The dish — The collected thoughts of sportswriter, bookworm, & food critic Keith Law

→ June 27, 2026
→ By keith
→ 2 Comments

Stick to baseball, 6/27/26.

Nothing new this week at the Athletic, but I’ll have an updated Big Board and a reaction to the Futures Game rosters in the coming week, plus probably a scouting blog – I’ve been accumulating some notes but have been waiting for something big or wow or otherwise hook-worthy to lead the column. Getting Anthony Eyanson’s worst outing of the year – he was 90-93 and couldn’t find the plate – did not help matters.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter on Saturday morning. You should sign up. Also, you should follow me on Instagram or TikTok, because I’m posting videos on both places now. Please don’t call me a ‘content creator.’ (Or an ‘influencer.’ I might die of shame.) I’m still on Bluesky first among all social media outlets.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Colorado River system is headed for a crash, with likely water restrictions and reductions in hydropower output, according to this report from the Denver Post.

A massive miscarriage of justice and a violation of the First Amendment took place in Texas, where else, as several anti-ICE activists were sentenced to decades in prison for distributing leftist zines. It deserves far, far more attention than it has received. These people were convicted of terrorism charges for spreading words.

Speaking of the First Amendment, ICE agents found a woman who posted the name of the agent who killed Renee Good in Minnesota, Jonathan Ross, after he was identified in numerous news reports. The agents demanded that she take the post down. She has steadfastly refused.

Charlie Warzel writes in The Atlantic (gift link) about the myth of SpaceX, a meme masquerading as a company.

Some asshole called child protective services with a false claim against Pete Buttigieg. It’s swatting, but with a new twist. And in many states, CPS will investigate even anonymous, nonsense claims.

Texas’ push towards Christian nationalism – and against the Constitution – continues as the state will now require public-school students to read the Bible, or at least parts of it. I wonder if they’ll read Judges 21 or Numbers 16 or Deuteronomy 20!

Israeli troops murdered a Palestinian man who was on his way to the hospital for the birth of his son. So much for the “cease fire.”

The Trump Administration is cutting 20-30% of NSF’s funding for basic science research to redirect it to techbro “X-labs.”

Kalshi gave Donald Trump, Jr., equity worth about $300K, and now the government is actively fighting states that are trying to block the gambling sites (because gambling is illegal).

More Perfect Union has a video report on Yotta, the not-bank that tricked thousands of Americans into depositing their savings by falsely claiming they were FDIC-insured – which the customers discovered when Yotta suddenly stopped allowing withdrawals in 2024.

Cambodia’s crackdown on phone-scam compounds, where trafficked people were held captive and forced to mass-text or call potential victims, has put those people on the streets of Phnom Penh with no place to go and no easy way back to their home countries.

Parker Molloy points out how Giants reporters held Buster Posey accountable in a way White House reporters refuse to do with Trump.

The headline says it all: “I’m a critical care doctor. I’ve never seen the US harm its children this deliberately.”

I loved this post on Bill Watterson’s refusal to compromise his integrity in any way, giving up millions of dollars in potential earnings by declining to license Calvin & Hobbes for anything, and then closing up shop while he was still at his creative peak.

A professor at Indiana University was dismissed for teaching students that “Make America Great Again” is a slogan for white supremacy, which, well, it is. It’s America First for the modern age.

Researchers at Texas A&M published a paper that may identify ways in which coffee helps slow the aging process in our bodies.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) warns Democrats not to throw trans people under the bus, on moral and strategic grounds. If you give up on the rights of one oppressed minority, the other side will go after another minority, and another, and another, because they have learned you won’t fight for them.

An Alberta court upheld a permanent ban against ex-doctor William Makis practicing anything like medicine there, as he’s now hawking ivermectin as a cancer cure (it’s not, at all, this is just fraud).

This New York Times piece on bank tellers stepping in to stop people, often the elderly, from falling for phishing scams is both heartening and depressing. Most people want to do good. We are also so far away from being able to manage and regulate the technologies that we use every day.

On the Gamefound page for Galileo’s Truth, ThunderGryph Games announced they’re being acquired by Awaken Realms. I’m waiting to see how this pans out; Awaken Realms was caught using AI art in some reissues but they seem to have found the true path of using human artists for their upcoming reprint of Concordia.

I nearly backed this Kickstarter for Sprout, an upcoming game about houseplants – a core interest of my wife – but couldn’t get enough of a sense of what the game is like, and at $39 it seemed a lot to commit for a game I didn’t understand. Which is a long way of saying it might be awesome, but I want to wait and see.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, coffee, first amendment, frauds, gambling, gaza, immigration, indiana, israel, links, longreads, scams, science, stick to baseball, texas, the swamp, trans rights, white nationalism

→ June 26, 2026
→ By keith
→ Leave a Comment

Ichor.

Ichor is the latest iteration of a Reiner Knizia game that dates back to 1993 and has been published under the names Tiku, when it was just an abstract game of moving pieces; and Battle for Olympus, which introduced some of the unique powers that you find in Ichor. This game, produced by Bitewing as part of their series of medium-box games that are heavier on the strategy, refines the powers from the preceding versions, while adding another board and several new characters you can use so that you can play the game differently every time. (You can buy Ichor at Amazon or Noble Knight.)

Ichor has two possible boards, a 6×6 board and a 7×7 one; the game is the same on either board, but the larger board gives each player another character and more stones. The goal of the game is to be the first player to place their last stone, or to put your opponent in a position where they lack any legal moves. You begin the game with your characters on the second row in from you – as in, the back row is empty – in random order.

On your turn, you take any of your characters and move it as far in any orthogonal direction as you wish, stopping if you run into any other character (yours or your opponent’s). You then place one of your stones on every place your character passed through, including the starting space. If any of those spaces contained an opponent’s token, they take it back and you replace it with one of your own.

Instead of taking a regular move, however, you may use any character’s one-time power. Those range from breaking the movement rules, like allowing diagonal movement or pushing another character or jumping, to more substantial changes that might end with one or more characters removed from the game. Thus the real strategic heart of Ichor is deciding when and how to use those powers to maximum advantage.

The base game comes with 8 characters for each side, one gods and one monsters, all drawn from Greek mythology. (I didn’t find the theme to be that connected to the game play or the specific powers of most of the characters, but it’s a Knizia game, so it’s not like I expected otherwise.) There’s an expansion that comes with some versions of the game – my review copy didn’t have it – that adds four characters for each side, along with Gates that you place on the board and that are activated when a character passes horizontally through it. Even with just 8 characters per side, you have 28 possible rosters for each player on the smaller board, and they can be in any order, so you can see how every single game will probably be unique.

Ichor is solid enough, but a bit fiddly with six (or seven) character powers to grapple with. It’s very chess-adjacent; chess pieces have their own powers as well, of course, but they’re permanent, and while they’re not exactly intuitive (stares in knight), they are mostly easy enough to remember, and have the benefit of hundreds of years of precedence. With Ichor, there will be a lot of looking at the reference card for your side to remember what’s at your disposal. I do love the idea of each character having that single use, so that activating it feels momentous, and you will often wonder if you should have waited for another opportunity.

I reviewed Iliad, a new two-player game from Knizia that was also published by Bitewing, in January for AV Club, and it’s the superior game across the board – pun intended. It’s tighter, mostly symmetrical, and evokes some of Knizia’s best, including Samurai, while Ichor seems more like a good idea at the core that has some bells and whistles added to make the game more interesting. I would play Ichor if you asked, but I’m asking you to play Iliad (Amazon, Noble Knight) over this one.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: boardgames, reiner knizia, strategy games, two-player games

→ June 20, 2026
→ By keith
→ 1 Comment

Stick to baseball, 6/20/26.

Four new posts this week at the Athletic: How the White Sox helped Jacob Gonzalez get his groove back, my redraft of the 2016 draft class, my look at all of the first-round misses from that year (and there were so, so many), and a story on Cubs pitcher Matthew Boyd’s efforts to help Ugandan kids and his collaboration with Connect Roasters on a new coffee release. (Full disclosure: Connect sent me a bag of Hope Blend, and has sent me other coffees to try in the past as well.)

You can sign up for my free email newsletter. You can find me on Bluesky for text-based commentary and links, and TikTok and Instagram for short videos, mostly on baseball.

Longreads first: All this talk about putting some kind of colony on Mars ignores the reality that it’s an unbelievably hostile environment for life, writes Henry Wismayer in the Berggruen Institute’s magazine, No?ma.
The Atlantic discovered that popular AI song-generating agents were trained on millions of stolen copyrighted tracks. Make ‘em pay.
The kleptocracy in Washington knows no bounds: Markwayne Mullin, now head of Homeland Security, has fought any regulation or warnings about the dangers of kratom, because he’s invested $1 million in a kratom company. Kratom has two psychoactive compounds and can cause liver toxicity, but because it’s a “supplement” it’s basically unregulated.
Also in The Atlantic, Adam Serwer points out that the war on the abortion pill shows that the whole “leave abortion up to the states” story was just another lie.
Trump and his cronies debated ending the Constitutional right of habeus corpus for people arrested as potentially undocumented immigrants.
One common claim from creationists and other evolution deniers is that humans are some sort of end point in the process of evolution. This is disproven by copious evidence that humans are still evolving.
The Atlantic Meridian Overturning Circulation (Amoc), a system of ocean currents that moves heat around the Atlantic ocean, may be heading towards collapse due to anthropogenic climate change. The UK and EU are threatening to cut funding that helps monitor it.
A cop responding to a shoplifting incident shot into a car and killed a one-year-old boy, even though the officer knew the child was in the vehicle. I am struggling to understand why any shoplifting claim would provoke the use of a firearm. The officer has since been placed on administrative leave, but we all know that’s a temporary and often worthless response.
The high school group that had sued to block Idaho’s anti-trans bathroom bill dropped its case after one of the students involved took their own life. A few days later, a federal judge blocked the law. These bills/laws do absolutely nothing except put targets on trans people. There is zero evidence that they’re addressing an actual problem in child safety.
Rep. Max Miller (R-OH), a Trump toady and election denier, pointed a gun at his ex-wife and threw scalding water at her, according to police audio. His ex-wife, Emily Moreno, is the daughter of Senator Bernie Moreno, and she has accused Miller of physical abuse, while he’s responded by calling her crazy. He’s opposed this year by union ironworker Brian Poindexter.
Oklahoma regulators approved a new mine that will threaten a fragile aquifer, because in Oklahoma, profits are more important than clean water!
The Frontier obtained contracts various Oklahoma cities and towns signed with data centers, often with NDAs that prevent officials there from even acknowledging the deals’ existence.
Texas’ state Board of Education is going to vote on whether to teach second graders the story of the “Black Robe Regiment” Christians who did not actually help lead the American Revolution. It’s just not true.
The University of Texas used specious logic to block a fund-raising festival for the public-radio station KUT, then fired the station manager when she put the lie to their claims.
The son of Sen. Kristin Gillenbrand (D-NY) just graduated from college and then landed $30 million in investment in his crypto-derivatives startup. I’m sure there’s no connection.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, artificial intelligence, climate change, evolution, idaho, links, longreads, mars, ohio, oklahoma, police, stick to baseball, texas, the swamp, trans rights

→ June 19, 2026
→ By keith
→ Leave a Comment

First Giants.

First Giants is a rethemed version of the 2015 game Elysium, which had a pretty good theme of its own but ultimately didn’t work because the game ended before you could get anything interesting going. (I reviewed it for Paste/AV Club.) This new game is a streamlined Elysium that focuses just on the set-collecting aspects, ditching the card-drafting mechanic of the original, so that the game is faster but a little more random.

In First Giants, you’re trying to collect sets of fossil cards in five colors, numbered 1 through 3, each of which has an immediate or an ongoing power on it. There are four ‘depots’ or dig sites from which you select cards, with two cards at each site; once you’ve gone to a particular dig site, you can’t go there again until you recall all of your markers (you have four, but can recall them at any time). When you take a card, you use its immediate power if it has one, then check the cards still in your active area to see if any of them have a power that applies to give you points, amber, or the ability to transfer a card.

When you recall your markers, you choose for each one whether to take one amber token or to pay the numerical value on a card to move it to your collections. Once it’s in a collection, its power goes away, but you don’t score any cards that aren’t in collections. You can create collections of 1-2-3 in any single color, or three cards of the same value in different colors. There are news tokens that you claim when you have the largest set of each type, and if you’re the first to get a set of three in any type, you get that bonus permanently, worth 3 or 5 points at game-end. (Board Game Arena’s implementation of the game has additional news tokens that give bonuses for transferring cards of specific colors all in the same turn, such as two oranges and a blue.)

The game ends once the last set bonus token is taken, which scales to the number of players, at which point you add up the points you earned during the game from card powers, the points from set tokens you obtained (2 points for 2 cards in a set, 3 if you got all 3), and points from your news tokens. This variable end condition means the game can drag on a bit if all players try to load up on points by not transferring cards to collections against the modest incentive to do so first for those news tokens.

Anyway, I never loved Elysium because it seemed like the game ended too quickly; you’d plan something, get it started, and then boom, the game was over. First Giants doesn’t have that problem at all; you can keep your cards active for long enough to get some benefit from them, and then shuffle them over to collections while replacing them with new cards that give you further benefits. It feels like you’ve always got something cooking. My issue with First Giants is that there’s nothing novel here: it is a workmanlike game, breaking no new ground, perfectly playable but not one I’m yearning to play again. I also still prefer the Elysium theme, as fossils/dinosaurs are kind of overdone. But I’m still going against the consensus here and saying First Giants is a slight improvement on the original, and definitely a more accessible game than Elysium is.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: boardgames, family strategy games

→ June 18, 2026
→ By keith
→ Leave a Comment

Flashlight.

A ten-year-old girl, Louisa, is walking on some rocks on a beach with her father at night, using a flashlight to light their way. The next thing she knows, she wakes up feeling half-drowned on the beach, and her father has vanished. It will be decades before she and her mother Anne get the whole truth.

Susan Choi, who won the National Book Award for her 2019 novel Trust Exercise, once again plays with narrative structure and unreliable narration in Flashlight*, a longer and more ambitious novel that leans heavily on a stranger-than-fiction slice of history to illuminate (pun intended) the four very eccentric characters within the story. It’s unfortunate, however, that they are all so unlikeable, making so much of this 500-page book a chore to read despite the smart prose and sensible pacing.

* Da da da dee, da da da, da da da da.

Saying too much about the plot risks spoiling the big twist, although I have to say I saw it coming almost from the start. (I’ve said before that I am not a reader who typically sees twists coming or successfully figures out the culprits in books; in this case, I was helped by a couple of clues and the fact that I know the real-world story that Choi used as her basis.) What I can say is that the story then moves back to how Anne and Louisa’s father, variously known as Serk or Seok, each grew up, including Anne giving birth to a son, Tobias, who goes to live with his father. The plot passes quickly to Louisa’s birth, her early years, and then to life after Serk’s presumed death by drowning, which happens as Anne is experiencing neurological symptoms that I think any reader will recognize as early signs of multiple sclerosis. Louisa becomes a very difficult and cruel teenager who can’t wait to escape to college and shuts her mother out for most of her life, while Anne’s life is largely filled with tragedy and disappointment. Tobias, meanwhile, pops back up a few times, eventually settling in as an itinerant samaritan who takes a particular interest in being a kind big brother to Louisa, when he’s not wandering the world or hanging out in Buddhist temples.

The plot twist is really secondary to the four character studies that constitute Flashlight, so if you do figure it out, it likely won’t materially alter your experience reading it. I did find some of the resolution to be exhausting to read, not because of the details, which are true to life, but because it was such a tonal departure from everything that came before – well, except that there’s more suffering, there is a lot of suffering in this book – at a point where a reader might expect the plot’s movement to accelerate towards the ending. Choi does craft indelible characters, even if at least two of them in this book kind of suck, and none of the four generated the empathy I’d expect to feel for at least one protagonist in any serious novel. Tobias is a wisp of a person, but the other three are well-rounded and hard to forget – and, even when they didn’t deserve it, I was still rooting for any of them to get something like a satisfying ending.

I couldn’t get there with Flashlight, even though it is well-written and well-crafted. I couldn’t avoid comparing it to one of the books she cites in her acknowledgements as an inspiration, Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son, which is a better plotted work, one that mixes its suffering with dark humor, and takes the reader to more interesting places. It may be an unfair comparison – there are only so many American novels that touch on North Korea, and only so many ways to get into the topic – but ultimately Flashlight came out on the losing end.

Next up: C. Thi Nguyen’s The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 2025 novels, american literature, north korea

→ June 13, 2026
→ By keith
→ 3 Comments

Stick to baseball, 6/13/26.

My second mock draft of 2026 went up this week, with a new name at #1. I also held a Q&A on Wednesday to discuss it. Last Sunday, I posted a scouting notebook on Theo Gillen, Miguel Sime Jr., and other Rays & Nationals prospects.

I sent out a new epistle of my free email newsletter this week. You can find me on Bluesky for text-based commentary and links, and TikTok and Instagram for short videos, mostly on baseball.

I appeared on The Fan LA on Wednesday to talk about the Dodgers’ farm system.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Longtime vaccine denier and supplement peddler Joseph Mercola – who has taken up other anti-science positions like claiming aspartame is behind all sorts of health problems – quickly changed his tune on vitamin K shots after ProPublica asked him for comment on why he’d made false claims about these lifesaving injections for infants.

WIRED (reprinted on KFF Health News) explored the devastation caused by vaccine denialism in Utah, where a measles epidemic has sickened many infants too young to be vaccinated and strained hospitals unprepared for a highly contagious disease that had been eradicated from the Western hemisphere. We all pay the cost for these grifters and the idiots who follow them.

The Times spoke to Scott Pelley on his ouster from 60 Minutes and the self-immolation of CBS News under Bari “Free Speech” Weiss.

In a related story, noted Trump-lie debunker Daniel Dale hasn’t appeared on CNN in three months. I’m sure that had nothing to do with the Justice Department’s review of the Paramount-Warner Brothers merger.

The Guardian looks at the rise and fall of West Ham United owner David Sullivan, asking how someone who made his fortune in pornography reached the pinnacle of English football.

Republican Senator Jim Justice of West Virginia owns an empire of coal-mining companies. The Trump Administration closed investigations into potential criminal violations by Justice’s firms.

Auburn University’s board of trustees dissolved the faculty senate and took control of curricula to comply with a law that doesn’t apply to the school.

Conservative Americans have higher mortality rates and worse health outcomes than liberals because of ‘ideological divides,’ which is a polite way to refer to science denial.

In the LA Times, Michael Hiltzik writes that the right’s war on science has reached a new low, and could go lower.

Avelo sucks to begin with, but now the CEO is demanding that regional airports give him equity in exchange for the airline flying there.

China is producing more solar energy than it can use. The Financial Times notes that it is “madness” to waste this surplus. Meanwhile, U.S. solar energy output has passed coal for the first time, despite a federal government openly hostile to green energy. Imagine what might happen if we had people in charge who accept scientific facts.

Gun-rights extremist Brandon Herrera is likely to end up representing Uvalde in Congress.

San Carlos Lake in Arizona is now closed to visitors after drought and a water release from a dam upriver killed all of its fish.

A 21-year-old Seattle man who was recently playing basketball for his junior college team was arrested for running an abusive pornography content mill, kidnapping, threatening, and beating girls to get them to produce pornography for OnlyFans and similar sites.

A good use of artificial intelligence: Mathematicians used an internal model from OpenAI to find a better solution to Paul Erdös’ planar unit distance problem.

I enjoyed this Vulture interview with KISS’ Paul Stanley, who never directly answers the interviewer’s questions but gives insightful comments on just about every one.

AVClub’s Sam Barsanti writes that it might be for the best that Doctor Who is on hiatus after the BBC sacked Russel T. Davies.

Dire Wolf has a Kickstarter going for a board game based on Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, board game news, climate change, denialism, guns, links, longreads, math, Music, soccer, stick to baseball, texas, the swamp, tv, vaccines, west virginia

→ June 6, 2026
→ By keith
→ Leave a Comment

Stick to baseball, 6/6/26.

Quirky timing this week led to just one post for subscribers to the Athletic, a scouting notebook on Gage Wood, Gavin Fien, Eli Willits, and some other Nats/Orioles prospects. I’ve got at least two already on the docket for this upcoming week.

I appeared on the Rates & Barrels podcast to talk about my top 50 prospects, which you can get on Apple, Youtube, or directly on our site.

My free email newsletter is still free and still infrequent. I also posted a new video about hitting 20 years as a full-time baseball writer to Instagram and TikTok.

Longreads first: Old Apostolic Lutheran Church leaders have ignored child sex abuse within its ranks for generations, and refused to report these crimes to the police, according to a new report from ProPublica. Church teachings also tell victims that they can’t speak about the crimes against them once the abuser has been “forgiven.” Excuse me if I find it impossible to distinguish this from a cult.

Companies that “donated” to Trump’s ballroom boondoggle subsequently took home over $50 billion in government contracts, according to a report in the Washington Post.

The New Yorker exposes how private prisons increase their profits by starving inmates.

TechCrunch writer and Bluesky board member Mike Masnick writes about how decentralization is one way to combat the enshittification that has ruined the major tech services over the last fiteen years, notably social media.

In their annual report on the use of sexual violence in war zones, the United Nations listed Israeli forces, both armed and security, along with Hamas and Russia, documenting at least nine cases of Gazans raped by IDF or Israeli prison security members.

One in sixteen pardoned J6 insurrectionists have been arrested again for new crimes, including child molestation and homicide.

Scientific American revisits the unsolved Riemann Hypothesis, one of the Millennium Prize problems that would net the person or team who solves it $1 million, but which isn’t a major research focus because its solution may not have many practical applications – it’s just interesting. There’s a great book about the hypothesis called Prime Obsession, which I reviewed back in 2010.
The Chapel Hill High School yearbook omitted twelve graduating students with disabilities. The school claims it wasn’t intentional. Uh-huh.

A devastating flesh-eating parasite called a screwworm that regularly devastated U.S. cattle farms until the 1960s has reappeared in Texas, just in time for an Administration that has slashed budgets for food safety and epidemic prevention.

Vaccine denialism is leading to more cases of preventable diseases in hospitals, which threatens to further their spread, while doctors are also seeing idiot adults refusing tetanus shots.

In the department of what the actual fuck: The Minnesota Republican Party held a moment of silence for convicted murderer Derek Chauvin at its state convention.

A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times, gave a speech that criticized AI companies for their willful ignorance of copyrights and the likely impacts on the journalism industry, even as the Times Guild, the union that represents the paper’s journalists, has said the Times hasinsufficient guardrails around AI use.

From the great Jamelle Bouie: America Broke Something When It Gave Trump a Second Chance.

Druid City Games has a Gamefound crowdfunding page up for Bloodstone, an “epic dice combat game” for 1-5 players.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: artificial intelligence, board game news, carceral state, gaza, israel, links, longreads, math, minnesota, north carolina, religion, stick to baseball, texas, the swamp, vaccines

→ June 5, 2026
→ By keith
→ Leave a Comment

Waddle.

I did not know that a group of penguins is called a waddle until I encountered the small-box board game Waddle, published by Allplay, last year at Gen Con. It’s one of the best games Allplay has produced, playing 2 to 5 but best with at least 3, and is great value at $19. (It’s $24 on amazon for some reason, but $19 direct from Allplay, or $26 for the base game and the three-in-one expansions.)

In Waddle, you’ll place your penguins on the white ice hexes on the modular board adjacent to the blue water hexes, which form fishing ponds of varying sizes. You only score points in two ways in Waddle, which is something of a relief: you score for every waddle of penguins you create, and you score for having the most or sometimes second- or third-most penguins around a pond with at least one fish (scoring icon) on it. So there’s some pattern-building and some classic area control, with very quick turns.

On your turn you either can place one of your penguin tokens, most of which show one penguin but two of which show a pair of penguins, or ‘scout ahead,’ passing your turn to move up in the turn order for the next pond. Once you’ve build the modular board, you find the pond with the white number 1 on it, and players begin placing penguins on open white hexes around it, going in turn order. Play moves to the pond with next number once all hexes around the current one are filled with penguins.

If you would rather jump ahead in turn order for the next pond, you can scout ahead, taking your marble off the current turn order track and moving it to the next track, either at the bottom or behind any players who’ve already scouted ahead. If you are the last player with a marble on the current track, however, you must place penguins on all open white hexes around the current pond before play can continue. (Single penguin tokens are considered unlimited, so you can’t run out.)

There are twenty pond tiles with numbers on them, and play progresses through them in ascending order, although you may skip some because there are no open hexes adjacent to them by the time you get there. Once you’ve finished pond 20, all white spaces should have penguins on them, and you begin the scoring. Your waddle is worth anywhere from 1 point for a single penguin all by its lonesome to 36 points for a waddle of 8 or more penguins; there’s a table on each player aid card, but for the math-inclined among you, the number of points for a waddle of size N is the sum of all integers from 1 through N. Double penguin tokens count as 2 penguins for both scoring methods.

Then you check each pond with yellow points icons and look at all white hexes surrounding the entire pond. The player with the most penguins around it gets the number of points shown on the highest icon in the pond. If there are multiple fish/scoring icons, then the player with the second-most penguins gets the second-highest points total, and so on, until you’ve either scored all of the fish or each player has scored once. All ties are ‘friendly,’ so ties players get the full amount shown.

There are a couple of rules tweaks for playing with two players, but that player count kind of obviates the scout-ahead mechanic, and I don’t think Waddle is nearly as good without at least three. It sings at four or five, though, as there’s a ton of competition and you can often find a move that helps you and blocks someone else, and with turns this quick you can play with five and never get bored. Allplay promises a one-minute teach and that’s about right – I think I described every single rule in this review, and you don’t need all of those details to get started.

I’ve played nine of the games in Allplay’s Small Box Big Game series, with one more on my Shelf of Shame (9 Lives), and I’d put this near the top. It might be second, behind Sail; I think Sequoia is a real sleeper, but I’m one of its bigger fans, I think. I would even put Waddle over Mountain Goats, which is good but I think has a limited ceiling. It’s a keeper for me, and the best game Allplay put out in 2025.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: boardgames, family games, family strategy games, highly recommended

→ June 4, 2026
→ By keith
→ 1 Comment

Mood Machine.

Music journalist Liz Pelly has spent most of her professional life working and living in indie music circles, which gives her a distinct and important perspective on the consolidation of the music industry around just a few streaming services, with Spotify foremost among them. In her book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, she explores the birth of Spotify, how it took over the streaming space, and how pernicious its effects have been on indie musicians and labels – as well as listeners who want to hear anything but the most anodyne music available.

Spotify began as an idea to sell ads, not as a way to save the music industry, or even just as a way for its founders, including the military-minded Daniel Ek, to get rich while working in music. Songs were just a vehicle for selling ads and collecting user data to do so more effectively. Ek and other Spotify execs have retconned their history to make Spotify out to be some kind of savior for music and musicians, even as their practices have proven predatory, including bringing back payola, and they’ve cracked down harder on musicians with tiny followings than they have on scammers posting fake music tracks and clips to try to deke Spotify’s algorithms and rack up streams from listeners who aren’t paying much attention to what’s playing.

Pelly spoke to over a hundred current and former Spotify employees, got access to internal Slack logs, and interviewed musicians, label executives, and others to research Mood Machine, and two consistent themes emerged (among many smaller topics). One is that Spotify’s entire structure, built largely around algorithmic playlists, which are made by machine-learning systems and are distinct from curated ones, assembled by humans, like the ones I post every month, is both corrupt and tends to funnel listeners to a small number of artists from major labels, while paying artists from outside of the big 3 labels a pittance (and paying no artists anything close to fair value). The second is that a huge portion of Spotify’s audience isn’t actually listening to the music: One of their main goals is to get listeners to stick on a playlist as some sort of background noise – similar to Netlix’s “second-screen” nonsense – and let it play for hours and hours, and if it runs out let Spotify’s algorithm just keep playing more songs, so they can serve more ads. Playing a song costs Spotify less than half a penny in royalties. Their dream scenario is The Lost Weekend except with some algorithmic chillwave playlist going in the background for 72 hours.

Harper’s excerpted a portion of Mood Machine in 2024 as a story called “The Ghosts in the Machine.” It exposed Spotify’s program to commission fake tracks from outside vendors under its “Perfect Fit Content” program, where those companies would supply songs by ‘ghost artists’ to pad Spotify’s playlists for deeply discounted royalty rates, allowing Spotify to deliver the same quantity of music to listeners for a lower cost. Spotify execs defended the practice, saying that listeners of those playlists were “half-listening anyway,” so why deliver them real music? Pelly spoke to a number of employees dismayed by the practice, saying it was unethical to deceive listeners and harmful to the music industry they were supposedly supporting. The few editors remaining who curated playlists themselves reported increased pressure to use these ghost artists on their playlists, even though that was antithetical to their mission (and, I would presume, their music fandom). Some of the companies Pelly cites as ghost-artist producers are now getting into AI-generated tracks, such as Epidemic Sound, which also sells royalty-free background music to video producers. It’s the most interesting chapter in a book that’s full of them, and the most overt explanation of why Spotify is harmful to the music industry.

Pelly wraps up with a chapter (not the epilogue) about how listeners can support artists better in the streaming era. The obvious answer – and I’m not criticizing Pelly here – is to buy music. You love an album? Pay for it, whether digitally or physically. Buy it direct from the label or from the artist. Going to shows and buying merch helps as well. Streaming an artist’s music barely makes a dent; you’d have to stream a song around 300 times to get them $1. She points out that while Spotify is generally presumed to have the worst payout rates to artists – no one knows because Spotify’s agreements with major labels are confidential and protected by NDAs, which seems like maybe a restraint of trade, but I’m not a lawyer – the other major streaming sites, like Apple and Amazon, aren’t that much better. I don’t believe she ever said not to stream music, but her message is more like “stream responsibly, and buy liberally.”

The book is so thoroughly researched, with citations as well as quotes from relevant sources, that it can bog down a little in the details, but I will gladly accept that tradeoff to get such an academic take on a popular topic. It is easy to find reasons to hate streaming and find people to tell you they hate streaming. It is a much harder task to explain just why streaming is bad for music, and culture, and explain why it’s also going to be hard to fix the problems streaming, and Spotify in particular, has created. Mood Machine does all of this, without once allowing you to forget that the reason you downloaded Spotify in the first place was because you, in fact, like music.

Next up: Susan Choi’s Flashlight. Dun dun, dun dun dun.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: books, exposes, highly recommended, Music, non-fiction

→ June 3, 2026
→ By keith
→ Leave a Comment

Music update, May 2026.

Thirty-six tracks might be a record for one of my monthly playlists. May was loaded beyond the normal boost from having five Fridays, and I think it’s going to be a tremendous summer for new music given how many albums were teased with strong singles this past month.

As a side note: NPR appears to have put an AI-generated track by a fake band on its latest New Music Friday playlist. I can’t promise I’ll never be fooled, but I do not intend to ever put an AI-generated song on any of my playlists on purpose, and if I do so, I’ll own up to it. They’re spreading like ice-nine.

As always, if you can’t see the playlist below, you can access it on Apple Music or Spotify.

KNEECAP – Carnival. I loved the movie Kneecap, but I thought the group’s music was a little more of a novelty – they were certainly serious about their politics, but the music itself wasn’t that sophisticated. Their latest album Fenian turns that entirely on its head; as it’s smart, experimental in places, and surprisingly polished, without losing the urgency and power of Mo Chara and Móglaí Bap’s lyrics. It’s one of the best albums of the year, buoyed by a cavalcade of guest appearances, with some incredible hooks as on this song as well as the title track.

The Waterboys – Don’t Even Have to Say His Name. A one-off track by Mike Scott – the singer, not the 1986 Cy Young Award winner – that’s about you-know-who without ever having “to say the motherfucker’s name.”

Blondshell – Heart Has to Work So Hard. Blondshell just put out her second album last year, but she’s back with this new, way more uptempo rock track that’s one of her best songs yet. There’s a new album and a big tour coming, but there are no details on the LP yet.

DMA’s – Heatin Park. This Australian trio started out as a very Oasis-like rock band, with “For Now” and “Too Soon” among their best early songs, then tried an electronic sound for a few years, but now they’re back with what appears to be a return to their roots. Their new album, just called DMA’s, comes out August 7^th.

Mystery Jets – Black Sage. This is Mystery Jets’ first new track in over six years, with their last album releasing in April of 2020, so just in time to sink into the abyss of the pandemic. The British indie-rock band will release their seventh album, A Hole To See The Sky Through, in August; I don’t think I’d ever heard anything from them before, but I love the Amazons-style guitar riffs here.

Ceremony – Other Hells. Ceremony’s last album was my #1 LP of 2019, their post-punk/new wave In the Spirit World Now, with the opening 1-2 punch of the title track and “Turn Away the Bad Thing.” They’d released all of two songs since then before this single dropped in late April, and this one harkens way back to their early hardcore punk sound. No word yet of a new album.

Yard Act – Redeemer. My favorite group of Gang of Four fans return with a darker track that still features singer James Smith’s wry, sesquipedalian lyrics, ahead of their third album, You’re Gonna Need a Little Music, due out on July 17^th.

Y – Duplicate. Y is a fairly new band that crosses many genres and talks about it a lot in interviews, but it ain’t bragging if you can bring it. Their music is interesting, and unusual, and seems to combine elements of several musical styles while also pushing the boundaries of what you hear in a typical radio-length rock song. This is the first track off their second EP, ENTER, released in early May. T was unavailable for comment.

1000 Rabbits – White Horse. There’s some wildly inventive music coming out of the UK right now, with My New Band Believe, KNEECAP, Dry Cleaning, Yard Act, Plantoid, JJerome87, and 1000 Rabbits, just to name a few artists, all putting out new music so far in 2026. 1000 Rabbits is a five-piece experimental rock band from Suffolk who’ve put out three singles so far, all rather out there in arrangement and song structure.

Genesis Owusu – Life Keeps Going. I liked Owusu’s last album more than his newest, Redstar Wu & the Worldwide Scourge; this record seems more electronic, more dance-oriented, although the lyrics are more political and more (appropriately) angry than his previous work. This is the best song I’ve heard from the album, with the best hook, even though it’s one of the most dance-oriented tracks on the record.

Chanpan – confessions part ii. Chanpan are a trio of Asian-American musicians who try to blend drum & bass, jazz, and indie-pop with occasional dashes of other genres. The driving bass line is the big hook here on their second single of 2026, with one EP, Endlessly, to their credit before this year.

Weird Nightmare – If You Should Turn Away. Weird Nightmare is the side project of Alex Edkins of METZ, and just dropped its second album, Hoopla, at the start of May. This song is almost a 180 from METZ’ music; it’s mellow, jangly, and subtly catchy.

youbet – Ground Kiss. Shoegazey bedroom-pop from Nick Llobet and new bassist/vocalist Micah Prussack; Pitchfork referred to part of their sound as “country-grunge” and I had a similar thought on this specific track.

feeble little horse – Dior. FLH released their third album, bitknot, on May 26^th, with this extremely Smashing Pumpkins-esque track as the lone single that I could find. It’s more straightforward than thir last album, 2023’s Girl with Fish, at least.

Swim Deep – Mud. The second single from this shoegaze/dream pop band from Birmingham is one of their strongest yet. Their fifth album, Hum, comes out in June, almost exactly two years after There’s a Big Star Outside. If you’re going to go for a slower tempo like this, vast guitar sounds like Swim Deep has on “Mud” help give the song some textural contrast.

TV Star – The Package. Speaking of “country-grunge,” that may apply to this TV Star track even more than it does to youbet’s. It’s got the acoustic guitars of the former, the lo-fi distortion of the latter, and vocals that sound like early Miki Berenyi.

Failure – Crash Test Delayed. With Location Lost, Failure has now released more albums since they reunited (four) than they did before they broke up in 1997 (three). This track reminds me quite a bit of Pinback, which is funny because 1) Pinback debuted after Failure’s first hiatus began and 2) I only really like one Pinback song, “From Nothing to Nowhere.”

Lip Critic – Shoplifting. There’s definitely a media/label push behind this dance-punk band’s second album, Theft World, as their tracks have shown up on all sorts of playlists, both curated and algorithmic, over the last month or so. The story behind the new album may be better than the album itself.

The High Curbs – RACER #23. Fun California surf-punk with a great melody and perfect run time. Also, check out the band name’s acronym.

False Advertising – Next Big Thing. I wasn’t familiar with this British duo, which features the niece of the original lead singer of Madchester band Inspiral Carpets, before this song, which comes off The Sorry Window, their first album since 2019. It’s close to a punk, with the slightly sung-talked cadence of many post-punk bands.

MUNA – Eastside Girls. MUNA’s latest album Dancing on the Wall is more MUNA-y, but I don’t think that’s necessarily better, and I much preferred Katie Gavin’s solo album to this. “Eastside Girls” is the best track here, and also a good example of the direction of this LP.

Radhika – Since Yesterday. I don’t include many covers on these playlists because they’re often boring and/or cash grabs. This is neither: It’s a cover of a wonderful 1980s new wave track by the one-hit wonders Strawberry Switchblade, sung in a late-60s folk-pop vein by an Indian-Scottish singer from Glasgow. Music is fuckin’ awesome, man.

Arab Strap – You You You. Like a dark synth-pop track sung by Brian Cox. And I’m into it.

Jorja Smith – What’s Done is Done. Smith’s vocals win every time, even when the music is just mid as it is on this electronic track. Also, she’s blonde now.

Alabaster DePlume – Bringing up the Nakba. DePlume is a saxophonist & jazz musician who often adds spoken-word lyrics with strong political content to his songs … or just gives them highly political titles, like this one, which refers to ethnic cleansing during the 1948 Palestine War.

Knats feat. Geordie Greep – Carpet Doctor. Knats are a “nu jazz” trio from the UK who sprinkle in various rock subgenres on top of many of their tracks; their latest album, A Great Day in Newcastle, was produced by Greep, former lead singer/guitarist of black midi, who also appears on this track.

Ezra Collective feat. Pa Salieu – Only Love. Salieu is the star of this track – less than two years after he was released from prison – with the Mercury Prize-winning Ezra Collective fading a little into the background with music that feels more jazzy than jazz.

Tamikrest – Imanin. Tamikrest is a desert blues (or assouf) band from Mali with a sound very similar to that of the Nigerien musician Mdou Moctar. They hadn’t released anything since 2020 before their sixth album Assikel came out last month.

They Are Gutting a Body of Water w/Horse Jumper of Love – charter spec. TAGABOW just put out an album in October, and now they’re back with this track, which alternates My Bloody Valentine-level shoegaze with what sounds like detuned guitars playing arpeggios without distortion alongside mumbled lyrics. It’s almost metal in its own strange way.

Gurriers – Nobody’s Coming to Save You. Noise-rockers from Dublin who clearly take some inspiration from post-hardcore bands like Thrice, while the chorus here reminds me quite a bit of Irish shoegaze revivalists Just Mustard. This is the title track from the band’s second album, due out September 25.

Monolord – Iodine. I’m new to this Gothenburg doom metal band, whose sixth album, Neverending, just came out on Friday, but I love what I’ve heard from them so far, including this, “You Bastard,” “Oozing Wound,” and “It’s Neverending.” It’s heavy, Pallbearer-level stuff with occasional dashes of the melodic death metal that’s a hallmark of Gothenburg bands.

Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats – I’ll Cut You Down. I thought this was a pretty dumb name for a band, but there’s some history here, as their music is heavily inspired by the proto-metal band Vanilla Fudge, which devolved into Cactus, whose lead singer Rusty Day later had a band called Uncle Acid and the Permanent Damage Band. This Uncle Acid is from Cambridge, England, and their sound is bluesy hard rock mixed with doom metal and, appropriately, a dose of psychedelia, so the result is lighter than that of Monolord.

All Them Witches – Red Rocking Chair. The opening track from this hard rock/blues/stoner band’s latest album House of Mirrors, whichcame out on Friday, is a very slow burn, bordering on doom metal in pace and heaviness.

If These Trees Could Talk – Blurry Creatures. This “post-metal” band is a metal band. I hope that clears that part up. It’s instrumental, layered, with elements of post-hardcore (a genre name I accept), with more focus on atmosphere than melody.

Karmanjakah – Diamond morning. This Swedish progressive metal band produces highly technical, textured metal tracks that incorporate less traditional elements like synths and choirs, while also working in some of the dropped-tuning riffs common to extreme metal. (I’ve seen their music called “thall,” a subgenre of technical metal.) I’m into the big riffs near the end here and the way the song builds on its earlier textures for a finish that feels conclusive.

Cemetery Skyline – Dream Delusion. A bonus track from the new deluxe edition of this metal supergroup’s lone album to date, Nordic Gothic.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 2026 in music, alternative, doom metal, hip-hop, indie, jazz, metal, Music, progressive metal

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