Nothing new from me at the Athletic as I wait for some real news, a trade or signing, that I can break down. I’ve also begun the offseason prospect work, although those rankings won’t run until late January or early February.
Over at Paste, I reviewed the wonderful game Fit to Print, which has a real-time aspect like Galaxy Trucker where players grab various tiles, then some tile-laying like Patchwork, as players try to fill out their woodland newspapers – with some hilarious text and art on the tiles – with articles, photos, and ads, playing over three rounds to represent three days of issues.
On the Keith Law Show, I spoke with Robert Kolker, author of Hidden Valley Road and The Lost Girls, primarily about the first book, which deals with a family where six of their twelve children developed schizophrenia, although we touched on his update to the latter since the case may have been solved. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I also appeared on NPR’s Marketplace, talking about Moneyball and the data revolution in baseball in the last twenty years. You can catch it on iTunes on the Marketplace Tech podcast.
I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter last Saturday and will do another this weekend as I try to make this a weekly thing, although I might shift to Monday since that tends to be the slowest day of my week (in more ways than one).
- Two longreads from ProPublica: The first is an appalling story of how white Louisiana judges on the 5th Circuit decided to deny all petitions from prisoners who couldn’t afford attorneys, many of them Black men who claimed they were unjustly convicted – over 5000 such petitions in total, over a period of 12 years. It first became public when the staff director for the court wrote a confessional note before killing himself, but the judiciary managed to clamp down on the story and there have been no consequences for any of the judges or others involved. Oh, those prisoners still had to pay the $300 fee to file those petitions that judges wouldn’t even read. Many of the affected prisoners are still incarcerated.
- The second looks at the twenty farming families who use more than half of the water taken from the Colorado River by farms, and 1/7 of all of the water that flows through the river’s Lower Basin each year.
- Climate change is pushing the insects that spread tropical diseases further north, into Europe and the United States. Europe had as many cases of dengue in 2022 as they did in 2010 through 2021 combined. California just reported two cases of local transmission last week.
- Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian wrote the best piece I read this week on the Israel-Hamas war, arguing that both sides have to fight their own extremists to get us to a sustainable peace.
- BlueTriton, the company that owns Poland Spring, quashed a bill in Maine’s legislature to cap the length of water-pumping contracts at seven years. A lobbyist for BlueTriton wrote an amendment that friendly legislators introduced, killing the bill.
- Just a day before they got spanked in school board elections in Iowa and Pennsylvania, the pro-censorship group Moms for Liberty demanded that Florida cops arrest a school librarian because there was a fantasy novel that they alleged had risqué content available in the school library.
- Hold your surprise: Nine of the 12 members of a Congressional committee that advises the nation on its nuclear strategy have financial ties to weapons manufacturers.
- Wounded Falling Bird Ron DeSantis (R) removed commissioner Oren Miller from office in The Villages from office in 2021 after Miller fought a property tax that benefited a local developer, then forced a bogus perjury charge against Miller as well. A three-person panel of Republican judges not only threw out the conviction, they ordered the lower court to find Miller “not guilty.”
- Also in Governor WFB’s Florida, the plan to remake the tiny, once-liberal New School into a bastion of conservative something will cost taxpayers $600,000 per student.
- The NY Times’s Katherine Miller looks at Nikki Haley’s campaign, and how her fight against Trump may turn “brutal.”
- Did anyone else notice that Trump threatened to call in troops to put down protests and arrest dissenters if he wins the Presidency next November?
- A student at the University of Pennsylvania who had Long QT syndrome, a form of cardiac arrythmia, died after having a Charged Lemonade at Panera, as she was unaware that it contained as much caffeine as four cups of coffee. Her family is suing, and Panera has added new warning language around the drinks. I go to Panera probably 4-5 times a year, and I’ve seen those drinks, but I had no idea they had that much caffeine, which is more than I have ever had in a single day in my life as far as I know.
- Parents demanding that their kids skip once-mandatory childhood vaccinations are doing so at the highest rate ever, raising the risk of outbreaks of preventable diseases like measles and mumps.
- Yusef Salaam, one of the falsely accused Central Park Five who was arrested at age 15 and served nearly seven years in prison before his exoneration, was elected to the New York City Council on Tuesday.
- Your second COVID-19 infection increases your risk of getting long COVID, and it appears to also increase the odds that you never fully recover. Less than 10% of Americans have gotten a COVID-19 vaccine booster this fall. I did, and you should too. Also, now I’m magnetic wheeee!
- Paper straws are everywhere in the UK, but they’re not clearly better for the environment than plastic ones. How about you just skip the straw if you’re able and we save them for folks who require them?
- Israel has killed yet another Palestinian journalist, appearing to target Mohammad Abu Hasira this week, running the count of journalists killed in Gaza to at least 37.
- Director of the National Counterterrorism Center Christine Abizaid used Hamas’ terrorist attacks on October 7th as an argument to urge Congress to renew FISA Section 702, which allows our government to spy on us if the purpose is to gather “foreign information.”
- The Last Dinner Party have been anointed a Next Big Thing by many critics. The BBC talked to the quintet about what that’s been like, including weird accusations that they were a fabricated band like a K-Pop act.
- Board game news: There’s a new site devoted to video and board game content called Aftermath. It’s a writer-owned subscription site that hopes to follow the Defector model, and includes Luke Plunkett, who spent many years at Kotaku, and whom I met on the Shelf Stories podcast this summer.
- The Kickstarter for Undergrove, the newest game from Wingspan designer Elizabeth Hargrave (co-designed with Mark Wootton), is already over $250K in just three days.
- Alley Cat Games has a Kickstarter for a fresh printing of the 2017 game Calimala, designed by Fabio Lopiano (3 Ring Circus, Merv).
Regarding the long-covid article, you should take that with a large grain of salt. Al-Aly has been hammering away at the VA data for some time while making the same methodological errors over and over. In short, if you’re doing studies on imperfect data sources like EMR data, you need to introduce negative controls to account for those shortcomings. If you follow his work over time, you see how slippery he is at this, changing these negative controls seemingly arbitrarily to get headline-seeking results. And if you follow the covid doomer crowd (Taylor Lorenz et al), you will notice how the misleading results of this one researcher/team fuels so much of their misinformation.
And even if you don’t get into the weeds of these EMR studies to understand their problems, the implications of their findings are obviously untrue. For this specific example, if long covid were truly more likely upon second infections, we would expect to see higher volumes of it over time. And yet, the CDC long covid survey (admittedly imperfect but directionally useful) consistently shows a decrease in long covid incidence over time: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19/pulse/long-covid.htm
Trumps enemies could quite easily include states that never voted for him and states with governors he doesn’t like/refused to help him like Whitney, Evers, Kemp, and Hobbs. Residents in these states could see federal funds withheld, tariffs that affect these states more, or ignoring or delays in federal response to disasters.
Take a look at the Federalist Society’s Project 2025. It talks about deploying the military to put down protests and a whole bunch of other shit.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025
The Freedland piece reminded me of the lessons of Algeria: The extremists of both sides are united in that the moderates, the peace-seekers, are the primary enemies. That makes advocating for a rational solution not only difficult but dangerous.
In addition to the point that skipping a straw is perhaps the only environmentally sound choice, the key thing this article calls out — and I’ve read this several other places as well — is that while it may feel good this doesn’t really do much overall. If you’re skipping the straw in your morning beverage you drink during your hour long drive or while waiting for your flight at the airport, you’re entirely missing the issue of climate impact.
Reminds me of a friend who used to have artificial sweetener instead of real sugar and then because she was good would reward herself with a 500-calorie dessert.
Agreed. It’s a bit performative at this point. And by the way, the disposable coffee cups you get from Big Coffee are much worse for the environment than straws (and aren’t recyclable either).
If you went to bar and ordered a glass or bottle of beer or a glass of wine– or to a restaurant and ordered a glass of milk or fruit juice– it would never be served to you with a straw. So how/why is it the default in most places and for most people to serve or drink a glass of soda or water with a straw? There are of course some people with disabilities or other limitations who will require a straw, and children will usually need a straw as well. But why are adults without disabilities unquestioningly drinking soda and water with an implement that they would never use for any other kind of beverage? I have heard some people say that they don’t want to put their mouth on the glass because the glass may be dirty, but the beverage is in the glass. If there’s a contaminant on or in the glass, the straw is not going to make any difference. If you’re an adult without disabilities and the thing you’re drinking is not a milkshake, you almost certainly do not need a straw. It’s just a behavior that people default to without ever having thought about it. They should teach as part of Mixology 101 that straws are usually not appropriate for most beverages. We could probably eliminate 95 percent of straws.
By the same token, I see people all the time at fast-food or fast-casual restaurants who don’t think twice about putting a plastic lid on a paper soda or water cup and then plugging it with a straw– and I’m talking about people who are dining in, not taking the drink in the car with them where there might be a concern about spillage. Would they do this at home? If you have the manual dexterity to drink a glass of soda or water in your own home without a plastic cover or straw, you have the manual dexterity to drink a cup of soda or water in a restaurant without a plastic cover or straw. (And the same is true for sit-down restaurants that serve soft drinks and water in glasses.)
Keith, just so I’m clear, you’re saying that asking for a paper straw is performative, right, not that declining to use a straw altogether is performative?
I do not understand why people use straws. I haven’t used one in eons, well before anyone started caring about this issue.
As for milkshakes, if the milkshake can be drank through a straw, it’s a poorly made milkshake.
I don’t think I’ve felt as out of my depth in understanding something as I do with the Israel-Hamas war. Each thing I read about it makes me reconsider what I’ve read before, and even trying to learn the things I need to in order to form an opinion can be met with pushback, if I use one word or refuse to use another. I appreciate your sharing these pieces.
Fucking livestock?! That pro-publica report blew my mind.
I had not seen that and thank you.