baseball

→ 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

→ May 18, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/18/24.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I posted my first mock draft for 2024. I also held a free Klawchat on Wednesday to take questions on that and a few on some minor-league prospects.

I swear I’ll send out a new version of my email newsletter in the next day or two. It’s just been very hectic here lately. It’s not exactly slowing down – I may not go to any conference tournaments because my daughter’s birthday is this week and the Delaware state tennis tournament was delayed until Monday due to (a teeny tiny threat of) rain.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: ProPublica has the story of a mom in Texas who won election to her school board in Granbury on a platform of stopping left-wing indoctrination, only to find that none of that was happening. When she went public with her change of views, however, she found herself attacked by her former allies.

Defector’s Nick Zarzycki interviewed Richard Garfield about the creation of Magic: the Gathering and his disenchantment with how the game has developed and (in his view) devolved in its 30-year history.

This excerpt from Jacob Kushner’s new book Look Away: A True Story of Murder, Bombings, and a Far-Right Campaign to Rid Germany of Immigrants hooked me into adding it to my to-read list.It’s about a trio of white supremacist killers in Germany who robbed banks when they weren’t murdering immigrants, and also about the new rise of such racist violence across the west in the last decade.

Author Lauren Groff (Fates and Furies, Florida) has opened a bookstore in Gainesville, Florida, with a focus on banned and challenged books because of the state’s war on literature.

An unvaccinated child, under the age of 5, died of measles in the Canadian province of Ontario. There is no reason whatsoever to allow parents to neglect their child’s welfare like this.

RFK Jr. had quite a week, as reports found that in his divorce filing in 2012, he claimed a worm had eaten away part of his brain, leading to half-serious jokes that it explains how completely batshit his views have become. Slate has a short piece arguing that it’s just more evidence of how RFK Jr. is happy to lie his way through any situation. Scientific American explained that such “brain worms” are an actual global health problem, which you’d think the vaccine-denialist candidate would embrace since he claims to be so concerned with public health. Meanwhile, a new hire for his campaign appears to have been at the insurrection on January 6^th. And his VP candidate Nicole Shanahan just dumped $8 million of her own money into his flailing campaign effort.

The Beverly Hills billionaires who own the companies behind Wonderful pistachios and Fiji water are trying to kill a California law that helps unions bring farmworkers under their umbrella. The Resnicks donate millions to mostly liberal and Democratic causes, but would rather destroy workers’ rights than deal with unions at their Wonderful agricultural firm.

Saudi Arabia’s quixotic Neom project includes a 170 kilometer-long linear city called The Line, but the BBC reports that the autocratic nation has destroyed villages and murdered residents of the area to clear the path for the city’s construction.

Is Mexico City about to run out of fresh water? Maybe not yet, but the situation is dire there and in many other large cities that have overdeveloped and/or relied too much on a single water source, with climate change exacerbating the situation on multiple continents.

David R. Boyd, the outgoing United Nations special rapporteur for the environment and human rights, excoriated our reliance on exploitation of both humans and nature to run our global economy, citing climate change, plastic pollution, and declining biodiversity as critical issues that most people and governments are ignoring.

David Tennant remains my favorite Doctor, although I have yet to see any of Ncuti Gatwa’s episodes; I’m not surprised that Tennant has also come out clearly in favor of trans rights as well.

Tiffany Haddish, on the other hand, is not one of my favorite actors, and it turns out she used the United States’ lack of data privacy laws to dox people who criticized her online. There’s way too much personal information about us available to anyone willing to cough up a few bucks. Also, Haddish really needs to log off.

I tweeted this link when the story ran, but it’s worth reposting: Jackson County legislator DaRon McGee (D) helped put the Chiefs/Royals stadium tax initiative on the ballot. He also hit up the Royals for free suite tickets last year while he was involved in negotiations with the club.

The Supreme Court ruled that people whose property is seized in civil asset forfeiture cases have no right to a preliminary hearing to determine if the forfeiture was legal or justified, instead favoring the police’s so-called “right” to continue their “important law-enforcement activities.”

North Carolina’s far-right legislature passed a bill banning the wearing of masks in public, which likely violates both the First Amendment and federal disability rights statutes. The ostensible targets are pro-Palestine protesters, but even so, they also have free speech and free assembly rights.

Chad recently held the first free election in its 64-year history, although observers have said the election was not fair and at least two opponents have alleged fraud. The winner was Mahamat Idriss Déby, son of the strongman Idriss Déby who ruled the country from 1991 until he was killed in a coup in 2021.

The parliament of the European country of Georgia passed a Russian-backed bill requiring organizations receiving at least 20% of their funding from outside of the country to register as “agents of foreign influence”, over objections from the country’s western allies and protests from Georgians that have lasted for weeks.

ProPublica also explores Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s dubious claim that Israel has done enough to address serious rights violations by its military, such as the Israeli soldier who murdered an unarmed Palestinian and was sentenced only to community service.

Evan Urquhart at Assigned Media points out how many other anti-trans voices have found J.K. Rowling too toxic to defend, coming in the wake of Rowling bullying a trans woman who became the first openly trans referee in a major soccer league.

St. Petersburg, Florida, is banking on 7% annual growth to help pay for the stadium they want to build for the Rays, which is wildly optimistic in any circumstances, but I’d say even more so for a city right on the water in an era of rising sea levels.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, banned books, baseball, climate change, first amendment, florida, gaza, germany, labor rights, links, longreads, mexico, north carolina, saudi arabia, scotus, texas, trans rights, vaccines

→ April 28, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/28/24.

Nothing this week from me at the Athletic, but I need to write up a couple of minor-league games I’ve been to so there will be something in the next few days.

I reviewed the board game Ancient Knowledge over at Paste; it’s pretty clever, but I found the title and theme didn’t connect to the game play at all.

I’ll be back on Stadium on Monday at 2 pm ET on Diamond Dreams and on their new collectibles show at 2:30 for one segment, all to talk about prospects. You can watch via the app or if you subscribe to Roku, Youtube, or some other sites; I have figured out that the shows re-air all week, but you can’t just watch an archived version.

I also sent out a fresh edition of my free email newsletter on Saturday, talking about … death. Wait, that’s only the cat.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: ProPublica explores how a lack of funding and organization at a VA clinic in Chico, California, led to two preventable shootings, including one where a veteran shot and killed her own mother. If you want to support our troops, instead of just standing and clapping at a ballgame, vote for candidates who’ll fully fund the VA and its indispensable resources for our veterans.

Climate change is driving us towards a “coffee apocalypse” as the growing regions for the plant shrink and the plant itself tries to migrate to higher altitudes.

A tech bro wants to “ethnically cleanse” San Francisco, in his own words. Balaji Srinivasan has worked at Coinbase, Andreessen Horowitz, and the genetic testing firm Counsyl (which he co-founded). He sounds insane.

A prosecutor in Texas has asked the courts to clear the conviction of a woman he helped put on death row. Melissa Lucio’s two-year-old daughter died after falling down a flight of stairs, but she was convicted of capital murder and spent 16 years behind bars.

The LA Times’s Michael Hiltzik excoriates the cash grab in Nevada, where state legislators are trying to hand hundreds of millions in taxpayer money to the Oakland A’s’ billionaire owner in a climate of increasing voter resistance.

Another relief agency has accused Israel of targeting its vehicles: the International Development and Relief Foundation says that the IDF deliberately bombed its trucks delivering water to Gazans.

Columbia barred a student protester who said that “Zionists don’t deserve to live” from its campus. Khymani James was active in the pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia. This seems like a pretty simple case of someone crossing the line and the university responding appropriately – in contrast to the preponderance of stories about protests on campuses across the country.

A Jewish student at Columbia wrote on Mehdi Hasan’s new site Zeteo that the news coverage of antisemitism on campuses is inaccurate and distracts from actual threats, like outside groups that dox Jewish students.

The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Will Bunch wrote in praise of the student journalists covering the protests and the university responses at Columbia and beyond.
Will the “cancel culture” pundits say anything about USC’s decision to cancel its Muslim-American valedictorian’s commencement speech? Don’t hold your breath, writes Arwa Mahdawi in the Guardian.

Transphobes have latched on to the dubious “Cass Report” as further evidence of … I don’t even know, it’s all just bigotry and trans panic, but the interesting bit here is that Dr. Hilary Cass herself is already distancing herself from the report’s conclusions, saying HRT and puberty blockers should be made available to trans teens. The same newsletter reports on Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) saying that he wants to “end” trans and gender non-conforming teachers in the state.

Tennessee Republicans passed a law arming teachers over loud opposition from parents and students. How long until the first “friendly fire” death in a Tennessee school?

However, the state GOP’s attempt to ram through a school voucher bill and strip funding from the state’s already poor public schools failed.

The risk of cardiomyopathy to young men from mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 actually decreases after the third dose, although the risk is always higher from even a single infection with the virus.

Jay Bhattacharya has been a major purveyor of disinformation around COVID, from masks to vaccines to other public-health efforts, and he’s built a huge following. Now he’s about to get a big cash windfall from a large right-wing foundation. The grift is profitable.

A new firm that includes disinformation reporter Ben Collins as as CEO bought the Onion from the turkey vultures at G/O Media.

Iowa universities are closing their DEI programs after Republicans there passed a bill banning such endeavors.

Measles cases are rising in the U.S. and it’s a big, underreported problem.

The PEN literary awards’ annual ceremony has been cancelled after a large number of authors requested that their works be removed from consideration.

2023 ended with a surge in book bans, according to PEN America, but the children’s publishing world has responded by flooding the market with new titles representing diverse perspectives.

The Atlantic has an appreciation of John Sterling (tied, a bit tenuously, to AI). My confession: Even when I was an ardent Yankees fan, I didn’t care for Sterling’s style, which always seemed to put himself front and center over the game he was calling.

The Guardian interviewed Lauren Mayberry on going solo and the misogyny she experienced online.

Also in the Guardian, a profile of two professors teaching the Gullah language, one of the only creole tongues based on English, including Harvard’s Sunn m’Cheaux (who is a great follow on Threads). Gullah is still spoken on some of the islands off the coast of South Carolina, and you may be familiar with it if you’ve read Pat Conroy’s book The Water is Wide.

There’s finally been some movement to pass legislation banning deepfake nudes, with over 20 states doing so or at least considering bills to do so, and the impetus is teenage girls who often find themselves the targets.

A former model decided to listen to some online wellness influencers rather than her doctors, choosing an all-juice diet to try to treat her stage 3 cancer. She nearly died before doctors convinced her to go the medicine route – but only after she kept refusing for several days while in intensive care.

Time flowed five times slower right after the Big Bang. Imagine all the extra board games you could have played!

Some light reading: Here’s the complete genome for SARS-CoV-2.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, book banning, coffee, death penalty, gaza, iowa, Languages, links, longreads, nevada, physics, stick to baseball, tennessee, texas, trans rights, vaccines

→ August 26, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/26/23.

Three new pieces this week for subscribers to the Athletic: Some thoughts on Shohei Ohtani’s free agency in the wake of his torn UCL; a post mortem after the White Sox fired Kenny Williams and Rick Hahn; and why college conference realignment is probably bad for college baseball.

At Paste, I reviewed the board game Hickory Dickory, which has a very cute theme and some clever mechanics but I think might just be overdesigned in the end. I do like it, just with reservations.

On the Keith Law Show, I spoke with Joe Posnanski about his upcoming book Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments, which comes out on September 5^th. You can listen & subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Quillette has a lengthy explanation of the failed lab-leak hypothesis around COVID-19’s origins, and the people who still refuse to accept its failure.
Vanity Fair gives the previously untold story of a Texas mom who was abducted by a serial killer in 1981 and talked him into letting her go by leaning on her deep religious faith.
Writing in the New Yorker, Ronan Farrow has an unflattering profile of Elon Musk and the billionaire’s increasing influence over public policy.
ProPublica provides the coda to their coverage of Illinois student Amara Harris, who was given a ticket by police when she was accused of stealing a fellow student’s AirPods. She won her case when a jury in Naperville determined that she did not knowingly take the AirPods (she thought they were hers and returned them when approached), and the story highlights the use of police in schools for incidents that could be handled first by school officials.
The man who shot a California store owner for flying a Pride flag was a far-right conspiracy theorist who followed the religious zealot Matt Walsh and espoused false-flag hoaxes and climate change denial.
Oppenheimer left out a key part of the history of nuclear weapons: the exploitation of Congolese people who mined the uranium ore by hand, including a massacre of workers who tried to bargain for higher wages in 1941.
This 2022 article from Vice explains productivity cafes, a Japanese trend of coffee shops and bars where you tell the employees the task you’re trying to finish when you enter and they won’t let you leave until you’ve finished (e.g., writing a chapter).
FIFA just temporarily suspended Luis Rubiales, the President of the Spanish football federation, after he kissed Spanish player Jenni Hermoso on the lips without her consent and subsequently claimed that she did consent in the wake of calls for him to resign.
A Maine hospital is threatening to sue a 15-year-old college student for defamation over his petition calling for increased patient safety at their facility. FIRE has stepped in to demand that Northern Light retract the threat, citing Maine’s anti-SLAPP law.
Guitar legend Carlos Santana went on a bizarre anti-trans rant during a recent concert in Atlantic City.
A goal that seemed impossible just a few years ago is in sight – we might be able to eradicate wild polio in the wild, which would make it just the third disease we’ve eradicated after smallpox and rinderpest.
Delaware has joined the growing list of states and cities prohibiting restaurants from using polystyrene containers, which don’t break down in landfills and can leach chemicals into the water supply.
The Baltimore Banner once again calls out Orioles owner/failson John Angelos for how his antics are overshadowing the team’s incredible season. We’re now over seven months past his promise to open the team’s books.
Tiny forests of native flora can help increase biodiversity and grab some carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, growing even on spaces that might seem too small to support this kind of horticulture.
One version of a single gene may increase your chances of developing long COVID after infection.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, biodiversity, conspiracy theories, coronavirus, first amendment, illinois, links, longreads, maine, metoo, soccer, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ August 19, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/19/23.

I’ve got a piece filed to run on Monday or Tuesday at The Athletic, and another review coming up this week at Paste, but had nothing new up this week. My podcast will be back this week with an episode I recorded on Friday. So … sorry? But I’ll have a lot of content up in the next few days.

A few weeks ago, I appeared on the video podcast Shelf Stories to discuss ethics in board game media and questions of integrity and professionalism among folks who review games or otherwise cover the space, along with former Kotaku writer Luke Plunkett. It’s a long discussion but I greatly enjoyed it.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New York Times has a long adaptation from an upcoming book about how a California high school was torn apart by an Instagram account that posted racist memes about students there.

Nature discusses the impact of scientists leaving or cutting back on Twitter use, allowing anti-science and denialism to fester there – and that ran before Elon threatened, again, to terminate the site’s block function.

The Times also had a piece about three weeks ago looking into the continuing mystery over the origins of COVID-19, arguing that the public’s greater belief in the lab-leak conspiracy theory – any hypothesis of a lab leak remains stubbornly unsupported by evidence – is a function of distrust of authorities and the competition between narratives, not a question of facts.

By now you’ve likely read about Kansas cops raiding the offices of a small, local newspaper, after which the paper’s 98-year-old owner died. It turns out that the cops did so to try to prevent the paper from writing about a local restaurant owner’s DUI, which would have prohibited the woman, Kari Newell, from obtaining a liquor license. The county attorney has said there was insufficient evidence to support the warrant the cops obtained, and there’s now a complaint against the judge, Laura Viar, who signed it. The editorial boards of the Kansas City Star and Wichita Eagle co-published an editorial calling the raid “an intolerable overreach.”

Why did a Missouri judge grant a restraining order preventing the St. Louis Post-Dispatch from publishing details of an accused cop killer’s mental health evaluation? This seems like a First Amendment violation.

Meanwhile, Wisconsin State Senator Cory Tomczyk, a Republican, called a 13-year-old kid a homophobic slur at a county meeting in August of 2021, according to several people who witnessed it, but he’s trying to sue a local newspaper out of existence just for reporting on it.
I don’t know why this story has received so little attention: A 3-year-old girl who was trafficked by Texas state officials died while on a a so-called “migrant bus.” I couldn’t find articles on this in the Times (either one) or Washington Post, for example.

The Los Angeles Times looks at the people who actually lived near the nuclear test sites depicted as remote and unpopulated in Oppenheimer.

NPR summarizes some of the indoctrination awaiting Florida public school students as they return to the classroom this month.

A Montana judge ruled in favor of young climate-change activists who sued the state, arguing that Montana’s policy preventing state agencies from considering greenhouse gas emission potential when evaluating permits for fossil fuel development is unconstitutional. It’s largely symbolic, but could present a path for similar suits elsewhere.

The Baltimore Banner’s Kyle Goon tears apart Orioles failson/owner John Angelos’s bid for more state money along with a land grab around Camden Yards. Meanwhile, Orioles announcer Kevin Brown issued a statement nobody believes that tried to defuse reports that he was suspended for citing facts about the team’s past performance. In the Orioles’ best season in a decade, leave it to John Angelos to muck it up with this clownery.

A new state tax in Massachusetts that levies an extra 4% on incomes over a million dollars will raise $1 billion for FY2024, and the proceeds will pay for free school lunches for all kids in the state, among other things (I assume). Unfortunately, this article’s author confuses wealth with income, referring to “the state’s wealthiest residents.” Income and wealth are not the same thing, and taxing each is a very different process.

From last month, Katherine Miller wrote in the New York Times about the farcical No Labels party, which won’t reveal its funding sources and seems more interested in re-electing Donald Trump than pushing an actual new “centrist” platform (as if Democrats weren’t closer to the center than the progressive left anyway).

The Atlantic points out that asking why people keep moving to the Phoenix area ignores the broader questions of cheap energy and housing that drive it.

Board game news: The Kickstarter for Perch launched this week and is already about 250% funded.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, baseball, board game news, coronavirus, first amendment, florida, kansas, links, longreads, massachusetts, missouri, social media, stick to baseball, taxes, texas, wisconsin

→ June 24, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/24/23.

I released my second mock draft for 2023 this week for subscribers to the Athletic. I also did a Q&A to answer your draft questions.

My guest on the Keith Law Show this week was Michael Ruhlman, author of Ruhlman’s Twenty and the brand-new The Book of Cocktail Ratios: The Surprising Simplicity of Classic Cocktails, which is an essential guide for any home bartender. You can listen & subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New Yorker’s Louisa Thomas has a tremendous story on the vicissitudes of Daniel Bard’s career, as he’s had at least two distinct comebacks already in his baseball life. (There’s also a mention of Keith Law Show guest Sian Beilock, author of Choke.)

Defector has the story of con artist John Rogers, who scammed people out of millions through his business of buying and digitizing photo archives from major newspapers and professional photographers.

NPR affiliate KNKX looks at how Christopher Rufo, who made “critical race theory” an electoral rallying cry and is now going after trans people, went from a little-known City Council candidate to a right-wing influencer with links to two Presidential candidates.

The new chief of the 1100-person Grand Caillou/Dulac Band of Native Americans in Louisiana is a 25-year-old coastal scientist who wants to help his tribe fight climate change and preserve their way of life.

Water recycling is the next big thing in building and urban planning, from commercial to residential properties.

Meanwhile, the state of Arizona is making it way too hard for native populations to access their guaranteed water rights.

The Guardian spent three days interviewing the Kenyan Nobel Laureate Ng?g? wa Thiong’o, author of Wizard of the Crow and A Grain of Wheat.

The BBC has a rare look at the famine and increased repression taking place right now in North Korea.

NBC News’s Brandy Zadrozny interviewed putative Presidential candidate and science denier Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who shows just how divorced from reality he is, claiming that the powers-that-be prolonged the pandemic, that the vaccines killed more people than they saved (they did not), and that the CIA killed his father. He also still doesn’t understand that the mercury found in fish and the mercury that used to be found in vaccines were in completely different forms that the human body handles differently.

RFK Jr. is not a doctor or scientist; he’s a lawyer, with no medical or scientific background whatsoever. This TIME editorial explaining how and why RFK Jr. is “dead wrong” about vaccines was co-authored by a doctor and professor of global health.

Still not convinced? RFK Jr.’s anti-vaccine group, the misleadingly-named Children’s Defense Fund, has been reaching out to neo-Nazi and white nationalist users to drum up support for him. Very fine people.

The Washington Post has more on how a fringe, Christian doctors’ group has spurred Republicans’ renewed war on abortion, transgender rights, and more.

The same billionaire who lavished gifts on SCOTUS Justice Clarence Thomas has also donated over $450,000 to Republican Senators who might vote on judicial ethics reform.

The British government is holding over 60 migrants, mostly Tamils, in a makeshift detention camp on Diego Garcia, with conditions deteriorating and what seems like an end-run around refugee rights because the Brits are claiming the island, which houses a military base, isn’t actually part of the UK.

Two old morons accused a nine-year-old girl of being trans at a track meet, stopping the event and demanding proof that the girl was cis. This is what comes of right-wingers spreading fear and hate of trans people just to gain political currency.

Writing in the Observer, Kathryn Bromwich argues for a more inclusive feminism and less focus on the distraction of transphobia, as there are far more pressing and practical issues confronting women today.

Starbucks caved to pressure from bigots and removed Pride décor from many of its stores. Workers from over 150 locations are going on strike to protest the move.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who uses a wheelchair, vetoed a bill to make it easier for people with disabilities to vote by mail. He also approved a law that bans cities and counties in Texas from mandating water breaks for construction workers in the heat.

The BBC has the story of a Texas woman who was denied an abortion for a nonviable pregnancy and nearly died as a result of the state’s draconian, misogynistic abortion ban.

The Speaker of the North Carolina House, Tim Moore (R), stands accused of using his position to gain sexual favors, including “engaging in group sex” with people looking to benefit politically.

The British newspaper The Times ran a story claiming that COVID-19 came from a lab leak, although they didn’t provide any evidence. It’s right in line with the paper’s AIDS denialist stance from the 1980s.

Elon Musk joining in and encouraging an attack against vaccine developer Dr. Peter Hotez has many scientists looking for the exit from Twitter.

Can you wash and reuse plastic zip-top bags? Yes, several times.

Barbara Kingsolver became the first author to win the Women’s Prize for Fiction twice.

PEN America referred to the removal of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s memoir Between the World and Me from a South Carolina school’s AP course list as “an outrageous act of government censorship.”

NBC News reporter Ben Collins received a Walter Cronkite Award for TV Political Reporting, earning special recognition for his “incisive reporting from the trenches of the information war,” and gave a great speech about fighting misinformation and the need to stand up for the truth.

Truthout has some details on billionaire Leonard Leo’s operation to try to buy up the American judiciary and impose a hard-right agenda on the country.

Looks like CNN and MSNBC learned one tiny lesson, refusing to broadcast Trump’s post-arraignment speech live, since they couldn’t fact-check it in real time.

A whole bunch of Trump supporters claimed they’d respond to his arraignment with violence. They did not. You can’t cave to these people.

Meanwhile, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R) sent out a fundraising email for a “Trump Defense Fund” that would actually funnel most of the money to her.

On the bright side, Delaware’s at-large Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D) announced that she’s running for the Senate seat soon to be vacated by Tom Carper’s retirement. Delaware has never had a female Senator or a Senator of color.

Writer/activist Michael Harriot exposes some of the hypocrisy of Nikki Haley’s views and statements on race.

Verge explains the Reddit shutdown last week where multiple subreddits went dark for days to protest the company’s new policies.

The astroturfing group Moms for Liberty, which is pushing book bans and other anti-LGBTQ+ policies, quoted Hitler … again.

Board game news: A new version of the 1980s classic game Crossbows & Catapults is now up on Kickstarter.

Tangerine Games launched a Kickstarter for yet another bird-themed game, the very pretty Nestlings.

Thiefdom, a new game from the designers of Clans of Caledonia, is now also up on Kickstarter. I don’t like Clans of Caledonia anywhere near as much as the consensus – I find it a rather soulless economic Euro – but this appears to be a totally different sort of game.

Waypoints, a print-and-play game for $5, is also up on Kickstarter for one more week.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: african literature, anti-science, baseball, board game news, book banning, con men, delaware, links, longreads, misinformation, north carolina, north korea, refugees, scotus, social media, stick to baseball, texas, trans rights, vaccines, water

→ May 20, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/20/23.

I had two new posts this week for subscribers to the Athletic – a minor league scouting notebook on prospects with the Brewers, Pirates, and Phillies; and a draft scouting notebook looking at Max Clark, Dillon Head, Mac Horvath, and more.

My guests on the Keith Law Show the last two weeks have been Max Bazerman, discussing his new book Complicit: How We Enable the Unethical and How to Stop; and Russell Carleton, talking about his upcoming second book The New Ballgame: The Not-So-Hidden Forces Shaping Modern Baseball. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Just a reminder you can also find me on Spoutible and Bluesky as @keithlaw.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This (extremely long) piece from the New York Times Magazine on a woman whose dementia led to a long battle between her daughters and her second husband, whom the daughters accused of abusing and manipulating her, is sad and sobering for all of us with parents getting into that age range.

Three pieces from ProPublica: How South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn (D) conspired with Republicans to gerrymander his way into a safer seat, and how a former NFL player has sold “child ID kits” to eleven states despite no evidence they work and free alternatives already available, and how NYPD investigators never even asked for footage showing that one officer tried to stop his partner from killing an unarmed Black man. The investigators cleared both officers of any wrongdoing.

A new research paper found, once again, that sports stadiums/facilities do not generate enough ancillary economic activity to justify their costs to taxpayers when subsidized by the government. This Boston Business Journal piece covers the paper’s examination of Polar Park in Worcester.

NBC News has a longread on how conservatives took over the school board in Woodland Park, Colorado, ushering in a right-wing curriculum, forcing out employees who spoke out, and engaging in apparent self-dealing.

The Guardian spoke to a number of Florida teachers about their experiences under the state’s draconian new laws restricting their speech and lesson content, with several saying they’re considering leaving the state and/or the profession. Florida already has a severe teacher shortage, by the way.

The science behind reverse osmosis filtering was unclear, until a paper published in April upended the previous model and opened up the possibility of new membranes that make filtration, including desalination, more energy-efficient.

A conservative “foundation” recruited fifteen men at a Poughkeepsie homeless shelter to pretend they were veterans kicked out of a hotel to make room for migrants coming up from New York City. The plan fooled state Assemblyman Brian Maher (R), who fed the outrage machine until he had to admit he’d been had.

The Philly Inquirer has a story on a victim of the romance scam known as ‘pig butchering’ who ended up out $450,000 to a con artist she met on Hinge.

An invasive weed known as stinknet has taken over Arizona’s Sonoran desert, fueling wildfires, crowding out native species, and causing lung problems for nearby residents. And it’s spreading.

The executive director of the Kinsey Institute at the University of Indiana wrote in the Washington Post about the Republican-controlled state government’s attack on the institute, which prohibits the university from using any state funds to support the institute. It’s culture-war bullshit that impedes important research.

Bryan Slaton has resigned his post in the Texas legislature after it emerged that he’d behaved inappropriately with an intern. The Republican once introduced legislation to ban children from attending drag shows, claiming it was some form of grooming.

Meanwhile, doctors at Austin’s Dell Clinic who were treating trans kids there are leaving after the state’s under-indictment AG Ken Paxton announced an investigation into the facility after the duplicitous far-right Project Veritas claimed it was conducting surgery on kids as young as eight. The Texas Observer found documents from the also right-wing American College of Pediatricians setting out a playbook for how to defund trans care in Texas.

The current moral panic over trans kids is part of a larger effort to control the lives of American youths, argues researcher Dr. Chris Pepin-Neff in Scientific American.

Richard Uilhein, the right-wing billionaire owner of U-Line, is one of the chief backers of the proposed Ohio amendment that will make it harder for future amendments to pass by raising the threshold from 50% to 60%. Don’t buy from U-Line!

Ohio Republicans are trying to follow Florida’s lead in banning DEI programs at state universities and mandating their sort of indoctrination in the classroom, along with the definitely not problematic proposal to base tenure on whether a professor taught with “bias.”

I know you’re shocked, but Iowa’s new law allowing residents to use school vouchers for private and even religious schools has led many of those schools to raise tuition in response. You’d think they might have learned from the national student loan fiasco.

Nebraska legislator Megan Hunt is the hero we need. Just don’t call her a Democrat.

I agree with everything in this Mary Sue post about the disappointing S3 of Ted Lasso, which has none of the things that made the show good in its first two seasons. But at least the episodes are longer!

A woman in Utah who wrote a children’s book about how to deal with grief after her husband died has now been charged with his murder.

Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) has no problem with white nationalists serving in the U.S. military.

The Arab League has quietly reinstated Syria, more than a decade after the nation and its murderous dictator President Bashad al-Assad were expelled for violent reprisals against protestors leading up to the country’s 12-year civil war.

Two mass shootings in Serbia have led to public demonstrations and a wave of people turning in their guns. Must be nice.

Jasper Fforde ffans like me have waited thirteen years for a sequel to his novel Shades of Grey. It’s finally coming, as Red Side Story will be released in the UK in February of 2024. No word yet on a U.S. release; the fourth Dragonslayer novel didn’t get one, which is not a great sign.

Ben Collins wrote at NBC News about how Twitter has disabled some key content-moderation controls, allowing things like animal torture videos to spread across the site. Meanwhile, Elon Musk has been busy spreading misinformation about the Texas mall shooter.

The best piece I read on CNN’s Trump Town Hall faceplant was, in fact, this one on Teen Vogue.

This post from WBUR’s Here and Now recommending some modern board games for families is actually very good.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alabama, arizona, baseball, board game news, Economics, florida, frauds, iowa, links, longreads, nebraska, ohio, police, science, social media, stick to baseball, syria, texas, the swamp, trans rights, tv, voter suppression

→ January 22, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/21/23.

No new content for subscribers to the Athletic as I’ve continued writing capsules for the top 100 prospects ranking, which will run on January 30^th. Please stand by.

My podcast did return this week, with guest Seth Reiss, who co-wrote the screenplay for the film The Menu. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I’m planning to send out another issue of my free email newsletter on Sunday, now that I’m back on track with the prospect stuff. I was fairly stressed about it as recently a few days ago, but I’ve caught up enough that I can finish everything with a reasonable daily output of words.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: A 17-year-old woman in Texas wanted an abortion. A judge decided she wasn’t “mature” enough to make that choice. ProPublica looks at the ramifications of that decision.

The BBC looks at the revolutionary TV show Homicide: Life on the Street on the 30^th anniversary of its debut. I can remember seeing it for the first time and being riveted. I’d never seen a TV show like that before.

The Ringer looks back at the Simpsons episode “Marge vs. the Monorail” on the 30^th anniversary of its first airing.

An epidemiologist and an emergency medicine physician debunk the whole “died suddenly” myth around COVID-19 vaccines. No, people are not dying suddenly of cardiac events from vaccines; we did see a jump in such cardiac deaths, but it came in 2020 and early 2021, due to COVID-19 infections.

New York’s Intelligencer explains how the theft of Ashley Biden’s diary might take down Project Veritas – but that the case is creating some surprising bedfellows for the right-wing hoaxers.

Also from Intelligencer, a longread on what it’s like right now at Twitter.

The San Francisco Chronicle has the heartbreaking story of a mother’s attempts to help her daughter, a 35-year-old opioid addict living on the San Francisco streets, touching on the city’s lack of services for addicts and for homeless people. There’s a sad baseball connection: The daughter’s boyfriend, Abdul Cole, was a Marlins minor leaguer for three years, but died last April.

A new research paper looks at decision fatigue in the context of baseball umpires.

The COVID misinformation-spreading Brownstone Institute is mostly funded by a small number of large, anonymous donations, and is led by a neo-Confederate advocate who has previously written for white nationalist sites.

LitHub has an excerpt from Dr. Henry Marsh’s new book, And Finally: Matters of Life and Death, as the 70-year-old neurosurgeon faces his own likely terminal cancer diagnosis.

Quanta looks at a 17-year-old who helped prove part of a theorem on the pseudoprimes known as Carmichael numbers, which are related to Fermat’s Little Theorem (not the more famous Last Theorem).

The School Board of Madison County, Virginia, voted to ban 21 books from its libraries, including The Handmaid’s Tale and four books by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, because Christian groups complained.

Meanwhile, two Christian activists in Crawford County, Arkansas, are trying to remove the library director and defund the system over the display of LGBTQ+ books, calling it an “alternative lifestyle.” Sexual orientation is not a lifestyle, or a choice. Gender identity is not a lifestyle, or a choice. Religion is a lifestyle, and a choice.

How does this shit happen? Because right-wing zealots have been pushing to take over school and library boards. The Christian nationalist group FlashPoint is even holding an event to train people to run for these positions.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) says that schools there cannot teach AP African-American History because of the state’s anti-anti-racism law.

And that same law has professors at universities across the state scrambling to avoid any possibility that their courses would be found to violate it. So a law that is supposed to prohibit “indoctrination” is increasing the likelihood students will receive indoctrination, but from the other side.

Iowa Republicans are trying to defund public schools by allowing parents to use vouchers for private schools, including religious schools, which would seem to violate the principle of separation of church and state. You can send your kids to a parochial school, but only without my tax dollars.

The City of Pittsburgh passed an ordinance prohibiting police from using secondary infractions as a reason to make traffic stops. The Chief of Police has told officers to ignore it.

Idaho Republicans are trying to “fix” the state’s anti-abortion law to avoid prosecuting women who have ectopic pregnancies, but within the article, you can see quotes from a legislator who wants to remove exemptions for cases of rape or incest and said that a woman who became pregnant after she was raped by a family member would view it “as the opportunity to have a child.” He also invoked Martin Luther King, Jr., of course.

Texas’s Supreme Court declined to block the state’s attempted takeover of the publicly elected school board in Houston.

Gregg Doyel says Tony Dungy should stick to sports and stop spreading anti-LGBTQ+ nonsense.

A couple of Eagles players recorded a Christmas album for charity, hoping to raise about $30,000. It raised $250,000 and will help fund two toy drives and a summer camp for Philly kids with serious behavioral problems. (We have a copy.)

Utah police investigated and then ignored complaints about child abuse from the daughter of the Mormon man who killed his wife, kids, and himself earlier this month. His 14-year-old daughter described serious physical abuse at her father’s hands less than three years ago, but no charges were filed.

Scottsdale has cut off a nearby town, Rio Verde Foothills, from its city water supply, leaving the residents to use rain water to flush their toilets. The subtext here is that the whole state is going to run out of water sooner rather than later.
A Republican candidate for the House in New Mexico was arrested for shooting at the homes of multiple Democratic legislators.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, arizona, arkansas, baseball, drugs, florida, guns, iowa, links, math, new mexico, pittsburgh, san francisco, social media, stick to baseball, texas, tv, utah, vaccines

→ October 22, 2022
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/22/22.

My second and much longer notebook on guys I saw in the Arizona Fall League went up this week for subscribers to the Athletic. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

My guest on The Keith Law Show this week was Craig Calcaterra, writer of the excellent Cup of Coffee newsletter and author of the book Rethinking Fandom: How to Beat the Sports-Industrial Complex at Its Own Game. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

You can sign up for my free email newsletter and maybe I’ll send another edition out this week. Also, you can buy either of my books, Smart Baseball or The Inside Game, via bookshop.org at those links, or at your friendly local independent bookstore. I hear they make great holiday gifts.

My friend and former colleague at ESPN Sarah Langs announced a few weeks ago on Twitter that she has ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. Mandy Bell of MLB.com set up a GoFundMe for Sarah, if you’d like to join me in contributing.

And now, the links…

Climate change could cause the collapse of Antarctica’s ice shelves even sooner than forecasted, in case you were feeling too good about anything this week.
Two stories of women who nearly died because anti-abortion laws denied them access to medical care, one in Texas who suffered a miscarriage and had to wait so long she developed sepsis before doctors would intervene, and one in Missouri whose own state Senator referred her to an anti-abortion clinic. The latter woman had to go to Illinois to get medical care to save her life.
Parker Molloy wrote about how the English press, buoyed by transphobic parents, bullied a schoolteacher who came out as trans into suicide. One of the main writers who attacked Lucy Meadows was Richard Littlejohn, who is still alive and writing twice a week for the Daily Mail, which ignored calls to fire him for his role.
WIRED has an excerpt from Rebecca Gilbin and Cory Doctorow’s new book Chokepoint Capitalism on how streaming services control what we hear and what music gets made, abrogating the promise that the technology would democratize music.
A Supreme Court case around copyright law, fair use, and an Andy Warhol piece may permanently alter the landscape of American art.
Florida’s state Surgeon General issued new guidance around COVID vaccines based on research that produced howls of derisive laughter from actual experts. Here’s one takedown of its many, many flaws. Charles Pierce put it well when he wrote that Florida will just keep “asking questions” until it gets the answer it wants ($).
Dr. Mehmet Oz, currently running for Senate, met a gun-violence victim at a campaign stop, but failed to disclose that she works for him and has received over $2100 from the campaign. The Associated Press reported on the encounter without noting the conflict. Do your fucking jobs, AP.
While on TV, Dr. Oz also promoted Joseph Mercola, long one of the biggest purveyors of anti-vaccine and other forms of medical misinformation online. Mercola has been selling supplements by denigrating evidence-based treatments since at least the 1990s, when I first came across his site’s claims that aspartame caused multiple sclerosis and all sorts of other health problems that it doesn’t cause at all.
Oz’s opponent, John Fetterman, accused the super PAC Democratic Coalition, run by Scott Dworkin, of misleading donors into thinking their money is going to support candidates like him.
Will Leitch wrote about the abysmal media response to Tua Tagovalioa’s second head injury in five days.
Slate’s Evan Urquhart defended Jon Stewart’s interview with and humiliation of Arkansas’s bigoted Attorney General, where he makes it clear she’s either ignorant of the facts on the issue of gender affirming care or just denying them.
How did social media content moderation become such an issue in the culture war?
This is sort of old news by now, but if you haven’t heard the racist comments by members of the Los Angeles City Council, you should check it out. Only one of the three people making those comments, Nury Martinez, has resigned, as calls mount for the other two to do the same.
Wildfire smoke doesn’t just pollute the air, but it can carry bacteria and fungal spores across long distances, thus potentially expanding the area where Valley fever and other diseases of rural/desert areas into more population regions.
Research published in Polymers showed microplastics in human breast milk.
Many artists are pushing for more student debt relief, as the $10,000 offered is a “drop in the bucket” compared to their debt loads.
An Oklahoma teacher encouraged students to call a special-needs student in the class the f-slur. The school district dragged its feet, so the state is investigating while many parents are calling for the teacher’s removal. This is the lowest bar, really.
Is hip-hop’s dominance in American popular music finally slipping? Billboard spoke to industry executives who believe it is, and I would point to the lack of innovation in the space as a reason – and streaming may be the cause, as seen above.
A terrorist group calling itself a branch of ISIS is attacking villages in northern Mozambique, killing men and raping women, while threatening one of the most important natural gas supply lines in Africa.
Amidst news of ethnic cleansing in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, the Economist called for sanctions against Eritrean dictator Issaias Afwerki ($), calling him “equally malign” as Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un.
Randy Kaufman, running for the Maricopa County Community College District Governing Board and who said he wanted to “protect our children from the progressive left,” suspended his campaign after he was arrested for masturbating in his car near a preschool. Always be wary of those who doth protest too much.
Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake (R) refused to say whether she would accept the election results if she loses.
Republicans in Congress have introduced a “Don’t Say Gay” bill that would prohibit schools, libraries, and other institutions that receive federal money from teaching children about, well, anything related to sex, gender, gender identity, and so on, and would allow parents to sue if they did. The Human Rights Campaign has denounced it. The end result of bills and laws like this is more youth suicides, and if that’s your goal, we’re not going to agree.
George M. Johnson wrote about his experiences seeing his book, All Boys Aren’t Blue, a memoir of growing up Black and queer in America, become the second-most banned book in the country.
Michigan Republicans introduced an anti-trans bill that would jail parents for life if they sought gender-affirming care for their kids. This is the totalitarian playbook: demonize a small, vulnerable minority to rally your adherents and get them to the polls.
Florida Times-Union columnist called Gov. Ron DeSantis’ closed-door selection of Sen. Ben Sasse, both Republicans, as the new President of the University of Florida, the “crowning achievement of the DeSantis-led effort to defile” the college, questioning Sasse’s qualifications and his intentions.
A Texas sheriff certified that the nearly 50 migrants DeSantis trafficked to Massachusetts are “crime victims,” creating the possibility they could receive special visas to stay in the U.S. Unintended consequences FTW!
In the wake of Hurricane Ian, DeSantis relaxed voting restrictions in three heavily Republican counties, but not in heavily Democratic Orange County.
Police body camera footage shows officers arresting people for so-called voter fraud, as DeSantis proudly announced a sweep and emphasized the criminal records of the arrestees, who were overwhelmingly Black.
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel columnist James Causey called Sen. Ron Johnson’s comment that his opponent this year, Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes (D), has “turned on America” and “finds America awful” a “cheap shot,” saying that you can love America and still criticize it. Johnson’s campaign has also run ads that darkened Barnes’s skin tone and claimed he’ll be soft on crime.
South Carolina’s medical licensing board has yet to discipline any physicians for spreading misinformation on COVID-19 or the vaccines that help prevent it, apparently for fear of backlash from the conservatives who run the state government.
Marin County in northern California was once a haven for highly educated anti-vaxxer parents. COVID-19 vaccines changed that, and the county now has one of the highest uptake rates in the country at 91%.
Jazz Chisholm was impressive in his brief stint on MLB Network’s studio coverage of the first round of the playoffs.
A new property, the Hotel Lyra, is trying to revive a nearly-abandoned town in Croatia called Licko Petrovo Selo. The town, which is near the country’s scenic Plitvice Lakes National Park, was destroyed during World War II, rebuilt by the Yugoslav government, and then heavily damaged during the Balkan wars, with most of the population, especially its Serbs, driven out.
The white nationalist teenager who opened fire outside an LGBTQ+ bar in Slovakia had posted anti-Semitic, anti-LGBTQ+, and white replacement views on Twitter and 4chan. The Anti-Defamation League says in response that Twitter and similar sites don’t do enough to moderate hate speech.
Board game news: Rock Manor Games, run by my friend Mike Gnade, has a Kickstarter up for its new role-playing game The Few and the Cursed.
BoardGameTables, who make tables for board games (!) and have also published titles like On Tour and Sequoia, have a Kickstarter up for three small-box games, including Pollen, a re-theming of Reiner Knizia’s Samurai: The Card Game.
Rising Waters, the historical co-op game about the 1927 Mississippi Flood and the racial disparities it exposed, just funded in the last few days, with about a week and a half to go in its Kickstarter.
Race to the Raft, a cooperative game from Isle of Cats designer Frank West, is already about 8x funded on Kickstarter.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, africa, arizona, arkansas, art, baseball, board game news, california, climate change, croatia, florida, football, frauds, hip-hop, lgbt rights, links, los angeles, missouri, Music, oklahoma, pennsylvania, social media, south carolina, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines, wisconsin

→ October 1, 2022
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/1/22.

Since my last weekend post, I’ve had three few posts up for subscribers to the Athletic, including my annual column on players I was wrong about, my annual Prospect of the Year column, and a quick scouting take on last weekend’s Future Stars Main Event showcase for the 2023 draft.

For Paste I reviewed the board game Cellulose, from Genius Games, which produces science-themed games that try to be both accurate and educational. It’s definitely the former, but I’m not sure about the latter, as it’s a good worker-placement game that you can play well without getting into a lot of the technical stuff.

On the Keith Law Show this week, my guest was author and sportswriter Will Leitch, who wrote the wonderful 2021 novel How Lucky and who has a new novel coming out in May that you can pre-order here. We discussed his writing, his beloved Cardinals, and the upcoming slate of movies for this fall and winter. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

My free email newsletter should return next week. COVID and some travel and other stuff just knocked me for a loop.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This story has gone beyond this one subtopic, but it’s worth reading about how Brett Favre took $6 million in welfare funds and gave it to Southern Miss to build a volleyball stadium.
Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed won a Nobel Peace Prize by ending the decades-long conflict with Eritrea, a former Ethiopian province that took Ethiopia’s only coastline when it became independent. Now Ahmed stands accused of starting a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the minority Tigrayans and fomenting a civil war less than a year after earning the honor.
Vigilante “predator catchers,” using techniques similar to those from To Catch a Predator, are infiltrating and often interfering with the criminal justice system.
Yet another author thinks he’s identified the Zodiac killer – although this time, the suspect’s daughter thinks it might be true.
Fifth Circuit judge Andy Oldham ruled that internet companies no longer have any right to moderate content on their sites, which doesn’t jibe well with the First Amendment. The Atlantic’s Charlie Wurzel asks if this is the end of the internet. The subreddit r/PoliticalHumor is protesting the ruling and the Texas law in question in a rather clever way.
Virginia is trying to enact a set of policies to deny trans kids’ rights in schools, such as prohibiting the use of their preferred pronouns or their use of bathrooms that match their gender identities. It’s cruel, and it solves no problem other than catering to transphobic voters. If you live in Virginia, the public comment period is open and you can comment here.
An editorial in Nature argues that we need to let science and data determine transgender policy, not anti-trans politicians. “The current spate of anti-trans positions has little to do with evidence-based research, science or data,” such as bogus claims of sexual assaults by trans people (or people pretending to be trans) in bathrooms.
Meanwhile, right-wing trolls are targeting children’s hospitals that provide gender-affirming care, going after facilities in Akron and at Vanderbilt just weeks after a similar misinformation campaign led to bomb threats against Boston Children’s Hospital. And, as usual, Twitter does nothing.
Libraries under attack: A dozen public libraries across the country received bomb or active shooter threats in the last two weeks, which might be part of a coordinated effort targeted at LGBTQ+ communities. Last week was Banned Books Week, and yet schools across the country continue to target LGBTQ+-themed books. A librarian in a St. Louis-area school received two visits from a police officer because parents complained about “pornographic” books on the shelves. In Greenville, South Carolina, Republicans have stolen several LGBTQ+ books from the library and are trying to get the system to remove any such books from the kids’ sections (where, say, a child questioning their sexual orientation or gender identity might find them). Cory Doctorow points out that vast majorities of Americans oppose book-banning efforts, but the other side is louder.
A French scientist who pushed the thoroughly discredited notion that hydroxychloroquinone could treat COVID-19 now faces a criminal investigation and possible retraction of six of his published papers.
A measles outbreak in Zimbabwe has killed 700 children.
ProPublica explains how “pig-butchering” scams work. If you’ve been getting texts from random numbers or similar messages on Whatsapp/Instagram, sometimes saying “hi” or “your number is in my phone” or something, that’s often the first step in the scam.
In a new documentary about Mario Batali, a former employee alleges that he sexually assaulted her.
Fentanyl is the new bugaboo for Republican politicians and a lot of MAGA accounts on Twitter. The problem is it’s arrant nonsense: You can’t overdose from touching it, and it’s not in random Halloween candy.
I loved this MLB.com story and video about a lovely new ballpark in Bavaria, built to house a Bundesliga (the German professional league) team in Füssen.
The Danish island of Bornholm is trying to go trash-free, reusing or recycling all waste, as their waste-incineration plant is nearing the end of its life and officials there chose not to replace it.
A number of Trump’s phony electors from 2020 still hold powerful positions in their states, are on the ballot this November for the same, or are working for major campaigns like those of Blake Masters (Arizona) or Sen. Ron Johnson (Wisconsin).
Speaking of Sen. Johnson, he flip-flopped on the bill to protect marriage equality, pandering to a small but vocal minority of voters.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) hired a company tied to one of his closest advisers to fly migrants from Texas to Massachusetts, and his office has refused to explain how the company won this contract.
John Fetterman responds to the strange attacks against his tattoos, including a rant from Tucker Carlson. Are we really still worried about people with tattoos in the year 2022?
Can “brown noise” help your brain relax? There isn’t much research on this, and the research on “pink noise,” which allegedly helps with deep sleep, is limited to one real study.
Board game news: Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game is already 10x funded on Kickstarter with 12 days to go.
Daybreak, the new cooperative game about fighting climate change co-designed by Matt Leacock (Pandemic), is over $300,000 already with 20 days to go on Kickstarter.
LX News has a story on Dungeons & Dragons players who tout mental health benefits from playing, which isn’t exactly backed by research but does talk up some of the benefits of gaming in general. The article does note the actual research on how reading fiction increases your empathy, though.
NPR’s Code Switch looks at race in Dungeons & Dragons – how the game’s fictional races bring in real-world stereotypes, and how some players are trying to rewrite some of the rules to eliminate or confront those issues.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, baseball, board game news, book banning, books, ethiopia, first amendment, frauds, lgbt rights, links, longreads, metoo, science, stick to baseball, trans rights, true crime

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