vaccines — Page 7

→ July 17, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/17/21.

All of my draft coverage is now up for subscribers to The Athletic, including my team-by-team draft recaps, posted by division:
• AL East
• AL Central
• AL West
• NL East
• NL Central
• NL West

I also recapped the Futures Game with notes on prospects who stood out or who I saw for the first time. I held a Klawchat on Friday.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: A new preprint on the origins of SARS-CoV-2 states that “there is substantial body of scientific evidence supporting a zoonotic origin for SARS-CoV-2” and “there is currently no evidence that SARS-CoV-2 has a laboratory origin.” This failed hypothesis isn’t just the province of the right-wing; the anti-GMO movement has also latched on to it.
A conservative activist invented the nontroversy over critical race theory. If someone tells you CRT is bad, just ask them to name an author who’s written about it, or a book on the subject. Like this Alabama columnist did to a state lawmaker.
This ran a few weeks ago, during my hiatus from these posts, but former sportswriter Kat O’Brien detailed how she was raped by a major league ballplayer while she was on the Rangers beat.
Influencers who peddle anti-vaccine misinformation are raking in cash from their efforts. It’s almost entirely a grift, with a societal cost measured in bodies.
The Delta variant’s threat explained in three simple points by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ed Yong.
The “mystery Chinese seeds” that made the rounds of the news last summer? Probably just a brushing scam.
Why don’t we have a vaccine against Lyme disease? It’s complicated. Anti-vaxxers, a dubious claim about side effects, and the regional nature of the disease all contributed.
A nurse in Louisiana who posted anti-vaccine views and misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines has, in fact, died of COVID-19.
Poynter spoke to Walter Hussman, the conservative megadonor to UNC who led the school to deny Nikole Hannah-Jones tenure and ultimately cost them her services. He doesn’t think he did anything wrong, but also disputes some of the story that’s been publicly reported.
MEL magazine is coming back.
A power plant in upstate New York is primarily powering a bitcoin mining operation, warming Seneca Lake and polluting the air (as well as contributing to climate change). I’m not sure what the solution is – taxing bitcoin is the most rational economic move, but tricky because of its nature – but cryptocurrencies are an environmental threat that demands some sort of government action.
Why did three people in different states contract the often-fatal tropical bacterial disease melioidosis?
The state of Alabama took a man’s gun after he shot his wife. Nine months later, they gave it back to him, despite a protection order, and he used it to kill her. I’m sure the fact that he was a cop had nothing to do with this.
Men read far fewer books by women than women do. This has real-world implications for the way readers’ minds work.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, bitcoin, links, longreads, north carolina, racism, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ June 5, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/5/21.

For subscribers to the Athletic this week, I did my annual redraft column, looking back at the best players from the 2011 draft class, as well as the first-rounders who didn’t work out.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Umbra Via, an afterlife-themed game with route-building elements that just did not click for us at all.

My free email newsletter has returned, with my first edition in over a month, where I explain why I just haven’t felt much like writing lately – an unusual feeling for me.

My second book, The Inside Game, is now out in paperback, and I don’t think I’m just being a buy-my-book marketing guy when I suggest that it would make a great Father’s Day gift. Midtown Scholar still has a few signed copies of the paperback available, and you can buy the book via bookshop or amazon or anywhere else you buy books.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: America has a drinking problem. Well, I don’t, but the rest of you do.

There’s growing evidence that UNC’s decision not to grant tenure to Nikole Hannah Jones was driven by the interference and objections of mega-donor Walter Hussman, Jr, for whom their journalism school is named. In one email to a board member, he wrote that “he was concerned about how Hannah-Jones’s work could clash with his vision for the school and what it teaches.”

These “leaked” intelligence stories are often based on dubious sources that the authors fail to explain or even question. Indeed, the now widely-spread claim that COVID-19 leaked from a Wuhan lab is still free of actual evidence to support it.

A group of unvaccinated staffers at a Houston hospital have filed a lawsuit against the hospital’s vaccine mandate, aided by a Houston lawyer with a long history of deranged legal actions including homophobic and anti-trans moves. I can’t speak to the legal issues here, but the plaintiff’s claims (e.g., that the vaccine can alter your DNA, which, come the fuck on already) are crazy, and if a hospital can’t mandate vaccinations, we are going to have to live with the pandemic forever.

Sharyl Attkisson, a faux-journalist who has spread anti-vaccine disinformation for years and made the news in 2020 when she tried to air an interview with a conspiracy theorist who claimed COVID-19 was the product of a secret a government plan, is threatening to sue Dr. Peter Hotez, author of Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism, for defamation, a baseless threat aimed at silencing one of the most vocal and erudite advocates of vaccination.

A new editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine explores incentives for increasing COVID-19 vaccine uptake, including mandating it in health care settings, requiring it for access to events that “involve close person-to-person contact,” and raising life and health insurance premiums for people who refuse to get the shot. I’m a big fan of the last approach: people respond strongly to financial incentives, and those of us who have gotten vaccinated shouldn’t be subsidizing those who won’t.

We loved Mare of Easttown, especially since we caught many of the local references, living just a mile or two away from the border between Delaware (state) and Delaware County. The show’s depictions of the residents of DelCo, however, isn’t very accurate. That county has historically been quite red, with deep racial tensions going back to the Civil War.

Texas, whose tourism board has adopted the slogan Where The Cruelty Is The Point™, is trying to pass voting restrictions that will disproportionately disenfranchise voters of color. Because that too is the point.

Arizona has wasted a bunch of taxpayer money “updating” its execution systems, including buying the ingredients to make the same gas the Nazis used to kill Jews, Roma, and other victims in concentration camps. You know what would be cheaper, and also less murdery? Ending capital punishment.

Democrats in the House and Senate are showing no sense of urgency in the face of attempts to undermine our democracy by the January 6^th insurrectionists and their enablers in Congress. Meanwhile, over 100 scholars in political science and the law signed a letter stating their concerns over threats to our democracy and lack of national voting and election standards.

Climate change is an emergency, so why can’t journalists call it one?

The best reaction I saw this week to the French Open telling Naomi Osaka that she can go fuck herself was from the Guardian‘s Jonathan Liew, arguing that we in sports media are not the good guys here, and that press conferences are problematic. Indeed, the day after Osaka withdrew, some asshole reporter asked 17-year-old Coco Gauff an insulting, racist question that should have gotten his credentials yanked. (Apparently that only happens if you dial into a press conference from a supermarket.) Scottish tennis coach Judy Murray, mother of two tennis champions in Andy and Jamie Murray, supported Osaka and talked about the absurd demands of the press on players.

Stanford Law toyed with preventing a student from graduating because he’d distributed a flier mocking the Federalist Society, spawning a complaint from campus snowflakes – er, conservatives. The school eventually dropped its investigation on free speech grounds.

New York Times health writer Tara Parker-Pope writes about four lessons we’ve learned in the last year for your anxious brain. Strengthening your connections seems like an especially valuable one in a year when most connections have become slack (pun intended).

Monster Couch announced that they’re releasing the iOS adaptation of Wingspan on July 21st, with pre-orders now open.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: academia, anti-science, anxiety, arizona, board game news, climate change, coronavirus, links, longreads, pennsyvlania, Sports, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ May 29, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/29/21.

I had two posts this week for subscribers to the Athletic: my first mock draft of 2021, and a scouting post on high school pitchers Chase Petty and Frank Mozzicato, both of whom will be day-one picks. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste last week, I reviewed Cryo, a really engaging new worker-placement game from the designers of Manhattan Project: Energy Empire, where resources are always limited and you have to build your board to maximize your resource collection.

If you’d like to buy The Inside Game and support my board game habit, Midtown Scholar has a few signed copies still available. You can also buy it from any of the indie stores in this twitter thread, all of whom at least had the book in stock earlier this month. If none of those works, you can find it on Bookshop.org and at Amazon.

And now, the links:

Longreads first: This New York Times story on Andrea Smith, a professor at UC Riverside who has been falsely claiming Cherokee ancestry for at least 20 years, is one of the best-reported pieces I’ve read this year – and maddening.
The Berglas Effect, an amazing card trick created by the magician David Berglas, still fascinates and mystifies even other magicians decades after he invented it.
A New York law firm is behind most of the lawsuits against workplace vaccine mandates and other efforts driven by anti-vaccine grifter Del Bigtree.
From April 2019: Matthew Salesses wrote about grief and how it distorts our sense of time after the passing of his wife.
A former employee of the Chaplain’s Office at a small ‘elite’ college writes of the disconnect between progressive values and western religions on campus. I’m not sure the piece led mew to the conclusion the author intended.
Rosella, a NYC restaurant that only serves sustainable fish, might be the future of sushi. I’ve wondered for at least a decade now how there could possibly be enough fish in the oceans to keep all of these sushi places – they’re everywhere in the country, in the suburbs now, far too many for a dwindling supply of fish – in business.
Delaware Democrats have introduced a bill to make it harder for police to use force against citizens, and to make any materials in misconduct complaints and hearings public. The bill would also require that authorities collect data on the races of all people involved when officers use deadly force. No Delaware cop has been charged for shooting a citizen in at least the last 16 years.
The United States has a strong history of ethnic cleansing of its own. Teen Vogue looks at how our government used the 1830 Indian Removal Act to displace hundreds of thousands of Native Americans, with thousands dying as a result.
The Associated Press fired a young writer, Emily Wilder, after conservative trolls complained about her social media activity from when she was in college (before she was hired), but AP employees have mutinied and their leadership is on the defensive.
Texas will allow the unlicensed carrying of handguns. We won’t just see a rise in suicides there if this lasts, but I would bet we’ll see a surge in random shootings in situations like this road rage incident in DC.
Florida Republicans are ripping power away from local authorities to try to keep the state red.
Oklahoma Republicans are pushing a bill that would ban the teaching of critical race theory in public schools, and one community college has already cancelled such a class before the bill has even become law. If you live in Oklahoma, anywhere, call your state rep and Senator – no matter how right-wing crazy they might be – and tell them you oppose this bill.
Pennsylvania Republicans, meanwhile, have introduced three bills aimed at punishing women who have miscarriages or try to get abortions. The Democratic Governor has promised to veto them.
An Islamophobic ‘vlogger’ in Canada was arrested for punching a store employee and trying to make a citizen’s arrest.
COVID-19 isn’t spread through fomite transmission (by touching a surface that an infected person touched), so it’s time to end the hygiene theater.
A shady advertising agency offered to pay a bunch of French social media influencers to spread fake news against the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines.
A new coronavirus – not a variant, but a different virus from SARS-CoV-2 – is making people sick in Malaysia, and it appears to have jumped species from dogs.
Seth Rogen had some smart comments on comedians and so-called ‘cancel culture.’
Eric Carle, whose book The Mixed-Up Chameleon was the first book I ever read by myself, died this week at age 91.
Board game news: Heroes of Barcadia, a “pun-tastic” dungeon crawler, is coming soon to Kickstarter.
Capstone Games announced the new Kiesling/Kramer title Savannah Park, available at Gen Con and Origins in September.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, coronavirus, delaware, florida, links, longreads, oklahoma, pennsylvania, social media, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ May 16, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/16/21.

I’ve had three posts up in the last week for subscribers to the Athletic: my ranking of the top 100 prospects for this year’s MLB Draft; a special Q&A about that ranking; and a post on my trip to see Vanderbilt and Alabama, when Jack Leiter was a very late scratch for his start. He did pitch yesterday and his velocity was completely normal.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Flourish, a new, quick-playing card game from the designers of Everdell.

For more of me, you can subscribe to my free email newsletter, which will return this week (tomorrow, I hope).

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Dyatlov Pass mystery may have a very mundane, anti-climactic solution.
The headline here doesn’t really summarize the article, but musicians are organizing to try to fight the vice grip Spotify has on the industry.
Policymakers ignored the United States’ near-total lack of child care infrastructure until the pandemic exposed this massive economic weakness. If you want to grow the economy, you need affordable child care.
The CDC’s statistic that “less than 10 percent” of COVID-19 transmission occurred outdoors is probably wildly misleading. The actual rate might be 1/100^th of that.
Adolescents can finally get their COVID-19 vaccines! My daughter got her first dose less than 24 hours after the approval came through. Her only complaint afterwards was two days of a sore shoulder. Go get your kids the shot.
Facebook deplatformed an Ohio-based anti-vaccine group, and then did the same to Erin Elizabeth, a major anti-vaccine wacko who is partners with longtime quack Joseph Mercola.
Activists opposed to syringe exchanges are just bizarre, but their work may lead a major success story in Indiana, which helped end an HIV outbreak, to close.
If the West Antarctic Ice Shelf collapses, the rise in sea levels will be 30% higher than originally thought.
The Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth may be misusing data from students’ electronic devices to accuse those students of cheating.
Frank Abagnale authored a best-selling memoir that became the movie Catch Me If You Can. It turns out that his story is probably a big hoax.
The cicadas are coming, so of course some folks suggest eating them.
Former UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s defence against a charge of improper lobbying is that he was undone by autocorrect. The lede here is spectacular.
Bari Weiss really took off her mask in a substack post that justified the killing of Palestinian children.
Two good op eds from the Washington Post this week on our current quaqmire: how two men named Joe (Biden & Manchin) hold the future of our democracy in their hands, and why democracy and cults of personality don’t mix.
I know Jonathan Chait’s reputation is … not great, perhaps, but I agree with him on the subject of Rep. Liz Cheney. She can be wrong on many issues, but she is right on Trumpism and the direction of the GOP, and we can acknowledge or even praise the latter without somehow tacitly supporting the former.
The bloated U.S. military budget isn’t just wasteful – its consequences disproportionately harm people of color.
Board game news: Board & Dice, publisher of some of really heavy Euro titles like Teotihuacan and Tekhenu, explained how and under what terms they’re continuing their relationship with designer Daniele Tascini, who made some insensitive comments on race last year. I think it’s a good blueprint for working with someone who might be too quickly ‘cancelled.’

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, climate change, coronavirus, hoaxes, longreads, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ May 8, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball , 5/8/21.

I got back out to a minor league game last week and wrote about the prospects I saw for subscribers to the Athletic, focusing on Jackson Rutledge (Nationals) and Grayson Rodriguez (Orioles). I’ll have a post up Sunday or Monday on Kumar Rocker and Jack Leiter, followed by a ranking of draft prospects later in the week.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the new card game Flourish, co-designed by the person behind the outstanding 2018 game Everdell.

On the Keith Law Show this week, my guest was Louisville catcher Henry Davis, one of the top prospects in this year’s MLB Draft; I also answered a number of your questions, mostly about the draft but also one about my three-legged cat. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify. I also appeared on the Athletic Baseball Show on Friday, which will be my regular slot for most of the year.

For more of me, you can subscribe to my free email newsletter

And now, the links…

Longreads first: And I do mean long, as this piece from WIRED‘s June 2020 issue – which I don’t remember seeing last year – on the rise, fall, and rise again of white-hat hacker Marcus Hutchins, who played the biggest role in stopping the WannaCry ransomware worm, is exceptionally well-written and well-reported, and it runs nearly 15,000 words.
Almost as good is this New Yorker profile of legendary yet reclusive Simpsons writer turned self-published detective novelist John Swartzwelder, who is responsible for “Homer At the Bat” and one of my favorite SNL sketches, “Those Unlucky Andersons.”
A small number of wealthy donors to Trump now wield outsized influence within the GOP – and potentially over our government, too – just by virtue of their seven- and eight-figure donations.
Four L.A. cops coerced a 13-year-old boy into confessing to a crime he didn’t commit. A court ruled they get qualified immunity on some of the potential charges against them, because they didn’t coerce him for a long enough period of time. What if – stay with me here – we just ended qualified immunity for cops?
The controversy over the University of Texas’ racist fight song continues, as a perfectly normal person brought a gun to a Zoom discussion on the topic. I assume he shot his computer to own the libs.
Anti-diversity activists won big in a school board election outside Dallas, because, you know, Texas has no history of racism you might want to teach to schoolchildren.
Teachers in Rockwood, Missouri, are now facing threats and harassment over that school district’s diversity curriculum. In a state where you stand on your porch with semi-automatic weapons to face peaceful protesters, this fits.
An Idaho legislative intern alleges her boss, Aaron von Ehlinger (who has since resigned in disgrace), raped her, and in return, several other members of the Idaho legislature – all Republicans – doxxed her, harassed her, and tried to get her charged with filing a false report. Two of those other legislators are women.
It’s time to start shunning the vaccine hesitant, says USA Today editorial writer and former federal prosecutor Michael Stern.
Centner Academy, a private primary school in Miami, has become a “beacon” for anti-vaxxers, as the school is turning away vaccinated students and staff because of the bogus idea that they can “shed” the virus. (The vaccine does not contain the live SARS-CoV-2 virus, and thus vaccinated people have nothing to “shed.” This is sheer ignorance.) Linda Centner, who founded and runs the school, has espoused all sorts of anti-science conspiracy theories, including anti-mask views and baseless fears of 5G cell towers.
Meanwhile, one former anti-vaccine influencer in Texas got her COVID-19 shot and is talking about it publicly.
Is some anti-vaccine loon in your life claiming there are hundreds of reports of adverse reactions to the COVID-19 jab? Well, here’s a thread explaining why those reports, from VAERS, don’t actually mean any of these reactions were to the vaccines – if they happened at all.
Is there some hope on the horizon for a vaccine against HIV? It’s still a ways off, but a new breakthrough at least means there’s the possibility of such an inoculation, although retroviruses are extremely difficult to treat with antivirals or prevent via vaccines.
Regardless of your opinion of the filibuster, it’s not the thing preventing Democrats from enacting major legislation right now.
Speaking of which, President Biden wants to create a family leave plan that would put the U.S. in line with other developed nations. We are far worse off than our peers in Europe and parts of eastern Asia when it comes to quality-of-life laws.
Hold your surprise, but white authorities in Arkansas executed a Black man who may very well have been innocent. The death penalty is barbaric and should be abolished everywhere.
A Black homeowner in Indianapolis found the appraisal of her house went up for $100,000 when she removed items that might have hinted at her race, and had a white friend pose as the homeowner.
An Israeli man visiting relatives in Baltimore was shot and killed, possibly because he was Jewish.
Eleven Madison Park, one of the most acclaimed (and expensive) restaurants in the world, will reopen with a completely plant-based menu, at $335 a person.
Signal tried to place ads on Instagram showing just how much the social-media site (owned by Facebook) knows about you, but Instagram banned the ads instead.
This BBC story of a stranded sailor who couldn’t leave his ship for four years is fascinating and a little horrifying.
Stars, they’re just like us! Kate Winslet loves Wawa. As a non-native who has been converted to the cult of Wawa, I say to Kate, welcome.
Google Doodle celebrated Teacher Appreciation Week by animating some StoryCorps stories of teachers who made a difference in specific students’ lives, such as this wonderful one from Dr. William Lynn Weaver.
The Guardian explains why the Carters looked so tiny in that photo with the Bidens. (I mean Pres. Jimmy and Rosalynn, not Jay-Z and Beyoncé.)
Board game news: The Kickstarter for Floodgate Games’ upcoming title Vivid Memories has 13 days to go.
Michael Luu, designer of the upcoming cooperative game Mission ISS, wrote a designer diary about his experience.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, baltimore, board game news, dark money, links, missouri, social media, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines, vegan

→ May 1, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/1/21.

I had two posts for subscribers to The Athletic this week, one on how the Rockies’ next GM might start to turn the franchise around, and a draft scouting notebook looking at several day-one candidates, led by Fordham lefty Matt Mikulski.

On the Keith Law Show this week, my guest was MLB Pipeline’s Jim Callis, talking about this year’s MLB draft class. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify. I also appeared on the Athletic Baseball Show on Friday, which will be my regular slot for most of the year.

For more of me, you can subscribe to my free email newsletter.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: One of the many victims of disgraced writer/teacher Blake Bailey came forward to tell how Bailey manipulated and raped her.
Alameda police killed Mario Gonzalez, who was unarmed, by pinning him to the ground for five minutes during an arrest on April 19^th. This is a systemic issue.
CloseCallSports has the best explanation of the obstruction call in Milwaukee that I tried to explain on Twitter, only to have my replies explode with people who didn’t like the call. An umpire can make a call that is technically correct – and Marty Foster’s was, indeed, justified by the rules – but so rarely made that we assume it’s wrong.
Tony LaRussa’s animal welfare nonprofit is plagued by claims of racism and a toxic workplace environment. Between this and his multiple DUIs, LaRussa’s hiring by the White Sox this offseason looks even more suspect. Over at Sox Machine, Jim Margalus talks about some of what LaRussa is doing wrong on the field, too.
West Virginia Governor Jim Justice (R) announced that residents aged 16-35 who get the COVID-19 vaccine will get a $100 savings bond, an ingenious use of the stimulus funding the state has received.
After years of misguided opposition, Florida officials will finally release genetically modified Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, the kind responsible for spreading the Zika virus, dengue fever, chikungunya, and more, to stop the insects’ offspring from surviving into adulthood.
Anti-vaxxers are adopting yellow stars and other symbols of the Holocaust, in case you were wondering how low they would sink in their war against science and rationality.
The official Twitter account for the Auschwitz Museum is pushing revisionist history that absolves Poles of their role in the Holocaust (Haaretz, $ required).
PBS has a new series coming up on May 11^th called Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer, about the extraordinary success of vaccines and other major medical advances that helped double our life expectancy in a century.
Facebook claimed they removed the “Disinformation Dozen,” twelve people responsible for the vast majority of anti-vaccine lies on the internet, but ten of them are still active on the site.
Joe Rogan told his millions of young listeners not to get a COVID-19 vaccine. That is dangerously irresponsible, and he shouldn’t be issuing medical advice.
Julie DiCaro reminds us not to listen to people with obvious conflicts of interest – agents, lawyers, fans – when they try to downplay charges of sexual assault against popular athletes.
Fox News is struggling to “pick a side” when their culture-war takes conflict with the facts, as with two recent manufactured outrage stories that turned out to be false – that Biden would ban or limit meat consumption, and that migrant children were being given Kamala Harris’ book.
The BBC asks why the west neglects a potential superfood source that’s efficient, sustainable, and climate-friendly: insects.
Epicurious revealed that they won’t publish any new beef recipes, part of an effort to encourage more sustainable eating. They stopped publishing those a year ago and they say nobody has noticed.
Conservative writer Gary Abernathy argues that all conservatives should support reparations to Black Americans.
From the National Review, the “Fairness Doctrine” is not the answer to Tucker Carlson’s misinformation.
University researchers appear to have moved and possibly lost the remains of two children killed in Philadelphia’s bombing of its own citizens in 1985, part of a government assault on the MOVE cult.
Deforestation in the amazon has soared under the reactionary Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, devastating native homelands and reducing one of the world’s most important carbon dioxide sinks.
A teacher in Washington State’s Issaquah School District is on administrative leave after parents objected to a poem she used in her anti-racism curriculum
Ashley Feinberg may have found JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon’s secret Instagram and Twitter accounts. Dimon has been accused of misleading investors in the “London Whale” investment disaster and of overseeing a culture of discrimination at his banks.
Board game news: Capstone Games is reissuing the Uwe Rosenberg worker-placement classic Glass Road, and pre-orders are open now at $10 off.
Renegade has a Kickstarter going for the ‘epic mad scientist’ game My Father’s Work, which they say will only be sold through their website once it’s released.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, baseball, board game news, coronavirus, links, longreads, police, racism, stick to baseball, sustainability, vaccines

→ April 17, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/17/21.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I ranked the top 50 prospects in this year’s MLB draft class, a list I’ll expand to 100 in early May. I had to skip the chat this week due to travel and the two-hour round trip on Thursday to get my first vaccine dose (Pfizer). I’ll do one this week.

On The Keith Law Show this week, I had our Padres beat writer Dennis Lin on to talk about Musgrove’s no-hitter, Tatis Jr.’s injury, and more Padres/NL West news. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify. I also co-host our daily baseball show every Friday, and on this week’s episode we talked about Rodon and a number of pitchers who appear to be on the rise.

I appeared on the Huddle Up with Gus Frerotte podcast to talk about my book The Inside Game, now out in paperback. I also spoke to Chris Phillips, Associate Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon CMU, about The Inside Game in a half-hour conversation for the CMU Alumni Association.

If you’d like to buy The Inside Game and support my board game habit, Midtown Scholar has several signed copies available. You can also buy it from any of the indie stores in this twitter thread, all of whom at least had the book in stock earlier this month. If none of those works, you can find it on Bookshop.org and at Amazon.

For more of me, you can subscribe to my free email newsletter.

Longreads first: This New Yorker post on a suicide cluster at a small Midwestern college, and whether one person who knew all the victims was somehow responsible, is extremely well-reported and written.

The Burmese genocide of the Rohingya is a massive humanitarian tragedy, but there are other consequences to ethnic cleansing, such as the loss of native foodways.

Does urban planning produce ‘bad cities?’ Is there a third way to balance the need for affordable housing and the desire for certain aesthetics in design?

Earlier this month, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins tried to claim that acceptance of transgender people means we should accept so-called “trans-racial” people (like Rachel Dolezal). Here’s a rational response to that sort of argument.

Polygon has a column that tries to explain why the Muppets have had a hard time catching on in recent years.

Why did a Queens judge dismiss a DWI charge and seal the case against a Bronx ADA who crashed her car into a line of parked vehicles? Does everyone charged with a DWI get that treatment in NYC?

Jorge Cham, aka Phd Comics, has a great comic strip on the recent discovery of an anomaly in the behavior of muons that might break the Standard Model of physics once and for all (but might not).

Could the pandemic lead to a massive drain of women working in the sciences? There’s a growing body of evidence that the pandemic and associated lockdowns have had a disproportionate impact on working women.

This is from a couple of weeks ago, but Islamist insurgents took over a town right near a Total natural gas installation in Mozambique – the largest foreign investment project in Africa to date.

I’m so sad that last week’s White Lives Matter rallies were a giant flop. (I’m not actually sad about it.)

A virologist who got the Johnson & Johnson shot explains why she’s not losing any sleep over the federal investigation into a very rare blood clot disorder that might (but might not) be caused by the vaccine.

The Atlantic’s tremendous coverage of the pandemic continues with Derek Thompson’s article calling for an end to hygiene theater now that the CDC has acknowledged that SARS-CoV-2 spreads through the air, not surfaces. My daughter’s school closes one day a week for “deep cleaning” that, it turns out, is unnecessary.

An immunological process called imprinting could make second- and third-generation COVID-19 vaccines less effective, although there are reasons why that may not be true for this particular virus.

Media Matters’ Bobby Lewis spent a month watching and documenting the racism and lunacy aired daily on One America News Network. If you have cable, you’re probably paying something for OANN whether you know it or not.

The Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law has released a brief on the spate of anti-trans bills, especially those banning gender-affirming medical care, appearing in state legislatures across the country. These bills, if passed and upheld, are going to result in unspeakable harm to trans kids, including a more suicides, but they’re sold to gullible (or bigoted) voters under the guise of preventing “child abuse.”

Mississippi passed an anti-trans law and the NCAA might pull sports championships from the state as a result. Hard for me to believe the NCAA is on the right side of a progressive issue, but they are.

One of the officers who shot Breonna Taylor got a book deal from a small right-wing press; Simon & Schuster bowed to public pressure and declined to distribute it. I see a thorny issue here – we may all believe he committed multiple crimes, but without a conviction (he’s still on the police force in Louisville), I’m not sure what legal recourse there would be to stop him from writing about what happened, as vile as it seems.
Florida plans an “audit” of a state regulation that prohibited parents of children who suffered brain damage in childbirth from suing.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, blm, coronavirus, longreads, new york city, racism, stick to baseball, trans rights, vaccines

→ March 27, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/26/21.

I had one filler post for subscribers to the Athletic this past week to tide us over until we get to my predictions this upcoming week, looking at some possible trends in player development to watch for as games begin next week. I also held a Klawchat on Friday.

At Paste, I reviewed Renature, the latest collaborative design from Wolfgang Kramer and Michael Kiesling, who’ve worked together before on Torres and Tikal. This game has a good bit more oomph to it – it’s less abstract and definitely more fun.

On the Keith Law Show this week I spoke to Julie DiCaro about her new book Sidelined: Sports, Culture, and Being a Woman in America and how sports leagues can do better on matters of gender, race, harassment, and domestic violence. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify.

For more of me, you can subscribe to my free email newsletter. Also, you can still buy The Inside Gameand Smart Baseball anywhere you buy books; the paperback edition of The Inside Game will be out on April 6^th, just 10 days from now.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: A professor in the United Kingdom who has spent about a decade trying to defend the Assad regime in the western media thought he was corresponding with a Russian spy, but was actually talking to someone at the very group he was trying to discredit. Prof. Paul McKeigue is also a COVID-19 hoaxer, signatory to the Great Barrington anti-lockdown manifesto, and close pal of a 9/11 hoaxer.
ProPublica looks at the disastrous state of Maine’s public defense system; the state has no public defenders and farms the work out to private attorneys, many of whom are ineligible to try the cases they’re assigned.
Just twelve people are responsible for two-thirds of the anti-vaccine content found on social media. The Center for Countering Digital Hate has issued a report on the dirty dozen and is urging social media platforms to crack down before it’s too late. Just days before they released, a dozen state attorney generals told Facebook and Twitter to do a better job against this misinformation. I’m pleased to see our Attorney General here in Delaware, Kathy Jennings, was one of the signatories.
It’s been lost in the news for understandable reasons, but Aurora, Colorado, police forced an innocent Black family, including a six-year-old girl, to lie on the pavement while the cops had guns drawn – and they’re upset at the angry response to their actions.
Eric Garcia writes in the Washington Post of the rightward shift of some Latino men, including his father, an avid Trump supporter. It’s the most vulnerable demographic in the Democratic coalition right now.
Also in the Post, a principal in Indio, California, has had to go looking for students missing since the city’s high school closed to in-person instruction last March.
USA Today, the same newspaper that rushed to have Bob Nightengale provide a fresh coat of whitewash to Thom Brennaman after the latter uttered a vile homophobic slur on air, fired For the Win’s Hemal Jhaveri for tweeting about mass shooters mostly being white men.
The story of cascatelli, a new pasta shape designed by podcast host Dan Pashman, is an amazing only-in-2021 kind of tale where a guy who thinks (correctly) that spaghetti (the shape) is boring and nonfunctional can end up engineering a brand new shape and partnering with a manufacturer to produce it.
The great Dr. Peter Hotez debunks five myths about coronavirus vaccines in a piece he co-wrote with Dr. Maria Elena Bottazzi in the Washington Post.
Zoom earned $660 million in pre-tax profits in 2020 and paid $0 in taxes on it. It might be cheaper to eliminate the corporate income tax entirely – saving the costs to collect it and freeing up productive capacity dedicated to it – than to perpetuate a system where this happens over and over.
North Carolina sends six-year-olds to court, as in the case of a boy who faced a hearing for picking a tulip from a neighbor’s yard.
Arkansas passed a law that would allow doctors to deny medical care to LGBTQ+ patients. The absolute obsession many Republicans have with gay and trans Americans is pathological.
West Virginia is trying to ban needle exchanges in the midst of the country’s worst HIV outbreak.
Here in Delaware, a former police officer who shot an unarmed teen and escaped criminal charges has been indicted for lying about the incident and tampering with evidence.
Illinois State Rep. LaShawn Ford resigned from the board of Loretto Hospital to protest the board’s decision not to suspend or fire the CEO and COO who distributed vaccines to ineligible recipients at Trump Tower and other wealthy enclaves.
A Missouri Republican state senator has been charged with fraudulently billing the government for over $900,000 in COVID-19 claims, including some services that were never provided.
Dr. Emily Oster caused a stir recently with a column that had a headline saying your unvaccinated kids were comparable to their vaccinated grandparents. Dr. Tara C. Smith explained why this is misleading and possibly dangerous, one of the critiques that led Dr. Oster to correct herself a day or two later.
Naia Cucukov, the Executive Producer of the acclaimed 2020 Netflix adaptation of The Babysitter’s Club, wrote a powerful thread in the wake of the shootings of Asians by a deranged white man in Atlanta last week. (Naia is also a personal friend.)
Matt Leacock, designer of Pandemic and its various offshoots (as well as Era: Medieval Age), is working on a new game about combating climate change.
A 25-year-old mystery about the sudden deaths of bald eagles in some parts of the south has now been solved. Humans were responsible, of course, but perhaps not in a way you’d expect.
GQ interviews the priceless Sir Ian McKellen on his remarkable career, including an upcoming film shot entirely on iPhones in London’s mostly empty streets.
The New York Times’ Bret Stephens, known for so many things but especially (to me) for his climate change denialism, is the editor of a new journal focusing on “Jews and social justice.”
The BBC profiles Jang Yeong-Jin, the only openly gay North Korean defector. Jang crawled across the DMZ to reach South Korea in 1997, and now, at 62, is about to get married.
The New Republic argues that the media are manufacturing a crisis at the border to try to prove that they’re balanced in their coverage of President Biden.
Cymru am byth.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, arkansas, coronavirus, links, longreads, maine, north carolina, racism, science, social media, vaccines, west virginia

→ March 15, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/15/21.

I have one new post up for subscribers to the Athletic, looking at prospects I can’t wait to see when minor league games resume. I also held a Klawchat last week.

On the Keith Law Show last week, I spoke with Cleveland right-hander Triston McKenzie about his development as a pitcher and his experiences as a Black ballplayer. On this week’s episode, I spoke with film critic Tim Grierson about his new book This is How You Make a Movie, the Oscar nominations, and his Cardinal fandom. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the new game Holi: Festival of Colors, played on a 3-D board that’s immediately striking and that lends itself to some novel strategies, with almost no random elements at all.

For more of my writing, you can subscribe to my free email newsletter. Also, you can still buy The Inside Game and Smart Baseball anywhere you buy books; the paperback edition of The Inside Game will be out in April.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: ProPublica’s look at some of the mental health costs borne by teenagers during the pandemic is a long, grueling read, and while it might go a little too far in blaming the lockdown for teen suicides, it’s as balanced a look at this as I’ve seen. The piece pairs well with the New York Times’ stunning gallery of artwork from teenagers using multiple media to show how the pandemic and lockdown have affected them.
Ann Patchett has a lovely essay in the New Yorker about letting go of one’s stuff, which she refers to by the euphemism of ‘practice.’
The Atlantic profiles Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman (D), now the front-runner for the Senate seat coming open in 2022, including a look at an incident that took place while he was mayor of Braddock that will probably become a major issue in the campaign.
Bloomberg takes aim at racial inequity in the property tax system, where Black-owned properties are overvalued in tax assessments in cities like Detroit, Chicago, New York, Baltimore, and St. Louis.
Jelani Cobb asks if the Republican Party is destroying itself by focusing so heavily on white men, a declining portion of the electorate, to the point that “voter suppression becomes the only viable strategic option.” I wouldn’t underestimate the role that dark money can play in keeping them in power, whether through voter suppression or by targeting Latinx populations as they did in 2020.
“In Georgia, Republicans Take Aim at Role of Black Churches in Elections.” Why do Republicans hate Christians?
Related: At least 250 new laws have been proposed in 43 states to make it harder for people to vote. It’s about gaining and clinging to power at all costs. Stacey Abrams detailed some of those bills in a Twitter thread.
Facebook is finally, belatedly cracking down on anti-vaccine content, but it’s having a very hard time because it started so late and makes it too easy for users to share false information. One thing they could do, however, is focus on the small group of users having the greatest impact on others’ vaccine doubts. Meanwhile, those anti-vaxxers are pushing the lie that the vaccines cause cancer.
Also in “what took you so long,” the FDA warned quack Joseph Mercola to stop hawking fake COVID-19 treatments. He’s been pushing pseudoscience and outright anti-science for at least 25 years, all in the service of selling his supplements.
A new research study, published in Nature, found evidence of higher mortality rates from the SARS-CoV-2 B.1.1.7 variant, which is now the predominant strain in Texas, Florida, and Georgia.
James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds, explains why he thinks the NFT bubble is destined to pop.
The Cleveland Plain-Dealer‘s editor wrote a column defending the paper’s decision not to cover a fringe Republican candidate’s outlandish statements, calling him a “nobody begging for people to notice his tweets.”
In a victory for people who remember the First Amendment, Des Moines Register journalist Andrea Sahouri was acquitted of bogus charges stemming from her coverage of police activity during a BLM protest.
Oklahoma’s lower house passed a bill protecting drivers who hit protestors from prosecution, as long as they say it was an accident.
Pakistan is turning a blind eye to the problem of child marriages involving kidnapped Christian, Sikh, and Hindu girls, forced to convert to Islam and marry under threats of violence to them or family members.
A writer with autism watched Sia’s execrable movie Music and wrote about its awfulness for Slate.
This Irish Times editorial on the Meghan-and-Harry interview is a marvel of excoriating humor.
Norton Juster, the author of The Phantom Tollbooth, died last week at age 91.
Board game news: Asmodee acquired Plan B games, yet another notch in the former company’s acquisition spree, but also notable because Plan B was founded by Sophie Gravel, who sold her last company, F2Z (which included Z-Man Games and Plaid Hat), to Asmodee in 2016, then left and starter Plan B, which also includes the imprints Next Move and eggertspiele.
Some Kickstarters of note include the dice-game version of Baseball Highlights 2045; the new roll-and-write game Three Sisters, from the designers of Fleet: The Dice Game; and two new expansions for Everdell.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, coronavirus, first amendment, georgia, links, longreads, oklahoma, pennsylvania, pseudoscience, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ March 6, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/6/21.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I ranked the top 30 prospects in this year’s draft class, with the caveat of course that we’ll likely see a lot of movement this spring because most college players didn’t play at all last summer or fall. I also answered some questions on the Padres’ farm system for our beat writer Dennis Lin. And I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

My guest on the Keith Law Show this week is Aaron Fitt of D1baseball.com, talking about this year’s draft class, Kumar Rocker vs. Jack Leiter, and other topics around college baseball. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify.

The latest edition of my free email newsletter was about how it feels when the face in the mirror finally starts to catch up with your biological age. Also, you can still buy The Inside Gameand Smart Baseball anywhere you buy books; the paperback edition of The Inside Game will be out on April 6^th.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: WIRED looks at the strange economy of scandals in Hollywood and the man who often inserts himself into the deals made around them.
In 1963, Alderman Ben Lewis, a rising political figure in Chicago and one of the most powerful Black men in the city government, was killed in his office, execution-style, but the city made sure not to investigate it thoroughly. ProPublica examines why not, and whether the police may have been involved in the murder.
Anti-vaxxers are now misusing federal data to lie about COVID-19 vaccines, claiming they pose dangers that aren’t supported by evidence. Alex Berenson, once a promising New York Times reporter, has now gone from cannabis alarmist to COVID-19 denialist to full-blown anti-vaxxer, using his sizable Twitter following to encourage fellow deniers and discourage people from getting the vaccine.
The Washington Post examines the history of lies and fraud that propelled Madison Cawthorn to the House of Representatives.
From last August, Current Affairs explains that police aren’t the answer if crime isn’t actually the question.
The Guardian has the story of the battle over the Wentworth golf club in Surrey, England, which they describe as a battle between the rich and the very, very rich.
Georgia Public Broadcasting has an update on the voter suppression bills currently in the works in the state.
Kayla Parker, a 25-year-old Black activist, is trying to mobilize Tennessee voters the way Stacey Abrams did in Georgia.
Dr. Richard Pan, a state Senator in California, writes that anti-vaccine extremism is a form of domestic terrorism.
David Leonhardt, writing the daily briefing for the New York Times, explains why the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is just as effective as the other two vaccines on the market already, even though misleading headlines show lower efficacy rates.
The University of Texas is embroiled in a completely avoidable controversy over a racist song sung by some fans of their football team. Some angry white donors sent some rather telling emails to the school, threatening to pull their donations if the racist song was banned, because you can’t have college football if you don’t get to do a racism.
The Atlantic reports on the success of a small Universal Basic Income experiment in Stockton, California. The United States is the stingiest developed country when it comes to helping people in our lowest income strata. That needs to change if we don’t want to lose the economic and social gains of the last century.
New York Times opinion page writer David Brooks, who hates millennials but married one anyway, has been taking a second salary from the Weave Project, funded by Facebook and by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ father, without disclosing the potential conflict of interest to his editors or his readers.
A U.S. diplomat has been railing against Jews and promoting the idea of a Christian nation-state online for years and is somehow still employed by the Foreign Service.
Wealthy residents of one town in the Florida Keys received COVID-19 vaccines before most of the state … and, oh, hey, a bunch of donors to Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) live there.
Dan Dakich, an announcer for ESPN and a former assistant coach who has denied being there when Bobby Knight choked Neil Reed, doxxed a UNC teacher and threatened to sexually assault an Ursinus professor. Somehow, four days later, ESPN hasn’t suspended him or taken any other action. Sure seems like they move a lot faster when the tweets are about evolution, doesn’t it?
Former WNBA owner and former Senator Kelly Loeffler lost control of her basketball team to a player whom she refused to meet to discuss their differences of opinion.
The former head of the agency that oversees the Voice of America racked up over $1 million in taxpayer-funded expenditures to investigate his own employees to find reasons to fire them. I thought the Republicans were the party of smaller government and less waste?
These transgender athlete bills pushed by Republican lawmakers – who don’t care about athletes of any identities, only about staying in power – are a solution in search of a problem, according to critics of one such bill in Missouri.
Hundreds of scientists and researchers have signed an open letter to President Biden saying that evidence-based policy should mean decriminalizing sex work. Doing so would be the best way to protect the interests and health of the workers themselves.
Board Game News: Red Rising, the latest release from publisher Stonemaier Games (Scythe, Charterstone, Pendulum), is now available for pre-order.
Alderac has a Kickstarter up for Meeples & Monsters that funded fully in just 15 minutes.
And there’s also a Kickstarter for High Noon, a card-based strategy game for 2+ players, where the first 4000 people to fund the game will get their copies as soon as the Kickstarter closes – the first I’ve seen of this in a board game crowdfunding effort.
The British Museum offers a look at ten board games from ancient history.
And finally, watch a doctor dismantle Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene’s ignorant claims on sex and gender in about 30 seconds.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: florida, lgbt rights, links, longreads, social media, texas, the swamp, vaccines

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