I wrote two scouting notebook columns for subscribers to The Athletic this week, one on Dustin May, Luis Robert, Brady Singer, and others; the second on Nate Pearson, David Peterson, Zach Plesac, and more. I also held a Klawchat on Friday afternoon.
You can buy my latest book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, anywhere you buy books, and I recommend bookshop.org. I sent out another edition of my free email newsletter this week as well.
I participated in one panel for the Gen Con Online Writers Symposium this year, on using social media in tumultuous times. It looks like it’s free for everyone to watch.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: Vanity Fair has an exclusive report on how a White House group led by Jared Kushner – who is both unelected and unappointed to any official role in the government – came up with a comprehensive national plan for testing and tracing back in the spring, only to have Kushner scrap it because the pandemic was hitting blue states much harder.
- The Daily Beast looks at the alt-right sports site Outkick, which has been pushing COVID-19 hoaxes and misinformation since late February.
- ProPublica has a useful guide to interpreting public COVID-19 data. One conclusion to bear in mind: deaths lag cases by a few weeks, so people celebrating lower death rates are often just misreading the data to support a desired conclusion.
- OneZero looks at Pinterest’s difficulty in keeping offensive content off their platform, although I think the takeaway here is that they’re doing a much better job than Twitter, Facebook, or Youtube. Moderating content is always going to suck as a job, and moderators should be better compensated and cared for, but the problems described here pale next to what those other sites have.
- The Guardian has an excerpt from James Nestor’s new book Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art.
- “Hygiene theater” is a waste of time, writes Derek Thompson at the Atlantic. The novel coronavirus spreads primarily via the air, from people in proximity to one another and/or in enclosed spaces.
- Twenty percent of Americans say they wouldn’t get a COVID-19 vaccine if one is available. We need better education and outreach to overcome that.
- Since Jeva Lange’s piece on how baseball’s COVID-19 struggles are a microcosm of the U.S. as a whole ran, both situations have deteriorated further, with a rolling outbreak now in the St. Louis clubhouse.
- This twitter thread from an OR doc shows how he talked a reluctant patient, who fell for fake information on the coronavirus he saw on Facebook, into getting a COVID-19 test.
- Another Twitter thread, this one authored by a (self-described) lawyer, explains why the “Covington kid” probably got little or nothing in his settlement with the Washington Post.
- Just days after her newest novel This Mournable Body was longlisted for the Booker Prize, Zimbabwean author Tsitsi Dangarembga (whose Nervous Conditions was #98 on my last top 100 novels list) was arrested during anti-government protests in Harare.
- A Singaporean ‘consultant’ used LinkedIn to troll for contacts in his work as an agent for Chinese intelligence. Jun Wei “Dickson” Yeo pleaded guilty to an espionage charge in a U.S. court last month.
- The British-Japanese musician Rina Sawayama found out she’s ineligible for the prestigious Mercury Prize and the BRIT Awards because she holds a Japanese passport. Those awards’ rules have “nationality clauses” that exclude her, even though she’s lived in the UK for 25 years, in part because she’s a solo artist; musical groups don’t have to comprise only British citizens.
- A profoundly anti-gay state Senator in Arkansas called mask mandates “draconian,” and then was hospitalized with COVID-19. Guess his party affiliation!
- U.S. Senator Tom Cotton (also of Arkansas) called slavery a “necessary evil” in building the United States, and is fighting attempts to introduce new historical perspectives on slavery into U.S. school curricula, such as considerations of the long-term impact of slavery on Black Americans.
- Movie theaters have been mostly closed since March, so we are now relying on opaque claims from streaming services to determine when a movie is “a hit.”
- Several ex-Deadspin staffers have banded together to create Defector Media, a new site that promises, at least, to fill the void left by Deadspin’s implosion last year.
- Much “nutrition research” today amounts to p-hacking, writes Tamar Haspel, who helped expose … , in the Washington Post. She suggests more research on the effects of portion sizes, food delivery to people to keep them out of supermarkets, food and nutrition education, and more.
- Society , a research journal published by Springer Nature, published a commentary by Prof. Lawrence Mead of NYU that argues that Black and Latinx people lack the ambition and temperament of European immigrants to rise out of poverty, leading to a massive backlash and quick retraction. NYU issued a statement decrying the paper’s sentiments while defending Mead’s academic freedom.
- Board game news: The cooperative game Spirit Island is now available on Steam.
- Renegade announced an upcoming game called Embarcadero, from one of the designers of Scoville, featuring hand management and tile-laying mechanics.
- A number of publishers put together game bundles for sale during Gen Con Online, which took place from Thursday through Sunday, which would have been the dates for the regular convention had COVID-19 not led to its cancellation.
- Serious Catan players might like these new game-specific accessories coming soon from a partnership between Gamegenic and Asmodee.
Something I haven’t seen a lot about is around ventilation in closed quarters. Where I live, we only have a little less than three months before it is too cold to eat outside. So we don’t have a lot of time to make it safer to eat and drink indoors.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/07/why-arent-we-talking-more-about-airborne-transmission/614737/?fbclid=IwAR2WUGUoW231WD26X2FAZxSAak417Vc_mDUFy53uZ-CMgzVQWzinDFvF0B4
So maybe we don’t eat or drink indoors for a little while.
Maybe we *shouldn’t* do anything indoors until we can have kids in school. Would folks agree to that? Why or why not?
Maybe we *shouldn’t* do anything indoors until we can have kids in school. Would folks agree to that? Why or why not?
I would, because it would probably allow us to do a lot of things we can’t safely do now, and because shy of a vaccine, I don’t think anything else will work.
I’m more optimistic about a path forward without a vaccine, but all the same, we (collective we, as a society) have shown our self-serving attitude with what “normalcy” we’ve pursued. Too much me, not enough we. And we’ll all suffer as a result.
Kids can’t goto school, but adults can golf, get their hair colored, go out for steak and beer, etc. Well done, us.
Because we couldn’t stay home and eat homecooked meals, our kids are gonna get homecooked education.
Joe, as someone who has clashed with Kazzy before, and has been demonstrably much more pessimistic about COVID-19 on this site, I think that’s way over the top. While I think his characterization of the news was hyperbolic, I don’t think that comes close to being dangerous misinformation.
Agreed. Also, 1) that comment violated my rules on attacking other commenters and 2) “Joe Khule” appears to be a user I’ve banned before.
I sincerely fear that “hygiene theater” is going to grip our schools and make any reasonable reopening impossible. My girlfriend’s school has removed books from her PreK classroom. The children will not be allowed to hold or handle them because of the supposed risk of them as a source of transmission. I’ll repeat that: A PreK classroom will not have books available to the children. It seems that school leaders are erring on the side of liability, which means doing everything to make it look like they have eliminated risk so if anything were to happen, they can avoid any accountability. This is shameful, primarily because it ignores the very real costs that our children will absorb as a result.
I get it… no one wants to have their school on the news with a list of sick or even possibly dead children. But what the news is NEVER going to talk about is all of the emotional, social, cognitive, and other harms our children are being subjected to.
There are absolutely steps that our schools need to take to mitigate risk. Hygiene theater should be none of them.
“But what the news is NEVER going to talk about is all of the emotional, social, cognitive, and other harms our children are being subjected to.”
Absurd — this is discussed in the news all the time. I can’t think of interview with parents, teachers, administrators or politicians that I’ve read or heard that hasn’t addressed it, whether it’s a viewpoint I agree with or not.
What stats are reported? What graphs are shown? We have a million data points on Covid that make headlines every minute. This stuff ain’t making headlines and never will.
And you disagree with what “viewpoint”? That kids being out of school for an extended period is harmful for their development? What happened to trust the experts?
I have to respectfully disagree with this take as well. There have been quite a few articles discussing this on sites such as WaPo, CNN, CNBC, USA Today, and the Atlantic.
I probably overstated it by saying “never.” Hyperbole gets the best of us. But right now every time I check the news, I see screaming headlines about new cases, new deaths, and spikes. I’ve seen he reports on the camps in Georgia. I have seen far fewer reports — and never with the big headlines — discussing camps like mine that are doing everything right and have had zero issues thus far.
If a school sees an outbreak and god forbid a child or teacher dies, you can all but guarantee it will be the headline for days to come. But in 5 or 10 or 20 years time, how many screaming headlines will we see about this generation of children and how they’ve been harmed? Will we see graphs showing the spikes in rates of anxiety, depression, or other mental health issues if they emerge?
Yes, it will be discussed in quieter corners of the world. But right now the dominant narrative is that those of us who are in support of a more full opening of schools want to see kids and teachers dead. Which is ironic… seeing as how I’m a teacher and a parent of kids myself. Many folks are dismissing any discussion of the downsides to school closing.
So, yes, quite a few articles. I’ll concede that and walk back my exaggerated “never”. But they are still far outweighed and far less prominent than those on the other side of the issue.
“And you disagree with what “viewpoint”?”
People both for and against (and in between) starting in-school classes claim to have the children’s best interests at heart. I believe they think they do, whether I agree with them or not.
I’m not interested in debating whether they should be in school or not, I only popped in to address your mischaracterization of the news coverage of the issue. We don’t have “data” because we’re in uncharted waters.
I think some weighing in on the school debate have non-student issues in mind, including the economy (generally pro-opening) and protecting schools (generally anti-opening).
I won’t pretend there is an obvious or easy answer. My preference would be a measured conversation that considered pros and cons on all sides, specific to the situation being discussed. Sadly, I’m not seeing that (and have fallen short of that ideal myself at times).
FWIW Kazzy, I do think it’s appropriate to have those conversations. The challenge is that COVID virology and epidemiology is the *easier* part to quantify and model, and that’s still been fairly difficult with a novel virus. Understanding how our COVID policies will affect the economy (especially long-term) is harder to model, and understanding affects on mental health and child development are harder still. As a scientist, my instinct is always to want to see the data before making decisions. For that latter stuff there really isn’t much comparable data, so making decisions has been much harder. I’ve been perhaps more pessimistic on our COVID response than some, because I perceive having much more certainty surrounding the epidemiology and virology than the other less quantified aspects.
That’s an interesting take, and perhaps reveals a bit about each of our own biases. To me, there is much uncertainty with regards to the virus but much of the available data (as best I understand it) points to minimal risks for children. While the risks from extended school closures — while difficult to quantify in a graph — strike me as very certain, very knowable, all but guaranteed, and likely pretty significant (especially when taken collectively). But, of course, there is uncertainty on both sides.
As a parent, thinking only about my own children’s well-being, I’d rather them be in school full time than home full time. And I’d rather them be in school full time than the 25% model our district proposed. I believe firmly in the statement put out by the AAP.
Of course, it’s not just about my own children. I get that. There is concern about the health of school personnel and about the possibility of further community spread. It is a tricky calculus.
But what really irks me is that we seem to be applying that calculus differently to schools than to most other areas. Some of that is legitimate because the stakes are higher. But that cuts both ways. The risks of failure in a school are higher than in, say, a restaurant. But so too is the value gained by success.
It just seems to me that too many people are too willing to say, “It’s fine for kids to not goto school. What’s the big deal?” And I’m gobsmacked by that. Especially when some of those same people are so gung ho about the importance of restaurants or gyms or salons opening. Like those staying closed are truly big deals. It just boggles my mind.
I mistakenly thought that opening lower stake things would help us get to the higher stake ones. I was wrong. The energy put towards those other areas was only about those areas. Schools were left with so little to support their reopening, that we are now in the mess we fond ourselves. In hindsight, I’m ashamed I welcomed the return of outdoor dining and retail shopping as a step towards schools reopening instead of seeing them as something altogether unrelated and which possibly divided time/energy/resources from schools to these other areas.
The question I keep offering: “If we offered a billion dollar prize to someone who came up with an effective school re-opening plan, would we have one?” I think the answer is yes. But rather than prioritize schools, we did what we always do and let them tumble down the list. So here we are: Kids can’t goto school but I can go golfing, get a haircut, go out for a steak, and polish it all off with a beer. America 2020, baby.
IMO, much of our lack of political will comes from a place of institutionalized selfishness. My guess is that the people who want the bars open but the schools closed largely don’t have kids and are unaffected. I also don’t doubt that there are similar proportions of short-sighted people in several European countries that have done better than us, it’s just that those people haven’t been political empowered to actually do whatever the hell they want. Rugged individualism doesn’t make for a good pandemic response. We weren’t willing to put in the work early, and we’re paying dearly. And now we’re so collectively apathetic and tired that I don’t think we have the energy to change course. Even if we were presented with that billion-dollar “perfect” school re-opening plan, there would still be a political dogfight and subsequent stalemate towards implementation. This is one major reason that I’m pessimistic about anything improving without a vaccine.
Is anyone who is willing to have his or her kids return to school able to share your school’s policy on what happens when someone in the school tests positive? This is my biggest concern. I don’t see how this can work if I have to get my kid tested and quarantine him for however long it takes to get the test results every time someone in his class tests positive.
Excellent point re: rugged individualism. Which doesn’t mean rugged individualism is inherently bad, but it is counter productive when collective action is needed.
I’m a bit more optimistic not because I think we’ll get our shit together, but because I think we may see greater inherent immunity and quicker herd immunity. But I wouldn’t bet on that.
Re: school policy on cases
My camp would require all members of a group where a member is diagnosed positive to quarantine for 14 days. My sons’ school hasn’t issued a policy. I haven’t seen the policy for the school I work at.
I can’t even imagine what a good policy will be.
I feel similarly, in part because I don’t know what our goals are or what they ought to be.
Some folks seem to think that any instances of transmission within a school represent failure. Well then, don’t bother opening at all. You won’t achieve that and would likely fail within weeks if not days.
To me, it seems like you’d want minimal spread within parameters that could be withstood by the local healthcare system. That will vary dramatically by state and county. There are probably ways to calculate the impact of X number of cases on R-values and work backwards from there. Then you can determine what response is warranted.
My concern is that we are going to hold schools to a standard we don’t hold any other institution to. The malls in NJ are open. I went to Ikea yesterday. NJ has a 7-day MA in the 400s last I checked. Seems reasonable to assume some of those people got it at the mall. Or Ikea. Or dining outdoors. So in those arenas, we’ve decided a spread of X is worthwhile for gains of Y provided by those institutions remaining open. I hope we see similar calculus applied to schools. I don’t think we will because (public) schools don’t have the financial stakeholders to push for that. I don’t think we’ll see reasonable plans developed, either because they’ll be hamstrung by regulations OR schools won’t even try.
In my son’s school district, the original offer was either 100% in school or 100% remote. They sent out a survey to parents and the results were 50% want in school and 50% remote.* After the results came back, the school board changed it to everyone is 100% remote until November. After the survey went out, the Teacher’s Union said they were concerned for their health and safety and wanted remote learning. Now this is a serious complication for some parents, who may be single, or both are essential workers, or their employers require them in the office, or a lot of other issues. The district is considering opening the school for those that don’t have any options to watch their children, but no firm plans as of yet.
* Because we live with my in-laws, including one of whom is at a very high risk, we choose remote learning. We looked into having them move out to an apartment temporarily, but there isn’t a lot available with what they require. If they didn’t live with us, I would have leaned towards in school. My wife does has asthma, so that would be a consideration. We also both WFH full time until at least the New Year, so watching our son isn’t an issue.
My question about the “Opening for those who need it” is are they vetting need in some way? Or is it basically in-person if you want or virtual if you want?
We have that option but in-person is 25%… every other morning. Which… I mean… have you ever met a kid?
“Okay… today you have school. But tomorrow you don’t. Then yes. Then no. Then yes again. Then three nos. A yes. Another no. Yes again. 3 more nos. Then another yes. Repeat. Got all that?”
They only sent out the details to the 50% that indicated they wanted in school learning. Facebook groups for the neighborhood said they are trying to gauge interest and need so they can figure out how many supervisors are required at the schools. And who will be the supervisors? Substitutes? Teachers that aren’t high risk and willing to go in? There are only two weeks until school starts, so it isn’t a lot of time to figure out. Some families are forming small groups of same grade kids where the group will rotate between a couple different houses, so Monday the kids are all at the Smiths (hopefully Morrissey isn’t there), Tuesday at the Johnson’s, etc.
2 of my employees already stated that they won’t get the COVID-19 vaccine if it becomes available. I am thinking of firing them for being stupid but I don’t think that is a justifiable reason.
I guess the question would be if you can say that they’re putting the rest of your workplace at risk by not getting the vaccine. I’m not sure I’d like to work with anyone who won’t get it, let alone have them work for me.
It probably varies by state but can an employer have vaccine requirements?
I was required by my employer to get MMR because of an outbreak. Public university.
I’m not a lawyer, but I think if your employees are public-facing, you could at least argue it’s a bona five occupational qualification that they be vaccinated against COVID-19. I know we have a few lawyers here (and Shaun’s comment below just came in) so I’ll defer to them, of course.
I hate anti-vaxxers with the fire of a thousand suns, but if a vaccine suddenly becomes available in late October… I will have questions.
Yea, I’m not gonna run out and get one right away, nor would I likely be able to.
I read something where Clay Travis was bragging about how his site will just be all about sports. If you take a look at all of the random stuff that appears there, what’s amazing about all of it is that’s he’s convinced people to pay for Deadspin 2.0.
Which is always the big lie from conservative sports pundits. They don’t want sports only discussion and never have. They’ve wanted the freedom to be misogynistic, borderline racist, conservative, etc without consequences. When they say they want sports and politics separate, they mean liberal politics.
There’s also the fact that the history of sports in the world can’t be separated from politics because they’ve been intertwined since the ancient olympics. It’s impossible to tell the whole story of Jesse Owens without bringing up the backdrop of Nazi Germany. It’s whitewashing to mention Jim Thorpe’s achievements without mentioning how Native Americans were treated at the time. It’s impossible to tell the story of Jackie Robinson without Jim Crow. You can’t the tell the whole story of Ted Williams without mentioning the games he lost by fighting overseas. I could go on.
I am a lawyer, and while I don’t have the amount of litigation experience that Respectable Lawyer seems to have – and none in defamation lawsuits – I have dealt with enough nuisance settlements in my area of law, and know enough about commercially insured litigation, that his reasoning about the Covington case makes sense to me. I recognize I am as self-described as Respectable Lawyer is, though I am happy to prove my bonafides to Keith if asked.
Oh – and the Catan accessories link isn’t working, Keith – can you please fix it? I am very curious!!!
Try this.
Dangarembga updated her Twitter: “Friends, thank you for your solidarity. Everyone who spread the news of my and Julie Barnes’ arrest contributed to our safety and highlighted the ongoing erosion of civil liberties and clampdown on the nation in Zimbabwe. Lets keep acting for reform in #Zimbabwe. It’s ours too.”
She was released on bail and will have to appear in court in September and pay a small fine.