keith — Page 18

→ October 21, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/21/23.

My second Arizona Fall League notebook went up on Monday, covering everyone of note whom I hadn’t written up in the first one. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I appeared on TSN 1050 in Toronto to talk about the League Championship Series and the Blue Jays, including prospect Ricky Tiedemann and the controversial decision to replace José Berrios with Yusie Kikuchi in what turned out to be their last playoff game.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has profited by spreading lies and half-truths about vaccines for twenty years now. A book his group, Children’s Health Defense, and his publishing partner Skyhorse put out about the COVID-19 vaccines used the photo of a 12-year-old who died when a malformed blood vessel burst in his brain on its cover, claiming he’d died from the vaccine. He was unvaccinated, and of course they used his photo without his family’s permission. This Associated Press story talks to several families hurt by Kennedy’s lies and his so-called activism.
A Koch-funded right-wing site, Cowboy State Daily, is injecting climate denial and transphobic rhetoric into Wyoming politics, crowding out legitimate news sites that adhere to basic journalistic standards. It’s part of the national Metric Media network, which has over 1200 sites across the country and also takes funding from the Koch family’s DonorsTrust foundation.
Arizona continues to deny native tribes water rights they were promised under a 1908 treaty with the federal government. A third of homes on the Navajo reservation do not have access to clean water.
The Los Angeles Times’ Michael Hiltzik looks at how anti-vaxxers are exacting a personal and professional toll on scientists, and we’re losing the war against such disinformation. Dr. Peter Hotez notes within the story the death threats, doxing, and other intimidation tactics he’s seen as a vaccine developer and advocate for vaccination and science in general.
Meanwhile, a new study in BMJ estimates that 27 would-be mothers in the UK died during the pandemic because of confusion over the safety of COVID-19 vaccines during pregnancy.
The Minnesota Reformer has a story on how small businesses in Minneapolis are pressured to hire off-duty cops as “security” in what sure sounds like a protection racket to me.
Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen (R) owns a conglomerate of hog farms that are dumping huge amounts of nitrates into ground water in the state, but when a local journalist published an exposé in the Flat Water Free Press, Gov. Pillen attacked her personally by saying “the author is from Communist China. What more do you need to know?” I think I need to know when he’s going to clean up his hog farms, and I hope more journalists there put his pig’s feet to the fire.
Barbers Hill ISD in Texas suspended an 18-year-old Black student for wearing dreadlocks and is now forcing him to attend an alternative high school, despite the fact that Texas passed its own CROWN Act, prohibiting discrimination based on hairstyle, and the district already lost a lawsuit over the same issue in 2020. The district’s superintendent and deputy superintendent are both white, in case you were wondering.
Book-banning zealots in Iowa are having a field day by targeting any books with a ‘sex act,’ including numerous important works of literature like, ironically, the dystopian novels 1984 and Brave New World.
The federal government has begun distributing the $100 billion in funding for climate change mitigation projects under the Inflation Reduction Act, but it’s taking much longer than expected.
Trump, with the help of The Heritage Foundation, has a plan to gut the federal civil service and replace tens of thousands of employees with Trump sycophants in a return to the “spoils system” of the 1800s.
My friend Tim Grierson has a long, entertaining interview with Eddie Izzard on Cracked.com.
Scientific American looks at the “Sleeping Beauty problem” in probability, which has generated arguments like the Monty Hall problem and the question of that dress’s color.
A professor at UC-Davis tweeted a fairly overt threat against the lives of Jewish journalists, spurring an investigation by the university.
If ChatGPT can do much of the work in academic grant writing, does that tell us that the grant-writing process is broken?
Police in Newton, Iowa, have twice arrested a local resident for speaking out against the police at town meetings, so he’s suing them for violating his First Amendment (and other) rights.
The Azeri-Armenian conflict may move to Meghri, an Armenian town in a strip of land that separates Azerbaijan from its Nakhchivan exclave. Azerbaijan calls it the Zangezur corridor, and it borders Iran, which opposes any changes to the current structure, while Turkey and Russia appear to favor some alteration that would connect the two parts of Azerbaijan even at a reduction in Armenia’s sovereignty.
The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland argues that Benjamin Netanyahu has walked into Hamas’s trap, and Israel needs to remove him from power before the situation gets even worse.
Twitter Blue subscribers have become “super-spreaders” of misinformation about the Israel-Palestine conflict according to a brief analysis from the independent group NewsGuard, which attempts to rate the reliability of news sites.
The New York Times’ Katherine Miller writes about the rambling, repetitive speeches of Donald Trump as he pounds his false claims that the 2020 election was rigged.
St. Louis County police appear to have ignored erratic, threatening behavior from one of their own in the days leading up to him firing shots in the air at a trunk-or-treat event and shouting “you’re all going to die!”
Deepfake porn videos are spreading too fast for the available tools, and far faster than any government is moving to stop them. Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-NY) did introduce a bill to ban deepfakes and step up enforcement, revising a similar bill she’d introduced in 2019, but it’s only at the committee stage and all sponsors are Democrats.
David Roth writes about how Michael Lewis was taken in by fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, as Lewis’ reputation continues to take hits after his cringy response to Michael Oher’s lawsuit against the Tuohy family. (Oher appears to have no dispute with Lewis over the book The Blind Side.)
The Chicago man who stabbed a 6-year-old Palestinian boy 26 times, killing him, and stabbed the boy’s mother as well appears to have been radicalized by right-wing media. The spread of disinformation and hate has real consequences.
Board game news: The Kickstarter for the roll-and-write game Merchants of Magick is 3x funded and still up for six more days.
This year’s Essen Spiel convention was the largest ever, bringing nearly 200,000 people to the German city for the biggest board game con in the world.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, anti-semitism, arizona, Armenia, board game news, environment, first amendment, iowa, israel, links, longreads, math, minnesota, nebraska, palestine, police, social media, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines, wyoming

→ October 19, 2023
→ By keith

Klawchat 10/19/23.

My most recent post at the Athletic covered most of the prospects I saw in the Arizona Fall League last week.

Keith Law: I built this thing for you. Klawchat.

TomBruno23: What role, if any, should the Democrats play in helping to solve the issue of the next Speaker?
Keith Law: None. Not their circus. Let the other side struggle.

Sam: Any good food recommendations in the Raleigh area?
Keith Law: Bharvana Brewery, MOFU, Beasley’s, Poole’s Diner, Jubala Coffee.

mac: Is there a systemic problem in the yankees’ approach to hitter development? Do you see Volpe, Peraza, Pereira, and others’ helplessness against major league breaking balls as linked or coincidental?
Keith Law: I don’t see the link other than that two of those guys (Volpe and Pereira) were promoted to the majors before they were ready. I think Volpe will adjust. Pereira was having trouble with contact in the minors so the promotion was pretty risky.

Dave: Does the tremendous success of Jackson Holliday impact how teams view his brother, Ethan?
Keith Law: Yes, naturally, but I’m not sure that it should. It’s just human nature to assume they’ll follow similar paths. Everything I’ve heard on Ethan is wildly positive, though, even before Jackson became the #1 pick in 2022.

Ian: What in the world is going on with the Red Sox?
Keith Law: I have no idea. Some of the names that have been floated have been … uninspired?

Chuck: Glad to see you posting on Bluesky a bit. With Twitter suppressing links and non-blue checks, it’s become increasingly useless. The conversation on Bluesky seems like Twitter 10 years ago.
Keith Law: I’m on Bluesky more than any other place because of what you just said – there’s some actual conversation, and a lot of my favorite Twitter follows migrated there already. I’m still on Threads and Spoutible as well. I’m not that invested in any particular site taking off, but I want to be where you folks are.

Alex: Maybe too long for a chat, or maybe not possible with publicly available data, but… while your player analysis is franchise-agnostic, is it possible to apply sabermetric analysis to team-level competencies? E.g. we know that Cleveland and Los Angeles have a track record of success at improving pitchers in their farm system. Tampa is *really* good at assembling a bullpen. How rigorous can we get in analyzing those kinds of skills?
Keith Law: We do know these things, but they’re also quite subject to change – if one particular coach leaves an org, do they take that competency with them? I don’t view any of those things as permanent to a specific club.

Sedona: hey Keith, I enjoyed your read on the MVP predictions. Too bad we couldn’t get your thoughts on NL ROY. Wanted to see your thoughts on Nolan Jones. He’s shown even splits home and away as well as righty vs. lefty (very unusual). He’s gonna strike out a ton, but hits for a high avg. What to make of this? The next CGON?
Keith Law: I’m not really buying that as sustainable … there’s still a ton of swing and miss there even with the benefit of altitude. He had a .401 BABIP this year! I do think the L/R evenness is a function of playing half his games in Denver, so the LH breaking stuff that gave him trouble in AAA isn’t breaking as well, giving him more of a chance. I think he’s a useful but flawed player.

Bret: Have you seen Jung Hoo Lee play enough to have an opinion on his MLB potential?
Keith Law: He’ll be on my free agent rankings later this month.

Greg: I just can’t imagine Vaughn Grissom is in the Atlanta organization next year. What would his value be in a trade? Could he bring back a controllable starter like Cease?
Keith Law: By himself, no, but in a package, sure. He’s valuable – I think a lot of teams would see him as a future starter.

doug dennis: When might we expect an updated prospects list? thank you for your work.
Keith Law: Prospect rankings will be in late January/early February.

Andrew: Any thoughts on the Tigers moving Jung to 3B, as has been reported? I was surprised because I thought Keith would play 3B and Jung 2B. Can either be an above average defender?
Keith Law: Keith probably ends up at 1b. I wish I’d see Jung play third in the AFL but he DH’d the one game I saw him play, and didn’t start the other two times I saw his team. It was not my most productive AFL trip with several days where all games were at the same time plus some odd lineup choices.

Ryan: Two part question. When do you see the Brewers bringing up Jackson Chourio, and when should they bring him up? I assume both answers will be sometime in 2024?
Keith Law: Yes to both. I wouldn’t rush him, and I don’t think they will since CF is one place where they have depth.

Louie: Do you think Tyler Stephenson has any trade value left after a pretty poor season both at the plate and behind the dish? With Reds bringing Luke Maile back, it feels like he could be on the way out.
Keith Law: I thought his 2021 was kind of his ceiling, but 2023 seems way below his true talent level. I’m shocked that he’s not making harder contact – that was his profile as a prospect, in HS and in the minors when healthy, a catcher who might be power over hit but you can live with that for that position. So yes, I think he has trade value, since there are always 6-8 teams looking for help behind the plate.

Marc: Keith, have you seen enough of Nick Gonzales to say he’s not a first division 2B? Not a big board game person but bought Lacrimosa based on your review and my wife and I love it. Anything you’d recommend that’s similar is style of play? Thanks!
Keith Law: I’m probably the wrong person to ask on Gonzales because I’ve always been a skeptic, at least since he signed; I took a fair bit of grief from Pirates fans for leaving him off my top 100 several times, but I saw below-average D and too much of a dead-pull approach. He needs to make several changes to be a regular. I’m thrilled you like Lacrimosa – check out Red Cathedral and Merv: Heart of the Silk Road.

Larry: Why don’t the Astros play Chas McCormick every day? 3.8 fWAR, above average vs lefties and righties. Am I missing something?
Keith Law: About ten years too young, maybe?
Keith Law: I don’t know any details, but I thought the Astros dismissing Sara Goodrum, kind of a rising star over there, when that system keeps kicking out players who exceed expectations was surprising, even before we consider the bad look of firing one of the highest-ranking women in any baseball ops department. She’d be a good hire for any team.

JJ Picollo: Is trading Salvador Perez to the White Sox an actual thing?
Keith Law: Why would the White Sox do that?

Matt C: Who is your preferred pitching prospect between Chase Hampton, Tekoah Roby, and Jairo Iriarte?
Keith Law: Roby.

Guest: I saw your report on Chase Delauter’s wonky swing mechanics. Do you think he gets exposed in AAA and MLB?
Keith Law: I think that’s the risk; it’s what several area scouts around here expected, given the hips and the swing and his tendency to cheat to get to good velo. I noted that there are guys who get away with suboptimal swings, so I don’t mean to say this is definitive, but I’m more worried about him getting exposed at those levels than other hitters of comparable performance and backgrounds.

James: Will Twitter still exist in 2 years?
Keith Law: Yes, but it’ll be like Gab or any of those other highly siloed right-wing sites.

Mike: Is Luis matos just a manny margot offensively? I want to think he has more pop but was curious on your thoughts
Keith Law: More raw power, yes. I thought Margot would hit for more average than he has – .274 is his season high – given his contact skills. Matos is similar in a few ways but he’s got more now power.

Jake: Michael Fulmer is going to miss 2024 with a UCL and is out of contract. If he filed for workers compensation to put some money in his pocket, do you think teams would retaliate against him over it?
Keith Law: I saw that news this morning and took him off my rough cut at a top 50 free agents – he was on the bubble – but I thought maybe someone signs him for two years.

Brian: Do you think the Phillies will resign Nola or will he leave?
Keith Law: I can not imagine they let him walk, especially if they get to the World Series again. They have to be so flush with cash, he’s their one FA of note (everyone loves Hoskins, but they just don’t need him), and you’ve seen the old Nola again the last two months.

Codey: Almost 1 year later. What would your update be to the DBacks BlueJays trade? Varsho/Moreno/Gurriel
Keith Law: AZ definitely ahead so far. Surprised Varsho regressed that much.
Keith Law: I had Moreno as a top 6 prospect in baseball before he came up, though, so I could have a little confirmation bias here.

Ryan: The Dbacks have a gaping hole at third base. The Rays have a ton of depth at third base (Paredes, Diaz, Caminero, Mead, and Aranda). They also have a need at shortstop right now. Does a trade involving Perdomo for Mead make sense for both teams?
Keith Law: Three months ago I would have said yes. After seeing Mead play defense in the big leagues, I’m less sure. The game sped up on him really quickly.

Brad: Would you have Schwarber in the leadoff spot if you were managing the Phillies?
Keith Law: No.

Mike: Dj herz looks like a weapon, but in what capacity? Not many bullpen arms throw only 92
Keith Law: Might throw a little harder in the pen. I think he’s a reliever, FB/CH only with deception, maybe he becomes a bulk guy who goes once through the order?

Codey: Why do you think prospects are going through the minors what feels like quicker than ever these days?
Keith Law: Great question without a single explanation. Some I think is teams realizing players can be ready sooner than the one-level-per-year norm. Some is teams realizing those players are cheaper than veterans – 80% of the production for 5% of the price. Some is the advent of better data that should help teams make better decisions (e.g., Boston promoting Roman Anthony to high A). But I also worry it will encourage MLB to further contract the minors.

Duncan: Do you think Alek Thomas will ever be a decent or better major league hitter?
Keith Law: Yes. He’s only 23 and boosted his contact quality quite a bit this year.

addoeh: If there is anything to change with regards to the wild card round, I would get rid of off days. If there has to be double headers, so be it. Thoughts?
Keith Law: Players hate doubleheaders – they’d oppose that. I sort of agree with you about off days in general … I think days without baseball are bad for the sport. This is one of our strongest times of year, with NHL/NBA barely starting, the NFL obviously there but in a quieter part of their season, and yet we just give away real estate with days that would never have games.

JR: Can you pray to the baseball gods we get some close postseason games and/or game 7s? This postseason has lacked much drama to date.
Keith Law: Some great individual games but I agree that we need a long series or two. TEX/HOU might go that way after last night. Houston’s bullpen remains ridiculous.

SJ: Any hope Elly stays at SS? If not, can he stick at 3B or will he follow his fellow Cruz Oneill to RF?
Keith Law: I give Elly a way better chance than Cruz.

Brad: Long time fan, love your work. Am I right to be very underwhelmed by the Chris Getz promotion seeing as how he had a major hand in making this roster what it is?
Keith Law: No, I don’t think he had anywhere near as much of a hand in the MLB roster as you seem to think. I’ll be very curious to see what he does with far more autonomy. He’s definitely a change from Williams/Hahn.

Codey: would any of next years top 100 ranked hire than this years Corbin Carroll or Gunnar Henderson to start this season?
Keith Law: I don’t know. Holliday is obviously still my #1, and he’s in that range too. I might have gone Carroll, Holliday, Henderson? Hard to say because we now have a year of big league data on two of those guys and they were, to use the technical term, fucking awesome./

George: Questions about two guys you didn’t touch on in your AFL article: Hassell and Herz from WSH. Whats your outlook on Hassell now, after almost a year and a half of poor performance following his hamate injury? and is there anything there with the crazy k/9 numbers with Herz?
Keith Law: Herz I just answered. Hassell has gone backwards, unfortunately. Maybe he just changed his approach too much because he didn’t have his hand strength back earlier in the year, but now he’s kind of stuck in the wrong gear.

David: How much do you care that the best baseball team each year is likely not going to win the World Series? Should we celebrate the best regular season teams more? Or should this whole debate just stop and we all just enjoy baseball?
Keith Law: You know what I’m going to say. Just enjoy the baseball. And by the way, is anyone really going to argue that the Phillies or Rangers or Astros aren’t actually the best team? They all look pretty damn good to me. Isn’t October as much about who’s got their A roster healthy as anything else?

Harry Potter: When evaluating a prospect, how do you factor in something like Tommy Troy playing most of the year with a broken foot? Or do you factor it in at all?
Keith Law: I always factor injuries into evaluations.

Codey: do you still believe in Drew Jones as a top flight prospect potential wise? Or has his struggles/ injuries since draft day scared you off of that?
Keith Law: I see a lower floor than I did before. I also know we haven’t seen him fully healthy since he signed.

Cwsoxfan: Please come to FPAZ, eventually. ?
Keith Law: First Pitch? It’s really too late for me to come to the fall league. By that point a lot of the better prospects are gone.

Brad: Everyone here in Chicago seems to believe that trading Burger is like trading Sosa or the cubs trading Lou Brock. To me this is his ceiling and it’s about a 2 WAR player. What do you think?
Keith Law: Yeah the OBP problem really caps his ceiling. Nice player. If he turns into a star, I would say that wasn’t likely to happen in Chicago.

Jay: I wouldn’t say I struggle with mental health, but I can’t put the damn Twitter down and as a result I cannot get my mind off this dumpster fire of a country and world we’ve got here. Have you benefited from not being on Twitter as much as you used to, or do you just keep up with the shit show in other ways?
Keith Law: I’ve definitely been happier using it far less. Some fan of a specific team got mad because I tweeted about one bad strike call but not others, and it was just such a reminder of how stupid that site has become. (I was on a plane most of that day and happily offline.)

Dr Who: Do you have any thoughts on Kim Ng leaving the Marlins? I thought she was doing a pretty good job over there.
Keith Law: It sounds like she stood up for herself in the best possible way. The most concerning detail I’ve read is that the owner wouldn’t let her hire her own people for some scouting and PD jobs. If that’s true, then she’s not really the GM! I believe she’ll get another opportunity this winter or next. I’m not saying the glass ceiling is gone, but it’s cracked, at least.

Matt: Apologies if I missed your coverage on this, but curious about your thoughts on Rintaro Sasaki forgoing the NPB draft to play college baseball. Are there development advantages to going this route or is this more about earning potential?
Keith Law: He’ll get paid a lot sooner this way, assuming he stays healthy and performs as expected. I’m not sure we want a flood of Japanese and Korean amateurs coming here and damaging NPB/KBO, though. I’m all for players getting paid, but I don’t want to see two of the three strongest leagues in the world destabilized, either.

John: What is the deal with Andrew Vaughn? Seems to have actually taken a step backward this year. With his limited defensive value this worries me
Keith Law: He was one of my breakout picks for this year who plateaued instead. Really thought that approach from college would carry over to pro ball but he has never gotten the patience back.

Sedona: Is Jakob Marsee in consideration to make your top 100 on your next update?
Keith Law: No.

Cwsoxfan: Will Montgomery / Ramos actually be the future of our MI? Thanks
Keith Law: I wouldn’t bet on either guy being in the middle infield

Rich Campbell: Do you play Immaculate Grid, Keith? If so, thoughts?
Keith Law: I do not, sorry.

John: Is Colson Montgomerys ceiling Seager? To me I see maybe a light Seager. Not as good defensively and not the same power but just solid all around. Agree?
Keith Law: Seager Lite is a good way to put it. I was a little disappointed to see Montgomery look less mobile in the field in the AFL.

George: Yohandy Morales really popped in pro-ball after the draft. Did you see enough for you to bump your evaluation on him?
Keith Law: No, a major college product going off in low A (where he spent the most time) isn’t that meaningful.

Matt: I went to Ocotillo last week on your recommendation. My friends were skeptical when I explained that a baseball analyst I had never met recommended it, but everyone loved it. Just wanted to say thank you.
Keith Law: Awesome – I haven’t been in some time and am glad to hear it lived up to what I wrote several years ago. I always run into this challenge in Arizona, where I want to revisit old favorites but feel compelled to try new places so I can write about them.

Adam D.: Obviously Reggie Crawford (pitching) and Bryce Eldridge (hitting) are far superior on one side of the ball than the other, but do you see any real issues with the Giants approach to at least give them each some chances to show what they can do on the other side? At what point in their development would you say doing so becomes detrimental?
Keith Law: Yes, it risks needless injury (more a concern for Eldridge) and takes time away from developing in the role where they’ll end up.

Jim: Keith, no skin in the game, but a follow-up to your Nolan Jones comments. The Rockies AAA club plays at over 5,000 feet in ABQ (as are several other PCL cities), so wouldn’t the issues regarding breaking balls be at least as relevant, if not more so because of the talent level?
Keith Law: Jones spent 2022 in AAA in Columbus because he was still with the Guardians.

Codey: Do you think Ivan Melendez could grow into an every day 1B or DH at the MLB level? His power seems top of the charts
Keith Law: No, it’s way too power over hit.

Matt: Does it feel like Counsell is the likely guy for Mets skipper?
Keith Law: I don’t know any gossip on this but he’s done a great job in Milwaukee and really grew into the role. I was a big skeptic, and remain so with managers who have zero experience, but he’s a success story.

E: Trey Sweeney upside? Platoon type or something more?
Keith Law: Maybe? Or utility infielder? I’ve seen him a bunch the last two years and I don’t think there’s enough stick there for more.

Sam: If I offered you the choice between winning 54% of your games every season for a decade (and the corresponding chance at winning a WS) or a decade with a guaranteed title and 9 years of 2023 A’s performance, which one would you pick?
Keith Law: Flags fly forever.

mcgiveittome: Is there enough untapped upside for players like Lewis, Julien, Ober, etc., to help the Twins take the next step toward World Series contention? It feels like they’re so close, yet so far.
Keith Law: They’re going to miss Gray’s production if they can’t re-sign him, but I think they’re still contenders. A healthy Lewis is a potential star, now that they’ve fixed all his swing issues. Still some talent marching up that system too.

KC: Gold Glove award is a joke, kinda surprised a DH doesn’t win it someday. Oh forgot that already happened when Palme8ro won it
Keith Law: Yeah I stopped paying attention to it a while ago. They tried to update the criteria but it’s still flawed.

Sedona: I read your piece on Chase Delauter’s swing for the AFL. He describes his swing as a “Scissor Swing”. He has a high contact/hard hit rate, low strike out rate, and seems like he hits the ball oppo on pitches that he’s late on and it still flies w/ strong wrists. Built like a freak athlete. I’ve seen Kyle Tucker comps. Does he have to adjust his swing to succeed?
Keith Law: Lots of guys have scissor swings – that’s not really an issue.

George: What do you think about the player dev and scouting hires in DC? Cause for optimism? Or more of the same from a Rizzo-led FO?
Keith Law: Haas, Ciolek, Dunn are all great hires.

Guest: Hello Mr. Klaw. it’s been awhile since I’ve been able to catch one of your chats, so today’s a good day for me. It’s getting close to end-of-year lists, including music. Any top-of-mind thoughts about which certain albums will land on your upcoming list?
Keith Law: In no particular order – Slowdive, Noname, Arlo Parks, Corinne Bailey Rae, Geese, The Hives, Grian Chatten, Cory Wong, Altin Gun. I probably forgot a few in there.

Codey: Will Jordan Lawler be close to a top 10 prospect for your next rankings? Or did his s.s.s. MLB struggles worry you about his future?
Keith Law: I don’t worry about tiny samples like that.

Heather: When people say of a GM/Head of Baseball Operations, “Oh, that guy’s really good at drafting and developing”, are they praising the wrong person? Chaim Bloom, for instance, was killed for his trades, but lauded for rebuilding the Red Sox’ farm system. But how much did he see of Roman Anthony, Mikey Romero, or even Marcelo Mayer before he drafted them? Do GMs run a team’s draft, or is it the scouting directors/
Keith Law: The GM hires the scouting director, normally. They might see the first-rounders, and have input into that one pick. The GM also sets the overall philosophy, such as determining that the team will use a model to make the picks vs. the scouting department doing so subjectively. But saying such-and-such a GM signed or drafted all those players is nonsense.

AHume92: Barger or Martinez at 3B for Toronto next year? Seems like either plan could easily end badly.
Keith Law: Yes but I’m more hopeful on Orelvis than I was a year ago.

Shawn: I enjoyed your summary of The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis. Had you read any of his earlier books? I liked a few of them a lot, but his style could be exhausting. I haven’t read Zone of Interest yet, but I suspect he would have been more understated with that kind of setting and storyline.
Keith Law: Yes, I read Money some time ago. I liked Zone of Interest more.

Shawn: You always hear about pitchers trying to increase the spin rate on their fastball, but is it possible for a spin rate that’s much lower than the normal range to be especially effective too?
Keith Law: Yes. Spin rate in a vacuum isn’t all that telling – more isn’t necessarily better.

Shawn: What should Bobby Dalbec’s future hold? Is he just a classic AAAA player?
Keith Law: To me, yes.

Santaspirt: I don’t understand… Is Alec Bohm good at defense now and Trea Turner bad? What if defense we’re a zero sum game all this time?
Keith Law: Bohm’s clearly better, and Turner’s defense was already sliding a little bit even last year. I said when they signed him that Stott at SS and Turner at 2B would be a better alignment. I doubt that happens any time soon.

Duff: Are you down on Baty?
Keith Law: No.

Lefty: They might call me Lefty, but I will be voting Republican next Presidential election.
Keith Law: Sure.

Marani: Is Adrian Beltre the only candidate elected to the HOF this winter? Or does Todd Helton sneak his way in as well?
Keith Law: My guess is only Beltre.

Anthony: How would you sort the Rangers OF going forward, with Langford likely ready at some point next year?
Keith Law: Keep all four – him, Taveras, Garcia, Carter – and cycle them through the DH spot to keep everyone fresh.

Anthony: Shouldn’t the Rangers be celebrated for taking a losing team and actually spending money to try and win? I know it all didn’t work out perfect (Degrom), but they now have foundational building blocks to mix with their young, upcoming talent.
Keith Law: Absolutely. You don’t have to win every move – they tried enough that they’re two wins from a pennant. That’s a success.

Jake: Does Bellinger get paid as if this year is who he is?
Keith Law: Yes.

Tommy: What’s your biggest baseball heresy? Mine: Fenway Park is a dump, that should’ve been torn down 20 years ago. I’ve been going there since 1979. It’s grimy, the seats are so tiny that even Keith Law finds them uncomfortable, the clubhouses are supposedly much too cramped — if it wasn’t for that GD Wall, Fenway Park would just be the site of some Boston University dorms.
Keith Law: I don’t love Fenway or Wrigley like many/most fans do. They are very uncomfortable places to watch a game. I understand the nostalgia value and I’m definitely not advocating for premium seats in every ballpark (at taxpayer expense) … but those two aren’t especially high on my list.

Tracy: Movie talk: Oppenheimer might be the best film I’ve seen this century. Have you seen it? Review?
Keith Law: Not yet. Will see it soon now that it’s coming to digital.

Thomas: re: Ng… did any team have a worse run of draft picks in 2021 and 2022 than the Marlins? Watson already got traded and Jacob Berry looks like a complete bust with the 6th pick.
Keith Law: Berry was a huge reach; Watson seemed like a great pick, although I guess the makeup was as bad as or worse than advertised. Either way, though, the scouting director who made those picks wasn’t Ng’s hire.

John Poles: Senator Steve Garvey?
Keith Law: I’d be surprised.

Jud: Keith, I know you appreciate some shoegaze. Check out Film School’s newest album if you haven’t already. Been really enjoying the new Slowdive and FA records.
Keith Law: New name to me – thank you.

Scott: Thoughts on Johan Rojas’s playing ability and future?
Keith Law: Defense and speed are legit. I don’t think he’s ever much with the bat but there is contact skill there to carry him enough so the rest of it plays. It would help if he gained a little strength – that frame isn’t going to allow much, but any increase in contact quality is a big boost to his chances to be a regular or more.

Jon v: Think Manzardo opens 2024 at 1B with big league club with Naylor mostly at DH?
Keith Law: Seems too soon? Maybe June.

PhillieJake: Late to chat sorry if this was asked. Why did The Pirates send Carter Bins to AFL? He’s at best fourth in depth chart. No real future in majors with team.
Keith Law: They were probably required to send a catcher – teams are given certain spots to fill – and chose him.

Sagya Williams: Believer in Wilyer Abreu? Will he stick as an above-average regular?
Keith Law: Don’t see it.

Patrick: As one of the skeptic/rationalist types I follow, can you help explain why so many – yourself included – have taken the maximalist position on transgenderism? There isn’t much in the way of “science” to support it. The science I’ve seen you cite is flimsy at best, and reliant on language games to confuse/distort reality (“sex is not binary” is not true in any sense when every human being on the planet has exactly two parents). Is it just fear of social/professional consequences? And if so, do you see any potential downside to introducing unreality to science and politics? A concern I have is with vaccine advocates promoting an easily disprovable lie, like “trans women are women” – who would trust anything you say on vaccines when you’ve proven yourself to be willing to throw rationalism out the window when it suits your politics?
Keith Law: You kind of took the mask off there at the end. There’s plenty of science demonstrating that sex is not binary – the “two parents” thing has nothing to do with it – and that the transgender brain is real, with some genetic influences. But the important point here is that my advocacy for trans rights comes in the face of a hate-filled, anti-science, highly partisan attempt to demonize trans people, very much in the way that the Nazis othered Jews and Roma people, and very much in the way that Hannah Arendt explained would-be autocrats do as they try to rise to power. Laws that ban gender-affirming care for minors don’t improve any outcomes, and they increase suicides and self-harm. What those laws do do, however, is play to a base of voters that has been primed by a decades-long disinformation war that has told them that tobacco is safe and the climate isn’t changing and vaccines don’t work and the earth is flat and the 2020 election was stolen.
Keith Law: You have a choice: You can stand up for the rights of one of the most vulnerable populations in the country, even if it amounts to no more than opposing laws designed to isolate or harm them, or you can side with the people shouting “groomers” and “pedophiles” and doing everything they can to other trans people. I don’t think this is a very hard choice, especially given all of the evidence from the neuroscience world that the transgender brain is different.

Bartleby: Why can’t people just STFU about sexual issues that have nothing to do with them?
Keith Law: It’s the disinformation war I mentioned. Most of these people never gave a shit about trans folks until the alt-right threw a target on their backs.

Sedona: Have you had a chance to evaluate Yamamoto? Potential #1? Prediction where he does?
Keith Law: He will also be on my free agent rankings.

Heather: Local radio show was talking about the Red Sox’ GM search, got deep into the weeds, and started talking about Billy Beane. One of the radio guys was adamant: Billy Beane should be in the HOF, for the way he changed how front offices approached the game. Should a GM who never got a team to the World Series be in the Hall?
Keith Law: I have no opinion on Beane’s Hall candidacy but I wouldn’t use pennants or WS rings as a strict, binary criterion.
Keith Law: That’s all for this week – thank you all for reading and all of your questions. My free agent rankings will drop right around November 1st, give or take a day or two, and that will probably be my next major piece for the Athletic. Stay tuned for that, some new game reviews, and some great podcast guests coming up as well.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: klawchat

→ October 17, 2023
→ By keith

Arizona eats, 2023 edition.

Bacanora is one of the most acclaimed new restaurants in the country, landing on Bon Appetit’s list of the 50 best new restaurants of 2022, Esquire’s list of the same, and the New York Times’s list of the 50 best restaurants in the country, while it was a semifinalist for the James Beard award for best new restaurant. It’s very difficult to get a reservation, with seats opening a month in advance, but they do take walk-ins for bar seating and the patio, which is how I ended up with a spot right. I arrived just before they opened at 5 pm, which left me enough time to get to the 6:30 game in Glendale, and sat right at the bar, where I was eventually joined by another visitor from out of town who’d found the restaurant on Eater Phoenix (which does a great job covering the city’s food scene, along with the Phoenix New Times). I ordered two dishes on the bartender’s recommendations, the charred cabbage salad and the scallops elote, the latter of which is a ceviche in disguise. The cabbage salad was the best thing I ate on the entire trip and one of the best dishes I’ve had anywhere this year. There’s a wood-fired grill/hearth right there just past the end of the bar, and the cabbage (white and/or green) is indeed charred and smoky, chopped and tossed with a chiltepin vinaigrette, crema, pumpkin seeds, and crumbled tostada shells. It was tangy and spicy and very crunchy, unlike any cabbage dish I’ve ever had, so much so that I’m going to buy cabbage this week, grill it, and try to at least re-create this ‘salad’ in concept. The scallops elote did sort of pale in comparison, although the freshness of the scallops was remarkable in the seafood desert (pun intended) of Phoenix. Raw shellfish preparations are one of the few foods that make me hesitate, probably because I grew up on Long Island during a period when there were frequent health warnings about the risks of eating raw local oysters (which happened again this summer, this time after several deaths from Vibrio parahaemolyticus). These bay scallops were tender and had a faint flavor of seawater, although they were a little drowned by the flavors from the elote, grilled corn with two different types of crema, one spicy and one lime-infused, and comes with tostada sheets for scooping to add a little more salt and some more crunch. The menu, which reflects the flavors of the Sonora state in northwestern Mexico, changes very frequently, and neither of the items I had is on the permanent menu on their site, so you’re rolling the dice a little if you book ahead of time. I’m comfortable saying it’ll be worth it regardless.

Hai Noon is the latest restaurant from chef Nobuo Fukuda, a legend in Phoenix dining circles and a Beard winner for Best Chef – Southwest back in 2007, but whose namesake restaurant Nobuo at Teeter House closed in 2021 during the nadir of the pandemic. Hai Noon takes over a former dive bar’s space at the Sonder Mariposa hotel in Scottsdale, and the contrast between the setting and the delicate cuisine, which is mostly Japanese but with some French flourishes, enhances the whole experience. Chef Nobuo is known for his “sashimi spoons,” two per order, each of which is a single bite of raw fish with a few small accoutrements and a sauce, usually salmon, amberjack, or hamachi. I over-ordered, in hindsight, but I wanted to try both of the spoons with amberjack (kampachi), one with grapefruit and avocado, the other with shiso, Japanese ginger, and taro chip. I’d eat both all day long because the fish was as high a quality as any I’ve had anywhere, although I think the latter one (shiso/ginger) would get the nod as the superior one because the flavors were relatively new to me. In both spoons, however, the fish remained front and center, as it should when it’s this fresh. The cauliflower with sesame sauce also comes with okra, and the sauce was salty and very rich, with that faint peanut buttery taste I often detect with toasted sesame seeds (in a good way). The mushrooms en papillote were my least favorite of the four things I ordered, mostly because the flavors were so muted compared to the other three items that they felt a little flat, although the mushrooms themselves were excellent. It’s possible that I just couldn’t adjust my palate from the salty, umami-filled flavors of the sashimi and cauliflower to the garlic butter of the mushrooms. I also had a “Japanese old-fashioned,” which was just an old-fashioned with a little ginger syrup and black sugar (kuro sato). Nobuo is also planning to open a second restaurant in an adjacent space called Hidden Gem.

Dilla Libre Dos is, as you might infer, the second outpost from the folks behind the Dilla Libre food truck, this one located in Scottsdale not too far from the Giants’ stadium. They’re best known for their quesadillas, but as lactose is not really my friend, I went with the shrimp tacos with Tapatio crema, slaw, and pico de gallo, which were good-spicy and extremely flavorful, with lime, salt, cilantro, and other herbs between the seasoning on the shrimp and the toppings. I’d skip the rice and beans, though, which were just ordinary.

The Neighborly Public House is a high-end gastropub that might be a little overpriced for its target demographic but does serve quite credible food for the genre. I had the grilled “bbq” salmon because it was the end of the week and my stomach was starting to complain about all the heavier things I’d eaten, but other than the sauce being kind of generic, this salmon – from Iceland, which is trying to make its mark in sustainable aquaculture – was perfectly cooked, just barely to medium and still extremely tender and buttery. It’s served with a jicama slaw and a little salad of grape tomatoes with cornbread croutons, so I achieved the goal of eating something that was lighter and in theory more healthful than most of my meals this week. The menu also has several varieties of burgers, a fried shrimp platter, Maryland crab cakes (I just couldn’t), and salads, more or less what you’d expect from a gastropub, with a modest list of beer and wines. I did enjoy their take on a Manhattan, which used rye, orange bitters, and sweet vermouth infused with cacao nibs, adding a little more bitterness to what can be a too-sweet drink.

I went to Pa’La for lunch one day, and it’s changed quite a bit since I first went there back in 2018, when the place itself was smaller and so was the menu. It’s still built around wood-fired cooking, including outstanding breads, including the Tuscan flatbread known as schiacciata, which is sort of an Italian pita or naan that’s thick enough to slice in half and use as a sandwich bread. Their menu changes frequently but the boquerones (pickled white anchovies) are nearly always on it, which are bright and briny but would probably be better with a little bread rather than the crackers that come with them. I also had the albacore tuna sandwich, which comes and goes based on availability, on that schiacciata bread. It’s lightly dressed with aioli, arugula, and pickled red onions, and was big enough that I didn’t actually need the boquerones after all. The bread is the real star here, though – whatever you get, get something that brings you bread, or even a pizza if they have it. (They’re also known for grain bowls, which is what I had when I first went five years ago.) Co-owner Claudio Urcioli has a new spot out in Gilbert called Source that also uses some of his incredible breads, but I wasn’t anywhere close to it.

Provisions Coffee was the one disappointment of the trip – it’s a very trendy space, but the coffee is just fair and my drink was just lukewarm, I think because the barista just used milk they’d already steamed for someone else’s drink and allowed to cool for too long. I also got a donut from Outcast Donuts in Mesa, which uses a croissant dough (so it’s a cronut, just not by that name); the donut was good and shockingly not too heavy, but my goodness is that place trying too hard, with the decor, the names of items, all of it except the actual food.

I also hit some old favorites, including the Hillside Spot, Crêpe Bar, Matt’s Big Breakfast, the Cornish Pasty Company, Pane Bianco, and Frost Gelato, but the different schedule for the AFL this year meant I missed Cocina Chiwas, the new full-service spot from the folks behind Tacos Chiwas; and didn’t get to Pizzeria Bianco or FnB or Virtù or Noble Eatery, some of my favorites from the Valley.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, bread, italian cuisine, japanese cuisine, mesa, mexican cuisine, phoenix, scottsdale

→ October 14, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/14/23.

My one piece this week for subscribers to the Athletic this week was my first dispatch from the Arizona Fall League, covering prospects from the Tigers, Cardinals, and Rockies. I’ll have a longer wrap-up once my trip concludes on Saturday evening.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: ProPublica continues to lead the way in exposing the role of Leonard Leo in creating the conservative super-majority on the Supreme Court and packing federal courts with right-wing jurists, often of dubious credentials, and how he plans to push the country further towards a Christian theocracy.
New York’s Olivia Nuzzi followed the clown car of Republican candidates trying to run against the disgraced former President – and, so far, failing.
The richest man in Pennsylvania is spending millions of dollars to support Republican candidates for judicial races, most of it to support Carolyn Carluccio, a right-wing justice running for a seat on the state’s Supreme Court.
Sports Illustrated’s Steve Rushin wrote a lovely memoriam to sportswriter Jim Caple, who died last week at age 61 of frontotemporal dementia. I did not know Jim well, and even argued with him at times about matters such as the value of the runs scored statistic for individual hitters, but I believe the outpouring of sadness from people in our industry who did know him well is a testament to his legacy.
Several new instant-loan apps in India have targeted borrowers with threats of leaked nudes, harassment, and other forms of coercion that have led to multiple suicides.
I have taken a psyllium husk supplement every day for nearly 25 years now to help manage my stomach, as I was diagnosed with the meaningless term “irritable bowel syndrome,” which means that I don’t actually have a GI disease or disorder but the doctors didn’t want me to walk away empty-handed. Psyllium husk works wonders, and it’s probably pretty good for my overall health anyway. Now it’s a fad food and if you fucking hippies and influencers create a shortage I will come for you all.
Target closed several Seattle stores, blaming crime for the decisions – but is that really the reason for the failures of these Target mini-stores?
Arkansas, befitting its status as a backwater state, gave prisoners with COVID-19 ivermectin without their knowledge or consent, so now the ACLU has filed suit on their behalf. Just a reminder that ivermectin is completely ineffective against COVID-19 and comes with rather unpleasant side effects, no matter what the grifters on the interwebs told you.
Mississippi was one of the only two states that disallowed religious exemptions to childhood vaccination requirements until a Republican judge struck down the state’s rule, and this fall over 1800 such exemptions have been issued – even though no major religion bans or forbids vaccines. This is all a con from parents who are ignorant, denialist, or just sheep going along with the Republican party’s anti-science platform. We’re likely to see some sort of outbreak there in the next few months, perhaps measles, as it’s the most contagious of the vaccine-preventable diseases that affect humans.
Eric Trump hosted an overt anti-Semite who denies the Holocaust and once killed someone while driving drunk at the Trump Doral Miami resort for a “Reawaken America” event this week.
And some prominent Texas Republicans hosted Holocaust denier and white supremacist Nick Fuentes at the headquarters of right-wing consulting firm Pale Horse Strategies.
Elon Musk is actively promoting false information about the Israel-Hamas war, even sharing a video that falsely claimed a reporter there was actually an actor. (By the way, I’m avoiding any commentary on that conflict. I know I don’t know anywhere near enough to say anything worthwhile beyond condemning any and all attacks on civilians.)
Alex Norris is the creator of the web comic known simply as Webcomic Name, but after he signed a deal with Golden Bell Games to publish a board game using his creations, the publisher is trying to claim ownership of his intellectual property. There’s a GoFundMe to support his legal case, but I’m also linking this so people know what Golden Bell – publishers of Unbroken, Dungeon Dice, and other titles – are all about.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: coronavirus, health, india, links, longreads, mississippi, pennsylvania, scotus, social media, stick to baseball, texas, white nationalism

→ October 12, 2023
→ By keith

The Zone of Interest.

Martin Amis died earlier this year at age 73, leaving behind a bibliography of fifteen novels, several books’ worth of short stories, and eight non-fiction works or essay collections. His penultimate novel, The Zone of Interest, was in the news the same week that he died, as a film of the same name premiered at the Cannes film festival, where it won the Grand Prix (second place, of a sort, after the Palme d’Or). Both are set during the Holocaust at the Auschwitz concentration camp, but while the film – which I have not seen – focuses on Rudolph Höss and his wife, the novel fictionalizes the commandant and adds two more fictional characters for a tripartite narrative that plunges the reader into the contrast of setting and story.

Angelus “Golo” Thomsen is a Nazi officer at the death camp, a scheming womanizer who becomes obsessed with Hannah Doll, the wife of camp commandant Paul Doll, who is the fictional stand-in for Höss. Thomsen pursues Hannah despite the obvious threat to both of their lives, and she’s more than amenable, as she’s become disgusted with her true-believer Nazi husband, who drinks far too much and is becoming increasingly paranoid both of those around him and of his superiors in Berlin. Szmul is a Sonderkommando, a Jew and prisoner who is forced to help dispose of the bodies of victims of the Nazis’ gas chambers, in exchange for slightly better living conditions and little threat of arbitrary execution. Each of the three narrates his portion of the story, with Szmul’s sections the shortest but offering the starkest contrast to the mundane machinations of the other two.

While the story of Thomsen’s bizarre courtship of Hannah is ostensibly the core of the novel, it’s Amis’s development of the setting, presenting us with the contradictions between love, sex, and other ordinary facets of life with the murder, torture, and privation happening on the same grounds. There is no actual separation here – smoke from the crematorium fouls the air, prisoners from the camp sometimes ‘serve’ the Nazis, one prisoner happens to see Doll in a vulnerable moment and pays for it with his life. The Nazis, including their wives, simply choose not to see what is happening around them, like each ethnic group in China Miéville’s The City and the City, and go on with their daily lives as if they were not complicit in, or even actually ordering, the deaths of thousands of Jews, Roma, and others right in their literal back yard. That Amis makes this so plausible, this depiction of the banality of evil and the ways in which humans can justify anything to themselves, is what makes this novel such an odd, impressive work.

It’s often easy to get lost in the trivial nature of the bizarre love triangle here, until reality intrudes somewhere, either when Szmul gets the microphone or when one of the prisoners is forced to do something at one of the officers’ houses, and we’re reminded of the horrendous circumstances in which Thomsen’s and Hannah’s mundane acts and emotions are taking place. It’s a twist on absurdism, where the actions and dialogue are entirely normal, but they all occur at a death camp where over one million people were murdered. I don’t know if that was Amis’s point, to indict everyone involved, to show how easily people can devolve into complicity with genocide as long as they have food and shelter and sex, but I found that idea inescapable while reading this book. In many ways the plot reminded me of some of Graham Greene’s more literary works, such as The Heart of the Matter, where Greene would focus on a very small number of characters and work deep within their emotional cores to tell an extremely human story, often in a setting like British-occupied west Africa. Amis has a similar gift for prose and characterization, but here he shifts a similar story to the worst setting imaginable, yet keeps the diegesis intact, like picking up a house and moving it so carefully that the paintings stay on the walls. The Zone of Interest would be a great book if it were set anywhere, in any time, but Amis’s feat of using a compelling story to expose something darker about humanity turns it into a greater work and a highlight of modern literature.

Next up: I’m reading Liam O’Flaherty’s 1925 novel The Informer, although MC Shan has yet to make an appearance.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: amis, british literature, contemporary novels, highly recommended, holocaust, world war ii

→ October 7, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/7/23.

I’ve had one post up for subscribers to the Athletic since the last roundup, with my hypothetical postseason awards ballots for 2023. I do have another story filed for Sunday, so keep an eye skinned for that.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Votes for Women, a (mostly) two-player, asymmetrical game about the fight for women’s suffrage. It’s fantastic, and I also love that this review went up the week that Glynis Johns turned 100.

On the Keith Law Show this week, my guest was MLB’s Sarah Langs, talking about the season that was, who she would vote for in the various awards, and what excited her about this year’s playoff teams. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Rolling Stone’s Sean Williams writes about being conned by a con artist who tried to get the journalist to write a long profile/feature on him to further a movie deal, only for Williams to discover that the fraudster had as many as 200 victims of various romance and other scams over the last forty years.
The Washington Post looks at how climate change increases the demand and need for air conditioning, which in turn contributes more to climate change. Cooling a world that’s getting hotter requires increasing levels of energy, and we still rely far too much on energy-production methods that pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
An effective vaccine against tuberculosis would save millions of lives; it’s the deadliest infectious disease in the world, killing 1.6 million people a year. When pharmaceutical company GSK developed a vaccine for it, they chose instead to use the technology for a shingles vaccine, keeping the TB vaccine off the market for years.
Workers in California who cut stone countertops are coming down with silicosis, an incurable and terminal disease.
Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull gave a very candid interview to the San Diego Union-Tribune ahead of the band’s concert last month in that city.
Dr. Peter Hotez warns that antiscience conspiracy theorists are growing in power and organization, threatening public health and the scientists working on projects like new vaccines – such as the brand-new vaccine against malaria, potentially one of the biggest global health breakthroughs in decades.
SARS-CoV-2 infects coronary arteries and arterial plaque, which increases the risk of heart attack and stroke in people who have or had COVID-19.
NBC News’s Ben Collins may have found a clue to why Elon Musk bought Twitter only to destroy it. Musk also wiped out the company’s election integrity team and cut the group targeting disinformation on the site.
Rumble host Stew Peters called for the execution of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. Media Matters found ads for the NFL appearing on Peters’ Twitter account, including one near a link to the video of his death threat.
Fact-checking had a big moment between the 2020 election and the pandemic, with news organizations hiring more fact-checkers and more independent groups combating misinformation online, but nothing has really changed and now the effort has stalled.
Italy’s right-wing government has moved to erase LGBTQ+ people, especially parents, from their society.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has spent millions of taxpayer dollars defending his “anti-woke” laws targeting LGBTQ+ rights, public education, Disney, and more, only to lose repeatedly in the courts.
Harris County, Texas, taxpayers are in a similar boat, having paid over $1 million to people roped into County DA Kim Ogg’s (D) prosecutions of public officials with whom she’s feuded.
Republicans in North Carolina passed a bill to grab power from the Governor so they can control elections in the state, which already has a gerrymandered legislative map. Gov. Roy Cooper (D) vetoed Senate Bill 749, but the body is set to override his veto on Tuesday.
Delaware became the 17^th state to ban the “gay panic” defense, where a defendant accused of a violent act claims the act is justified because their victim was LGBTQ+.
A city commissioner in Anchorage, Alaska, who had a previous history of fraud, has been indicted for fraudulently taking $1.6 million in COVID-19 relief funds. She and her husband are accused of using the money to buy cryptocurrency, pay taxes, and for other personal matters.
The mayoral race in Franklin, Tennessee, got even more bizarre last week when a bunch of self-proclaimed white nationalists showed up to support candidate Gabrielle Hanson at a campaign event.
People of Praise, the extreme Catholic group that counts SCOTUS Justice Amy Coney Barrett as a member, is facing an FBI investigation into a cover-up of sexual abuse in the sect.
A rare bit of good news on the environment – Antigua & Barbuda has transformed the nation’s uninhabited third island, Redonda, from a lifeless rock into a thriving fountain of biodiversity.
An activist group is suing the EPA on behalf of a largely Black community in West Virginia’s “Chemical Valley,” arguing that the agency hasn’t done enough to protect residents from ethylene oxide pollution from a Union Carbide plant there.
The capitalists will let you drown. There’s money for cops and sports stadiums, but not for housing, or for infrastructure that might have prevented the flooding that plagued New York City eight days ago.
Speaking of which, just ten New York City cops were responsible for $68 million in payouts to victims of their misconduct, yet all ten are still on the public payroll.
A cop in Pennsylvania tried to strangle his ex-girlfriend and then used his authority to have her involuntarily committed.
The conservative newsletter/site The Dispatch argues that Trump and his supporters in office are devoid of moral leadership, and as Trump’s rhetoric worsens, too few people in his party seem to notice or care. Indeed, Trump called for the execution of General Mark Milley, and it barely made a ripple.
Did Hasan Minhaj go too far in fabricating autobiographical details in his standup routine? Brian Logan, comedy critic for the Guardian, says he did. The controversy seems likely to cost Minhaj a shot at the hosting job for the Daily Show.
Your brain sees winning streaks everywhere, even in random sequences. Scientific American looks at why.
Did the James Webb Telescope discover galaxies older than the projected age of the universe? Maybe, explains astrophysicist Katie Mack.
Some board game Kickstarters of note: Diatom is a tile-laying, pattern-making game based on an old Victorian art form.
And there’s a Kickstarter for the roll-and-write Merchants of Magick game, which is in the same universe as Set a Watch, along with two new expansions.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alaska, antiscience, board game news, climate change, cognitive psychology, delaware, environment, florida, frauds, health, italy, lgbt rights, links, longreads, Music, north carolina, physics, police, social media, stick to baseball, tennessee, texas, vaccines

→ October 6, 2023
→ By keith

The Sum of Us.

Heather McGhee was the head of Demos, a think tank that aims to “power the movement for a just, inclusive, multiracial democracy,” for four years before stepping aside in part to work on her first book, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Prosper Together, which came out in March of 2021. It’s a clear-eyed, evidence-based argument that public policies that aim to reduce racial or gender inequity actually benefit society as a whole, including white people and men, even though political opponents of those policies will try to paint them as anti-white or anti-male.

McGhee’s topic might seem incendiary, and in her rhetoric about modern conservatives, the Republican Party as a whole, and the race-baiting Trumpists and MAGA adherents in particular, she does not shy away from calling out the racist attitudes behind their arguments and beliefs. When making her arguments about the societal benefits of these policies, however, she sticks to the facts, and allows the shock value of just how much white conservative Americans are voting against their own self-interest to speak for her.

There are plenty of arguments, and quite a bit of evidence, that diversity in and of itself brings broad benefits to communities and companies, such as the way demographic diversity leads to increased creativity and productivity in the workplace. McGhee largely avoids that line of thinking in favor of more tangible benefits from particular policies that conservatives tend to oppose, such as Medicaid expansion. The states that have rejected expanded Medicaid funds from the federal government have lower life expectancies than the states that have accepted it. There are actual lives in the balance, and the excess deaths in the states that refuse to take the extra Medicaid money, declining it for political gain only, are not limited to people of color, although of course those communities are more adversely affected than white communities are. McGhee uses example after example to show why policies that are often depicted as favoring people of color would in fact be beneficial for substantial portions of the white populations of states or the country as a whole.

The first full chapter of The Sum of Us is titled “Racism Drained the Pool,” a fantastic bit of wordplay that has a literal meaning, referring to the closing of public pools across the country, even outside of the South, after courts required them to integrate. The results are still evident today; cities and towns filled in their old pools rather than allow Black kids to swim there, or converted those pools to private “swim clubs” that Black residents were less likely to be able to afford, but public pools never came back, so now everyone suffers. Where I live in northern Delaware, most people who have the means belong to some sort of private pool, and I can say from experience, as someone who has belonged to two different pools, that they’re not exactly integrated affairs. If you’re poor, you don’t get to swim – or to learn to swim, which is a life skill, not just a matter of recreation. The visible segregation is racial, but the invisible sort is economic.

McGhee explores these policy questions across most of the major spheres of public-economic life, including health, education, real estate, and the environment. Environmental racism and real estate redlining might be the best known examples, but McGhee points out, with data and research, that these inequities do not only affect people of color, regardless of what politicians who oppose stronger environmental regulations or greater controls on banks and lenders. Most of the policies she covers end up adversely affecting all poor people, regardless of race or ethnicity, but politicians and pundits try to sell these policies as somehow good for white people because they’re supposed to be worse for people of color. This is the ‘sum’ of the book’s title: These aren’t zero-sum policies, and in all of the cases she covers, the rising tide will lift all races. If we tighten environmental regulations, everyone benefits from cleaner air and water, with better health outcomes, better education outcomes, and so on. If we improve access to education with greater public investment, lower tuition, or greater reimbursements or grants, then we get a more educated populace, which improves the economy as a whole through increased productivity while also reducing crime.

The book goes through example after example of policies that would benefit wide swaths of the population but that die at the state or federal level through opposition from so-called “fiscal conservatives” who depict public aid or other public spending (e.g., infrastructure) as wasteful, as well as from politicians and activists who lean more into the language of white grievance by painting such government spending as “handouts.” They try to cut it completely, as the extreme right wing of the House is doing right now with the federal budget, or tie it to so many criteria that it’s difficult or impossible for people in need to benefit from it. McGhee points to the medieval Medicaid policies in Texas, where adults are not eligible at all for this need-based health coverage if they don’t have kids, and a family of four can’t have household income over $3900 a year to remain eligible. That’s not a typo – if you work 40 hours a week for the minimum wage in Texas (which is $7.25 an hour, the lowest legal amount, of course) for 14 weeks, you lose eligibility for Medicaid in Texas. Over three quarters of a million people in Texas go without health insurance because of these restrictions, and that population is not limited by race or gender or national origin or party affiliation. The Sum of Us makes a compelling argument to rid ourselves of the zero-sum thinking that says a gain for non-white people is a loss for white people, and recognize that in many, if not all, areas of the economy, raising the tide will lift all boats.

Next up: I just finished Martin Amis’s book The Zone of Interest, although I understand the upcoming film of that name has a very loose connection to the novel.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Economics, highly recommended, non-fiction, racism, social criticism

→ October 4, 2023
→ By keith

Music update, September 2023.

Months with five Fridays always take me a bit longer to write up, since they have more new releases to work through, and I was away for the weekend as well so I finally caught up after writing this in bits and pieces over several days. Anyway, we got some big new album releases in September from Speedy Ortiz, Jorja Smith, Corinne Bailey Rae, The National, Romy, Olivia Rodrigo, Slowdive, Royal Blood, The Coral, and more, and I’m still working through many of them. Here are some of the best new tracks I found this past month. I’ll also note that the 2023 Mercury Prize went to jazz artists Ezra Collective for their November 2022 album Where I’m Meant to Be, which I hadn’t heard before; it’s cross-over jazz with lots of great guest appearances, but I don’t think it would have made my best albums of the year list. As always, if you can’t see the Spotify widget, you can access the playlist here.

Speedy Ortiz – Ranch vs. Ranch. Rabbit Rabbit, the band’s fourth proper LP, came out appropriately on the first of the month, and finds the band in peak form. The album itself is a little uneven, but has several standout tracks where Sadie Dupuis’ off-kilter vocals and the band’s key changes meld with some heavier riffing to provide what makes them unique, songs where the sense of melody is always teetering on the edge of musical disaster.

Kid Kapichi – Let’s Get to Work. I thought about seeing Kid Kapichi in Philly last month, but I had no interest in the main act (Nothing But Thieves) and couldn’t see spending the coin for an opening act after I’d shelled out for Arctic Monkeys a week earlier. Anyway, this track sounds more like the band’s debut album This Time Next Year than their still strong but slightly lesser second record.

Jorja Smith – Falling or Flying. This is the title track from Smith’s sophomore album, which comes five years after her Mercury Prize-nominated debut Lost and Found, and the fourteen tracks (plus two skits) show tremendous growth in her musical style while her voice remains the greatest attraction. I love this song, “She Feels,” “GO GO GO,” “Try Me,” and “Little Things.”

Slowdive – alife. Slowdive’s second post-hiatus album everything is alive seems destined for a slew of best-of-2023 lists, as the eight-track LP has the band performing at the level of their album Souvlaki, a classic of the original shoegaze movement. Apparently they played here in Philly a few days ago while I was out of town. Alas.

Griff – Vertigo. Griff has released three major singles since her debut album came out, including the collaboration with Sigrid on “Head on Fire,” so I presume we’re getting another album from her at some point. She’s one of the most exciting pop artists recording today and if this isn’t quite up to “Black Hole” and “One Night” it’s still one of the best pure pop tracks of the year.

Susanna Hoffs – I Don’t Know Why. Hoffs, who has been a guest on the Keith Law Show, follows up her latest album of covers The Deep End with this ‘lost’ cover of a 1999 Shawn Colvin track, and it probably belonged on the record because it’s an excellent showcase for her voice.

Lauren Mayberry – Are You Awake? Another Keith Law Show guest, Mayberry released her first solo single early last month and then embarked on a small tour (no Philly show, alas). This is a mournful piano ballad, which is fine but I don’t think is the best vehicle for her voice. I’m hoping we get some more diverse tracks as she releases more material.

Sampha – Only. It’s funny; when Sampha won the 2017 Mercury Prize for Process, I listened to the album and thought it was just okay, with some interesting vocals but nothing all that award-worthy. Since then, the album has grown on me and I’ve loved the two singles so far ahead of his sophomore album Lahai, due out on October 20^th.

Romy – She’s on My Mind. Romy Madley Croft of the xx just released her debut solo album Mid Air in September to wide critical acclaim, although I think it’s just a good dance-pop record. “She’s on my mind but I wish she was under me” is one of the lines of the year, though.

flowerovlove – Next Best Exit. flowerovlove is an 18-year-old musician/singer and model from London who produces bedroom pop, here with a great hook and a sound that feels full despite fairly sparse arrangements. She’s released an EP and a few singles so far but this was my first encounter with her music.

Baby Queen – Quarter Life Crisis. This South African singer announced last month that the release of her debut album, also called Quarter Life Crisis, will be pushed back to November 10^th. It’s indie-pop with a snarky edge to the lyrics, although I think the words to this particular track are more hackneyed than some of her previous songs – it’s not that novel to hit age 25 and wonder about the direction of your life.

Corinne Bailey Rae – Erasure. I loved Bailey Rae’s first big single, “Put Your Records On,” but lost track of her music after her second album, The Sea, which came after the accidental death of her husband from an overdose of methadone and alcohol in 2008. She recorded just one more album, in 2016, and didn’t release any more music until this year, with the September release of her fourth album, Black Rainbows, a massive departure from her previous work. It’s a loose concept album inspired in large part by artifacts she saw at the Stony Island Arts Bank in Chicago, which holds a large collection of “African and African-diaspora materials,” and sees Bailey Rae working through genres she’s never touched before, even flirting with punk-tinged metal, and blending them into a weirdly cohesive whole. I think it’s going to be one of the most acclaimed albums of the year and it’s certainly one of the most interesting and ambitious, which makes it hard to pick any one song to represent it on a playlist.

James BKS feat. Angélique Kidjo & Nomcebo Zikode – Best We Can. James BKS released his second album, Wolves of Africa Part 2, in September, and the top track is this collaboration with legendary Beninese singer Angélique Kidjo, winner of five Grammy Awards, and South African singer Zikode, who also won a Grammy in 2020. James BKS was briefly signed to Idris Elba’s record label but went on his own after a few singles, and both of his albums blend the music of his native Cameroon with broader Afrobeat sounds and some elements of African hip-hop.

The Kills – God Games. This noise/indie-pop duo is set to release their first album since 2016 on October 27^th with God Games, which is their first new material of any sort since the 2018 single “List of Demands (Reparations).” I’ll always be partial to “Sour Cherry” from 2008’s Midnight Boom but the first three singles from this album are all pretty solid.

The Drums – Isolette. The chorus to this song has to be the earworm of the month, for better or worse. Good luck getting it out of your head. The sixth album from this solo project of Jonathan Pierce, Jonny, drops on October 13^th.

Soft Science – Stuck. The fourth album from this California post-shoegaze band, titled Lines, came out last month, and there’s a lot of early Lush or Slowdive to their sound. Their debut album Maps made my top ten of 2018. I wasn’t a shoegaze fan when the genre first emerged in the early 1990s, but got more into it when file-sharing opened a whole world of new tracks to me at the end of that decade, and it’s only grown on me since.

Pastel – Your Day. Credit to MLB.com’s Matthew Leach for posting about Pastel on social media, which is how I found them. This is the sound I loved from the DMA’s on their first two albums or even on some early Arctic Monkeys tracks – big, anthemic rock that isn’t afraid to be a little bombastic.

SPRINTS – Up and Comer. This Irish punk act announced that their second album, Letter to Self, will arrive on January 5^th, with this (I presume) third single off the record my favorite so far.

Van William – Getaway Car. Another former podcast guest of mine, this one going back to my ESPN days, William is also the lead singer/guitarist for the band Waters, although he’s only released music as a solo artist since 2015. This is his first new track of any sort since 2018 and definitely more in line with his EP The Revolution than his work with Waters or Port O’Brien.

Del Water Gap – Quilt of Steam. Del Water Gap is Holden Jaffe, and I have to credit my daughter here, as she introduced me to his music. This catchy indie/dream-pop single comes off his second album, I Miss You Already + I Haven’t Left Yet, which came out on September 29^th.

Cory Wong feat. Brasstracks – Flamingo. Wong’s latest album The Lucky One is just a blast, a fun ride through various funk, jazz, and pop styles with a great roster of guest artists. “Call Me Wild” is still my favorite track from the LP but this instrumental might be the runner-up.

Kojaque feat. Biig Piig – WOOF. Kojaque is an Irish rapper who teams up with the Irish singer Jessica Smyth, aka Biig Piig, which is how I ended up finding this track; her vocals and the ‘80s R&B music are the highlights here, more so than his rhymes.

Sundara Karma – Wishing Well. Very glad to have this British band, who are very much descendants of U2 and similar to Australia’s Gang of Youths, back on the scene, even with a song as melancholy as this one. Their newest album Better Luck Next Time drops on October 27^th.

milk. – I Think I Lost My Number Can I Have Yours? This Dublin band delivers despite the ridiculous pickup line in the song’s title, with great harmonies in the chorus and a lush pop sound. They’ve released about a dozen singles over the last four-plus years, but there appears to be an album called London in the offing.

Roosevelt – Fall Right In. I was fairly sure I’d had a Roosevelt track on a previous playlist, but I appear to have misremembered, or just confused him with another artist. He’s a German synth-pop artist with some strong new wave influences, and this track especially reminds me of one of my favorite albums of this century, St. Lucia’s When the Night.

Bombino – Alwane. Omara Moctar, who records as Bombino, is a Tuareg singer/guitarist from Niger and a political activist, no relation to the great Tuareg guitarist Mdou Moctar but working in a similar genre with less Western influence to his music. Bombino’s latest album Sahel came out last month, shortly after his family was evacuated from Niger’s capital Niamey during the military coup there.

Geese – Jesse. The Brooklyn indie quintet followed up their sophomore album 3D Country with an EP called 4D Country that includes tracks from the same sessions, including this single, which very much fits with the same faux-country post-punk vibe of the album.

Anxious – Down, Down. The first new single from this Connecticut emo band since last year’s Little Green House, which was one of my top 22 albums of 2022, finds the quintet mining similar musical territory, with the same contrast between sung and screamed lyrics, with highly melodic guitarwork behind the vocals.

Royal Blood – Shiner in the Dark. This duo’s fourth album, Stuck in the Water Below, finds them … stuck in neutral, really. The album has garnered mostly positive reviews, but I think it’s their least inventive and least compelling record to date, with nothing like “Out of the Black” or “Lights Out” anywhere on the album. This track is probably the best one, but it’s weirdly poppy for a band whose best moments were grounded in hard rock – as bassist/vocalist Mike Kerr will gladly tell you.

Ratboys – Making Noise for the Ones You Love. Singer Julia Steiner sounds a lot like Waxahatchee, which I mean as a compliment, while this thumping track harkens back to some early Arcade Fire and has less of the alt-country trappings of a lot of Ratboys’ other songs.

Rival Sons – Sweet Life. If you like Greta Van Fleet, and I don’t really know why you would, Rival Sons does it better, without trying so hard to sound like Led Zeppelin.

Wheel – Blood Drinker (Instrumental). This Anglo-Finnish progressive metal group put out a three-track EP called Rumination last November, and just released instrumental versions of the same three songs last month. I prefer this with the vocals, but I also find Wheel to be one of the most interesting metal acts recording right now so I appreciate the instrumental versions.

Frankie and the Witch Fingers – Empire. This group is new to me but they’ve been around for ten years, with their seventh album, Data Doom, dropping on September 1^st. This track has a heavy King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard vibe, from the psychedelic rock aspects to the massive tonal and stylistic shifts through the song’s seven minutes.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 2023 in music, afrobeat, alternative, indie, Music

→ September 29, 2023
→ By keith

Tom Lake.

Ann Patchett remains one of my favorite contemporary novelists; I think she’s only missed once, really, with Run, which was too heavy-handed in its political allegory, and Taft is probably the weakest of the remainder even though it’s above the line for me. Bel Canto remains her magnum opus and one of the best works of American fiction since World War II, reimagining The Magic Mountain through a fictionalized version of the Túpac Amaru hostage crisis, and other than Run she’s been on a roll this century with State of Wonder, Commonwealth, and The Dutch House, the last of which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2020, losing to The Nickel Boys.

Patchett’s run of success continues with Tom Lake, which returns to the motif of reworking a classic of literature into a modern narrative, while also seeing her return to themes of family history and mythmaking, this time through the lens of a family matriarch telling her life story to her three grown daughters. Lara is in her late 50s, but the bulk of the story she’s telling her girls is about the few years when she played Emily in a community theater production of Our Town, which led to a summer gig playing the same character in the western Michigan town of Tom Lake, where rich people would spend a few days or a week at the lake and often drop in to see a prestigious actor or two on the stage. While there, Lara has a fling with a young actor named Duke who would later go on to great fame in Hollywood, first as a heartthrob and later as a more serious actor. Lara’s daughters have known about her affair with Duke, with very little of the details, but the pandemic throws them all together on the family cherry orchard, giving them plenty of time together to talk, and for the kids – the eldest of whom, Emily, was once convinced that Duke was actually her father – to grill their mother.

Lara is right about the age Patchett was when she was writing Tom Lake, and this novel feels like her second attempt at an autobiographical work, this time perhaps more inspired by the way we reconsider our lives as we cross the half-century mark (which I did earlier this year). I’m not aware of Patchett having a summer fling with a future movie star, but Tom Lake reads like someone reckoning with their past, contemplating paths not taken, maybe thinking about the role chance plays in the paths our lives take. So much of Lara’s story comes down to these seemingly tiny details of life, such as the way she lands the first role as Emily, how she ends up at Tom Lake, or how that summer ends.

At a certain point in your life, if you’re lucky enough to live long enough, you become an observer as well as a participant: you live with your memories, good and bad, and in retelling them you choose what to include and what to omit, especially when telling your children. Lara makes those choices, holding back some information for the pleasure of surprising her daughters with the reveals, and then holding back some information forever, including the last time she saw Duke before the pandemic hit. (It’s also the one sour note in the novel, certainly the least realistic moment, and a drastic tonal shift from what’s come before, although it’s possible that that was an intentional contrast between the sepia-toned filter of our memories and the harshness of reality.) We curate our pasts for our children, much as we curate our lives for social media. Lara’s daughters are all adults, each unique and each very well-drawn, yet she still only shows them a portion of herself and is thoughtful about what she excludes.

As always, Patchett has created a whole cast of fully-realized characters; the three daughters each have their own personalities, goals, and values, each sharing a little something from their mom and yet also baffling her in ways in which they differ both from her and from each other. If she were Marilynne Robinson, another of my favorite contemporary novelists, each of these girls would get her own spinoff novel, but alas, Patchett has never (to my knowledge) revisited any of her prior creations. Lara’s husband appears a little later on, a little less three-dimensional than the women in the family or the Duke of Lara’s memories, although that’s also clearly part of the point – he’s the steady man Lara married after her dalliance with the unreliable bad boy.

I’ve read all of Patchett’s novels, and Bel Canto is the clear leader for me, still, but I could at least make an argument for Tom Lake to be in the #2 position. After a week or so of pondering this, I came down at Commonwealth second, The Dutch House third, and Tom Lake fourth over State of Wonder. At her best, she gives us a cast of wonderful, realistic characters, and wraps them up in a plot that’s realistic but compelling. Tom Lake might show her in a more mature, meditative mood, but her prose and her characterization is as strong as ever.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 2023 novels, american literature, ann patchett, contemporary novels, highly recommended

→ September 23, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/23/23.

For subscribers to The Athletic, I posted my annual Minor League Player of the Year column this week, as well as my last regular-season scouting notebook of 2023, covering prospects I saw from the Red Sox, Orioles, and Nationals. I’ll head to Arizona in October for Fall League coverage, of course. My podcast will be back next week and I’ve already filed my next review for Paste.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas didn’t just take a bunch of free trips from billionaire Harlan Crow; he also attended donor parties hosted by the billionaire Koch brothers, as reported here by ProPublica.
The New York Times reports on child labor at Perdue and Tyson chicken-processing plants, where immigrant kids are exploited by factory officials willing to look the other way and who claim ignorance when these children are seriously injured on the job. The Department of Labor only investigates when they receive a tip, and fines top out at $15,000.
Penn Medicine hired a new facilities director for its hospital without checking his background, which included a five-year federal prison sentence for wire fraud and misuse of a social security number. Larry Butler was fired four days into his tenure as COO of a hospital in Oregon in 2022, but Penn still hired him in July of 2023, only for him to “resign” four weeks later.
The Indian state of Kerala is experiencing yet another outbreak of the Nipah virus, which causes severe respiratory illnesses in humans and appears to have jumped the species barrier from pigs about 25 years ago. This is the fourth such outbreak in Kerala in the last five years.
Elon Musk’s grandfather was an antisemite and avid supporter of South Africa’s racist apartheid system, according to this lengthy story from The Atlantic, which contradicts Musk’s own mythmaking.
The U.S. media continues to fuck up its coverage of the Presidential race, treating Trump as some sort of entertainment vehicle – as they did in 2015-16 – while playing into dubious narratives around President Biden’s age or his son’s behavior.
The daughter of Dennis Rader, the serial killer who called himself “BTK,” is an adult now and is trying to use her knowledge of her father to help police close more cases.
The Sound of Freedom was a surprise box-office hit this summer and sits in 10^th place this year for U.S. receipts thanks to a broad effort by conservative and Christian groups to sell tickets, but the subject of the film, Tim Ballard, was ousted from his anti-human trafficking organization after an investigation into sexual misconduct, and now the film’s producer also stands accused of sexual assault, in this case of a minor.
The all-Muslim city council in Hamtramck, Michigan, banned the display of any Pride flags on public property during June (Pride Month) this year, after LGBTQ+ groups had supported the Muslim immigrant groups when they arrived in the city. The issue came back up this past week when Mayor Amer Ghalib refused to march near the city’s queer alliance in a Labor Day parade.
South Africa is facing a new, xenophobic movement called Operation Dudula that is targeting foreigners in the country and blaming them for the rise in drug addiction, especially the drug known as nyaope, a form of black tar heroin that sellers claim contains antiviral properties. The group’s beliefs and philosophy seem to mirror those of right-wing, anti-immigrant groups in the U.S. and Europe.
Azerbaijan has reclaimed the majority-Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh after the region’s separatist government, which called itself the Republic of Artsakh, agreed to disarm and to seek reintegration with the surrounding nation. This should end the looming humanitarian crisis in the region but may lead to a large exodus of ethnic Armenians; it also may further reduce the influence of Russia, which had backed Armenia’s interests with military aid, in the Caucasus.
Russell Brand’s agency learned three years ago that a minor accused him of sexual assault, and they ignored her. Tavistock Wood dropped Brand from its roster with the revelations this month that three other women also accuse him of rape or sexual assault, and they’re claiming they knew nothing about it.
Gabrielle Hanson, a Republican and Trump-supporting candidate for Mayor of Franklin, Tennessee, used images of women culled from social media in campaign materials, claiming these women – many of them women of color – were her supporters. The women were actually selected seven years earlier for an ad campaign for the clothing brand The Limited and had posted photos of themselves at a celebratory brunch, which Hanson and her now ex-campaign manager Erin Mazzoni used without their permission. That link has an incredible video where journalist Phil Williams interviews Mazzoni, who sounds, to put it kindly, completely bonkers.
Alabama Republicans continue to fight to preserve their gerrymandered legislative map that suppresses the power of Black voters (who make up 27% of the state’s population), and they’re doing it with the backing of Leonard Leo’s dark-money network. Just this summer, Congressional Republicans blocked a bill that would have required such dark-money groups to come into the light and disclose their donors.
Both The New Yorker and Paste ran stories on The Baseball Project, the fun supergroup with members of R.E.M., Dream Syndicate, and the Minus Five, where all of their songs are about baseball. They’re great live, by the way.
Anti-vaccine misinformation is highly effective: More Oklahoma parents are skipping safe, effective childhood vaccinations against dangerous and incredibly contagious viruses like measles.
Climate change may cause 39 million U.S. homeowners to lose access to home insurance, including many homeowners who don’t accept the reality of climate change and vote for the one party that also denies it.
New York editor Katy Schneider describes “the pandemic skip,” the way we all lost about two years to the pandemic but may not have fully realized or internalized the passage of that time.
A sketchy group calling itself “NY Citizens Audit” has received a cease-and-desist letter from the New York Attorney General’s office, accusing the group of intimidating voters by posing as election officials to knock on doors and accuse people of committing voter fraud.
Australian officials visited D.C. this week to call on the United States to drop its prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing leaked documents, a call echoed here by the Freedom of the Press Foundation because the same overbroad reading of the Espionage Act could easily be used against all sorts of journalists anywhere on the political spectrum.
Believing transphobic things does, in fact, make you a transphobe.
Board game news: Undergrove, the next new game from Wingspan designer Elizabeth Hargrave, will go up on Kickstarter in November, and you can save the page now to be notified when it’s live.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alabama, board game news, climate change, coronavirus, frauds, free speech, health, labor rights, lgbt rights, links, longreads, metoo, oklahoma, scotus, south africa, stick to baseball, tennessee, vaccines, voter suppression

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