board game news

→ May 10, 2025
→ By keith
→ 5 Comments

Stick to baseball, 5/10/25.

I posted my first mock draft of 2025 this week for subscribers to the Athletic, and took questions from readers about that and other prospect matters on Friday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Finspan, the new fish-themed spinoff to Wingspan that features simpler rules and a faster teach.

I’m about to send out the first new issue of my free email newsletter since February, before my travel schedule went nuts; I’ve been to fourteen states to see players, just via air, plus two more around here.

A short list this week, for no particular reason, but here are the links…

Longreads first: Automakers are going back to physical buttons and moving away from touchscreens, like the massive billboard-sized screens in Teslas, as consumers prefer the physical buttons and touchscreens are associated with much-reduced reaction times. I rented a car with physical buttons and no touch screen recently, and it took me all of about 30 seconds to figure it out.

Current Affairs has a detailed takedown of the Douglas Murray, who wrote a book on the Israel-Palestine conflict and self-described expert, but whose writing appears to omit or misrepresent facts that don’t support his (pro-Israel) conclusions. I haven’t read Murray’s book, though, and would be curious to hear from any of you who have.

At Futurism, Maggie Harrison Dupré spoke with an AI “sloperator” who floods Pinterest with fake recipe links and home décor posts, and who says he’s specifically targeting women over 50 with his content.

The Pulitzer Prize board chose to give the Fiction award to Percival Everett’s James, overriding the selection committee, which recommended three other titles. I just started one of the three, Mice 1961, because I want to see if I agree with the choice. I thought James was incredible.

Trump threatened to withhold $3 million in USDA funding from Maine schools because their Governor, Janet Mills, refused to comply with his extra-legal demand that they ban trans girls from playing girls’ sports. The USDA caved. If you don’t comply in advance, they back down. There’s still an ongoing court case over trans athletes in Maine, but the funding is restored.

Trump’s entire process for finding people to fill out executive branch jobs seems to be picking the worst purveyors of misinformation on Twitter: He made Vinay Prasad, a massive COVID and vaccine denier, in charge of the FDA’s vaccine regulation arm; and now he’s nominated a grifting “wellness influencer” without a medical license to be his Surgeon General.

The Trump family cryptocurrency offering – I’d call it a scam, but I think all crypto is a scam – has enriched them by nearly $3 billion.

ICE agents arrested Newark, New Jersey, Mayor Ras Baraka at their “immigration detention center” in his city, a facility that he says is not properly permitted and should not have been allowed to open.
New Yorkers are about to make a huge mistake if they elect Andrew Cuomo, he of the numerous sexual harassment cases and $60 million use of taxpayer funds, to be their next mayor, writes Alex Shephard in the New Republic. The man is walking ethical disaster.

Côte d’Ivoire had been one of the democratic success stories of Africa in the last decade-plus, but the recent court ruling that the leading candidate to oppose three-term incumbent President Alassane Ouattara is ineligible because of a technicality. The “little-used post-independence law” says that Tidjane Thiam, who was born in Côte d’Ivoire, should have lost his Ivorian citizenship automatically when he accepted French nationality, something he already had had through his father.

Mainstream media outlets seem loath to credit independent journalists for scoops and stories, as happened last week when multiple big-name sites failed to even name Marisa Kabas when she was the first to report on Trump’s deal with Rwanda to deport an Iraqi refugee to the central African nation.

A new preprint argues that it is nearly impossible that we live in a simulation because the energy required to ‘run’ the universe as a simulation is beyond the energy we see anywhere in the universe.
The Guardian has a wonderful interview with my favorite Doctor, David Tennant.

Rock Manor Games, whose owner, Mike Gnade, is a friend and frequent gaming opponent, has a new Kickstarter up for a reprint of Seas of Havoc, their top-rated game on BGG.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, board game news, links, longreads, maine, new jersey, new york, physics, pulitzer prize, stick to baseball, the swamp

→ May 3, 2025
→ By keith
→ Leave a Comment

Stick to baseball, 5/3/25.

I had one post for subscribers to The Athletic this past week, a draft scouting notebook on Riley Quick, Kyle Lodise, some UVA bats, and three college hitters who could be top ten picks in 2026.

At Paste, I reviewed the two-player game Floristry, which is important as I think it’s the first two-player title to use an auction mechanic that really works, but unfortunately that doesn’t have enough game beyond that.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New York Times has the bonkers story of how a bunch of college-aged and high school kids stole nearly $250 million in crypto from one guy, and then got caught within a month because they were so sloppy about it. It includes a real-world kidnapping story that demonstrates how this stuff can and will spill over into physical danger, even for people not directly involved in the scams. (Also, the victim of the original theft is a ding-dong, falling for some of the most obvious tricks to get him to divulge his passwords.)

Elon Musk’s xAI is operating 35 gas turbines in Tennessee with no permits for all pollution they’re spewing into the air. AI is an environmental disaster as it is, but Musk using his dubious position in Washington to skip any and all regulations is making the problem worse.

The author/owner of Recipe Tin Eats wrote about how influencer and cookbook author Brooki Bellamy copied several of her recipes, and those of other recipe sites, in Bellamy’s best-selling new book. Nagi refers to it as plagiarism, which is probably inapt, but Bellamy at least appears to have swiped the recipes and very slightly reworded the instructions to avoid copyright claims.

A group of religious zealots called My God Votes are trying to turn Texas into a Christian theocracy (they have lots of help, unfortunately), positively pissing on any notion of the separation of church and state in this country.

And Texas is also threatening to go after bookstores that sell whatever it is that the religious right deems “obscene,” allowing a minor to claim damages from such books.

As Trump and Musk ignore Congress by eliminating federal funding and firing workers, Trump’s golf trips are costing taxpayers tens of millions of dollars. I thought these guys wanted to eliminate government waste. I just found a whole lot of it. Yet food banks across the United States are running desperately short now that Trump/Musk have cut off funding and supplies.

ICE agents raided a house in Oklahoma City … but they had the wrong place. Instead they traumatized a mother and three daughters who had just moved there from Maryland when twenty armed agents broke down the door and seized the family’s computers, phones, and cash. The Philly Inquirer’s Will Bunch writes that people who were called crazy for saying we should abolish ICE were right all along.

AI-generated slop sites are proliferating across the internet; Futurism’s Maggie Harrison Dupré writes about one such site that used an old domain associated with Emerson College’s radio station to appear legitimate while churning out fake ‘news’ stories.

Polygon, the great gaming-news site that was under the Vox umbrella, was decimated after Vox sold it to a content-farming group, with nearly all Polygon staffers laid off. It’s now part of the same company that runs clickbait sites like ScreenRant. I wrote two pieces for Polygon in 2021-22, but if those disappear I’ll repost the reviews here for posterity.

Scientific American reports on the mass-brainwashing effort around measles, spearheaded by the Republican Party and specifically the Trump Administration, pushing the twin lies that the measles vaccine causes autism (again, it does not) and that measles isn’t that harmful (it has already killed two children in the U.S. this year, and can cause the fatal condition SSPE in people who recover from the infection).

The same anti-vaccine lunacy has led to a jump in pertussis cases – over 8400 already in the U.S. this year. Whooping cough kills about 1% of infants under one, children too young to be vaccinated, who contract the bacterial illness.

And bird flu continues to spread, with more people getting infected, raising the specter of another pandemic. If only we had some sort of government agency that could track and respond to this sort of thing.

The NIH has rolled out new rules that prohibit grants to anyone working on programs related to diversity, equity, or inclusion. Like so many other executive orders and federal mandates of the last four months, it’s probably not legal, but it won’t matter. They’ve already caused the chaos they sought.

A mathematician in Australia seems to have solved the problem of finding a generalized solution to polynomial equations of power 5 or greater. I keep seeing the same headline for this one story, but nothing further about the method, or whether other mathematicians agree with what sounds like a controversial approach (among other things, he says he “doesn’t believe in irrational numbers,” which…).

Two board game Kickstarters of note, even as the Trump tariffs threaten the entire industry: Flamecraft Duals, a two-player version of the hit game Flamecraft that promises to be more directly competitive; and Nippon: Zaibatsu, a brand-new edition of a heavy game from 2015 just called Nippon.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, crime, cryptocurrencies, first amendment, immigration, links, longreads, math, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ April 26, 2025
→ By keith
→ 8 Comments

Stick to baseball, 4/26/25.

I had two posts for Athletic subscribers this week, a draft scouting notebook on Ethan Holliday, Eli Willits, and JoJo Parker; and a minor league scouting post on some Mets and Orioles prospects in high A. I’m very worried about what I saw from Carson Benge. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I’ve updated the top 50 pizzerias post from yesterday to reflect two places that closed (one just within the last five months).

And now, the links…

Harvard is fighting back, suing the Trump Administration over the latter’s (likely illegal) attempts to cut funding to research programs the school conducts on behalf of the government. The Times has more on the conservative twits on the Harvard Board of Oversees who wanted to make a deal with Trump – even though Columbia tried that and it got them nothing.

Vox has the story of grid-scale batteries and how they might help green energy sources replace more fossil fuels … if the Administration doesn’t stop it.

The damage from President Trump’s irrational and ever-changing tariff … uh, are they even policies? … may be irreparable and will certainly last well beyond his term.

Trump has also deported at least two U.S. citizen children with cancer. This appears to be on top of the illegal deportation of a two-year-old girl, also a citizen, with “no meaningful process” in the words of a federal judge in Louisiana.

It looks like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) may have misappropriated public funds, moving $10 million earmarked for … into his personal campaign fund.

A former Tesla engineer says that when she pointed out a safety issue with the breaks in the company’s cars, Elon Musk threatened to deport members of her team.

Mississippi was on a heater last week in its effort to prove it’s the most backward state in the union. Their Supreme Court ruled that a transgender teen can’t legally change their name until they’re 21, because that’s the age of majority in that state. (For reference, the age of consent in Mississippi is 16. Real consistent there, fellas.) And then their Governor declared April Loser Heritage Month.

The Guardian has a story on former Royals minor leaguer Tarik El-Abour, who played four games in the Arizona Rookie League in 2018, making him the first player in the history of affiliated ball who was known to be autistic. (I don’t know what the best phrasing is for that, but I hope the point is clear.) El-Abour responds to the hateful, ignorant comments from the Secretary of Health and Human Services where he painted autistic people as a burden on society.

A group of scientists have banded together to form the Vaccine Integrity Project with the goal of countering vaccine misinformation coming from our own federal government. It comes as the Administration replaced the official site for information on COVID-19 with a page promoting the debunked lab-leak theory of its origins.

Texas’s House passed a school vouchers bill despite broad opposition from the public, because Trump bullied a number of legislators into voting for Gov. Abbott’s pet project. The program seems very likely to drain funds from public schools that need it and allow wealthy Texans to send their kids to private schools on the taxpayers’ dime.

The six brownshirts who forcibly removed a woman from a town hall in Idaho last month have been charged with various crimes, five of them with battery and four with false imprisonment.

Two German backpackers were handcuffed, held in dirty holding cells, and deported from Hawai’i because customs officers thought they were sneaking into the U.S. to work. Travel into the U.S. from overseas is tumbling. I’m not clear how cutting the billions foreign tourists spend here is supposed to help our economy.

In a largely symbolic move, two Delaware legislators, including my representative Krista Griffith (D), introduced a bill to inhibit local attempts to ban books from school or public libraries.

Thanks to the reader who pointed me to this Times story about the massive monthly board game night in NYC hosted by Richard Ye, which topped 500 people in March.

Greater than Games has effectively shut down as a result of President Trump’s futile tariff war. Their most popular game is Sentinels of the Multiverse.

Bitewing Games has a Kickstarter up for two travel-sized board games, Gingham and Gazebo, the latter of which is from designer Reiner Knizia.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, delaware, Economics, environment, florida, harvard, immigration, links, longreads, mississippi, police, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines

→ April 5, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/5/25.

One piece from me this week at the Athletic, but it’s a long ’un, as I rounded up all of the draft prospects I’d seen in the previous three weeks, covering Arkansas/Vandy, Arizona State, and high school prospects from Arizona, Florida, Alabama (Steele Hall), Nevada (Tate Southisene), and New York. I also held a Klawchat on Wednesday.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Sarah Harman writes about how she spent years hiding the fact that she was a mother from her colleagues and bosses at the TV network where she used to work because she understood the discrimination, overt and covert, that targets mothers and pregnant people in the workplace. It’s especially sobering to read this when anti-discrimination laws are being rolled back willy-nilly.

Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, a crank and anti-vaxxer, has a faculty post at the public University of Florida. He’s barely done anything since he got the job, according to an investigative report in The Alligator. I thought we were supposed to be rooting out corruption and waste.

A Republican judge in North Carolina ruled that 60,000 voters whose ballots have been challenged by the Republican who lost a Supreme Court election there in November have just 15 days to prove their ballots are valid. This is a blatant attempt to overturn a fair and free election. Stop the steal, folks. ProPublica wrote more about this case in January.

We are now living in a police state.

South Dakota taxpayers ponied up over $600,000 to pay for then-Gov. Kristi Noem (R)’s travel, including a junket to Paris, a trip to Houston for cosmetic dental work, and a bear-hunting trip in Canada.

Canary Mission is a decade-old group that’s been doxing university students and faculty they deem antisemitic, using whatever definition they want, and now ICE appears to be using their information to find deportation targets.

The UN says Israel killed 15 Palestinian paramedics and rescue workers, and then buried the evidence in a mass grave. They killed their victims one at a time. Israel, as always, claims they were terrorists. CNN also reported on the story.

The Guardian’s Timothy Snyder writes how JD Vance’s ridiculous posturing in Greenland was more than just embarrassing – it was a huge strategic blunder.

Sen. Jim Banks (R-IN) told a laid-off HHS employee that they “probably deserved it.”

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) quote-tweeted and mocked a trans woman, which of course sent a flood of hate the woman’s way. There was no reason for Mace to do this. It’s just petty, hateful behavior from someone who talks a lot about how much she loves Jesus.

The gutting of federal science agencies will likely have dire economic consequences, warn many independent economists.

A Michigan woman was assaulted at work and reported it to the police. The police then alerted ICE that she was in the U.S. illegally, and she’s almost certainly going to be deported. If the police can do this, then people in the U.S. without authorization won’t go to the police when they’re victims of crime, and that makes them perfect targets.

A curbside happy hour that started in the pandemic in DelCo, Pennsylvania, is still going strong five years later.

That left-leaning tabloid … uh, The Economist described Trump’s tariffs as “mindless” and said they’ll cause “economic havoc.” I mean, yeah. Any first-year econ student could tell you they’re going to hurt the U.S. more than anyone else. This is the same publication that said France should allow the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen to run for President again, just to give you some sense of their perspective.

These economically destructive tariffs are going to cause carnage in the board game industry, where most of the manufacturing takes place in China and small businesses don’t have the margins to absorb the tariffs – nor does anyone expect consumers to spend more money to end up with fewer games.

Stonemaier Games is releasing a new edition of Tokaido, an all-time top 100 game for me and a classic from the designer of 7 Wonders.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, Economics, florida, frauds, gaza, indiana, links, longreads, pennsylvania, police, police state, south carolina, south dakota, stick to baseball, women's rights

→ March 22, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/22/25.

I’m back from Arizona, and wrote five scouting notebooks while I was out there: on the Mariners-Guardians Breakouts Game (plus some Brewers notes), on the Giants-Rangers Breakouts Game (plus some Rockies/Angels notes), on the White Sox-Rockies and Reds-Brewers Breakouts Game (plus some Dodgers notes), on some Dodgers & Guardians prospects, and on some Royals & Rangers prospects. I wanted to do a Klawchat on the flight home but we were delayed an hour-plus and then I fell asleep a few minutes after takeoff.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Teen Vogue’s cover story is a profile of Vivian Jenna Wilson, who happens to be the estranged daughter of Elon Musk, and who has some interesting things to say about her father and on the fight for basic rights for trans people.

The Guardian’s long read explains how an extremist, bigoted rabbi who died over 30 years ago holds sway over leaders at the top of the Israeli government.

M. Gessen, a trans immigrant to the United States, wrote in the New York Times about the “hidden” motive behind Trump’s war on trans rights – which isn’t that hidden, as it’s one of the first steps in the totalitarian playbook: Find a vulnerable minority and demonize them, casting them out of the polity, and then move on to the next one. One time it was the Jews (okay, more than one time). One time it was the Tutsis. One time it was the intellectuals. This time it’s trans people.

One more – The Bulwark’s Jonathan Last rants about how it was never about trans women in sports, and how we should just leave trans people alone.

A 6-year-old girl died of the measles in Texas, because her parents are part of a religious cult that has largely rejected vaccines. The anti-vaccine movement has pounced and is using the death to further press their own dangerous bullshit.

Columbia University bent the knee to President Trump over $400 million in funding. Their endowment, by the way, is about $15 billion. This is an active choice, not a financial necessity.

Prof. Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist and professor of bioethics at Columbia, coincidentally, wrote an editorial for Nature calling on scientists to stand up against the war on DEI.

Three prominent conservatives were arrested just this past week for child sex crimes. The issue is not trans people. It was never trans people. Here’s more on the Minnesota Republican, who spoke out against teaching kids about sexual orientation and gender identity back in 2016. (It’s not limited to right-wingers, though; a Democratic party official in Florida was arrested a few weeks back for the same.)

The Mississippi Free Press reports on deaths and injuries resulting from no-knock raids in that state.

Dark energy might be weakening, challenging cosmologists’ understanding of the way it works and threatening the standard model of the universe.

SpaceX’s Starship ships keep blowing up – and it will never work because of Elon Musk, according to journalist Will Lockett.

I watched Flow at home a couple of weeks ago, and my dog, who almost never looks at any screen at all, seemed to be watching it. Turns out I might not have been imagining it after all – dogs like that movie.

From my colleague Carson Kessler: MLB may be ending its Diversity Pipeline Program to try to comply in advance with the new Administration’s anti-DEI crusade.

A math problem known as the Kakeya Conjecture has been solved after 117 years.

Two board game Kickstarters to highlight this week – Pirates of the High Teas, a light strategy game from a small publisher that tries to bring diverse designers into the space; and Misfit Heroes, a card-crafting game from Phil Walker-Harding.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, israel, links, longreads, mississippi, physics, stick to baseball, trans rights, vaccines

→ March 16, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/15/25.

At the Athletic this week, I posted my annual column of potential breakout players, a draft scouting notebook from seeing UNC-Stanford, and a scouting notebook on the Mariners-Guardians Breakout game with some notes on some Brewers guys. I’ll also have a scouting notebook up shortly on the Giants-Rangers Breakout game.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: WIRED has the most comprehensive look so far at the “digital coup” being staged by Elon Musk and his DOGE toadies.

A doctor at Brown Medicine went to Lebanon to visit her family, and on her return, she was – and still is being – held at Logan Airport for deportation.

The Atlantic’s Tom Bartlett spoke to the Mennonite father whose six-year-old daughter died of the vaccine-preventable disease known as the measles.

A website with AI-generated content accused a scholar at Yale of having connections to a terrorist group, without evidence or any apparent involvement from a human writer or editor. Yale suspended her anyway.

Two professors at my alma mater argued in The Harvard Crimson that it is time for the university to stand up against the Trump regime, and then wrote a similar piece on Columbia’s capitulation and Harvard’s continued silence.

More Harvard news: former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett spoke at Harvard Business School and joked that he’d give pagers to people protesting the war on Gaza, a reference to the Israeli government’s murder of several dozen people in Lebanon via exploding pagers.

Rep. Keith Self (R-TX) deliberately misgendered my Representative, Sarah McBride (D-DE), leading her to refer to him as “Madam Chair” and for ranking Democrat Bill Keating (MA) to actually stand up for her, something Democrats have barely bothered to do since Republicans started their attacks on her.

Robert Morris, a megachurch pastor in Texas who was a “spiritual advisor” to Donald Trump, was indicted in Oklahoma on five counts of lewd and indecent acts with a child. He was a major force behind Texas’s bill banning trans people from using the correct bathrooms, arguing that it would – get the irony – protect children from sexual abuse.

Armenia and Azerbaijan might be ready to sign a peace agreement that would end nearly 30 years of hostilities between the two neighboring nations, both former USSR Republics. Azerbaijan took control of the Armenian exclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in the fall of 2023, but the two share a complicated border; Armenia separates Azerbaijan proper from its constituent republic Nakhchivan, and there are several tiny exclaves along the shared border between Armenia and Azerbaijan proper.

Sarah Spain, my former colleague at ESPN, was honored for her efforts to promote gender equity in sports coverage. I admit I hadn’t heard of the award before and don’t know anything about it, but Sarah has worked very diligently for a very long time in an industry that remains male-dominated and just generally allergic to change, all in the name of promoting women’s voices. She deserves the accolades.

A Seattle chef and Top Chef contestant announced he’s closing his last restaurant, Taku, citing his other non-restaurant obligations, including appearances on Food Network’s Tournament of Champions.

Bernd das Brot is a “depressed loaf of bread” that appears on a German kids’ TV show and has developed a cult following over the last 25 years.

Three board game Kickstarters to highlight this week. Space Lion 2 is a standalone version of last year’s Space Lion that’s specifically designed for two-player games. POND is a deckbuilder with area control elements that the designer says was inspired by Root. And The Great Harbor is a worker placement and dice-drafting game from the designer of 2022’s Magna Roma.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, fascism, harvard, links, longreads, seattle, stick to baseball, top chef, vaccines

→ March 9, 2025
→ By keith

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

→ February 22, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/22/25.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I posted my first draft scouting notebook of 2025, covering the players I saw at the Shriners College Classic, which probably includes anywhere from three to six first-rounders and maybe ten guys who’ll go on day one. I also held a Klawchat here on Thursday.

Coming up, I’ll have my ranking of the top prospects for impact in 2025 on Monday, plus a draft scouting notebook from this weekend probably Tuesday, and then I believe my first ranking of draft prospects will go up around March 5^th.

You can also sign up for my free email newsletter, which didn’t go out this week because I was recovering from some sort of respiratory infection that wasn’t flu or COVID but still sucked.

And now, the links…

The so-called SAVE Act is a backdoor way to make it impossible for millions of women to vote, because they took their husbands’ surnames or have otherwise changed their names so that they no longer match those on their birth certificates. Democrats should be lying in front of the steamrollers to stop this one.

Epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves wrote an editorial in The New York Times about how RFK Jr.’s bullshit “just asking questions” line led to over 300,000 preventable deaths in South Africa, when that country’s leader was a rabid HIV denialist.

The President of the American Association of University Professors wrote an open letter stating that the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights has declared war on civil rights in our education system.

A prosecutor for ICE has been running a Twitter account that’s made highly racist, xenophobic, and white nationalist comments for a decade. He’s still employed by ICE as an attorney as of this writing; I’m surprised he hasn’t been promoted or transferred to DOGE.

SFGate reports on the chaos at Yosemite National Park after DOGE did its thing.

Many Americans are leaving the country for good, or at least for the foreseeable future, as the new Administration is slashing and burning through science and other federal budgets while threatening a level of authoritarianism never seen in this country. I don’t blame them one bit.

Meanwhile, the Administration is flouting federal rulings ordering them to release promised funding for NIH grants by refusing to submit notes to the Federal Register, which is required to release the funds.
Such federal grants help fund studies like this one at the University of Southern Mississippi into the causes of the tick-borne ‘red meat allergy’ that has been spreading across the United States, mostly in the south.

The great Elie Mystal asks how New Yorkers should solve the problem of Eric Adams; the only acceptable answer has him removed from office, obviously.

Quite a coincidence – just as I was reading W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz (spoiler: I hated it), this damning review in the Guardian of a posthumous collection of Sebald’s literary criticism appeared.

A dam in Czechia was held up by red tape, so beavers went and finished it themselves. I for one welcome our new beaver overlords.

The daughters of the late cofounder of Target spoke out against the company’s decision to end DEI initiatives, which have also led to a big drop in the company’s share price.

The mayor and city council in Clarksdale, Mississippi, sued a local newspaper for publishing an accurate story on a secret vote that the council was required to announce to the public before holding. The paper took the editorial down, but other sites are publishing it to get the word out.

Some board game Kickstarters of interest: Flatout Games has one for Point Galaxy, the third game in the Point Salad/City series, along with a new small-box citybuilder called Propolis.

Rock Manor Games has one up for StarDriven: Gateway, the second go-round after they pulled a campaign in the fall to tweak the game somewhat. I’ve demoed this game, as the publisher is a friend (our kids go to school together), and I recommend it.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, denialism, links, longreads, mississippi, new york city, our dying democracy, science, stick to baseball, vaccines, voting rights

→ January 25, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/25/25.

I had two posts for subscribers to the Athletic this week, on the signings of Anthony Santander and Jurickson Profar. My ranking of the top 100 prospects in baseball will go live on Monday morning; the content is all written but I am still tweaking the final order.

At Paste, I reviewed the game Gnome Hollow, a medium-weight family game of tile placement, set collection, and some market selling, along with gnomes. I liked it but I would say I didn’t love it.

I did send a short newsletter out to subscribers earlier last week; you can subscribe here for free and get the next one, which I hope will go out Monday/Tuesday to go along with the unveiling of the top 100.

As the social media landscape has lurched to the right, I’m posting links on several sites but only posting other content or answering people on Bluesky, so if you want to interact with me that’s the spot.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Molly White writes in her newsletter, [citation needed], about Elon Musk’s and the right’s war on Wikipedia, a source of information they can’t easily control.
An independent journalist is going to trial over her coverage of the police response to a pro-Palestine protest at Portland State University. Alissa Azar has already been convicted once for her work, as the police claim she’s not a journalist, but “antifa.” How convenient for them.
Joe Kahn, the executive editor of the New York Times, said that defending democracy would amount to “abandoning its central role as a source of impartial information.” His comments, made to a former colleague of his now at Semafor, didn’t go over well.
Just days after a (so-called?) cease-fire in Gaza, Israel launched a major offensive against Palestinians in the West Bank city of Jenin. La plus ça change.
I hate to link to the dumpster fire that is Politico, but they have a good piece on how RFK Jr. might try to remove vaccines from the market entirely if he’s confirmed as HHS Secretary. And his buddy Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) might vote for him. If you live in Rhode Island, you need to call Sen. Whitehouse’s office on Monday morning.
Florida has benefited from net positive migration for years because of its weather, cheap real estate, and general economic growth. That may be changing, as more people left Florida in 2023 than any other state but California. Climate change and the state’s hard-right shift are likely causes.
My former colleague at the Athletic Lindsey Adler has a newsletter of her own now after she left the Wall Street Journal, and her latest issue, “Ten Years in a Crumbling Industry,” is an excellent look at her decade in (mostly) digital media and what it’s been like to work in a field that’s imploding around you like the Hamptons sequence in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Character.AI has been in the media more for problems with its software, including one user’s suicide after he became obsessed with a chatbot modeled after Daenerys Targaryen, than for anything good about the product. So why would any media brand want to partner with them?
Jeb Lund writes at Truthdig that AOC ’28 needs to start now – not necessarily because she’ll win, but because she is the right person to stand front and center as the leader of the opposition to the President. And I agree. I don’t think concerns about “electability” are even relevant any more; Trump should have been the most unelectable candidate ever, and he just won his biggest victory yet.
At Slate, Dan Kois writes about The Straight Story, David Lynch’s most conventional film, and an absolute fucking masterpiece.
Outgoing President Joe Biden commuted the sentence Leonard Peltier, who spent nearly 50 years in prison for a murder he says he didn’t commit. The federal government withheld a ballistics report that showed the fatal shots did not come from Peltier’s gun, and no witnesses identified him as the shooter.
Support our troops! But don’t give them houses! Oklahoma scrapped a plan by the Veterans Community Project to build tiny homes for homeless veterans in Oklahoma City after neighbors objected. I bet they stand for the anthem, though!
Elon Musk made a Nazi salute at the inauguration, twice. We know that’s what it was because neo-Nazis online said so – and they loved it.
Greg Sargent of the New Republic says that Trump allies are conceding they don’t have a huge “mandate” after all. I’m not sure this means much if no one is willing to stand up to him.
The New England Patriots set up a Bluesky account and the NFL told them to shut it down. Then the league announced a new partnership with Twitter.
The Columbia Journalism Review has a story on how the White House press corps is looking forward to a second Trump term. It’s the most effective way I can think of to make someone hate the media. The people they spoke to do not care who’s hurt or what the long-term effects on the country might be, as long as their individual jobs are easier.
One of Trump’s barrage of executive orders tried to erase the existence of trans people. It is cruelty for cruelty’s sake. No one benefits from this – certainly not the very women who such orders are supposed to protect, not as their rights to basic medical care are also under assault.
Another order froze pretty much all business at the NIH, which is going to seriously impact critical scientific research on things like cancer treatments and disease prevention. NIH, NSF, and other federal agencies fund all kinds of research into medicine, mental health, and other areas of science that have helped keep the American economy among the world’s strongest and driven continued improvements in global health. That’s all at risk now.
The American Association of University Professors put out a statement called “Against Anticipatory Obedience.” Do not comply in advance. It’s not hard to remember.
We have a new Fabio Lopiano (Merv, 3 Ring Circus) game up on Kickstarter, called Baghdad: The City of Peace. I love Lopiano’s games – they’re medium-heavy but manageable – and this one looks like it’ll have great art similar to that of Merv, which I own and have played just once but kept because it’s so gorgeous.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: artificial intelligence, board game news, fascism, football, links, longreads, movies, oklahoma, police, portland, rhode island, science, social media, stick to baseball, trans rights, vaccines

→ January 12, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/12/25.

I took a month or so off from these Saturday posts, mostly because I was busy just about every weekend in December – PAX Unplugged, hosting two holiday parties, getting ready for Christmas, then traveling. I do plan to return these to their normal format, but for now I’m doing a briefer one just to get one posted after I was out of town for the weekend (we went to NYC to see friends and to watch SIX).

I did have one story up this week for subscribers to The Athletic, covering the Gavin Lux trade and associated signing by the Dodgers of Hyeseong Kim.

Over at Paste, my review of the excellent board game Tower Up went up this past week; that game appeared on my list of the top ten games of 2024.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Defector’s exhaustive history of the barely-a-company Color Star, which first appeared on anyone’s radar when they signed a partnership deal with the 76ers in 2021 that the team quickly rescinded, is completely bizarre and an amazing piece of investigative work. The short version is that the company looks like it’s been running some kind of stock scam for at least five years, and has never produced any actual product or service.

The New Yorker has the story of one author’s copyright infringement lawsuit alleging another author, an editor, and a publisher stole the plot and many key details from of one of her unpublished novels, which delves into the question of how far you can copy an idea before it might cross into infringement, but also explains the anti-literary world of “romantasy” and other fast-fashion books that are written to chase trends on TikTok and other social media.

ProPublica published an exposé from and about a man who, on his own, infilitrated multiple right-wing militias, collecting data on members and recording conversations with leaders. He believes they’ll take the country down if they’re not stopped soon.

Dogs who press buttons to ‘talk’ to their owners are all the rage on Instagram and TikTok. Is there any science behind this? I’m a strong skeptic here, and I think the experts quoted in this New York Times Magazine piece lean that way as well, although there are experiments underway to try to understand better what dogs really can understand and express.

Some idiot flew a drone into forbidden airspace over the Palisades wildfire last week, and it crashed into a Super Scooper firefighting plane, disabling it.

Greg Sargent & Kyle Cheney discuss Rep. Jamie Raskin’s (D) pointed and very accurate criticism of the phone call between SCOTUS Justice Samuel Alito and President-Elect Donald Trump.

Editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes quit the Washington Post after the paper refused to run a cartoon she drew that depicted billionaires bending the knee to the incoming President. She explained why on her Substack.

Coffee futures prices hit record highs in December and haven’t come down much thanks to below-average rainfall in Brazil and bad weather in Vietnam, the two largest coffee producers in the world. Between weather, climate change, and rising demand, coffee futures prices are up over 75% in the last year.

Are we ready for the next pandemic? Of course not!

This story is a bit out of date, but I’m going to share it anyway because it touches on two topics of particular interest to me, board games and the enshittification of social media: Facebook banned ads for the Kickstarter for an upcoming board game called First Monday in October, which is about the Supreme Court, claiming the ads’ content could somehow influence how people voted in elections.

The now-fired fact checker group that worked with Facebook for the past nine years published an open letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg about the likely consequences of his decision to end fact-checking on the site. Do not comply in advance.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, coffee, frauds, links, longreads, science, social media, stick to baseball

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