look at the first-round misses. I also wrote a scouting post on some Orioles, Royals, Yankees, and Blue Jays prospects, including the top prospect in each of the first three organizations coming into the year. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Guardian looks at the ongoing and now renewed investigation into the assassination of Olof Palme, the Swedish Prime Minister who was shot and killed on a Stockholm street in 1986.
The New Yorker goes deep on the question of land ownership and redistribution currently roiling South Africa, which has some of the greatest economic inequality in the world.
Also from the Guardian‘s Long read program, why depression is not merely a disease of affluent countries, and how developing nations need more resources to focus on citizens’ mental health.
New York looks at how the wildfire season in California has become unending thanks to climate change.
Dr. James Hamblin explains the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, and why it doesn’t mean vaccines are unsafe, at The Atlantic. The VICP is a favorite talking point of anti-vaxxers, who refuse to understand how the program works or that it exists because litigious parents nearly drove vaccine manufacturers out of the market.
Alabama’s new abortion ban is akin to torture, mimicking a popular war crime we’ve seen recently in Bosnia and the Congo. I said on Thursday that I will not cover the SEC tournament this year or in the near future because of this law.
Austin, Fort Worth, and Houston are all at risk of measles outbreaks thanks to the hard work of anti-vaxxers (and their friends in the extreme religious right, like state Rep. Jonathan Stickland).
Members of a closer anti-vaxxer group on Facebook are calling for the violent overthrow of the U.S. government in response to rational, science-based laws that make it harder for parents to refuse to vaccinate their school-aged children.
Former evangelical Christian Sara Olson writes of learning about science after growing up in a denialist household.
Truthdig examines how an innocuous BBC interview exposed the vacuous nature of Ben Shapiro, who accused the conservative host of being a bias left-winger before abruptly ending the interview.
A sci-fi author showed how not to deal with someone about to publish a negative review of your book.
The recent imbroglio at my alma mater over a law professor being removed from his post as Winthrop House faculty dean involves far more serious charges than the Harvey Weinstein narrative implies. Prof. Ronald Sullivan joined the legal defense team for Weinstein, which did spur some outrage by students, but his removal comes after a long series of allegations of inappropriate behavior on his part as head of the upper-class student house.
A white Tennessee pastor raped his adoptive daughter for several years, but a white male judge sentenced him to just twelve years, rather than the 72 years prosecutors sought – even though the now-convicted rapist continues to deny guilt in the face of her allegations and DNA evidence.
San Francisco pie shop Mission Pie has refused to do business with food delivery services over their high surcharges, which they would have to subsidize by raising prices for customers dining in-store.
Virginia Del. Danica Roem (D) has ended up in the spotlight after her surprise win in 2018, and she’s using it to try to help other Democrats across the state get elected.
Anti-gay, anti-Semitic, totally American preacher Steven Anderson was denied entry to Ireland under a previously-unused immigration statute, with the Irish Minister for Justice citing “the interests of public policy.”
Israel’s ruling party is in turmoil over claims Prime Minister Netanyahu is trying to reduce their Supreme Court’s power to protect himself against three ongoing corruption cases.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who churns out policy proposal after policy proposal, has also proposed a 2% wealth tax above $50 million and an additional 1% on wealth over $1 billion. If enacted, it will likely be challenged as unconstitutional, and the outcome of such a case is an open question.
Monsanto has now lost three straight jury trials over glyphosate (the main ingredient in Roundup) despite a lack of any scientific evidence that the chemical is harmful to humans; David Bernstain of the Volokh Conspiracy (at Reason) explains why these verdicts are so outrageous.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: climate change, gilead, harvard, links, longreads, mental health, science, stick to baseball, sweden, texas

→ May 5, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/5/19.

I had two ESPN+ posts last week, my ranking of the top 50 prospects in this year’s draft class and a scouting blog post covering a half-dozen top prep players (five of them on the top 50). My first mock draft of 2019 goes up on Monday. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I sent out the latest edition of my free email newsletter on Friday as well. I’ve been trying to time those to when I’ve got actual content to tell you all about, especially baseball things.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Cut looks at a small cult that operated within the Sarah Lawrence campus, as the father of a student there ended up crashing in her dorm and taking control of many of her roommates’ lives. The university’s reluctance to act is especially disturbing.
BuzzFeed talked to former white nationalist writer/provocateur Katie McHugh, a piece that tries to exonerate her (and fails, in my opinion) but that is instructive into how the alt-right social media machine works.
The Saudi government has regularly helped its citizens living in the U.S. escape prosecution for crimes by spiriting them out of the country, yet we do nothing about this because we continue to believe that the Saudis are our friends despite forty-plus years of evidence that they are not. First it was oil, now it’s help against terrorism, but there’s always an excuse for treating the Saudis as allies even when their actions say otherwise.
My friend Tim Grierson interviewed director/actor Werner Herzog on the eve of the German film giant’s new documentary Meeting Gorbachev.
Kavitha Davidson wrote in the Guardian about sexual assault in sports and society, focusing on Luke Walton’s attorney is trying to use #MeToo to denigrate the coach’s victim.
The New York Times explores eleven major food crops already affected by climate change, which, as the article notes, is widely denied by elected officials (always Republicans) from many of the states that rely on agriculture for employment and income.
The Washington Post profiles D’Arcy Carden, who plays Janet on The Good Place.
The Post also argues that anti-vaxxers should bear the financial costs of their actions when outbreaks occur.
The anti-vaxxer movement is also turning to increasingly violent rhetoric. We ignored this as a society when anti-abortion activists did it, and then when white nationalists did it, and both movements eventually turned to violence and terrorism.
Those same anti-vaxxers are harassing and threatening a Toronto mother whose son died of the flu as she has been advocating for greater use of the flu vaccine.
Measles had been eradicated in this hemisphere in 2000; it just reached its highest level in the U.S. in twenty years, entirely because of anti-vaxxers.
Meanwhile, science-denier Darryl Metcalfe, Pennsylvania’s representative for its 12th district (guess which party!), introduced a bill making it easier for parents to skip vaccinations by requiring doctors to treat unvaccinated children even if it poses risks to other patients.
Germany’s health minister proposed issuing large fines to families who don’t vaccinate their school-aged children. Add that to liability and you might extinguish enough of the deniers to stop these outbreaks.
Indonesia announced a plan to move the capital away from Jakarta because that city is sinking.
The political science valedictorian at Brigham Young University announced during his speech that he’s gay, a huge move given that the Mormon Church just announced a month ago that homosexuality was no longer considered apostasy.
Adam Serwer argues in the Atlantic that Nazis are and have always been trolls.
A National Geographic editorial argues that we must keep half of all land mass in its natural state to stop climate change. That may be true, but, uh, good luck with that.
A federal court ruled that Ohio Republicans violated Ohioans’ constitutional rights with a 2011 gerrymander. I know New Jersey Democrats did this too, but are all of the remaining gerrymanders this decade by Republicans?
Board game news: Plan B Games opened pre-orders for Century: A New World, the third game in Emerson Matsuuchi’s trilogy that also included Spice Road and Eastern Wonders.
Acram Digital announced that they’re developing a digital port of Charterstone, the tremendous legacy game that was my #2 title of 2018.
Asmodee announced the creation of a new fiction imprint to publish works based on or tied to its wide stable of board game and RPG titles.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, climate change, links, metoo, rape culture, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ April 6, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/6/19.

No ESPN+ content from me this week, although I have a draft blog post to file tonight that will cover what I saw at NHSI this week as well as potential first-rounder George Kirby of Elon. I did hold a Klawchat on Tuesday.

Meredith Wills helped me do some of the research that went into Smart Baseball, and, in addition to being an astrophysicist and general baseball expert (who realized that a change in the thickness of the baseball’s laces likely explains the current home run surge), she’s also a knitter and generally quite crafty. She’s disassembled many baseballs to look into their construction and is now selling crafts made from the leather on these baseballs, repurposing material that would otherwise go to landfills.

And now, the links, with a note. I didn’t get through all the longer reads I’d saved this week, so I may post a bonus roundup tomorrow or Monday. We’ll see how my weekend goes.

The best thing I read this week, one with particular relevance to me and many people close to me, is the New Yorker‘s piece on Laura Delano and the poorly-understood challenges of going off psychiatric drugs. I take one of those drugs, escitalopram (Lexapro), at the lowest ‘therapeutic dose’ of 10 mg/day, to help manage my anxiety.
Irin Carmon, now of New York magazine’s Intelligencer, writes of how the Washington Post, including famed editor-in-chief Marty Baron, spiked her work (with Amy Brittain) revealing that 60 Minutes boss Jeff Fager had a history of sexual harassment. CBS and Fager barraged the Post with threats of lawsuits and implied that they’d leak information to sink the story and some individuals’ careers, so the Post excised Fager’s story from their exposé of Charlie Rose; Ronan Farrow eventually published these allegations last July, leading to Fager’s belated firing.
The BBC looks at the murder of Iraqi Instagram star Tara Fares, part of what appears to be an increasing campaign to silence “liberal” women with significant social media profiles in the country.
Two of the links this week are very difficult reads about the deaths of children. The Washington Post goes deeper on the story of the grieving mother Susan Stevens, whose daughter’s death by overdose been used by Trump as ‘evidence’ we need a border wall, but whose story is far more complicated, with abuse and sexual assault possibly contributing to her daughter’s drug use.
The second is a photo essay on NPR covering the life and death of 12-year-old Lola Muñoz from a brain tumor, documented by photojournalist Moriah Ratner, who spent over a year with Lola and became very close to her subject before Lola’s death one year ago.
Vox asked fifteen experts about what modern practices or beliefs will be “unthinkable” in fifty years; I thought Lux Alptraum’s answer on sex work and its possible decriminalization was particularly insightful. When we turn sex workers into criminals, we are often revictimizing the people we charge with crimes.
The Anti-Defamation League called out anti-vaxxers for misappropriating the Holocaust-era Star of David badge to try to make themselves into some sort of victims.
The HPV vaccine has led to a dramatic drop in cervical disease, referring to the precancerous cells found in cervixes as a result of HPV infections.
I may have included this once before, but Undark’s profile of 18-year-old Ethan Lindberger, who was unvaccinated until he gained his majority and whose mother is still off in cloudcuckooland when it comes to vaccines, is worth your time.
From McSweeney’s: “I’m Vaccinating my Child the Natural Way – With Measles.“
The Administration is draining that swamp by letting pork producers have more control over inspections. Getting food-borne illnesses to own the libs?
Texas billionaire and Trump ally Andrew Beal is trying to get courts and regulators to stop California’s clean energy goals so he can profit, with zero apparent concern for the effects on our environment. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be born without a soul.
The Fifth Circuit Court’s recent ruling in Gibson v. Collier abandons the rule of law so the majority could weigh in against trans rights, according to plaintiff’s attorney Max Kennerly.
Probiotics do little to nothing for your overall health; they may even be bad for your immune system. Want a healthier gut? Eat more fiber.
The Atlantic has a fun interview with songwriters Norm Stiles and Chris Cerf, who wrote many of Sesame Street‘s most famous songs and later co-created Between the Lions. I do dispute the writer’s assertion that Sesame Street‘s best-known tune is “Put Down the Duckie.” That’s not even the show’s best-known song about a rubber duck; “Rubber Ducky” was so popular it hit the top 20 on Billboard‘s pop singles cart in 1970.
In a video essay for the New York Times Venezuelan-American writer Joanna Hausmann says the American Left is wrong to glorify Venezuelan dictator Nicholas Maduro, and that protests against U.S. action in the collapsed South American state seem to ignore the wishes of actual Venezuelans. She also points out that Venezuela’s economy collapsed due to decades of corruption, with Maduro and his predecessor Hugo Chávez looting the state for personal gain.
BuzzFeed writers have unionized, but the company is refusing to even recognize the union. You can see the union’s open letter to management on its Twitter feed.
Political science professor Leah Stokes looks at Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s claim that corporate money, not public opinion, is the real opposition to the Green New Deal, and finds evidence to support it.
Wine Enthusiast has a guide to amari, potable bitters, mostly from Italy that I’m seeing more on dessert menus at fine restaurants. The piece mentions my two favorites for drinking straight – Meletti and Montenegro.
Nationals pitching prospect Sterling Sharp is running a pledge drive to benefit youth baseball in Detroit where you can donate a flat amount or do as I did, pinning your donation to the number of groundball outs Sharp records this year.
Renegade Game Studios announced pre-orders for two upcoming titles, Artsee and the trick-taking game Time Chase.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: climate change, depression, food safety, links, liquor, longreads, mental health, the swamp, vaccines

→ March 30, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/30/19.

For ESPN+ subscribers, I posted my second Cactus League scouting notebook, covering prospects from Cleveland, the Giants, the A’s, the White Sox, the Cubs, and the Padres; my first scouting notebook from Arizona went up the previous week. I also posted a draft scouting post that looked at four of the top college position players in the draft class, including Adley Rutschman and Andrew Vaughn, the top two players on my first draft board. I also wrote up my predictions for this year’s standings, playoff outcomes, and postseason award winners, which has already upset Yankee fans (who cares, my picks don’t affect anything) and had one Mariner fan trying to told-you-so me because they’ve scored a lot of runs through (checks notes) four games.

At Paste, I gave the first perfect score (10/10) I’ve given to any board game in the 100+ reviews I’ve written for them in the last five years, awarding the honor to Wingspan, an incredible, smart, beautiful, and scientifically accurate new game from Elizabeth Hargrave that, coincidentally, is one of the only games I know that was designed and illustrated entirely by women. It’s so well-designed, yet easy to learn and doesn’t take that long to play once you understand a few basic mechanics. The game has sold out its first two print runs but the next one is expected in early May.

I didn’t chat this week for a few reasons, and am behind on my email newsletter for the same, but hope to pick all of that back up in the next few days. I appreciate your patience. That sounds ominous but they’re mostly good things that have simply demanded more of my time.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This is from February, but this New York/The Cut longread on the rise and fall of Tulum, Mexico as a vacation destination is fascinating, and a lesson in how some of the ills of western prosperity are causing environmental destruction and economic harm in the developing world.
The surgeon who writes and tweets as Doc Bastard has compiled a list of rebuttals to 73 common anti-vaxxer claims, including some I’d never seen before.
Mother Jones looks at how crowdfunding has made catastrophic medical care into an online popularity contest.
Alex Jones is being sued – I hope into oblivion – by parents of victims of the Sandy Hook massacre, and in his deposition he claimed he had a “psychosis” that led him to say Sandy Hook was a staged, false-flag operation, and frequently denied saying or doing things he actually did.
Nevada Lt. Governor Lucy Flores details getting an unwanted kiss from then-VP Joe Biden in 2014. I have zero interest in a Biden candidacy for President anyway, but I hope this finally ends it.
The New Yorker‘s Helen Rosner describes Julia Child’s commitment to progressive politics, which became more public as her profile grew.
Ginny Searle, writing for Deadspin, takes a critical look at the increasingly fan-unfriendly policies implemented across MLB, often with the outright complicity of media shills like Darren Rovell.
The Economist tweeted and then deleted a teaser that asked, rhetorically, if trans people should be sterilized. The Daily Dot examines the transphobic history of editor Helen Joyce, arguing that this was far from an isolated or accidental incident.
The NRA had quite a week: They fought against renewal of the Violence Against Women Act, arguing that domestic abusers shouldn’t lose their rights to own guns, and then a Huffington Post investigation revealed that NRA executive Mark Richardson solicited a Sandy Hook hoaxer, asking him to do the same for the Parkland mass shooting.
The Atlantic describes the chytrid fungus Bd, responsible for the decline or extinction of over 500 amphibian species, making it the deadliest pathogen in recorded history.
My friend Adnan Virk is starting a great new gig at DAZN, co-anchoring their nightly whip-around baseball show. He spoke to the Washington Post‘s Ben Strauss about his new job and how ESPN treated him, up to his firing in February.
NPR profiles Bob’s Red Mill, especially how it became a force in gluten-free products. I counted three Bob’s bags in my pantry just now, and need to pick up two more items – their GF flour mix and their almond flour – today. Their products are great for any bakers, since they’re often the only source of things like tapioca or potato starch, both superior to corn starch for hot fruit pies, Mike.
The CDC helped fund the development of a drug that can prevent HIV transmission even during unprotected sex, so why is a private company reaping all the profits and pricing it as a monopolist?
A California GOP delegate appointed a white nationalist to an ‘associate’ delegate position, and seems rather pleased with himself.
An African-American attorney in Maryland says he was detained in a Harford County courthouse because the deputy thought he was pretending to be a lawyer.
Here’s this week’s roundup of vaccine news and anti-vaxxer madness. Maryn McKenna, writing for WIRED, looks at the real costs to society of the anti-vaxxer movement. We all pay more for health insurance because of these idiots.
VICE‘s Joseph Cox says Instagram’s algorithm pushed him into an anti-vaccine ‘rabbit hole’ within ten seconds of him following one prominent denialist account.
Maine’s rate of pertussis infections is eight times the national average because of Mainers’ higher than normal rate of refusing vaccines.
I’ve included a few links recently on California doctors selling questionable or outright fraudulent ‘medical exemptions’ to the state’s tight vaccination laws; now Dr. Richard Pan, a state Senator there, has introduced new legislation targeting such doctors, who put personal profits over the good of the community.
New York’s Rockland County has declared a state of emergency due to a massive measles outbreak caused by anti-vaxxers, with over 150 reported cases of the highly contagious, dangerous disease. Prof. Peter Hotez, writing for the BMJ‘s opinion blog, calls the outbreak nightmarish, especially how anti-vaxxers targeted orthodox Jews with their messaging. This is an increasing problem – anti-vaxxers find vulnerable groups and bombard them with bullshit, but face no consequences when outbreaks occur.
Someone ran around Cook County (Chicago) with the measles, sparking a warning to the public of possible exposure at fifteen different locations over the past week. I hope this person is held accountable for the costs of their actions, but I doubt it.
There’s a mumps outbreak near me in Philly, spurring officials at Temple University, where the outbreak is centered, to give students booster shots to try to counter the waning immunity teenagers seem to experience from that specific vaccine.
Deadspin’s Albert Burnenko asks Which Online Edgelord Mishaps Will Derail Trevor Bauer’s Season?.
Oceans, a new standalone game with similar mechanics to its parent game, Evolution, is now on Kickstarter; I demoed this at PAX Unplugged in December and found there were some aspects I preferred, especially the mechanics around feeding.
Dire Wolf’s upcoming Game of Thrones: Oathbreaker social deduction game is now available for pre-order.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: climate change, Cooking, environment, gluten-free, guns, health, hoaxes, metoo, mexico, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ March 2, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/2/19.

For ESPN+ subscribers this week, I wrote three pieces, breaking down the Bryce Harper deal, ranking the top 30 prospects for this year’s draft, and offering scouting notes on players I saw in Texas, including Bobby Witt, Jr. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

On the gaming front, I reviewed the Kennerspiel des Jahres-winning game The Quacks of Quedlinburg for Paste, and also reviewed the digital port of the game Evolution for Ars Technica.

I went on the Mighty 1090 in San Diego with Darren Smith to talk Manny Machado, Olive Garden, and the Oscars, and on TSN 1050 in Toronto to talk about Ross Atkins’ strange comments on Vlad Jr.. I also spoke to True Blue LA about Dodgers prospects, and joined the Sox Machine podcast to talk White Sox prospects.

I’m due for the next edition of my free email newsletter, so sign up now while the gettin’s good.

High Street on Market’s Sandwich Battles begin this Monday, with tickets available for $25. They’re my #1 restaurant in Philly, in large part because their breads are otherworldly.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: GQ has a length profile of the prolific and highly disturbed art thief Stéphane Breitwieser, who stole artworks valued at over $1 billion but never sold anything.
21st Century Fox was hit with a $179 million penalty by an arbitrator over a wide scheme to defraud the actors and producers of Bones of residuals from streaming on Hulu. Fox lied about the profits they were receiving from Hulu, of which Fox owns 30%, and at one point a Fox executive signed both sides of a deal between the two companies.
MLB.com’s Mike Petriello, who was a huge help to me when I was working on Smart Baseball, has a superb primer up on the Rapsodo and Edgetronic devices that are revolutionizing player development, especially in the area of ‘pitch design,’ where coaches and pitchers can work together to change or develop pitches by using real-time data that show how changes in grips or release points affect a pitch’s velocity and spin. Driveline Baseball, mentioned in Mike’s piece, has a blog post up on gaze research, or tracking how hitters see the ball. Technology has allowed teams and players to measure things that were either estimated by scouts/coaches in the past or that were simply brushed off as unmeasurable.
Little Falls, Minnesota, has found success in fighting opioid addiction by treating it as a disease, rather than as a crime or a personal failing. It’s an approach that has worked in other countries – Portugal is a paragon in this area – but goes against the Puritanical strain in American culture that sees addicts as degenerates.
What if climate change leads to enough cloud loss to further accelerate the warming of the planet? The odds of this are higher than we previously realized.
Why is California’s Attorney General refusing to release a list of cops convicted of crimes? Xavier Becerra, running for re-election this year, has even rejected public records requests from his own agency, which has led to lawsuits and would appear to violate open-records laws.
Marcela García writes in the Boston Globe how the should-have-won-Best Picture film Roma has exposed the deep racism within Mexican society.
A popular talking point among Republicans right now is that doctors are “killing babies” right after they’re born. The President said it in his State of the Union address, and it’s been repeated ad nauseam over the last month. Dr. Jen Gunter, an OBGYN who herself gave birth to a son so premature he could not survive, points out what a dangerous lie this line is.
Anti-vaxxer Forest Maready, who likes to depict people with autism as “tragedies,” has a new book coming out that resurfaces the debunked myth that vaccines cause autism. Amazon and Apple are planning to sell it, but I signed this petition asking them to pull the title from their stores. Meanwhile, an inquiry from Rep. Adam Schiff led amazon to pull six anti-vaccination “documentaries” from prime video.
Anti-vaxxer groups on Facebook are harassing pro-vaccine doctors by trashing their Yelp and Google ratings as well as flooding those doctors’ Facebook posts with comments. Facebook has done little to nothing to combat the problem. The Atlantic points out that the Facebook anti-vax community is quite small, just loud, and banning them would be easy for the platform.
WIRED argues that amazon’s anti-vaxxer problem is worse than Facebook’s.
A Nova Scotia chiropractor lost her license for spreading anti-vaccine information and making other unfounded claims. We should strive for the same kinds of laws around chiropractors, naturopaths, and even the rare medical doctor who embraces this sort of bullshit.
CNN also weighed in on tech outlets failing to police the anti-vaxx bullshit on their platforms.
The Washington Post looks at how anti-vaxxers are responding to the overdue public backlash against their efforts, as well as bills in various state legislatures to end religious and/or philosophical exemptions to mandatory vaccination requirements.
Scientific American presents public policies we can use to fight anti-vaxxer lunacy.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch‘s Kevin McDermott asks why so many Americans are rejecting science in the face of incontrovertible evidence.
Italian researchers used CRISPR to create a genetically modified version of a malaria-carrying mosquito; if released, it should lead to collapses of that specific species and thus reduce malaria transmissions.
Paste‘s Jacob Weindling noticed that CNN stacked its phony ‘town hall’ for Bernie Sanders with political operatives/lobbyists posing as regular folks.
LA Times movie critic Justin Chang wrote that Green Book is the worst Best Picture winner since Crash, calling the vapid white-savior film “an embarrassment,” “insultingly glib and hucksterish,” “a self-satisfied crock,” and a “palatable brand of godawful.”
Late Night with Seth Meyers rather perfectly sent up the film with their ‘trailer’ for White Savior.
And apparently Green Book producer sent critic Jenni Miller a condescending, tone-deaf email where he doesn’t even know the main character’s real name.
In a bit of things coming full circle, Pig Destroyer’s John Jarvis has formed a new baseball-themed grindcore band, Kolten Wong City, a name that alludes to Kowloon Walled City, whose bassist, Ian Miller, is part of baseball-themed grindcore band Puig Destroyer, whose name alludes to … well, you get it now.
Why are progressive artists still working with Morrissey despite his embrace of far-right causes and outright racist statements?
Talk Talk’s singer and main songwriter Mark Hollis died this week at age 64. His last release was a solo album in 1998, after which he retired from music to spend time with his family.
Splinter writer Samer Kalaf released an email exchange he had with conservative NY Times writer Bret Stephens, without Stephens’ permission, but I think Kalaf comes off far worse here than he realizes.
Roland’s Market, a collaboration between Chris Bianco and the couple behind Tacos Chiwas, closed without warning last month. The location will be converted into a larger outpost of Bianco’s Pane Bianco.
The former editor of the Rocky Mountain News writes of his fear that local journalism will continue to fade and die as newspapers are plundered by hedge-fund owners.
Charlotte Riley describes the game Patriarchy Chicken in a column subtitled “why I refuse to move out of the way for men.”
The FTC is finally cracking down on scammers who buy fake reviews on amazon, going after the seller of a bogus weight-loss ‘supplement.’
In board game news, Disney’s Villainous: Wicked to the Core hits Target tomorrow; it’s exclusive there for a month and will later roll out to other outlets. I’ve played it, and it’s as good as the original, but with rules that are much clearer for first-time players, enough that you might do better to start with this before going back to the first game. (This is a standalone expansion that you can combine with the original.)
Renegade Game Studios has Hex Roller, a new roll-and-write game that I haven’t seen yet, up for preorder.
Days of Wonder announced a few weeks ago that their next title will be Corinth, an update/retheme of the game Yspahan that alters some core rules and eliminates the caravan (which was a dominant strategy in Yspahan).

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 2018 movies, addiction, anti-science, art, baseball, board games, california, climate change, frauds, links, movies, oscars, pseudoscience, social media, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ February 16, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/16/19.

No ESPN+ content this week, but my entire prospect ranking package is now up for subscribers, including the top 100, farm system rankings, and in-depth rankings for all 30 teams, with at least 15 prospects ranked in each system. Before my vacation I wrote up the J.T. Realmuto trade. I also held a Klawchat this Thursday and another back on February 6th.

My most recent board game review for Paste covered the light, fun engine-builder Gizmos, by the designer of Bärenpark and Imhotep, a very family-friendly title with no text to worry about that takes the engine-builder concept and boils it down to a simpler game that plays in well under an hour.

I also resumed my email newsletter, so feel free to sign up for that if you just can’t get enough Klaw in your life.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Jessica Luther and Dan Solomon have a massive piece up at Deadspin looking at how Baylor football became a haven for sexual assault, building on their great work over the last few years at Texas Monthly.
The Verge interviews Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan, who has made millions of scientific papers available ‘free’ online, violating copyrights to do so – but should scientific research not just be copyrighted, but held behind prohibitive paywalls that may slow the progress of other research by denying people access? Should copyright laws, which predate the idea of research journals and existed to protect the rights of publishers and content creators, treat scientific papers the way they treat novels or films?
SkepticalRaptor has a long review of a bad book from last fall that claims the HPV vaccine isn’t safe. The book’s authors aren’t scientists, but two lawyers and a homemaker, so nobody with a science background, and it shows in the text.
Amanita phalloides, the deadly mushroom colloquially known as the death-cap, is spreading across North America.
My friends Tim Grierson and Will Leitch ranked every film that won the Oscar for Best Picture. I’ve probably seen only 20 or so of these, but I at least agree with their praise of numbers 1, 3, 6, 12, and 17.
Why don’t we have a vaccine for streptococcus A, the aftereffects of which, including rheumatic heart disease and sepsis, kill half a million people a year? It’s a combination of a regulatory screwup, successful medical interventions in developed countries, and the low profit margins of vaccines.
In a Guardian longread, Tom Yarwood writes about surviving being sexually molested by a music teacher when he was a child. He’s specific about the nature of the abuse, in case you might find this triggering.
The BBC looks at how Helsinki ended street homelessness through progressive policies designed to get such people off the streets into stable housing, even if they have substance-abuse problems.
Laura Snapes writes in the Guardian that the Ryan Adams allegations are just the start in a field where such “beta male misogyny” is rampant.
Measles is on the rise in Europe thanks to anti-vaxxers, and our state laws here need to keep up by eliminating all non-medical exemptions for schoolchildren.
Facebook’s role in spreading vaccine-denial bullshit has come under fire in two directions – the rise of closed groups that freely share false information against vaccines, and now anti-vaxxer groups using Facebook ad targeting to serve ads to pregnant women scaring them away from vaccines.
Some unvaccinated teens are now going around their parents to get vaccinated or doing so as soon as they’re of age. I’d drive any unvaccinated kid to the doctor if they had the legal side sorted out to get their shots.
There’s a measles outbreak in the Philippines, including the capital city of Manila, with nearly 13 million people in its metropolitan area.
Now some especially dumbshit parents are refusing the vitamin K shot for newborns. It’s essential to help newborns’ blood clot properly, so look for a bunch of babies bleeding to death needlessly because their parents are morons and the law lets them stay that way.
Climate change may melt most Himalayan glaciers in the next 80 years, which, I don’t know, sounds like a national emergency to me.
Scientific American looks at proposed policies to combat rising temperatures in Phoenix, although I notice water conservation, an outright failure of the city and state governments there, isn’t mentioned.
Math geeks may enjoy this paper (PDF) on the Sheldon Conjecture, based on an episode of the Big Bang Theory where that character says 73 is the perfect prime number – and it’s possible that the writers were more right than they knew.
Harvard professor Jill Abramson stands accused of plagiarism as well as inaccurate quotes in her latest book, and she seems to think she’s above the fray. I’ve emailed multiple deans at Harvard to ask for any sign they’re even aware of these problems – she teaches seminars on writing there, for crying out loud – but so far I’ve had no response.
Instagram “influencer” Rachel Hollis has also been accused of plagiarizing quotes on her social media account.
Bernie 2020? Not so fast, if you look at his history of embracing pseudoscience.
Julian Edelman’s title as Super Bowl MVP exposes our ‘selective morality’ on performance-enhancing drugs in sports, Hunter Felt writes for the Guardian.
Oh, we back on that again? New York’s City Council is considering a ban on foie gras, based again on a misunderstanding of how the delicacy is actually produced. I’m not a huge fan myself, at least not commensurate with its reputation among foodies, but this is a needless regulation, and shouldn’t be near the top of anyone’s priority list of rules on food production and sale.
I shouldn’t laugh, but I did: “Investors” in a cryptocurrency exchange might be out $137 million because the founder died and no one knows his passwords.
Jane Coaston wrote in Vox about conservative pundits’ bad faith arguments around Gov. Ralph Northam while also arguing that the governor, who appeared in blackface in a yearbook photo from his time in graduate school, should resign. I feel like we should just turn Virginia off and turn it back on again.
George Will argues in the Washington Post that Democrats can bail out Trump by nominating someone too liberal/progressive in 2020. I don’t agree, but I think Will makes a cogent argument about the center (without, I think, considering voters on the far left who might have abstained in 2016).
A great podcast from the BBC explains why we don’t care about the war in Yemen, which we support by funding our ‘friends’ the Saudis.
Two unrolled Twitter threads worth reading: Harvard professor Juliette Kayam depantsed Rep. Dan Crenshaw over border security and the wall.
Writer Anand Giridharadas was invited to fill in as guest speaker at a dinner, only to have the ‘liberal’ crowd defend the Koch brothers. The dinner took place at The Players, a private social club founded by Edwin Booth, which has also been accused of labor law violations (detailed within).
Board games! Floodgate Games’ Bad Maps is now available for pre-order.
The board game Evolution is now out as an app for iOS, Android, and Steam. I have a review coming for Ars Technica, but I’ll report here that it’s pretty great – it looks fantastic and I think it’s easy to read, learn, and play on a tablet screen.
Villainous: Wicked to the Core, is a new standalone expansion to last year’s hit game Villainous, and will be available exclusively through Target starting on March 3rd, with pre-orders through that link. I’ve played it five times already, and it’s more of the same but with better rules explaining each villain character’s unique powers and victory conditions. This comes with three new characters – the Evil Queen, Doctor Facilier, and Hades (no James Woods, thank goodness) – and may be combined any way you like with the six villains from the original game.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, board games, climate change, frauds, links, math, metoo, oscars, vaccines, virginia

→ February 2, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/2/19.

My ranking of the top 100 prospects in baseball ran this week, with four separate pieces: #1 through #50, #51 through #100, my column of fourteen more guys who just missed, and a ranking of the top 20 prospects just for impact in 2019. I also held a Klawchat on Wednesday and a Periscope video chat on Thursday.

My ranking of all 30 farm systems will run on Monday, February 4th, after which the team by team reports will run, one division per day for the following six days. I’ve written 24 of the 30 team reports so far, if you’re curious.

Many thanks to the White Sox blog SouthSideSox and writer katiesphil for this lovely review of Smart Baseball.

And now, the links…

The best thing I read this week was the New Yorker‘s profile of Nashville’s iconic Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack and current owner André Prince Jeffries. It’s a wonderful piece that touches on questions of culinary authenticity as well as the intersection of race, food, and access to money.
A close second is this Atavist story on a nearly-blind man in Texas who robbed a bank so he could get health care, a story that combines a profile of him – he also lost a foot to the effects of type 2 diabetes – and our very broken social safety net.
A woman attacked by a serial groper in DC found out he was a chef at a popular restaurant she’d visited, so she fought back by spreading word among city restaurants about his history of assaults.
Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Grimes (D) examined voting records of state employees, job applicants, and political rivals, which may have contributed to her decision not to run for Governor next year. She called the ProPublica report a “sexist smear job.”
Self-styled activist Kevin Powell nearly ruined a woman’s life over a matter of mistaken identity, running an actual smear campaign against someone who shared the same name as someone who’d send his wife a critical email. Powell, who appeared on the inaugural season of MTV’s The Real World, has faced multiple accusations of assaulting women, and lost a lawsuit in this case during which he plugged his ears with his fingers to avoid hearing the judge’s ruling, and then claimed he was being targeted because of his race.
Washington state legislators are pushing to end nonmedical exemptions to mandatory vaccination laws – as every damn state should by now – and of course anti-vaxxers are fighting back. These deniers – not skeptics, as I told the author on twitter, because skeptics want evidence, while anti-vaxxers reject evidence – are loud, so those of us on the side of science need to be louder.
Arizona is backsliding even in the face of measles outbreaks, with Republicans there introducing two bills that will reduce vaccination rates, one making it easier to opt out, one that would force medical professionals to explain vaccination “risks” to parents. (Here’s the main risk: you might be a little sore at the injection site.)
California did tighten its laws, but now many doctors are selling bogus “medical exemptions” to insane parents who’d rather break the law than protect their children from deadly diseases. This should be grounds to revoke a doctor’s license to practice medicine.
The Oregonian ran an editorial advocating eliminating nonmedical exemptions there and otherwise pushing pro-vaccination policies. If you live in any of these states, call your state rep and senator and tell them both you favor laws that end all nonmedical exemptions (religious or philosophical) for schoolchildren, and want sanctions against doctors who help parents skirt the rules.
Police failed to file charges in a 2013 rape case in Eastland, Texas, allowing the rapist to remain free so he could rape and nearly kill an 11-year-old girl. Worse: One of the officers who screwed up the original case, Frank Saylors, won election as city commissioner of Eastland in 2015.
The mayor of Dearborn, Michigan, didn’t like that the city-funded historical magazine had a piece about Henry Ford’s (well-documented) history of anti-Semitism, so he fired the longtime editor and refused to let the magazine distribute the issue. Of course, it has already backfired, with the story making national news.
I can’t imagine you missed this but Virginia Governor Ralph Northam needs to step down.
Top Chef alum Fatima Ali died of Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare bone cancer, last week.
Is there a connection between gum disease and Alzheimer’s? If you need me, I’ll be flossing my teeth.
GQ ran a guide to dating someone with serious food allergies.
A reader passed along this story of members of indie-folk band Murder by Death opening a Neapolitan pizzeria in Louisville.
The efforts of a single evangelical woman in Virginia just derailed the Equal Rights Amendment again. Of course, she’s white and highly privileged, so she can’t understand why such an amendment would be beneficial.
The EPA named a climate change denier to its advisory board. John Christy has argued for the repeal of regulations against greenhouse gas emissions because he claims (against all evidence) that their effects will be positive.
Two St. Louis cops decided to play Russian roulette with one bullet in the revolver, so of course one of them is now dead.
Also from St. Louis, the Riverfront Times details how the FBI outsmarted the violent cops who beat protesters in the wake of the acquittal of officer Jason Stockley on murder charges.
Public transport in Vienna has boomed thanks to a broad-based combination of increased geographic coverage, pricing strategies, regulations, and support from the federal level.
Mohanad Elshieky, who is in the U.S. legally, had a terrifying interaction with overzealous ICE agents, whom Greyhound allows to board its buses for these so-called “checks.”
My friend Emma Span wrote an advice column for Mother Goose characters over at Slate.
Matt Leacock, designer of Pandemic and the Forbidden cooperative game series, has a new title coming this year called Era: Medieval Age, a “roll and build” title inspired by Roll Through the Ages.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, board game news, california, climate change, kentucky, links, longreads, louisville, mass transit, metoo, nashville, pizza, top chef, vaccines, virginia

→ January 19, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/19/19.

Nothing new from me this week, between prospect writing and a trip to NYC the last two days to attend a MEL magazine event. The prospect rankings will start to run on ESPN.com on January 28th and will roll out over two weeks.

And now, the links…

The best piece I saw this week was a research paper, with the glorious title “Extreme opponents of genetically modified foods know the least but think they know the most.”
Ashley Feinberg of the Huffington Post interviewed Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who comes off extremely poorly on a variety of topics, including the site’s enabling of the far right, its inconsistent enforcement of its own policies, and his bizarre apology to far-right provocateur Candace Owens.
GQ interviewed numerous musicians who are also recovering alcoholics or substance abusers about creating while clean, with a wide range of questions that allow them to attack the longstanding myth that connects drug use or drink to creativity.
Vulture‘s Nate Jones looks at how Green Book and Bohemian Rhapsody became this year’s Oscar villains. He makes good points, although I’d submit that the biggest issue is that they’re both bad films.
MEL‘s Hussein Kesvani speaks to women whose former partners were “redpilled” by online misogyny communities that argue that women secretly control the world and men can’t even complain about it. (Yes, if there’s a real tragedy in modern gender relations, it’s that we men aren’t given enough outlets for complaints.)
At Media Matters, Parker Molloy details how right-wing media have made Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez into a star through their weird obsession with her, playing right into her hands and making her very popular among young progressives (and older ones too).
At the Athletic (subscription required), Lindsey Adler spoke to new Yankees minor league coordinator Dillon Lawson, whose focus is on helping hitters recognize pitches better. I’m not sure there’s a major prospect more in need of what Lawson brings than Yankees outfielder Estevan Florial, who has multiple plus tools but truly atrocious pitch recognition skills for his age.
Was there really a backlash against the Gillette ad on toxic masculinity? This Twitter thread shows how even the BBC was duped by tweets from dubious accounts. I thought the ad was sweet and that you’d have to be the tenderest snowflake to take offense in it.
The last glacier in Venezuela is vanishing, thanks to anthropogenic climate change. It will become the first country to lose all of its glaciers, and since the government is barely functioning, it’s not as if this is a priority for the authorities there, who are barely holding on to power in the failed state.
The World Health Organization listed anti-vaxxers as one of the ten greatest threats to world health for 2019.
Another fake “investigative journalist” has been running around claiming there’s a vaccine-autism link that the authorities are suppressing, and The Hill fell for it and let her write an editorial pushing it. You can’t unring the bell but the site did let Dr. Peter Hotez write a rebuttal that is clear and unequivocal: vaccines can’t cause autism.
Kamau Bobb writes about being pulled over by white police officers for what turned out to be an administrative error.
George Will writes how the Brexit vote and subsequent fiasco shows how direct democracy can, at times, be dangerous. If we were to hold a similar plebiscite here on a major policy question, I’d be concerned that a majority would simply trample the rights of a minority (think transphobic bathroom bills), or that the results of the vote wouldn’t reflect the popular will as a whole, but the will of people who are sufficiently motivated to vote and mobilize others to do so.
The upcoming film The Red Sea Diving Resort will be based on the true story of how Israel took a disused Sudanese village, made a fake tourist destination, and used it to evacuate 6000 Ethopian Jews. Oh, and some tourists really did show up.
The three actresses who star in The Favourite spoke to IndieWire editor Anne Thompson about how Yorgis Lanthimos created an environment that allowed them to thrive in their roles. It’s the one major 2018 film that has only women at its center – there are men in the film, but they exist at the periphery (and occasionally have oranges thrown at them).
Pastor and activist John Pavlovitz writes in an open letter to white evangelicals that their behavior is why they’re being marginalized, as they demonized President Obama for nothing but forgive President Trump for serious transgressions.
Michigan State President John Engler stepped down this week, but the list of his misdeeds calls into question the entire process of his hiring. They’d have had to work hard to find someone more ill-suited to that job in the wake of the series of crimes that took place at the school to protect serial sexual abuser Larry Nassar.
Boardgames! Dire Wolf Digital announced a whole slate of upcoming digital adaptations of popular games, including Sagrada, Root, and Mage Knight. I got a preview of their adaptation of Raiders of the North Sea back at PAX Unplugged and it looked phenomenal. Dire Wolf generally does great stuff – their port of Lanterns is fantastic – and this one has similar tweaks and animations that make the experience of playing the game on a tablet even better.
It’s just in the prototype/print-and-play stage but a PhD student, Célia Souque, has created a board game called Bugs in Bangkok to try to teach kids about antibiotic resistance, targeting kids in Thailand, where she spent three months as part of her PhD program.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board games, climate change, links, movies, potential oscar nominees, vaccines

→ December 29, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/29/18.

I’ve had several ESPN+ pieces in the last two weeks, including my Hall of Fame ballot and explanation, my analyses of the Jurickson Profar trade and that huge Reds-Dodgers trade, and a post that covered the Michael Brantley and Wilson Ramos signings. I held a Klawchat here on the 20th.

On the board game front, my year-end articles went up two weeks ago – my top ten games of 2018 for Paste and my best games by category for Vulture.

Here on the dish, I posted my top 100 songs of 2018 and top 18 albums of 2018 that same week.

My free email newsletter will resume next week. Join the five thousand other satisfied customers who’ve already signed up for occasional goodness.

And now, the links…

Longreads first, as always: Marc Randazza, a lawyer who represents or has represented several major neo-Nazi and white nationalist figures in lawsuits, has a very long history of legal misconduct, much of it dating from his time working for gay porn producers, but has only received a slap on the wrist from the Nevada Bar for his misdeeds, detailed in this lengthy Huffington Post piece.

Former U.S. Marine Lyle Jeremy Rubin writes in the Guardian about what he learned about America while serving in Afghanistan. “For me the empire is rooted in the barbarism it pretends to oppose.”
Amazon’s Marketplace is enormous and part of why the company controls half of the U.S. retail market, but The Verge reports on the byzantine process of suspensions and how sellers use it to attack rivals on the site.
The Athletic looks at the disastrous two-year reign of Mike Piazza in Reggio Emilia, where he bought a Serie C soccer club and ran it into the ground (subscription required).
Katie Prout writes about her brother’s longtime alcoholism and her own mental health struggles over at Longreads.
ProPublica investigates the banana republic that is Louisiana, where former legislators turn into lobbyists or take jobs in the executive branch and continue to wield outsized power to line their own pockets, often in ways that harm the populace.
A study published in the Journal of Science Communication found that scientists who engage in debates with deniers may do more harm than good (PDF link) to the causes they support, such as climate change or evolution, because such beliefs are immovable especially when founded in religious beliefs.
Natalie Wood’s final film, Brainstorm, deserves a better legacy than it’s received, according to Popular Mechanics. I’d never heard of the movie before this piece, and I am old enough to remember Wood’s death and thus the time this film hit theaters.
Shirley Wang’s piece on her late father’s surprising friendship with Charles Barkley went viral last week for good reason.
This unrolled Twitter thread highlights one investigative journalism piece from each of the 50 states this year, including an item in the Delaware News-Journal about courts banning people from entering the city of Wilmington for trivial infractions like loitering or panhandling.
An Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigation found that Bryan Kemp (guess) used a real warning of voting database vulnerability into a political attack against Stacey Abrams that may have tipped the Georgia gubernatorial election into his favor.
Detained migrants are being used as slave labor in private prisons funded by taxpayer dollars.
Texas is one of many states that has ignored the First Amendment and passed laws prohibiting state employees from supporting Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) efforts against Israel – similar to efforts used, perhaps with some success, against the apartheid regime in South Africa in the 1970s to early 1990s. A Palestinian-American speech pathologist in Texas lost her job for refusing to sign a pro-Israel oath, which, if I may say so, is utterly fucking terrifying: You should never have to sign an oath to hold a job in the United States. She’s suing, and I hope Texans realize they’ll foot the bill for this lawsuit with their taxes.
The University of Utah and local police were warned six times in ten days by Lauren McCluskey that her ex-boyfriend was threatening her, but they did nothing. He killed her on October 22nd.
Eater has an excerpt from the forthcoming book You and I Eat the Same on how just about all of us love fried chicken.
New York‘s Intelligencer has two great pieces on the awful state of online right now: how so much of what happens on the Internet is fake, and why Youtube star PewDiePie can make anti-Semitic/pro-Nazi jokes and still thrive. It’s all generally bad news for society in general, and for those of us who make our livings online in particular.
The Obama Administration tried to ban the pesticide chlorpyrifos, exposure to which leads to serious neuromuscular problems in humans and may lead to cancer over time, but former EPA head Scott Pruitt denied the application to ban it; the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in August that the EPA must ban all sales of the chemical within 60 days of its ruling. In the interim, however, millions of pounds of chlorpyrifos were dumped on U.S. crops, one of many examples of how the Trump Administration’s rollbacks of environmental regulations have harmed U.S. workers.
OUT looks at Ruth Coker Burks, who helped care for hundreds of gay men dying of AIDS in a piece from 2016.
The Cut points out that the attacks on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez derive from fear that women of color might start to wield real power, the kind only white men have had in our country’s history to date.
New Jersey Democrats tried to gerrymander the state to protect incumbents and thus the party’s control of the legislature, but pressure from their own supporters led them to drop the plan. It’s funny how that hasn’t happened in other states, like Wisconsin or Michigan, where Republicans have similarly tried anti-democratic efforts to retain power.
You’ve likely seen by now that Michael Cohen’s cell phone was in Prague around the time of a meeting with the Russians, yet more circumstantial evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Putin government – plus more hard evidence Cohen lied. But what I found most notable is who broke the story: McClatchy Washington Bureau, the DC arm of former Pirates owner Kevin McClatchy’s publishing empire.
An award-winning German reporter who garnered praise and hardware for his dispatches from Trump-voting areas of the United States fabricated nearly all of his stories.
The news that a federal judge in Texas ruled the ACA’s mandate unconstitutional, a ruling widely criticized by legal experts across the political spectrum, was symptomatic of a larger problem: Our federal judiciary has been packed with arch-conservative judges, and removing or replacing them will be difficult if not impossible.
An Australian woman whose 32-day-old infant died of pertussis has some things to say to anti-vaccine lunatics. Australia cracked down on vaccine denialists with its “No Jab, No Play” policy, ending all non-medical exemptions for schoolchildren; it’s high time the United States does the same.
Scientists may have discovered the brain circuit that causes seasonal depression in 20% of people, a discovery that also supports the use of light therapy as a treatment.
The Atlantic‘s Amanda Mull looks at the rising popularity of “anxiety baking,” although I tend to think of it as just “baking,” where the anxiety dictates how much I eat afterwards.
The Washington Post‘s media columnist Margaret Sullivan writes that news outlets need to stop booking Kellyanne Conway.
Sinclair Broadcast Group fired a reporter who was on sick leave with bone cancer, although the company disputes that version of events.
The cold season in Arizona has warmed by 3.5 degrees in 50 years due to climate change, one of many facts in this Arizona Republic wrapup that should disturb residents of the state. Phoenix experienced a 119-day dry spell this year, and in mid-July 97% of the state was experiencing “severe drought” conditions.
The New York Times investigates claims that Planned Parenthood has discriminated against pregnant employees. The headline likely overstates the case, since one issue is failing to offer benefits that the company says they can’t afford, but other aspects are definitely troubling.
Former Runaways bassist and sexual assault survivor Jackie Fuchs (f.k.a. Jackie Fox) recently had a five-day winning streak as a Jeopardy! contestant. She’s also a fan of heavy Eurogames.
Your 30-day trial with Black Patience has expired.
Deepwater Gaming announced the early 2019 release of Claim, a two-player trick-taking game that is already out in Europe.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: climate change, delaware, denialism, environment, fried chicken, georgia, italy, links, louisiana, mental health, new jersey, soccer, stick to baseball, texas, utah, vaccines

→ December 8, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/8/18.

I had five pieces for ESPN+ subscribers this week, on the Robinson Cano trade, the Paul Goldschmidt trade, Washington signing Pat Corbin, the Yan Gomes trade, and the Jean Segura trade. I did not hold a chat this week due to other demands on my time.

I have updated my annual posts of recommendations of cookbooks and gifts for the cooks in your life. My top board games of the year columns for Paste and Vulture should both go up next week; I’ll post my year-end music rankings here the week of the 17th.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New York Review of Books looks at the plight of undocumented farm workers in California, under the increased pressure to deport them going back more than ten years, even though these workers are the reason we have affordable (or, more accurate, artificially underpriced) food on our tables.
The Guardian ran an excerpt from a 2016 book called The Spy Who Couldn’t Spell, a fascinating story of a master sergeant in the Air Force who decided to try to sell thousands of pages of classified documents to the governments of Iraq and Libya.
GQ ran a long tribute to the late Anthony Bourdain.
The New York Times‘ Ross Douthat wrote a column lamenting the loss of our ruling class of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant men that would have been funny were it not so utterly ignorant; Splinter’s Libby Watson had the best excoriation of the column I saw.
As bad as the Times‘ regular editorial writers are, their investigative journalists continue to churn out good work, like the revelation that Trump employs illegal immigrants at his golf course in New Jersey, including the Guatemalan woman who made Trump’s bed.
Jane Coaston explains the Jeffrey Epstein case, and how he got away with serial rapes of underage girls, over at Vox.
Jennifer Rubin writes in the Washington Post that we’re now seeing the “Trump economy,” and it ain’t good. The President inherited a strong economy, and his advocacy of protectionist policies in particular is helping to weaken it.
There’s an actual voter fraud case going on in North Carolina right now, and the perpetrators are – in a shocking twist! – Republicans. The Washington Post has pieces on the operative with a criminal history at the heart of the scandal and on the old-fashioned investigative reporting that has helped uncover it.
Slate’s Jamelle Bouie looks at Republicans’ lame-duck power grabs in Wisconsin, Michigan, and North Carolina. The national party’s tacit support of these moves should tell you all you need to know about its moral rot.
Author David Neiwert posted a long Twitter thread on the history of the Aryan Nations and related white supremacist groups, in part a response to convicted felon Dinesh D’Souza’s regular claims that “liberals are the real Nazis.”
New York has a piece arguing that Uber’s business model is unsustainable and probably unfixable.
Adminstrators and faculty members at Temple University wanted tenured professor Marc Lamont Hill fired for his advocacy of statehood for Palestine, specifically for using the phrase “free Palestine from the river to the sea,” which some groups use as a code for the destruction of Israel.
The Philippines may be on the verge of a measles outbreak, the result of anti-vaxxer disinformation and conflict between the state and Islamist rebels in the archipelago.
Italy’s pseudoscience-spouting health minister sacked the board of the country’s main committee of scientists, who advised the government on health policy. Giulia Grillo has opposed mandatory vaccination laws and supports the “Five-Star Movement,” which also opposes those laws and has pushed quack ‘cures’ for cancer.
The Weekly Standard‘s David Shabtai argues that vaccine denialists are hurting efforts to protect ‘religious freedom’ by using it as a backdoor way to avoid mandatory vaccinations. There’s a simple solution to this: Ban all nonmedical exemptions to childhood vaccination requirements.
The simplest way individuals can fight climate change is to stop wasting so much food. Food waste is the #1 contributor to landfills, and landfills contribute 14% of U.S. methane emissions. (Methane is a far more potent contributor to climate change than carbon dioxide.)
Climate scientist Michael Mann pre-empted an attempt by a coal industry front group to obtain his emails from the six years he spent at the University of Virginia by releasing them all himself.
New Jersey taxpayers paid $18 million to build a beautiful minor-league ballpark in Camden that was supposed to host an independent league team, which folded a few years later after they couldn’t agree to a new lease. Now taxpayers will spend another $1 million to tear the stadium down.
Parker Molloy explains in the New York Times why Twitter’s ban on deadnaming trans people will promote free speech rather than hindering it.
Utah Representative Chris Stewart (guess) defended the state-sponsored murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by saying “journalists disappear all the time,” which is a hell of a way to encourage people and governments to kill or just ‘disappear’ reporters who are bothering them.
This won’t make anyone mad: A Yale psychiatry professor says Trump supporters exhibit emotional patterns most children outgrow by age five, notably the “might makes right” mentality, which I’d argue also defines most of U.S. foreign policy of the last hundred years. There’s actually a lot more in this piece about how demagogues like Trump manipulate their bases to attain and hold on to power.
A man thought he would put one over on advice columnist Amy Dickinson and the #MeToo movement in general, but he forgot that Dickinson would get the final say, and she drags him appropriately.
The Good Place‘s Jameela Jamil wrote an op ed for the BBC arguing that airbrushing in adverts should be illegal.
The Cut’s “I Think About This a Lot” series is back with a piece by Karen Geier on the parody account PrinceTweets2U’s epic response to Time Warner Cable.
Board game news: Dire Wolf announced the fall 2019 release of Clank! Legacy Acquisitions Incorporated, a joint development with Renegade (publishers of Clank!) and Penny Arcade.
CMON announced a seven-day Kickstarter for a digital adaptation of their game Blood Rage, and it has funded at 1000% already through day five.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board games, climate change, food waste, free speech, links, north carolina, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

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