harvard

→ February 24, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/24/24.

My entire prospect rankings for 2024 are now up for subscribers to The Athletic, including:

I held a Klawchat earlier this week to take questions on the lists and more.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Apiary, the latest game from publisher Stonemaier Games (Wingspan, Scythe, Tapestry); The Search for Lost Species, a deduction game and sequel to my #1 game of 2020, The Search for Planet X; and The White Castle, my #1 game of 2023, designed by the folks behind The Red Cathedral.

I also sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter last week, about how we had to put our cat, Hexie, down when a blood clot traveled to his descending aorta and paralyzed his hind quarters. It’s been tough.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Religious zealot and billionaire Tim Dunn is behind the Texas GOP’s hard shift to the right as he tries to remake the state into a Christian theocracy. Imagine if a Muslim billionaire used his money in a similar way. It’s certainly not about following the teachings of Jesus – as does this Catholic charity in El Paso, which is now facing closure at the hands of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
I’ll also just mention here that religious ‘nones’ are now the largest single group in the U.S. The term refers to anyone who does not identify themselves as affiliated with a church or religion, including atheists, agnostics, ‘spiritual but not religious’ people, deists, and others.
The New York Times had an excellent story on the athletes recruited to The New School in Florida, as the state pours money into the once-liberal institution to try to turn it into a southern version of Hillsdale College. The kids are going to be all right, despite the adults’ best efforts.
Gary, Indiana, has an ongoing lawsuit against gun manufacturers over their tacit allowance of illegal gun sales. The Indiana Republican Party is trying to pass a bill that would invalidate the suit and protect gun manufacturers from liability.
A former minister in the Christian cult The Truth admitted to molesting a young boy through his role in the ‘church,’ part of a decades-long pattern of abuse and cover-ups in the home-based movement, also known as Two by Twos.
A doctor who went to Gaza to help victims of Israel’s ongoing assault wrote in the LA Times that what he saw “wasn’t war – it was annihilation.”
In the face of growing hate towards Palestinians, some chefs and restaurant owners who come from or trace their ancestry to Palestine are choosing to emphasize their identity
The 76ers’ proposed downtown arena is likely to cost the city millions in lost tax revenue while also risking Philly’s vibrant Chinatown neighborhood. Let the owners pay for it themselves.
There’s a huge measles outbreak in Florida thanks to parents rejecting universal medical advice and skipping the MMR vaccine. Florida’s Surgeon General is telling parents they can still send their unvaccinated kids to school. Measles is the most contagious virus that infects humans, and it can kill children and adults, either during the infection itself or up to a decade later due to an incurable neurological condition called SSPE. This is abject insanity. The MMR vaccine is safe, effective, and led to the (temporary) eradication of measles from the Americas, until Andrew Wakefield and the fucking idiots who follow him brought it back.
KFF Health News looks at how these fringe anti-science views became so dominant in American politics, and what it might mean this November.
Meanwhile, vaccine denialists are everywhere, downplaying the severity of measles. I see it every day on the disinformation hellhole of Twitter. Measles kills, maims, deafens, and more. It can lead to weeks of hospitalizations. I would love to see health insurers insist on vaccinations for coverage, because why should my premiums go up just because someone else was too dumb or misinformed to make the right choice?
West Virginia Republicans saw this outbreak and decided to exempt private schools from the state’s strict vaccination requirements, because I guess having the nation’s highest death rate from opioids wasn’t good enough!
Timor-Leste (formerly known as East Timor) is battling simultaneous outbreaks of three mosquito-borne diseases: Zike, dengue, and chikungunya. We need more releases of genetically modified mosquitoes and mosquitoes infected with Wolbachia bacteria to reduce their numbers before these diseases spread further.
Tim Burke, formerly of Deadspin, was indicted in Florida for allegedly hacking Fox News video streams of Kanye West and Tucker Carlson … that Burke says were unprotected by passwords or other encryption. This is a freedom of the press issue. You could contact your Representative or Senator, especially if any serve on their respective Judiciary Committees, as I’ve done. An attack on any journalist is an attack on all of us.
A Texas attorney poisoned his pregnant then-wife with abortion pills, which didn’t cause the pregnancy to terminate but caused enough damage to the fetus that their daughter has developmental delays. He was sentenced to merely 180 days in jail, because abortion bans are not about saving babies (or fetuses), but about subjugating and controlling women.
Abortion rights are a consistent, winning issue for Democrats, writes Ilyse Hogue in the New Republic, and the party needs to lean into that more.
We got an answer, belatedly, on the Hugo Awards’ exclusion of certain works, notably those by Chinese or Chinese-American authors, and it was craven submission to Chinese government involvement. Dave McCarty, a sci-fi fan who was head of the Hugo Committee for 2023, and others resigned and/or were censured. One of the winners, Adrian Tchaikovsky, has already said he will no longer cite or list the award among his honors.
This satirical column from The Crimson mocks national reporters’ obsession with campus life at Harvard.
Posts from the transphobic ‘activist’ LibsOfTikTok led to at least 21 bomb threats against schools, libraries, small businesses, and more. Twitter has done nothing to shut Chaya Raichik down, despite the real-world consequences to her actions.
Pamela Paul wrote an anti-trans editorial in The New York Times. It was riddled with inaccuracies.
The co-founder of the anti-LGBTQ, book-banning advocacy group Moms for Liberty engaged in threesomes with her husband and another woman. Bridget Ziegler is on the school board in Sarasota County, Florida, and her husband Christian (heh) was the former head of the Florida Republican Party. MfL’s influence appears to be waning as more people catch on to their radical agenda.
Seattle cops raided several LGBTQ+ bars in the city, taking photos of patrons, citing regulations banning “lewd conduct.” Owners and patrons fought back, and the state’s liquor board, which oversees such businesses, agreed to knock it off and end this collaboration with the police.
New York’s Nassau County issued an order banning teams with trans athletes from using public fields or arenas, yet another pointless, cruel rule pandering to bigots, a solution in search of a problem.
Republicans smeared Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) over comments she made – but they used a bogus translation to do so.
An old indie blog called The Hairpin that closed in 2018 has come back to life as a zombie clickbait farm.
A mother of four was shot and killed while driving to work in Philadelphia in November, and her family says the police aren’t doing enough to try to solve the case.
There’s a Kickstarter open for Conservas, a new solo bag-building game from designer Scott Almes (Tiny Epic Galaxes, Beer & Bread).

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, board game news, florida, guns, harvard, hugo awards, indiana, lgbt rights, links, longreads, new york, philadelphia, religion, seattle, social media, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines, west virginia

→ January 6, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/6/24.

I took a few weeks off from these posts around the holidays, but I did write one piece for subscribers to The Athletic over the break, looking at the Chris Sale trade and Lucas Giolito signing.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the games Daybreak, a cooperative game about fighting climate change; and Wandering Towers, the best new family game of last year. Both games were on my ranking of the ten best new board games of 2023.

My free email newsletter will return today (most likely). Several of you have pledged to support me if the newsletter were to go paid; I have no immediate plans to do so, but if that happens 1) I’ll give everyone a ton of notice and 2) I’ll move it off Substack.

And now, the links…

Writer Tom Scocca’s piece in New York about his sudden, unsolved medical mystery is the best thing you’ll read all week. It’s well-written, of course, and combines the deeply personal with an inherent attack on our broken health-care system.

President Biden won’t just be facing Donald Trump or another GOP opponent in the 2024 election – he’ll be opposed by the News Corp misinformation machine, too. (Related: The Washington Post’s Philip Bump wrote of how journalism needs to defend itself in the face of bad-faith actors. He might start with his own paper’s opinion section.)

The New Yorker looks at board games with serious themes, profiling Amabel Holland, a trans woman who co-owns the publisher Hollandspiele and designed the Iron Rails series of games.

Parenting is hard. It’s been harder thanks to the pandemic. That and other factors have led to the rise of the “accidentally permissive” parent, especially in my age cohort.

Stuart Thompson of the New York Times looks at how anti-vaxx ghouls latched on to the death of a 24-year-old man, who showed no symptoms of myocarditis after his COVID-19 vaccination but whose parents think the vaccine gave him myocarditis anyway. George Watts, Jr., had an enlarged spleen – over six times the normal size for that organ – which is a sign of long-term heart failure, chronic inflammation in his brain, and signs of late-stage pneumonia in his lungs.

mRNA vaccines do not cause cancer, and there is no such thing as “turbo cancer.”

Measles is on the rise around the world thanks to vaccine denialists and misinformation peddlers like RFK, Jr.

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D) has introduced two bills to block military aid to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates due to both nations’ atrocious human rights records. Omar is Muslim, and Islam is the official religion of both nations. Just imagine a similar scenario with Judaism or Christianity instead of Islam.

Meanwhile, Israel has censored its press on eight topics relating to the war on Gaza.

On the coordinated attacks against now former Harvard President Claudine Gay: It was never about plagiarism, but about DEI (from Don Moynihan); American Jews’ moral panic over Gay’s and two other college Presidents’ answers to Congress is misplaced (from The Forward); and Gay’s own editorial in the New York Times on what happened, which I thought was far too reticent.

Why do pundits like Jonathan Chait and Nate Silver say outrageous things? Because it’s effective, at least when you consider that attention is their goal.

The science is clear: Masks work to reduce the spread of COVID-19 and similar viruses, no matter what the misinformation merchants tell you.

The Guardian looks at the unfunny punching-down comedy specials from Dave Chapelle and Ricky Gervais. Chapelle was so groundbreaking at his peak that it’s sad to see him pitching with an 80 mph fastball now.

A list of all 673 books removed from classrooms in Orange County, Florida. I don’t know how anyone with the means to move could still live there. Even if you send your kids to a quality alternative school, your tax dollars are supporting this anti-education.

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) declined federal food aid to provide lunch to schoolchildren over the summer, making a specious argument about obesity. This is free money for the state, and they would rather turn it down than feed poor children in Iowa.

NYC Mayor Eric Adams (D) has drained the city payroll of over $24 million to pay for 293 “special assistants,” many of them major donors to his campaign.

Adams (still D) also tried to kill a bill that requires police to report when they stop anyone on the street to ask for identification, promising to restore budget cuts to other programs if council members voted against it. The bill passed anyway.

Overtime pay for NYPD officers working the city’s subway stations went from $4 million to $155 million between 2022 and 2023, reducing “major crimes” by 2% but primarily leading to more arrests and fines for fare-jumping. That’s a lot of money to fight a handful of skipped $2.90 charges.

New York bookstore Bluestockings is facing eviction for providing Narcan to save people who have overdosed on opioids.

Amanda Todd was 15 when she killed herself in 2012 after three years of cyberstalking by a Dutch man who blackmailed her with threats to send nude images of her to her friends and family. He was sentenced to 13 years by a Canadian court, but a Dutch court cut the sentence in half to match that country’s legal standards.

The Las Vegas Business Journal announced a new editorial policy that it will not publish economic impact estimates for stadium projects and other events unless they can see the methodology and criteria used to reach those estimates (which, in my view, are usually bullshit).

Francis Howell School District in St. Charles, Missouri, has seen white conservatives take over its school board; the board recently backed off a plan to eliminate all Black History and Black Literature courses after massive opposition, including from the NAACP. The same white conservatives are trying to ban trans students from using the appropriate bathrooms. School board elections matter, folks.

Speaking of Missourah, a St. Louis cop crashed his car into an LGBT bar, Bar:PM, and then cuffed one of the owners, who was later charged with a felony. The police didn’t do a toxicology test on their colleague, and now they’re trying to hush up any investigation and refusing to release body cam footage to the public.

Shoegaze had its moment in the early 1990s as a subgenre of alternative music, mostly heard from British acts like My Bloody Valentine, Ride, and Slowdive. It’s had a huge comeback thanks to TikTok.

The data from Insomniac Games released by hackers shows that big-game video game development is not sustainable, per Nathan Grayson of Aftermath, a great new site covering video and tabletop gaming.

I own a fantastic sweater and very warm hat from Quince, specialists in inexpensive cashmere clothing items. It turns out that cheap cashmere has a stark environmental cost.

The seams on a baseball have a higher-than-expected effect on the trajectory of the ball in flight.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, board games, Economics, environment, florida, harvard, iowa, journalism, links, longreads, misinformation, missouri, Music, new york, new york city, parenting, police, science, shoegaze, stick to baseball, vaccines, video games

→ December 16, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/16/23.

We’re getting busy over on the hot stove front, and this week I wrote about the Shohei Ohtani signing, the Lee Jung-hoo signing (plus two Royals signings and the Yanks-Dodgers trade), the impact of the injuries to Ronny Mauricio and Endy Rodríguez, and the Tyler Glasnow trade for subscribers to the Athletic.

At Paste, I ranked the ten best new boardgames of 2023. It was a hard list to make, with probably 20 games I played this year that I liked enough to include, and at least five more I know that I would probably like enough but haven’t played yet. To give you a little more context, a game like Emerge, which I mentioned in my PAX Unplugged writeup, is absolutely fine and I think a lot of casual players would enjoy it. It didn’t stand a chance of getting on this list.

My free email newsletter is alive and well, and more than a hundred new subscribers have joined the list in the last three weeks since I switched platforms, so thank you and welcome. I’m hoping to keep this up as a weekly endeavor again.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New York Times had two outstanding longreads this week. The first is by graphic designer Giorgia Lupi, who has been struggling with long COVID for three years and describes the disorder in prose and graphics that make it one of the most remarkable pieces I’ve read all year. As a companion, you might read Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist/author Ed Yong on how covering long COVID has made him a better writer.
The second is also an interactive story, about a 1973 expedition to the summit of Aconcagua that left two Americans dead on the mountain while six others returned, with the truth about how the two died still mired in uncertainty. The story resurfaced literally this year as climate change led to the withdrawal of a glacier that exposed one of the dead climber’s cameras.
The testimony of three university presidents to Congress a few weeks ago that led to the ouster of Penn’s Liz Magill and calls for Harvard’s Claudine Gay to resign has devolved into claims that Ms. Gay “plagiarized” parts of her dissertation. The Harvard Crimson looks at these claims, line by line, and contacts the authors whose work Ms. Gay allegedly stole. (Spoiler alert: This is a bad-faith argument by right-wing trolls.)
ProPublica looked at one gun store in Indiana that does little to nothing to avoid contributing to the illegal gun trade, and how it impacts communities in Chicago and beyond.
The Intercept obtained a document showing India’s Hindu nationalist government was specifically targeting Sikh separatists in the west, including Hardeep Singh Nijjar, whom the Canadian government says was murdered by Indian intelligence agents in June.
Those stories you saw a year or so ago about the ten-figure toll of organized shoplifting gangs? It was all a lie, cooked up by the retail industry’s lobbyists.
Ben Collins, who spent several years on what he called the “dystopia beat” of online hate and disinformation, writes about how the farce of cable news has reached the end of its lifespan, as younger audiences aren’t falling for the fake debates and dichotomies required by CNN, Fox, and their ilk.
Cameron County, Texas, located at the state’s southernmost tip, is prosecuting an 11-year-old boy who was arrested and put into solitary confinement for reporting his principal for bullying. Principal Marta Garza has a history of retaliating against any parents or children who cross her, including calling CPS after one district grandparent challenged the goals set for her 5-year-old grandchild.
The lie of abortion bans was made very clear with this past week’s ruling in Texas against Kate Cox, a pregnant woman whose fetus was nonviable but was denied an abortion under the state’s bogus “to save the mother’s life” exception.
The Washington Post is laying off experienced journalists – but expanding its increasingly reactionary editorial board, which led to a one-day strike on December 7^th.
Meanwhile, former Post reporter Felicia Sonmez’s lawsuit against the paper reached the DC Appeals Court, where the judges will have to determine whether its editors’ decision to take Sonmez, a sexual assault survivor, off coverage of #MeToo and related stories was discrimination or was a step to maintain objectivity.
First-time author Cait Corrain had her book canceled by its publisher after it came out that she’d review-bombed numerous other authors on Goodreads with various sock-puppet accounts.
A pastor in the United Church of the Kingdom of God was caught on film trying to rid a 16-year-old of “evil spirits,” while another former parishioner said the church tried to convince him to use prayer to become heterosexual when he was 13.
Missouri Rep. Sarah Unsicker (D) has dropped out of the race for the state’s attorney general post after some bizarre behavior, including having a “basil lemonade” with right-wing troll Chuck Johnson and claims that at least one of her opponents is actually an agent of the Israeli government.
Vivek Ramaswamy has now become the new(est) face of the racist, xenophobic Great Replacement Theory.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, coronavirus, harvard, india, links, longreads, Media, missouri, stick to baseball, texas

→ April 29, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/29/23.

I’m writing this from the press box at Alex Bos Stadium in Baton Rouge, so I’ll have something up on Dylan Crews and Paul Skenes on either Sunday or Monday, depending on whether I bounce to another game on Saturday with rain scheduled here. I’ve had two posts up in the last two weeks for subscribers to The Athletic, one a Q&A with our own Nick Groke about Brewers prospects, and a draft blog post covering some Virginia and California prep prospects plus general thoughts on the top 15 or so names in the class.

On my podcast this week, I spoke with Elizabeth McCracken, author of 2022’s The Hero of this Book and 2018’s Bowlaway, about the former of those two books, the craft of writing, and being short. The week prior, I spoke with David Grann about his new book The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder, whichI enjoyed so much I bought a copy for my dad for his birthday last month. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links:

Longreads first: This story on The Cut about how a woman coped with her husband getting a dementia diagnosis and then serving her with divorce papers as the disorder took hold is just devastating, especially when the twist in the story hits.

An Iowa middle school history teacher explained how the state’s ban on teaching about racism drove him out of the profession, especially when his boss wouldn’t say he could teach that slavery was wrong. Tennessee just passed a similar bill.

Parents across the political and income spectra are pushing back on school literacy curricula that aren’t doing enough to teach kids to read.

The New York Times magazine interviewed Deep Work author Cal Newport on the paradox of productivity in the digital era, where we have so many tools that are supposed to make us more productive, but we’re not.

The head of a law firm with frequent cases before the Supreme Court bought a property owned by SCOTUS justice Neil Gorusch, who didn’t identify the purchaser on disclosure forms.

Now Missouri and other states are banning or restricting gender-affirming care for trans adults. It was never about protecting kids.

In one of the more blatant First Amendment violations I can recall, Texas’s Senate passed a bill that would require teachers to display the Ten Commandments in their classrooms. It’s a waste of time and taxpayer, and ignores the clear intent and words of the Founding Fathers.

Conservatives are now targeting no-fault divorce in their attempts to force their religion’s values on the rest of us.

Iowa Republicans aren’t done – they held a pre-dawn session, always a great sign that you’re not doing anything sketchy, to pass a bill allowing for expanded child labor.

A non-binary high school student at Nashville Christian School wanted to wear a suit to their prom, rather than a dress, but the school banned them on dress code grounds. A local business stepped in to hold a prom just for them. Support AB Hillsboro Village if you live in that area.

West Texas A&M University faculty scheduled a no-confidence vote in school President Walter Wendler, who banned a student drag show because it conflicted with his personal religious views. The no-confidence vote passed with over 2/3 of the voters supporting it. Wendler is refusing to step down despite the non-binding result. The school faces a lawsuit over the cancellation, and a financial penalty would probably do more to get Wendler out of office than any resolution could.

Roadside drug tests aren’t accurate, yet courts have been using them regularly to convict drivers of drug-related offenses. That’s starting to change, slowly.

I certainly share enough negative news about my alma mater so I’ll share a positive story – Harvard raised the income threshold below which undergraduate students pay no tuition to $85,000.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: education, first amendment, harvard, iowa, links, longreads, missouri, police, stick to baseball, tennessee, texas, trans rights

→ February 4, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/4/23.

My top 100 prospects ranking ran on Monday for subscribers to The Athletic, followed by the players who just missed the list, and then my ranking of all 30 farm systems. I held a Q&A on Monday, which the site excerpted for a separate article. I also held an old-fashioned Klawchat here on Friday. The team-by-team top 20s will start to run on Monday.

On The Keith Law Show, I spoke with Steve Ives, writer and director of the upcoming documentary Ruthless: Monopoly’s Secret History, which will run on PBS’s American Experience and stream online on February 20^th. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I’ve been keeping up better with my free email newsletter recently, and I’ll get back to it again this upcoming week once I get through the last nine team reports.

And now, the links…

The Atavist has the story of a family caught up in the world of YouTube influencers, including one star’s mother accused of inappropriate behavior against a number of her daughter’s co-stars.

Mother Jones looks at the troll site Kiwi Farms, and how driving it offline hasn’t worked to stop its users’ campaigns of doxing and harassment.

The new emerging microbe threat around the world? Infectious fungi taking advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic by exploiting people with damaged immune systems.

Cory Doctorow examines what he calls the “enshittification” of TikTok and other sites that built up massive user bases on one premise and then switched to another model to make some money – a digital bait and switch of sorts.

The New Yorker looks at NY Times opinion columnist Pamela Paul, whose columns seem designed to push buttons and have often engaged in TERF-like arguments.

Chuck D spoke to Rolling Stone about the new documentary series Fight the Power: How Hip Hop Changed the World, available now via PBS.

Even a mild case of COVID-19 leads to a massive increase in heart disease risk.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) announced a plan to block all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs at state colleges.

Dan Rather wrote about DeSantis’ platform of white grievance.

Florida teachers are removing all books from their classroom for fear of prosecution by the white police state. Here’s more on the policy behind this.

Meanwhile, the craven College Board, whose entire business model is built around making it more expensive for students to go to college, bowed to pressure from DeSantis and eviscerated its A.P. African American Studies curriculum.

Republicans continue to push anti-abortion laws, proposing 105 bills and counting just this year alone, even subverting democratic norms to do so. They’re also forum-shopping to try to ban the abortion pill.

Abortion bans often include exceptions for rape or incest. They’re mostly meaningless, there to make people feel better about discriminatory laws against providing medical care.

Utah passed a law banning transition health care for trans kids.

Arizona’s legislature passed a law allowing lawmakers to delete all emails after 90 days, which isn’t suspicious at all.

Some businesses are warning Missouri lawmakers their culture war is going to harm the state’s economy.

An off-duty cop in Providence, RI, shot an unarmed kid, and a jury acquitted him of all charges.

Georgia cops killed a protestor fighting the construction of a massive training facility in the woods around Atlanta. They’re claiming he shot first. I do not take the word of police as truth.

Texas election deniers raised funds to build a mobile hospital in Ukraine. They failed, and it’s not clear where the donated money went.

Harvard Prof. John Comaroff has been accused of sexual harassment by multiple women, leading to a mass walkout of his first class back from suspension last week.

Tom Verlaine, founder of the essential American art-punk band Television, died last week at age 73.

Many consumers say that tipping is getting out of control. This isn’t a yes/no question, really; I think you can say tipping for some services is obligatory, and for others is unnecessary.

Noted free speech absolutist Elon Musk took down a video critical of India’s hypernationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the government’s request.

The FBI infiltrated a major ransomware group called Hive, gaining the group’s decryption keys to allow victims to recover their locked files.

Rolling Stone’s EJ Dickson asks, “Can we please just let the M&M’s fuck?”

The Guardian looks at Daybreak, the upcoming cooperative board game about climate change co-designed by Matt Leacock (Pandemic, Forbidden Island).

The role-playing game based on the Hugo-winning novel The Fifth Season is now on Backerkit.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, arizona, board game news, coronavirus, georgia, harvard, links, longreads, missouri, police, science, social media, stick to baseball, texas, trans rights, utah

→ August 29, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/29/20.

I had one column this week for subscribers to The Athletic, with scouting notes on Triston McKenzie, Sixto Sanchez, Wil Crowe, and Joey Bart. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

For Paste this week, I reviewed Succulent, a solid new game of tile-laying and set collection, and would have given it an even higher grade had I not had issues with some of the art and graphics.

My guest on this week’s episode of The Keith Law Show was Orioles reliever Dillon Tate, talking about youth baseball and overcoming the obstacles he faced on his path to the majors. You can also subscribe on iTunes – and if you do, please leave a rating and review.

You can still get my book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, where fine books are sold, like on bookshop.org. I’m also planning to send out another edition of my free email newsletter this weekend.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Guardian looks at the case of one Nigerian woman who fought back against the sex traffickers who enslaved her in Italy, and how difficult it is for authorities to prosecute such cases.
Harvard magazine has an excerpt from Prof. Daniel Lieberman’s new book Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding, looking at how exercise might help reduce the odds of age-related maladies from senescence to diabetes to Alzheimer’s, even cutting your chances of dying relative to others your age. One key message is that no matter how old you are it isn’t too late to gain these benefits from regular exercise.
Blockchain is “an amazing solution for almost nothing,” a widely-lauded technology that combines horrendous energy inefficiency with a lack of apparent benefits to end users.
The CTC Sentinel, published by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, has a long explanation of QAnon as an emerging domestic terror threat. I have recently tried to explain the QAnon conspiracy theory to two different people who are not extremely online, and even trying to say it out loud makes me feel crazy. It’s like Scientology and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion had some sort of demon offspring. Anyway, this paper argues that “QAnon has contributed to the radicalization of ideologically motivated violent extremists,” which should make you a lot more nervous than the imagined threat of ISIS or similar terrorist groups infiltrating the United States.
If someone tries to argue with you that masks don’t work, here are 70 studies showing that they do.
A new case report published in the Lancet describes an 11-year-old girl who died one day after admission to the hospital of COVID-19-related cardiac failure. The condition is called multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS), and while rare, it is killing a very small number of children who contract COVID-19.
Several people who survived COVID-19 infections but continue to feel aftereffects are connecting online to try to gather data on and study their conditions so they can provide more information to others suffering the same problems.
There’s a surge in COVID-19 cases in Paris, so the French Prime Minister has mandated masks and stepped up testing. This is what a competent leader and evidence-based policymaking look like, in case you’d forgotten and were thinking about staying home on November 3^rd.
“Gullible” White House negotiators overpaid by up to $500 million for ventilators from the Dutch conglomerate Royal Philips N.V., paying about four times what the Obama Administration had contracted to pay. I thought that Trump was supposed to get the best deals.
Harvard Professor of Anthropology Gary Urton was effectively forced into retirement after multiple students accused him of sexual harassment.
A Florida couple who believed that COVID-19 was some sort of hoax ignored advice to observe distancing guidelines and wear masks. They caught the virus; both ended up in the ICU, and one of them died of complications from the disease. The lesson here isn’t that they’re stupid, but that they fell victim to all of the misinformation spread online by hoaxers, trolls, and by people speaking at this week’s RNC.
Speaking of the RNC, Madison Cawthorn, a Republican candidate for the state house in North Carolina, has a long history of fabrications and multiple accusations of sexual assault. He was lauded on Twitter by right-wing blue checkmarks as the future of the GOP.
The FDA ruled that all distilled spirits are gluten-free, because science.
Hardly surprising, but this New York Times piece finds evidence of discrimination against Black homeowners in the home appraisal process.
A Washington Post editorial asks where the sympathy is for Megan Thee Stallion after the rapper was shot by another rapper, Tory Lanez, pointing out that if a black man had shot a white woman the outrage would probably be much louder.
A new study from Ohio State researchers says that the Greenland ice shelf will melt due to climate change regardless of what we do to try to stop the warming trend.
Another book excerpt, this time from Reverend William Barber’s Winning the Green New Deal: Why We Must, How We Can, on the history and roots of environmental racism.
Why 2020 will be the death of the working mother.
Board game news: I have seen the game Maracaibo at PAX Unplugged but never played it, given its weight and time required, which meant it wasn’t going to get much play in my house. I’m thrilled to see it’s coming to digital next year.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, climate change, coronavirus, harvard, italy, links, longreads, racism, stick to baseball, the swamp

→ May 2, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/2/20.

I was busy this week promoting The Inside Game, my new book, now available from bookshop.org and other fine retail outlets. As of Thursday, Midtown Scholar in Harrisburg had signed copies for sale. I’m especially thrilled to see how positive the reviews have been, from a starred review in Publishers Weekly to this glowing writeup in the Maine Edge. Library Journal also “highly recommended” the book, although the review is only for subscribers.

WIRED has an excerpt from The Inside Game on its site, a portion of the chapter on anchoring bias that discusses a major reason why the automated strike zone would be an improvement over human umps.

I appeared on several great podcasts this week, including:

Jeremy Schaap’s The Sporting Life: ESPN Podcenter, Apple, Spotify, Stitcher
Inquiring Minds: Apple; Stitcher
Wharton Moneyball: Apple, Spotify, Stitcher
Sox Machine: Apple, Spotify, Stitcher
KPCC Airtalk: Apple, Spotify, Stitcher (around the 93:00 mark)

On my own podcast this week, I had board game designer & Blue Jays fan Daryl Andrews (Sagrada, Bosk), talking about his latest games, designing & playing during self-isolation, and his Toronto fandom. You can subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or Stitcher.

I was interviewed by my friend Tim Grierson for MEL Magazine, talking about my new book and life in self-isolation.

Also, my first book, Smart Baseball, is now available in Korean. If you’re in South Korea, you can pick it up here on Kyobo.

I reviewed the game Half Truth, a fun party/trivia game designed by Ken Jennings and Richard Garfield, for Paste this week, and reviewed the digital adaptation of the great dice-drafting game Sagrada for Ars Technica.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Can we just give Ed Yong a Pulitzer Prize for his essay in the Atlantic called “Why the Coronavirus is So Confusing?” It is clear, coherent, comprehensive, and serious without being alarmist. It makes clear the role disinformation is playing in the pandemic, lays appropriate blame for the U.S.’s poor and late response, and discusses the structural problems that made a pandemic of some sort inevitable. It’s the best piece I’ve read this year.
CNN has the story of the man who spent 46 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, the longest such wrongful sentence in U.S. history.
Gabrielle Hamilton, chef-owner of Prune and author of Blood, Bones, and Butter, wrote a poignant, self-searching editorial in the New York Times asking if her restaurant really is “essential” and whether she’ll have the energy or the funds to reopen.
Writing for SB Nation, Shakeia Taylor looks at the curious life of Effa Manley, Negro Leagues owner and Baseball Hall of Famer, and, according to multiple sources, a white woman who passed herself off as black when it was convenient to do so.
Why does Belgium have such a high COVID-19 fatality rate? One major reason is that they’re being more honest in reporting such deaths.
It’s “doubtful” that COVID-19 was accidentally released from a Wuhan lab, but that won’t stop conspiracy-mongers and xenophobes from spreading a probable lie.
Those two Bakersfield ER docs you might have seen on Youtube calling for states to reopen their economies? They’re quacks, pushing a bogus epidemiology, which I presume is for attention.
Progressive women politicians are being offered “a poisoned chalice” when it comes to Joe Biden, who faces a serious allegation from Tara Reade that he sexually assaulted her in the 1990s. Meanwhile, Biden, obviously taking this very seriously, appointed notorious partier Chris Dodd, himself involved in sexual assault allegations (with Ted Kennedy) in the 1980s, to serve on his VP selection committee.
Tennessee restaurants re-opened as the state saw its biggest one-day jump in COVID-19 cases. The states that were the slowest to shut down or refused to do so will compete with the states that rushed to re-open for the worst spikes in COVID-19 cases, and I expect they’ll ask the federal government to bail out their incompetence, too.
Iowa is one of those states that never closed, but governor Kim Reynolds (R) is already loosening restrictions, even though COVID-19 cases there are surging.
Cosplayers stormed the Michigan Capitol this week, armed with small-penis symbols, and some called for the Governor’s murder, to which state Republicans have said … nothing.
The shutdown is changing how people buy books, and has given a huge boost to the startup bookshop.org, which I have begun using for all affiliate links to books on this site.
Tim Grierson also interviewed the director of A Secret Love, a wonderful new Netflix documentary about two women, one a former AAGPL star, who were a couple for nearly 70 years but hid their relationship even from close family until the very end.
Why did billionaire Monty Bennett get $96 million in Payroll Protection Program loans that his company, Ashford Inc., does not appear to plan to pay employees? It’s a bit of a shell game, as Ashford merely “advises” two hotel companies Bennett owns.
Why did my undergraduate alma mater maintain such close ties with Jeffrey Epstein even after his conviction for sex crimes against a minor?
Betsy Levy Paluck writes in the Washington Post about how she gave birth by herself during this pandemic, but she never felt alone.
No board game news this week, but I know of two interesting Kickstarters coming on Tuesday and will tweet about them when they launch.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, bookstores, coronavirus, harvard, iowa, links, longreads, metoo, michigan, restaurants, stick to baseball, tennessee

→ March 28, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/28/20.

One new article this week for subscribers to The Athletic, looking at what the agreement between MLB and the players’ union might mean for this year’s draft. It’s not very good for the draft prospects themselves, unfortunately. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday and a Periscope (where my voice gave out!) on Tuesday.

On the gaming front, I had four new pieces this week. For Paste, I reviewed ClipCut Parks, a new “flip-and-cut” game that is great for younger kids who love using scissors but not much of a game for older players. For Vulture, I updated my ranking of the top 25 board game apps available on mobile platforms. For Ars Technica, I reviewed the new app version of the legacy game Charterstone.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, is due out on April 21^st from Harper Collins, and you can pre-order it now via their site or wherever fine books are sold. Also, check out my free email newsletter, which I say I’ll write more often than I actually write it.

And now, the links…

Matt Leacock, the game designer behind Pandemic, wrote an op ed for the New York Times about how no one can win this real-life pandemic ‘game’ by themselves.
Who funds the Federalist? It would be nice to know that, after the extremist site ran a column from an unlicensed dermatologist calling for people to hold ‘coronavirus parties,’ as VICE’s Laura Wagner writes. Twitter briefly locked the site’s account for posting the link.
The preacher who leads Bible study for members of Trump’s Cabinet claims that coronavirus is God’s wrath on people for allowing homosexuality and environmentalism to exist. His fans in government include Vice-President Mike Pence and Senator Joni Ernst. I wonder how much of our tax dollars go to enabling this hatemongering.
Delusional politicians and right-wing media members are making scientists developing statistical models of coronavirus’s spread harder by implying or outright claiming such models are hoaxes.
The Trump Administration has been citing a retracted paper to defend its early opposition to expanding COVID-19 testing, a policy that will likely lead to tens of thousands of needless deaths. Meanwhile, their plan involves blaming China for a ‘cover-up’ that never happened rather than coming up with a viable plan for slowing the pandemic.
Surgeons are increasingly reluctant to perform operations in this environment, due to equipment shortages, fear of infection from asymptomatic patients, and the possibility that doctors might be at higher risk for the most serious form of the disease.
“Mothers are held responsible for every detail — large and small — of their children’s well-being.” Jess Grose explains how coronavirus has exposed the ‘great lie’ of modern motherhood.
The owner of a Philadelphia hospital – who shuttered the facility last year – demanded $6 million in rent for the city to use it for six months to house COVID-19 patients.
Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey (guess) voiced opposition to the $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus bill because sending the unemployed or underemployed money “creates incentives not to work.” Toomey is repeating a popular conservative myth, probably because it sells.
Longreads: The Ford Motor Company purchased the Michigan Central train station in downtown Detroit, part of that city’s ongoing revitalization, the story of which is the subject of this BBC longread.
A ProPublica investigation found that the Chinese government is using tens of thousands of hacked or fake Twitter accounts to spread pro-Beijing propaganda on issues ranging from the Hong Kong protests to the government’s COVID-19 response.
Texas Monthly looks at how the H-E-B supermarket chain prepared for the pandemic several weeks ahead of just about any other company or government authority.
Writing for Billboard, Natalie Weiner looks at how two hits from 2000 that told of women getting revenge on their abusers elicited entirely different public reactions. My real issue with “Goodbye Earl” is that there is no “midnight redeye flight” from Atlanta that would put you anywhere in the United States.
Ann Forsyth, director of Harvard’s Healthy Places Design Lab, writes about how COVID-19 may alter the future of urban and home life.
Harvard finally reversed course and will pay its furloughed dining-hall workers. The University has a miserable history of failing to reasonably compensate the people who keep the place running.
Americans are stocking up on various dry goods, but also on jigsaw puzzles. I have quite a few in the house but never seem to choose them over a board game or a movie.
I didn’t realize that gay marriage is still illegal in South Korea, where there’s still a terrible social stigma around homosexuality in some parts of the country.
This ad, lambasting Trump for his late and inadequate response to this crisis, is superb.

what an ad. pic.twitter.com/yZV9KJCOEn
— Florida Chris (@chrislongview) March 25, 2020

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: coronavirus, detroit, harvard, links, longreads, south korea, stick to baseball

→ December 14, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/14/19.

I was busy these last two weeks, with numerous reaction pieces for ESPN+ subscribers.

I also held a Klawchat, probably my last of 2019, on Friday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the new small-box game Ankh’or, which plays up to four but works nicely with two, and wrote up the best games I saw in two days at PAX Unplugged (before my daughter got sick and we had to skip day three #sadface).

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, comes out on April 21^st, 2020. You can pre-order it here, and I have tentative appearances for that week at Politics & Prose (DC), Midtown Scholar (Harrisburg), and One More Page (Arlington, VA).

My free email newsletter will return in the next few days – sorry, I got sick, then the winter meetings happened – and you can sign up here.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This New York Times piece on two woman artists, Celia Paul and Cecily Brown, is devastating in multiple ways as it explores divers forms of misogyny in the art world.
Former major-league pitcher Bobby Jenks opens up about years of substance abuse and pitching through pain.
A GP writes in the Guardian about things he’s learned from his suicidal patients, with a discussion of the death of Frightened Rabbit lead singer Scott Hutchison.
The Verge reveals the toxic work environment at the trendy luggage maker Away.
Multiple researchers and publishers worked together to try to come up with a definition of predatory publishers.
Nouns in romance languages have genders, and when a plural noun refers to a group of people that includes men and women (or any non-men), the default is to use the masculine plural. So a group of 100 teachers, 99 of them women and just one a man, would still be “los profesores.” Teenagers in Argentina are fighting to change that in favor of gender-neutral language.
I love The Monster at the End of this Book, having read it many times to my daughter (complete with my Grover impression), so of course I enjoyed author David Burr Garrard’s essay on how that book opened his mind to the world of literature.
Deposed Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin has been busy pardoning murderers who contributed to his campaign, as well as pardoning a man convicted of beheading a woman and a teacher convicted of possessing child pornography.
The Washington Post looks at Israeli people trying to escape Ultra-Orthodox communities, which keep their members in cult-like isolation from the outside world.
David J. Roth, formerly of Deadspin, writes about the Astros’ McKinsey connections and mentality. McKinsey’s business practices are under scrutiny elsewhere as well, such as how they charge U.S. taxpayers $3 million per year for the work of a recent college graduate.
France has mounted an extensive information campaign to fight vaccine hesitancy in a country with some of the highest levels of vaccine stupidity … er, distrust in the world. One side note in the article describes two families, one from France and the other from the U.S., bringing unvaccinated kids carrying the measles into Costa Rica. If I’m Costa Rica, or any other country, I would start demanding vaccination records for idiot travelers from rich western countries with vaccination rates below the herd immunity threshold (95% for measles), and making it a crime to bring an unvaccinated child into a country and putting my local populace at risk.
“Samoa buries its children as measles outbreak worsens.” I think that says it all.
That measles outbreak is what happens when anti-vaxxers win, according to this LA Times editorial.
Anti-vaxxers hate your children. Dead kids don’t bother them; they’re so obsessed with their fantasies of vaccine ‘injuries.’
Aung San Suu Kyi stands accused of deliberately saying nothing while the Burmese government massacred the Rohingya people in an International Court of Justice trial over the genocide.
A first-grade teacher in Alameda County, California, teaches his students about race, class, and privilege.
If you missed the Thanksgiving Twitter backlash over a now-deleted Scientific American editorial that (in my view) was just a hit piece on Dr. Jen Gunter, Slate offers one balanced take on the situation, while the American Council on Science and Health called out SciAm’s embrace of “anti-medical” pseudoscience. The piece’s author, Jennifer Block, maintains that she did nothing wrong, despite hiding her conflict of interest in the matter.
Climate change deniers love to argue that past climate models have been wrong … but that’s not true.
House Democrats have passed nearly 400 bills that Mitch McConnell refuses to even consider in the Senate. I’m reasonably certain that this is not how the Framers intended for our legislature to work.
My alma mater screwed up, again, this time denying a popular and highly regarded Latina professor tenure. Harvard President Lawrence Bacow could do something about it, but says that’s just not how we do things around here. Why does it matter? Because the rejection may push other minority professors and grad students out of academia.
If you live in or near Clarksburg, Maryland, there’s an indie bookstore that needs your help. The owner has Parkinson’s disease and is struggling to keep the store afloat.
If you’re not constantly on Twitter, you may have missed this video of British citizens aghast at how expensive health care is in the United States. Basic health care is a right, not a privilege for the wealthy or the employed.
Board game news: Dire Wolf Digital’s app version of Reiner Knizia’s Yellow & Yangtze, a sequel/reimplementation of his hit game Tigris & Euphrates, is now live for iOS, Android, and Steam.
Z-Man Games has a bunch of mini-expansions for Stone Age, Cacao, First Class, NMBR9, and the Voyages of Marco Polo.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, climate change, france, harvard, israel, links, longreads, mental health, myanmar, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ October 12, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/12/19.

I’ll have an Arizona Fall League scouting post up Monday or possibly Sunday night, covering everything I’ve seen out here in the desert. No chat this week as I was traveling.

I did review Tapestry, the newest game from the mind of designer Jamey Stegmaier (Scythe, Charterstone), for Paste this week; it’s a quick-to-learn strategy game with a ton of potential decisions and paths for players, pitched as a civ-builder but playing more abstract than that.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves,
is now available for pre-order on the Harper Collins site and through major retailers. It’s due out in April 2020.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: From The Atlantic, technology is creating a massive noise pollution problem that nobody’s trying to stop, despite decades of research into the harms of excessive or incessant noise, as well as newer research that quiet or the sounds of nature are particularly good for our brains.
The Guardian asks why American pedestrian fatalities are going back up, and says it’s not just because the victims were distracted by their phones or because of driverless cars.
For The Athletic ($), Pablo Maurer looks at the broken promises of the soccer stadium in Chester, Pennsylvania, a very disadvantaged exurb of Philly that has seen no benefit from the facility’s existence.
The same dumb British newspaper ran two columns this week touting diametrically opposed claims on the safety of consuming processed meat. David Speigelhalter explains the three questions readers should ask when confronted with this kind of journalistic malfeasance.
This is from 2007 but I only saw it this week when Langdon Cook referred to it in The Mushroom Hunters: Those “truffled” dishes at restaurants probably contain no truffles or anything made from truffles, but use truffle oil that gets its flavor from the synthetic flavoring agent 2,4-dithiapentane.
The Atlantic‘s James Hamblin writes about identity fusion and why it might explain Trump supporters’ irrational devotion to him even as he’s accused of committing further crimes and continues to stoke fear and prejudice.
John Holdren, professor of environmental science and policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School and at the university’s Department of Planetary and Earth Sciences, says that that recent IPCC report on climate change understates how much danger we’re in, particularly if we ignore this problem long enough to let the permafrost in earth’s polar regions melt, releasing tons of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere.
The Washington Post‘s Samantha Schmidt examines both sides of the question about dress codes and norms for teenaged girls. Is ‘revealing’ clothing empowering, or playing to harmful societal standards of beauty?
From the same paper, AirPods aren’t just short-lived, but they can’t be repaired or have their batteries replaced; they’re just trash and Apple needs to do better.
The Hutchins Center at Harvard hosts The Hip Hop Archive, including a list called 24 albums with annotated lyrics, including entries from Eric B. & Rakim and A Tribe Called Quest, as well as a broader collection of 200 albums deemed seminal to the genre’s history.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution‘s Bill Torpy calls for the Braves to get rid of the Tomahawk Chop, a racist, ignorant gesture that has outlived its welcome.
I love third-wave coffee but didn’t realize the term had a known originator. Trish Rothgeb coined the phrase while working in Oslo in 2002, and is now leading the push to make coffee more inclusive without compromising the new genre’s emphasis on quality.
Floodgate Games’ Cosmic Colonies is now on Kickstarter.
James Mickens’ tenure announcement is probably the funniest such piece you’ll ever see.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, board game news, climate change, coffee, environment, food science, harvard, hip-hop, journalism, links, longreads, pollution, psychology

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