board game news — Page 11

→ 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

→ August 29, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/29/20.

I had one column this week for subscribers to The Athletic, with scouting notes on Triston McKenzie, Sixto Sanchez, Wil Crowe, and Joey Bart. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

For Paste this week, I reviewed Succulent, a solid new game of tile-laying and set collection, and would have given it an even higher grade had I not had issues with some of the art and graphics.

My guest on this week’s episode of The Keith Law Show was Orioles reliever Dillon Tate, talking about youth baseball and overcoming the obstacles he faced on his path to the majors. You can also subscribe on iTunes – and if you do, please leave a rating and review.

You can still get my book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, where fine books are sold, like on bookshop.org. I’m also planning to send out another edition of my free email newsletter this weekend.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Guardian looks at the case of one Nigerian woman who fought back against the sex traffickers who enslaved her in Italy, and how difficult it is for authorities to prosecute such cases.
Harvard magazine has an excerpt from Prof. Daniel Lieberman’s new book Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding, looking at how exercise might help reduce the odds of age-related maladies from senescence to diabetes to Alzheimer’s, even cutting your chances of dying relative to others your age. One key message is that no matter how old you are it isn’t too late to gain these benefits from regular exercise.
Blockchain is “an amazing solution for almost nothing,” a widely-lauded technology that combines horrendous energy inefficiency with a lack of apparent benefits to end users.
The CTC Sentinel, published by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, has a long explanation of QAnon as an emerging domestic terror threat. I have recently tried to explain the QAnon conspiracy theory to two different people who are not extremely online, and even trying to say it out loud makes me feel crazy. It’s like Scientology and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion had some sort of demon offspring. Anyway, this paper argues that “QAnon has contributed to the radicalization of ideologically motivated violent extremists,” which should make you a lot more nervous than the imagined threat of ISIS or similar terrorist groups infiltrating the United States.
If someone tries to argue with you that masks don’t work, here are 70 studies showing that they do.
A new case report published in the Lancet describes an 11-year-old girl who died one day after admission to the hospital of COVID-19-related cardiac failure. The condition is called multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS), and while rare, it is killing a very small number of children who contract COVID-19.
Several people who survived COVID-19 infections but continue to feel aftereffects are connecting online to try to gather data on and study their conditions so they can provide more information to others suffering the same problems.
There’s a surge in COVID-19 cases in Paris, so the French Prime Minister has mandated masks and stepped up testing. This is what a competent leader and evidence-based policymaking look like, in case you’d forgotten and were thinking about staying home on November 3^rd.
“Gullible” White House negotiators overpaid by up to $500 million for ventilators from the Dutch conglomerate Royal Philips N.V., paying about four times what the Obama Administration had contracted to pay. I thought that Trump was supposed to get the best deals.
Harvard Professor of Anthropology Gary Urton was effectively forced into retirement after multiple students accused him of sexual harassment.
A Florida couple who believed that COVID-19 was some sort of hoax ignored advice to observe distancing guidelines and wear masks. They caught the virus; both ended up in the ICU, and one of them died of complications from the disease. The lesson here isn’t that they’re stupid, but that they fell victim to all of the misinformation spread online by hoaxers, trolls, and by people speaking at this week’s RNC.
Speaking of the RNC, Madison Cawthorn, a Republican candidate for the state house in North Carolina, has a long history of fabrications and multiple accusations of sexual assault. He was lauded on Twitter by right-wing blue checkmarks as the future of the GOP.
The FDA ruled that all distilled spirits are gluten-free, because science.
Hardly surprising, but this New York Times piece finds evidence of discrimination against Black homeowners in the home appraisal process.
A Washington Post editorial asks where the sympathy is for Megan Thee Stallion after the rapper was shot by another rapper, Tory Lanez, pointing out that if a black man had shot a white woman the outrage would probably be much louder.
A new study from Ohio State researchers says that the Greenland ice shelf will melt due to climate change regardless of what we do to try to stop the warming trend.
Another book excerpt, this time from Reverend William Barber’s Winning the Green New Deal: Why We Must, How We Can, on the history and roots of environmental racism.
Why 2020 will be the death of the working mother.
Board game news: I have seen the game Maracaibo at PAX Unplugged but never played it, given its weight and time required, which meant it wasn’t going to get much play in my house. I’m thrilled to see it’s coming to digital next year.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, climate change, coronavirus, harvard, italy, links, longreads, racism, stick to baseball, the swamp

→ August 22, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/22/20.

I had three posts for subscribers to the Athletic this week, one column on what’s going on each day over at teams’ alternate sites; and two scouting notebooks, one on Casey Mize, Dane Dunning, and Alec Bohm, and the other on Tarik Skubal, Dylan Carlson, and the Nats’ Luis García.

My guest on the Keith Law Show this week was my friend Craig Calcaterra, late of NBC Sports’ Hardball Talk and now the author of his own subscription newsletter Cup of Coffee. I also appeared on Blue Jays broadcaster Dan Shulman’s podcast Swingand a Belt, talking about what this lost minor league season means for prospects and the teams that employ them; and on the U.S. Army’s Mad Scientist program podcast The Convergence, talking about my new book, The Inside Game, and what might help people become better analysts in a world awash in data.

For Paste, I previewed many of the major board game titles due out for the rest of 2020, including the follow-up to Wingspan from Elizabeth Hargrave and a new game inspired by New Jersey’s infamous Action Park.

My free email newsletter returned this week, with thoughts on just how exhausting this science-denying, homophobic slur-using world has become.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: One reason why many of us feel so awful is that our cognitive ‘surge capacity’ is depleted, writes science journalist Tara Haelle, who provides suggestions to help us rebuild it.
The Washington Post profiles Tim Scott, the only Black Republican in the Senate, although in some ways I think it still let him off the hook for his decision to support a party and President that have both acted strongly against racial equality and justice in the last four years.
One reason so many people still fail to understand the seriousness of the pandemic’s spread is exponential growth bias, where we have a hard time intuitively understanding how that mathematical function works.
COVID deniers love to point to Sweden as a success story, since the country didn’t lock down yet seemed to have the pandemic under control. Sweden just reported its highest death toll for the first six months of a year since 1869. Their case fatality rate is also double that of neighboring Norway.
The rush to reopen bars and restaurants is a major reason why we can’t get this pandemic under control.
The CDC said we could likely control it in 12 weeks if most Americans wore masks and adhered to physical distancing guidelines.
Dr. Jen Gunter wrote in praise of “WAP” while criticizing longstanding, misogynistic taboos on the subjects of female sexuality and, er, natural lubrication.
Writing for Slate, Ray Suarez says that the NRA might not survive the New York state’s lawsuit to dissolve it. We should only be so lucky, after the NRA was a major reason the Violence Against Women Act was allowed to lapse in 2019.
Rush Limbaugh’s descent continued this week as he mocked Joe Biden for having lost multiple family members to tragic, early deaths, and then referred to Kamala Harris as a ‘ho’ and claimed she slept her way to various political offices.
The Atlantic‘s John Hendrickson looks at how 13-year-old Brayden delivered the best speech of this week’s Democratic National Convention. You can see the video of when Brayden first met Joe Biden, and how Biden encouraged Brayden not to let his stutter define or limit him.
A pilot project to release genetically modified mosquitoes that produce female eggs that die as larvae in the Florida Keys has received final approval. It could be a major step in controlling mosquito-borne diseases from malaria to Zika to dengue.
Writer Shakeia Taylor told the CBC that MLB isn’t doing enough to combat the structural racism within the industry.
Two Detroit police officers who coerced a 14-year-old boy into confessing to two murders who didn’t commit and who fabricated evidence in that case are still on the job and aren’t on the county’s do-not-call list of police officers who’ve committed crimes or other forms of misconduct.
Board game news: A few games were announced in the days after I filed my second-half preview, including Anno 1800, an adaptation of an Ubisoft video game by longtime designer Martin Wallace (Steam, Brass).
Meeple Mountain is giving away a copy of Fairy Trails, the new two-player game from Uwe Rosenberg.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, board game news, coronavirus, longreads, science, stick to baseball

→ August 15, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/15/20.

I had one column this week for subscribers to The Athletic, looking at the demotion calculus in a short season with no minor leagues, plus notes on Spencer Howard, Ryan Castellani, and Luis Basabe. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

My podcast guest this week was Dr. Angela Duckworth, author of Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, discussing concepts from her book and how baseball scouts and executives might apply them – and how to avoid the pitfalls of using “intangibles” as a cover for more insidious biases. You can buy Grit here via bookshop.org.

You can also buy my new book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us about Ourselves, which came out this April, via the same site. I’ll send out the next issue of my free email newsletter as soon as my fall board game preview comes out over at Paste.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Carina Chocano spent hours taking MasterClass sessions and wrote about the product for The Atlantic, asking what it is they’re really selling since they’re not selling actual education.

At Slate, William Saletan lays out the timeline of how Trump’s bad decisions have led to over 171,000 U.S. deaths from COVID-19.

Current Affairs’ Nathan J. Robinson points how, increasingly, verifiable information is behind paywalls while alt-right bullshit is free, and looks at the consequences of that dichotomy.

Novelist Chimamanda Adichie suffered a concussion earlier this year, and wrote about the experience, including the introspection that came with the temporary loss of part of her brain function.

The World Health Organization has created a one-stop shop for correct answers to common myths about COVID-19.

The Delaware Interscholastic Athletic Association made the correct decision to delay fall sports until February. Some parents are pushing a petition to demand they reverse this, and the comments from parents in that article drip with ignorance and privilege.

A Florida church leader has been arrested for pushing the fake cure known as “miracle mineral solution” (MMS), which is really just bleach.

Mom influencers on Instagram are spreading anti-mask propaganda. Instagram is owned by Facebook and neither site seems willing to clean up their own shit.

Almost a third of elite sportswomen reported harassment or trolling on social media according to a survey by BBC Sport.

The opposition to masks is beyond belief at this point. You probably read about the sheriff in Marion County, Florida, who banned masks in his offices, and banned his deputies from wearing them. He eased those restrictions slightly after the backlash, but really, why is anyone objecting to mask mandates at this point other than ignorance or selfishness?

Putting more healthful, nutritious foods into school lunches appears to have improved health outcomes like obesity for children who receive them – so of course the Trump Administration’s USDA has rolled back those changes.

A major Iowa Republican donor who ‘somehow’ won a no-bid contract to provide PPE from China to the state is now under investigation for prostitution and possession of child pornography.

The Massachusetts Democratic Party helped a college group orchestrate a campaign to entrap and smear a local Democratic candidate for the state’s 1^st Congressional District.

That Georgia high school that suspended a student for taking a picture of all of the maskless kids packed in the halls as they resumed classes? They had to shut down for several days due to an outbreak.

Reproductive rights took a huge hit this week at the Supreme Court thanks to John Roberts’ conservative majority and their decision to allow several anti-abortion and outright misogynistic laws in Arkansas to stand.

There’s a massive oil spill in progress on the Indian Ocean island nation of Mauritius.

A telling comparison of the different speaker lists at anti-vaxx and pro-vaccine conferences.

We watched season one of Perry Mason on HBO and I agree with everything Alan Sepinwall said about it.

Board game news: There’s an Umbrella Academy card game in the works, for fans of that Netflix series.

I’ve never played Arkwright given its length and complexity, although it’s pretty highly regarded. Now there’s a simpler version coming as a card game, on Kickstarter this week.

I enjoyed Elizabeth Hargrave’s Designer Diaries around her newest game, Mariposas, due out later this month.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arkansas, board game news, coronavirus, florida, georgia, iowa, links, longreads, massachusetts, reproductive rights, stick to baseball, tv, vaccines

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