board game news — Page 11

→ January 31, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/31/21.

My ranking of the top 100 prospects in baseball ran this Thursday for subscribers to the Athletic; the column of guys who just missed the list will run on Monday. Subscribers can also read my breakdown of the Jameson Taillon trade. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday afternoon.

Over at Paste, my review of the game Cloud City, a disappointing game from a designer whose work I really love, is now up.

I joined my friend Eric Longenhagen on the Fangraphs Audio podcast this week to talk top 100s and the process of assembling them, especially in this weird year.

My most recent edition of my free email newsletter shared some details of my recent nuptials, and I’ll send another issue at some point this week. You can still buy The Inside Gameand Smart Baseball anywhere you buy books; the paperback edition of The Inside Game will be out in April.

And now, the links…

David Sirota weighs in on the New York Times‘ publication of what amounted to a GOP press release and other media nonsense in the wake of the terror attack on the Capitol.
The Times fired a reporter earlier this month for saying she got “chills” during Biden’s inauguration, but when reporter Don McNeil used the n-word and other offensive terms on a trip with students, they promoted him.
Scientific American looks at the most worrying mutations in five COVID-19 variants.
The BBC looks at the twenty-year search for the billions of dollars stolen by former Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha.
A former KGB agent alleges in a new book that the Russian agency cultivated Trump as an asset for nearly 40 years.
A white Ohio state Senator named Stephen Huffman (guess) questioned whether “the colored population do not wash their hands as well as other groups,” and now he’s leading the Ohio Senate Health Committee.
Dr. Peter Hotez, author of Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism, wrote that Biden’s new vaccine goal is good, but not ambitious enough.
Sen. Josh Hawley’s “ludicrous clean-up act,” to try to undo the damage done to his reputation earlier this month, is already underway.
A new study showed that some bacteria adapt to antibiotics by changing their shape, which can reduce the surface area for antibiotics to penetrate.
Delaware’s Senate passed our version of the CROWN Act, banning discrimination against people based on their hair or hairstyle. It has to pass the House and be signed by Gov. Carney, but both are extremely likely.
A Magic: the Gathering card sold for over $500,000 at auction last week.
Asmodee and Game in Lab announced a clinical study that showed that playing board games might help Alzheimer’s sufferers.
I haven’t seen or played the game Coffee Talk, but this one-year lookback makes it sound kind of weirdly fun. Then again, I bought Necrobarista two months ago and still haven’t played it, so maybe I won’t.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, coronavirus, delaware, links, ohio, science, stick to baseball, the grey lady

→ January 23, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/23/21.

I had two columns this week for subscribers to the Athletic, on the George Springer signing and the Joe Musgrove trade. My top 100 prospects ranking will appear on Thursday, January 28^th, with the org rankings and team top 20s running the week of February 8^th.

For Paste, I reviewed New York Zoo, a light tile-placement game from Uwe Rosenberg, the designer of Patchwork, Cottage Garden, and Agricola.

I’ll send out another edition of my free email newsletter this weekend, with some exciting personal news. You can still buy The Inside Gameand Smart Baseball anywhere you buy books; the paperback edition of The Inside Game will be out in April.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Harvard magazine looks at the loneliness pandemic, which predated the COVID-19 one but has been exacerbated by the last ten months of shutdowns and isolation.

California’s public utilities regulator fired an employee who found $200 million due to disadvantaged state residents had gone missing.

Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in the Atlantic that now that Trump is gone, we need to reckon with how he got into office in the first place.

A vaccine-hesitant mom rushed to vaccinate her kids when the pandemic hit, and she talked to NPR about how she ended up hesitant based on bad information she found onilne.

Trump and a Justice Department lawyer were planning to oust the Attorney General and try to force Georgia to invalidate Joe Biden’s win there.

Some notes from the right-wing terrorist attack on the Capitol: Black police officers described the racism they faced and heard during the assault, while members of several well-known hate groups were spotted among the rioters. A non-participant who was in the crowd documented what he saw in words and pictures. The farthest-right groups are trying to use Telegram to further radicalize new recruits disaffected by Biden’s win – perhaps some of the QAnon adherents in “disarray” after their long-awaited Storm never happened.

One of Delaware’s Senators, Chris Coons (D), argued in the New York Times that we need to hold Trump accountable for encouraging the terrorists through his words and tweets.

Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) has lied to the public about many things in his very short life, and the latest is that he’s been lying about being a contender for the Paralympics in wheelchair racing.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) has been lying about having experience as an Army Ranger in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Why in the actual fuck did the federal government give PPP money to anti-vaccine groups in the middle of a pandemic?

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is an intelligent person and he’s wasted it backing Trump.

The Washington Post looks at the investigative journalism outfit Bellingcat, which helped crack the secret of Alexei Navalny’s poisoning, and their unorthodox methods.

The federal government executed Lisa Montgomery among their rush to kill as many prisoners as they could before Trump left office, in spite of her documented history as a victim of horrendous sexual and physical abuse. (Trigger warning.)

Uganda President Yoweri Museveni has stayed in power for 35 years, despite frequent claims of oppression, malfeasance, even spending international debt relief on a private jet. He appears to have won re-election this week, although his main opponent claims there was voter fraud.

Slate has an argument of why Parler getting wiped off the internet is bad for everyone. I don’t agree, but it’s a thought-provoking read.

Twitter bots have become a major source of disinformation on climate change, just as Pres. Biden has made fighting climate change a core policy.

I really liked the documentary Boys State, which is only available on Apple TV+, and one of the main participants wrote about attending the event in a New York Times editorial.

Board game news: The Kickstarter for the worker placement game Darwin’s Journey ends in five days.

Umbra Via, which won an award for unpublished games in 2019, is now available for pre-order from Pandasaurus.

Eagle-Gryphon has a Kickstarter for two new two-player games, Illumination and The Road to Canterbury.

Bézier Games posted a look at their games due out early in 2021.

Quined restarted its Kickstarter for the new game Carnegie, which looks like a heavy economic and routebuilding game from the designer of Troyes.

Casual Game Revolution is holding voting for the best casual game of 2020, with the candidates My City, Calico, and Back to the Future: Back in Time.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, board game news, climate change, links, longreads, social media, the swamp, vaccines

→ January 9, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/9/21.

I had one post for subscribers to The Athletic this week, breaking down the trade that sent Francisco Lindor and Carlos Carrasco to the Mets for four players. Just about everything else is on hold as I have started work on the top 100 prospects package, which will run on or around February 1^st.

I will, however, keep writing my free email newsletter this month, with the next issue probably going out by Monday. My thanks to all of you who bought – or asked for – either of my books this holiday season. You can still buy The Inside Game and Smart Baseball anywhere you buy books.

And now, the links…

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) lost his son to suicide on New Year’s Eve, and then survived the terror attack on the Capitol this week. The Atlantic spoke to him about this awful sequence of events. The Congressman and his wife wrote a beautiful, heartfelt eulogy to their son after his death.
This was a coup, and it should lead to impeachment.
The Kansas City Star called for Sen. Josh Hawley to resign or be removed, as members of his own party condemn his words and actions.
“They’re shooting at us. They’re supposed to shoot BLM, but they’re shooting the patriots.” The Nation‘s Andrew McCormick reports from the scene of the assault.
The woman who was shot and killed while breaking into the Speaker’s Lobby was an Air Force veteran who fell for the QAnon hoax and other right-wing bullshit spread online.
How can we fight the flood of false information that led hundreds of Americans to storm the Capitol and scream nonsense about auditing the vote? The Guardian spoke to multiple experts, but there are no simple answers: Disinformation spreads easily, but combating it is harder.
George Saunders believes social media is killing us. He’s also thinking about writing an epic novel along the lines of the Russian classics.
A lawsuit over a high school punishing a student for her use of foul language on Snapchat could alter free speech rights for students across the country.
Federal disaster aid disproportionately helps affluent communities and exacerbates racial and economic disparities.
The EPA just adopted a new rule making it harder for regulators to use data that aren’t available to the public, yet another way in which the outgoing Administration is making it easier for companies and individuals to despoil the environment with impunity.
There’s a Danish children’s show about a man who can’t control his enormous penis.
Just two years after he won the Nobel Peace Prize, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has begun attacks against Tigrayan dissidents in the north of the country and now has fallen out with their neighbors in Sudan.
The BBC has an ode to the alfajor, the most popular cookie in South America.
A clinical social worker tells of the hospice patient who told him of a ghost he saw who changed his view of life.
Board game news: there’s a new Kickstarter for the very intriguing game Darwin’s Journey, co-designed by Simone Luciani, the designer of Tzolk’in and Tekhenu.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, board game news, cookies, hoaxes, links, stick to baseball, the swamp

→ December 26, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/26/20.

I had one post this week for subscribers to the Athletic, looking at six of the players who impressed me or beat my expectations for them in the truncated 2020 season.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Tekhenu and Tawantinsuyu, two heavy, complex games from the publishers Board & Dice. Tekhenu made my top ten games of the year. I also have a post up at Vulture on the best board games of 2020 in various categories.

If you missed it here on the dish, I posted my annual rankings of my top 100 songs and favorite 15 albums of the year.

This link roundup is a bit skewed – I was fully possessed by the Christmas spirit this week and offline a good bit more than usual – but here are the links…

Longreads first: Actor Leonard Roberts detailed explicit and implicit racism from his time on the NBC series Heroes.
Ed Yong’s superb writing on the pandemic continued for the Atlantic with his latest column on how science defeated the virus, going from zero scientists studying the virus 13 months ago to multiple effective vaccines already delivered to first responders.
ProPublica detailed the misdeeds of a family court judge in Ohio who brought his own denialism of COVID-19 into the courtroom, including threatening to jail a mother for contempt of court if she got one her sons tested for the virus. He’s also collecting a salary and a pension by exploiting a loophole in Ohio laws, claiming he intended to retire but also running for re-election (which he won, running unopposed).
A new study out by two LSE economists shows that cutting taxes on the rich does not, in fact, create jobs for anyone. This had been a long-argued point by classical economists; I was taught it in college and business school. The evidence says otherwise.
A CNN/Bellingcat investigation identified the specific Russian agents who poisoned opposition politician Alexey Navalny.
The New York Times had a wonderful history of Chartreuse liqueur and how the spirit is surviving when most bars are closed.
Monopoly accounts for about 30% of mass-market board game sales – which excludes the hobby channel – and it got there in large part due to monopolistic behavior by Hasbro. Competition from new publishers, including the acquisitive, PE-owned Asmodee, might dent that stranglehold on the niche.
Denver’s Tattered Cover is now the country’s largest Black-owned bookstore.
Philly’s independent, listener-supported radio station WXPN counted down the top 2020 songs of all time, and the ranking reflected the eclectic nature of their audience. (If you just want the list, it’s here.)
NME ranked every Arctic Monkeys song ever.I’m not nearly as high on their #1 choice, and would put “R U Mine” in that spot, with “I Bet You Look Good on the Dance Floor,” “Arabella,” “Flourescent Adolescent,” “Do I Wanna Know,” and “From the Ritz to the Rubble” also in the top ten.
Two of the surviving members of the Waitresses told the Guardian about the making of their song “Christmas Wrapping.”
Megachurch leader and entrepreneur Joel Osteen received a $4.4 million PPP payment, from funds primarily intended for small businesses. Neither Osteen nor his wife, who also works for the church, received any of the payout.
New research shows that COVID-19 is much deadlier for younger people than previously believed.
Delaware’s New Castle County bought a local hotel and is turning it into a shelter for unstably housed persons.
The BBC has a video on the growing hole in the earth in Siberia, the result of the interaction between permafrost and the environment.
The new diplomatic agreement between Israel and Sudan, one of several trumpeted by the Trump Administration as a foreign-policy victory, threatens the status of Sudanese migrants in Israel.
Sen. Mitch McConnell bragged about being the “grim reaper” of Congress; the pandemic has made that nickname a reality.
One of the local leaders of the protests in Louisville in response to the police murder of Breonna Taylor was himself shot and killed on Friday.
From my colleagues at the Athletic ($), Omar Vizquel’s wife has accused him of domestic violence.
There’s just four days left in this Kickstarter for the Vindication board game’s new edition and its Chronicles expansion.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, bookstores, coronavirus, delaware, links, liquor, stick to baseball

→ November 29, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/29/20.

I had one piece this week for subscribers to the Athletic, on the Reds-Rockies trade and Atlanta’s two free agent signings, as well as a piece last week on what we can learn from the various pro leagues’ approaches to the pandemic. I held a Periscope video chat on Thanksgiving day while I spatchcocked the turkey.

Over at Paste, I ranked the ten best deduction board games, including Coup and this year’s The Search for Planet X.

I held off on sending the next issue of my free email newsletter until after the holiday so I could write up the trade and signings, but I’ll get one out in the next 48 hours. You can sign up for free here.

My first book, Smart Baseball, got a glowing review from SIAM News, a publication of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics. You can buy Smart Baseball and my second book, The Inside Game, at any bookstore, including bookshop.org via those links, although Smart Baseball has been backordered there for a while. You can check your local indie bookstore or buy it on amazon.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This GQ article, about the author’s parents and a promise each made to never put the other spouse in a nursing home, is just heartbreaking.
The New Yorker details the underground network (with many Korean-Americans) trying to topple the North Korean government.
NiemanLab details the moral and business cases for increasing diversity in the newsroom, although with newspapers dying it may be a bit of a lost cause.
The Justice Department is now looking into the questionable stock trades by Sen. David Perdue (R-GA) that I mentioned in a link last week. If you’re still voting for this crook – who still refuses to debate Jon Ossoff, his Democrat opponent – I really don’t know what to tell you.
The logic of COVID-19 restrictions is falling apart, because they’re determined by economic factors, not by science.
SCOTUS’ decision last week on COVID-19 restrictions, written by “scientifically illiterate judges,” will cost Americans’ lives, writes economist Dr. Jeffrey Sachs.
YouTube finally suspended the feed of the nationalist One American News Network for spreading bogus information on the pandemic – not for spreading bullshit about the election.
A coffee brand that had capitalized on its conservative political leanings ran into trouble when it (rightfully) declined to support accused murderer Kyle Rittenhouse.
Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Anti-Racist, discussed how to make higher education less overtly racist in an online talk with Radcliffe and Harvard College Everywhere.
From 2010, Ed Yong, who has written some essential pieces on the COVID-19 pandemic for The Atlantic this year, wrote about a woman whose amygdala was so damaged that she can no longer experience fear.
The Wall Street Journal profiled the conservative social media network Parler, but the real revelation here is that it’s backed by the Mercer family, whose views are about as neo-Nazi and white nationalist as it gets.
Anti-lockdown twits like to point to Sweden as some sort of success story, but so far there’s no evidence herd immunity is working there – and they’re faring much worse than their Nordic neighbors.
Greg Burton writes for the Arizona Republic about how the modern environment has made it more dangerous for journalists to do the most routine tasks for their jobs.
On Tuesday, December 1^st, the Welsh Rugby Union is hosting a free community talk on autism and the autism community in Wales. (I’m friends with one of the scheduled speakers.)
Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff locked students out of remote class sessions if they failed to get required COVID-19 tests. Getting tested isn’t just about you, but it’s a responsibility to your community.
Several board game publishers have Black Friday sales going on right now, including Renegade, Capstone, Floodgate, and Japanime.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, autism, board game news, coronavirus, georgia, longreads, science, stick to baseball, sweden

→ November 14, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/14/20.

For subscribers to The Athletic, I wrote about the major rule changes in MLB in 2020 that might stick around, and which ones might be worth keeping. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed The Search for Planet X, a deduction game that is one of the best board games I’ve played all year.

My guest on this week’s episode of The Keith Law Show was Fangraphs managing editor Meg Rowley, talking with me about the state of baseball, free agency, and some recent managerial hires. My podcast is now available on Amazon podcasts as well as iTunes and Spotify.

I’m due for another edition of my free email newsletter, this weekend, I hope.

As the holiday season approaches, I’ll remind you every week that my books The Inside Game and Smart Baseball make excellent gifts for the baseball fan or avid reader in your life.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: In Arkansas, tenants who fall behind on their rent can end up in jail, because apparently that state is still operating like the setting of a Dickens novel. The law dates back to the turn of the last century and even prosecutors say it’s probably unconstitutional. ProPublica examines the law and cases where people, often women and people of color, have been further victimized by it. Arkansas voted overwhelmingly red this month, giving Trump, his sycophant Sen. Tom Cotton, and three of their four Representatives at least 60% of the vote, while elections in the two chambers of their state legislature went more than 3 to 1 for Republicans.
An extensive disinformation campaign run by Russian and Syrian intelligence agencies led to the suicide of the founder of Mayday Rescue, best known as the group that helped create Syria’s White Helmets.
Scientists may have solved the information paradox of black holes, which was first described by Stephen Hawking. Black holes appear to be able to ‘shed’ information, rather than simply absorbing (and thus destroying) all information that enter them. This goes against Einstein’s theory of general relativity, instead relying on quantum gravity.
From September of 2019, this Washington Monthly story profiles a far-right Youtube hatemonger whose rise in popularity has been a nightmare for establishment conservatives – yet they have no problem courting that audience’s votes come elections.
Protocol has a brief history of Discord, the popular social media app for gamers (which I’ve used several times to demo board games with publishers), although it’s still not really clear how the company can monetize this large audience.
Taiwan’s 2014 Sunflower Revolution led to a change in how its democracy works, powered by a new platform called vTaiwan that facilitates discussion of policy matters and encourages consensus rather than the chaos typical of social media.
Rev. Raphael Warnock is a Democrat running against Sen. Kelly Loeffler in one of the two runoff elections in Georgia in January, and Republicans are attacking him for a 2002 arrest for obstruction of justice … which was for objecting to police interrogating minors without a lawyer or guardians present. The investigators later apologized.
Meanwhile, multi-millionaire Sen. David Perdue (R), facing Jon Ossoff (D) in the other runoff, is a climate change denier who owns a beachfront mansion in a neighborhood that has taken extensive steps to protect itself from rising sea levels.
And major GOP donors are pouring money into the state to try to preserve the GOP’s advantage in the Senate.
Several State Senate candidates in Florida were fake candidates funded by dark money to confuse voters into not voting for Democrats – such as an Alex Rodriguez running against the Democrat Jose Javier Rodriguez in a district the Republican won by just 31 votes.
This was published the day before the election, but Vox described some activist groups’ plans to fight back when Trump refused to concede the election, some of which we’ve seen already in action.
A Republican firm run by a top aide on Trump’s campaign sent out mass, unmarked tests to Philly supporters urging them to protest vote-counting in the city.
From Nate Silver: Joe Biden won pretty convincingly in the end.
Jennifer Rubin (writing in the Washington Post) writes that changing demographics spell trouble for the Republican Party going forward as their path to the Presidency gets narrower.
The same paper reports on the shift of Latinx voters in the Rio Grande valley towards Trump, even as the state as a whole moved towards Biden, underscoring the diversity of the Latinx population, especially when it comes to what issues and policies matter to each voter, and the Democrats’ messaging failure in that region.
Roxane Gay wrote for the New York Times that the continued support for Trump is a disgrace, but that she’s energized and ready to fight for a better future. I don’t understand how 70 million Americans can see (gestures wildly around self) this and say they want four more years of it.
This Twitter thread undercuts any arguments in favor of the Electoral College, asking whether its defenders even understand what they’re defending.
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito went on a steeply partisan rant while speaking at the Federalist Society. Not for nothing, but the house impeached SCOTUS Justice Samuel Chase in 1804 on grounds that he was too partisan.
Public health experts and scientists say Utah’s government is ignoring their calls for action to stop the state’s COVID-19 surge, with an infection rate of 1.17, 81.3 daily new cases per 100,000 residents, and less than 25% of their ICU beds available.
Meanwhile, Florida hired an unqualified, conspiracy theory-touting sports blogger for its COVID-19 task force. He showed up in my mentions one time with some bullshit about masks being ineffective (fun fact – they are, and the CDC just updated their recommendations to say that masks offer the wearer more protection than previously believed).
WHYY’s The Pulse podcast looks at the ongoing efforts to develop a COVID-19 vaccine and the upcoming battle to get people to trust it.
Have you seen the claim that suicides are up 200% due to the lockdown, often cited as an argument against a second closing of the economy? It’s false, and it’s gross to try to use suicide, a very real problem, to fight policies designed to reduce the spread the coronavirus.
The Cut looks at several youngish Americans who are ignoring the pandemic and guidelines for limiting its spread by traveling around the world without regard to the consequences of their selfish actions.
High Street on Market, my favorite restaurant in Philadelphia, has closed temporarily but plans to relocate and open again in 2021. Their sibling restaurant Fork is still open, with outdoor seating, as they had a different lease and landlord.
Geneva now has the world’s highest minimum wage, about US$25 an hour, to allow the many service workers in its city to pay their rent and feed themselves without having to rely on public assistance or food pantries. It’s the same problem facing low-wage earners in many U.S. cities like San Francisco – they can’t afford to live in or near the city where they work.
Chris Archer wrote on the Players Coalition site about how absurdly hard it was for him to vote.
Vogue offered a quick appreciation of Stacey Abrams’ role in turning Georgia blue – which may matter even more in those upcoming runoffs. You can volunteer to help the Democrats try to win those seats or donate to Abrams’ Fair Fight.
VICE explores the history of the Great Barrier Hotel, once floating near the reef of that name but now moored and disused on the coast of North Korea.
Sarah McBride became the highest-ranking trans elected official in the U.S. when she won election to the state Senate here in Delaware this month.
This Inside Hook article on The Strand bookstore is the most balanced look I’ve seen at the controversy around the store’s actions this year with its workforce and PPP loan. (The owner’s purchase of shares in Amazon is a red herring, mentioned to get an emotional reaction but logical for any high net worth investor during a pandemic.)
The New York Times‘ nepotista Maggie Haberman has made a career out of normalizing and excusing Donald Trump and many of his supporters; Drew Magary skewers her, the Times, and the paper’s bizarre decision to run a profile of her in its own pages.
The Court of Master Sommeliers, Americas has failed in its response to dozens of claims from women that they were manipulated or sexually abused by men on that certification body, which certifies Sommeliers and Master Sommeliers in the U.S. and Canada. They’re on their second apology already.
Philadelphia was prepared for post-election violence, but street protests turned into dance parties. That was no accident, but was the result of planning efforts by the Working Families Party, a pro-labor, semi-progressive political party mostly active in the northeast.
Board game news: Asmodee introduced Connect and Play, guides for playing some of its games over Zoom or other remote communication services, including Just One and Dixit.
Satish Pillalamarri, one of the co-founders of North Star Games (publishers of Evolution and the Quacks of Quedlinburg), passed away this month at the age of 42 due to cancer.
Quined Games, a European publisher of primarily mid-weight to heavy games like Agra and Keyflower, announced that the new game Carnegie will hit Kickstarter on November 23^rd. It’s from the designer of Carson City and co-designer of Troyes.
Z-Man Games has released Pandemic Legacy: Season 0, the final installment in this trilogy, this one a prequel to the other two games and thus not a continuation of that storyline.
Evolution, which has been out for Steam and tablets since late 2019, is coming to Nintendo Switch in December.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, florida, georgia, links, longreads, philadelphia, physics, social media, stick to baseball, syria, taiwan, utah, voter suppression

→ October 17, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/17/20.

Just one piece this week for subscribers to the Athletic as I work on the top 40 free agents ranking, which will run a few days after the World Series ends: Nick Groke, our Rockies beat writer, asked me a bunch of questions about Colorado’s farm system, and I dutifully answered them. Klawchat, board game reviews, and dish posts should return next week.

My guest on this week’s episode of The Keith Law Show was my old partner-in-crime Eric Karabell, although Bias Cat did not make an appearance. My podcast is now available on Amazon podcasts as well as iTunes and Spotify.

I’m due to send out a fresh edition of my free email newsletter this weekend as well. We’ll see how that works out for me.

As the holiday season approaches, I’ll remind you every week that my books The Inside Game and Smart Baseball make excellent gifts for the baseball fan or avid reader in your life.

And now, the links…

The New England Journal of Medicine has just weighed in on the election, urging Americans to vote Trump out of office, the first time it’s done so in its 208-year history. This comes on the heels of Scientific American and Nature doing the same. The Lancet published an editorial calling on governments to act now in accordance with the science, attacking the so-called herd immunity approach and supporting continued attempts to control the virus’s spread.

Now some longreads: ProPublica details the fall of the CDC, undermined from above by the anti-science Trump Administration and from within by craven, spineless leadership.

David Wallace-Wells writes for New York that there’s still no plan to stop the pandemic, a third crest is approaching, and we’re basically waiting until January – and hoping that brings a functional government – to do anything about it. Imagine how quickly this Administration would have committed a few billion dollars to responding if 200,000 Americans died from terror attacks rather than a virus.

The President and his children have turned the government into a sort of personal ATM, as exposed by this New York Times investigative piece, which you’d think would be the sort of thing to turn off the very voters who said they wanted him to drain the swamp.

Sara Benincasa’s essay “Fred and Me” is just wonderful and I won’t spoil it in the least.

Scientists confirmed that a Nevada man caught COVID-19 twice, requiring assistance breathing the second time around, which has some unpleasant connotations for the future of the pandemic and should end any discussion of a strategy based solely around herd immunity.

Why has Germany handled COVID-19 better than its neighbors? By following the science, including implementing widescale, frequent testing.

Earlier in October, a group of people who’ve lost loved ones to the pandemic set up 200,000 chairs on a lawn facing the White House to protest the government’s inaction.

One of those who’ve died from COVID-19 was a 44-year-old husband and father of two young children in northern New Jersey. He leaves behind a two-year-old daughter and a six-month-old son.

QAnon, the batshit-crazy hoax embraced by multiple alt-right figures and now our sitting President, is tearing families apart as people become sucked into this utterly false conspiracy theory and alienate family members with their nonsense.

A new complaint alleges that ICE is torturing Cameroonian immigrants to try to coerce them into signing deportation documents.

A six-year period of horrendous weather may have exacerbated the 1918-19 Spanish flu pandemic.

Lauren Witzke, the Delaware GOP candidate for the Senate seat currently held by Democrat Chris Coons, appeared on white-nationalist, anti-immigrant hate site VDare last month, not long before saying the Proud Boys provide security at her events. She has no chance to win, but still, Delaware Republicans should revoke their endorsement of her.

Neal Karlen was a close friend of Prince and interviewed him many times over a period of about a dozen years earlier in the musician’s career. He’s written a biography of Prince called This Thing Called Life (natch) and this excerpt tells how Prince was the loneliest person he’d ever met.

Draining the swamp update: A former patent litigator became a federal judge and is openly advising patent trolls to come to his court. This lets those trolls abuse the patent system (which has its own problems, but still) for their own profit, and ultimately American consumers will end up paying the cost.

Project Veritas, the grift run by so-called journalist James O’Keefe, bribed the brother of a Minneapolis councilman to say he was harvesting ballots for Rep. Ilhan Omar, a popular target of Islamophobes.

There may be a new, more efficient method of answering the traveling salesperson problem, which makes use of the geometry of polynomials to improve the results. A truly efficient solution probably can’t be found in polynomial time, which refers to the P vs. NP problem described in the book The Golden Ticket.

HBO Max has a new series called Patria, based on the bestselling novel by Fernando Aramburu. The Guardian explains how a novel about Basque separatists’ decades-long terror campaign became a global success.

Paul Heaton, former lead singer for the Housemartins and the Beautiful South, made a large donation to help the staff of the shuttered music magazine Q.

Several people sent me this story from the New York Times on how local bookstores are struggling to survive in the pandemic and lockdowns.

Irina Slavina, a Russian journalist who reported on excesses of the government’s security apparatus, killed herself via self-immolation in front of the Interior Ministry headquarters earlier this month.

This 2018 piece from Smithsonian magazine details some of the science behind the flavors of chocolate.

Board game news: The Princess Bride Adventure Book Game is out and exclusively on sale at Target.

The Kickstarter for Flora, a “semi-cooperative” game based on the Voynich manuscript, launched this week.

Greenbrier Games’ cooperative story-based game Lost Ones funded its Kickstarter in the first day.

Cascadia, from the publisher and artist behind the game Calico (which I haven’t played but hear is quite good), has already blown past its tiny funding goal.

The role-playing game designer outfit Roll20 is holding a 3-day virtual gaming con with proceeds to benefit a charity focused on racial justice.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, bookstores, chocolate, coronavirus, delaware, hoaxes, links, longreads, math, Music, prince, russia, stick to baseball, the swamp

→ September 26, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/26/20.

Nothing new this week at the Athletic, but I’m hoping to write two pieces this upcoming week to make up for it.

I reviewed the light resource-management and tile-placement game Cosmic Colonies for Paste this week; it’s a fine enough game, but I was left a little underwhelmed because it didn’t offer anything I hadn’t seen before in other games.

My guest on The Keith Law Show this week was my colleague at the Athletic Kaitlyn McGrath, talking about what it’s been like covering a team (the Blue Jays) she can’t see in person because they’re playing in the U.S. You can also subscribe to my podcast on Amazon, iTunes, and Spotify.

I’ve been keeping up with my free email newsletter better recently; my thanks to those of you who’ve signed up and who’ve sent kind notes in response to some recent editions. That said, I didn’t send one this week since … well, I haven’t had the muse much at all lately.

The holidays approach! My books The Inside Game and Smart Baseball make excellent gifts, or so I’m told by my editor and publicists.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: A new paper in the Annals of Internal Medicine details what we know about coronavirus transmission. The dominant route is respiratory; proximity is an extremely important variable; and proper ventilation appears to play a huge role in decreasing transmission. Also, “there is currently no conclusive evidence for fomite or direct contact transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in humans.” That topic came up in a few places recently, as the CDC posted and almost immediately deleted language that said that the virus could spread over distances of more than six feet.
My colleagues Britt Ghiroli and C. Trent Rosecrans wrote about MLB’s long-damaged relationship with the LGBTQ+ community in the wake of Reds announcer Thom Brennaman using a vile homophobic slur on air.
Authors David Mitchell (Utopia Avenue) and Jasper Fforde (The Constant Rabbit) appeared together on the Book Off! podcast to discuss their latest books and to recommend one book apiece for the show’s title segment.
The New York Times style magazine’s Ligaya Mishan looks at mushrooms, the “last survivors,” an increasingly popular source of food and raw material and, unfortunately, useless dietary supplements.
Scott Gottlieb and Mark McClellan, both former FDA Commissioners, wrote for the Wall Street Journal that the public can still trust an FDA-approved vaccine – as long as the agency isn’t bowing to political pressure in the approval process.
Dr. Paul Sax, who was a guest on my podcast back in the spring, wrote about the success of pro sports leagues in containing COVID-19 and what we can learn from them.
On the eve of the release of a trove of material from the recording sessions, the BBC has an oral history of Prince’s album Sign O’ The Times.
This is from May, but I hadn’t seen it before: the founder of JetBlue funded the highly dubious study out of Stanford that claimed that the infected rate in California was 85 times higher than reported. Prof. John Ioannidis failed to acknowledge that potential conflict of interest – and he continues to discourage governments, most recently Greece’s, from taking steps to control the pandemic.
Speaking of Stanford, new Trump adviser Dr. Scott Atlas was denounced in a public letter signed by roughly 100 of his former colleagues at Stanford’s School of Medicine. The letter calls out his “falsehoods and misrepresentations of science” regarding the COVID-19 pandemic. (Atlas is still at Stanford, now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute.)
MLB.com’s Alexis Brudnicki profiled Tom Burns, a scout for the Blue Jays, discussing his 30-year career in baseball. I worked with Tom at the end of my time in Toronto and he’s one of the best and kindest people I have met in this business.
Australian indie singer/songwriter Gordi had her spring tour with Bon Iver cancelled, so she returned to her previous career as a physician, offering her services to hospitals around Melbourne as they fight the pandemic.
Oliver Burkeman, author of The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking, writes about telling the difference between what you want and what you need.
Even before we had the likely name of the new SCOTUS nominee, Harvard Kennedy School political scientist Maya Sen indicated that the appointment would likely move the court far to the right.
Some small bit of good news on the electoral front: Four Delaware progressives defeated Democratic incumbents in this month’s primaries, and that doesn’t include Sarah McBride, who is likely to become the highest-ranking transgender elected official in the country, or Kyle Evans Gay, who won the Senate primary in my district and for whose campaign I have volunteered. What’s most interesting about the primary upsets is the common theme that the incumbent Democrats were out of touch with the will of their constituents.
Multiple publicly traded companies used PPP funds, given out so firms hit hard by the pandemic would retain and pay employees, to buy back stock and/or pay out dividends to shareholders.
Mike Doughty is back with a new band, Ghost of Vroom 2, and just released an EP under that name. It’s definitely the most Soul Coughing-like stuff he’s recorded since that group broke up after El Oso. He spoke to Stereogum about the new project.
Board game news: There’s one Kickstarter for two new games from Pandasaurus, Dinosaur World and Dinosaur World: Rawr ‘n Write. It’s already at over 18 times its goal as of Thursday night.
The app version of the asymmetrical game Root is now available on iTunes, Android, and Steam.
The Kickstarter for Embarcadero has another week to go.
No link yet, but I got a review copy of the Princess Bride Adventure Game, which will go on sale on October 4th exclusively at Target.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, board game news, coronavirus, delaware, links, longreads, mushrooms, music news, stick to baseball

→ September 19, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/19/20.

I had one post of my own this week for subscribers to The Athletic, on my disdain for MLB’s proposal to keep expanded playoffs beyond 2020. I also did a Q&A with our Royals writer Alec Lewis and answered some questions for our Nats writer Britt Ghiroli on each of those teams’ farm systems.

My guest on The Keith Law Show this week was my friend and former colleague Adnan Virk, talking about the season to date and some upcoming movies of interest to him (he hosts his own movie podcast called Cinephile). My own podcast is now available on Amazon podcasts as well as iTunes and Spotify.

Over at Paste, I ranked the five best board game reboots I’ve played, as a companion to last week’s review of Nova Luna, itself a reboot of an earlier game called Habitats.

I’ve been keeping up with my free email newsletter better recently; my thanks to those of you who’ve signed up and who’ve sent kind notes in response to some recent editions.

The holidays approach! My books The Inside Game and Smart Baseball make excellent gifts, or so I’m told by my editor and publicists.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The most likely way to get infected with COVID-19 is coming into airborne droplets that contain the virus – that is, breathing in what infected people breathed out. All of your Lysol wipes and closing schools/workplaces for “deep cleaning” is hygiene theater: You get COVID-19 from being in an enclosed space with someone who has it and isn’t wearing a mask.
The New York Times looks at the strange case of Ed Buck, who appears to have killed multiple gay Black men by overdosing them with meth. Buck pitched himself as a major Democratic donor in southern California, but the evidence is that he talked a big game but really wasn’t a big deal.
NPR exposes how “Big Oil” sold U.S. consumers on the lie that plastics would be recycled.
This Washington Post story highlights the dangers of medical misinformation by showing how one 26-year-old film editor fell prey to online conspiracy theories about COVID-19, masks, and vaccines. By the end of the story, he’s gone completely off the rails.
A former Facebook data scientist alleges that the company has ignored blatant manipulation by autocratic governments or other political parties, including those in Honduras, Azerbaijan, and Ukraine, and says she was fired for spending time on these matters.
Scientific American has endorsed Joe Biden for President, the first time in the publication’s 175-year history that it has endorsed a Presidential candidate.
A second Washington Post story highlights the battles over the US Postal Service and how the Trump Administration scotched a plan to distribute hundreds of millions of masks to Americans.
Dividing athletes into male and female groups requires imposing a clear binary on a messy reality. So says David Epstein, writing for Slate on the decision to ban Castor Semenya from women’s track unless she agrees to suppress her natural testosterone production. Vonnegut called this one in “Harrison Bergeron.”
Shere Hite, a pioneering sex researcher who first rose to prominence with her 1976 book The Hite Report, which discussed female sexuality and sexual experiences, died earlier this month at 77.
Another woman has accused Donald Trump of sexual assault and his adherents do not care…
…because so many of them care only about ending a woman’s right to choose.
The group “Democrat Voters Against Joe Biden” doesn’t have any actual Democrats in it.
Meanwhile, Turning Point USA, a pro-Trump cult led by Charlie Kirk, is paying teenagers to tweet disinformation on COVID-19 and mail-in voting or post similar information on Facebook. I’m not clear why those sites haven’t banned Kirk and TPUSA for running de facto troll farms.
Trump’s legal strategy to suppress the vote is continuing apace in Wisconsin and other swing states, right in plain sight of everyone who should care.
A nurse who worked at an ICE detention center alleged that women held prisoner there were being given hysterectomies without their consent. Some women who were in that camp have alleged that the nurse was complicit in those forced sterilizations.
Climate change is killing Americans and destroying our physical infrastructure, but the Republican Party says we can’t afford to try to stop it.
The UK government’s chief scientific advisor revealed that he was strongly rebuked for arguing for a stricter lockdown earlier this year.
This New England Journal of Medicine editorial advises us how to build trust in an eventual COVID-19 vaccine. Hint: It’s not by promising one will be out before the election.
Two more white women revealed (or were exposed) in the last week that they’ve been posing as Black. I feel like this is a bigger problem than the salacious coverage implies – this isn’t just a scandal, but it’s a serious case of fraud, as these women all have taken jobs or academic positions that should have gone to Black women, and thus probably slowed or derailed other women’s careers as a result of their fraud. The news coverage focuses more on the scandalous part, which leads to pointless claims about “racial dysphoria” or other nonsense, when these women are just frauds.
My friend and colleague Lindsay Adler wrote about Dak Prescott and her own experiences with depression (for subscribers to the Athletic).
The NYC bookstore Kitchen Arts & Letters, which sells books about cooking, food, and drink, has a GoFundMe up to try to help them survive the pandemic’s drastic effects on their business.
There’s a fight going on within Spotify over the company’s new, exclusive deal with Joe Rogan, because of many transphobic comments he’s made over the years, and appearances by guests who engage in transgender denialism.
Board game news: Embarcadero, a 2021 game co-designed by the designer of Scoville, is on Kickstarter and already well past its modest funding goal.
Infinity Gauntlet, a new variation of the fast-playing deduction game Love Letter, is now out from Asmodee.
Dire Wolf announced the forthcoming game Dune: Imperium, an officially licensed property with art from the new movie version of Frank Herbert’s novel.
This about sums things up for 2020.

We should probably call it a night pic.twitter.com/YJbU1QGJpn
— The Oatmeal (@Oatmeal) August 29, 2020

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, climate change, conspiracy theories, coronavirus, environment, gender issues, links, longreads, mental health, olympics, sexual assault, social media, the swamp

→ September 5, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/5/20.

I had three pieces for subscribers to The Athletic around the trade deadline, wrapping up the Padres’ three moves, the Blue Jays’ and Mets’ moves, and five other trades in separate columns. I also had two new episodes of The Keith Law Show this week, one featuring Jessica Luther and Kavitha Davidson, authors of the new book Loving Sports When They Don’t Love You Back (which you can buy here), and another one with Will Leitch, which we posted Friday morning so you’d have it before the holiday weekend.

On Friday night, September 11^th, I’ll be hosting a live talk with author Chuck Palahniuk about his new book The Invention of Sound through Midtown Scholar in Harrisburg. It’s a ticketed event, and with your purchase you’ll get a signed copy of the book as well as a link to the talk. (I just started reading the book about an hour ago.)

At Paste, I reviewed the tile-laying and set-collection game Succulent, and then ranked the five best tile-laying games I’ve played, which should include a few titles familiar to longtime readers.

I sent out a fresh edition of my free email newsletter on Friday, describing how I went from someone who hadn’t run in any meaningful way since 1985 to running 5 km without interruption in about four months.

And now, the links…

In a story since confirmed by other outlets, including Fox News, the Atlantic reported that President Trump referred to soldiers killed in action as “losers” and “suckers,” which, in a rational world, would end any support he received from current or former members of the U.S. military.

We will need a vast, coordinated effort to convince Americans of the safety of an eventual COVID-19 vaccine, or we will have too few people getting it to stop the pandemic. This assumes that Trump doesn’t coerce regulators into approving one before it’s adequately tested, and that very possibility is why we are where we are.

Kuli Kohli was born with cerebral palsy, and in the village in India where she was born her parents were encouraged to drown her. They eventually moved with her to the UK, where she’s now a poet, a mother, and a mentor to other women writers.

Daniel Thompson, the only full-time Black journalist at The Kenosha News, resigned his position to protest the paper’s use of an incendiary quote that cast protesters in an inaccurate light.

Larry Flynt wrote a “final farewell to the Falwells,” and it’s a more nuanced and thoughtful note than you might expect, with kind words about Jerry Falwell, Sr., with whom Flynt waged a very public battle over his First Amendment rights, and damning words about Falwell’s hypocritical son.

How did T. Denny Sanford, the richest man in South Dakota and a major Republican donor, get out of an investigation into his alleged possession of child pornography? ProPublica is asking for possible sources to come forward.

Online hoaxes, like the myriad ones about COVID-19, are making doctors’ jobs harder – and the blame falls primarily on Facebook and other sites that have let this misinformation fester.

Ars Technica reports that Facebook’s “plan” to combat election misinformation is the same as its plan for pretty much everything else that goes wrong on its site – doing nothing at all.

Philly Inquirer columnist Will Bunch says that Trump’s “reelection scheme of a civil war” is kicking into high gear as the election approaches. I was always skeptical of those who said Trump wouldn’t leave office willingly, but my view is shifting as his rhetoric changes, and the rest of his party continues to enable him.

Jean Guerrero, author of the new book Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda, writes about how writers and critics have questioned whether she, as a Latina journalist, is ‘qualified’ to write a book about a white man. It’s another example of the longstanding white-centric and male-centric views of mainstream publishing.

The American Academy of Sleep Medicine called for the elimination of Daylight Savings Time, citing a large body of evidence showing that DST is harmful to our health.

If you’re looking for an alternative to dairy milk, but are also concerned about the environmental damage wrought by almond production, the Guardian says oat milk is your best choice.

Three mathematicians have solved a longstanding question about straight paths on the dodecahedron, one of the five Platonic solids and the only one for which this question remained unsolved.

Board game news: Climate Crisis, a cooperative game with an educational goal, is about to end its Kickstarter run tomorrow.

The Days of Wonder crossover game Small World of Warcraft is now out in stores and online.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, coronavirus, environment, links, math, social media, south dakota, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

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