I didn’t write anything this week other than the review here of Patrick Radden Keefe’s book Say Nothing and my review of the lovely little light strategy game Walking in Burano. I will do a season preview with some picks for breakout candidates this week for subscribers to The Athletic, as well as a new game review for Paste, and a Zoom Q&A session on The Athletic’s site on Thursday at 3 pm ET. I answered reader questions on a mailbag episode of my podcast last week.
My book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, is out now, just in time for Opening Day (okay, three months before, but who’s counting). You can order it anywhere you buy books, and I recommend bookshop.org. I’ll also resume my email newsletter this week once I have some new content.
I’ll be speaking at the U.S. Army Mad Scientist Weaponized Information Virtual Conference on Tuesday at 9:30 am ET, talking about topics from The Inside Game. You can register to watch the event here.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: Data scientist David Shor, fired for tweeting that nonviolent protests tend to push public opinion leftward (a conclusion based on data), spoke at length to New York about what the data say about the Democrats’ chances in 2020 and beyond. It’s sobering, but comes with evidence-based recommendations that start with not taking any swing states for granted in October.
- The Guardian looks at the rise and fall of Nespresso, which faces low-price competition, criticism of environmental impact, and growing consumer awareness.
- Politico has a long profile on Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D), a first-term representative from Michigan running for re-election in her purple district, and what lessons she may have to offer Democrats nationwide.
- The inspiration for the original text-based adventure game Colossal Cave Adventure (often just abbreviated as Adventure) was Patricia Crowther, ex-wife of the game’s co-creator, who didn’t credit her with the cave mapping that he used to design the game.
- Orac looks at the controversy over airborne transmission of COVID-19. His conclusions: the virus can be spread via respiratory aerosols, but we already guessed that, and mandating masks and physical distancing is part of the solution.
- Cases have been rising, but deaths weren’t, which isn’t the good news it might appear to be, writes Alexis Madrigal for the Atlantic. The death rate has begun to rise since Madrigal’s piece went up, though.
- The CDC’s longtime status as an agency beyond the reach of partisan politics has left it defenseless against attacks from the science-deniers in the White House.
- Vox looks at why Arizona has the nation’s worst outbreak of COVID-19, and may be undercounting cases since they have so little testing. They closed too late, reopened too soon, people didn’t take the masks and distancing guidelines seriously.
- The New Yorker looks at how Texas Republicans politicized the coronavirus pandemic, leading to an ongoing outbreak, and over 600 deaths in just the last four days.
- An Alabama jail refused to give masks to prisoners because, jail officials claimed, the prisoners would eat them.
- There’s a threat to American democracy beyond that posed by the President and his sycophants – the ongoing disappearance of local news outlets. When nobody watches local officials, they can get away with a whole lot more.
- Why are federal law enforcement agents arresting protestors in Oregon, using unmarked vehicles? When did the feds start looking at the Sicherheitsdienst as a model?
- Multiple employees of color at ESPN spoke to the New York Times about racism behind the camera at the company, from limited career opportunities to a lack of diversity in leadership. I can’t say I ever witnessed any of this, or heard about it from people affected, but given the ways you get into leadership positions at ESPN, a lack of diversity is a feature rather than a bug.
- Authorities in Selah, Washington, including the city leaders, are trying to criminalize speech in the form of chalk writing of “Black Lives Matter.”
- Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler (guess!) is running against Black Lives Matter, opposing the WNBA’s use of the term (she owns part of the WNBA’s Atlanta Dream) and claiming that BLM harbors anti-Semitic and anti-Christian views (they don’t, as BLM is not a single, coherent organization). Here’s a list of some major companies that donated to her while proclaiming support for Black Lives Matter and efforts to fight structural racism.
- Three articles on the additional challenges working mothers are facing during the pandemic: “They Go to Mommy First,” from Jess Grose in the New York Times; Parents Can’t Wait Around Forever, by author/economist Emily Oster in the Atlantic; and how a lack of childcare options is keeping women unemployed, in Politico.
- A woman who had been tested for COVID-19 but didn’t self-isolate while she waited to get her results dropped off her child at a day care facility in upstate New York. She tested positive and gave it to 16 other adults and children.
- A meeting in Utah to discuss requiring students to wear masks in schools was postponed because dingbats without masks filled the room, some carrying signs opposing the mask requirement. Their ‘arguments’ mirror those of anti-vaxxers’, which should be reason enough to overrule them.
- An activist couple who support Palestinian causes found themselves attacked online in columns appearing in the Jerusalem Post and The Algemeiner by a student at the University of Birmingham named Oliver Taylor … except that Oliver Taylor doesn’t exist, and seemingly accurate photos of him are just well-made deepfakes.
- A Toronto health official has the right to intervene in the case of two children whose dipshit mother doesn’t want to get them vaccinated. Vaccines work. They are safe and effective, and it turns out that the MMR vaccine may even protect you against some of the worst symptoms of COVID-19.
- Walt Disneyworld is permanently closing three attractions, two rides and a show, none of which will be particularly missed.
- Board game news: Renegade Game Studios announced a new line of puzzles based on art from four popular board games, including Raiders of the North Sea and Arboretum, with pre-orders now open.
- Grail Games has a Kickstarter up for Whale Riders, a new game from Reiner Knizia, which is always of interest to me. I’m not sure about this theme, though; those look like Inuit people, and there’s no reason to use them in the artwork.
- Marvel Villainous, the new standalone game in the Villainous line from Ravensburger, is available for pre-order exclusively through Target. I have a review copy and have played it once; it’s quite good, with five new villains from the MCU, but can’t be played with any of the 15 villains from the previous four boxes in the series.
Keith, the MMR link doesn’t seem to be working.
It’s working for me.
I never went on Stitch’s Great Escape or Primeval Whirl, though I had opportunities to ride both. Primeval Whirl just never looked that interesting, and from what I’ve read about it, seems like I missed nothing and potentially saved myself injury. Regarding Stitch, I went on that ride’s predecessor, Alien Encounter, and absolutely hated it. Nothing but screaming because they made it completely dark (and it WAS dark), dripped water on you and had hot breath come on your neck. So when I heard they tried to make it comical with Stitch, I thought that was a terrible use of Stitch. I am surprised they bailed on Rivers of Light so soon. They want to make nighttime a thing at Animal Kingdom, and if they’re already bailing on their nighttime show after not even 2-3 years, it makes you wonder if they intend to keep the park open past dark once things are “normal” again.
Yes, I focused on the least essential post this week because I’m a Disney fanatic and because we’ve still got 15 weeks to go and I’m not sure my sanity will last.
I think they’ll keep Animal Kingdom open at night. They’ve invested so much money in Pandora and that is 100% best experienced after the sun goes down. Especially with the new Avatar movie coming out next year, I bet they bend over backward to keep that place open. Maybe even a Pandora-inspired river show?
I have a question regarding contact tracing, in particular how it relates to the daycare. As I understand it, the child has been attending for a number of days while infected and displaying no symptoms. The mother began experiencing symptoms, got tested, and did drop-off/pickup for three days awaiting results at which point she was confirmed to be infected. Following all this, a number of children from the day care and their family members became infected.
Is contact tracing able to determine the exact route of transmission? Like, do they know if it came via the mother or the child? Do they know where the child became infected? Is it possible they also became infected at the daycare by a different asymptomatic child? If so, could that child be the one who spread it to the other children? Or some combination of the children bouncing it around each other?
As a teacher myself and a parent, I’m very interested in how this all works because it seems inevitable that one of the schools or children’s programs I am connected with experience some number of infections. And knowing how accurately contact tracing can identify the route of transmission seems important. For instance, I am currently working at a summer camp. We are using a pod model to minimize contact between children who aren’t grouped together. If one of my campers tests positive, the entire group must quarantine for a minimum of 14 days. I do not know if testing all those children will be required, but it seems likely that many families will voluntarily get them tested. If any of those kids come back positive, is there a way to know definitively that they were infected at camp?
If contact tracing has limits on its accuracy (which wouldn’t be an indictment by any means… no system is perfect), I fear that it may wrongly identify schools and day care programs as hot spots of infection when they really aren’t. That is to say, it may wrongly identify these programs as causative rather than correlative. Given how this thing seems to spread. it seems possible that you could have a class with multiple children all infected independently, but which would look like a cluster and outbreak. Can contact tracing make that determination?
Appreciate anyone who can shed any light on this?
The main goal for contact tracing is to identify people who may have been exposed and thus should self-isolate (to help break the chain of transmission). While not perfectly precise, we can use parsimony and timing of infections to infer directionality (e.g. it’s more likely that one student gave COVID-19 to 19 other students than the alternative that 20 students each independently contracted it at roughly the same time). But it’s not clear to me that identifying how a clustered outbreak started is really giving us any more information than we already have (from a public policy perspective, not a blame and shame perspective).
Thanks. So in this particular scenario, the spread may not have been preventable if the asymptomatic child was the source and contracted it before the mom developed symptoms?
For that particular story, the probability that the mother was culprit is dependent on the timing of all cases. If she was symptomatic well before anyone else, it’s more likely that she had it first. I still contend though that even if this cluster happened due to unavoidably asymptomatic carriers, that does not change public policy guidelines–families should stay home if anyone is showing COVID-19 symptoms while waiting for a test result. And I fully realize that the lack of sick leave for many people puts them in untenable situations and serves as a further indictment of our social failures.
Oh, yes, she definitely behaved irresponsibly. As a teacher, what I’m thinking about is that we could conceivably do everything right and still experience spread. Which doesn’t in and of itself mean we shouldn’t re-open schools, but that we need a plan in place for what may be some inevitable spread within school populations.
I also am continuing to see evidence emerge that the risk of transmission from young children (under 12 or, perhaps more accurately, pre-pubescent) is very very low. Which might also point to the mother as the source of the other infections. But it sounds like it all remains a bit of a guessing game in terms of knowing exactly how the virus is spreading. All the more reason to be extra cautious when there is any suspicion that one may be infected.
There isn’t a ton of research on child transmission, but I think *lower* is probably more accurate than *very very low* (the latest is that children under 10 transmit about half as well as adults: https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/10/20-1315_article). But yes, because of pre/asymptomatic transmission it’s inevitable that there will be “no-fault” outbreaks within schools, and contract tracing will be important for minimizing further spread. And individuals should be extra cautious about staying home from work/school if presenting COVID-19 symptoms (fever and/or cough).
That last point is so important. At my camp, we typically give a bonus for “perfect attendance” and you don’t get paid if you’re out. It’s hourly work and most staff are high school/college kids so this incentive is needed. This year, they’re giving everyone the bonus no matter what and 1 paid sick day (over six weeks) because they don’t want anyone trying to “push through” feeling sick. They have to totally flip the incentives from “Do your best to be here everyday” to “Only come if you’re healthy.” This also involved an online screening we must fill out each day. It relies on honesty but it at least prompts you to check your temperature and think about how you’re feeling and what activities you’ve been involved in. We need a very different mindset with regards to sick days and the like than we are accustomed to in this country.
I don’t get your problem with Whale Rider being illustrated with Inuit avatars. The alternative, sourcing the art with non-native conceptuals, would be inappropriate.
Why use indigenous people as a theme at all? I don’t think it’s remotely necessary for this game.
Keith- Is that a somewhat unfair framing of the Loeffler saga? I am no fan of hers, but asserting that there’s no room to distinguish between the rallying cry “Black Lives Matter” and the organization BLM, even while granting significant overlap, seems dishonest and unhelpful.
BLM, the organization, isn’t anti-Semitic or anti-Christian. The claim that BLM is anti-Semitic derives from its statements that Israel is an apartheid state, calling on Israel to end its occupation of Palestinian territories, and supporting the BDS movement. Those are not anti-Semitic ideas; they support an oppressed minority in another part of the world. Calling them “anti-Semitic” dismisses the real substance of their positions, which we could certainly debate (e.g., is Israel’s treatment of Palestinians “genocide?”), in a way that both terminates the possibility of debate and avoids the need for Loeffler to directly engage with BLM’s other positions.
Kelly Loeffler’s statement: The lives of each and every African American matter, and there’s no debating the fact that there is no place for racism in our country. However, I adamantly oppose the Black Lives Matter political movement, which has advocated for the defunding of police, called for the removal of Jesus from churches and the disruption of the nuclear family structure, harbored anti-Semitic views, and promoted violence and destruction across the country. I believe it is totally misaligned with the values and goals of the WNBA and the Atlanta Dream, where we support tolerance and inclusion.
So I went onto the BLM website to break down her claims:
1) Defund the police–they have several posts on what they mean by that, but yes, that’s an official position. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to have a discussion about diverting some police resources to other professionals that are better equipped to deal with certain issues (e.g. welfare checks).
2) Searched for Jesus, Christ, Christianity, and all I found was one post calling to boycott White corporations and support Black organizations during Christmas 2017. So that is false.
3) On nuclear family: “We make our spaces family-friendly and enable parents to fully participate with their children. We dismantle the patriarchal practice that requires mothers to work “double shifts” so that they can mother in private even as they participate in public justice work. We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.”
Loeffler is scaremongering here.
4) Searched for Israel, Jew(s)/Jewish, Palestine/Palestinian: nothing
5) There is no evidence that they condone violence. Seems again like scaremongering.
So on the whole, I think Loeffler is being dishonest about BLM’s positions and is trafficking in scaremongering and economic anxiety.