metoo

→ December 9, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/9/23.

Five new pieces for subscribers to the Athletic this week, breaking down the Jarred Kelenic trade, the Alex Verdugo trade, the Juan Soto trade, the Eduardo Rodríguez/Jeimer Candelario/Craig Kimbrel signings, and the Tyler O’Neill trade.

At Paste, I recapped everything I played at this year’s PAX Unplugged board game convention here in Philly. My time there was a little shorter than normal for various reasons, but I still sneaked in a whole bunch of great new games. I also got Apiary to the table here last night.

My free email newsletter has moved over to Substack. If you got an issue from me on Monday, then you’re all set. Mailchimp is sunsetting their free Tinyletter product, so I had to move it to a different site.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Joel Anderson, who overlapped with me at ESPN for a few years, writes in Slate about ESPN’s abortive attempts to “stick to sports” and the company’s uncertain future.
Mississippi Today exposes a “goon squad” of violent, law-breaking police deputies in Rankin County, home of the state’s capital and largest city, Jackson. The report describes beatings of suspects in petty drug crimes – or no crimes at all – and long prison sentences based on coerced confessions.
A professor at Nevada-Reno began a sexual relationship with one of his students. She’s now accusing him of rape and extortion; he says the relationship was consensual and that she has threatened him and his wife since he ended it. The Chronicle of Higher Education tries to tell the whole story, but isn’t the fact that he had a relationship with a student he oversaw enough to cost him his job? There is no consent with such an imbalance of power.
King Charles is taking the assets of dead Britons and using the money to upgrade properties he owns in his commercial portfolio.
I spent some time this week at the Barista Parlor in East Nashville, but I won’t be back after a reader pointed out that the owners have engaged in union-busting, including closing a shop where workers tried to unionize.
Trump’s lawyers have brought an internet conspiracy theory into one of their filings, accusing a Wisconsin reporter of being a plant at the January 6^th insurrection.
The United States has broken its record for the most mass shootings in a single calendar year, and we still have over three weeks to go.
In defense of the block button.
Young Fathers gave an incredible performance on KEXP, playing four songs from their latest album, Heavy Heavy.
A woman who threw a bowl of hot food in the face of a worker at a Chipotle will serve 30 days in prison and have to work 60 days in fast food. It’s a showy sentence, but I think it’s better than more prison time, and maybe it will build some empathy in the perpetrator.
The executive committee of the Texas Republican Party rejected a proposal to ban associations with Nazi sympathizers and Holocaust deniers.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: great britain, guns, links, longreads, metoo, mississippi, Music, nevada, stick to baseball, texas, unions

→ November 18, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/18/23.

I offered my opinions of the Aaron Bummer and Cal Quantrill trades for subscribers to the Athletic. That Jake Bauers trade really didn’t move the needle, but I’ll probably include a thought or two on the Vidal Bruján trade when we get another one so I can include it in a longer column.

On my podcast this week, I spoke with film critic Matt Singer about his new book Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I appeared on Seattle’s 710 AM to discuss the Mariners’ possible offseason moves and the challenge of competing in the AL West in 2024.

My free email newsletter has returned, as I sent out a fresh edition last night, my second one this month.

And now, the links…

ProPublica looks at how two women died on the property of an Alaska Mayor, but no one’s ever been arrested or charged – even though they were both involved with the now ex-mayor’s sons, who both had histories of domestic violence.
Colorado banned forced labor in its prisons in 2018, but prisoners in the state are still being punished for refusing work assignments, according to an investigation from Bolts magazine.
The BBC has a great piece on the (im)possibility of time travel on the eve of the new season of Doctor Who.
Trump laid out some very autocratic aims if he’s elected in 2024. The New York Times looked at his plans for mass deportations and concentration camps for undocumented migrants. The Washington Post also looked at the same, as Greg Sargent refers to the “brutal reality” of the next election. And Axios has some details on Trump’s plan to install loyalists throughout the federal government, called Project 2025 and developed by the right-wing Heritage Foundation.
Elon Musk endorsed what amounts to a “Great Replacement Theory” tweet, leading IBM, Apple, and others to pause advertising on X.com. Full disclosure: As of this morning, my employer is still advertising on the site.
Delaware Lt. Governor Bethany Hall-Long, one of two declared Democratic candidates for our gubernatorial race, has been caught up in a possible scandal around over $200,000 in campaign payments to her husband. She has claimed that it’s a repayment of a personal loan to the campaign.
Police in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, a city right next to Albuquerque, responded to a home there where a woman said her caretaker was threatening to kill her. The police complimented the caretaker on his guns, one of which he used a few hours later to kill the woman in his care. It appears the police chief is saying his officers did nothing wrong.
Ohio Republicans suffered two huge losses on Election Day ballot questions, so now they’re pledging to defy the will of the people by stripping the judiciary of its powers, prompting Toledo entrepreneur Pete Kadens to write that Ohio is the most antidemocratic state in the country.
I posted a link a few weeks ago to the New York/ProPublica investigation into serial abuser Dr. Robert Hadden of Columbia University; the school has now set up a $100 million compensation fund and begun contacting his former patients, a turnaround from the school’s past attempts to act like they knew nothing of his crimes and bore no responsibility to his patients. Hadden was convicted of multiple sexual assaults in January and is serving a 20-year sentence.
No matter what you read on the internet, incidents of sudden cardiac death in college athletes have declined over the last twenty years.
A school in Iowa had to pay for increased security after a single teacher there posted a joke that Chaya Raichik, who posts as “LibsOfTikTok,” then shared to her 2.6 million followers with a tag identifying the school district.
Murfreesboro, Tennessee, home to Middle Tennessee State University, passed an ordinance banning any public displays of homosexual behavior. The ACLU is already challenging it. MTSU hosts the state’s oldest LGBTQ+ student organization, MT Lambda, but I guess those kids just can’t step off campus.
The Atlantic looks at the plight of firstborn daughters, who are expected to be caregivers and to be high achievers in many cultures.
Pulitzer Prize winner Anne Boyer resigned as poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine.
You should read this wonderful obituary of New Orleans resident Virginia Jane Smith, who died this month at age 98 and survived Hurricane Katrina by living for a week off boiled eggs, water, and whiskey. As the headline says, may her memory be a blessing.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alaska, colorado, delaware, guns, links, longreads, metoo, new mexico, ohio, social media, stick to baseball, tennessee, vaccines

→ September 23, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/23/23.

For subscribers to The Athletic, I posted my annual Minor League Player of the Year column this week, as well as my last regular-season scouting notebook of 2023, covering prospects I saw from the Red Sox, Orioles, and Nationals. I’ll head to Arizona in October for Fall League coverage, of course. My podcast will be back next week and I’ve already filed my next review for Paste.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas didn’t just take a bunch of free trips from billionaire Harlan Crow; he also attended donor parties hosted by the billionaire Koch brothers, as reported here by ProPublica.
The New York Times reports on child labor at Perdue and Tyson chicken-processing plants, where immigrant kids are exploited by factory officials willing to look the other way and who claim ignorance when these children are seriously injured on the job. The Department of Labor only investigates when they receive a tip, and fines top out at $15,000.
Penn Medicine hired a new facilities director for its hospital without checking his background, which included a five-year federal prison sentence for wire fraud and misuse of a social security number. Larry Butler was fired four days into his tenure as COO of a hospital in Oregon in 2022, but Penn still hired him in July of 2023, only for him to “resign” four weeks later.
The Indian state of Kerala is experiencing yet another outbreak of the Nipah virus, which causes severe respiratory illnesses in humans and appears to have jumped the species barrier from pigs about 25 years ago. This is the fourth such outbreak in Kerala in the last five years.
Elon Musk’s grandfather was an antisemite and avid supporter of South Africa’s racist apartheid system, according to this lengthy story from The Atlantic, which contradicts Musk’s own mythmaking.
The U.S. media continues to fuck up its coverage of the Presidential race, treating Trump as some sort of entertainment vehicle – as they did in 2015-16 – while playing into dubious narratives around President Biden’s age or his son’s behavior.
The daughter of Dennis Rader, the serial killer who called himself “BTK,” is an adult now and is trying to use her knowledge of her father to help police close more cases.
The Sound of Freedom was a surprise box-office hit this summer and sits in 10^th place this year for U.S. receipts thanks to a broad effort by conservative and Christian groups to sell tickets, but the subject of the film, Tim Ballard, was ousted from his anti-human trafficking organization after an investigation into sexual misconduct, and now the film’s producer also stands accused of sexual assault, in this case of a minor.
The all-Muslim city council in Hamtramck, Michigan, banned the display of any Pride flags on public property during June (Pride Month) this year, after LGBTQ+ groups had supported the Muslim immigrant groups when they arrived in the city. The issue came back up this past week when Mayor Amer Ghalib refused to march near the city’s queer alliance in a Labor Day parade.
South Africa is facing a new, xenophobic movement called Operation Dudula that is targeting foreigners in the country and blaming them for the rise in drug addiction, especially the drug known as nyaope, a form of black tar heroin that sellers claim contains antiviral properties. The group’s beliefs and philosophy seem to mirror those of right-wing, anti-immigrant groups in the U.S. and Europe.
Azerbaijan has reclaimed the majority-Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh after the region’s separatist government, which called itself the Republic of Artsakh, agreed to disarm and to seek reintegration with the surrounding nation. This should end the looming humanitarian crisis in the region but may lead to a large exodus of ethnic Armenians; it also may further reduce the influence of Russia, which had backed Armenia’s interests with military aid, in the Caucasus.
Russell Brand’s agency learned three years ago that a minor accused him of sexual assault, and they ignored her. Tavistock Wood dropped Brand from its roster with the revelations this month that three other women also accuse him of rape or sexual assault, and they’re claiming they knew nothing about it.
Gabrielle Hanson, a Republican and Trump-supporting candidate for Mayor of Franklin, Tennessee, used images of women culled from social media in campaign materials, claiming these women – many of them women of color – were her supporters. The women were actually selected seven years earlier for an ad campaign for the clothing brand The Limited and had posted photos of themselves at a celebratory brunch, which Hanson and her now ex-campaign manager Erin Mazzoni used without their permission. That link has an incredible video where journalist Phil Williams interviews Mazzoni, who sounds, to put it kindly, completely bonkers.
Alabama Republicans continue to fight to preserve their gerrymandered legislative map that suppresses the power of Black voters (who make up 27% of the state’s population), and they’re doing it with the backing of Leonard Leo’s dark-money network. Just this summer, Congressional Republicans blocked a bill that would have required such dark-money groups to come into the light and disclose their donors.
Both The New Yorker and Paste ran stories on The Baseball Project, the fun supergroup with members of R.E.M., Dream Syndicate, and the Minus Five, where all of their songs are about baseball. They’re great live, by the way.
Anti-vaccine misinformation is highly effective: More Oklahoma parents are skipping safe, effective childhood vaccinations against dangerous and incredibly contagious viruses like measles.
Climate change may cause 39 million U.S. homeowners to lose access to home insurance, including many homeowners who don’t accept the reality of climate change and vote for the one party that also denies it.
New York editor Katy Schneider describes “the pandemic skip,” the way we all lost about two years to the pandemic but may not have fully realized or internalized the passage of that time.
A sketchy group calling itself “NY Citizens Audit” has received a cease-and-desist letter from the New York Attorney General’s office, accusing the group of intimidating voters by posing as election officials to knock on doors and accuse people of committing voter fraud.
Australian officials visited D.C. this week to call on the United States to drop its prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing leaked documents, a call echoed here by the Freedom of the Press Foundation because the same overbroad reading of the Espionage Act could easily be used against all sorts of journalists anywhere on the political spectrum.
Believing transphobic things does, in fact, make you a transphobe.
Board game news: Undergrove, the next new game from Wingspan designer Elizabeth Hargrave, will go up on Kickstarter in November, and you can save the page now to be notified when it’s live.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alabama, board game news, climate change, coronavirus, frauds, free speech, health, labor rights, lgbt rights, links, longreads, metoo, oklahoma, scotus, south africa, stick to baseball, tennessee, vaccines, voter suppression

→ September 16, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/16/23.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I wrote my annual column on players I was wrong about, and I weighed in on the Red Sox’ firing – and perhaps scapegoating – of Chaim Bloom. I held a Klawchat again on Friday.

On the board game front, I reviewed the excellent new game 3 Ring Circus over at Paste, and updated my list of the best new games so far in 2023 over at Vulture.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Why the actual fuck has Columbia University spent years protect an OB/GYN who abused hundreds of patients while working at the school – and even let him return to practice for five weeks after a patient went to the police, accusing him of sodomizing her, during which period he assaulted at least eight more patients. Columbia refused to cooperate with an earlier prosecution that resulted in a plea arrangement that kept him out of jail. And the Columbia leaders who oversaw all of this have gotten off scot-free, unlike the leadership at Penn State or Michigan State. Dr. Robert Hadden was convicted, finally, in January, of four counts of sexual abuse involving interstate travel (making it a federal case). Columbia still has not notified his former patients that he’s a sex offender. There are over 240 additional women who say he molested or abused them while under his care. If I had gone to Columbia, I wouldn’t give them another fucking dime.

There’s a million-dollar Kickstarter up for a series of expansions and enhancements to the hit game Terraforming Mars, from Indie Game Studios, which bought TM’s original publisher Stronghold Games when the latter’s founder retired a year or two ago. Kickstarter requires now that creators disclose what parts of the project are generated by AI projects, and it turns out that Indie decided to use AI for a whole bunch of the art in the new game – and Indie’s President Travis Worthington is completely unapologetic about this, even in the face of some pretty direct questions from Polygon’s Charlie Hall. What I find most distasteful about this is that they’re charging more for the product while their costs are going down, since they’re not paying actual artists for actual art. This is straight-up profit-taking. (Full disclosure: I’ve written for Polygon and Charlie was my editor.)

Vanity Fair has a story from author and journalist James David Robenalt on the upcoming book by and revelations from former Secret Service agent Paul Landis, who claims that he found another bullet lodged loosely in the seat behind President John F. Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy right after the President’s body was removed from the car. The implication, if we accept this story, is that there was a second shooter. It’s a long story, and I think Robenalt doth protest too much, but he’s also arguing against 60 years of government reports and denials.

The Daily Beast explains how Barstool built up its audience and social media presence by using burner accounts to avoid DMCA-related suspensions of their actual accounts.

The affirmative action policy you haven’t heard about: With enrollment of boys declining at colleges across the country, many have been finding ways to tip the scales in favor of male applicants. Weird that I don’t hear any protests from the right about this. It’s a mystery!

The Zulu prince and South African politician Mangosothu Buthelezi died last week at age 95. The BBC looks at his lengthy and complicated legacy. He served as president of one of the country’s “Bantustans,” puppet states within South Africa that claimed to give autonomy to Black citizens living under apartheid, then allied with the African National Congress in the fight for equality, only to split with the ANC over whether armed action was necessary or whether to ask for international sanctions.

Georgia the state is trying to become less democratic than Georgia the country, as they’ve made protests over the Cop City development a felony. I think this is a 1A violation, but I’m obviously not a lawyer.

Charles S. Pierce weighs in on how Clarence and Ginni Thomas are making a mockery of our democratic system.

Republican politicians who decried “indoctrination” in schools and passed laws banning materials like the 1619 Project from classrooms are now happily allowing students to be indoctrinated by the ahistorical nonsense from the right-wing disinformation outfit PragerU, because this is where censorship inexorably ends up.

Meanwhile, the GOP’s extreme wing is trying to shoehorn further abortion restrictions, including banning the safe, effective abortion pill, into various unrelated bills, and it’s backfiring on Rep. McCarthy and other Republican leaders already – to say nothing of what it might do next November. The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent also looks at how what he calls the “MAGA doom loop” may kill their chances in key battleground states next year.

Argentina is trying to get Italy to extradite a priest who helped the military junta torture dissidents in the 1970s. Franco Reverberi fled Argentina to return to his native country when it became clear he might be called to account for assisting torturers, sitting in the room while these abuses took place and even telling victims that God wanted them to reveal their secrets.

Convicted murderer Danelo Cavalcante escaped from Chester County Prison, about eleven miles from where I live, and was on the run for two weeks before a police dog found him. You know who didn’t find him or even remotely help in the search? All of the random idiots who went out to search for him or “report” on the search as so-called citizen journalists.

The library director and another library official in Sterling, Kansas, were fired in July after displaying a rainbow image at the entrance to the library because a few “Christians” complained it was promoting a “gay agenda,” even though the image was about neurodivergent people. I can’t with these people. Your religion is your business but it is not an excuse for hate, ignorance, or just being an asshole.e

A mathematical puzzle unsolved for fifty years, about the minimum dimensions for a Möbius strip, has been solved.

The asymmetric coop game Flock Together hit its funding goal in a few hours and is already 300% funded, over $150,000, just a few days into the campaign.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, argentina, board game news, georgia, kansas, kickstarters, links, longreads, metoo, police, scotus, south africa, stick to baseball

→ September 9, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/9/23.

Nothing new this week other than two contributions to headlines on the callups of Jordan Lawlar and Evan Carter, but I’ll be back next week with the players I got wrong column. I did hold my first Klawchat in ages, though.

On The Keith Law Show this week, I spoke with Jonathan Abrams, New York Times reported and author of the 2022 book The Come Up: An Oral History of the Rise of Hip-Hop, which comes out in paperback on October 3^rd. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: “The Dungeons and Dragons Players of Death Row,” from the New York Times’s Keri Blakinger, is one of the best things I’ve read this year.

Rolling Stone has an exposé on Anti-Flag lead singer Justin Sane, who now stands accused of rape by at least thirteen women. Anti-Flag and Sane (born Justin Geever) himself made feminism and progressive ideology a core part of their public images.

A Peter Thiel-backed startup is supposedly planning to found its own libertarian city-state … somewhere, I guess. Fyre City?

Vulture exposes the corruption behind Rotten Tomatoes’ algorithm as studios and publicists have paid small-time reviewers, who are often inexplicably included in the site’s calculations, to post positive reviews or withhold negative ones. I’m not included in RT’s metrics and I’m not paid by any studios or publicists, so you can always trust my reviews, even if they’re not any good!

Parents of trans kids who spoke to the New York Times’ Azeen Ghorayshi spoke out against the reporter and how they felt used and misled by her actions. Ghorayshi wrote a fairly uncritical piece about the so-called whistleblower at a St. Louis clinic for trans kids, but didn’t accurately reflect the sentiments of the parents she spoke to, while the whistleblower appears to have fabricated or inflated most of her claims.

Regulatory changes may spell the end of Airbnb and similar short-term rentals in New York City. There’s some evidence that these sites are driving down housing stock in already depressed urban supplies.

Warming oceans due to climate change are allowing the flesh-eating bacterium Vibrio vulnificus to expand its habitat further north, killing three people in the New York area this summer.

The Florida town of Mount Dora established a program where businesses can declare themselves safe spaces for LGBTQ+ people and display a decal in their window to that effect. Several Florida Republicans are vowing to stop the program, because they are apparently opposed to the First Amendment, or too stupid to understand why it applies here.

Goodreads sucks. Even best-selling author R.F. Kuang says so – okay, sort of.

Christian nationalist commentator Matt Walsh, who doesn’t understand the biology of gender, decided to dunk on a single woman for a Tiktok video about her Saturday routines, and even the National Review said it was a bit much. Walsh’s view is that women exist solely for procreation, so it’s unsurprising that Julia Mazur’s unmarried, childless lifestyle would be so confusing to him.

One of the only pediatric cardiologists in the state of Louisiana is leaving the state because of its anti-LGBTQ+ legislation. Well well well.

The Kids Online Safety Act isn’t about protecting kids, at least not for its Republican backers – it’s about blocking LGBTQ+ content online, according to sponsor Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R). It has broad bipartisan support, however, and I contacted both of Delaware’s Senators to voice my opposition, even though both are sponsors of the bill as well.

Two Texas billionaires who’ve made their fortunes from fracking are using their gains to fund climate denial and conservative indoctrination sites like PragerU and the Daily Wire. Florida has now approved the use of PragerU materials in its K-12 schools. The Guardian has more on the lies and misinformation of PragerU, which is just doing what its backers pay it for.
Prison officials fired the guard who didn’t see Danelo Cavalcante escape from Chester County Prison by crabwalking up two walls, leading to a manhunt for the convicted murderer that is now entering day ten. Another inmate escaped the same way back in May, so I’m unclear why the guard is getting the blame rather than the officials who didn’t think to, say, use anti-climb paint to prevent a recurrence?

South Korean teachers have been protesting after one of their own committed suicide due to extensive bullying by her students’ parents.

Astrophysicist Katie Mack uses a baseball analogy to explain quantum tunneling.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: climate change, florida, lgbt rights, links, longreads, louisiana, metoo, misinformation, south korea, stick to baseball, trans rights

→ August 26, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/26/23.

Three new pieces this week for subscribers to the Athletic: Some thoughts on Shohei Ohtani’s free agency in the wake of his torn UCL; a post mortem after the White Sox fired Kenny Williams and Rick Hahn; and why college conference realignment is probably bad for college baseball.

At Paste, I reviewed the board game Hickory Dickory, which has a very cute theme and some clever mechanics but I think might just be overdesigned in the end. I do like it, just with reservations.

On the Keith Law Show, I spoke with Joe Posnanski about his upcoming book Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments, which comes out on September 5^th. You can listen & subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Quillette has a lengthy explanation of the failed lab-leak hypothesis around COVID-19’s origins, and the people who still refuse to accept its failure.
Vanity Fair gives the previously untold story of a Texas mom who was abducted by a serial killer in 1981 and talked him into letting her go by leaning on her deep religious faith.
Writing in the New Yorker, Ronan Farrow has an unflattering profile of Elon Musk and the billionaire’s increasing influence over public policy.
ProPublica provides the coda to their coverage of Illinois student Amara Harris, who was given a ticket by police when she was accused of stealing a fellow student’s AirPods. She won her case when a jury in Naperville determined that she did not knowingly take the AirPods (she thought they were hers and returned them when approached), and the story highlights the use of police in schools for incidents that could be handled first by school officials.
The man who shot a California store owner for flying a Pride flag was a far-right conspiracy theorist who followed the religious zealot Matt Walsh and espoused false-flag hoaxes and climate change denial.
Oppenheimer left out a key part of the history of nuclear weapons: the exploitation of Congolese people who mined the uranium ore by hand, including a massacre of workers who tried to bargain for higher wages in 1941.
This 2022 article from Vice explains productivity cafes, a Japanese trend of coffee shops and bars where you tell the employees the task you’re trying to finish when you enter and they won’t let you leave until you’ve finished (e.g., writing a chapter).
FIFA just temporarily suspended Luis Rubiales, the President of the Spanish football federation, after he kissed Spanish player Jenni Hermoso on the lips without her consent and subsequently claimed that she did consent in the wake of calls for him to resign.
A Maine hospital is threatening to sue a 15-year-old college student for defamation over his petition calling for increased patient safety at their facility. FIRE has stepped in to demand that Northern Light retract the threat, citing Maine’s anti-SLAPP law.
Guitar legend Carlos Santana went on a bizarre anti-trans rant during a recent concert in Atlantic City.
A goal that seemed impossible just a few years ago is in sight – we might be able to eradicate wild polio in the wild, which would make it just the third disease we’ve eradicated after smallpox and rinderpest.
Delaware has joined the growing list of states and cities prohibiting restaurants from using polystyrene containers, which don’t break down in landfills and can leach chemicals into the water supply.
The Baltimore Banner once again calls out Orioles owner/failson John Angelos for how his antics are overshadowing the team’s incredible season. We’re now over seven months past his promise to open the team’s books.
Tiny forests of native flora can help increase biodiversity and grab some carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, growing even on spaces that might seem too small to support this kind of horticulture.
One version of a single gene may increase your chances of developing long COVID after infection.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, biodiversity, conspiracy theories, coronavirus, first amendment, illinois, links, longreads, maine, metoo, soccer, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ February 11, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/11/23.

My top 100 prospects and team reports have been running for the last 12 days, finishing up today with the AL West team reports/top 20s. You can see the index of everything I’ve written here, which includes direct links to the reports for every team, the top 100, the farm system rankings, my chats on that site, and more.

My latest review for Paste actually went up last week, and even I missed it in all the hubbub. I reviewed the board game It’s a Wonderful Kingdom, the two-person variant of the popular game It’s a Wonderful World, but I have to say I think the original is a better game, even for two people. It’s a bit like 7 Wonders meets Century Spice Road, but with a little more to it than that might imply. You can buy It’s a Wonderful World here on amazon if you’re intrigued.

My free email newsletter has been almost-weekly this year, and I’ll send out the next iteration this weekend. I skipped my podcast this week because I was writing so much. I think it’ll be back next week. Maybe. Life is full of uncertainties.

And now, the links…

The Toronto Star looks at the fall of Jamie Salé into conspiracy theory and denialism. The 2002 Olympic gold medalist, previously best known as one of the two skaters originally cheated out of the gold by corrupt judges, has become a COVID and vaccine denialist – and, of course, now she’s trying to profit off these false views.

The Hollywood Reporter has more details on the implosion of Rick and Morty co-creator Justin Roiland’s animation empire in the wake of his arrest on domestic abuse charges and multiple former co-workers detailing harassment by Roiland.

Intelligencer looks at the increasing “junkification” of Amazon, where legitimate products are getting harder to find as the company tries to muscle its way into more spaces. My outsider’s take: this is what happens when a company needs unbridled growth to prop up a stock price (or a billionaire owner’s wealth).

The right-wing propaganda site Revolver states that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R )’s takeover of that state’s schools, including the previously progressive New College of Florida, is the blueprint Republicans need to use to take down public education across the country. (The article also says that African American studies is “a joke of a subject,” if you doubt my characterization of Revolver’s leanings.)

Elon Musk fired a top Twitter engineer because engagement on the billionaire’s tweets is low. Totally stable genius there.
Twitter glitched for me twice this week – once when we all got the “exceeded the daily limit” warning, and once when the app showed me misplaced white boxes where certain tweets should have appeared in my timeline. Former employees say this is due to a series of code freezes and Musk’s frequent, mercurial demands for changes.

The BBC profiles the French author Colette, calling her “the most beloved French writer of all time,” although in the English-speaking world she’s probably best known for writing the novel Gigi that became a hit musical and film.

Native American groups are protesting the Kansas City NFL team’s nickname, mascot, and their use of the embarrassing “tomahawk chop.” Atlanta baseball fans, pay attention.

A Montana bill would prevent schools from punishing students who intentionally misgender or deadname classmates. Just say bullying is allowed and be done with it.

Is disdain for the less educated the “last acceptable prejudice,” as Michael Sandel writes in the New York Times? He also argues that it’s a problem for the Democrats, and a perception they need to shed.

Voice actors are being asked to sign away rights to their own voices so studios can create AI versions and save a few bucks.

Tony Dungy and James Brown (the NFL announcer) have withdrawn from their speaking slots at an event hosted by an anti-gay Pharisee preacher.

Republicans are not serious about governing, except when it comes to using the government as a weapon against their enemies, which is, you know, what fascist regimes do.

Also in Florida, the state is going to pass legislation to end Disney’s extra-governmental Reedy Creek Improvement District as retaliation for the company’s opposition to the state’s anti-LGBT “don’t say gay” law. See the previous bullet point.

Attempts to erase Black history from curricula, as Florida is doing, end up doing nothing except leaving students less literate in American history, rather than getting them to “love” the U.S. more, writes education Prof. Adam Laats in the Washington Post.

By the way, sometimes pressure works, even on zealots: Florida’s interscholastic sports committee has dropped plans to make questions about athletes’ menstrual cycles mandatory. It was a blatant attempt to out trans kids, of course, although they claimed otherwise.

Missouri’s Republican-led legislature rejected a measure to ban children from carrying guns in public.

Iowa Republicans introduced a bill that would expand child labor in the state, including jobs previously deemed too dangerous for kids like those in mining, logging, and animal slaughterhouses.

A professor at the University of Wyoming tweeted about a former student of hers who was trans and killed themselves. Legislatures passing laws attacking trans people, especially trans kids, are destroying lives just to score political points.

We’re seeing fewer big scientific breakthroughs, with the pace dropping steadily for over three-quarters of a century. Part of it is that breakthroughs are harder to come by as the low-hanging fruit is long picked, and part is that nations don’t invest in basic science research without promise of immediate financial returns the way they used to.

Over 200 people have been quarantined and at least 8 have died in Equatorial Guinea from an as-yet unidentified hemorrhagic fever (a category that includes dengue and the Ebola and Marburg filoviruses).

Board game news: Allplay (formerly known as Board Game Tables) has a Kickstarter up for four new small box games, with pledges starting at $19 for any one of the titles.

Rock Manor Games has a Kickstarter, already over 400% funded, for the new expansion to the game Set a Watch.

This blog post arguing that Dominion killed replayability in board games makes a great point – the need to constantly buy expansions to is a great business model for a very small number of games/publishers but not sustainable for the industry as a whole.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, disney, florida, football, french literature, iowa, links, longreads, metoo, missouri, montana, racism, science, social media, stick to baseball, trans rights

→ October 1, 2022
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/1/22.

Since my last weekend post, I’ve had three few posts up for subscribers to the Athletic, including my annual column on players I was wrong about, my annual Prospect of the Year column, and a quick scouting take on last weekend’s Future Stars Main Event showcase for the 2023 draft.

For Paste I reviewed the board game Cellulose, from Genius Games, which produces science-themed games that try to be both accurate and educational. It’s definitely the former, but I’m not sure about the latter, as it’s a good worker-placement game that you can play well without getting into a lot of the technical stuff.

On the Keith Law Show this week, my guest was author and sportswriter Will Leitch, who wrote the wonderful 2021 novel How Lucky and who has a new novel coming out in May that you can pre-order here. We discussed his writing, his beloved Cardinals, and the upcoming slate of movies for this fall and winter. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

My free email newsletter should return next week. COVID and some travel and other stuff just knocked me for a loop.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This story has gone beyond this one subtopic, but it’s worth reading about how Brett Favre took $6 million in welfare funds and gave it to Southern Miss to build a volleyball stadium.
Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed won a Nobel Peace Prize by ending the decades-long conflict with Eritrea, a former Ethiopian province that took Ethiopia’s only coastline when it became independent. Now Ahmed stands accused of starting a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the minority Tigrayans and fomenting a civil war less than a year after earning the honor.
Vigilante “predator catchers,” using techniques similar to those from To Catch a Predator, are infiltrating and often interfering with the criminal justice system.
Yet another author thinks he’s identified the Zodiac killer – although this time, the suspect’s daughter thinks it might be true.
Fifth Circuit judge Andy Oldham ruled that internet companies no longer have any right to moderate content on their sites, which doesn’t jibe well with the First Amendment. The Atlantic’s Charlie Wurzel asks if this is the end of the internet. The subreddit r/PoliticalHumor is protesting the ruling and the Texas law in question in a rather clever way.
Virginia is trying to enact a set of policies to deny trans kids’ rights in schools, such as prohibiting the use of their preferred pronouns or their use of bathrooms that match their gender identities. It’s cruel, and it solves no problem other than catering to transphobic voters. If you live in Virginia, the public comment period is open and you can comment here.
An editorial in Nature argues that we need to let science and data determine transgender policy, not anti-trans politicians. “The current spate of anti-trans positions has little to do with evidence-based research, science or data,” such as bogus claims of sexual assaults by trans people (or people pretending to be trans) in bathrooms.
Meanwhile, right-wing trolls are targeting children’s hospitals that provide gender-affirming care, going after facilities in Akron and at Vanderbilt just weeks after a similar misinformation campaign led to bomb threats against Boston Children’s Hospital. And, as usual, Twitter does nothing.
Libraries under attack: A dozen public libraries across the country received bomb or active shooter threats in the last two weeks, which might be part of a coordinated effort targeted at LGBTQ+ communities. Last week was Banned Books Week, and yet schools across the country continue to target LGBTQ+-themed books. A librarian in a St. Louis-area school received two visits from a police officer because parents complained about “pornographic” books on the shelves. In Greenville, South Carolina, Republicans have stolen several LGBTQ+ books from the library and are trying to get the system to remove any such books from the kids’ sections (where, say, a child questioning their sexual orientation or gender identity might find them). Cory Doctorow points out that vast majorities of Americans oppose book-banning efforts, but the other side is louder.
A French scientist who pushed the thoroughly discredited notion that hydroxychloroquinone could treat COVID-19 now faces a criminal investigation and possible retraction of six of his published papers.
A measles outbreak in Zimbabwe has killed 700 children.
ProPublica explains how “pig-butchering” scams work. If you’ve been getting texts from random numbers or similar messages on Whatsapp/Instagram, sometimes saying “hi” or “your number is in my phone” or something, that’s often the first step in the scam.
In a new documentary about Mario Batali, a former employee alleges that he sexually assaulted her.
Fentanyl is the new bugaboo for Republican politicians and a lot of MAGA accounts on Twitter. The problem is it’s arrant nonsense: You can’t overdose from touching it, and it’s not in random Halloween candy.
I loved this MLB.com story and video about a lovely new ballpark in Bavaria, built to house a Bundesliga (the German professional league) team in Füssen.
The Danish island of Bornholm is trying to go trash-free, reusing or recycling all waste, as their waste-incineration plant is nearing the end of its life and officials there chose not to replace it.
A number of Trump’s phony electors from 2020 still hold powerful positions in their states, are on the ballot this November for the same, or are working for major campaigns like those of Blake Masters (Arizona) or Sen. Ron Johnson (Wisconsin).
Speaking of Sen. Johnson, he flip-flopped on the bill to protect marriage equality, pandering to a small but vocal minority of voters.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) hired a company tied to one of his closest advisers to fly migrants from Texas to Massachusetts, and his office has refused to explain how the company won this contract.
John Fetterman responds to the strange attacks against his tattoos, including a rant from Tucker Carlson. Are we really still worried about people with tattoos in the year 2022?
Can “brown noise” help your brain relax? There isn’t much research on this, and the research on “pink noise,” which allegedly helps with deep sleep, is limited to one real study.
Board game news: Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game is already 10x funded on Kickstarter with 12 days to go.
Daybreak, the new cooperative game about fighting climate change co-designed by Matt Leacock (Pandemic), is over $300,000 already with 20 days to go on Kickstarter.
LX News has a story on Dungeons & Dragons players who tout mental health benefits from playing, which isn’t exactly backed by research but does talk up some of the benefits of gaming in general. The article does note the actual research on how reading fiction increases your empathy, though.
NPR’s Code Switch looks at race in Dungeons & Dragons – how the game’s fictional races bring in real-world stereotypes, and how some players are trying to rewrite some of the rules to eliminate or confront those issues.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, baseball, board game news, book banning, books, ethiopia, first amendment, frauds, lgbt rights, links, longreads, metoo, science, stick to baseball, trans rights, true crime

→ September 11, 2022
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/11/22.

I pushed this post back a day so I could file another post for the Athletic, so you had two from me in the last 48 hours – a scouting post on some top Guardians and Nationals prospects, and a second edition of my looks at September prospect callups. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Next Station: London, a great new flip-and-write game with a route-planning mechanic that makes it a sort of a puzzle – the choices you make early in the game constrain your choices later. This is definitely the year of the roll/flip-and-write.

My guest on this week’s episode of the Keith Law Show was Wingspan game designer Elizabeth Hargrave, talking about her next big game, The Fox Experiment, now on Kickstarter (and already 500% funded in five days). You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New Yorker looks at how Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost and the Ottawa County police department have worked together to turn rape victims into defendants, putting one of their own on trial for accusing a cop – who has been accused by at least two other women of sexual assault – of coercing her into sex.

A column denying the extent of racism in Canadian society led to a successful effort to unionize the country’s conservative paper the National Post, securing gains for BIPOC employees in the process.

A Fox producer warned execs to stop Jeanine Pirro from airing her election-denial views, according to documents revealed in the Dominion Systems lawsuit against the right-wing juggernaut.

Billionaire Barre Seid has used his money to fund climate-change denialism and fight Medicaid expansion (that is, health care for our poorest citizens), while also funding a law school to churn out archconservative future judges, according to records unearthed by ProPublica.

One Alabama prison has been holding pregnant women there for weeks or months, in what appears to be a violation of basic Constitutional rights, to protect the fetuses from drug use.

David DeWitt of the Ohio Capitol Journal writes of the intolerable cruelty of Ohio’s total ban on abortions, including the suffering already of pregnant women needing essential medical care.

Nature’s editors write of the need for greater protections for scientists and researchers from threats and abuse, pointing at lawmakers and the executives running social media sites.

Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the House Minority Leader, introduced a new “Commitment to America” that is short on ideas and long on Trumpian insanity, according to Alex Shephard of the New Republic, pointing to the lack of details for how it will achieve vague goals, emphasis on truly counterproductive policies (like increasing fossil fuel production), and kowtowing to election deniers.

Oxford scientists may have developed an effective malaria vaccine. Malaria has long resisted traditional approaches to vaccine development because it’s caused by a parasite, rather than a bacterium or virus, and the parasite changes form once inside the host’s body.

Count me among those Duolingo users who hate the app’s total redesign, as it has removed most of the flexibility the old structure gave users to set their own pace; I used the app to try to keep my Spanish skills fresh, but wouldn’t do those lessons at the same speed or rate as those of Welsh, which I was learning from scratch. The founder’s comments don’t give me much hope, as they betrayed a real disdain for their customers.

I knew Florida state Rep. Randy Fine in college, and am not surprised to see the person he’s become as an adult or politician – he was one of the most vocal Florida officials to rail against “woke” Disney, but is also happy to spend thousands of dollars on the company’s cruises and products.

An 18-year-old student was elected to the Boise School Board, in no small part because his opponent refused to denounce an endorsement from a far-right extremist group that arrives armed with AR-15s to public events, supports book banning, and refers to undocumented immigrants as “illegals.”

As many GOP candidates across the country are trying to scrub anti-abortion or other hard-right rhetoric from their campaign sites, Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano is leaning harder in that direction, becoming “Trumpier than Trump” in the words of Axios’ Jonathan Swan.

Lots of board game Kickstarters etc. this week, starting with the solo-only game Legacy of Yu from Shem Phillips, designer of Raiders of the North Sea and the North Sea and West Kingdom series of games.

Disney is introducing a new Magic: the Gathering-style collectible card game called Lorcana, and Polygon has images of some of the superb art.

Keith Matejka, designer of the Roll Player games, has a new title on Kickstarter called Dawn of Ulos, a tile-laying game for 1-5 players set in the Roll Player universe.

25^th Century Games has a Gamefound campaign up for expansions to its Prehistories and Space Explorers games.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, alabama, board game news, florida, idaho, Languages, links, longreads, metoo, ohio, pennsylvania, social media, stick to baseball, unions, vaccines

→ August 20, 2022
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/21/22.

I’m returning from a long vacation to England and Wales, one in which I was barely online and enjoyed this tremendously. A couple of folks reached out to see if my absence from the internet was due to something unfortunate, and I appreciate that you checked in.

Before I started this break, I had a slew of articles for subscribers to The Athletic, including a ranking of the top 60 prospects in the minors that included recent draftees; some thoughts on which teams did best and worst at the trade deadline; and breakdowns of the Juan Soto trade, the Frankie Montas trade; the Josh Hader trade; and some smaller deals from that final day. I held a Q&A at the Athletic on August 1st.

Before this vacation, I took a few days to head to Indianapolis to go to Gen Con, the largest board game convention in North or South America, and wrote about it in two posts for Paste – one ranking the ten best games I played there, and another discussing everything else I tried or saw. I also reviewed the very disappointing new Stranger Things game, Attack of the Mind Flayer.

My podcast will return this upcoming week, as will my newsletter.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New York Times details the numerous allegations against former Gravity Payments CEO Dan Price, who had become a media darling for his decision to raise his company’s minimum salary to $70K a year (which, to be clear, is still good!) and his tweets about excessive CEO pay and living wages.
Bob Nutting, owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates, bought the Aspen Times newspaper, and in what appears to be a concerted effort with a Russian oligarch, suppressed negative coverage in the 140-year-old paper, according to a former editor.
Climate change is causing a mass movement of people from the worst-hit areas, and we need to prepare for it.
NBC News has the story of a Texas mom campaigning to ban LGBTQ+ themed books from school libraries – even though her own son is gay.
Texas’ abortion law made one woman’s wanted pregnancy a medical nightmare. Republicans trying to ban abortion are worse at failing to anticipate consequences than Bud Selig was.
The BBC looks back at the failure of Disney and Miramax to sell Hayao Miyazaki’s film Princess Mononoke to American audiences.
Dr. Angela Rasmussen, one of the authors of the recent studies that showed that COVID-19 almost certainly had a natural origin, discussed the toxic “lab-leak” discource on social media, one pushed by bad actors, including people with books to sell.
Dan Szymborski wrote about how the Fernando Tatis suspension is a loss for baseball, not just for Padres fans.
Two billionaires, Jeff Yass and Dick Uihlein, are funding a far-right election denier in Nevada’s Senate race. Uihlein’s money comes from U-Line, his closely held packaging company. If I get a package in an U-Line box, I ask the shipper or vendor to use someone else for their packaging needs.
A Nigerian doctor tried to warn the world about monkeypox back in 2016, but nobody listened.
President Biden has almost completely stopped drone attacks in Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, and Syria, compared not just to his immediate predecessor but to President Obama as well.
This was inevitable: some sore-loser parents used Utah’s anti-trans law to question the gender of the girl who beat their daughters in a track event.
Meanwhile, far-right transphobes are harassing Boston Children’s Hospital employees over false claims that the hospital is conducting gender-affirming surgeries on trans kids.
Reader Dr. Paul Sax wrote a personal piece about why abortions are medical care.
The Washington Post wrote about how Indy Star reporters showed that the story of a pregnant 10-year-old who had to travel out of Ohio to Indiana for an abortion was, in fact, not a hoax. (And then Indiana banned all abortions, because that state is also a theocracy.)
Board game news: The Kickstarter for Trailblazers, a short, portable family game about hiking and kayaking, funded in less than two hours.
Level Up Dice made custom polyhedral dice from metal melted down from a German WWII tank, and then had to apologize for it.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, baseball, board game news, censorship, coronavirus, links, longreads, metoo, stick to baseball, trans rights, utah

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