Uncategorized — Page 65

→ August 2, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/2/20.

I wrote two scouting notebook columns for subscribers to The Athletic this week, one on Dustin May, Luis Robert, Brady Singer, and others; the second on Nate Pearson, David Peterson, Zach Plesac, and more. I also held a Klawchat on Friday afternoon.

You can buy my latest book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, anywhere you buy books, and I recommend bookshop.org. I sent out another edition of my free email newsletter this week as well.

I participated in one panel for the Gen Con Online Writers Symposium this year, on using social media in tumultuous times. It looks like it’s free for everyone to watch.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Vanity Fair has an exclusive report on how a White House group led by Jared Kushner – who is both unelected and unappointed to any official role in the government – came up with a comprehensive national plan for testing and tracing back in the spring, only to have Kushner scrap it because the pandemic was hitting blue states much harder.
The Daily Beast looks at the alt-right sports site Outkick, which has been pushing COVID-19 hoaxes and misinformation since late February.
ProPublica has a useful guide to interpreting public COVID-19 data. One conclusion to bear in mind: deaths lag cases by a few weeks, so people celebrating lower death rates are often just misreading the data to support a desired conclusion.
OneZero looks at Pinterest’s difficulty in keeping offensive content off their platform, although I think the takeaway here is that they’re doing a much better job than Twitter, Facebook, or Youtube. Moderating content is always going to suck as a job, and moderators should be better compensated and cared for, but the problems described here pale next to what those other sites have.
The Guardian has an excerpt from James Nestor’s new book Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art.
“Hygiene theater” is a waste of time, writes Derek Thompson at the Atlantic. The novel coronavirus spreads primarily via the air, from people in proximity to one another and/or in enclosed spaces.
Twenty percent of Americans say they wouldn’t get a COVID-19 vaccine if one is available. We need better education and outreach to overcome that.
Since Jeva Lange’s piece on how baseball’s COVID-19 struggles are a microcosm of the U.S. as a whole ran, both situations have deteriorated further, with a rolling outbreak now in the St. Louis clubhouse.
This twitter thread from an OR doc shows how he talked a reluctant patient, who fell for fake information on the coronavirus he saw on Facebook, into getting a COVID-19 test.
Another Twitter thread, this one authored by a (self-described) lawyer, explains why the “Covington kid” probably got little or nothing in his settlement with the Washington Post.
Just days after her newest novel This Mournable Body was longlisted for the Booker Prize, Zimbabwean author Tsitsi Dangarembga (whose Nervous Conditions was #98 on my last top 100 novels list) was arrested during anti-government protests in Harare.
A Singaporean ‘consultant’ used LinkedIn to troll for contacts in his work as an agent for Chinese intelligence. Jun Wei “Dickson” Yeo pleaded guilty to an espionage charge in a U.S. court last month.
The British-Japanese musician Rina Sawayama found out she’s ineligible for the prestigious Mercury Prize and the BRIT Awards because she holds a Japanese passport. Those awards’ rules have “nationality clauses” that exclude her, even though she’s lived in the UK for 25 years, in part because she’s a solo artist; musical groups don’t have to comprise only British citizens.
A profoundly anti-gay state Senator in Arkansas called mask mandates “draconian,” and then was hospitalized with COVID-19. Guess his party affiliation!
U.S. Senator Tom Cotton (also of Arkansas) called slavery a “necessary evil” in building the United States, and is fighting attempts to introduce new historical perspectives on slavery into U.S. school curricula, such as considerations of the long-term impact of slavery on Black Americans.
Movie theaters have been mostly closed since March, so we are now relying on opaque claims from streaming services to determine when a movie is “a hit.”
Several ex-Deadspin staffers have banded together to create Defector Media, a new site that promises, at least, to fill the void left by Deadspin’s implosion last year.
Much “nutrition research” today amounts to p-hacking, writes Tamar Haspel, who helped expose … , in the Washington Post. She suggests more research on the effects of portion sizes, food delivery to people to keep them out of supermarkets, food and nutrition education, and more.
Society , a research journal published by Springer Nature, published a commentary by Prof. Lawrence Mead of NYU that argues that Black and Latinx people lack the ambition and temperament of European immigrants to rise out of poverty, leading to a massive backlash and quick retraction. NYU issued a statement decrying the paper’s sentiments while defending Mead’s academic freedom.
Board game news: The cooperative game Spirit Island is now available on Steam.
Renegade announced an upcoming game called Embarcadero, from one of the designers of Scoville, featuring hand management and tile-laying mechanics.
A number of publishers put together game bundles for sale during Gen Con Online, which took place from Thursday through Sunday, which would have been the dates for the regular convention had COVID-19 not led to its cancellation.
Serious Catan players might like these new game-specific accessories coming soon from a partnership between Gamegenic and Asmodee.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, arkansas, baseball, board game news, coronavirus, links, longreads, mercury prize, nutrition, social media, stick to baseball, the swamp

→ August 1, 2020
→ By keith

Educated.

In her memoir Educated, Dr. Tara Westover describes her upbringing off the grid by survivalist Mormon parents, including a father who she describes as suffering from undiagnosed bipolar disorder and a physically abusive older brother, and the price she paid for leaving that world by going to university and beyond. It’s a maddening read, and often grueling given the family’s refusal to seek medical treatment even when family members suffer gruesome accidents, but the ultimate message is that Westover did get out and establish herself as an independent adult in a way her parents would never have allowed had she stayed.

Westover’s father is indeed a Mormon, but is more completely described as an extremist, with a violent, anti-government, apocalyptic worldview that has far more in common with hardline Islamists than with mainstream LDS adherents. He refuses to send his children to school and doesn’t even get the younger ones proper birth certificates or social security numbers. He makes money running cash businesses like scrap collection and some construction work, risking grievous injury to his children, more than enough that a state authority should have stepped in at some point and removed the kids for their own protection. The state of Idaho appears to take no interest in the Westovers, however, even when he removes his older children, who did briefly attend public school, and doesn’t bother to home-school them. Meanwhile, as Tara gets older and especially when a local boy takes an interest in her, she finds herself increasingly targeted by Shawn, her violent, controlling older brother, whose behavior becomes even more erratic after multiple head injuries.

So much in this book is appalling, not the least of which is the willful ignorance of just about every adult who comes into contact with Tara and her siblings – and that includes her subservient mother, who does nothing to stop Shawn’s abuse, and who later becomes a successful charlatan purveying essential oils (and, from what I can see online, making all kinds of fraudulent medical claims about their powers) and “balancing” chakras. There are other adults in the town near where the Westovers live who have some idea of what’s amiss with the family, such as the total lack of home-schooling or the child labor occurring at their homestead, but appear to do nothing. Tara’s attempts to stand up for herself are nearly always undermined by the lack of support from anyone except, occasionally, one of her older siblings, although even her older sister Audrey – an earlier target of Shawn’s abuse – lets her down in this regard, leaving Tara no choice but to sever relations with her parents and most of her siblings if she wants to lead an independent life.

Westover takes pains in a one-paragraph introduction to say that she rejects any interpretation of her book as an indictment of Mormonism or organized religion, and there’s some merit to her implicit argument here that the real villain in the story is her father’s untreated mental illness. It is hard to read Educated, however, without seeing their church as complicit in the cycle of abuse and subjugation in the Westover family: Girls are raised to be wives and mothers, not to be educated, and certainly not to be independent in thought or deed of their husbands. There’s more than just familial pressure on Tara to stay in Idaho rather than pursue a formal education for the first time, starting at Cambridge and later continuing at Harvard – where her parents visit her to make one apparently last effort to bring her back into the fold from Satan’s clutches.

Her decision to pursue that education, after much soul-searching and a battle within herself to make a decision in her own best interests for what might have been the first time, results in some seriocomic moments that had to be excruciating for Tara to experience in the moment. She went to college having never heard of the Holocaust, with little to no sense of the existence of the civil rights movement, and ignorant of most aspects of modern Western culture. It’s a testament to her own natural intelligence that she was able to score highly enough on the ACTs to get into college at all, and that she was able to catch up on the equivalent of several years of material to be able to take age-appropriate classes once at Cambridge. It’s also incredibly aggravating to read this and think of all the Tara Westovers likely living out in the hinterlands who never get the opportunity to pursue their educations, or never even learn of the world beyond the borders of their homesteads or towns. She’s the lucky one, who got out, and realized that so much of what her parents and her church had taught her was false. She’s also probably the tip of a much larger iceberg of girls and women whose potential and agency are wasted by ignorance and superstition.

Tara is now Dr. Westover, and her story is still going, so Educated doesn’t conclude the tangible parts of the narrative; this is a memoir of personal growth, and of what Dr. Westover endured and ultimately sacrificed to become an independent woman who has rejected the core tenets that most of her immediate family hold. She seems torn in the last few chapters of the book between her choices and what she left behind, to the point that she seemed to be apologizing on behalf of the many family members, most importantly her parents, who will never apologize, and who seem to think she’s the one in the wrong. The catharsis here is not ours to demand, but I wanted one, a final break, an acknowledgement that her parents, with the help of their church, did her numerous wrongs, and with her brother have dealt her damage from which she will probably spend the rest of her life recovering.

Next up: I’m halfway through David Mitchell’s new novel Utopia Avenue.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: feminist literature, memoirs, non-fiction, religion

→ July 31, 2020
→ By keith

Klawchat 7/31/20.

I’ve got two scouting blogs up for subscribers to the Athletic, one today and one from Tuesday, covering rookies and young players of note.

Keith Law: You’ve got that pure feel, such good responses. Klawchat.

John: Man, Bieber’s command looks really strong. How did you see him as a prospect?
Keith Law: I saw him as a back-end starter because he was more 88-91. His velocity kept creeping up, which I absolutely did not see coming, so now he’ll sit 94 and his secondary stuff has improved as well. He’s at least a legit #2 starter. I think over time he’ll give up a few too many home runs to be an ace, but I could be wrong again.

Brett J: Jp Crawford has been noticeably better in his small sample size this year. Are you seeing anything that shows his improvements might stick?
Keith Law: I’d say this is more a continuation of what we saw from him last year.

Mike: Just wanted to say the Scouting Notebook pieces you’ve been running on The Athletic have been stellar. Really looking forward to that series for the next week that baseball will be around.
Keith Law: Thank you. The response to the first one was so good that it made doing a second one an easy call. Now I am a bit stuck as we wait for some more debuts, but if we get another week of games, I’ll have enough guys to discuss. Could always look at which players seem noticeably different from last year too.

Andrew: What is the point of the Mariners carrying 2 actual outfielders while Kelenic sits idle in Tacoma? Shouldn’t they just see what he can do against Major League talent?
Keith Law: At this point, no. They’ve pushed off his free agency by a year already.

Jibraun: In his newsletter today, Joe Sheehan mentioned that MLB’s K rate is rising again this year. What rule changes do you think should be instituted to lower K rates?
Keith Law: Raise the bottom of the strike zone. I also think the automated strike zone would help too.

Jebediah: Since you’re a grump with no emotion for baseball, can you just calculate the teams with the highest WAR so we can award the World Series trophy to them?
Keith Law: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Arnold: Did Giants make right choice to not put Joey Bart on roster? On one hand, Posey opting out created space for him and he looks to be major league ready as a hitter. On the other hand, who knows if MLB will make it through the shortened season and Giants aren’t contenders so why waste a year of salary control.
Keith Law: This is the one variable that might stop teams from recalling prospects now – what if the season ends in a few days, and you called up a guy to play three games only to have him get most of a year of service, and maybe put him on the 40-man too soon? I hate that that’s a consideration, but it’s real.
Keith Law: It’s like when the White Sox recalled Michael Kopech a few years ago, and he made two starts before blowing out his elbow. He got a year-plus of service out of that.

Robert: What would it take for the MLB to admit failure and call the season? Half the league not being able to play?
Keith Law: I bet a player in the hospital in serious condition would do it.
Keith Law: Or another Marlins-level outbreak.

AJ: Who were better prospects as amateurs, Cole and Bauer at UCLA or Rocket and Leiter at Vandy?
Keith Law: I haven’t seen the Vandy boys in college, but I think Cole and Bauer.

Deke: Even if we get anything approximating the rest of the 2020 season, it’s still basically going to be a wash. So my question is: Should we be at all optimistic for NEXT YEAR’s MLB season? It seems like there’s every chance this is comparably bad then.
Keith Law: We shouldn’t be optimistic about anything as long as the hoaxers are in power. We should have had a national shutdown for 6 weeks in the spring. Instead we have the worst situation of any developed country, even worse than many developing countries, out of every place that’s been hit with the pandemic. How anyone can see this and not immediately blame the Administration is beyond me.

Kevin W: What would you do with ohtani? Keep status quo? Hitter only? Pitcher only?
Keith Law: I’d pick one. Still prefer him on the mound but if he hasn’t really come back from TJ yet then maybe you let him hit only and have him throw on the side?

Cubs: Is it way to early to call up someone you just drafted?
Keith Law: In theory, now. In this environment, probably.

Patty O’Furniture: Max Fried looked the best he’s ever looked last night! Not ready to call him an ace or anything, but damn. He pitched like a grown man
Keith Law: Feeling good about all the years I kept him as a top 50ish prospect. Great athlete, smart kid, just needed time.

Kevin W: Has any player you have scouted ever had all 5 tools rated above 50?
Keith Law: I can’t think of one. Many guys have the power-run-glove-arm tools. Few also have the hit tool.

addoeh: If a player getting seriously ill from COVID nor having half a team testing positive have stopped the season, nothing short of a player dying is going to.
Keith Law: This is also possible.

Kevin W: How are you going to handle school this year with your daughter?
Keith Law: We’re going to do what her school offers, which I believe will be hybrid (a few days in school, a few remote).

Robbie: Were you impressed at all/ have an opinion on the way William Contreras handled his surprise early debut?
Keith Law: No opinion. Minuscule sample. I saw him get overwhelmed in his last game, unfortunately.

Greg: Should Dylan Carlson be playing every day instead of Billy Hamilton 2.0 (Bader)? If so, what kind of numbers would you expect from him in a full season?
Keith Law: I think so. .350+ OBP this year which would be a big help.

Bob: Tatis seems to be worth the $27m it took to pay off Shields.
Keith Law: Yes, yes he does.

Greg: What way do you prefer to cook zucchini or yellow squash
Keith Law: Fritters! I just made zucchini/corn fritters the other day. Recipe was on Serious Eats.

John: Seems like its impossible to find a reasonable argument with non-maskers, how did our country fall so far, is it really too much to ask to look out for others for 2-3 months?
Keith Law: Masks, evolution, vaccines … so much of this is misguided “liberty” talk, and often is really about people clinging to a vision of yesteryear.
Keith Law: That includes white power, religion, and patriarchy.

Luis: just wanted to congratulate you on the amazing book. I’m at chapter 4 at the moment and waiting for the day to end to dig into ch5! Enjoy your weekend!
Keith Law: Thank you! Glad you’re enjoying it.

addoeh: 2020 is drunk. The President is promoting a doctor who believes in demon semen.
Keith Law: She’s a massive, massive quack. This is like the President promoting Gwyneth Paltrow or Andrew Wakefield or Uri Geller as authorities on science and medicine.

Mike: Can Tony Gonsolin be a #2 starter? Do you see him seizing a rotation spot this year from Stripling or Wood, if he’s ever healthy?
Keith Law: I like him more than those two guys, but thought he was more of a fourth starter or an ace in a swingman role. Wouldn’t rule him out from a higher ceiling given how far he came just in his first year in pro ball when he was pitching full time.

Benji: I really don’t like Espn anymore
Keith Law: You should hear what ESPN says about you.

Buck: With his changeup looking so good can B Woodruff become a legit ace?
Keith Law: Above league-average starter.

Matt: Keep seeing the White Sox are playing around with Vaughn at 3rd base – assume the chances of him actually being able to play there are ~0%, right?
Keith Law: I think so. Same for Torkelson. Third basemen are usually a lot more agile than those guys.

Mike: Could Dustin May end up starting a playoff game this season?
Keith Law: Why not?

Josh: Might the league be better off pausing the season, and setting up a “bubble” in Southern California, where they can easily play into November while (probably) leaving time to rest for next season?
Keith Law: I suppose we could see if the NBA bubble works, although MLB has more than twice the player count.

Jack: Nick Madrigal making his MLB debut tonight. Do you think he immediately becomes the non-pitcher with the least present power in the big leagues?
Keith Law: It’d be a close competition between him, Leury Garcia, and David Fletcher, I think. Billy Hamilton would win this but he’s not in the majors.

Tom: do you believe padres catcher mejia can be an above average contributor offensively?
Keith Law: He was on my breakouts list last week, so clearly I do.

TC: How much of Edwin Diaz’s struggles are mental vs mechanical? He looked fine in his first two outings up until giving up the home run to Ozuna & last night he had zero command & no feel for a slider.
Keith Law: I think the altered baseball last year really hurt him. His slider went poof when the baseball changed.

Chris P: Hey KLaw, are you going to be able to get any information on the secondary sites for each team? I’m wondering if we’re able to get any information on prospects that aren’t in the show this season.
Keith Law: I expect to get some information, filtered through team sources though, after a few weeks.

Pat D: I’ve been desperate to get this question answered by multiple people. Shouldn’t the MLBPA fire Tony Clark at the very least get him a MUCH better negotiating partner for the next CBA? It seems like his track record is pretty terrible so far with these negotiations.
Keith Law: I think it’s more about who’s advising him, and whether he even has final say over negotiations. I’ve heard, anecdotally, that he’s been overruled by people around him, which – if true, and I want to be extremely clear that this is unverified – would be the worst position for a leader.

TC: Is it fair to say the only true way we can have a safe season is if we have a vaccine widely available? Should MLB be concentrating on being able to safely open 2021 spring training?
Keith Law: Other countries have limited the virus’ spread without a vaccine. They locked down nationally, enforced it, and got compliance from the populations. We had a piecemeal approach, hoaxers and deniers in the White House, and mouthbreathers in the streets claiming masks were tyranny (but abducting protesters in unmarked vans and calling for delaying an election isn’t?).

Nate: Will you be able to do a prospect list this offseason? With no minor league games and only the opinions of team officials as to what is happening at their satellite camps, it seems like there just wouldn’t be enough unbiased info to make the process legitimate this year.
Keith Law: Sure, it just won’t change as much year over year as it usually does.

Guest: Does it seem odd to you that Markakis saw how things are going and now has decided to play?
Keith Law: Yes, although maybe he thinks he’ll play for a few weeks, the season will be cancelled, and he’ll at least go back into free agency with some playing time?

Lee: Has Trump officially killed the Republican party? How the hell did any sane person ever vote for this?
Keith Law: If he loses in November, which I am not willing to assume just yet, the party will quickly move to disavow him, and individual politicians will rewrite history to say they never really supported him. It is on us to stop them from doing so.

Dave: You prefer the Vetri Neopolitan dough to Reinhart? I’ve gotten decent results with Reinhart, but it’s so sticky it’s hard to handle unless I keep it cold, which is suboptimal.
Keith Law: Different doughs for different temperatures. I use Vetri’s Neapolitan for my outdoor oven, which gets to 800+. Reinhart’s is my go-to for indoors, where I set the oven at 500.

Another Matt: What are you missing most about having no minor league season this year?
Keith Law: All of it. Going to games to scout, and to see scout friends, and watching stuff online, and following players through box scores, and talking to scouts and player development people about players.

Leprekhan: Long term Soroka or Fried?
Keith Law: I feel better about Fried staying healthy over the long term than Soroka. Both are probably #2 starters.

Ethan: Any suggestions for Carcassonne expansion packs? Already have hills and sheep and traders and builders. Thanks!
Keith Law: I like Inns & Cathedrals. Haven’t tried Hills & Sheep.

Todd Boss: I know he’s not a major prospect, but Nats farmhand Tres Barrera (who was recently hit with an 80game PED suspension) filed a counter suit. In the complaint he says he tested positive for “10 picograms” of DHCMT. In mass units, a picogram is equal to 0.000000000001 of a gram.

If this is true, is this just a patently ridiculous suspension? Is a MLB player actually being suspended without pay for 80 games for ingesting less than a millionth of a gram of a performance enhancing substance?
Keith Law: I’m probably out of my league answering this, but I think the issue is that you wouldn’t have that in your system at all unless you’d ingested it, because it’s synthetic.

Adam Trask: Nick Madrigal gets the call. You see real value there or replacement level?
Keith Law: More than replacement level. Maybe an average regular if he can keep his average up. My concern remains his inability to make hard contact, with zero power.

Todd Boss: So are you in a Sinclair market that’s being forced to show Plandemic? Are you setting your DVR?
Keith Law: I am not. I think we’re an hour-plus from their nearest affiliate.

Danny: Simple question and not at all wishcasting- what are the odds that Trump is indicted at some point post-presidency (i.e. election fraud, tax fraud, money laundering, improper profiteering from office?)
Keith Law: I hope that whoever succeeds him, whenever it happens, holds him and his cronies (and his children) accountable for any crimes they’ve committed, rather than pardoning them and saying we need to move forward or turn the page. The latter would simply encourage the next set of grifters who come along.

Adam Trask: We’ve learned JK Rowling is a bigot. I was looking forward to reading the Potter books to my baby girl. Should I still?
Keith Law: Yes.
Keith Law: There is a lot of good in those books, even though their author has revealed herself to be a TERF.

Don: How did we get brainwashed as a country to prefer chicken breasts over chicken thighs?
Keith Law: Our national fat phobia, along with bad advice from some quarters of the federal health establishment.

David: Keith, do you think Jeff Lunhow will work in an MLB front office again?
Keith Law: My guess is no.

Eric: Sadly, my father unexpectedly passed. Do you have any tips for grief or any good books to rec? It’s…hard.
Keith Law: I’m so sorry for your loss. I don’t have a book to recommend, but would certainly suggest talking to a therapist or psychologist, even if it’s just for a few sessions.

Robbie: He’s already 29, so clearly he’s not a prospect, but what’s your opinion of Yaz. He seems to have a great approach and has continued to hit the ball hard to start the season
Keith Law: Extra outfielder at best.

Pat D: Is there any movie that’s SUPPOSED to come out this year that would get you into a theater? I’m still very determined to see Tenet in IMAX.
Keith Law: No, I’ll wait to see them all at home.

Drew: If you saw an anti-mask tirade in real life like we’re seeing all over the news, would you step in? I keep picturing myself wanting to get involved but also not wanting to be in the cloud of a covidiots screaming and spittle.But my 2020 rage could use a good screaming.
Keith Law: I think I would. I haven’t told anyone to put a mask on, even though I’ve seen people without them, or “wearing” them off their noses and mouths.
Keith Law: If they’re giving an employee a hard time, though, that employee would probably benefit from other customers voicing support. I think.

Greg: Why does there seem to be a very local contingent of fans who are seemingly convinced that sports media are driving some kind of agenda to get sports cancelled? Just general distrust of media of any kind? If the fans are for something, that means the media must be against it? Or just a more widespread dumbing of America?
Keith Law: Distrust of media, and wishful thinking. The funny part is that they think we have some power to affect the outcome.

Arnold: Today’s reports that national pandemic plan was tossed in trash by Jared because COVID-19 was hurting blue cities/states more is both least surprising and most frightening thing yet from this administration.
Keith Law: And should make more people mad … but it won’t.

Brett: Thank you for your taking time to do this today. Kris Bubic makes his big league debut tonight. Have you seen him live, and if so, what did you like/dislike? What’s your ceiling on him long term?
Keith Law: Low ceiling but command/changeup guy who should succeed for a while as a back-end starter.

Don: Leury Garcia is secretly a yoked muscle hamster. Jacked two dongs from both sides of the plate in the opener
Keith Law: ISO under .100 last year. He’s strong for his size, but that size is awfully close to me.

Whodini: What was your favorite song from that Eurovision Song Contest movie?
Keith Law: No interest, sorry.

addoeh: How would you describe yourself when you’ve had a couple adult beverages? Happy, huggy, sleepy, loud, sings a lot, dances a lot, belligerent, wordy?
Keith Law: I’m more voluble, and I’m told I’m a funny drunk.

Chris: Given his crazy stuff, why has Dustin May struck out less than a batter an inning in his minor-league career? Do you think he ever wins a Cy Young?
Keith Law: He does, or should, get a lot of bad contact.

Guest: Ha the Socialist agenda officially killed the Democratic party? How the hell could any same person ever vote for this?
Keith Law: Please go read any actual history or economics book about what “socialist” means.

Ridley: So, I hear more than a few politicians saying that they’re not going to extend/increase unemployment because they don’t want people to make more money than if they were at work.

Isn’t that the point? Don’t we want to incentivize people to stay at home, avoid spreading the disease, and be safe?
Keith Law: Painting the poor as lazy has been a popular pastime for both parties, especially the GOP, for at least 75 years.

Craig: MLBPA has a say in how the draft is run because draft pick compensation is tied to free agency. Why don’t the owners get rid of free agency compensation so they can do whatever they want with the draft?
Keith Law: The union doesn’t want to give up that say, and they’d have to give that.

Chris P: Vladdy Jr seems to still be hitting mostly groundballs and has only 1 homer going back to last August. Are you noticing anything different from him or his approach that would give you pause? I know he was on your breakout list this year and I still think he’s going to be a star…but I’d be lying if I wasn’t a little concerned.
Keith Law: It’s been a week. Even with the high GB rate last year he had a 105 wRC+, because he hits the ball hard. Everyone I’ve asked who’s spent time around him thinks he’s such a smart hitter he’ll get to driving the ball more. Also, he’s just 21, way too soon to be concerned. He’d be a junior in college right now.

Sal: Earlier you said to raise the bottom of the strike zone to deal with the rise in Ks. Is that suggestion for a hard rule change or for umps being less generous with the low strike?
Keith Law: A hard rule change.

Jonny: “individuals with a cervix” by CNN today. At some point this becomes Orwellian speech, no?
Keith Law: Please go read 1984 if you’re going to allude to it.

xxx(yyy): do you listen to any podcasts? have any recs for non-baseball related ones?
Keith Law: Grierson & Leitch, The Hidden Brain, BBC’s The Inquiry. I don’t have time to get through any more right now with no car time.

Sal: One last one….can you give Mets fans *any* reason not to start twitching when they hear or read the name “Kelenic”?
Keith Law: No, sorry. You should be permanently angry over BVW just giving him away.

Frank: The Giants traded for Zach Cozart and released him before the season was shorted so they owe him the money for this contract under the 2020 season. Since he was released before the new agreement and 60 game schedule, do they owe him the full amount of his contract or the agreed upon prorata amount? If its the later, makes this trade even better for the Giants.
Keith Law: Great question. I assume pro rata but I do not know for sure.

Andrew: If MLB created a “Utility Man of the Year Award” (think: NBA 6th Man of the Year), who would you name it after?
Keith Law: Tony Phillips.

addoeh: For Eric, I lost my dad two weeks after he was diagnosed with cancer. Talk to a therapist, talk to friends. For me, it was time that also helped.
Keith Law: Thank you.

Samsonite: I wouldn’t normally recommend this kind of thing but this year is different – you should watch that Eurovision Song Context movie. Is it dumb? Very much so. Is it good? Well, I guess it’s not. But it made me happy for a couple of hours and I’ve had some really terrible songs in my head for a week.
Keith Law: It’s not even a style of movie I like. There are still so many movies out there I want to watch and don’t have time to see – plus a billion TV shows, although I’ve finally started watching Stranger Things – that I can’t see spending time on something I’m so unlikely to enjoy.
Keith Law: ok, apparently Cozart gets the full salary because he was released before the season.

That Guy in Detroit: The U.S. might benefit from the presence of an actual “socialist” party — and ranked choice voting to give it, and others, an actual shot
Keith Law: The presence of one, yes. I don’t think I’d like to live anywhere with a true socialist party in power.

Ken: Let me rephrase the question. Has the policies of the Democratic Party made it impossible for them to win a Presidential election?
Keith Law: Their candidate got 3 million more votes than her opponent last time, so I am pretty sure your questions reflect more about your desires than they do any political reality.

xxx(yyy): who would you rather have for the next 5 years as a team cornerstone – Vladito or Joey Gallo?
Keith Law: Vlad.

Mickey: hey Keith – loved the book, of course. Are you less active on twitter these days or am I just missing your tweets (or mis-remembering you as being more active in previous years)?
Keith Law: Less active. It just doesn’t pay to have discussions on there, let alone to argue with anyone. Credit to Twitter for finally booting David Duke, but the site is still overrun by bots, racists, science deniers, and just general assholes.
Keith Law: People will say *anything* if they don’t have to put their names on it.

Henry: Isn’t the entire 2020 season just a small sample size? I’m not sure if we can count anyone’s performance this season seriously.
Keith Law: I tried to make a similar point at the top of my predictions column. Sixty games is less than half a season. It would get us to about June 10th in a regular year.

JJ: The Democrats’ candidate has won the popular vote in six of the last seven elections. It’s not their policies that are keeping them from the White House …
Keith Law: It’s the electoral college, and maybe some gerrymandering and voter suppression.

Patty O’Furniture: Thoughts on Mike Foltynewicz?
Keith Law: Not sure where his velocity went, but he might be a candidate to take eight months off to try to regain strength, or let whatever’s gone awry heal up, and try again in February or March.

Jackie: Giving a 12 year contract to any player is just insane, right? Mookie might be a great player now, but the vast majority of major leaguers don’t last nearly that long. If the Dodgers employ an actuary, he probably pulled out all his hair.
Keith Law: It’s a luxury tax thing. You spread out the payments over more years to reduce the AAV and thus reduce the hit to your payroll for LT purposes.
Keith Law: Nobody thinks he and Harper and Trout will still be $30MM+ players at age 40. It’s just accounting.

Colin: Don’t you think Yaz as an “extra OF at best” is a bit harsh? He hit last year at a solid OF level already. After reading MVP machine, I feel more open to late bloomers, myself. Especially when I didn’t know what was not happening for the player in their early-mid 20s
Keith Law: No, it’s right. I’d go further: without the Happy Fun Ball, he wouldn’t even be that. I’m sorry that the .556 BABIP he has so far this year hasn’t changed my view.

Greg: I don’t like that there is a world series attached to this. Can we just call this a beefed up spring training. I’d be happy with that.
Keith Law: At this point, I’m happy with every day of games we get, and not looking any further.
Keith Law: I need to wrap this up a bit early and will be offline most of the weekend, so I won’t have a links post up Saturday either. Thank you all for reading and for all of your questions. Please stay safe and wear your masks.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: klawchat

→ July 30, 2020
→ By keith

The Famished Road.

Nigerian-born poet and author Ben Okri won the Booker Prize in 1991 for his sprawling novel The Famished Road, which now sits as the start of a trilogy of novels about the spirit child Azaro, who moves back and forth between the spirit and material worlds until he decides to stay with one family in a nameless African country until he can make his mother happy. Okri’s prose is stunning and the book is replete with the magical realism common in postcolonial literature, but even a week after finishing it I still can’t quite decide what, if anything, this book was about.

Azaro, short for Lazaro (since he has seemingly returned from the dead multiple times), is the only child of a couple in a small African village where citizens are getting by, but where the mere appearance of a car or a radio is notable. Representatives of two political parties, the Party of the Rich and the Party of the Poor, visit the village, where the hub of activity is the bar owned by the mysterious Madame Koto, who lets Azaro hang around during the day while his mother hawks goods at a local market and his father does … well, a lot of nothing. Azaro’s father chases various chimeras throughout the book, at one point deciding he’s going to be a boxer and at another that he’ll be a politician, never doing much to earn money to feed his family (and, while he’s a boxer, eating more than his share, so Azaro and his mother go hungry). There’s also a blind man in a wheelchair who seems to just wish evil on Azaro and the other kids in the village, a photographer who runs afoul of the political thugs and begins to document the strife they cause in the village, and various incarnations from the spirit world who want to pull Azaro back to the other side.

Okri is a beautiful writer, and even descriptions of ordinary events and moments sparkle. Azaro is probably around eight or nine years old, but uses phrasings and imagery of a wizened adult – or, perhaps, an ageless being from the spirit world: “The only points of light were the mosquito coil, its smoke spiralling to the ceiling, and his cigarette. In a way I came to think of Dad as a cigarette smoked alone in the dark.” Even scenes of violence take on a mystical quality that lessens their graphic nature, which makes some of the rioting – a not infrequent event in The Famished Road – a bit easier to navigate as a reader.

I love both magical realism and postcolonial literature, but something about this book didn’t hit the mark with me, primarily because I couldn’t connect with whatever its underlying themes might be. It seems like Okri writes at a figurative level, but perhaps without the metaphorical meaning beneath it. If Madame Koto represents someone or something, or Azaro’s father does, I missed it completely, perhaps just because I lack the historical context (what I know of Nigerian history is fairly limited to their civil war), but even his depiction of the two political parties felt a little facile; if the message here is just “all politicians are corrupt,” well, sure, but I think we already knew that.

Because of Okri’s prose and the incredible imagery throughout the book, The Famished Road flies by, even at 500 pages, and even with a plot that meanders substantially. Okri sets a scene, creating a vivid environment with a clear atmosphere, but what happens in these scenes is murky and I was left with a constant sense that I didn’t really get what he was trying to express. It reminded me of Ng?g? wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow, which seems thematically similar, but is more grounded in the concrete and, as a result, has a more powerful and evident metaphorical meaning as well.

Next up: I’ve finished Tara Westover’s Educated and begun David Mitchell’s new novel Utopia Avenue.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: african literature, magical realism, man booker prize, nigerian literature, post-colonial literature

→ July 29, 2020
→ By keith

The Whistlers.

I doubt I would have even bothered looking for The Whistlers, which is free to watch on Hulu, if my friend Tim Grierson hadn’t named it one of his favorite films of 2020 so far. Submitted by Romania for this year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, The Whistlers missed the shortlist in a very competitive group, and perhaps was too quirky or absurd for the committee (who did nominate The Painted Bird, which you couldn’t pay me to watch given how much I hated the book). It’s a crime drama with a perfectly ridiculous twist that makes it one of the most interesting and unusual films I saw from last year, so even where the plot is a bit off, it still works and kept me engrossed till the end.

The Whistlers takes place in Romania and on La Gomera, one of the smaller islands in the Canaries, jumping back and forth in location and time to follow the main character, Cristi, a Romanian police officer, as tries to free a businessman named Zsolt who has been taken by an organized crime ring based on the island. I was completely unaware of this before watching The Whistlers, La Gomera has a whistling language called Silbo Gomero that has been used for centuries to communicate across the island’s valleys. (You can read more about it at UNESCO’s page, commemorating its inclusion on the list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.) To evade detection by foreign police officers, Cristi learns the whistling language, with comic misfires along the way, using it to talk to the various thugs with whom he’s working, along with the femme fatale Gilda, who is working with the criminals but also has her own agenda.

Cristi’s bosses suspect him of criminal involvement and have him under what appears to be nonstop surveillance, including bugging his apartment, which leads to all sorts of subterfuge, not least of which is Gilda pretending to be a sex worker, with Cristi a regular client, to fool the cameras. Of course, Cristi is hardly the only corrupt cop – one theme throughout every Romanian-language film I’ve seen is that pretty much everyone is corrupt – and it’s not really clear how effective their cover story is, especially given one detail towards the end of the film that was the only element I found hard to accept as plausible.

The Whistlers has a very neo-noir feel even with the comedic elements, thanks to a short list of named characters and a plot that has just about everyone in the story working multiple angles, including Cristi himself, reminiscent of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang orsome of the Coen Brothers’ work. The script plays the comedy very straight, respecting the whistling language even as Cristi looks utterly ridiculous trying to reproduce the sounds required for it, while also hiding enough of the byzantine machinations of all of the major characters to make the film’s resolution as suspenseful as you’d demand from a classic noir film.

Writer-director Corneliu Porumboiu is apparently better known for dramatic films, including Police, Adjective (which also stars Vlad Ivanov, who plays Cristi), so this script was a new turn for him, and his ability to write dark comedy is quite promising – and a welcome shift from the grim reputation of Romanian films. It also adheres to the spirit of traditional noir stories in that the actual crime at the heart of the plot, the theft of several million leus stuffed into a couple of mattresses, isn’t actually all that important to the film as a whole. This is about the interactions between the characters, with levity from Cristi’s difficulty mastering the whistling language, with an ending that ties the remaining threads together in clever, cohesive fashion.

Because The Whistlers was submitted and eligible for this year’s Oscars, I’ve included it as a 2019 film and added it to my ranking of all films from 2019 that I’ve seen.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 2019 movies, dark comedy, movies, noir, romanian films

→ July 25, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/25/20.

I wrote two pieces for subscribers to The Athletic this week – a season preview, with breakout candidates and team predictions; and a look at the top 100 prospects who made Opening Day rosters. I held a live Zoom Q&A via The Athletic’s Twitter account on Thursday.

For Paste, I reviewed the new flick-and-write game Sonora, where players flick discs on to the same board, possibly knocking each others’ discs out of the way, and score on their personal scoresheets based on where the discs end up.

My book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, is out now. You can order it anywhere you buy books, and I recommend bookshop.org. I’ll also resume my email newsletter this weekend.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: GEN looks at evangelical women who’ve left their churches and the Republican Party because they couldn’t reconcile Christian support for Trump with the ostensible tenets of the religion.
The New Yorker‘s Isaac Chotiner interviewed Thomas Chatterson Williams, one of the authors of the Harper’s letter decrying ‘cancel culture’ on the left; it’s an informative conversation, made better because Chotiner is unafraid to challenge Williams’ inaccuracies and to correct others in the final text.
The Jackson Free Press spoke to doctors and nurses at the University of Mississippi Medical Center’s dedicated COVID-19 ICU about how overloaded they are and how sick the victims become. The executive vice chair of emergency medicine, begging people to wear masks and keep distancing, says, “Please don’t make this worse.”
A SPLC Hatewatch investigation found that OANN employee Jack Posobiec went to Poland to meet with a Polish neo-Nazi party, promoting their messages through his popular Twitter account.
Customs and Border Protection is involved in far more cities than just Portland, and they’re not being transparent about their activities.
Florida’s former top coronavirus data scientist claims she was fired for refusing to manipulate data to make the pandemic there appear less serious than it actually was.
WIRED looks at the difficulty of calculating herd immunity requirements for COVID-19; the quick summary is that we need a vaccine to get there.
A group of over 100 scientists called for a rapid review system for research preprints so papers like the Stanford one that used highly questionable methods to claim that the rate of COVID-19 infection was 50 times higher in California than widely accepted don’t get widely reported before they’re further vetted.
To be a parent right now is to be a liar, writes Dan Sinker for Esquire.
Dave Grohl – yep, that one – wrote an op ed in the Atlantic in defense of teachers, saying we need better plans before we reopen schools.
Why have rates of premature births gone way down in some areas during the pandemic?
Here’s a list of all of the known QAnon supporters running for Congress this year, or who tried to run; fourteen have already secured spots on November ballots. Sixty-two of the 67 are Republicans. Meanwhile, Twitter has at least begun to ban or limit accounts promoting the QAnon conspiracy theory, on the grounds that the ‘movement’ is associated with increasing violence. Facebook needs to do the same.
Over 280 Wall Street Journal employees signed a letter to the paper’s new publisher asking for a clearer distinction between the news and opinion sections, something the paper reported on itself (subscription required).
A Philadelphia attorney who makes her living evicting people on behalf of city courts is married to a city eviction judge who doesn’t recuse himself from cases involving her.
Quanta has a pretty good, concise explanation of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems.
Board game news: Renegade Game Studios announced the release of a new RPG, Kids on Brooms, that is itself a spinoff of the game Kids on Bikes.
Capstone announced the late 2020 release of Renature, from designers Michael Kiesling and Wolfgang Kramer, which I assume is a sequel to their 2017 game Reworld. The two are probably best known for their collaborations on Tikal and Torres.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, conspiracy theories, coronavirus, links, longreads, math, philadelphia, stick to baseball

→ July 24, 2020
→ By keith

The Old Guard.

The Old Guard, now available on Netflix, is an extremely competent action flick that checks just about all of the necessary boxes, with a mostly credible story and some solid character development for its two leads, played by Charlize Theron and Kiki Layne. It’s also a superhero story that has to fit some of the conventions of that particular subgenre, and has some regrettable song choices that often detract from what’s happening on screen, but the two lead actresses are so good, and Theron especially has some incredible fight sequences, that it managed to be better than I’d expect from this sort of film.

Theron plays Andy, the leader of a group of four mercenaries who, we learn very early in the film, can’t die – or, more precisely, don’t stay dead for more than a few seconds. Their bodies heal quickly, even ejecting bullets from their skin, so while our heroes do feel pain, they’re impossible to kill, and have dedicated their long existences to doing good in the world. They’re hired by an ex-CIA man to go rescue a group of kidnapped schoolchildren in South Sudan, but that mission goes awry, leading them to try to figure out who was behind the failure. Around the same time, a new immortal, Nile (Layne), appears to the four heroes in their dreams, so Andy goes on a separate mission to take Nile into their fold, knowing that she can’t continue to live in the human world when she can’t die or even age normally.

There’s a villain, of course, a pharma CEO who is rather one-note as a character and is played perfectly by Harry Melling; if his name isn’t familiar, I won’t spoil why, because the moment when you figure out where you’ve seen him before is pretty incredible. He wants the immortals’ DNA because he sees a way to save humanity, and to turn a tiny little profit too, of course, but while his words seem to favor the former, his actions entirely point to the latter, and he ends up a stock Big Pharma/evil scientist character – as does Anamaria Marinca, who won wide acclaim for her leading role in the Romanian film 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, but is wasted here as Melling’s lead scientist. The antagonists’ entire argument is that the immortals have an obligation to share their gift, which is presumed to reside in their genes, with the rest of humanity, but that rationale denies the immortals any agency in the decision, and ends up reducing them to the status of lab rats in the eyes of the scientists here.

Based on a series of graphic novels by Greg Rucka, who also wrote the screenplay, The Old Guard feels like an attempt to start up a franchise, especially with the way the ending of the film perfectly sets up a sequel – but it’s effective in that attempt. Andy and Booker, the next-oldest of the four superheroes, are well-drawn, distinctive characters, with varying views on the responsibilities that accompany their gift, while Nile gains depth from her struggle to accept her new powers and the imminent loss of her connections to her family. The other two heroes, Joe and Nicky, both needed a bit more to do as well as some more back story, but they’re notable because they’re a couple, apparently the first out gay superheroes in film, and the script plays that fact as totally unremarkable beyond one interaction with a homophobic mercenary.

The history of this crew is that they go around the world saving people who need saving, trying to do some good, but we don’t actually get any of that in the story here, which is a little bit disappointing since the fight scenes are exceptionally well done (especially when Theron is involved). The two subplots are the battle with Melling for their freedom and survival, and the integration of Nile into their group once they make her understand and accept what’s happened to her, neither of which shows us the Old Guard (who never call themselves that) doing the thing they would typically do. Perhaps that will come in the sequel.

The music in this movie doesn’t just suck, although I would argue that most of the songs on the soundtrack are indeed quite bad, but it’s poorly deployed, with electropop songs playing during what should be tense action sequences. This is the kind of movie that would benefit from less music, or no music at all, given how dark some of its themes are and how brutal the violence can be, although the camera seldom lingers luridly on the violence as it does in, say, Deadpool, where the gore is kind of the point. I was far less bothered by the formulaic parts of The Old Guard, which could just be unavoidable in the genre, than by the obtrusive nature of the soundtrack, which often seemed at odds with the movie’s underlying themes about mortality and meaning. It may be a movie about superheroes with impossible powers, but The Old Guard at least tries to be more serious and thoughtful than the standard MCU film, and by and large it succeeds.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 2020 movies, movies, superhero movies

→ July 21, 2020
→ By keith

Les Misérables (2019).

Les Misérables won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2019 and was France’s submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film this past year, earning one of the five nominations but losing out to eventual Best Picture winner Parasite. The first full-length film directed by Ladj Ly, who was born in Mali and raised in the Montfermeil commune in the eastern Paris suburbs, Les Misérables takes its name from the Victor Hugo novel, but tells a very timely story of police brutality and racial strife that seems like it was made specifically for the current moment both in France and in the United States.

Based loosely on an actual incident of police violence Ly witnessed in that same commune in 2008, Les Misérables takes place over the course of about 36 hours, following three police officers – one, Stéphane, new to the job and to the city – who patrol a specific neighborhood of apartments and shops that are largely populated by immigrants from former French colonies in northern Africa. Both veteran cops, Chris (who is white) and Gwada (who is black and speaks Bambara as well as French), take the approach that they must use force to make the residents ‘respect’ them, with Chris especially willing to profile people, even kids, and rough them up while frisking them without cause, while Gwada often stands by. They’re entwined in the subculture of the neighborhood as well, with rival forces that include the “mayor,” who works with Chris in particular to maintain his local authority, and the Muslim Brotherhood, led by former drug dealer turned imam Salah. When a touring circus of Roma performers threaten the immigrants unless a lion cub stolen from them by one of the children in the neighborhood is returned, the cops’ overbearing tactics leave one child seriously injured and spark a cascade of violence.

Les Misérables is a serious film that balances its multiple themes of police brutality, racism, and xenophobia with a plot that often unfurls like that of an action film. Most of the adult characters have some complexity to them, other than Chris, who is your garden-variety racist white cop like you might find in a less nuanced film. Stéphane has a real arc to his story as he’s confronted with Chris’ increasingly violent and counterproductive tactics and Gwada’s tacit approval despite the latter’s racial and ethnic ties to many of the residents of these apartment buildings, and thus has to choose when to speak or act, finding his voice more as the story progresses and puts him into increasingly more difficult situations. The main child character is Issa, who we’re told is always causing trouble, and who ends up a central character in the trouble that follows – in no small part because the police already know him, and Chris and Gwada seem more than ready to treat him like a dangerous adult rather than a small child who (as we see in an early scene) has no guidance at home.

While this film was made in 2019 and hit amazon prime back in April, watching it right now made it seem like it was written as an argument for community policing. The racism and xenophobia depicted here are nothing new and the script isn’t making any novel points or arguments about them, but the way that Chris and Gwada maintain ‘control’ of this area is extremely damning of what I would think of as the American model of policing. It’s punctuated by their link to this local fixer/boss who calls himself the Mayor, and how they react when they find out they’ve been filmed during one such act of violence against a suspect, and in turn how Stéphane, who isn’t from this geographical area and hasn’t worked as this sort of cop before, reacts when seeing it from an outsider’s view. While the script at least creates some ambiguities around some of the adults in the community, this is a protest against the power given to and wielded by police against underprivileged and mostly powerless communities that lack avenues to fight back through political or legal channels, leaving them little recourse but to respond in kind.

—

I went to put Les Misérables on my rankings of 2019 films, only to discover that I didn’t post them back in March/April like I’d planned to do. So while I still have a few stragglers from last year I’d like to see (Monos, Invisible Life), here’s everything I saw from 2019, with links to my writeups, from my favorite to my least favorite:

1. Parasite
2. Knives Out
3. Little Women
4. Uncut Gems
5. Pain and Glory
6. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
7. The Irishman
8. Corpus Christi
9. The Farewell
10. Ford v. Ferrari
11. Les Misérables

12. Monos
13. Hustlers
14. American Factory
15. Wild Rose
16. The Whistlers
17. The Two Popes
18. The Souvenir
19. 1917
20. Toy Story 4
21. Marriage Story
22. High Flying Bird
23. Non-Fiction
24. FYRE
25. Honeyland
26. Bombshell
27. Climax
28. Jojo Rabbit
29. Atlantique
30. Joker
31. Booksmart
32. Judy
33. High Life
34. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
35. The Great Hack
36. Frozen 2

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 2019 best international film nominees, 2019 movies, french films, highly recommended, movies

→ July 18, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/18/20.

I didn’t write anything this week other than the review here of Patrick Radden Keefe’s book Say Nothing and my review of the lovely little light strategy game Walking in Burano. I will do a season preview with some picks for breakout candidates this week for subscribers to The Athletic, as well as a new game review for Paste, and a Zoom Q&A session on The Athletic’s site on Thursday at 3 pm ET. I answered reader questions on a mailbag episode of my podcast last week.

My book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, is out now, just in time for Opening Day (okay, three months before, but who’s counting). You can order it anywhere you buy books, and I recommend bookshop.org. I’ll also resume my email newsletter this week once I have some new content.

I’ll be speaking at the U.S. Army Mad Scientist Weaponized Information Virtual Conference on Tuesday at 9:30 am ET, talking about topics from The Inside Game. You can register to watch the event here.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Data scientist David Shor, fired for tweeting that nonviolent protests tend to push public opinion leftward (a conclusion based on data), spoke at length to New York about what the data say about the Democrats’ chances in 2020 and beyond. It’s sobering, but comes with evidence-based recommendations that start with not taking any swing states for granted in October.
The Guardian looks at the rise and fall of Nespresso, which faces low-price competition, criticism of environmental impact, and growing consumer awareness.
Politico has a long profile on Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D), a first-term representative from Michigan running for re-election in her purple district, and what lessons she may have to offer Democrats nationwide.
The inspiration for the original text-based adventure game Colossal Cave Adventure (often just abbreviated as Adventure) was Patricia Crowther, ex-wife of the game’s co-creator, who didn’t credit her with the cave mapping that he used to design the game.
Orac looks at the controversy over airborne transmission of COVID-19. His conclusions: the virus can be spread via respiratory aerosols, but we already guessed that, and mandating masks and physical distancing is part of the solution.
Cases have been rising, but deaths weren’t, which isn’t the good news it might appear to be, writes Alexis Madrigal for the Atlantic. The death rate has begun to rise since Madrigal’s piece went up, though.
The CDC’s longtime status as an agency beyond the reach of partisan politics has left it defenseless against attacks from the science-deniers in the White House.
Vox looks at why Arizona has the nation’s worst outbreak of COVID-19, and may be undercounting cases since they have so little testing. They closed too late, reopened too soon, people didn’t take the masks and distancing guidelines seriously.
The New Yorker looks at how Texas Republicans politicized the coronavirus pandemic, leading to an ongoing outbreak, and over 600 deaths in just the last four days.
An Alabama jail refused to give masks to prisoners because, jail officials claimed, the prisoners would eat them.
There’s a threat to American democracy beyond that posed by the President and his sycophants – the ongoing disappearance of local news outlets. When nobody watches local officials, they can get away with a whole lot more.
Why are federal law enforcement agents arresting protestors in Oregon, using unmarked vehicles? When did the feds start looking at the Sicherheitsdienst as a model?
Multiple employees of color at ESPN spoke to the New York Times about racism behind the camera at the company, from limited career opportunities to a lack of diversity in leadership. I can’t say I ever witnessed any of this, or heard about it from people affected, but given the ways you get into leadership positions at ESPN, a lack of diversity is a feature rather than a bug.
Authorities in Selah, Washington, including the city leaders, are trying to criminalize speech in the form of chalk writing of “Black Lives Matter.”
Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler (guess!) is running against Black Lives Matter, opposing the WNBA’s use of the term (she owns part of the WNBA’s Atlanta Dream) and claiming that BLM harbors anti-Semitic and anti-Christian views (they don’t, as BLM is not a single, coherent organization). Here’s a list of some major companies that donated to her while proclaiming support for Black Lives Matter and efforts to fight structural racism.
Three articles on the additional challenges working mothers are facing during the pandemic: “They Go to Mommy First,” from Jess Grose in the New York Times; Parents Can’t Wait Around Forever, by author/economist Emily Oster in the Atlantic; and how a lack of childcare options is keeping women unemployed, in Politico.
A woman who had been tested for COVID-19 but didn’t self-isolate while she waited to get her results dropped off her child at a day care facility in upstate New York. She tested positive and gave it to 16 other adults and children.
A meeting in Utah to discuss requiring students to wear masks in schools was postponed because dingbats without masks filled the room, some carrying signs opposing the mask requirement. Their ‘arguments’ mirror those of anti-vaxxers’, which should be reason enough to overrule them.
An activist couple who support Palestinian causes found themselves attacked online in columns appearing in the Jerusalem Post and The Algemeiner by a student at the University of Birmingham named Oliver Taylor … except that Oliver Taylor doesn’t exist, and seemingly accurate photos of him are just well-made deepfakes.
A Toronto health official has the right to intervene in the case of two children whose dipshit mother doesn’t want to get them vaccinated. Vaccines work. They are safe and effective, and it turns out that the MMR vaccine may even protect you against some of the worst symptoms of COVID-19.
Walt Disneyworld is permanently closing three attractions, two rides and a show, none of which will be particularly missed.
Board game news: Renegade Game Studios announced a new line of puzzles based on art from four popular board games, including Raiders of the North Sea and Arboretum, with pre-orders now open.
Grail Games has a Kickstarter up for Whale Riders, a new game from Reiner Knizia, which is always of interest to me. I’m not sure about this theme, though; those look like Inuit people, and there’s no reason to use them in the artwork.
Marvel Villainous, the new standalone game in the Villainous line from Ravensburger, is available for pre-order exclusively through Target. I have a review copy and have played it once; it’s quite good, with five new villains from the MCU, but can’t be played with any of the 15 villains from the previous four boxes in the series.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alabama, arizona, board game news, coffee, coronavirus, disneyworld, frauds, links, longreads, michigan, stick to baseball, utah, vaccines, video games

→ July 15, 2020
→ By keith

Say Nothing.

Patrick Radden Keefe won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Non-Fiction this spring for his book Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, a well-deserved honor for what is easily one of the best narrative non-fiction books I’ve ever read. The future of the NBCC is in doubt after mass resignations over the behavior of board member Carlin Romano in the wake of the board’s attempt to draft a strong statement on structural racism in the publishing world, but with this, Everything Inside (Fiction) and The Queen (Biography), they picked three tremendous books for their three big awards in this cycle.

Say Nothing is the story of the disappearance of Jean McConville, a widowed Protestant mother of eight, in Belfast in 1972, who was “disappeared” and whose body wasn’t even found for forty years. Keefe uses that as a framing device to provide an incredibly detailed, unsparing history of the Troubles, taking advantage of the trove of new information that has become available in the last decade on the conflict, including copious interviews with people actually involved in the violence who spoke to historians working at Boston College.

McConville was one of sixteen people who were considered Disappeared from the Troubles, and her case, and its ultimate resolution, work extremely well as a point of entry to discuss the conflict as a whole – particularly because some of the people involved in or with knowledge of her abduction were major figures in the Troubles. Keefe walks back to the origins of the strife between Catholics and Protestants in the six counties of Northern Ireland, focusing on the rise of the Irish Republican Army and its various splits (into the Official IRA and the Provisional IRA), and on the violent repression by the British authorities that created a war zone in Belfast for decades.

Keefe shifts the focus in the second chapter, after depicting McConville’s abduction, to Dolous and Marian Price, Catholic sisters who joined the Provisional IRA, the terrorist wing of the group that sought the unification of all of Ireland and expulsion of the British from Ulster at any cost. These two fanatical women were involved in numerous critical events of the Troubles, including the car bombing of the Old Bailey and other London sites in 1973, for which she went to prison; the first series of IRA hunger strikes in the 1970s; and several of the abductions of the Disappeared. Dolours eventually gave up her role in the violent struggle but remained politically active, opposing the Good Friday Agreement and eventually revealing that Gerry Adams was far more involved in IRA violence than he admitted, while Marian continued to engage in terrorist activity well into her 50s. The two make fascinating characters to study while conveniently bringing the narrative to several events critical in any retelling of the Troubles.

The Belfast Project provided Keefe with a wealth of material to fill in much of the historical record on the McConville case and many other Provisional IRA operations from the late 1960s until the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998, thanks to hours of in-person interviews the two historians behind the project conducted with former and even still current IRA members. The original intent was for the content of those interviews to remain confidential until after each subject’s death, and after the first few passed away, including Brendan Hughes, who ran multiple terror attacks for the IRA against British soldiers and also led the 1978 “dirty protest” and the 1980 Hunger Strike while in the prison known as Long Kesh, and who opposed the peace accord as too favorable to the United Kingdom. Hughes named many names, including the person he said ordered the abduction and murder of McConville, and these revelations – coming after Hughes’ death – led to prosecutions and an international court proceeding that eventually forced Boston College and the Project to turn over all of their interviews relating to specific crimes, even those that involved confessions by still-living persons. Without those materials, Keefe wouldn’t have much to add to the history of the Troubles beyond what had already been written by 2010, but the interviews with Hughes and Dolours Price both shed substantial light on multiple attacks and murders, also allowing Keefe to provide a conclusion to the Jean McConville story (albeit one that never led to a conviction). There’s also a tangent here about the nature of oral histories and whether the Belfast Project might have deserved some legal protection, although the school declined to fight the subpoena and subsequent efforts to invoke journalists’ privilege failed.

The detail is what carries the day here for Say Nothing; even if you’ve read about the Troubles before, as I had for a project while in college, you probably haven’t read anything this specific and well-structured. Keefe weaves multiple narratives together, giving nuance to so many of the people involved, even those who participated in multiple murders and carried out vicious campaigns of terror against their own neighbors and fellow citizens. You won’t leave with sympathy for Hughes or the Price sisters, but you will still get to see them as three-dimensional actors, and their revelations help give more texture to the portrayals of other major IRA figures all the way up to Gerry Adams, who had a whole second act as a politician and supporter of peace while denying that he was ever involved in the IRA – a lie that he was able to perpetuate for more than two decades because of the very code of silence that kept Jean McConville’s killers from ever facing justice.

Next up: Tony Collins’ The Oval World: A Global History of Rugby.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 2019 books, british history, highly recommended, ireland, irish history, non-fiction, northern ireland

Archives