I wrote another scouting notebook column for subscribers to The Athletic this week, looking at Jo Adell, Jesus Luzardo, Touki Toussaint, Nate Pearson, Nick Madrigal, and more. On The Keith Law Show this week, I got together with my old friend Joe Sheehan to talk about this teetering disaster of a season so far.
For Paste, I reviewed Marvel Villainous: Infinite Power, the newest entry in the Villainous game series, this one with five new villains from the MCU, adding some new rules that mean these villains aren’t playable with any of the previous 15. I also ranked all twenty of the villains in the Villainous games so far.
I participated in a panel at Gen Con Online on using social media in tumultuous times, and whether there’s an obligation to use your social media accounts to support causes like BLM or other social justice endeavors.
My partner and I are among the co-hosts for a virtual event and fundraiser for Kyle Evans Gay, a Democratic candidate for the Delaware Senate, who is trying to flip our district blue. If you’d like to help us out and perhaps join the event on August 15th, you can buy tickets to the virtual event or just make a donation here. If you happen to live nearby, the full tickets also include dinner from V&M, an Italian restaurant in the district that has also been a takeout machine since the state first locked down in March.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: Ed Yong continues his peerless coverage of the pandemic for the Atlantic with this massive look at the United States’ epic failure this year, from a federal government “denuded” of experts to a social safety net sewn out of dental floss to one of the least efficient health-care systems in the developed world. This article is a list of failures, a maddening series of decisions not to fund basic initiatives that might have slowed the spread of COVID-19. Instead, we have 4% of the world’s population but a quarter of its cases and deaths.
- Reason looks at the emerging political philosophy of Peter Thiel, who claimed to be a libertarian but now supports nationalistic policies more commonly associated with fascism. Note that Thiel and his proxies supported travel bans to fight COVID-19; the link above this from Ed Yong explains why travel bans can actually exacerbate the spread of a new pathogen.
- The Guardian Long Read has a mournful look at the last of the Zoroastrians, as one of the world’s extant religions is slowly dying out.
- Politico explores how xenophobic activist David Horowitz helped mentor and create Stephen Miller, architect of this Administration’s worst anti-immigrant policies.
- Iowa’s state epidemiologist medical director got a 45% raise plus $55,000 in overtime pay this year despite leading one of the nation’s most ineffective responses to the pandemic, which including blocking school districts from closing unless they met state standards for virus spread and refusing to implement a complete shutdown. I’m all for paying scientists what they’re worth, but Iowa is still seeing 14+ new cases a day per 100,000 residents.
- You should not “do your own research” when it comes to science. People who say that are inevitably going to be wrong, because they lack the experience or knowledge to evaluate what they find in that “research,” and the results are dangerous to us all.
- A Utah woman is facing life in prison for buying red paint that was used at a protest. Really – not Zimbabwe, or Saudi Arabia, or China, but Utah.
- My friend Will Leitch wrote for New York about how watching sports simultaneously now feels meaningless and yet extremely powerful.
- Jeff Gregorich, superintendent of schools for a district in the hinterlands of southeastern Arizona, told Eli Saslow of the Washington Post that there is no good plan to reopen schools, and that “it’s a fantasy” to think it can be done without people in the community getting sick and dying from COVID-19.
- Colleges are reopening faster and more fully than primary schools, but that’s the reverse of how things should be, given how much better college-aged students can handle online learning.
- NPR published this helpful pocket guide to COVID-19 etiquette, with tips like talking to people about ground rules when you’re going to see them later at a physically distanced gathering.
- The Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan wrote that this was the week American lost the war on misinformation, thanks to the President’s promotion of raging quack Stella Immanuel, although I’m pretty sure we lost this war a long time ago and it’s going to take state and national vaccine mandates to stop it.
- Board game news: Starling Games will release Flourish, a lightweight game from the creators of the amazing Everdell, some time before the end of 2020.
- An update to Ultimate Werewolf Extreme is now on Kickstarter, funding in just 18 hours.
Keith, thanks as always for sharing a great list of weekly links. Sadly, they also serve to inform me weekly of situations like a woman facing life in prison for protesting, a poor school district in Arizona facing funding cuts unless they reopen, despite the Superintendent knowing doing so is impossible and that we Americans need a magazine article to try to convince us to trust the scientists, not our Facebook friends, when it comes to you know…science.
Unfortunately, colleges have a significant reason to open the campus. It’s the only way they can collect room and board fees.
A friend of mine has a child that goes to a flagship school in a Power 5 conference. When the school sent the students home and went 100% online, there were four weeks or 25% of the school year left. At the end of the semester, the school sent a letter to everyone saying if they wanted a refund on room and board then, they’d get 10% back. If they wanted to apply it to 2020-21 room and board, they’d get 20% back. So if you graduated, transferred, dropped out, or moved off campus for this coming school year, you lost a significant amount of money.
As a Prof at a large state university, I completely agree on the financial incentives to open in the fall. In addition to room and board, there are also concerns about incoming students deferring and current students taking fewer credit hours (and thus paying less tuition). Also, ICE is requiring that new international students cannot take a fully online course-load and stay in the US, so that’s a loss of another major source of tuition dollars. Dwindling state support of public universities has made them extremely reliant on tuition and room & board. There’s going to be a lot of financial pain this year, and I think we’ll see several of the smaller private colleges go under.
My alma mater privatized campus dorms a few years ago, with language in the contract requiring the university to fill them to a minimum of 85% capacity annually. Though they have not admitted it, many believe this contractual agreement is driving the decision-making about students returning to campus.
(It’s UGA…we’re really knocking it out of the park in all ways COVID around here….)
On the flip side, public K-12 schools have basically no financial incentive to open and may actually be incentivized to take an overly cautious (with regards to Covid) approach due to fear of lawsuits. Private schools near me will offer more robust openings with much more protocols in place. Some of that is about resources but much of that is incentives: private schools go out of business with a “bad” plan where publics harbor no such risk.
Which approach is “right”? Hard to tell and realistically the best plan for a school is based on a variety of factors. But don’t think for a minute this is just — or even mostly — about “health and safety.”
I particularly appreciate the elementary and middle schools that aren’t open, will not see a funding decrease due to lack of students (though obviously they may due to decreased tax revenue), AND are offering daycare services for a fee
“On the flip side, public K-12 schools have basically no financial incentive to open”
This is not entirely true. In a number of states, school districts are having their funding threatened by GOP-controlled statehouses if they don’t fully reopen.
Yes. Under normal operations — i.e., absent such threats — that is where my “basically” comes in. I do not support such GOP efforts. And while I do have questions about many school choice plans, this is a situation where school leaders having more accountability to their constituents would be a good thing.
We are attempting to engage our school leaders in a conversation and have had many emails go unanswered.
Here at East Carolina, the financial pressures clearly are driving the decision, along with governing boards made up of those with the philosophy that reopening is tantamount CoVid-19 be damned. Besides the room and board issue, many of our facilities (brand new student center, dorms) are built with self-retiring bonds, and student fees pay a big chunk of our athletics costs. Even though our enrollment is flat to slightly up, we are still facing significant cuts to offset those revenue losses and debt payments if student fee money isn’t coming in. Horrifyingly, the Board of Governors of the UNC system just voted to not refund those fees if we start out face to face and transition to online (previously those taking online didn’t have to pay many of the fees), and then asserted their power to decide if we make such a transition (i.e. campuses won’t be able to make that decision alone based on local circumstances).
There are 99 Dalmatian puppies and two parents.