Uncategorized — Page 81

→ May 5, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/5/19.

I had two ESPN+ posts last week, my ranking of the top 50 prospects in this year’s draft class and a scouting blog post covering a half-dozen top prep players (five of them on the top 50). My first mock draft of 2019 goes up on Monday. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I sent out the latest edition of my free email newsletter on Friday as well. I’ve been trying to time those to when I’ve got actual content to tell you all about, especially baseball things.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Cut looks at a small cult that operated within the Sarah Lawrence campus, as the father of a student there ended up crashing in her dorm and taking control of many of her roommates’ lives. The university’s reluctance to act is especially disturbing.
BuzzFeed talked to former white nationalist writer/provocateur Katie McHugh, a piece that tries to exonerate her (and fails, in my opinion) but that is instructive into how the alt-right social media machine works.
The Saudi government has regularly helped its citizens living in the U.S. escape prosecution for crimes by spiriting them out of the country, yet we do nothing about this because we continue to believe that the Saudis are our friends despite forty-plus years of evidence that they are not. First it was oil, now it’s help against terrorism, but there’s always an excuse for treating the Saudis as allies even when their actions say otherwise.
My friend Tim Grierson interviewed director/actor Werner Herzog on the eve of the German film giant’s new documentary Meeting Gorbachev.
Kavitha Davidson wrote in the Guardian about sexual assault in sports and society, focusing on Luke Walton’s attorney is trying to use #MeToo to denigrate the coach’s victim.
The New York Times explores eleven major food crops already affected by climate change, which, as the article notes, is widely denied by elected officials (always Republicans) from many of the states that rely on agriculture for employment and income.
The Washington Post profiles D’Arcy Carden, who plays Janet on The Good Place.
The Post also argues that anti-vaxxers should bear the financial costs of their actions when outbreaks occur.
The anti-vaxxer movement is also turning to increasingly violent rhetoric. We ignored this as a society when anti-abortion activists did it, and then when white nationalists did it, and both movements eventually turned to violence and terrorism.
Those same anti-vaxxers are harassing and threatening a Toronto mother whose son died of the flu as she has been advocating for greater use of the flu vaccine.
Measles had been eradicated in this hemisphere in 2000; it just reached its highest level in the U.S. in twenty years, entirely because of anti-vaxxers.
Meanwhile, science-denier Darryl Metcalfe, Pennsylvania’s representative for its 12th district (guess which party!), introduced a bill making it easier for parents to skip vaccinations by requiring doctors to treat unvaccinated children even if it poses risks to other patients.
Germany’s health minister proposed issuing large fines to families who don’t vaccinate their school-aged children. Add that to liability and you might extinguish enough of the deniers to stop these outbreaks.
Indonesia announced a plan to move the capital away from Jakarta because that city is sinking.
The political science valedictorian at Brigham Young University announced during his speech that he’s gay, a huge move given that the Mormon Church just announced a month ago that homosexuality was no longer considered apostasy.
Adam Serwer argues in the Atlantic that Nazis are and have always been trolls.
A National Geographic editorial argues that we must keep half of all land mass in its natural state to stop climate change. That may be true, but, uh, good luck with that.
A federal court ruled that Ohio Republicans violated Ohioans’ constitutional rights with a 2011 gerrymander. I know New Jersey Democrats did this too, but are all of the remaining gerrymanders this decade by Republicans?
Board game news: Plan B Games opened pre-orders for Century: A New World, the third game in Emerson Matsuuchi’s trilogy that also included Spice Road and Eastern Wonders.
Acram Digital announced that they’re developing a digital port of Charterstone, the tremendous legacy game that was my #2 title of 2018.
Asmodee announced the creation of a new fiction imprint to publish works based on or tied to its wide stable of board game and RPG titles.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, climate change, links, metoo, rape culture, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ May 3, 2019
→ By keith

Bad Blood.

Theranos was one of the hottest tech startups of the last fifteen years, at least in terms of the breathless coverage afforded to the company’s putative blood-testing technology and young founder and CEO, Elizabeth Holmes. As you know by now, the entire thing was a giant fraud: the technology never worked, the company ducked or lied to regulators, and Holmes in particular lied to the press and investors who plowed a few hundred million dollars into the company before it collapsed. That implosion came about thanks to a few whistleblowers from inside the firm and the diligent reporting of Wall Street Journal journalist John Carreyrou, who tells the entire history of the scam in his book Bad Blood. The book is thorough, gripping, and infuriating: how did one inexperienced college dropout manage to con so many ostensibly intelligent people into believing her bullshit?

Theranos’s claim was that they could run over a hundred tests on just a single drop of blood drawn by a fingerstick by using a relatively minuscule device, first one called the Edison and later one called the miniLab, that could live in a doctor’s office, a pharmacy clinic, or even a patient’s home. This included routine tests like those for blood cholesterol levels as well as more complex tests that would ordinarily require a lot more blood, which would have to be drawn from a vein. None of this ever worked, and Theranos hid the fraud by taking blood samples back to its headquarters and running the samples on larger machines made by Siemens, all the while making increasingly grandiose claims about its technology, forging nine-figure partnerships with Walgreens and Safeway, and continuing to solicit investments at valuations that eventually crossed $5 billion, making Holmes a paper billionaire.

The media coverage of Theranos in general and Holmes in particular was willfully credulous, none more so than the Fortune cover story “This CEO’s Out for Blood,” a fawning profile that bought all of Holmes’ lies wholesale with what appears to be no attempt to independently validate any of her claims. (The writer, Roger Parloff, eventually admitted he’d been duped.) Holmes appears to have had a strategy for executing this con by co-opting the reputations of powerful, older men: she managed to pack her board with major political figures, including George Schultz and Gen. James Mattis, who all tended to be old white men with zero scientific or technical background, but whose presence carried a lot of weight with the media. She also hired attorney David Boies, eventually giving him shares in the company and a board seat, to stage scorched-earth attacks on anyone who dared criticize the company, which included intimidating former employees who might reveal that Theranos’ technology didn’t work. She even landed a spot as an Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship for the Obama Administration, only stepping down months after the fraud was revealed.

Carreyrou didn’t buy it, and he didn’t back down, all of which shows in his WSJ articles that dismantled the company’s house of lies and again shows in Bad Blood, which is meticulous in reconstructing the genesis and perpetuation of the fraud, with information gleaned from over 150 interviews with employees and others close to Theranos. He particularly benefited from information from Tyler Schultz, George Schultz’s grandson and a Theranos employee for about a year, who realized that Theranos’ technology didn’t work and that they weren’t properly verifying their results (but were still making the same claims of accuracy to the public), and who reported the company to regulators despite intense pressure and outright threats from Theranos, its lawyers, and his own family. (Schultz, who will turn 99 later this year, was a true believer in Theranos and in Holmes until well after the fraud was made public.) Bad Blood is full of details of internal interactions from Theranos that depict Holmes and COO Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani as vindictive, paranoid bullies who didn’t care that the technology didn’t work, or simply refused to accept that it didn’t, and thought they could steamroll anyone who tried to get in their way – and for about a decade, it worked.

The overwhelming sense Bad Blood gave me is that so very many of the people involved in the scam belong in jail. Holmes and Balwani, who was also her boyfriend when she hired him, come across as sociopaths who relentlessly bullied employees and the media; both are still facing criminal charges, while Holmes settled SEC fraud charges while Balwani is fighting them. They had many allies in their scheme, from Boies (whose behavior seems unethical, at least) to the various marketing and PR flacks inside and outside Theranos who helped perpetuate the con. Does Chiat Day, the major advertising agency Theranos hired to build its image, bear any responsibility for helping disseminate untruths about the company? What about Theranos’ marketing employees or in-house attorneys, the former repeating the lies Holmes and Balwani told them, the latter using dubious tactics to intimidate former employees into signing agreements against their own interests? If Holmes and Balwani actually serve jail time – I’m skeptical, but there’s still a nonzero chance of that – it may deter some future mountebanks, but the biggest lesson of Bad Blood seems to be how many people happily went along with the scheme because they thought Theranos was going to make them rich, and because there was little direct cost to them. Patients could have died from errant medical directions that came from Theranos’ inaccurate test results, yet just about every person involved in promulgating the swindle walked away with nothing worse than a bad name on their resumes.

Carreyrou raises the most salient point that investors and reporters missed during Theranos’ days as a high-flying simurgh: the venture capital firms backing Theranos focused on high tech, but not on biotech or medical devices. The VCs with expertise in medical investments were absent. Carreyrou argues that that should have set off alarm bells for other investors or for reporters racing to laud the company or its female founder/CEO, who benefited from the media’s desire to find a rare woman among Silicon Valley leaders, from her photogenic looks, and from her overt attempts to channel Steve Jobs (which come off as delusionally creepy in the book). Con artists will never lack for marks, but when the people who would ordinarily be most interested in backing a venture head in the other direction, it should serve as at least a prompt to ask more probing questions before putting the CEO on your magazine’s cover.

Next up: I’m preparing for the upcoming amazon series by reading Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman’s novel Good Omens.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: frauds, highly recommended, history of science, medicine, non-fiction

→ May 2, 2019
→ By keith

The Wild Pear Tree.

I saw a three-hour movie! It’s just not the one everyone else saw this weekend (which I’m probably not going to see, not with the laziest plot device ever at the heart of the story).

Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2014 for his 196-minute film Winter Sleep, so his follow-up film, last year’s The Wild Pear Tree, was highly anticipated and ended up competing for that same prize at the 2018 festival. The new film was also Turkey’s submission for this year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, although it didn’t make the nine-title shortlist, which has only happened once for any Turkish film (Ceylan’s 2008 title Three Monkeys). The Wild Pear Tree is also long, 188 minutes, and somewhat slow, as there’s very little action of any sort, with most of the film comprising either dialogue or pensive, wide shots of landscape, but there is a novelesque story at the movie’s heart and a strong conclusion that at least provides an adequate payoff for your time investment.

The Wild Pear Tree follows Sinan, who has recently graduated from college and faces an uncertain economic future in modern Turkey, where the best options for recent graduates include serving in the army or joining the police so you can beat up leftist protesters for fun. Sinan plans to take the national exam to qualify to become a teacher, but his real passion is writing, and he is trying to self-publish a work he describes without a sense of irony as a “quirky auto-fiction metanovel.” The film follows him through his return from college to his hometown, where his father has bankrupted the family with his gambling addiction, his grandfather is starting to lose his faculties, and his mother and sister are both stuck in a situation not of their own making. Yet despite the obvious conflict he’s facing with his father, Sinan also comes to realize that these relationships are not binary functions, and that he may relate more to and inherit more from his father than he’d like to admit – while his mother’s love and empathy are more superficial than he understands.

Ceylan’s script here – reportedly pared down from what would have been more like a four-hour running time, God help us – touches on many existential issues that are generally universal but would appear to apply specifically to modern Turkey, a secular nation by its Constitution that has faced rising despotism from its elected leader, Recep Tayyin Erdogan. Turkey’s economy actually began contracting last year, deepening an ongoing malaise that the film reflects in Sinan’s limited employment prospects and general disaffection with the lack of options for him in jobs, in marriage prospects (he refers to himself as a “peasant”), and in geography. He runs into a popular local author and, under the guise of trying to solicit the man’s advice, ends up browbeating him with his own pretentious, juvenile ideas on art and literature, eventually labeling the author a sellout. The scene that turns increasingly contentious and only is resolved in one of the film’s sudden dream sequences (or visions), right after the author, to this point very even-keeled, loses his temper and unloads on Sinan.

The most compelling scene in the movie, a lengthy conversation involving Sinan and two local imams, one conservative and one liberal/progressive, that ranges from the question of God’s (Allah’s) existence to how strictly man should interpret the Koran to the imams’ seeming willingness to pray away the sins and materialism of their quotidian lives. It’s a sort of living thinkpiece, one where Sinan probably has the philosophical upper hand but wields his words clumsily, while the two imams are more eloquent but engage in specious claims about religious texts or morality in the material world, which I assume was in turn some sort of satire or indictment of the active forces in Turkish politics and culture under Erdogan.

This is a long movie that feels longer, but Ceylan at least sticks the landing by returning to the father/son dynamic that opened the movie and recurs multiple times as Sinan leaves and returns from his village and fights with his father over the latter’s profligate ways. The concluding scene, by which point Sinan’s parents have separated, was reminiscent of the speech the father (Michael Stuhlbarg) gave in Call Me By Your Name in its power and its ability to wrap up so much of what the movie as a whole was trying to say. There’s some sleight of hand in the final few shots, although Ceylan foreshadows that by using the same visual trick multiple times in the movie, and the very last image will stay with you for a while … if you make it that far.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 2018 movies, turkish films

→ May 2, 2019
→ By keith

Klawchat 5/2/19.

My ranking of the top 50 prospects for this year’s draft is up now for ESPN+ subscribers, as is a new scouting notebook covering six prep prospects I saw in April, five of whom are on the top 50.

Keith Law: Sometimes you break a finger on the upper hand. Klawchat.

Randal Grichuk: Tim Anderson is on an insane streak right now, but even though he has made some improvements, a lot of it is BABIP related. Moncada has cut his K-rate by 10% and has been awesome, but also has a high BABIP (although, with his contact profile and high exit velocity/speed, he could honestly be a .350 BABIP guy like Baez/Judge). Which of the two do you think is gonna end the season as better offensively, and do you agree that Moncada’s BABIP doesn’t need to regress *that* much due to his contact profile?
Keith Law: I’d rather bet on Anderson’s long term future.

Ray: I’m a big fan of Samin Nosrat’s show and cookbook , Salt Fat Acid Heat. Curious if you’ve seen/read either and what you thought?
Keith Law: I own the book but haven’t read it yet.

Bob: I hear a lot of complaining about the MLB ball wildly inflating AAA HR rates. If the point of bringing the MLB ball to AAA was to help players make the transition to MLB (I think that’s true?), then is this actually a problem or is this the policy working the way it was supposed to?
Keith Law: The bigger problem is that the MLB ball sucks. The answer to the problem was to un-juice the MLB ball, not bring the bad ball to AAA.

David: Enjoy your game lists. A long time ago you recommended Metro, a tile-laying game that has a similar format as many on your current top 100. Just wondering what happened to it – did you stop playing it because of the flood of new games, is it out of print, or did others just surpass it in your mind? Metro has long been one of our favorites, and it’s faster to play and simpler to set up and score than many of the more current games on the list, which is a plus for us. We just picked up Carcassonne finally (thanks for the link to the one-day sale!) and the game mechanics seem pretty similar so far, so I’m sure we’ll enjoy that one too.
Keith Law: Haven’t played it in years mostly because there are many better games in that vein – Carcassonne of course, but also Cacao, Karuba.

Kyle KS: I’ll eat some crow today on my Dexter Fowler question from a few weeks ago. He’s been a force since then and it has been fun watching him and Martinez get playing time and be all smiles in the outfield. You were right that they should keep giving him playing time. So no question, just a thanks for your work!
Keith Law: It’s still so damn early – everyone wants to react to the tiny samples of a few weeks of games but we have no real way to distinguish signal from noise in this little data.

Bob: Tirso Ornelas is off to a solid start, but not showing much HR power in the CAL. I’ve heard his called a potential middle of the order hitter. Does he have 25 HR/yr pop when he matures or a bit less than that?
Keith Law: He’s 19 in high-A. I don’t think he’s a future 30 HR guy, but please stop stat-scouting teenagers playing that far above their age level.

addoeh: Looks like you were able to see Quinn Priester on one of the few recent nice days in the Chicago area. Do you have any more thoughts on him beyond what you wrote in the top 50 draft piece or was there a draft prospect blog post I missed?
Keith Law: I have a blog post covering him, Barco, Callihan, Nunez, Siani, and Newell that should go up today.

Bob: Daniel Lynch has been extremely hitable in Wilmington. Have you seen him at all? I’m wondering to what extent that’s bad defense, bad luck or perhaps a sign that his stuff is a bit short for a mid-rotation projection.
Keith Law: I saw him. He’s fine.
Keith Law: Again, don’t scout the stat line.

James: Gallen for the Marlins and VanMeter for the Reds have big changes in their stats this year compared to last, are either of them good enough to be a regular going forward?
Keith Law: Gallen’s a back-end starter, still. Van Meter isn’t a shortstop, and obviously not a 50 HR guy, but he can hit and has come into more power even going back into last year, enough that I think he’s a clear big leaguer, maybe not with a set position but someone who can play semi-regularly while moving around.

Mike Greer: Is Devers slow’ish start mostly a product of not barreling the ball & poor launch angle (1.1% Barrel% | 5.6% LA) or is it a product of the skills not being as good as we thought? I know you’re bullish on him, but I wanted to see if your early season assessment has changed at all.
Keith Law: No, my early season assessment has not changed at all.

Frank V: Jesse Winker’s early season power numbers look great, regardless of his low AVG and poor BAIBP luck – do you think we are looking at a star in the making?
Keith Law: Yes, he was on my breakout list for that reason – that I think the power he showed last year was real.

Este: Thots on The hype surrounding Vladdy already. I saw video in the streets of d.r. of people cheering on his routine putouts. I love it
Keith Law: I love it too. I’d love it more if he’d been treated fairly, and if MLB and the Jays hadn’t been promoting him while also suppressing his salary.

Mike: Keith, love the chats. I know you can’t draft for need, but the Mets really have no OF prospects in full season ball. Would you recommend they draft an OF in first 2 rounds or still draft BPA?
Keith Law: Always, always, always draft best player available.
Keith Law: That said, don’t be shocked if they end up with a college bat at 12.

Patrick: Did you do Endgame? If so, had you seen all the movies leading up to it?
Keith Law: Hell no. One, I won’t go sit through any three-hour movie in a theater. But two, time travel is the *laziest* plot device ever. I don’t bother with movies that insult the audience’s intelligence like that.

Joe: Keith, how would you rate Adley compared to other recent top draft prospects? Is he the best prospect since Harper?
Keith Law: No, definitely not “the best since Harper.” He’s fine, not clearly 1-1 in every draft though.

Mike G: Worried about Royce Lewis’s slow start?
Keith Law: About his start, no. About the changes to his mechanics – he’s gotten very noisy, with a hitch now and multiple triggers – yes.

Drew W: Totally SSS, but Nolan Gorman’s power sure is playing up in Peoria. Would you put it as high as 70?
Keith Law: I put it at 80 in 2018 before he was drafted.

JAS: Is it reasonable to expect the Padres to contend when most of their hitters seem allergic to taking walks? They are next to last in OB%, and it seems to be a system wide issue.
Keith Law: Their system as a whole and major-league roster in particular are all very young.

BigDaddeh: Has Gosuke Katoh taken the leap or is this SSS noise?
Keith Law: SSS. He slugged .335 last year.

Dr. Bob: Hey there, Keith. Cardinals, Rays, and Twins are making your preseason predictions looking pretty good right now.
Keith Law: It’s nice to get something right occasionally.

Elizabeth Warren 2020: How depressing is it that we (myself included) feel comfortable writing off Mayor Pete in the primary, largely over a weak position on vaccines, but at the same time would take Richard Nixon’s head in a jar over Trump in the general election? Really shows how far apart the two parties are.
Keith Law: Are those even the same question, though? The former is Buttigieg vs the field of candidates; the latter is Buttigieg vs Trump. Of course I’d take the field in the former and Mayor Pete in the latter. (He did clarify that he opposes nonmedical exemptions.)

Robert: How high are you on Xavier Edwards? I know it’s still early but batting 400 with strong BB skills first year out of HS in the cold MW league is impressive. Even with the lack of power can he be a 55? See any Dee Gordon to his game?
Keith Law: I’m a fan, but he’s nothing like Dee Gordon.

Robert: Would you cut bait on Kinsler and just start Urias if you’re the Padres?
Keith Law: Yes.

Moe Mentum: Nick Pivetta. Should he convert to the bullpen, or can he figure it out to be a mid-rotation starter?
Keith Law: I’ve thought he would go to the pen for a while because he doesn’t have a viable pitch for lefties.

Meeeeeeeeeee: Do you think hitters are getting used to the higher velocity of the past decade, and (if so) could that possibly lead to teams giving more chances to pitchers who rely on guile and pitching knowledge (like a Jamie Moyer type, for example)?
Keith Law: Teams seem to be more concerned with guys who have strong secondary stuff now – Matt Allan is the top prep arm this year because he has the best breaking ball of that group – or who have clean deliveries and athleticism so that they can go into a player development system that works to develop new or refine existing pitches.

KLAU: Where does Shea Langeliers go at this point? Still a 1st rounder?
Keith Law: yes. Somewhere in the 15-30 range.

Meeeeeeeeeee: What is the political atmosphere like in Delaware regarding Biden? Are people excited, or do they have a ‘been there/done that’ attitude about him running?
Keith Law: He’s less popular locally than you might think.

Sage: Is Jon Lester best FA signing by Cubs EVER ?
Keith Law: Dawson in 1987 is tough to beat, but that’s not a fair comparison.

Greg: Hey Keith, Austin Riley’s K rate went from 29% last year to 21% in 100+ PAs this year. Is that enough sample size to believe in, or still small sample size?
Keith Law: Take a guess.

Gene: I miss Jarred Kelenic and I didn’t even like the trade at the time
Keith Law: He’s had a funny/weird season too. He started out 2 for 25 in his first seven games, with 7 BB and 9 K. Since then he’s hit in every game (17) and is at .456/.513/.868 in that stretch.

steve: Keith: Very impressive year plus for Red sox prospect Jarren Duran. Profile seems to be slap hitter with speed/ What are your thoughts here. Also does CJ Chatham have a big league future in him?
Keith Law: Duran is legit, chance to be a regular. Can really hit. Chatham probably a UT.

Jeff: To be clear, you think there is such a thing as a 9 year old “trans” child?
Keith Law: What I think is immaterial. Nine-year-old children can be transgender; that is just a fact. That’s not to say that all children who exhibit gender nonconforming behavior are trans, but a child nine or even younger can identify as a different gender than the one they were assigned at birth. Denying this fact will just do more harm to these children, who already experience sky-high rates of suicide and violence.

Tom: Who’s the best reliever only draft prospect this year, and could they be ready for October in the majors?
Keith Law: I have yet to hear of any relief prospect in this draft who is good enough to get to the majors this year.

Eric: Do you think Pete Alonso is an All-Star caliber player?
Keith Law: I think he’ll make the team this year, almost certainly.

David: Should the Braves bench Ender and play Camargo everyday? Ender hasn’t been good at all offensively and with Acuna shouldn’t he be in CF anyway?
Keith Law: Yes, I’ve been arguing that for a while now.

Steve: With the top 4 probably gone, who should the Tigers target?
Keith Law: I’ll do a mock for Monday but I don’t know that the top 4 will be gone either.

Eric: What is the ceiling for Simeon-Woods ?
Keith Law: #2 starter? Heard very good things back to last summer, have not seen him myself yet.

Zach: Is there an adjusted BABIP stat that accounts for hard-hit and line drive %?
Keith Law: Several, but I don’t think any of them has a high enough predictive value to rely upon.

Chris: Can Chavis play 2nd long term? Or is he strictly a corner infielder?
Keith Law: I’d be surprised if he could play anywhere but first base as a regular. He might hit enough to be a regular at 1b though.

Eric: At what age would starting books with actual stories and chapters be appropriate?
Keith Law: I can only speak to my daughter’s experience but I was reading her simple books like the original Mary Poppins stories and Winnie-the-Pooh when she was 4. There’s so much value in the interaction itself – the time you’re spending with your child as you read to them – that I wouldn’t worry if your kid isn’t grasping every word. It’s just so valuable to be with them one-on-one like that.

Zac: What does Derek Hill have to hit to be a glove first center fielder?
Keith Law: If he keeps doing what he’s done in a tiny sample this year – which is brand new for him, so I’m not saying I buy into it – then he’s going to be at least a quality fourth outfielder for a long time.
Keith Law: He’s that good a defender and runner. He’s also barely getting on base right now, even with much improved power, so maybe it’s nothing.

John: I read an article today saying the Dodgers already won the Puig-Kemp trade because they got back Jeter Downs and Josiah Gray. Do you agree?
Keith Law: I liked the trade more for them at the time, since they acquired two real prospects for guys whose contracts were ending soon anyway.

Beans Mahones: Corbin Carroll with some helium. Anything on fellow WA HS OF Joshua Mears?
Keith Law: Mears maybe 30-60 range in the draft. Someone I considered for the top 50 but just left off.

Raani: You would cease contact with your parents if they hadn’t vaccinated you when you were young? Dude, are you mentally ill?
Keith Law: Technically, yes, I am, as I have been diagnosed with anxiety disorder, but since you’re using “mentally ill” as an insult, kindly go fuck yourself.

Ryan: any good HS prospects in Minneapolis this year?
Keith Law: Not on my top 50 but Drew Gilbert and Will Frisch at Stillwater HS, both committed to Oregon State, are both prospects even though they might end up at school (to be overused like Abel and Rasmussen?).

Jim: Keith, I know it’s SSS and all that, but at what point do you sit someone who’s not hitting and not looking particularly good (I’m looking at you, Brian Dozier & Ryan Zimmerman)? After all, while it’s early, it’s not too early to dig too deep a hole for a team to get out of. Thanks, and welcome back!
Keith Law: Feel like Dozier is someone you’d give up on more than Zimmerman.

Chris P: When you say “non-prospect” that obviously means a guy isn’t going to become a star, but what would you call a guy that wont make your lists but likely can stay in the big leagues for 5-7 years?
Keith Law: Sometimes I would just say “big leaguer,” or extra guy or reserve. I think some readers would view any of those as denigrating the player, but it’s really not – it takes a lot of ability to get to that point.

Stubbs: Julio Rodriguez (SEA-OF) is a Guy?
Keith Law: He’s a prospect – but he’s hurt now, unfortunately.

alex: Who has the bigger upside, DL Hall or Grayson Rodriguez? I think Hall because he is LH, but GRod seems to be doing well and is a big dude. Thanks
Keith Law: Rodriguez has more size and velocity but I’d bet on Hall having the better career.

Troy: What is your favorite protein to cook with?
Keith Law: Duck.

Chris P: I try to remind myself that nothing really matters until the end of June…but I’m definitely enjoying this Buxton comeback so far
Keith Law: He was also pretty good the last five months of 2017, before injuries ruined his 2018. I’m more inclined to buy into a good April when there is preceding performance to support it.

Michael: How much confidence do you have in ranking a player in the top 50 that you’ve never seen but have heard great things about from others you trust?
Keith Law: I do enough work on those players that I feel pretty confident in the 50 guys I listed. I’ve seen 25 of the 50 on my list so far this spring, not counting anyone I saw last summer.

Snowy: Is McKay’s ceiling an ace? Or more of a #2?
Keith Law: More of a #2 due to lack of a clear plus pitch.

Troy: Does Dakota Hudson rate out as a 1 or 2 starter long term?
Keith Law: I don’t think he’s a starter long term.

Tyson: Keith, who is the most talented high schooler outside of Harper you have ever evaluated?
Keith Law: Of course we didn’t know at the time but the accurate answer would be Mike Trout.

Alex: Is Yordan Alvarez a major leaguer given his defense liabilities?
Keith Law: Definitely a major leaguer.

Peter Brand: Thoughts on Caster Semenya ruling?
Keith Law: Gross and scientificially inaccurate. There is no such thing as a “male hormone;” all humans produce testosterone, and calling that a male hormone is just ignorant. Gross because this feels like white women mad they couldn’t beat the black woman so they got a court to rule her some kind of freak.

Chris P: What’s the deal with Quantrill now? I know his 2018 was a disaster, so has something changed?
Keith Law: Yeah, his velocity is mostly back. He was 93-96 last night, which is much closer to his 2016 self. I’m intrigued.

Bynd : What is your impression of Beyond Meat?
Keith Law: I’ve cooked their burgers a few times and they’re great. My biggest complaint is how wasteful the packaging is.

Luke: No question, just wanted to say thank you for all the work you do. My wife’s son and I greatly enjoy it.
Keith Law: You’re quite welcome. I’m glad many of you enjoy it.

John: I’m seeing Cal play next week at USF, do you see Darren Baker as an early round prospect?
Keith Law: No. He can run, not sure there’s much else. Their first baseman is pretty good though…

Troy: When is it a trend instead of a SSS? June1?
Keith Law: There is no concrete date after which all sample sizes are automagically non-small. As the sample sizes grow, our confidence in the signal should gradually increase.

Frank: if you had to chose 1, Waters or Pache? (luckily the braves dont have to make this decision)
Keith Law: Pache. Elite defender with power.

Michael: For those confused on small sample size, Betts went from .239 to .290 in six games. It’s so early.
Keith Law: Perfect example.

Tadd: Josh Bell is…..very good? That boy has been CRUSHING baseballs this year.
Keith Law: He’s always had the ability, but for whatever reason he didn’t seem to try to drive the ball even in AA and certainly not in the majors. The Pirates signaled a whole new hitting approach for this year; maybe he’s the big beneficiary.

Sam: Thoughts on CHVRCHES saying they refuse to work with Marshmello again after he worked with Chris Brown and Tyga?
Keith Law: Good for them.

Jeff: Is there a Dominic Smith solution? He’s been raking when getting AB’s but you can’t really blame NYM for playing Alonso. Has to be a trade in the near future right?
Keith Law: Yep. Can’t bench Alonso, can’t let Smith rot on the vine. Best solution is a trade, once they decide what they most need.

PD: Will we see another draft pick go straight to the majors again?
Keith Law: I can’t say never, but it’s not bloody likely.

Jay: Do you think Cole Tucker has the ability to stick with the Pirates all season or will one of the Seinfeldian Kevin’s push him back to the minors due to service time considerations?
Keith Law: Wouldn’t surprise me if he ended the year as their shortstop or second baseman – his arm has been inconsistent for me post-surgery – but I don’t think they’re gaming his service time.

Frank: Tapia looks like an exciting player in Colorado…i wish they’d release Desmond but its nice to see him sit 3-4 days a week.
Keith Law: Tapia is unconventional but he’s got crazy hand-eye and I think he’ll hit as long as he’s given playing time.

Victoria: Luis Urias showcasing some previously unheard of power. Any thoughts for this to continue this year / into the bigs? A mirage?
Keith Law: Small sample + crazy hitter’s environment + new juiced balls in AAA. (The baseballs are juiced, I mean. Stop that.)

Eric: (can we not refer to josh bell as “boy,” please …)
Keith Law: Sorry, I completely missed that. You are correct.

Uli Jon: It seems you get a lot of response on your philosophy on hiring domestic abusers. I imagine there’s some scenario where you might allow it – the perpetrator is genuinely contrite, accepts their punishment, is open to exploring underlying issues that led them there, engage personally, financially, and in perpetuity with organizations and victims. As far as examples of this…wait, still checking.
Keith Law: Right – can we have one such case of a player expressing actual remorse and acting upon it in a meaningful way first? Trea Turner handled the revelation of his past homophobic tweets extremely well, so the community as a whole forgave him and moved past it. Josh Hader didn’t, and plenty of us still think he got away with something. In the case of (more serious) DV suspensions, every single player has talked his way around what he actually did.

Marco: We have nearly 2 full baseball seasons, including playoffs and World Series, until the next Presidential election. Do you agree that the breathless media coverage of every schmoe that announces their candidacy is bordering on lunacy?
Keith Law: Yes. I’d go further, that I think the ridiculous coverage and the desperate need to rank all these candidates, including the various slapdicks throwing in their hats when we’ve never heard of them before, subverts any semblance of a rational process.

Danny: Is Andrew Dalquist a Yankee target at 30/38 (he’s the only SoCal prep arm on the list)
Keith Law: I haven’t heard them at all with him or any prep arms for them right
now.

Grover: Any chance you think we might see May or Gonsolin called up for LAD this fall?
Keith Law: Doubtful. Again, I don’t like saying never, but it doesn’t make a ton of sense.

Moose: White Sox seem allergic to prep players with 1st round picks. Would they consider Witt if Adley & Vaughn go 1 and 2?
Keith Law: I don’t think Witt gets to them right now, but I don’t think it’s an “allergy” but a preference. They have a good system with a young core in the majors and a few more prospects near the majors, so it makes some sense to focus on guys who’ll move quickly.

Devon: What’s the story with Jamie Westbrook in the DBacks system? He’s hitting well (granted, its in the PCL) but is he a prospect?
Keith Law: I don’t think he is.

Corey: Boston’s slow start has resulted from many things, bullpen not really being one of them despite the media’s off-season worry beads. And there appears to be quite a bit of reliever depth in the system. Can we stick a pin in the Boston needs to sign Kimbrel thing ? Not going to happen given the actual cost after tax penalties. I don’t think the Sox need anything other than just to play better (and a 2b staying healthy)
Keith Law: Agreed. I feel like the bullpen is not near the list of their biggest problems, and also something they could fix more easily.

Danny: Do you think Luke Voit’s success is sustainable and did prospect analysts “miss” on him?
Keith Law: Lindsey Adler has a great piece on him in the Athletic (in the Athletic or on the Athletic?) that talks about the changes in his entire approach since the Yankees acquired him. I think much of it is sustainable because there’s a foundation of tangible changes there.

Dick Hickock & Perry Smith: Have yu ever read In Cold Blood? Thoughts?
Keith Law: I did. Capote falling in love with one of the murderers is problematic, to be kind, but it’s a hell of a read.

Minny: Alex Kirilloff was just activated today at AA. Does his injury to start the season remove any hope (if there ever was any) of seeing him in September? Or does the Twins competitive team and full OF make it a moot point anyway?
Keith Law: Yeah it’ll take an injury to find a spot for him, I think.

Jerry: Astros team offensive numbers looking pretty good. Except for hitting with RISP. Reason for concern or simply wait for regression to the mean?
Keith Law: Batting with RISP is just batting. There’s no such thing as a hitter who only hits without RISP.

Adam D.: I get what you’re saying about time travel being lazy as a plot device. And certainly if you aren’t invested in the characters and stories they’ve built up, Endgame doesn’t make much sense to go see. That said, for those of us who are invested, I did not feel insulted by the use of time travel at all. It’s handled far better than just about any movie besides maybe Looper, and the payoffs are tremendous.
Keith Law: Meh. If you guys like it, great, but my daughter watched Infinity War last week and I couldn’t get through a half hour. I also kind of have an issue with the whole characters throwing each other into buildings, off buildings, into walls, etc. as a means of conflict resolution.

Mark: Chris Sale, there’s obviously something wrong with his arm/shoulder right? You would think the Sox have done countless tests on his arm since last year, especially before signing him to an extension so what the heck is going on?
Keith Law: He doesn’t look healthy at all. I can’t speak to what the Red Sox did before the extension, but he looks (from his stuff and command) like someone who is pitching hurt.

MacDaddy: Thoughts on the possibility of George Valera finishing the year as a top 25 prospect?
Keith Law: No.

Jeff: Thanks for the chats/tweets/content. Are there any college games you are planning to scout in the near future?
Keith Law: I’m planning to hit the ACC tournament and I want to go see Vanderbilt before then. That’s probably it – it’s writing/phone calls/texting time for me, with the draft 32 days away (cue @infinite_scream).

Nate: Why do you spend so much time arguing with random people on Twitter? Wouldnt that time be better spent on your family or on your marriage or some other worthwhile endeavor?
Keith Law: The irony of someone coming to my free chat, which I do on my own time for no direct compensation, to ask this question is really quite something.

Randy: Just started getting into coffee recently, what kind of coffee maker would you recommend starting off?
Keith Law: I got a Hario V60 pour-over setup, which uses paper cone filters, for making myself a cup of coffee. It’s like $25, doesn’t require a fancy grinder, and aside from the fact that it takes about five minutes to make a cup it’s easy and convenient.

Hi: Despite you being Luis Robert’s Kryptonite, what are your thoughts on him? Has his performance warranted a bump up on top prospect lists?
Keith Law: I wrote him up last month, but I don’t move players up my lists after three weeks in the minors, sorry.

Joe: Keith, Blake Rutherford has been bruuuutal so far. Safe to write him off?
Keith Law: Just set him to the side. I really hate the idea of calling a player a bust, or assuming he’ll never turn into anything. Look at Voit, for example. Or, less extreme, Max Kepler, who is having his first good (maybe very good?) MLB season right now (SSS) *ten years* after he signed as an amateur. Guys change, they grow and mature on their timetables, and so they can always surprise us.

Josh: What are your thoughts on how Alex Verdugo has looked so far? Seems even better than I anticipated, especially holding his own against lefties.
Keith Law: He’d earned the opportunity on the field, at least. I feel better about him hitting .300+ going forward than about him slugging .600+.

Troy: I know you’ve mentioned autism is far more likely in older fathers. As a 41 year old having one last child should I be concerned?
Keith Law: Not sure you can do anything about it. Just hope for the best!

Danny: You saw Deivi’s “debut” in AA (he had a spot start in Trenton last year)? How is his changeup coming along and do you think he stays in the rotation?
Keith Law: I’ll write up the start soon, but his changeup was above average for me.

Questioning: What’s the difference between transgender and intersex? I know that the brain can be wired differently to not match genitalia, or there are both or no genitalia. But I’m confused on the specifics and want to understanding.
Keith Law: The Intersex Society of North America has a great answer to this Intersex encompasses a lot of conditions, but the best lay explanation I can think of is that they are born neither clearly male nor clearly female, which includes their genitalia. Many of these theocratic, GOP-pushed laws punishing trans people will also adversely affect intersex people, which is an added layer of injustice.

Mike: What do you think about how the Cubs have/are handling the Addison Russell situation?
Also, when does Kris Bryant start hitting again?
Keith Law: They should have non-tendered Russell in December. That was their biggest mistake.

AGirlHasNoName: If the Cubs were going to extend Baez, what would the numbers look like? Would you try to do it if you were the Cubs?
Keith Law: I would definitely try to extend him. Maybe offer him 6 years $125 million? Covers two arb years, four FA years.

Matthew: SSS of course but has Alec Hansen found a home in the pen? If he keeps the walks down, could he close?
Keith Law: Not sure about closing, but he’s back on the path to the majors. I saw him here a few weeks ago – his delivery is simpler now, just very functional, not great but it helps him throw strikes.

Jerry: RE: Troy. My children were born when I was 42 and 45. Both turned out fine. My nephew was born when my BIL was 31. He’s on the spectrum. Like Keith said, you just hope for the best.
Keith Law: So many of these things are risk factors but far from definitive. I think I mentioned this issue with respect to Robert Deniro, who was 55 when his son, who has autism, was born. Big difference there.

Tim : Heard you were one of the most sought after bachelors in Delaware.
Keith Law: The girls, the girls they love me…
Keith Law: (That’s Heavy D. I know it was recycled into another song more recently, but please, let’s stick with the classics.)

Drew: I just finished the Whiskey Robber book. I have no idea how I wasn’t aware of him, what an incredible story. Great recommendation.
Keith Law: Glad you liked it! One of my five favorite nonfiction books ever. Delightfully bonkers.

Chuck: If I could search all prospect rankings for keywords, would a phrase similar to “great athlete who just needs to make better contact to be a 5 tool stud” have the worst performance relative to ranking?
Keith Law: Agreed. I had this chat with a scout the other day – we can talk tools all we want but you have to hit.

Greg: Do you have any thoughts on the chickenpox vaccine? My kids have all their usual vaccinations, but I do wonder if they even need a chickenpox vaccine. Overkill, or long overdue?
Keith Law: Long overdue and utterly necessary. Varicella can kill adults.

Brett: Do you watch Jeopardy? Have been watching the run James is on? Guy is impressive. Love how he uses his math skills to increase his odds.
Keith Law: I don’t but it’s a great story and apparently he’s a hardcore baseball fan (and stats nerd, a term I use with great endearment).

Justin R: Ever think of doing a juice cleanse?
Keith Law: I don’t believe in pseudoscience, sorry.

Justin R: I know you don’t care about either, but if you’re at a bar and the NHL and NBA playoffs are on, which one are you ignoring less?
Keith Law: More likely to watch hockey.

Ed: You don’t strike me as an overweight lover !!
Keith Law: No, but I am currently in the house.
Keith Law: That’s all for this week – thank you all for your questions and patience with my erratic schedule the last month-plus. It’ll calm down for the foreseeable future as I focus more on draft writing and less on traveling to see players. (I realized I’m also still trying to see Corbin Carroll, as well as Bleday and the ACC guys, then I’m done.) I should be back for a fresh chat next Thursday, and the mock (projected) first round is scheduled to go up Monday for ESPN+ subscribers. Thank you again!

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: klawchat

→ April 30, 2019
→ By keith

The Overstory.

Richard Powers’ The Overstory won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in what feels like a crowded year of critical favorites, with Tommy Orange’s There There taking home one of the honorable mentions. Powers has woven a complex tapestry of narratives and seemingly disconnected characters around a central story of environmental degradation and injustice, a novel that feels extremely important but that suffers from the breadth of his vision and ambiguous characterization.

Trees are at the heart of The Overstory, both in terms of the characters’ interactions with trees and humanity’s degradation of the planet’s forests and climate. Powers rages against the human machine throughout the book, decrying everything from our failure to appreciate the beauty and diversity of nature to the capitalist impulse to plunder our forests for profits and rationalize it away. The characters themselves seem to lose hope for the planet as the novel progresses, and Powers himself is certainly no optimist, but there’s at least a strain of possibility throughout the story that gives us an inkling that we might still have time to save ourselves if we stop denying the truth and act to reverse the damage we’ve done.

Powers’ thematic ambition spreads to a diversity of central characters that seems to be beyond his ultimate reach. He has nine core characters in The Overstory, and I’m not sure I could name an author writing today who’s up to the task of managing that breadth of personae across 500 pages; Powers is game, but the characters bleed into each other far too much to keep them distinct or explain their varying purposes on the pages. Nick and Douglas, two middle-aged white men with personal tragedies in their back stories, become harder to distinguish, especially as their stories on the pages eventually connected, intertwine, and separate; the same is true to a lesser degree with Mimi and Olivia, who are a bit more sharply drawn but still are too similar in personality and speech to keep them completely separate in the reader’s mind.

An overstory is either the layer of foliage in a forest canopy or the trees that give the canopy its foliage, so Powers is playing with words here, as he’s layered the story of the trees, and how they have been indispensable to life on earth, on top of this story of nine characters who start the novel with no connections to each other but several of whom find themselves connected and even relying on each other in emotional symbiosis. It’s a clever conceit for a novel, but to make the understory work, you have to make at least some of those characters compelling and/or sympathetic. Powers doesn’t do that, at least not enough for me; I think one of the nine characters, the researcher and would-be professor Patricia, who may have autism, was well-drawn enough to stick with me, and even that was as much a function of the injustice the world of the novel does to her – laced with misogyny and the human tendency to reject new ideas – as it was to the depiction of her character.

There’s one common theme among the characters in the novel that serves as a functional metaphor for the environmental cause he’s espousing, that of death and rebirth. The novel opens with prologue chapters for each for the characters, and nearly all of them experience the death of a loved one, often a pivotal figure like a parent (at least two fathers die in this section, so steel yourself), as part of their back stories. The idea that new life comes from death recurs throughout the novel, including a discussion of how much one dead tree lying on the forest floor feeds the next generation of life in the forest, from fungi to insects to new plants; Powers extends the metaphor so that many of the characters in the novel find the paths of their lives determined or at least directed by the deaths that altered their childhoods.

There is an actual core plot in The Overstory, as five of the characters unite at a logging protest and end up splitting off to form an eco-terrorist cell, which has some of the consequences you’d expect and a few you wouldn’t – but Powers doesn’t resolve this story in a remotely satisfactory way, and the connections to the other four characters, notably the invalid lawyer Ray, are tenuous at best. There are many great ideas in this book, but it never comes together into a coherent narrative.

Next up: Iain Banks’ The Player of Games, part of his Culture universe of novels, currently on sale for $2.99 for the Kindle.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 2018 novels, american literature, contemporary novels, pulitzer prize

→ April 27, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/27/19.

No new ESPN+ content this past week, since the NFL draft sort of took center stage, but I’ll have a fresh draft ranking this upcoming week and my first projection for the MLB draft shortly after, either later this week or at the start of the next. Klawchat will also return this week.

My latest board game review for Paste covers Solenia from Pearl Games, a light strategy title that offers more depth of strategy than most gateway games do without sacrificing playability or making turns too long. I also recently reviewed the app version of the game Castles of Burgundy for Ars Technica.

You may also enjoy more of my words by signing up for my free email newsletter, which I send out when the muse speaks to me.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Sterling Jewelers, which operates most of the major mall jewelry store brands you know (Kay, Belden, Jared, Zales, and others), has allowed a culture of wage discrimination, sexual harassment, and outright assault to flourish even as a lawsuit first filed in 2005 continues to crawl through the courts. This lengthy expose by the New York Times‘ Taffy Brodesser-Akner has many triggering details of rape and sexual assaults, and explains how these problems became endemic to the company across brands and regions.
The New Yorker‘s Jia Tolentino explores what it takes to put your phone away and reduce the time we all waste on our devices.
Vox looks at the rise of the online ‘incel’ community and how it has spawned real-world violence. The worship of mass murderers like Elliott Rodger and Marc Lépine should tell you all you need to know about these atavists.
A new paper in the Hofstra Law Review looks at amateur baseball coaches who overuse their pitchers (PDF), exploring why a lawsuit against an offending coach on behalf of an injured pitcher would be extremely unlikely to succeed and thus arguing for a consistent scheme of pitch count regulations. (The piece mentions me in passing and incorrectly identifies my role with the Blue Jays.)
Also in the New Yorker: the story of a Jewish jazz musician who survived the genocide in part by playing in a jazz band for the Nazis.
The Cut interviewed Eula Biss, the author of On Immunity, about how “anti-vaxxers” are too heterogenous a group to be lumped under that single term. That’s one reason I would prefer that we call them ‘deniers,’ because that is something they all have in common – they deny the incontrovertible evidence that vaccines are safe and effective, even though they have diverse rationalizations for doing so.
The United States worked to dilute a UN resolution against the use of rape in war. You read that right: The UN tried to condemn rape as a war crime, and the U.S. fought to water it down.
Several women at Google have accused the company of retaliating against them for organizing a walkout to protest the company’s poor treatment of women.
NPR looks back at the immediate, effusive reaction when Nirvana released “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” which became an anthem for disaffected youth of its time despite lyrical content that itself is anti-anthemic.
A 30-year-old man came down with measles … which is how he learned he wasn’t vaccinated. I would never speak to my parents again if I found out they had skipped vaccinating me. (I’ve seen my records, so I know this isn’t the case.)
Meanwhile, measles cases in the U.S. have spiked to nearly 700, even though the disease was eliminated from our hemisphere in 2000. This is entirely the fault of vaccine deniers, and they should be forced to bear the cost of their decisions.
A New York Supreme Court Judge rejected a challenge to a city vaccine mandate, which is good news, if temporary, in the fight against measles. One of the lawyers who brought the challenge? Conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Washington State Representative Matt Shea (guess) was caught discussing violent attacks with far-right figures, according to a Guardian investigation. The Seattle Times‘ editorial board has called for the state GOP to oust him.
A cognitive scientist explains why we are so susceptible to fake news and distorted memories. I definitely thought the Evil Queen’s quote was “Mirror, mirror, on the wall.”
Several Ohio lawmakers (guess) are pushing legislation in response to a mother who let her 9-year-old son dance in drag at a local bar, in a transparent attack on LGBTQ children.
Chely Wright responded to the bigot Franklin Graham’s claims that you can’t be gay and Christian.
President Trump continues to defend white nationalists and the slave-owning general Robert E. Lee in response to attacks from Joe Biden over the very issue of Trump’s support of white nationalism.
McSweeney’s gives us a rough transcript of every interview with Pete Buttigieg.
Bosk, the new game from the co-designer of Sagrada, is available for pre-order on Floodgate’s site.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: longreads, metoo, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ April 20, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/20/19.

Nothing new for ESPN+ subscribers this week, although I’ll have another draft blog post next week, followed by a draft top 50 the week after (I got bumped by some other draft). My last ESPN+ post covered likely first rounders Alek Manoah and Josh Jung, with Manoah looking like a top ten pick when I saw him.

I reviewed the app version of Castles of Burgundy, one of my favorite high strategy games, for Ars Technica. MENSA also gave its Select tag to five games from 2019 and I’ve reviewed two already, Gizmos and Architects of the West Kingdom.

I rarely appear on podcasts due to time constraints, but when Kyle Bandujo asked if I’d come on his show, Trouble with the Script, to review the worst baseball movie I’ve ever seen, I couldn’t possibly decline. I think we properly eviscerated Trouble with the Curve.

My free email newsletter is becoming dangerously close to a weekly thing now. I must be mellowing in my old age.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This is from February but I hadn’t seen it until a friend sent it along this week – best-selling novelist Dan Mallory is a serial liar who has made false claims of cancer and bipolar disorder to try to further his career. None of the claims has anything to do with his book, The Woman in the Window, however; it’s just that much of what he says about his life to date is untrue.
Mariners pitcher Rob Whalen recently retired due in large part to anxiety disorder, and he says the Mariners handled his case extremely poorly.
WIRED has a long, in-depth look at the chaos inside Facebook in 2018 as the company was called to account for its role in influencing the 2016 election, the way it promulgates hate speech and fake news, and poor data privacy standards.
Audio link: KQED looks at the Coachella concert-goers and those of us at home don’t see, a community far less affluent than the attendees are, and that is dealing with environmental problems from the warming desert.
The Writers’ Guild of America has demanded that its members cut ties with their agents to protest conflicts of interest by agencies that also produce shows via “packaging” deals. This past week, the first writer came out to say he wasn’t going to do so, in a letter that is pompous, self-serving, and in at least one instance untrue.
Fair Harvard, doing me proud: The university’s health services rejected a student proposal to make naxolone, the treatment capable of reversing opioid overdoses, available on campus. The money quote: “They had some skepticism about whether the research actually suggested that naloxone would be effective at Harvard.” If Harvard students have different biology from other humans, I’d love to know about it sooner rather than later.
The FDA may start cracking down on the use of the Non-GMO Project label.
A Bangladeshi student who reported sexual harassment by one of her teachers to the police was burned to death by members of her community, sparking large protests in the Muslim nation in south Asia.
A pair of adults wore Nazi armbands and MAGA shirts in Providence, Rhode Island, and then stood atop the city’s Holocaust memorial where they gave the Nazi salute.
The Washington Post looks at one possible fix to the “nightmare” job market for academics.
Brewers reliever Jeremy Jeffress started a food truck with someone from his hometown to re-create a favorite childhood experience of fried seafood. I need reports from those of you in Milwaukee when it starts up on May 5th.
Apparently there’s a controversy brewing over a Canadian stamp with an inaccurate depiction of something called a Nanaimo Bar, which I’d never heard of it until this happened.
Board game news: Another Terraforming Mars expansion, Turmoil, is over $600,000 on Kickstarter already.
The unrelated game On Mars has also cleared the half-million mark on Kickstarter. The BGG listing for the game says playing time is 90-150 minutes, so I may end up giving this one a miss.
Not a board game, but after reading this review of Falcon Age at Paste, I’m suddenly interested in it despite my general avoidance of video games (because they suck up so much time).

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anxiety, bangladesh, board games, gmo, links, rhode island, social media

→ April 17, 2019
→ By keith

The Inheritance of Loss.

Kiran Desai won the Booker Prize in 2006 for her novel The Inheritance Of Loss, a slow-burning tragedy set in the Darjeeling district of northeastern India, near the border with Bangladesh, that covers distinctions of class, gender, and language, but never establishes a single compelling or central character anywhere in the novel’s 350-odd pages. It’s an oddly dispassionate novel given how much the passions of individual characters factor in the story.

The most central character in the novel is Sai, the suddenly orphaned daughter of an Indian engineer who is killed while in Moscow training for the Soviet space program; she arrives, without warning, at the home of the judge, a curmudgeon who has distanced himself from the rest of his family, living on his estate with the man known only as the cook. The cook’s son, Biju, has gone to America to make his fortune, but instead works his way through a series of entry-level jobs in various restaurants in New York City that rely on undocumented labor to run their kitchens.

These stories play out against the background of the rise of a Gurkha self-determination movement in the district that continues today. The Gurkhas, Indian natives who speak Nepali, have been agitating for their own state within India for over a century, and a more militant group, the ominously-named Gurkha National Liberation Front (styled after numerous insurgent groups, nearly always with communist leanings, around the developing world), sprang up in 1986, leading to a lengthy general strike depicted in the novel. Sai falls in love with her tutor, Gyan, who joins the GNLF and who makes a decision that affects their budding if likely forbidden romance as well as the lives of the judge, the cook, and other family members who have lived in privilege in a region where the ethnic majority has been subjugated.

There’s some beautiful imagery in the book and some recurring metaphors that would probably be worthy of a deeper dive – vapors appear in various forms from the first page onward – if I cared one iota about any of these characters. I’ve generally enjoyed fiction from South Asia, whether translated or originally written in English, probably because the setting is so different to me and because that part of the world has an ethnic and cultural diversity that lends itself well to complex stories, with many writers with south Asian backgrounds incorporating myths or magical realism into their works. Desai’s style is dry in just about every way; the prose is uninteresting, the characters unmemorable and unlikable. The judge’s back story, for example, explains his grim, misanthropic exterior, but in a way that will make you loathe him for his cruelty. There’s a parallel between his upbringing and what the cook hopes for Biju, certainly, where Biju chooses family and emotion over the sort of materialistic ambition that defined the judge’s life. Perhaps I would have felt more invested had Biju’s story resolved a little sooner, but Desai has us watch his debasement a little too long before anything of consequence happens in his story, and the novel ends before his story gets any sort of answer.

I still can’t decide what Desai was trying to depict in The Inheritance of Loss or what aspect of life she wanted to explore, which could be my failure as a reader rather than hers as a writer – but whatever it was, I didn’t get it, and that’s a pretty rare experience for me at this point in my life. I may not always like novels I read, but I’m rarely this flummoxed. That puts this towards the bottom of the two dozen Booker winners I’ve read so far, at least.

Next up: I’ve just started Richard Powers’ The Overstory, which just won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: disappointments, man booker prize, post-colonial literature

→ April 16, 2019
→ By keith

The Sea.

John Banville won the Booker Prize in 2005 for his novel The Sea, a slim, introspective novel on death and grief, written from the perspective of a middle-aged thesaurus. It’s a demanding read that brims with ideas and contains many sparkling turns of phrase while simultaneously maddening with the narrator-protagonist’s bloviating style and endless desire to show off his vocabulary.

Max Harden is a retired art historian who has recently lost his wife, Anna, to some sort of aggressive cancer, after which he revisits the seaside cottage where he’d spent time one summer and had first encountered death and loss, although exactly how that occurred is saved until the very end of the novel. (The reveal is similar in tone to that of another Booker winner, the marvelous The Sense of an Ending, but the latter book does it far more effectively.) He splits his meandering narrative across three separate timelines – the end of Anna’s life; the summer he spent with another family, the Graces, at their cottage; and the present day as he’s returned to the sea and found connections to the past.

There’s a profound sense throughout Max’s story that he’s still struggling to process his own grief in the face of several shocking losses, something he seems to cover up through his own dissembling, almost in parody of the British stiff-upper-lip stereotype, the man who can look at and even identify his feelings but refuses to engage with them. The reader never gets to know Max at all; he’s the astute observer, in the style of Nick Jenkins, but lacks any discernable personality traits of his own, other than, perhaps, his ability to keep his own grief off the pages. The only real indication we get that these deaths have affected him comes near the end, when a bout of drinking leaves him with a head injury and eventually brings his adult daughter around to try to coax him to come live with her, especially as she’s afraid he may have tried to take his own life. Even then, he can barely conjure up the emotions any father should feel for his daughter, not least the reversal of roles that comes when your children have grown and begin to wish to take care of you.

I mentioned the novel’s vocabulary above; Banville may have all of these words at his immediate disposal, but just because you know a word doesn’t always mean it’s the right choice for that situation. Here’s a sampler of esoteric words I encountered in the book, most of which I didn’t know previously: rufous, immanence, minatory, eructations, aperçu, anabasis, expatiation, putative, vulgate, refulgent, vavasour, plangent. I looked up all of the words on that list (and more) that I didn’t know, or of which I was unsure, and yet have forgotten most of them in the book’s wake. Former New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani called the book stilted, claustrophobic, and pretentious, while referring to Max as a gloomy narcissist, and even though I clearly liked the book more than she did (low bar, I know), I can’t argue with her criticisms. The occasional use of a twenty-dollar word in lieu of a ten-cent one can be fun for writer and reader, illuminating the page, signaling a shift in tone or sparking a thought in the reader’s mind, but when you’re regularly reaching for the OED, using minatory when menacing would have sufficed, you’re trying too hard.

Banville had been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize once prior to this win, for the superior The Book of Evidence, a twisted novel in both senses of the term, one that also has a narrator writing at some remove from his emotions but does so in a way that heightens the tension rather than suffocating it. His win in 2005 was not well-received, as The Sea beat Kazuo Ishiguro’s marvelous Never Let Me Go and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, both of which would have been better choices, as well as highly-regarded novels by Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes. It does, however, illustrate one of the criticisms of major literary awards – their tendency to reward their own, to be slow to recognize cultural and stylistic shifts, and to excessively honor works that draw heavily on or even mimic the classics of the western canon. I could live with a little pretension if the book took me on an emotional journey, but The Sea seemed to prefer to send me to the dictionary instead.

Next up: I’m just about finished with Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, another Booker winner, after which I’ll turn to this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winner, Richard Powers’ The Overstory.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: irish literature, man booker prize

→ April 13, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/13/19.

I’ve had four ESPN+ posts this week. On the draft blog, I covered last week’s NHSI tournament + Elon RHP George Kirby, then scouted West Virginia RHP Alek Manoah and Texas Tech 3b Josh Jung. I’ve heard Jung’s name pronounced a few ways, but I think it has to be either Josh Jung or Yosh Yung, for consistency’s sake. On the pro side, I looked at the most prospect-laden minor league rosters this year, and finally saw Luis Robert play against the Royals’ high-A squad. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Architects of the West Kingdom, the newest game from Shem Phillips, who got a Spiel nomination for 2015’s Raiders of the North Sea. Architects is a busy worker-placement game, but has a few fun quirks like capturing your opponents’ meeples and selling them to the prison, or trading reputation to steal tax money or go to the black market.

And now, the links:

Longreads first: Anne Boyer writes in the New Yorker about what cancer takes away from you even if you survive it.
Adjunct professors are the minor-league baseball players of academia: overworked, underpaid, and often living on the edge of poverty. The Atlantic looks at one such adjunct who died because she couldn’t afford basic medical care that might have saved her.
Hampshire College has long had a reputation as a ‘hippie’ school, loose on the academics, maybe heavy on the substances. The college may be on the verge of extinction as it seeks a partner or buyer.
Forbes looks at deadbeat billionaire Jim Justice, the current governor of West Virginia, a man who doesn’t pay his bills and ignores state regulations that don’t suit him.
I’ve written quite a bit here about antibiotic resistance and the need for aggressive, science-based policies to combat it. Well, fungi can also make us sick, and now Candida auris has evolved resistance to antifungal drugs, too – and it’s hard to kill even outside the body. Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (PA-06), an engineer by training, had a tweet thread about this topic after the article ran. Guess her party.
Kyle Korver, who sources tell me is a professional basketball player, wrote in The Player’s Tribune about learning to understand his own privilege.
Isaac Chotiner interviewed writer Bret Easton Ellis for the New Yorker, and Ellis said some things that didn’t play particularly well online, for good reason. I’m not linking this to dunk on Ellis, but to praise Chotiner: Look at how consistently he probes when Ellis dissembles, and how he refuses to let Ellis off the hook for saying something wrong. This is how the media should interview people in power.
ScienceNews has a follow-up piece to a link I posted last week that profiled fossil hunter Robert DePalma and the possible discovery of a fossil record from immediately after the Chicxulub impact.
Chik-Fil-A continues to pour money into nonprofit groups fighting LGBT rights across the country. I haven’t set foot in one of their restaurants in at least a decade, for this precise reason, but J. Kenji Lopez-Alt shows you how to recreate their famous chicken sandwich at home.
WIRED explains why the robocall problem will never truly be fixed.
Elizabeth Warren may not be faring well in early polls or fundraising, but Moira Donegan writes in the Guardian that Warren is the intellectual powerhouse of the Democratic Party, producing practical policy proposals where others purvey platitudes.
This week’s Hidden Brain podcast episode looks at how societal views of gay rights changed so dramatically inside of fifty years.
Stand your white ground: An Alabama woman who shot and killed the man who violently raped her and then assaulted her brother is now facing life in prison. Don’t get mad when people stereotype the south while this shit still happens in your backyard.
In Missouri, two legislators – guess which party! – are pushing anti-vaccine bills and conspiracy theories.
Another WIRED piece argues that our health laws have failed the public good when it comes to vaccines, making it too easy for idiots and the ignorant to opt out.
Amidst the furor over US-Israeli relations, we’re losing track of the various despots Trump is propping up around the world, including the rising dictatorship in Egypt.
Why am I including a link to a press release about a single-malt whiskey’s launch in India? You’ll see if you read it.
The New York Times crossword puzzle Twitter account got into a bizarre beef with another twitterer over what was pretty obviously a joke.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alabama, gay rights, links, missouri, science, vaccines, west virginia

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