Just one piece this week for subscribers to the Athletic as I work on the top 40 free agents ranking, which will run a few days after the World Series ends: Nick Groke, our Rockies beat writer, asked me a bunch of questions about Colorado’s farm system, and I dutifully answered them. Klawchat, board game reviews, and dish posts should return next week.
My guest on this week’s episode of The Keith Law Show was my old partner-in-crime Eric Karabell, although Bias Cat did not make an appearance. My podcast is now available on Amazon podcasts as well as iTunes and Spotify.
I’m due to send out a fresh edition of my free email newsletter this weekend as well. We’ll see how that works out for me.
As the holiday season approaches, I’ll remind you every week that my books The Inside Game and Smart Baseball make excellent gifts for the baseball fan or avid reader in your life.
And now, the links…
- The New England Journal of Medicine has just weighed in on the election, urging Americans to vote Trump out of office, the first time it’s done so in its 208-year history. This comes on the heels of Scientific American and Nature doing the same. The Lancet published an editorial calling on governments to act now in accordance with the science, attacking the so-called herd immunity approach and supporting continued attempts to control the virus’s spread.
- Now some longreads: ProPublica details the fall of the CDC, undermined from above by the anti-science Trump Administration and from within by craven, spineless leadership.
- David Wallace-Wells writes for New York that there’s still no plan to stop the pandemic, a third crest is approaching, and we’re basically waiting until January – and hoping that brings a functional government – to do anything about it. Imagine how quickly this Administration would have committed a few billion dollars to responding if 200,000 Americans died from terror attacks rather than a virus.
- The President and his children have turned the government into a sort of personal ATM, as exposed by this New York Times investigative piece, which you’d think would be the sort of thing to turn off the very voters who said they wanted him to drain the swamp.
- Sara Benincasa’s essay “Fred and Me” is just wonderful and I won’t spoil it in the least.
- Scientists confirmed that a Nevada man caught COVID-19 twice, requiring assistance breathing the second time around, which has some unpleasant connotations for the future of the pandemic and should end any discussion of a strategy based solely around herd immunity.
- Why has Germany handled COVID-19 better than its neighbors? By following the science, including implementing widescale, frequent testing.
- Earlier in October, a group of people who’ve lost loved ones to the pandemic set up 200,000 chairs on a lawn facing the White House to protest the government’s inaction.
- One of those who’ve died from COVID-19 was a 44-year-old husband and father of two young children in northern New Jersey. He leaves behind a two-year-old daughter and a six-month-old son.
- QAnon, the batshit-crazy hoax embraced by multiple alt-right figures and now our sitting President, is tearing families apart as people become sucked into this utterly false conspiracy theory and alienate family members with their nonsense.
- A new complaint alleges that ICE is torturing Cameroonian immigrants to try to coerce them into signing deportation documents.
- A six-year period of horrendous weather may have exacerbated the 1918-19 Spanish flu pandemic.
- Lauren Witzke, the Delaware GOP candidate for the Senate seat currently held by Democrat Chris Coons, appeared on white-nationalist, anti-immigrant hate site VDare last month, not long before saying the Proud Boys provide security at her events. She has no chance to win, but still, Delaware Republicans should revoke their endorsement of her.
- Neal Karlen was a close friend of Prince and interviewed him many times over a period of about a dozen years earlier in the musician’s career. He’s written a biography of Prince called This Thing Called Life (natch) and this excerpt tells how Prince was the loneliest person he’d ever met.
- Draining the swamp update: A former patent litigator became a federal judge and is openly advising patent trolls to come to his court. This lets those trolls abuse the patent system (which has its own problems, but still) for their own profit, and ultimately American consumers will end up paying the cost.
- Project Veritas, the grift run by so-called journalist James O’Keefe, bribed the brother of a Minneapolis councilman to say he was harvesting ballots for Rep. Ilhan Omar, a popular target of Islamophobes.
- There may be a new, more efficient method of answering the traveling salesperson problem, which makes use of the geometry of polynomials to improve the results. A truly efficient solution probably can’t be found in polynomial time, which refers to the P vs. NP problem described in the book The Golden Ticket.
- HBO Max has a new series called Patria, based on the bestselling novel by Fernando Aramburu. The Guardian explains how a novel about Basque separatists’ decades-long terror campaign became a global success.
- Paul Heaton, former lead singer for the Housemartins and the Beautiful South, made a large donation to help the staff of the shuttered music magazine Q.
- Several people sent me this story from the New York Times on how local bookstores are struggling to survive in the pandemic and lockdowns.
- Irina Slavina, a Russian journalist who reported on excesses of the government’s security apparatus, killed herself via self-immolation in front of the Interior Ministry headquarters earlier this month.
- This 2018 piece from Smithsonian magazine details some of the science behind the flavors of chocolate.
- Board game news: The Princess Bride Adventure Book Game is out and exclusively on sale at Target.
- The Kickstarter for Flora, a “semi-cooperative” game based on the Voynich manuscript, launched this week.
- Greenbrier Games’ cooperative story-based game Lost Ones funded its Kickstarter in the first day.
- Cascadia, from the publisher and artist behind the game Calico (which I haven’t played but hear is quite good), has already blown past its tiny funding goal.
- The role-playing game designer outfit Roll20 is holding a 3-day virtual gaming con with proceeds to benefit a charity focused on racial justice.
Keith,
For your year end music list consideration, check out “Impossible Weight” by Deep Sea Diver, released yesterday.
Listening now – thank you.
When did “herd immunity” come to mean “let the virus run its course”? I was taught that vaccination was the key to herd immunity — eliminating potential vectors of spread by immunizing those who can be immunized, to protect those who can’t. Have I been wrong about this?
Broadly, herd immunity just means that enough people are immune to prevent infection and replication by the disease agent. This is key for this particular epidemic to die out, and for things like measles to fizzle out before they become epidemics. Herd immunity can happen “naturally,” in fact this is why many historical diseases without vaccines would have epidemic waves that eventually receded. In modern times and for deadly diseases like COVID-19, vaccination is the key for getting to the herd immunity threshold without hundreds of thousands more deaths.
Thanks…everyone currently seems to be employing the term to mean solely in the “natural” sense. I have misinterpreted some people because of this, and have had to recalibrate conversations after the fact.
I think that’s because, in this moment, the only current path to herd immunity is exposure and contraction of the disease en mass. Of course, that presumes A) having the disease offers immunity and B) that this moment is the only moment.
A) seems likely but not necessarily universally true.
B) is obviously false.
I’m going to circle back to the Nevada man’s case because I think that it’s actually a weak anecdotal argument. It’s weak because even under the best-case immunization scenarios, you’ll have some individuals who fail to become immune. For example, the measles vaccine is amongst the best at 97% effectiveness, so we would expect to observe 3 anecdotal cases amongst 100 vaccinated. Nobody except anti-vaxxers would argue that the MMR vaccine is ineffective based on an anecdotal story about a vaccinated person contracting measles.
A better argument is that there is uncertainty around the effectiveness of natural immunization (based on antibody titers from individuals with mild vs. severe infections, and based upon what we know about immunity surrounding other coronaviruses), and that vaccination is often more effective than natural immunization. And that based on the R0 of the virus, we would likely need 60-70% of the population to be immune to get to herd immunity, which would likely mean hundreds of thousands more deaths if we get to herd immunity “naturally” vs. through vaccination.
Loved the Sara Benincasa piece and just put a library hold on the Prince book — more than making this week’s roundup worth it just for those two pieces.
FYI: Open Mike Eagle’s new album is fantastic; don’t remember if you’ve mentioned him before Keith, but I think you’d dig his entire body of work.
The link to your athletic article is off
Indeed it was. Thank you. I’ve fixed it.