I had several posts for subscribers to the Athletic this week. One was another scouting notebook looking at several top 100 prospects who debuted recently, including Ian Anderson, Ke’Bryan Hayes, and Deivi Garcia. Another looked at what the planned changes to the 2021 draft might mean in practice. The third was a Q&A with our Red Sox beat writer Jen McCaffrey, discussing the state of Boston’s farm system. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.
Over at Paste, I reviewed Nova Luna, one of the nominees for this year’s Spiel des Jahres award. It’s a reboot of an earlier game called Habitats, rethemed and redesigned by Uwe Rosenberg (Patchwork, Agricola). It’s very good, and definitely good for family play with kids 8 and up.
I’ve resumed writing my email newsletter more regularly recently, helped by the resumption of the baseball season and a few other things that have made life a bit more normal. Also, here’s your reminder that my second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, is available on bookshop.org and anywhere you buy books.
Charles Peterson, the Cardinals’ area scout in South Carolina and Georgia, has COVID-19 and is on a ventilator. You can join me in donating to his GoFundMe here … and maybe consider what it would be like to live in a country where we didn’t have to do this to pay our medical bills.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: Susanna Clarke’s long-awaited second novel, Piranesi, comes out on Tuesday. The New Yorker has a lengthy profile of the author, who has suffered from an undiagnosed malady for much of the last fifteen years that sapped her energy and led to her writing hiatus.
- BuzzFeed broke the story that billionaire Peter Thiel, who contributed significant funds to Trump’s campaign in 2016 and whose company Palantir holds numerous government contracts, cultivated contacts with white nationalist groups to gain their support for Trump before the last Presidential election, even meeting with the white supremacist Kevin De Anna.
- Seattle Mariners prospect Taylor Trammell wrote a powerful essay for the Players’ Tribune that says that Baseball is Not Black Enough.
- The Deadspin employees who resigned en masse last October have returned as Defector, a new, subscription-only site that promises the same sort of content Deadspin provided. The sports media world certainly has missed having some sort of watchdog to cover and spread
- Here’s a discussion paper (equivalent, I think, to a pre-print, and not peer reviewed) that details the spread of COVID-19 as a result of the Sturgis motorcycle rally. And here’s a review of some problems in the pre-print.
- The New York Times interviewed playwright and novelist Ayad Akhtar, the new head of PEN America, a group that advocates for free expression and gives out numerous literary awards through its various chapters (including the PEN/Faulkner and PEN/Hemingway awards).
- Regardless of what your bubble on the internet told you, the government did not break up a child sex trafficking ring in Georgia.
- America Can’t Take Another Four Years of This Lethal Idiot.
- A New York Daily News report found that the Trump Administration stole $4 million from a fund set up to pay for FDNY firefighters and medics still dealing with ill effects from 9/11.
- Science spoke to Dr. Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist who testified before Congress in May and has emphasized the need for stronger measures to combat the pandemic.
- Two-thirds of the world’s wildlife vanished in the last fifty years due to human activity.
- Joe Arpaio, the disgraced former Sheriff of Maricopa County , is on Cameo, so a furry convention hired him to welcome them to Arizona – and he did it because he didn’t know what a furry was.
- This meme seems like it will be useful forever:
It’s not just the meme, it’s that entire Simpsons episode (The Garbage Man Can) that demonstrates where we have been as a country the last few years.
The identity of the person behind a major Q-Anon site has been revealed to be a man in New Jersey. He’s been getting over $3,000 a month in donations to run it. After his identity was revealed the site and all apps associated with it were taken down.
https://www.logically.ai/articles/qanon-key-figure-man-from-new-jersey
And he works for Citi. I’m sure they’re thrilled to have their name associated with QAnon.
I bet right now, they’re looking at any company issued phones or laptops he was given to see if he did work on those sites/apps while on those devices. This could be anything like storing documents, code, repeated viewing of the websites, responding to emails/tweets, etc. If he did, he’ll be an ex-employee pretty quickly.
I was really hoping you wouldn’t link that Sturgis paper. They don’t seem to have run a sanity check of their model against the real cases numbers for counties outside of South Dakota. They listed 7 counties outside of South Dakota that had the most people go to Sturgis and said those counties had a 13.5% increase in cases because of Sturgis (end of page 26). But the real data shows something that their modeling ignored: 5 of those 7 counties had a big increase at the end of July, before the rally ever started, and have slowly decreased from that. So of course the August data looks much worse than before the rally, but it seems a stretch to blame that on the rally. A 6th county was Maricopa in AZ which had a 65% decrease in cases since the rally started pre-events on August 3rd until the end of the study period at September 2nd. The 7th county is listed as Campbell County, Wisconsin, but that doesn’t exist. There’s a reference in another place to a Campbell County, Wyoming which is probably what they meant. Campbell, Wyoming sort of does show an increase in late August, but the most cases it has ever had in one day is 13 (it’s had 1 death ever, in mid July), so any change in numbers is going to cause huge swings in percentages
There’s been a lot of irresponsible reporting about studies that make all their conclusions based on models that haven’t been confirmed to be correct.
Here’s a summary of problems in that pre-print from Slate.
Thanks Keith. That Slate article sums up a lot of what I was thinking reading through the study. The South Dakota analysis seemed okay because they compared it to real data, but everything else was just blindly following a model. And even then, they say that most of the results they got weren’t statistically significant but went ahead anyway making huge assumptions based off them.
The Sturgis study is garbage. Whenever people assert scientific things, you (rightly) ask where’s the peer reviewed documentation?
But, you put the Sturgis article on here, and then agree there’s problems. Why not delete it? Or add the Slate article to the main body?
You often talk about narrative – how people or media will feed a faulty narrative regardless of facts. Why did you just do what you (rightly) accuse others of doing?
The Sturgis folks weren’t really any different than the protesters and rioters. Almost all their activities were outdoors. If you’re on a motorcycle, you’re automatically socially distanced. If protesters and rioters around America weren’t a concern for Covid, then Sturgis wasn’t.
Honestly, those bikers should be held up as a model by the media, BLM protesters and rioters, and, really, the rest of America in terms of acceptance. If you’re a biker, no one cares your background, age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion or anything else. They accept you because you’re a biker, you understand the thrill of the ride, and that’s good enough, regardless of whatever else you have going on.
Like it or not, I only heard liberals complaining about Sturgis. It’s sad that liberals would complain about group of people who accept others, regardless of their differences. Or never notice those differences in the first place.
@Drew, I agree on appending the Slate article to the comment on the Sturgis article. I’m going to push back on the biker tolerance take. My little corner of the US has its own yearly biker convention, and the booths frequently sell white supremacist paraphernalia. I’m sure that the vast majority of casual bikers aren’t associated with white supremacist movements, but the racist minority is vocal enough that I sure as hell wouldn’t hold up bikers as a model of racial and religious tolerance.
I agree with Drew. To be fair, you should edit the main Sturgis study link to include the Slate analysis. Most people don’t read the comment section.
No comment other than Slade lyrics on the newsletter 2x in a row..Can you make it 3? Maybe a line from “Mama, Weer All Crazee Now”?
I was both disappointed and relieved that the new Susanna Clarke book weighs in at 272 pages.