stick to baseball

→ October 7, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/7/23.

I’ve had one post up for subscribers to the Athletic since the last roundup, with my hypothetical postseason awards ballots for 2023. I do have another story filed for Sunday, so keep an eye skinned for that.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Votes for Women, a (mostly) two-player, asymmetrical game about the fight for women’s suffrage. It’s fantastic, and I also love that this review went up the week that Glynis Johns turned 100.

On the Keith Law Show this week, my guest was MLB’s Sarah Langs, talking about the season that was, who she would vote for in the various awards, and what excited her about this year’s playoff teams. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Rolling Stone’s Sean Williams writes about being conned by a con artist who tried to get the journalist to write a long profile/feature on him to further a movie deal, only for Williams to discover that the fraudster had as many as 200 victims of various romance and other scams over the last forty years.
The Washington Post looks at how climate change increases the demand and need for air conditioning, which in turn contributes more to climate change. Cooling a world that’s getting hotter requires increasing levels of energy, and we still rely far too much on energy-production methods that pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
An effective vaccine against tuberculosis would save millions of lives; it’s the deadliest infectious disease in the world, killing 1.6 million people a year. When pharmaceutical company GSK developed a vaccine for it, they chose instead to use the technology for a shingles vaccine, keeping the TB vaccine off the market for years.
Workers in California who cut stone countertops are coming down with silicosis, an incurable and terminal disease.
Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull gave a very candid interview to the San Diego Union-Tribune ahead of the band’s concert last month in that city.
Dr. Peter Hotez warns that antiscience conspiracy theorists are growing in power and organization, threatening public health and the scientists working on projects like new vaccines – such as the brand-new vaccine against malaria, potentially one of the biggest global health breakthroughs in decades.
SARS-CoV-2 infects coronary arteries and arterial plaque, which increases the risk of heart attack and stroke in people who have or had COVID-19.
NBC News’s Ben Collins may have found a clue to why Elon Musk bought Twitter only to destroy it. Musk also wiped out the company’s election integrity team and cut the group targeting disinformation on the site.
Rumble host Stew Peters called for the execution of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. Media Matters found ads for the NFL appearing on Peters’ Twitter account, including one near a link to the video of his death threat.
Fact-checking had a big moment between the 2020 election and the pandemic, with news organizations hiring more fact-checkers and more independent groups combating misinformation online, but nothing has really changed and now the effort has stalled.
Italy’s right-wing government has moved to erase LGBTQ+ people, especially parents, from their society.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has spent millions of taxpayer dollars defending his “anti-woke” laws targeting LGBTQ+ rights, public education, Disney, and more, only to lose repeatedly in the courts.
Harris County, Texas, taxpayers are in a similar boat, having paid over $1 million to people roped into County DA Kim Ogg’s (D) prosecutions of public officials with whom she’s feuded.
Republicans in North Carolina passed a bill to grab power from the Governor so they can control elections in the state, which already has a gerrymandered legislative map. Gov. Roy Cooper (D) vetoed Senate Bill 749, but the body is set to override his veto on Tuesday.
Delaware became the 17^th state to ban the “gay panic” defense, where a defendant accused of a violent act claims the act is justified because their victim was LGBTQ+.
A city commissioner in Anchorage, Alaska, who had a previous history of fraud, has been indicted for fraudulently taking $1.6 million in COVID-19 relief funds. She and her husband are accused of using the money to buy cryptocurrency, pay taxes, and for other personal matters.
The mayoral race in Franklin, Tennessee, got even more bizarre last week when a bunch of self-proclaimed white nationalists showed up to support candidate Gabrielle Hanson at a campaign event.
People of Praise, the extreme Catholic group that counts SCOTUS Justice Amy Coney Barrett as a member, is facing an FBI investigation into a cover-up of sexual abuse in the sect.
A rare bit of good news on the environment – Antigua & Barbuda has transformed the nation’s uninhabited third island, Redonda, from a lifeless rock into a thriving fountain of biodiversity.
An activist group is suing the EPA on behalf of a largely Black community in West Virginia’s “Chemical Valley,” arguing that the agency hasn’t done enough to protect residents from ethylene oxide pollution from a Union Carbide plant there.
The capitalists will let you drown. There’s money for cops and sports stadiums, but not for housing, or for infrastructure that might have prevented the flooding that plagued New York City eight days ago.
Speaking of which, just ten New York City cops were responsible for $68 million in payouts to victims of their misconduct, yet all ten are still on the public payroll.
A cop in Pennsylvania tried to strangle his ex-girlfriend and then used his authority to have her involuntarily committed.
The conservative newsletter/site The Dispatch argues that Trump and his supporters in office are devoid of moral leadership, and as Trump’s rhetoric worsens, too few people in his party seem to notice or care. Indeed, Trump called for the execution of General Mark Milley, and it barely made a ripple.
Did Hasan Minhaj go too far in fabricating autobiographical details in his standup routine? Brian Logan, comedy critic for the Guardian, says he did. The controversy seems likely to cost Minhaj a shot at the hosting job for the Daily Show.
Your brain sees winning streaks everywhere, even in random sequences. Scientific American looks at why.
Did the James Webb Telescope discover galaxies older than the projected age of the universe? Maybe, explains astrophysicist Katie Mack.
Some board game Kickstarters of note: Diatom is a tile-laying, pattern-making game based on an old Victorian art form.
And there’s a Kickstarter for the roll-and-write Merchants of Magick game, which is in the same universe as Set a Watch, along with two new expansions.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alaska, antiscience, board game news, climate change, cognitive psychology, delaware, environment, florida, frauds, health, italy, lgbt rights, links, longreads, Music, north carolina, physics, police, social media, stick to baseball, tennessee, texas, 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

→ September 2, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/2/23.

Nothing new this week at the Athletic beyond contributing notes on the callups of Jasson Dominguez and Ceddanne Rafaela.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the board game Bamboo, a cute medium-box game that’s a pretty meaty game at heart.

I appeared on two podcasts this week, talking to Jim Margalus of Sox Machine about the White Sox’ front office turmoil and to Chris Crawford about eight prospects who’ve had surprising years, four positive and four negative.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The writer Naomi Klein writes in the Guardian about being confused with the crackpot Naomi Wolf and how people fall for conspiracy theories online, part of her upcoming book Doppelganger.
Albanian youths bought into the hype of influencers who claimed they’d found riches elsewhere, leading to a shortage of young people staying in the town of Kukes.
The Atlantic profiles the latest Presidential candidate/grifter, Vivek Ramaswamy, who seems to think January 6^th was something other than an insurrection of idiots and might be a 9/11 truther. He also claims he’s not “bought and paid for” but is a major investor in companies fighting climate change policies.
Florida state officials sought opposing viewpoints on slavery while reviewing the AP African-American Studies curriculum. The Tampa Bay Times has more details on how Gov. Ron DeSantis’s “anti-woke” policies have led to this embarrassing situation.
In the late 1950s, Spain built a dam that should have flooded the thousand-year-old town of Granadilla, leading authorities to evacuate it. Sixty-odd years later, the town remains above water, but residents and their descendants still can’t return.
ProPublica exposes a Chicago cop who’s lied under oath at least 44 times, putting dozens more cases at risk.
Do you follow a doctor or scientist on social media who’s always promoting their subscription newsletter? The BMJ ran an opinion piece on how those pose a conflict of interest.
The San Francisco Chronicle looks at how the New York Times has covered (badly) the national assault on trans rights.
Try to contain your surprise, but Republicans blocked a bill that would have required dark money groups to reveal their donors’ identities.
The Katy ISD in Texas has halted all new book purchases for its schools because of objections to any books with LGBTQ+ themes.
Disgraced Spanish soccer official Luis Rubiales is facing a national inquiry over his forced kiss of a Spanish women’s national team player; meanwhile, his mother is going on a hunger strike over what she claims is unfair treatment of her creep son.
Atlanta magazine has lost much of its editorial staff after its publisher and editor-in-chief told writers to cut back on “woke” coverage of one of the south’s most diverse cities.
Azerbaijani forces have blocked food shipments to the Armenian exclave of Nagorno-Karabach, leading to a massive humanitarian disaster.
The Gabonese military overthrew the country’s latest leader, the third in the line of the Bongo family that had ruled the country for 55 rules. Is it a real change in power or more of the same?
Big Gay Ice Cream was one of the hottest brands in the company before the pandemic hit, but mismanagement and a fight for control have reduced the brand to just one NYC outpost and left the future of the company in doubt.
Billy Bragg tore apart country singer Oliver Anthony’s faux working class song “Rich Men North of Richmond” for the Guardian and recorded his own response track calling on people to join and support labor unions if they actually care about the plight of blue collar workers.
Saudi Arabia has sentenced a critic of the regime to death for his tweets. Very nice for an ally of the United States and a primary owner of the site formerly known as Twitter.
When VICE declared bankruptcy, its executives still got paid even when its employees didn’t.
I missed this in June but a unique Magic: the Gathering card representing the One Ring from the Lord of the Rings trilogy was valued at over $2 million by companies offering a bounty for whoever pulled the card.
If you’re having trouble falling asleep, cognitive behavioral therapy may help.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: florida, frauds, links, longreads, police, social media, stick to baseball, texas, 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

→ August 19, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/19/23.

I’ve got a piece filed to run on Monday or Tuesday at The Athletic, and another review coming up this week at Paste, but had nothing new up this week. My podcast will be back this week with an episode I recorded on Friday. So … sorry? But I’ll have a lot of content up in the next few days.

A few weeks ago, I appeared on the video podcast Shelf Stories to discuss ethics in board game media and questions of integrity and professionalism among folks who review games or otherwise cover the space, along with former Kotaku writer Luke Plunkett. It’s a long discussion but I greatly enjoyed it.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New York Times has a long adaptation from an upcoming book about how a California high school was torn apart by an Instagram account that posted racist memes about students there.

Nature discusses the impact of scientists leaving or cutting back on Twitter use, allowing anti-science and denialism to fester there – and that ran before Elon threatened, again, to terminate the site’s block function.

The Times also had a piece about three weeks ago looking into the continuing mystery over the origins of COVID-19, arguing that the public’s greater belief in the lab-leak conspiracy theory – any hypothesis of a lab leak remains stubbornly unsupported by evidence – is a function of distrust of authorities and the competition between narratives, not a question of facts.

By now you’ve likely read about Kansas cops raiding the offices of a small, local newspaper, after which the paper’s 98-year-old owner died. It turns out that the cops did so to try to prevent the paper from writing about a local restaurant owner’s DUI, which would have prohibited the woman, Kari Newell, from obtaining a liquor license. The county attorney has said there was insufficient evidence to support the warrant the cops obtained, and there’s now a complaint against the judge, Laura Viar, who signed it. The editorial boards of the Kansas City Star and Wichita Eagle co-published an editorial calling the raid “an intolerable overreach.”

Why did a Missouri judge grant a restraining order preventing the St. Louis Post-Dispatch from publishing details of an accused cop killer’s mental health evaluation? This seems like a First Amendment violation.

Meanwhile, Wisconsin State Senator Cory Tomczyk, a Republican, called a 13-year-old kid a homophobic slur at a county meeting in August of 2021, according to several people who witnessed it, but he’s trying to sue a local newspaper out of existence just for reporting on it.
I don’t know why this story has received so little attention: A 3-year-old girl who was trafficked by Texas state officials died while on a a so-called “migrant bus.” I couldn’t find articles on this in the Times (either one) or Washington Post, for example.

The Los Angeles Times looks at the people who actually lived near the nuclear test sites depicted as remote and unpopulated in Oppenheimer.

NPR summarizes some of the indoctrination awaiting Florida public school students as they return to the classroom this month.

A Montana judge ruled in favor of young climate-change activists who sued the state, arguing that Montana’s policy preventing state agencies from considering greenhouse gas emission potential when evaluating permits for fossil fuel development is unconstitutional. It’s largely symbolic, but could present a path for similar suits elsewhere.

The Baltimore Banner’s Kyle Goon tears apart Orioles failson/owner John Angelos’s bid for more state money along with a land grab around Camden Yards. Meanwhile, Orioles announcer Kevin Brown issued a statement nobody believes that tried to defuse reports that he was suspended for citing facts about the team’s past performance. In the Orioles’ best season in a decade, leave it to John Angelos to muck it up with this clownery.

A new state tax in Massachusetts that levies an extra 4% on incomes over a million dollars will raise $1 billion for FY2024, and the proceeds will pay for free school lunches for all kids in the state, among other things (I assume). Unfortunately, this article’s author confuses wealth with income, referring to “the state’s wealthiest residents.” Income and wealth are not the same thing, and taxing each is a very different process.

From last month, Katherine Miller wrote in the New York Times about the farcical No Labels party, which won’t reveal its funding sources and seems more interested in re-electing Donald Trump than pushing an actual new “centrist” platform (as if Democrats weren’t closer to the center than the progressive left anyway).

The Atlantic points out that asking why people keep moving to the Phoenix area ignores the broader questions of cheap energy and housing that drive it.

Board game news: The Kickstarter for Perch launched this week and is already about 250% funded.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, baseball, board game news, coronavirus, first amendment, florida, kansas, links, longreads, massachusetts, missouri, social media, stick to baseball, taxes, texas, wisconsin

→ August 12, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/12/23.

I’m back, in more ways than one – I took some PTO right after the deadline to go to Gen Con, get some downtime, and just generally focus on myself for once. I’ll be back at work on Monday, although my next article probably won’t run until later in the week.

I was quite busy leading up to the trade deadline. I started with my midseason re-ranking of the top 60 prospects in the minors. Then I started breaking down trades as they happened:

Plus a brief look at some of the teams that did the best and the worst at the deadline.

Meanwhile, I wrapped up everything I saw and played at Gen Con, including my top ten games of the convention (which saw a record 70,000 unique attendees), and reviewed the family cooperative game Miller Zoo.

I’ve had two great guests on the Keith Law Show from the music world – Susanna Hoffs, talking about her debut novel This Bird Has Flown and her new album The Deep End; and Joe Casey of Protomartyr, talking about their new album Formal Growth in the Desert and his beloved Tigers. You can listen & subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links, gathered over the last four weeks…

Longreads first: The best thing I’ve read in the last month was this lengthy New York Times story on how one family has dealt with the discovery that frontotemporal dementia, an inherited condition with no cure or treatment, is in their genes. It’s wonderfully written and centers the people without ever leering at or patronizing them.
The Washington Post looks at how a Saudi company is draining scarce water resources in Arizona.
The New Yorker profiled Sudan Archives, whose album Natural Brown Prom Queen was my #2 LP of 2022.
Ed Yong announced he’s leaving The Atlantic (not my employer), but he did file a long piece on the shattering effects of long COVID.
ProPublica continues to show how Harlan Crow bought himself a Supreme Court vote by treating Clarence Thomas to cruises on his yacht, securing Thomas’ support in cases that affected Crow’s tax bill.
Ohio voters rejected the state Republican party’s bid to make it harder for voters to pass constitutional amendments. That ballot question, which lost badly in the election this past Tuesday, was boosted by about $4 million from the U-Line company’s owners. If you own or work at a company that’s shipping any kind of goods, don’t buy your boxes and materials from U-Line. And if you get a package from anyone in a box made by U-Line, ask them to find another vendor.
Texas A&M suspended a professor for criticizing the state’s Lt. Governor, Dan Patrick (R). Which is the party of freedom and liberty? And which supports cancel culture?
The President of Stanford has resigned after an investigation found manipulated research in three papers he co-authored.
Also from the Post, a moving story about a missing persons case from 13 years ago that the reporter who covered it couldn’t shake, and what it meant when the criminal case was finally solved.
Cory Doctorow points out how Tesla used its proprietary, DRM-protected software to tell drivers their cars had longer ranges than they actually did.
Efforts to reduce the population of the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which spreads numerous diseases including malaria and dengue, may end up thwarted by climate change. Several groups have released mosquitos infected with the Wolbachia bacterium, which makes the mosquitos’ offspring nonviable, but that bacterium can’t survive when temperatures are regularly 95 degrees and above.
This still seems so hard to believe, but scientists at the Livermore lab have used lasers to start a fusion reaction that created more energy than it required, which, in theory, could solve the looming energy crisis. I’m old enough to remember the “cold fusion” hoax, though, so I’d like to see a lot more of this.
Scientific American looks at how the four-color map problem was solved via brute force.
Donanemab may finally offer a huge step forward in the treatment of Alzheimer’s, with trials showing it can reduce cognitive decline in early-stage patients.
RFK Jr’s conspiracy theory-laden campaign promises to make it easier for doctors to spread medical misinformation. Meanwhile, Sherri Tenpenny, who’s been pushing anti-vax garbage for probably twenty years now and claimed that COVID-19 vaccines would make people magnetic, had her medical license suspended by the state of Ohio for her failure to comply with an investigation.
Meanwhile, an independent reporter unveils who’s funding the COVID-19 misinformation outfit the Brownstone Institute.
This is almost a month old but it still holds up: Ron DeSantis has a Ron DeSantis problem.
Texas took over the Houston Independent School District and is now closing the libraries at 28 schools there to convert them into ~~jails~~ discipline centers.
WBEZ in Chicago published video showing Waukegan cops coercing a false confession from a 15-year-old.
Footage emerged in Los Angeles of a sheriff’s department deputy punching a mother who was holding her baby.
NPR examines the rising number of people without housing in this country and offers four reasons why we can’t solve this issue, although I think they ignored the reason that most voters won’t actually give up anything to help. Homelessness is someone else’s problem to way too many people.
As every media entity on earth tries to be cool by celebrating hip-hop’s 50^th birthday, the BBC notes several pioneers who’ve been “written out of (rap) history,” including the Last Poets, the Watts Brothers, and Gil Scott-Heron, the last of whom you might at least know as the author of the poem “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.”
San Diego’s Juniper and Ivy might be my favorite restaurant in the country, and I was just there again in April. They’ve switched to a prix fixe menu for August that may be temporary, although I wonder if this is a trial balloon of sorts. I’ll still go there any time I’m in the best city in the country.
I’m not a big Starbucks customer; I don’t care for their coffee, although they do have good tea, and they offer a decent place to sit and work for a bit while I’m on the road. I’m going to have to rethink that as long as they’re engaging in a massive, dirty war against their own employees’ attempts to assert their right to organize.
Board game news: The Kickstarter for Wizards & Co. is complete but you can still pre-order the game, which comes from the designers of games like Egizia, Coimbra, Lorenzo il Magnifico, and Alma Mater.
Mistwind, designed by Daryl Andrews and Adrian Adamescu (Sagrada), is already about six times past its funding goal on Kickstarter.
The fourth Iron Rail game, Age of Rail: South Africa, has just three days to go on its Kickstarter. I have to admit I was not a fan of Iberian Gauge, the second in the series.
The next game from Elizabeth Hargrave (Wingspan) is Undergrove, which I believe is going to Kickstarter this fall. You can sign up here for updates from Alderac, the publisher.
You can also sign up to be notified when the Kickstarter for Perch, an area-control game with a modular board, launches in a few weeks.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, arizona, coronavirus, links, longreads, ohio, physics, police, science, scotus, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines

→ July 16, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/16/23.

For subscribers to the Athletic, here’s an index to my draft coverage from this past week:

My pick-by-pick analysis for the first 39 selections
My AL team draft recaps
My NL team draft recaps
My post-draft Q&A
My final mock draft, if you’re curious

I also recapped the Futures Game and wrote a brief note on the call-up of Pirates’ right-hander Quinn Priester.

I had Joe Sheehan back on the podcast last week, before the draft, and then skipped this week to write all that stuff above. You can listen & subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I’m a little pressed for time so let’s get to the links:

Longreads first: Well, not quite a longread, but here’s the GQ article on David Zaslav that he pressured the publication to pull after it was published online.
ProPublica reports on how the EPA has banned the pesticide chlorpyrifos for food crops in the U.S. but worked against a global ban on the chemical.
Unfortunately, ProPublica continues to seriously screw up its coverage of the research on the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Did an elite private school in New York City drive a student to suicide by asking him to leave?
Yet another story of the increasing harm from online romance scams, this time about how they’re driving victims to attempt suicide.
Elie Mystal argues that SCOTUS’s affirmative action ruling kicks the door open to Jim Crow-style bigotry.
Even before RFK Jr. revealed himself as an antisemite and Sinophobe, he was pushing an old anti-vaccine lie about “saline placebos” as part of his denialist messaging.
Reason asks why so many soi-disant libertarians are backing RFK Jr.
Giant hog farms are an environmental and animal-welfare disaster. They also make horrendous neighbors, but recent laws and court rulings have favored these factory farms over individual homeowners’ rights.
This is from last August but a Pew Research survey found American right-wingers are absolutely more insane in their climate change denial than even right-wingers in other countries. Meanwhile, the planet may be hitting the climate change point of no return.
Half the police force in Golden Valley, Minnesota, quit after the town hired a Black police chief. Crime went down.
Florida’s various laws repressing educator speech may already be driving a brain drain out of the state.
And the state of Florida is also going after voter registration groups, threatening them with thousands of dollars in fines for helping citizens exercise their constitutional right.
Moms for Liberty is an extremist group and Republican politicians are lining up to court their support.
Elon helped spread a conspiracy theory that claimed an innocent 22-year-old college student was a federal agent posing as a neo-Nazi to infiltrate hate groups.
Elon appears to be accelerating the enshittification of Twitter.
Rep. Clay Higgins (LA-R) suggested that the government close public libraries and replace them with “church owned” libraries instead.
Sen. Josh Hawley (MO-R) shared a quote that he claimed was from Patrick Henry but actually came from a virulently antisemitic magazine.
The WGA strikers may have been wobbling, but an anonymous comment from a studio exec seems have to given their strike new energy.
A US labor judge ruled that Starbucks illegally shut down a unionized store in Ithaca, New York, and ordered the company to reopen it.
A Muslim student from a Delaware high school was arrested outside his graduation ceremony by University of Delaware police.
As Substack and other sites become festering holes of homophobia and transphobia, Medium came out with a statement in support of LGBTQ+ rights.
Conservative activists didn’t stop at abortion – now they’re targeting birth control.
Conservative activists didn’t stop at trans kids – now they’re trying to ban gender-affirming care for adults.
Archaeologists think they’ve found the hidden entrance to what the Zapotec civilization believed was a path to the underworld. Nobody needs another Indiana Jones film, thanks.
India has a large sugar industry, and now a native rum industry is emerging by distilling better-quality spirits and exploring the liquor’s flavor profiles.
The ice in your cocktail has a significant cost in climate impact, so some bartenders and cocktail bars are trying to reduce its use and waste.
GQ did actually publish a fascinating look at one of the world’s most prolific and weirdest art thieves.
Jen Ramos Eisen wrote about what it was like to be a survivor of intimate-partner abuse at Domingo Germán’s perfect game.
Kevin Johnson wrote why he, as a Black man, has chosen not to review Morgan Wallen’s concerts in St. Louis given Wallen’s past, free use of the n-word.
Know a student affected by book bans? They can sign up for free to get access to a huge library of such titles via the Seattle Public Library.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-semitism, antiscience, climate change, coronavirus, environment, florida, lgbt rights, links, longreads, rum, scotus, stick to baseball, unions, vaccines

→ July 1, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/30/23.

I posted my 2023 Mock Draft v3.0 this week, and as usual did a Q&A to take your questions on it. Going forward, I’ll have the last Big Board update later this upcoming week and then mock 4.0 on Saturday, the morning I fly to Seattle to cover the Futures Game and then the draft. I also did a just-for-fun piece on who I’d put on the All-Star rosters, and then I avoided the comments entirely. I was a lot more active in the comments on the other pieces, including my scouting blog on Jackson Holliday and Brady House. And I weighed in on Friday night on the two players going to Kansas City in the Aroldis Chapman trade.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Rebuilding Seattle, a midweight economic game with some polyomino tile-laying aspects, an imposing game on the table that plays pretty quickly and doesn’t have that many rules to learn.

And now, the links…

Longreads: The LA Times looks at solar farms in the deserts of the American southwest and the complex forces shaping their construction and spread, from environmentalists to monopoly utilities.
At The Intercept, Ilyse Hogue looks at the founding of the nationalist group The Federalist Society, which sparked the 40-year battle to end abortion access in the U.S.
The Atlantic profiles RFK Jr., calling him the first MAGA Democrat for his misinformation-filled anti-science platform, in a piece that, to rational readers, makes him look insane. I just hope reporters keep asking him which vaccines he deems safe.
Another U.S. government report concluded that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was not at the Wuhan lab before the pandemic began. The conspiracy theorists, including some authors who have profited by spreading the lab-link hoax, were not happy.
Speaking of RFK Jr., his drive to “debate” a scientist over vaccines is also misleading, because what he really wants is a platform to shout his views. Denialists are big fans of the Gish gallop, where you say so much that’s false in a short period of time that you drown your opponent, making rebuttals impossible.
You know who might hate RFK Jr. more than I do? Autistic people, whom he’s mocked and demonized for decades, spreading outdated and dangerous stereotypes about the neurodivergent.
Did a relative of yours send you one of those scaremongering stories about a new study showing that sucralose was “genotoxic” and causes cancer? Yeah, it’s not and it doesn’t. That study’s authors have misrepresented their data, and journalists who aren’t science literate – or choose not to be – ran with it.
All this anti-science and the associated distrust of public health comes at a substantial cost to society.
Striking reporters at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Business Insider have gone old school and started their own strike papers, which, like Defector, give people a look at what worker-owned publications might look like.
All that money the U.S. spent to go find the remains of the Titan submersible will come from you, me, and all other American taxpayers.
The BBC looks at Community Violence Interventions, which may have prevented one or more revenge shootings in Chicago quite recently. It’s a better, cheaper approach to violence reduction in cities than spending more on police, which has no impact on violent crime rates.
A 53-year-old man who grew up with anti-LGBTQ+ views and has come around decided to go sit on the sidewalk at the Denver Pride parade with a sign saying “Recovering Bigot. I Am Sorry! Free Hugs.” The Washington Post interviewed him as he described the positive, inclusive, and forgiving environment he found.
Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs (D) signed an executive order banning conversion therapy in the state, making it the 27^th to do so.
Did you hear about the imbroglio around New York City’s plans to force some of its pizzerias to clean up their ovens to reduce carbon emissions? That’s wrong. The plan isn’t new and the target is particulate emissions, not carbon dioxide, which should resonate with everyone who’s been in the path of wildfire smoke this summer.
Florida Governor and Presidential candidate Ron DeSantis (R-) used Texas taxpayer resources on a recent campaign trip there.
DeSantis keeps losing – in court, as a judge blocked the state’s ban on drag shows as likely unconstitutional.
Groomer alert: A Texas pastor convicted of sexually assaulting 14 girls was released from prison early for good behavior. But drag shows!
And then we have Justice Sam Alito, who took a trip to Rome paid for by a group that has filed briefs before SCOTUS, whose wife leased land to an oil and gas firm while the Department of Justice was fighting the EPA before the Court, and, of course, when he received questions from ProPublica about some of these improprieties, he ran to the Wall Street Journalandwrote a whiny pre-buttal instead of answering.
Keith Law Show guest Jason Kander, author of Invisible Storm: A Soldier’s Memoir of Politics and PTSD, is one of four veterans dealing with the disorder whose stories make up the new film Here. Is. Better. The New York Times gave it a positive review.
The Kingdom of Jordan wants to build a brand-new capital city in the Black Desert, where there is no infrastructure, no natural water access, nothing at all to sustain a city and its population.
Modern hunter-gatherers have a thriving gut microbiome compared to those of us who sit in a desk chair and write about baseball prospects and board games.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, arizona, crime, florida, frauds, health, jordan, lgbt rights, links, longreads, police, scotus, stick to baseball, unions, vaccines

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