This isn’t quite new, but I put out a formal announcement this week that my second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, will be out on April 21, 2020. You can pre-order it now on HarperCollins’ site.
On the board gaming front, I ranked the top 25 board games of the 2010s for Paste this week, and also wrote about some recent programming games, where players issue instructions as if they were writing code, over at Ars Technica. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.
You can get more of me by signing up for my free email newsletter, which I send out irregularly but definitely not often enough to bother you.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: A ProPublica investigation found billionaire Dan Gilbert got a huge tax break with the help of the Trump Administration after making large donations to Trump’s campaign. The tax break in question involved “opportunity zones,” incentives aimed at spurring new development in disadvantaged urban areas – not, as in Gilbert’s case, for investments already made.
- One dollar of every $10 spent on AmazonBasics products is spent on batteries. One writer tried to track where those batteries come from and what their impact is on the environment. She found a few answers, but not enough, and a lot of opacity from a company that is already under fire for labor concerns, climate impact, and its logistics operation’s effect on road safety.
- Allie Conti, writing for VICE, describes discovering a vast, nationwide hosting scam on AirBnB that costs unsuspecting guests hundreds of dollars and leaves them without a place to stay.
- The well-titled article “The Fight Over a Shitty Rock” has a very serious point: There’s a dispute roiling over Rockall, a tiny and uninhabitable islet in the North Atlantic claimed by the United Kingdom, and whether the islet extends the UK’s fishing rights against the wishes and claims of Ireland.
- The chocolate industry has already been criticized for its use of child labor and even slaves; now the Washington Post points out that cacao farmers in West Africa are decimating forests, accelerating climate change, while western chocolate producers talk about sustainability without addressing this issue at all.
- Spotify’s dominance in the streaming industry is still tenuous and hasn’t led to consistent profits, which explains in part the company’s acquisition of podcast producers Gimlet Media.
- Anti-vaxxer nuts send racist, violent threats to people who post pro-vaccine messages, and Facebook does absolutely nothing about it. The people running these sites – Twitter is no better – talk a big accountability game when it comes to abuse and harassment, but they don’t back it up with actions.
- Facebook also lets right-wing propaganda site The Daily Wire violate its rules by using sock puppet accounts to promote its content. Again, Facebook does … nothing. And they blocked pro-vaccine ads while letting anti-vaxxer ads run. It’s okay if we’re still getting paid.
- Anti-vaxxers love to claim that measles is ‘benign,’ but there’s growing research on just how harmful a bout of the viral disease can be in the long term. New evidence shows that causes ‘immune amnesia’ in survivors, whose immune systems must relearn how to fight infections because measles wiped out 11% to 73% of antibodies already present in that person’s blood.
- The anti-vaxxer faux-documentary Vaxxed has a sequel, but the producers aren’t saying where it’s playing for fear rational people will try to stop it, so keep your eyes open, rational people, and demand any theater near you that tries to show Vaxxed 2 pull their screenings.
- An evidence-based technique called motivational interviewing is proving useful in addressing vaccine-hesitant parents. It involves one-on-one conversations between parents and trained counselors who don’t tell the parents what to do, but “simply talk through parents’ fears and goals, and let them decide what to do.”
- Louisa Thomas wrote of the ‘stories’ the Houston Astros have told, which don’t always align with reality, in the New Yorker. I know of at least three more departures from their baseball operations department in the last few months, only one of which, longtime Jeff Luhnow lieutenant Oz Ocampo, is public.
- Michael Stipe and Mike Mills spoke to the BBC about their album Monster on the 25th anniversary of its release.
- Writing for Paste, Annie Merkley writes about what it’s been like as an American in the midst of the protests in Chile, a piece that also explained to me what the protests have been about.
- It’s from June of 2018, but John Pavlovitz’s “Now You Want Civility?” post seems apropos after all the pearl-clutching over Nationals fans booing President Trump last Sunday. And, by the way, one of the clutchers was Delaware Senator Chris Coons, a Democrat I’m hoping gets primaried the next time he’s up.
- VICE asks if sex addiction is real, or a misidentification of people who have sexual habits or preferences that might vary from the median.
- A Spanish court acquitted five men of rape because the victim was drunk, so they didn’t have to use force. This is separate from the “Wolf Pack” rape case that led to protests earlier this year.
- A legislator from Cobb County, home of your Atlanta Braves, is trying to make it a felony for trans kids to get gender reassignment via surgery or drugs. In two thousand and fucking nineteen, we are still doing this. This isn’t ‘protecting kids,’ as she claims; it’s going to do nothing but increase suicides.
- Deep sleep may help protect the brain against Alzeimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases by triggering electrical pulses, according to one new study.
So I noticed your link to this article at Twitter and some asking if your website is down. I ran into the same issue, but the problem isn’t that the site is down. It looks like it isn’t rendering. This only occurs for me when I’m using cellular data to load the page and whether I used Chrome or Safari on my phone. On my home WiFi, it is fine.
I looked at it a little closer and there are pages that load without an issue. Your language interview pages load without a problem, so the URL isn’t being blocked by AT&T. This leads me to suspect that AT&T may not like a WordPress plug-in or an API. I did see a 403 (forbidden) when looking at developer tools. It was for freegeoip.net/shutdown, though it is probably something else. Maybe WordPress knows of the issue?
As for interesting links, the state of Missouri tracks women’s menstruation cycles at the state’s only abortion clinic.
https://www.vox.com/2019/10/31/20939890/missouri-abortion-clinic-hearing-periods-roe-wade
Hi, Keith!
Can’t wait for the new book!
I’m a fellow Delawarean (transplant). Any thoughts on who might be a good person to face Coons in the primary? I’m genuinely interested, but understand if this isn’t a venue where you would want to discuss this.
Love your work!
Dave
It’s not particularly shocking to hear that AirBnB is rife with scammers. As callous as it may sound, we should expect the gig/sharing economy to carry greater risk. That just seems inherent to the model. What you gain in options or flexibility or pricing over the traditional accommodations market is offset by sacrifices in quality control, professionalism, and the like. That doesn’t excuse intentionally dishonest or illegal behavior and AirBnB should be held accountable. But one way to do so is by not using the service. If you think ANY new entrant into a market is going to be all benefits with no downside, you’re just not understanding how the world works.
I’d be curious to learn if there are serial scammers on the guest side, which may help explain AirBnB’s seeming ambivalence on the matter. I have a friend who hosts via a basement apartment in his home. He’s had a couple horror stories but they all seem to just be bad guests and not scammers. But I imagine the latter exist.
At the risk of coming off glib, there are tons of things I’d rather see go away in the name of climate preservation before I would want chocolate to go away. The internet and computers can go first as far as I’m concerned.
Keith–I’m in the same boat as Chris P. from the last chat. I’d love it if you join the Athletic, but if you re-up with ESPN can you please negotiate to be able to send a subscription-fee newsletter with your Insider content to foreigners? Aside from wanting excellent content, it would be nice to see (a) ESPN recognize that with the current arrangement it’s treating long-time customer poorly and (b) a guy who had to divide by 2 recently (e.g. divorce) maximize the value of his work product.
Cheers.