arizona

→ March 30, 2025
→ By keith
→ 1 Comment

Stick to baseball, 3/30/25.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I posted my annual just-for-fun predictions column and a roundup of a few prospects I saw on the back fields in Florida this week. I also put together a post (with my editor’s help) with the preseason scouting reports and a sentence or two on the 2025 outlook for all top 100 & just missed guys who made Opening Day rosters.

At Paste, I reviewed the Ticket to Ride legacy game, Legends of the Old West, which is one of the best legacy games I’ve tried. It’s true to the original game and doesn’t load it up with too many new rules or twists (there are some, of course).

I appeared on NBC News This Morning and NPR’s All Things Considered on Thursday to discuss Opening Day and the upcoming MLB season; I was also on CNN that evening but I don’t think it’s online. I also discussed the Guardians on WHBC 1480.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: ProPublica reports on how a gay man in Idaho built a following on Telegram that encouraged followers to kill LGBTQ+ people and commit acts of terror in the name of white nationalism.

Florida is going to make it easier for companies to employ and exploit children now that the rush to deport immigrants is hitting the state’s work force.

Three senior partners at the law firm Keker, Van Nest & Peters exhort other law firms to join them in fighting the Trump Administration in an op ed in the New York Times, coming in the wake of two major firms completely capitulating to the President and his vindictive executive orders.

My alma mater, with over $50 billion in its endowment and quite a few alumni in powerful positions around the world, also bent the knee by dismissing the leaders of its Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

Hamilton Nolan writes in his Substack that the federal government is going to destroy labor unions if we don’t stop them, after Trump signed an executive order (which, to be clear, is just that, not a law) saying the federal government won’t recognize the unions that represent most of its employees.

Republicans in North Carolina continue their legal fight to steal a state Supreme Court seat, arguing that the right to vote is not absolute as they try to invalidate over 65,000 votes.

Arizonans voted in November to protect reproductive rights, but Republicans in their legislature don’t care and are trying a backdoor method to defund clinics by preventing them from even discussing abortion as an option with patients.

Another pregnant woman died in Texas because the state’s abortion ban meant doctors couldn’t perform a procedure to save her life.

Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) appears to have spent campaign money on businesses that don’t exist, just the latest in a series of financial improprieties uncovered by Phil Williams at Nashville’s NewsChannel 5. Williams previously reported on how Ogles fabricated details of his resume and background.

An immigrant to the United States appears to have broken Wisconsin law by offering $1 million via a lottery to anyone who voted in the state’s Supreme Court race. Unfortunately a judge in that state denied the Attorney General’s request for an emergency injunction to stop the lottery.

A barber in Texas who came to the United States from Liberia when he was two years old is now facing deportation to that country because he committed a crime for which he was pardoned. ICE also arrested and detained an indigenous Mexican farmworker and activist in Washington, allegedly because of his activism, although in his case ICE claims he was ordered to leave the country by a judge in 2018.

At Objective Journalism, James Salanga argues that authorities in the U.S. have always treated speech in favor of Palestinians’ rights differently than other forms of speech, whether it’s the federal government, universities, or journalistic outlets.

Mathematicians solved another century-old puzzle, this one on whether you can divide a triangle into fewer than four pieces and assemble those into a square. The answer is that you can’t – four is the lowest number.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, arizona, first amendment, florida, free speech, harvard, immigration, links, longreads, math, north carolina, tennessee, wisconsin

→ March 21, 2025
→ By keith
→ 1 Comment

Arizona eats, March 2025 edition.

The best thing I ate at any new (to me) restaurant this week was chicken, oddly enough. Mister Pio is a small Peruvian chicken spot in Arcadia that has a barebones menu: half chicken, quarter chicken, chicken sandwich, fries, drinks. The chicken comes with a side salad and aji verde sauce. The chicken is really incredible; I read online that it’s dry-brined with a mix of 21 spices (and then some) for two days, then it’s cooked for an hour and a half on a rotisserie over coals, but man, it’s just about perfect. It’s salty and deeply savory, and any fat under the skin has long rendered out, so the skin itself is paper-thin and just covered in flavor from the dry rub and the smoke, while the meat itself is extremely tender and juicy. The fries are fried to order (or at least mine were) and they’re properly salty. Mister Pio is only open noon to 8 pm, Tuesday through Saturday. Make a point of going if you’re anywhere in the vicinity – they’re less than 15 minutes from ASU’s park and not that much farther from Scottsdale.

Mensho Ramen is a Japanese chain that has three locations in California and now two in the Valley, one in Phoenix (where I went) and one in Mesa. Their menu is very simple, with just two broth types, one from chicken and one vegan, although the predominant protein across the entire menu is beef, specifically A5 Wagyu. I had their signature ramen, replacing the Wagyu with extra duck, although the pork was the best of the three proteins (there’s also chicken). This is really about the broth, which is as rich and savory as a typical tonkotsu broth, and the noodles, which are a little thicker than you might normally find, and are truly al dente. There’s less extra stuff in the bowl unless you chose more add-ins, but it doesn’t need anything more than the noodles and broth if the goal is flavor – and I say that as someone who likes all of the stuff you can typically add to ramen, like fish cakes or mushrooms or bamboo shoots. This is just exceptionally good, umami-rich broth, and I would guess it’s hard to mess up when you start with a base that good.

Uchi recently opened an outpost in Scottsdale, the seventh location of the award-winning sushi & Japanese restaurant by Beard winner Tyson Cole, whose first location is still going in Austin. (Now-disgraced Top Chef winner Paul Qui got his start there as well.) It’s a splurge meal to put it mildly, but this is some of the best raw fish I have ever had anywhere, and the best dishes I had during the omakase were generally the simplest. Highlights included the flounder, the Tasmanian ocean trout, the New Zealand king salmon, and their signature dessert called “fried milk,” which has a dark chocolate ganache, sweet cream ice cream, chocolate wafers, and little fried orbs that taste of coffee and whatever cereal they use that day as the coating. The worst dish was the grilled hamachi collar, which was an enormous portion but slightly overcooked and lacking much flavor on its own. It’s one of the most expensive meals I’ve ever had, so even saying “it was worth it” seems hollow, but at the least I can say that you are getting exceptional quality of ingredients for the cost.

Sfizio Modern Italian Kitchen is up north on the 101 just off the Tatum Road exit, run by a Calabrese chef named Rocco (of course). They make their pasta in house, so even though the pizzas looked good (baked in a giant oven right off the dining room), I had to go with the rigatoni alla vodka, which was delicious and different than any version I’ve had before. The sauce was extremely light in color and totally smooth, so I assume it used tomato paste or passata, and had no pork in it, coming with a dollop of fresh ricotta on top. I make it with onion, pancetta or guanciale (or bacon), hand-crushed tomatoes, and basil, so it’s a chunkier sauce with more texture. Vodka sauce isn’t a traditional Italian dish, and there’s a dispute over whether it’s even Italian in origin, so there’s no “right” or authentic way to make it. As long as you don’t overdo the cream, I’m probably going to like it. My friend and I split the focaccia starter, which comes with a delicious pesto-ricotta blend, but the focaccia itself was obviously made that day and served its primary function, sopping up some of the sauce that remained when I finished the pasta. The chef more or less forced me to try the tiramisu for dessert, and I appreciated the fact that it was less sweet than most varieties, with a little more kick from the rum. I do want to go back to try the pizza, though.

The Nach is a food truck parked inside the patio at the bar Sazerac downtown, around the corner from Futuro Coffee and the original (ish) Matt’s Big Breakfast location, serving al pastor, chicken, and shrimp street tacos, burritos, and quesadillas with a few additional items and sides. The chicken was better than the shrimp, with much more flavor to the meat itself, and I would definitely get the $2 guacamole as an add-on, which is more than enough to add to all three tacos and maybe have a little left over. The chicken was salty and slightly tart from its sauce, while the shrimp was perfectly cooked but under seasoned.

Beginner’s Luck is a new all-day outpost from the folks behind Citizen Public House and the Gladly, and eater.com recommended their breakfast in particular. I had their breakfast sandwich, as the server wavered when I asked whether she recommended that or the shakshuka, and it was fine, a good breakfast sandwich, a better iteration of the kind you get at First Watch or the like. I want to try a different meal there before coming to any real judgment but this wasn’t worth returning for breakfast beyond the cool space tucked in an alley just around the corner from Old Town.

I did play more of the hits, so to speak, returning to some old favorites. I went to Citizen Public House for the first time at least since before the pandemic; the menu has changed – the crispy salmon was outstanding, especially the sherry beurre blanc, and they still make the best Negroni for whatever reason – but the vibe is the same. Tacos Chiwas still has the best tacos I’ve had out in the Valley, but I went to Cocina Chiwas again and was disappointed in the food this time around. The menu is more beef-centered than I remembered, and the more vegetable-forward dishes I ordered were underpowered. Pane Bianco is now serving New York-style pizza by the slice, although the day I got there they had already sold out, so I had to suffer through their focaccia-style pizza, which was outstanding as always. Pizzeria Virtu was solid, although everything was maybe a half-grade down from the first time I went there. was I stopped in to Los Altos Public Market for one of their giant shortbread cookies and an agua Fresca, something I haven’t done in years but that I used to do every visit when I first went to ESPN and started coming to Arizona once and then twice a year. I did breakfasts at the Hillside Spot, Crèpe Bar, and Matt’s, as usual. I had coffee at Cartel (twice), Futuro (once, great space but you get some characters in there), and Giant (once), which is my favorite space to sit and write anywhere in the Valley, and Giant’s now using their own beans after they’d switched to ROC, a local roaster that goes darker than I like. I didn’t get to Valentine, which was recommended to me by two different baseball people, but that’s on the hit list for the next trip.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, breakfast, coffee, italian cuisine, japanese cuisine, pasta, peruvian cuisine, phoenix, pizza, ramen, sushi, tacos

→ March 9, 2025
→ By keith
→ 20 Comments

Stick to baseball, 3/8/25.

I had two columns this week for subscribers to The Athletic – a ranking of the top 30 prospects for this year’s draft, and a scouting notebook on Oregon State, Auburn, and high school shortstop Kayson Cunningham.

I’m on the run, so let’s get to the links…

The New York Times looks at the rising tide of the working homeless – people who work critical but low-wage jobs in wealthy areas where they can’t afford housing.

Elon Musk is pouring money into an Wisconsin Supreme Court election, and the Republican candidate he’s backing said just this week that women are too emotional to rule on abortion cases.

Musk’s goons disbanded the technology office known as 18F, which existed to develop projects designed to improve government efficiency. Some of the former employees have set up a site to explain and defend their work.

The Texas A&M Board of Regents voted to ban all drag shows at the entire campus network, a pretty clear First Amendment violation. FIRE has sued to block the ban.

Our genius President referred to Lesotho as a country “nobody has ever heard of,” so the BBC published a story with nine facts about the tiny African country, which is entirely surrounded by South Africa.

Phoenix Children’s Hospital – where my daughter received care multiple times in the two-plus years we lived out there – has put a halt to gender-affirming care in obeisance to Trump’s (probably unconstitutional) executive orders. Absolute cowardice.

More obedience in advance – the University of Virginia voted to dissolve its office of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Lindsey Boylan, the first woman to come forward to report on Andrew Cuomo’s history of sexual harassment, wrote a piece in Vanity Fair decrying the disgraced ex-Governor’s intended candidacy for mayor of New York City. Cuomo and his legal team have spent years hounding Boylan and his other accusers to try to discredit them.

Louisiana’s Department of Health is ending its mass vaccination programs and banning promotion of seasonal vaccines like the one against the flu. That measles outbreak in Texas and New Mexico has already killed at least three people with over 200 confirmed cases, by the way.

I don’t do a lot of feel-good stories here, but this one is exceptional: The owner of the last video-rental store in Pocatello, Idaho, closed down his shop, but preserved a little bit of it in the corner of his convenience store especially for one customer, a woman with Down syndrome who’s been renting from him for 15 years.

The Seattle Times explains why coffee has gotten much more expensive lately, and is likely to continue to get even more so.

Fox News anchors are suddenly panicking about the “weakening” economy under Trump, as if this is any sort of surprise.

People who voted for Trump are now losing their government jobs. I really find it hard to muster any sympathy for these folks; if they claim they didn’t know what they were voting for, they weren’t paying enough attention before they went to the booth.

A Mississippi State alumna writes about the Trump Administration’s attempts to threaten universities into historical denialism, including her own alma mater’s shameful history of racial discrimination.

A cop in Vermont who struck and killed a cyclist was watching a right-wing Youtube video while driving.

Some ongoing board game Kickstarters: Point City & Propolis is still going for three more weeks, and there’s another for a 10^th anniversary edition of Champions of Midgard with about the same time left.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, board game news, coffee, Economics, first amendment, idaho, links, louisiana, mississippi, new york, phoenix, police, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines, wisconsin

→ November 11, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/11/24.

We updated my ranking of the top 50 free agents in baseball this offseason on Monday after all options were declined or exercised to reflect the actual free agent pool. My next article there will probably come when we have a big transaction.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter, covering my feelings on the election, on Saturday.

I locked my Twitter account earlier in the week due to the site’s change to allow blocked users to see your posts. At this point, I will only post links to my work there, and I’ll be more active on Bluesky and Threads. Of course, I’ll still be here, and in the comments under my articles on The Athletic.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Does the NIL era mean the end of Ivy League athletics? I think it does, at least as we have known it. And maybe that’s fine.

Fine, here are some of the better post-election pieces I’ve seen, bearing in mind I’ve skipped a lot of the blame game going around. The New Republic has had the best content in the wake of the election disaster, including Kat Abughazaleh’s story saying the Democrats need to clean out their party leadership after losing to Trump twice in three elections, a Greg Sargent column on how Trump voters don’t realize how he actually hurt the economy and reproductive rights, and a podcast with Sargent and the Philly Inquirer’s Will Bunch on Jeff Bezos sucking up to Trump after the election. In The Nation, Elie Mystal wrote what I also believe, that Trump is not a fluke, but that this is what the United States is. In The Atlantic, Lora Kelley wrote about how the economy ended up more important than the issues on which the Democrats focused, including abortion rights and democracy itself. The Texas Tribune wrote about the rightward shift of the southern part of that state. Just before the election, Tom Nichols wrote in The Atlantic that Trump needs help, as we had even more evidence that the former and now incoming President might be losing his grip.

Scientific American covered how catastrophic a Trump Presidency will be for climate action.

There were some tiny, isolated bits of good news from Election Day, including Arizonans defeating three GOP-led ballot measures to restrict voting rights; my state of Delaware electing Sarah McBride to be the first openly trans member of Congress (I’ve met her and I’m a big fan); and abortion rights passing everywhere except in a rigged vote in Florida, where the ballot measure got 57% of the vote, but the Republicans moved the goalposts to 60%.

Iowa tried to purge alleged noncitizens from voter rolls after early voting had already begun. Sounds fair. It’s not like they had any warning that an election was coming.

A court in Maricopa County, Arizona, cancelled the registrations of some voters based on errant information that they had been convicted of felonies.

The Guardian’s Arwa Madhawi writes that we are witnessing the final stage of genocide in Gaza, citing historian Omar Bartov. The Associated Press covered Israel’s renewed attacks on hospitals in Gaza, buildings that Israel has already previously bombed.

A dismaying story from the Times on older folks giving all their money to scammers while their kids have no way to stop them from doing so. This isn’t people with (diagnosed) cognitive decline or impairment, but people who are perhaps a little more credulous because of their age and unfamiliarity with the digital world.

NPR has a story on attorney Victoria Burke, who helps victims of sexual assault fight defamation suits filed against them by the accused. Such lawsuits can become a way to silence victims and make it harder for them to come forward or pursue their cases, and Burke has helped expand anti-SLAPP statutes in California to cover these cases.

Not all tech companies are bad: Apple quietly added a feature to iOS 18 to protect users’ data on phones seized by police from potentially unlawful searches. Phones that have remained in the lock state for four days will automatically reboot to their Before First Use state, making it harder for forensic analysts to break into them.

Multiple women have accused University of Florida men’s basketball coach Todd Golden of stalking and sexually harassing them, according to a report in the independent site The Alligator. The University received a Title IX complaint against Golden on September 27^th.

Jason Yates, an evangelical Christian who supports Trump and previously was CEO of the activist group My Faith Votes, was arrested on charges of possession of over 100 images of child pornography. No trans people were involved in the case.

Jamie Oliver wrote a children’s fantasy novel, and it turns out it has some really dated stereotypes of indigenous Australians. Worse, neither he nor his publishers even consulted with anyone on cultural sensitivity to maybe avoid this fiasco.

Swifties are fleeing Twitter for BlueSky, too.

A 13-year-old girl in Florida went to the police after she was raped by her adoptive father; the police didn’t believe her and charged her with lying. When he raped her again, she recorded it on her phone. Taylor Cadle, now 21, came forward this week in a PBS story on the police’s complete mishandling of the case.

Prof. Donald Fanger taught my favorite class at Harvard, Comedy and the Novel, where we read several novels I still love, including my all-time favorite, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. Prof. Fanger died this July at age 94.

I mentioned the letter urging a literary boycott of Israeli cultural institutions in an earlier roundup; there is now a countering letter opposing that boycott, with hundreds of signatories of its own.

I had a couple of short links about the shocking and untimely death of Amber Cook, who worked in marketing for several board game companies and was an avid gamer herself, last weekend. Her partner wrote a slightly longer note about her passing and some upcoming events to raise funds for Amber’s young son.

An 11-year-old girl in Alabama killed herself as a result of bullying, possibly after just one incident at school.

Two updates on elections in Eastern Europe: Molvoda’s pro-western President Maia Sandu won re-election despite a massive disinformation campaign by Russia, while outside observers say that the election results in Georgia (the country) make no statistical sense. The incumbent Georgian Dream party claimed victory, while opposition parties have alleged fraud and blame Russian involvement.

A new study in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia found a correlation between higher caffeine consumption and lower risk of memory impairment. This is just one study, and it showed correlation, not causation, but that’s none of my business (sips tea).

Rich countries, led by the EU, blocked a proposal to help poorer countries restore their environments at the COP16 global biodiversity summit in late October.

France is prosecuting seven people involved in spreading the lies that led to the beheading of a French teacher who had shown an example of the cartoons from Charlie Hebdo that Islamist terrorists cited as their reason for murdering 12 people at the magazine’s offices in 2015. The actual killer was shot dead by police shortly after he murdered the teacher, Samuel Paty; this trial is about the online “hate campaign” that took place before the attack.

Trump’s Truth Social platform outsourced coding jobs to Mexico even as he threatened companies with retaliation for sending jobs outside of the U.S. American Second to Profits.

The progressive voter mobilization group AllVote sent misleading and/or inaccurate text messages to voters in swing states claiming they had already voted or sending links to the wrong sites for voting information, according to state officials in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Arizona.

Elon Musk’s false or misleading claims about the election, including those about the major candidates, were viewed over 2 billion times, according to an analysis by CNN. I’m sure that had no effect on anyone’s voting choices, though.

Nearly 400 people have joined lawsuits alleging sexual abuse at state-run youth detention centers in Washington, with the allegations dating as far back as 1956.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alabama, arizona, board game news, climate change, coffee, delaware, europe, florida, france, gaza, harvard, iowa, links, longreads, metoo, police, social media, stick to baseball, suicide, technology, trump, voter suppression, washington

→ October 26, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/26/24.

I spent last week in the Arizona Fall League and filed three scouting notebooks, one with some initial observations, a second was all about pitching, and a last one that wrapped up a bunch of additional position players.

I sent out another issue of my free email newsletter this week; with Twitter increasingly overrun with misinformation and white nationalists, I’m there less and less, and the newsletter or one of the Twitter alternatives (Threads, Bluesky) are better ways to keep up with my work.

I appeared on All Things Considered’s Weekend Edition on NPR to preview the World Series (before the LCS actually ended!) and then did the same on NBC Morning News yesterday. One of my tweets made this SI roundup of people mocking former Reds infielder Zack Cozart’s incredible ignorance.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Archconservative billionaire Leonard Leo’s ongoing effort to take over the American judiciary might bankrupt Planned Parenthood and gut women’s health care in the U.S. This Guardian report looks at the long tentacles of Leo’s judicial network, and how he’s managed to tilt the scales of justice in his favor.

A far-right Texas judge has shown other reactionaries a playbook for how to consolidate power and use local government to push their agendas, even in a purple county like Tarrant.

Two stories from ProPublica: Arizona’s school voucher program is supposed to help low-income families, but they’re not the ones using the vouchers – it’s wealthy parents doing so. A claimed lack of prosecutors in Anchorage is leading to dozens of cases, some involving serious crimes like domestic violence or child abuse, being dismissed without trial. Other dismissed cases include 270 people arrested for suspected DUI.

The Washington Post explains how the Russian-backed head of the International Boxing Association roiled the Olympics with the bogus “scandal” over the identities of two female boxers. Meanwhile, a Russian propaganda unit spread a false story smearing Tim Walz, and the conservative ecosystem ate it up without bothering to fact-check it (again, it’s false). WIRED has more on Russia’s disinfo machine, including how it is threatening democracy in tiny Moldova, where Putin has supported a separatist movement for decades.

Thanks to Arizona’s 15-week abortion ban, a pregnant woman who learned at 18 weeks that her fetus had a very high likelihood of spina bifida had to travel to Las Vegas for an abortion and ended up recovering in a casino hotel room. Abortion is health care.

This week in Bad Decisions: a doctor leading a large study on transgender youth said she didn’t publish her research findings because the results might be weaponized by anti-trans forces – which, of course, got out, and was promptly weaponized by anti-trans forces, even though the key quote here is this: “Puberty blockers did not lead to mental health improvements, (the doctor) said, most likely because the children were already doing well when the study began.” It’s also news that the children on puberty blockers didn’t get worse. Regardless of the results, her decision to withhold the results hasn’t helped anyone at all.

A Florida judge ruled that that state’s letters threatening TV stations that aired ads supporting a November abortion rights ballot question were unconstitutional – and he called Florida officials “stupid” for trying it.

A Black man alleges that Michigan police racially profiled him and tried to plant drugs on him during a traffic stop.

Phoenix police tased and punched a deaf Black man who has cerebral palsy – and now he’s the one charged with aggravated assault. They targeted the man based on a false tip.

Israel threatened a Palestinian teen reporter, telling him to stop filming in Gaza, and when he didn’t, they killed him.

A Palestinian man whose wife and children burned to death in a tent hit by an Israeli missile asks why the West sees their suffering and yet stays silent. Related: Israel’s assault on Gaza is happening with weapons made in the United States.

Elon Musk’s gambit of a lottery to try to drum up support for Trump may run afoul of U.S. election law. Of course, it doesn’t matter because he’s rich and the government doesn’t seem to have any desire to hold the rich accountable for their crimes. The Philly Inquirer has more on Musk’s campaigning in the state.

Three red states are suing again to try to limit access to mifepristone, a drug used in medical abortions, despite the recent Supreme Court ruling – and they’re going to the same rogue judge in Texas who sided with them the first time. If you live in Missouri, Kansas, or Idaho, is this where you want your tax dollars going?

The editorials page editor of the Los Angeles Times resigned after the paper’s owner blocked the editorial board from endorsing Kamala Harris for President; two more members of the board followed her lead. The Washington Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, blocked his paper from doing the same. Are these outlets doing so out of fear of retaliation from Trump? It sure looks like “anticipatory obedience” – kowtowing to the whims of a would-be autocrat before he’s even in power.

On the other end of the spectrum, the Boston Globe wrote about the clear signs of Trump’s cognitive decline and asked why the press isn’t holding him to the same standard they used for President Biden?

Trump praises Hitler and his sycophants rush to excuse it.

Tens of thousands of Christian nationalists went to DC for an anti-trans rally hosted by a self-styled “apostle” and former multi-level marketing hawker – and they held it on Yom Kippur, no less.

Another day, another church leader charged with sexually abusing children. No trans people or drag queens here.

A SuperPAC affiliated with Trump sent out mailers that looked like Medicare cancellation notices to try to scare older voters from voting for VP Kamala Harris.

The Central Park 5 are suing Trump again after he defamed them during the Presidential debate.

The country of Georgia is also heading for a pivotal election, and the pro-Russian incumbent may still win a plurality, with fears rising of actual election fraud.

The Times has an interview with author Susanna Clarke, who just released a new short story called The Wood at Midwinter, set in the world of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.

Defector’s Neil deMause writes about what a bad deal the proposed downtown arena for the 76ers will be for Philadelphia, on top of destroying what’s left of historic Chinatown.

Stanford held a conference on the pandemic that was full of grifters and purveyors of misinformation.

The hypothesis that Barnard’s Star, the second-closest star to our own, might have a planet orbiting it dates back at least to when I was a little kid. Now there might actually be some proof.

Japandroids just released their fourth and final album, Fate & Alcohol, eight days ago. Drummer David Prowse talked to Kerrang! about the ten songs that changed his life.

A new Kickstarter from Bitewing Games has raised over $200K for three new games from the master designer Reiner Knizia.

The Onion’s Point/Counterpoint this week: We Need To Take Trump’s Rhetoric Seriously, But Not Literally vs. Have That Guy Killed.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, alaska, arizona, astronomy, board game news, disinformation, education, first amendment, florida, gaza, links, longreads, michigan, Music, olympics, police, russia, science, stadium scams, stick to baseball, trans rights, voting rights

→ July 21, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/21/24.

The draft is over, let us go in peace. I wrote a lot of words about it this week, including an analysis of every first-round pick, some general thoughts on Day One of the draft, and team-by-team draft recaps for all American League clubs and all National League clubs. Prior to the draft, I posted a final mock (where I got 9 of the 30 picks right, and am still mad about two I changed from the previous version) and updated my ranking of the top 100 prospects in the class while also posting 25-odd more scouting capsules for guys outside of the top 100. I also wrote up some thoughts on last Saturday’s Futures Game. That’s all for subscribers to the Athletic. On this site, I held a Klawchat on the Thursday before the draft.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter on draft day. You can sign up here for more words from me.

I’ll be back in Chicago on Monday to appear on Stadium’s Diamond Dreams and other programming. You can watch via the Stadium app (visit watchstadium.com to download) or if you have the sports package on Youtube TV, Roku, etc.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This LA Times article frames a good story very oddly. There’s a mentally ill man living in a million-dollar home in the north San Fernando Valley, strewing his property with all manner of junk, including over 100 vehicles, posing an environmental hazard to the area and obviously creating an eyesore and a safety issue for neighbors. The story centers the neighbors who bought their home for $1.2 million, unaware of the hoarder next door, and local authorities are unable or unwilling to help. The real issue here is that there’s a person here in dire need of mental health treatment, not that the neighbors can’t sell their house.
Three (!) excellent pieces from ProPublica this week. A secretive organization of wealthy Christians called Ziklag is pouring money into elections to help push their vision of theocracy. Members include the Uihleins, the owners of the U-Line company and major backers of the Federalist, and the owners of Hobby Lobby. Arizona Republicans told voters allowing school vouchers to pay for private-school tuition would save taxpayer money, but instead they’ve destroyed the state’s education budget that’s being covered by cuts to water conservation programs and other essential initiatives. Many judges decline to recuse themselves from cases where family members have financial interests and there’s no real way to force them to do so.
I saw this Foreign Affairs editorial, on how the U.S. President has always been above the law in the eyes of the rest of the world (and not in a good way), before realizing it written by a college classmate of mine, Yale Law Prof. Oona Hathaway.
An L.A. journalist who wrote about officer gangs within the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department found himself the subject of surveillance and harassment from the LASD in apparent retaliation for his work.
This summary of what you need to know about J.D. Vance comes from Teen Vogue, which appears to once again be one of the few outlets willing to cover this election and the threat to our democracy honestly.
Texas Monthly looks at Major League Rugby’s plans to grow the sport – at least in Texas.
First it was crypto, now it’s AI, but one new technology after another is driving huge upticks in energy consumption. The solution is a use tax – if Meta wants to force AI search on all of its users, make them pay more for the energy they’re consuming.
A Senate committee report on working conditions at Amazon found that 45% of Amazon warehouse workers were injured on Prime Day 2019 as they tried to cope with the massive volume of sales. When I pulled this story up, there were three links to other stories on CNN on the right side of this column pushing deals on amazon, so … yeah. (Full disclosure: I did purchase about six items on Prime Day.)
Political violence in America is not new; serving in public office comes with it the constant threat of people who want to kill you.
The Wall Street Journal’s Lindsey Adler wrote about Paul Skenes’s splinker, the pitch that has made Skenes one of the best pitchers in baseball and a huge sensation beyond the sport’s core fans.
Scientific American weighed in on how the need for speed is driving an increase in Tommy John surgeries. I’m with Brian Bannister here, firmly.
Bad-faith politicians and pundits, mostly on the right, have attacked California Democrats for “watering down” a sex-trafficking bill, but Reason explains why these changes are good policy and not, as the opponents claim, about protecting sex criminals.
Rep. Cori Bush wrote about SCOTUS’s right-wing coup and how to fight back, although 1) that would require that Democrats gain control of both houses of Congress and hold the White House, and 2) the Court has held power to invalidate certain laws for over 200 years, since 1803’s Marbury vs. Madison, and undoing that seems like a large undertaking.
Repairing the hole in the ozone layer remains one of the great achievements in global science policy of the last 50 years, so of course we’re now about to screw it up through pollution from all of the satellites that are falling back to earth as they run out of juice.
Influential Portland chef and restaurateur Naomi Pomeroy, a James Beard winner who competed on Top Chef Masters back when I used to watch the show, drowned while inner-tubing near Corvallis.
Workers at Bethesda Game Studios, publishers of Fallout and Elder Scrolls, voted to unionize this week.
Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg was on Real Time with Bill Maher and offered a two-minute takedown of Vance.
A St. Louis-area woman made a false sex-abuse claim against her son-in-law’s political rival to try to sink his primary campaign for a state House seat.
Three board game-related Kickstarters of note: Lucky Duck Games, publisher of Chronicles of Crime and Tang Garden, has a KS up for The Flames of Fafnir, a “competitive tower-defense game, with a traitor mechanism” that promises a “physics-based” element.
Sinister Fish has a has a Kickstarter up for Yonder, a “fantasy worker-placement game” from the designer of Villagers and last year’s Moon.
And another Kickstarter to help fund the 8^th African Boardgames Convention (AB Con) in Abuja, Nigeria. AB Con 7 was self-funded and held over two days, a first for the convention, and their goal is to build out to a four-day con with space for at least 3000 attendees.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: amazon, arizona, baseball, board game news, california, climate change, environment, links, longreads, los angeles, missouri, police, rugby, scotus, stick to baseball, top chef, unions

→ July 13, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/13/24.

I posted a third projection for Sunday’s first round of the MLB draft, and updated my Big Board of the top 100 prospects in the draft class, both for subscribers to the Athletic. I also took your questions here in a Klawchat on Thursday. On Saturday, I’ll have a new post with smaller scouting reports on about 20-25 more players in the draft class, guys whose names you might hear Sunday or Monday but who didn’t make the cut for the top 100.

At Paste, I reviewed Neotopia, a perfectly cromulent filler game for family play that didn’t bring anything new to the tabletop. I do like the way the scoring forces players to think about balance throughout the game, though.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Gateway Church founder Robert Morris blamed his 12-year-old victim for the sexual abuse he inflicted on her. And so did Morris’s wife, according to the victim, Cindy Clemishere, who courageously came forward a month ago with the story, leading to Morris’s abdication and the resignations of four other Church leaders. No drag queens, no trans people, just a pastor and the leaders of a giant, tax-exempt religious organization.

Texas Monthly exposed how the Texas Senate has buried sexual harassment claims against its members and senior staffers even after it revised its policies to supposedly address the issue.

Also in Texas – what a great government they have down there! – the state has spent years siphoning public funds to so-called “pregnancy crisis centers,” usually religious groups that try to convince pregnant women not to have abortions, but there’s no evidence it has had any effect at all, aside from violating the principle of separation of church and state.

Vaccine denialist and antisemite Robert F. Kennedy Jr. helped spawn a measles outbreak in Samoa that killed several children. He’s denying that, too.

Vaccines save lives. We need new strategies to increase vaccine uptake and counter bullshit from bad actors like RFK Jr.

Donald Trump is Unfit to Lead: He Is Dangerous in Word, Deed, and Action. The NY Times editorial page belatedly gets the point. Biden may not be fit to be President. Trump is a threat to our democracy.

Trump is also lying to the press and public by saying he doesn’t know about Project 2025. We’ll see if Inquirer columnist Will Bunch’s belief that Project 2025 is poison for Trump’s candidacy is valid.

A Russian Kh-101 cruise missile struck a children’s hospital in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, killing at least two children. Trump has said he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want.”

It doesn’t matter what Trump says or does, though. His supporters don’t waver. If they think an action is bad, and Trump does it, they change their opinion of the action. If that’s not cultlike behavior, well, I don’t have a better word for it – and the media needs to cover his campaign accordingly.

A former student of the Kyrene School District in southeast Phoenix is suing the district for failing to address a long string of antisemitic bullying incidents that already resulted in a citation from the U.S. Department of Education.

Meanwhile, Arizona’s public schools chief is trying to push the right-wing PragerU materials into classrooms, promoting the misinformation group’s content on the department website, by claiming that teachers have only been presenting the “extreme left side” in classrooms. I’m very glad I didn’t raise my daughter there.

Our brains are wired to see patterns – even when they aren’t there. Which, coincidentally, is the theme of a single released last month by Mercury Rev.

Voters in Jackson County, Missouri, resoundingly rejected a sales tax hike to use taxpayer funds for stadium projects for the privately-owned Chiefs and Royals just three months ago, so, of course, the owners are just going to try to put it up for another vote and threaten to move the teams out of state.

Many species of tropical frogs are endangered because of a fungus that causes the disease chytridiomycosis; it turns out the fungus is heat-sensitive and a sort of ‘sauna’ can help kill the fungus and save the frogs.

Plaid Hat Games introduced a Kickstarter for Wandering Galaxy, a board game set in the Crossroads universe.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, board game news, environment, links, longreads, metoo, neuroscience, religion, science, stadium scams, stick to baseball, texas, trump, ukraine, vaccines

→ May 4, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/4/24.

Two new pieces for subscribers to the Athletic this week, a breakdown of the Luis Arraez trade and scouting notes on Justin Crawford and other Phillies, Orioles, and Mets prospects. I’ve also got a draft scouting notebook going up on Sunday with notes on J.J. Wetherholt, Hagen Smith, Peyton Stovall, and Ryan Waldschmidt. And I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter last Saturday, so I should do another one in a day or two, in theory.

I’ll be back on Stadium on Monday at 2 pm ET for Diamond Dreams and then for one segment of Unpacked at 2:30 pm. The shows re-air throughout the week, roughly twice a day, as far as I can tell. You can watch via the app or with certain subscriptions to Youtube, Fubo, Roku, etc.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Columbia Spectator, with the help of New York magazine, has a detailed look at the protests, the encampments, the police overreach, and more on campus, through hundreds of interviews with students and faculty across the religious and ideological divides.

In the Atlantic, Tyler Austin Harper writes of how colleges positioned themselves as activist havens when speaking to prospective students, only to find that those students believed them.

The LA Times has the story of a man who engineered the theft of millions of gallons of water from California’s limited resources, while enriching himself and his friends and lying on his income taxes.

ProPublica reports on the EPA’s decision to ignore its own scientists and approve a plastic fuel additive that is nearly guaranteed to cause cancer in anyone exposed to it regularly over a lifetime. Well, a shortened lifetime, I guess.

The Washington Post ran a long piece on the effects of sea level rise on the coastal U.S., much of it in states whose elected officials have denied climate change and fought efforts to mitigate it.

A research study by the Australian government’s Institute of Criminology examined how anti-COVID protests brought together numerous anti-government forces, including those beholden to conspiracy theories and extremist anti-authority sentiments (like so-called “sovereign citizens”).

Amos Goldberg, a Holocaust and genocide researcher at Hebrew University, writes about the assault on Gaza: “Yes, it is genocide.”

Sam Thorpe, a Jewish economist who works as a Senior Research Assistant for the Brookings Institute’s Tax Policy Center, wrote in a series of tweets that it is possible to be Jewish and oppose the actions of Israel in Gaza. He argues that it is imperative for believers to do so, as his faith teaches that all humans are made in the image of God.

Meanwhile, Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called for the “total annihilation” of Gaza, after which Haaretz called for his firing.

Of course, the American media are more caught up in covering campus protests, and not even getting the angle right, such as the Indiana State Police’s excessive use of force – including setting up a sniper on a nearby building! – against protesters at IU. This link has an interview with ISP Superintendent Doug Carter, who doesn’t seem to have the foggiest idea of what freedom of speech means.

The LA Times’ Michael Hiltzik wrote that college presidents who rush to call in the police haven’t learned a damn thing since the 1960s. Today is the anniversary of the police murdering four students at Kent State who were protesting U.S. involvement in Vietnam, by the way.

Credit goes to the Philadelphia police, however, who declined Penn’s request that they come clear out student protesters unless the school could provide evidence of imminent danger.

CNN’s Dana Bash went on air and parroted a bunch of pro-Israel talking points while comparing pro-Palestinian protesters to Nazi forces.

Ken Klippenstein resigned from The Intercept and revealed some of how management there sought to spike stories critical of Jeff Bezos and other rich, powerful targets, all while apparently paying themselves more while laying off editors and journalists. I’ve linked to quite a bit of Ken’s work here and will probably sign up for his newsletter now that he’s going solo.

Andrew Huberman’s podcast is one of the most popular in America. It’s also rife with false information.

Florida has removed over 22,000 children from its version of the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) this year, defying a federal law designed to protect them. I never though the wolves would eat my face!

Meanwhile, Florida’s farmers are suffering from a lack of labor thanks to the state’s draconian law attacking businesses that used undocumented workers, as are construction businesses, restaurants, and hoteliers, all major industries in the state.

Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA) shared a video of white University of Mississippi students making monkey noises and shouting racist chants at a Black protester, saying “Ole Miss taking care of business” (while using the racist-derived nickname for the school). Collins has previously shared posts from neo-Nazis and suggested murdering migrants, so we shouldn’t be surprised.

Chicago won’t discipline nine city police officers who were (are?) members of the right-wing extremist Oath Keepers group, after the mayor and CPD superintendent had promised to do so.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled that North Carolina and West Virginia can’t deny gender-affirming medical coverage to transgender people. North Carolina sought to specifically deny it to state employees and their dependents, while West Virginia sought to do so for people enrolled in Medicaid.

Arizona’s Kari Lake, running as a Republican for the seat that Krysten Sinema is vacating, is touting State Sen. Sonny Borrelli’s endorsement of her, even though Borrelli – the Arizona Senate Majority Leader has a history of domestic violence allegations against him and said just this March that women should put an aspirin between their knees as a method of birth control.

A second Boeing whistleblower has died. Joshua Dean, who was 45, died of a MRSA infection this week; John Barnett, 62, died in March in an apparent suicide, although friends and family have raised doubts that he took his own life.

The Guardian looks at how many bands make little to no money, even taking losses, from touring. With record sales in the toilet and tours unprofitable, what career is there in making music if you’re not a superstar?

I thought Netflix’s Baby Reindeer was outstanding, and am pulling for the two stars to earn Emmy nominations for their work, especially Jessica Gunning (who plays Martha). NPR’s Glenn Weldon argued that the series bungled its depiction of queerness; I didn’t interpret it this way, but I’m also straight and perhaps not the right person to answer this question.

Two new studies on the economics of sports and sport stadium financing: One that showed that policing becomes more aggressive where there are public subsidies of sports facilities, apparently to help make up for budget shortfalls; the other showed that sporting events lead to an increase in crime, and thus to an increase in spending on policing, two ways in which public subsidies for sports stadiums negatively impact the local economy.

ProPublica reports on a new effort at the IRS to identify illegal tax avoidance schemes by sports-team owners. It would appear these owners are happy to take taxpayer money, but not to pay back in the legally required portion of their profits.

Paris claimed it was going to use the Olympics as a spur to revitalize one of its poorest districts, Seine-Saint-Denis; instead it appears they’ve evicted impoverished residents and decreased the region’s air quality. The district was the site of the 2005 riots against the police that inspired the Oscar-nominated 2019 film Les Misérables.

Antiabortion zealots are trying to force the Amarillo, Texas, city council to pass a ridiculous, unenforceable ordinance forbidding the use of city streets for the purpose of leaving the state for an abortion. Find someone who loves you as much as these people love depriving other people of their rights.

Utah passed a transphobic bathroom law, and in the first week in which the site to report alleged violations was live, they received almost 4000 bogus reports and left a bunch of information unprotected for anyone to access.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, arizona, chicago, climate change, colleges, environment, florida, gaza, links, longreads, misinformation, mississippi, Music, olympics, paris, police, stick to baseball, taxes, texas, trans rights, utah, water crisis

→ April 20, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/20/24.

I updated my ranking of the top prospects for this year’s draft, going to 50 names but not without some difficulty; and posted a scouting notebook covering a half-dozen prospects in the class I saw over the previous ten days. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

As I mentioned in my chat the other day, the Athletic spiked my podcast and cut the daily baseball show to three a week, so I’m no longer doing any regular podcasts for them. I did make a guest appearance on the Windup on Friday, talking draft and prospect stuff.

I am now appearing weekly on the Stadium streaming channel, on the 2 pm show Diamond Dreams, which is entirely about prospects, with occasional appearances on their roundup show The Rally. You can get the app here. Right now, it doesn’t appear that shows are archived, but I’m looking into it.

Once this is done, I’m hoping to get another edition of my free email newsletter out this weekend, before I head back to Chicago for the next show.

Taylor Swift is on Threads now – but I was there first. I’m on Bluesky, too. I ended up re-verified on Twitter, which makes me eligible for a cut of ad revenues around my tweets; I’m going to donate all of it to the Trevor Project. My first and only payout so far was $16.64, which I’ve already donated.

And now, pop an edible (if it’s legal where you are) and enjoy the links…

Before I get to the longreads, this seems like the story of the week: The Supreme Court has declined to hear the appeal in McKesson v. Doe, which held that authorities may hold a protest’s organizer(s) liable if any attendee of the protest commits an illegal act. The decision effectively ends the right to assembly in at least three states. This should have been front-page news across the country.
An editorial in Haaretz argues that Netanyahu’s policies, from his brutal assault on Gaza and assassination of Iranian leaders, are endangering the long-term survival of Israel.
The billionaire co-founder of Cloudflare wanted to build an 11,000 square foot mansion in Park City over the opposition of residents. First he tried to slip a bill through the state legislature to allow the construction, but it failed. When the local paper ran stories critical of him, he bought it and installed his buddy as editor in chief.
Brandy Zarozny of NBC News reported from the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association conference, where speakers urged attendees to seize voting machines and investigate absurd conspiracy theories.
The New York Times reports on how Senate candidate Dave McCormick, a Republican running against Pennsylvania’s Bob Casey (D), appears to have fabricated details of his upbringing to downplay his privileged upbringing.
PressWatchers interviewed Chris Quinn of the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, who has made waves for his willingness to cover former President Trump accurately and for calling out the blatant bothsidesism happening across so-called mainstream media.
Candace Buckner of the Washington Post had a measured take on the outrage over Gregg Doyel’s odd treatment of Caitlin Clark. I’m with her: the story isn’t a non-troversy, but the level of vitriol here is out of proportion to the infraction.
Former federal prosecutor Terra Morehead will be disbarred in the wake of revelations that she helped a Kansas City cop frame an innocent man who then served 23 years in prison. Morehead was also a Wyandotte County prosecutor, and has been implicated in numerous incidents of prosecutorial misconduct.
USC announced that their valedictorian will not be allowed to speak at commencement this year as the university caved to anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian sentiment, including threats against the ceremony and school.
A St. Louis cop who was working undercover among protesters in the city in 2017 was badly beaten by his own colleagues; a judge just awarded him $23.5 million in compensation, which, ultimately, will be covered by taxpayers.
More fallout from Uri Berliner’s unverified column attacking NPR: The network suspended him, after which he resigned, presumably to start a Substack where he’ll rail against DEI and vaccines; while NPR’s Steve Inskeep wrote a detailed takedown of Berliner’s column, pointing out just how little fire there was behind the smoke. I’ll repeat what I’ve said before: Berliner’s argument that NPR didn’t give enough credence to the failed lab-leak hypothesis was a tell. Slate’s Alicia Montgomery, a former NPR staffer herself, has a much stronger critique of the problems at the network.
Louisiana Republicans voted to end mandatory lunch breaks for child workers, cut unemployment benefits, and reduce worker’s compensation.
Ocean acidification and climate change are causing a fourth mass bleaching episode in the world’s coral reefs. Coral reefs are essential to the marine ecosystem – including a lot of the fish we eat.
There are 806 billionaires in the United States. Their wealth exceeds that of the lower half of Americans’ total wealth combined, by a lot.
The great Phil Plait wrote about the declining odds that there is a ninth planet in our solar system, given how much of space we’ve checked without finding it. This is the subject of the fantastic deduction board game The Search for Planet X.
The Sundance Film Festival’s organizers are playing the sports stadium handout game, courting bids from cities to host the influential festival starting in 2027.
Kari Lake (R ), running for Senate in Arizona after voters there rejected her in the race for Governor in 2022, called on sheriffs to enforce the state’s 1864 abortion ban. That same territorial law also banned interracial marriage and set the age of consent for girls at 10.
Tennessee Rep. Scott Cepicky (R) confessed in a leaked conversation that his aim with a school-voucher bill is to “throw the whole freaking (public education) system in the trash.”
Dr. Allison Neitzel has become a target of anti-vaxx trolls for her pro-vaccine and pro-science activism; she responded on her newsletter with the wonderfully titled missive “I Will Continue to Piss Off Men.” If you want to read more about what amounts to harassment campaign against her from the soi-disant “journalist” Paul Thacker, you can go here. Thacker seems to focus on women in the pro-science movement, and I think it’s fair to ask if he’s really just a misogynist.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, arizona, astronomy, climate change, colleges, education, gaza, kansas, links, longreads, louisiana, misinformation, missouri, pennsylvania, police, stick to baseball, tennessee, utah, vaccines

→ April 13, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/13/24.

I’ve got some new content coming up this week, with a new draft ranking due to run on Thursday and a draft scouting blog probably running Monday or Tuesday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the collectible card game Star Wars: Unlimited – Spark of Rebellion, which I enjoyed even though I’m not generally a fan of deckbuilders.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter, detailing a rather ridiculous dinner I had at the bar at The Publican, an acclaimed Chicago restaurant where, to say the least, one does not belch as loudly as one can.

I’m going to be on a new TV show, Diamond Dreams starting on Monday, April 15^th, on the streaming channel Stadium. The show is a half-hour look at prospects around the minors and for the draft, and will be followed by a show on collectibles where I’ll also offer some comments on the prospects they’re discussing. You can watch via the app on pretty much any platform.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: How Elon Musk convinced MAGA partisans that hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) was a treatment for COVID-19 – which it absolutely is not – and set off four years of online misinformation around the pandemic.

Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote in the New York Times about how “colorblindness” has been hijacked by the white-grievance movement, in direct opposition to the original intent of the term, which meant ending racial discrimination against people of color.

Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote about how the Key Bridge disaster demonstrated the importance of immigrants to our society.

A hardcore conservative group is making it harder for Idaho school districts to renovate or upgrade their facilities.

There’s a big scam going around that has tricked a number of content creators into ceding control of their Facebook pages. It starts with what seems to be an invitation to appear on a big podcast, which of course is very appealing to most people trying to build their online audience.

Over half a million Arizonans signed a petition to put codifying abortion rights on the ballot this November. It’s part of a Democratic strategy to drive voters to the polls in purple states – and also, by the way, a basic human right. This comes on the heels of the GOP-packed Arizona Supreme Court reinstating the state’s 1864 abortion ban – yes, a law that predates Arizona’s statehood by almost 50 years.

The Guardian revealed that Boise State Professor Scott Yenor ran Action Idaho, an extreme right-wing site that attacked LGBTQ+ rights and accused Republicans of being insufficiently conservative. Yenor now also works for the Claremont Institute and just a month ago wrote a piece for the Federalist that said DEI had to die for Western civilization to survive.

ProPublica explains how authorities are trying to crack down on gift-card crime rings, where consumers often end up buying gift cards that appear new but that have already been drained of value by crooks.

Maria Bustillos writes in The Nation about the rise of journalist-owned news outlets amidst the ongoing bloodletting in the industry.

David Chang’s Momofuku company is trying to trademark the generic term “chili crunch” to describe a staple Chinese condiment best known as chili crisp – and they’re suing smaller firms to try to have their way.

Why is Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey (R – and not the former pitcher) doing the bidding of Elon Musk by suing Media Matters for reporting on Twitter’s failure to police hate on their site?

Voters in Enid, Oklahoma, removed Judd Blevins (R) from the city council after his ties to white supremacist groups were exposed.

The BBC has a first-person narrative from a woman who found deepfakes of herself online – and eventually learned it was a close friend of hers who made them.

This Twitter thread has some solid details on the IDF’s attack on the World Central Kitchen convoy in Gaza that killed seven WCK volunteers. I don’t know why those seven deaths should lead to more calls for a cease-fire when the 30,000+ Palestinian deaths before that haven’t … of course I do, let’s not kid ourselves.

Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket reposted a piece from the Kansas Reflector critical of Meta’s ad policy around climate change, and moments later, Meta removed all links to both sites from Facebook and Threads. After an outcry, Meta reversed the decision and blamed a “security error,” but, come on.

Landfills emit far more methane than previously believed, more bad news for the planet as methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

Before voters wisely rejected a stadium tax proposal to replace the two perfectly fine sports facilities outside of Kansas City, the KC Studio had a sensible op ed on what a waste tearing down Kaufmann Stadium would be.

Former SCOTUS justice Steven Breyer wants everyone to get along, like his former colleagues on the high court, even though some of those colleagues are busy destroying Americans’ basic civil rights, writes Elie Mystal of The Nation.

The BBC reports on exploitation of workers in Brazil who harvest the common ingredient carnauba wax, bordering on slavery.

Cleveland Plain-Dealer editor Chris Quinn explains why the paper treats Donald Trump differently from other politicians & candidates. Hint: It’s because he lies.

The Atlantic’s David Graham describes the “Trump two-step:” say something outrageous, claim that’s not really what he said or meant, and then quietly embrace the original statement.

The New Republic’s Greg Sargent details just how entrenched election denial, January 6^th denialism, and other insane conspiracy theories are within the Republican party right now.

Mehdi Hasan wrote in the Guardian that Justice Sonja Sotomayor needs to retire from the Supreme Court so President Biden can appoint a replacement, avoiding the possibility that Trump would get to appoint a fourth justice and give the court a 7-2 majority that would likely last decades. I’m not sure if I agree, but he at least offers a solid argument.

Fox News and several right-wing podcasters, including beanie-wearing Tim Pool, are now facing a lawsuit from a man they all falsely identified as a mass shooter. The man’s lawyer previously represented two Sandy Hook parents in their lawsuit against Alex Jones for his false claims that that mass shooting didn’t happen. Fuck ’em up, Socrates.

The Tampa Bay Times published a rare editorial pointing out that public subsidies for sports stadiums don’t work out for taxpayers, as the Rays try once again to soak Floridians for a new facility.

Here’s a great summary and index of economic research showing how consistently these sports stadium deals fail to live up to economic promises. If you’re writing about the topic, or know a journalist who is, this is invaluable, because the pro-stadium forces will always trot out fabricated numbers from consultants who give them what they want.

The PEN America awards are in a bit of a shambles after a number of high-profile authors withdrew their works from consideration or declined prizes in protest of the organization’s perceived bias towards Israel. The authors include Lorrie Moore, who just won the National Book Critics Circle’s Fiction award for I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home.

A senior editor at NPR wrote a bad-faith, error-filled critique of the public radio outlet on Bari Weiss’s blog. NPR responded, defending its hiring practices and its philosophy. You can find many takedowns of Uri Berliner’s original piece, but one fact that got me was that he accused NPR of downplaying or ignoring the lab-leak theory behind COVID-19’s origins, even when the evidence in favor of a zoonotic spillover kept mounting.

WFLA has the story of a young boy with autism who can no longer receive health services because Florida kicked him off Medicaid. We need more stories like this, showing everyday people getting badly hurt by state policies that cut funding for essential services like health care, education, and even school lunches for underprivileged people.

A former youth minister at a Baptist church in Bixby, Oklahoma, has been charged with sexual exploitation of a minor as well as possession and distribution of child pornography. No drag queens were involved.

Chicago police killed Dexter Reed during a traffic stop where he fired first, injuring one officer, after which the cops fired 96 rounds in less than a minute. The Sun-Times reports that the five officers involved in the incident have been investigated a total of 41 times since 2019, and that the area where they stopped Reed has a disproportionate number of traffic stops. The cops have said they pulled Reed over because he wasn’t wearing a seat belt.

The brightest cosmic explosion scientists have ever seen has now led to new questions about how some of the universe’s heaviest metals are formed. The supernova occurred about 2.4 billion years ago in a galaxy far, far away, producing a huge burst of gamma rays but none of the elements like gold or platinum that scientists expected to find.

Delaware State Senator Sarah McBride is running to be our at-large Representative, vying to become the first trans person elected to Congress. She’s one of at least three Democrats hoping to win the primary, which is tantamount to winning the election in our very blue state. Full disclosure: I’ve met Sen. McBride and we often see each other at our local Brew Haha coffee shop.

Is social media really driving a surge in mental illness among teenagers, as Jonathan Haidt claims in his new book? The evidence is mixed at best, according to this review in Nature.

Eric Hovde, who is running for Senate in Wisconsin as a Republican, is now facing backlash over his comments from a previous campaign where he called for cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits, attacked single mothers, said alcohol should never have been legalized, questioned whether farmers work hard, and lots of other great stuff.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, arizona, chicago, climate change, delaware, Economics, election denial, florida, gaza, idaho, links, longreads, Media, mental illness, misinformation, missouri, physics, police, scotus, social media, stick to baseball, wisconsin

Archives