board game news — Page 13

→ March 8, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/8/20.

My entire top 100 prospects package is now up for The Athletic subscribers. That includes:

I also wrote my first draft post of 2020, covering a pair of potential #1 overall picks in Emerson Hancock and Asa Lacy. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Episode #2 brand-new podcast, The Keith Law Show (also on iTunes), went up this past week, with guest Carlos Rodriguez, VP of Player Development and International Scouting for the Tampa Bay Rays. My thanks to all of you who’ve subscribed and/or left five-star ratings.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, is due out on April 21^st from Harper Collins, and you can pre-order it now via their site or wherever fine books are sold. Also, check out my free email newsletter, which I say I’ll write more often than I actually write it.

I only have a few links this week, between travel and the way that the news has been so focused on coronavirus. The best thing I read this week on that topic was Julia Belluz’s piece for Vox on why China’s COVID-19 case rate started declining. An infectious disease doctor answered some common questions about COVID-19 for WBUR.org.

Stick to baseball, 2/29/20.

My top 100 prospects package began to run this week on The Athletic, with the global top 100 running Monday, the column of guys who just missed on Tuesday, and then the American League org reports running the rest of the week. (Here’s the Rangers’ report, and the Royals’, for example.) You can access everything via this index page. I also held a Klawchat this Thursday.

My brand-new podcast, The Keith Law Show (also on iTunes), debuted this past week as well, with a guest appearance from Fangraphs’ lead prospect writer Eric Longenhagen. My thanks to all of you who’ve subscribed and/or left five-star ratings.

I’ve also got at least five signings scheduled at independent bookstores already, with two announced on the stores’ pages: April 24^th at Politics & Prose in DC and April 25^th at Midtown Scholar in Harrisburg.

And now, the links…

This week’s must-read piece is from James Hamblin in the Atlantic, on how we are all likely to get coronavirus. A vaccine won’t arrive in time to stop the outbreak, with U.S. policy failures a big reason why, and the virus’s long incubation period and 2% fatality rate ensure it will continue to spread despite containment efforts. We should try to get all our red city cards to the Scientist.
Of course, our Dear Leader referred to concerns about coronavirus and the media coverage of it as a hoax, and then offered some false statements on the virus’s spread.
Longreads: This history of the failure of the startup Homepolish is fascinating if entirely familiar. A fast-talking, highly educated con man convinced a lot of seemingly smart people to fund his company-without-a-business.
GQ has the story of “the Great Buenos Aires bank heist,” meticulously planned and executed, only to collapse because of one gang member’s infidelity to his wife.
The Guardian looks at the lasting influence of Copenhagen restaurant Noma, which continues to alter the global food scene with its ethos of local, sustainable cuisine.
Writing for VICE, the great ex-Deadspin writer Laura Wagner details testimony in a lawsuit over the NYPD’s racist policing practices.
Pippa Norris, Harvard political scientist and director of the Electoral Integrity Project, discusses the rise of authoritarian populism as a response to social change and why populism lends itself to authoritarian impulses.
How Gmail filters emails from various candidates may affect how those candidates fare in the primaries.
The mass murderer who killed nine Turkish immigrants outside Frankfurt was a Trump-loving, QAnon believer.
Bloomberg profiled Restoration Games and founder Rob Daviau fresh off the company’s blockbuster Kickstarter effort for the Return to Dark Tower, a reboot of a cult classic game from the early 1980s, which raised over $4 million. Daviau is also the inventor of the “legacy game” concept, which turned Pandemic Legacy into one of the most acclaimed and highest-rated board games ever released.
Celtics rookie Grant Williams loves him some Settlers of Catan.
Jon Melli goes inside the campers where two Orioles pitching prospects make their homes.
Learning another language can alter your perception of time.
You can only be a writer if you can afford it.
Plaid Hat Games, acquired several years ago by Asmodee, has been sold back to founder Colby Dauch, although much of its catalog of games will stay with Asmodee.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, coronavirus, history of food, links, longreads, stick to baseball

→ February 1, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/1/20.

I had two posts for Athletic subscribers this week, one on whether the Reds have done enough to contend in the NL Central, and one on the Starling Marte trade. I held a Klawchat on Thursday, and a Periscope chat, my first since I started getting sick at Thanksgiving (after taking prednisone for just four days!) and had a cough for most of the next six weeks. My prospect rankings will run on The Athletic the week of February 24^th.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Hadara, a civ-building, card-drafting game that made my top ten games of 2019. I keep comparing it to 7 Wonders because of the similarities in themes and card selection, but it’s more in the “try this if you like 7 Wonders” vein than a “this is too similar” one.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, is due out on April 21^st from Harper Collins, and you can pre-order it now via their site or wherever fine books are sold. Also, check out my free email newsletter, which I’ll get back to again this upcoming week in between writing words about prospects.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This Atlantic piece asking whether domestic violence treatment programs work was both interesting and frustrating, as the author barely mentions whether any of these programs are evidence-based (DAIP isn’t) and focuses only on group treatment rather than individual.
A Wisconsin doctor and his wife have lost custody of their adopted daughter due to a child-abuse claim disputed by fifteen medical experts. The state’s system for detecting child abuse may encourage its own experts to find abuse even where evidence is weak or absent.
The Guardian caught up with Kelis and learned how badly the music industry mistreated her. She accuses the Neptunes, which include Pharrell Williams, of cheating her out of her share of royalties from her first two albums.
The Congressional Budget Office reported this week that the U.S. national debt will rise to 98% of GDP by 2030, with deficits of over $1 trillion a year for over a decade. The Wall Street Journal‘s piece ($) blames the 2017 Republican tax cuts.
Greenpeace is fighting the Philippines’ approval of Golden Rice, a far more nutritious rice strain, because it’s genetically modified – not, mind you, because of any evidence of harm.
The Columbia Journalism Review weighed in on the Washington Post‘s since-rescinded suspension of Felicia Sonmez over her tweets in the wake of the death of Kobe Bryant, a move the Post‘s own Erik Wemple excoriated in a column in that paper.
With 85% of the world’s languages reportedly endangered, the BBC looks further at alphabets and writing systems similarly threatened with extinction.
The BBC also profiled Duolingo founder Luis von Ahn, who explains why he created the free app, which includes lessons in 28 languages. I’ve used it a few times but find it less useful than hand-written flash cards (albeit a fraction of the time required), and I don’t think it teaches much grammer or syntax.
A Sandy Hook hoaxer was arrested after tormenting the families of the victims. He’s a former contributor to Alex Jones’s Infowars site.
Practice Fusion provided free health-records software to doctors’ offices, but they struck a secret deal with Purdue Pharma for the software to ‘recommend’ opioids as treatment in an effort to boost prescriptions.
Climate change is threatening many high-end food items like coffee and wine; a rise of 2 C would cause the loss of 56% of current vineyard land.
The WHO has warned that the well of new antibiotics is running dry. While it’s hardly the main concern about rising antibiotic resistance, think of how much professional sports will change if ‘routine’ surgeries are no longer possible because of the risk of infection?
Tennessee state legislator Mitch Van Huss (guess) submitted a resolution declaring CNN and the Washington Post ‘fake news.’
That same Washington Post has some good tips on how to impede Facebook from stalking your activity off the Facebook site.
Our country’s anti-Muslim travel ban was just extended to add six countries, not that you heard about it much in the news.
Chemical and Engineering News looks at how chemical changes to the baseball’s core have contributed to longer batted ball distances.
I enjoyed the Netflix documentary The Killer Inside, about the late NFL player and convicted murderer Aaron Hernandez, but Will Leitch has a very different, critical take on it.
Facebook has hired a former Fox News exec who oversaw the spread of multiple bogus conspiracy theories, like one that Barack Obama was educated in a Muslim madrassa, to help ‘curate’ content to be shown on Facebook’s News tab.
Darren Rovell re-used an image without permission and threw a fit when asked to delete it.
Board game news: Genius Games’ Genotype, a game of Mendelian genetics, hit Kickstarter this week and is already at 6x its funding goal. I have seen the prototype of this game and I’m very excited for it.
I missed this around the holidays, but Board & Dice announced Tekhenu: Obelisk of the Sun, the new game from the designers of Tzolkin, will be released right ahead of Gen Con 2020.
And finally, in a video for Eurosport, John McEnroe has some truth to share about the bigoted tennis legend Margaret Court.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, climate change, Languages, links, longreads, science, social media, stick to baseball

→ January 25, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/25/20.

I had one piece for the Athletic this week, on Atlanta’s signing of Marcell Ozuna. I held a Klawchat on Friday.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, is due out on April 21^st from Harper Collins, and you can pre-order it now via their site or wherever fine books are sold. I also sent out a fresh edition of my free email newsletter this week, revealing my Hall of Fame ballot.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Vox looks at how the Netherlands makes universal, private health insurance work, resulting in some of the world’s best health outcomes.
“We live in a world where supply-side economics, which was always a fraud, became a religion.” The New Yorker looks at the Patriotic Millionaires, a group of ultra-wealthy Americans who fight for higher taxes, higher minimum wages, and other policies that would help the other 99%.
ProPublica and the New York Times reveal what we know about the longstanding FBI attempt to downplay Saudi Arabia’s involvement in the 9/11 attacks.
I read Kassia St. Clair’s enjoyable The Secret Lives of Color recently, and she mentioned the Bahia emerald, a giant rock that contains the largest emerald shard ever found and that has been valued, allegedly, at nearly a billion dollars. That led me to this 2017 WIRED story on the neverending legal battles over its ownership, which still seems to be unresolved.
David Schmidt, writing for the Huffington Post, crystallizes the problem with American Dirt – that it erases authentic Latinx voices by borrowing passages and language, then passing them off as authentic.
The Trump administration repealed a set of major clean-water regulations, continuing its push to make our environment dirtier and more dangerous so that businesses (like Koch Industries) can make more money.
Amanda Marcotte writes for Slate that Democrats need to stop buying the myth of the ‘reasonable’ Republican. Nothing Trump does or did matters, as long as he and the GOP cling to power.
A Republican activist in Georgia smeared a black Democratic Congresswoman by saying her son, who was shot and killed by a white man who didn’t like the music her son was playing in his car, was killed in “a drug deal gone bad.” Nothing matters to these people except power.
An Ohio pediatrician went viral after posting a pro-vaccine clip on TikTok, so, of course, anti-vaccine lunatics have threatened her person and her practice while also flooding her business’s Google and Yelp pages with fake negative reviews.
Politicans from the far right to the center-left love to frame family policies as promoting ‘choices’ for working mothers, but many of those aren’t choices at all, and they’re always ‘choices’ for women who must balance work and family, rarely if ever for men. When I discuss balancing my work schedule with my desire to spend time with my daughter, I’m praised, because the world doesn’t expect men to consider this.
Isabel dos Santos became Africa’s richest woman while her father was President of Angola. This BBC report examines over 700,000 leaked documents to show how she exploited her position to rob the oil-rich country, where 30% of the population lives on under $1.90 a day, of around $2 billion.
George Will writes about the right-wing Spanish Party Vox and its leader Santiago Abascal, who is peddling messages similar to Trump’s in a country that has, so far, not lurched so far to the right.
The title of this piece is a bit misleading, but a recent study compared ‘rational’ behavior against ‘reasonable’ behavior, showing evidence that doing what is in your best economic interest may not be in your best overall interest if it violates social norms.
Thanks in part to a ProPublica investigation, Illinois is restoring driver’s licenses to residents whose licenses were suspended for unpaid parking tickets.
A new study out of Cardiff University found a type of T-cell that may be useful in targeting multiple cancers, although the study is extremely preliminary and hasn’t been tested in humans at all.
I’ve recommended the iOS port of Carcassonne as the best digital adaptation of any board game for close to a decade now, but that’s about to change. Coding Monkeys’ license for the game is expiring, so if you want their version – which is now on sale for $4.99 – go buy it before March 1^st.
One last chance to back AlderQuest on Kickstarter, as the campaign ends on Thursday. Also, if you wanted Irish Gauge (like me!) but missed the first printing, Capstone Games is taking pre-orders for a bundle of that game and Ride the Rails.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, anti-science, board game news, environment, links, longreads, medicine

→ January 18, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/18/20.

I’ve written five pieces for the Athletic so far over the two weeks since I joined. In reverse chronological order, they are a ranking of the ten best prospects to change organizations this winter; a breakdown of the Josh Donaldson signing; a breakdown of last week’s Rays-Cardinals trade; notes on what I look for when evaluating players; and my introductory post. I also held a Klawchat this week.

Over at Paste, I reviewed The Taverns of Tiefenthal, the newest game from Kennerspiel des Jahres winner Wolfgang Warsch, who also designed The Mind, That’s Pretty Clever!, and The Quacks of Quedlinburg, all of which are quite good.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, is due out on April 21^st from Harper Collins, and you can pre-order it now via their site or wherever fine books are sold. You can also sign up for my free email newsletter for even more non-baseball content.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Slate has the story of a credible allegation of rape against three Mets from the spring of 1991, with Doc Gooden, Daryl Boston, and Vince Coleman all accused. None was ever charged.
The Root and the Young Turks detail outright racism in the South Bend police force under Pete Buttigieg. The details herein, and Mayor Pete’s unwillingness to answer basic questions about them, are quite damning.
Did an Oxford classics professor steal and sell ancient pieces of papyrus, including one that would be the oldest known piece of the gospels, to the billionaire owners of Hobby Lobby? (Also, how can you be a billionaire and a devout Christian? I’m reasonably sure Jesus said those two things could not be true at the same time.)
The New Yorker looks at a woman who can’t feel physical or emotional pain due to a genetic mutation, and whether the extent to which we feel pain is really an essential part of being human.
The New York Times describes how a recently-deceased real estate ‘star’ lied about her entire biography.
Peter Hotez, author of Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism, writes about how sick you’re going to get if you catch various vaccine-preventable diseases. It’s not pretty, and it’s all the more argument for tightening vaccination laws for schoolchildren.
Here’s a shocker: Gwyneth Paltrow’s new GOOP show on Netflix is a mixture of pseudoscience, bullshit, and tedium, including an episode with a so-called “energy healer” (which is not real) and another with a self-proclaimed psychic (also not real).
Michigan state senator Peter Lucido, who has delusions of governorship, told a woman journalist trying to interview him that a group of high school boys “could have a lot of fun” with her. As of Friday, he’s issued a half-assed apology, but remains in office.
The New Yorker talks to the two people behind the great @NJGov twitter account.
Writing for VICE, Laura Wagner (ex-Deadspin) writes about the Facebook ‘sponsored post’ fiasco at Teen Vogue.
A British Columbia court ruled that two young children must be vaccinated over their mother’s objections. The mother tried to cite one of the most vocal anti-vaccine cranks on Twitter, Toni Bark, who claimed the measles wasn’t a highly contagious disease (it’s considered the most or second-most contagious virus humans can catch).
Perhaps “cocktails” of multiple antibiotics aren’t as good of an idea for the long term as we thought, as one new study shows that they may accelerate antibiotic resistance.
Tabatha Southey writes for McLean’s about Watergate, my #3 game of 2019, and what a future board game of the Donald Trump presidency and impeachment might look like.
I’ve got four new board game Kickstarters to share this week. First is the one I tweeted about on Tuesday, Restoration Games’ Return to Dark Tower, which is already clear of $2.25 million pledged as of Friday afternoon. It’s an update to the 1981 cult classic, and I was hooked when I saw the demo at PAX Unplugged.
Next is AlderQuest, an area-control game from Rock Manor Games and Mike Gnade (Set a Watch, Brass Empire). Rock Manor pulled the original Kickstarter from before the holidays and restarted it; it’s about 2/3 of the way to its funding goal as I write this. Full disclosure: I met Mike this week to play an upcoming Rock Manor title, Lawyer Up, as he lives a stone’s throw from me.
Leder Games has the newest game from designer Cole Wehrle (Root, Pax Pamir), Oath: Chronicles of Empire and Exile, already more than 13 times past its initial goal.
Vesuvius Media has a Kickstarter up for Pacific Rails, a route-building/worker-placement game based on the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869.
Finally, here’s an intriguing game of dirty popes: Habeamus, which the publishers describe as “a game for ending 2-4 friendships. This is the farthest from its goal of these five Kickstarters right now.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, frauds, links, medicine, metoo, social media, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ January 4, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/4/20.

Happy New Year! I skipped last week since it was the holidays and I was offline quite a bit, but in the last couple of weeks I had a bunch of year-end board game posts, including my top 10 games of 2019 for Paste, my best games of the year by category for Vulture, and the top 8 board game apps of 2019 for Ars Technica.

My free email newsletter will return on Monday, time and health (I’m sick yet again) permitting. My second book, The Inside Game, will be out on April 21st and is available for pre-order.

And now, the links…

One longread this week, from the Guardian‘s best longreads of the year: Time management is making us miserable.
Figure skater Gracie Gold is working her way back to competition after a long fight with depression and an eating disorder.
One of the biggest funders of anti-vaccine groups has made millions selling “natural” health products. Joseph Mercola has also been fined by the FDA for making false health claims, and has promoted all kinds of pseudoscience on his site for over 20 years.
Joan Walsh writes about “this fucking decade” for The Nation: “The last decade showed that the United States can be dramatically changed by a minority of people seized by grievance, convinced that they’re the real victims, and determined to get revenge.”
The rivers and beaches of Guatemala are filling with trash, especially plastic, emblematic of a global problem with plastic waste.
An Alabama woman murdered by her former partner is another example why the NRA’s choice to kill the Violence Against Women Act will have deadly real-world consequences.
A study found that 39% of respondents in eight European countries would like to live in a world where chemical substances don’t exist. Good luck with that.
The search for new antibiotic drugs is hitting another roadblock: startups trying to develop these compounds are going bankrupt.
Congress appears on the verge of letting a program designed to help stop the next pandemic expire, likely because the GOP doesn’t want to spend money on anything but war.
I was obsessed with the periodic table when I was a kid, so of course I enjoyed this New Yorker piece on the search for larger and larger (and yet incredibly unstable) elements.
GQ interviewed Michael Caine about The Muppet Christmas Carol.
Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy signed letters authored by the Pebble Mining Company favorable to the company’s mining efforts in his state.
The U.S. held off on punitive tariffs against Argentina while the country reviewed two trademarks for Trump’s personal business.
Sacha Baron Cohen gave an incredible speech to the Anti-Defamation League on the failure of social media giants to regulate hate speech and fake news on their sites.
Capstone Games has really carved out a niche for itself for high-end games, many of them imported from Europe, including the popular train game Irish Gauge, which they imported and released in the U.S. in 2019. They just announced the follow-up game, Ride the Rails, will be released on July 1st, when Irish Gauge will also return to stores.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alaska, board game news, chemistry, environment, links, longreads, pseudoscience, social media, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ December 14, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/14/19.

I was busy these last two weeks, with numerous reaction pieces for ESPN+ subscribers.

I also held a Klawchat, probably my last of 2019, on Friday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the new small-box game Ankh’or, which plays up to four but works nicely with two, and wrote up the best games I saw in two days at PAX Unplugged (before my daughter got sick and we had to skip day three #sadface).

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, comes out on April 21^st, 2020. You can pre-order it here, and I have tentative appearances for that week at Politics & Prose (DC), Midtown Scholar (Harrisburg), and One More Page (Arlington, VA).

My free email newsletter will return in the next few days – sorry, I got sick, then the winter meetings happened – and you can sign up here.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This New York Times piece on two woman artists, Celia Paul and Cecily Brown, is devastating in multiple ways as it explores divers forms of misogyny in the art world.
Former major-league pitcher Bobby Jenks opens up about years of substance abuse and pitching through pain.
A GP writes in the Guardian about things he’s learned from his suicidal patients, with a discussion of the death of Frightened Rabbit lead singer Scott Hutchison.
The Verge reveals the toxic work environment at the trendy luggage maker Away.
Multiple researchers and publishers worked together to try to come up with a definition of predatory publishers.
Nouns in romance languages have genders, and when a plural noun refers to a group of people that includes men and women (or any non-men), the default is to use the masculine plural. So a group of 100 teachers, 99 of them women and just one a man, would still be “los profesores.” Teenagers in Argentina are fighting to change that in favor of gender-neutral language.
I love The Monster at the End of this Book, having read it many times to my daughter (complete with my Grover impression), so of course I enjoyed author David Burr Garrard’s essay on how that book opened his mind to the world of literature.
Deposed Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin has been busy pardoning murderers who contributed to his campaign, as well as pardoning a man convicted of beheading a woman and a teacher convicted of possessing child pornography.
The Washington Post looks at Israeli people trying to escape Ultra-Orthodox communities, which keep their members in cult-like isolation from the outside world.
David J. Roth, formerly of Deadspin, writes about the Astros’ McKinsey connections and mentality. McKinsey’s business practices are under scrutiny elsewhere as well, such as how they charge U.S. taxpayers $3 million per year for the work of a recent college graduate.
France has mounted an extensive information campaign to fight vaccine hesitancy in a country with some of the highest levels of vaccine stupidity … er, distrust in the world. One side note in the article describes two families, one from France and the other from the U.S., bringing unvaccinated kids carrying the measles into Costa Rica. If I’m Costa Rica, or any other country, I would start demanding vaccination records for idiot travelers from rich western countries with vaccination rates below the herd immunity threshold (95% for measles), and making it a crime to bring an unvaccinated child into a country and putting my local populace at risk.
“Samoa buries its children as measles outbreak worsens.” I think that says it all.
That measles outbreak is what happens when anti-vaxxers win, according to this LA Times editorial.
Anti-vaxxers hate your children. Dead kids don’t bother them; they’re so obsessed with their fantasies of vaccine ‘injuries.’
Aung San Suu Kyi stands accused of deliberately saying nothing while the Burmese government massacred the Rohingya people in an International Court of Justice trial over the genocide.
A first-grade teacher in Alameda County, California, teaches his students about race, class, and privilege.
If you missed the Thanksgiving Twitter backlash over a now-deleted Scientific American editorial that (in my view) was just a hit piece on Dr. Jen Gunter, Slate offers one balanced take on the situation, while the American Council on Science and Health called out SciAm’s embrace of “anti-medical” pseudoscience. The piece’s author, Jennifer Block, maintains that she did nothing wrong, despite hiding her conflict of interest in the matter.
Climate change deniers love to argue that past climate models have been wrong … but that’s not true.
House Democrats have passed nearly 400 bills that Mitch McConnell refuses to even consider in the Senate. I’m reasonably certain that this is not how the Framers intended for our legislature to work.
My alma mater screwed up, again, this time denying a popular and highly regarded Latina professor tenure. Harvard President Lawrence Bacow could do something about it, but says that’s just not how we do things around here. Why does it matter? Because the rejection may push other minority professors and grad students out of academia.
If you live in or near Clarksburg, Maryland, there’s an indie bookstore that needs your help. The owner has Parkinson’s disease and is struggling to keep the store afloat.
If you’re not constantly on Twitter, you may have missed this video of British citizens aghast at how expensive health care is in the United States. Basic health care is a right, not a privilege for the wealthy or the employed.
Board game news: Dire Wolf Digital’s app version of Reiner Knizia’s Yellow & Yangtze, a sequel/reimplementation of his hit game Tigris & Euphrates, is now live for iOS, Android, and Steam.
Z-Man Games has a bunch of mini-expansions for Stone Age, Cacao, First Class, NMBR9, and the Voyages of Marco Polo.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, climate change, france, harvard, israel, links, longreads, mental health, myanmar, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ November 23, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/23/19.

For ESPN+ subscribers, I discussed the baseball case for trading Mookie Betts, and looked at the Yasmani Grandal and Will Smith signings. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Watergate, a great and well-timed new two-player game where you play either as Nixon or as the journalists trying to uncover the scandal. For Ars Technica, I reviewed the social deduction game Game of Thrones Oathbreaker, a game with team & individual components that I think is too unbalanced.

My new book, The Inside Game, will be out on April 21, 2020, and you can pre-order it now. Stand by for news on store events, including Politics & Prose in DC and Midtown Scholar in Harrisburg.

I’ll send out the latest edition of my free email newsletter later today, talking a little about the philosophical debates I’m having with myself over this year’s Hall of Fame ballot.

My friend Jessica Scarane is mounting a primary challenge to Delaware Senator Chris Coons; Coons is a centrist Democrat who, among other things, thought Nats fans were wrong to boo President Trump, and who regularly works with the GOP. You can donate to Jess’s campaign on her website.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: My colleague Kevin Arnovitz describes how a Sacramento Kings exec pilfered $13 million from the team before he was caught.
A Newsday investigation found evidence of steering and de facto redlining in the Long Island real estate market.
This New Yorker profile of the 47-year-old Park Slope Food Co-Op is fascinating, by turns a paean to a community effort to make people and the planet healthier, and a portrait of how insufferable other people can be.
The Atlantic‘s Sarah Zhang detailed how a few Internet sleuths helped identify a Jane Doe murdered 13 years ago.
NPR reports on how the federal government is depriving U.S. territories of Medicaid funding, which may result in half or more of Guam and U.S. Virgin Islands residents losing their coverage, and Puerto Rican residents losing dental and prescription drug coverage. I should also point out that citizens of these territories do not vote for President and lack any representation in Congress.
MLB.com’s Joe Trezza has a thorough overview of how Mike Elias has reshaped the O’s baseball ops department.
Lindsay Gibbs of the Athletic wrote in her newsletter this week about Malcolm Gladwell’s betrayal of sexual abuse victims with his Penn State trutherism and misquoting of Michigan State victims. In addition to his own podcast, Gladwell was a guest on ESPN’s 30 for 30 podcast about the L.A. Clippers just three weeks ago, well after he’d started this weird campaign.
Philadelphia Eagles safety Malcolm Jenkins wrote an editorial urging mayor Jim Kenney to consider transparency and accountability when choosing the city’s next police commissioner. The city’s police union issued a juvenile response, calling him a “nonresident washed up [sic] football player,” which Jenkins simply called a “distraction.”
Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers and Wharton/Penn Law professor Natasha Sarin point out that improving the IRS’s auditing capabilities and resources should be the first step in any tax reform proposal because (according to their research) every $1 spent on auditing would yield $11 in increased revenue. That obviously can’t continue indefinitely – the ratio will decline with increased auditing, as the easiest targets are made to pay up and other tax scofflaws improve their compliance to avoid getting caught – but they refer to this as “low-hanging fruit” that also should be politically popular.
A former writer for The Simpsons explains how the “attempted crime isn’t a crime” defense of Trump comes from that show, where Sideshow Bob asked how attempted murder could be a crime.
Also in the Washington Post, two editorial writers described this week how Gordon Sundland’s testimony made the Trump/Ukraine scandal much bigger.
Should the Parthenon (“Elgin”) Marbles be returned to Greece? I mean, of course they should, but Mary Norris argues in favor as well. Also, they’re marble statues, not, like, actual marbles.
A mother explains why she chose not to use car seats.
Why has Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent, retracted paper on vaccines and autism been cited over a thousand times? The reasons are complex but one key takeaway is that the system of citing breaks down when the cited papers are partially or fully retracted.
Board game news: Alder Quest, a new area control game for 1-4 players, just hit Kickstarter this week.
A new game from the publishers of Ragusa (which I demoed but haven’t actually played), Venice is now on Kickstarter as well, with a very cool-looking board of streets and canals in the soon-to-be-underwater city.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, board game news, links, longreads, philadelphia, taxes, the swamp

→ November 9, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/9/19.

My ranking of the top 50 free agents this winter went up on Monday for ESPN+ subscribers, before the actual start of free agency and thus the deadline for some player options, so a few players are on there who ended up staying with their teams (J.D. Martinez, for one). I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Silver, the new deduction/take-that card game from designer Ted Alspach, who set this new game in the same ‘universe’ (loosely speaking) as his One Night Ultimate Werewolf games.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, will be released on April 21, 2020, and you can pre-order it now. We’re working on some bookstore events for late April as well, with Boston, New York, DC, and Harrisburg likely in that first week after release.

I also have this free email newsletter, you may have heard about it, it’s kind of cool.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This Atlantic story on a San Francisco woman who repeatedly stole packages from porches in an affluent neighborhood, despite multiple warnings, arrests, and eventually the loss of of custody of her daughter, is something to behold. It’s a story about technology, including how customers are using video-camera doorbells without considering the loss of civil liberties that may come with it. It’s a story about race, certainly. But the one theme I felt the author understated was that it’s a story about mental illness: The ‘porch pirate’ is ill-served by the prison system, especially since she continues to steal packages even while out on bail, and is not getting the help she probably needs.
A Louisiana parish DA lets defendants pay his foundation to get out of doing community service, according to this investigative report from Radley Balko in the Washington Post. The article appeared on Sunday; since then, I see zero coverage of this in any Louisiana publication.
This episode of the podcast Citations Needed looks at ‘pundit brain’ and the increasingly less data-driven Nate Silver, whose track record of predictions has tapered off since 2008 and who has had to walk back numerous statements on Twitter. Jacob Bacharach covers similar ground in a post on Common Dreams.
Alex Pareene writes about the death of what he calls ‘rude media’, including two entities for whom he used to work, Splinter and Gawker Media.
The New Yorker‘s Louisa Thomas weighed in on the killings of Deadspin and Sports Illustrated by private equity bros.
A new study in Nature (journal access required) found that many ICU patients who received probiotic capsules developed bacteremia as a direct result, using DNA comparisons to show that the bacteria in the patients’ blood came from the same bacteria in those probiotic pills. There’s also zero evidence that probiotic pills are helpful; the acid in your stomach destroys bacteria in those pills, or in fermented foods we consume like yogurt or kombucha.
Aaron Calvin was fired by the Des Moines Register because, in short, the Twitter mob demanded it; he wrote his side of the story for the Columbia Journalism Review.
Clark University dismissed a graduate student who had complained about possible gender discrimination and mishandling of data. This is her side of this story, but Clark issued a general statement, saying that federal law prevents them from commenting on a specific student’s case.
Youngstown State disciplined a student-athlete who sexually assaulted a classmate by (checks notes) letting him serve as a volunteer coach on both the men’s and women’s tennis teams (blinking guy GIF).
Anti-vaxxers use a strategy called ‘firehosing,’ repeating the same lies over and over to drown out the facts and those who try to speak the truth. Fighting these tactics involves more than just debunking falsehoods, but disrupting them by removing their podiums and forewarning people about how these propagandists manipulate them.
A white judge in Virginia sentenced a black woman to ten days in jail because he didn’t like that she slammed the courtroom door.
This is America: A San Diego man brutally assaulted a Syrian teen for speaking Arabic. He has since pleaded guilty and will serve five years in prison.
This is America: A white Milwaukee man threw acid in the face of a Peruvian-born U.S. citizen after asking “why did you come here and invade my country?” Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett blamed President Trump for feeding and encouraging anti-immigrant sentiment.
A new book that fawns over President Trump claimed that the Obama Adminstration held regular “PC (political correctness) meetings.” The author didn’t realize those were NSC Principals Committee meetings, and obviously didn’t bother to confirm it, nor did Fox News before promoting the book and this claim on its site.
If you’ve seen the surprise hit film Parasite, which will pass the $10 million mark for U.S. box office this weekend and is by far the highest-grossing Korean-language film ever in the U.S., you know the use of basements is key to the movie’s story. NPR has snippets from writer/director Bong Joon-hoexplaining a bit more about why basements are so critical in South Korean society.
Martin Scorcese’s explanation of why he doesn’t care for comic-book movies is worth reading, as it’s far more nuanced than the quote that got MCU fanpeople all up in arms. (I tend to agree with him. Comic book movies are entertainment, but I would not say they rise to the level of great cinema.)
I reviewed Gary Smith’s book Standard Deviations this week; he emailed me to point to a post he wrote on October 22nd explaining the role of luck in short series in baseball.
Twitter’s Jack Dorsey announced a plan to ban political ads, but the plan is toothless and misunderstands the nature of free expression.
A tweet asking people to RT if they were spanked as children but didn’t become violent later in life went viral this week, but it misses the point: Corporal punishment is ineffective and harmful, while other methods of discipline, including positive reinforcement and setting clear expectations, do work, without the negative consequences of spanking.
Alison Turkos writes about how her Lyft driver raped her and the company took no action. The driver continued to work for Lyft, and the company even charged her for the trip.
I agree with Cass Marshall: I do not have time for or interest in video games with hundreds of hours of material. Pre-parenthood, I played the Baldur’s Gate trilogy all the way through, hitting almost every side quest, and I’m sure I put over 100 hours into it. I doubt I’ll ever have the time for that again or the attention span.
Board game news: A reader of mine, Kevin Bertram, has designed a game called The Shores of Tripoli now on Kickstarter. This was on my BGG wishlist before I even knew Kevin was a reader.
A digital adaptation of the acclaimed co-op game Spirit Island is also on Kickstarter, and just got funded this week.
PAX Unplugged takes place in Philadelphia on December 6-8 this year. The convention schedule is now up and badges are on sale. I’ll be there as usual.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, health, links, louisiana, media criticism, social media, this is america, vaccines, video games

→ October 12, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/12/19.

I’ll have an Arizona Fall League scouting post up Monday or possibly Sunday night, covering everything I’ve seen out here in the desert. No chat this week as I was traveling.

I did review Tapestry, the newest game from the mind of designer Jamey Stegmaier (Scythe, Charterstone), for Paste this week; it’s a quick-to-learn strategy game with a ton of potential decisions and paths for players, pitched as a civ-builder but playing more abstract than that.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves,
is now available for pre-order on the Harper Collins site and through major retailers. It’s due out in April 2020.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: From The Atlantic, technology is creating a massive noise pollution problem that nobody’s trying to stop, despite decades of research into the harms of excessive or incessant noise, as well as newer research that quiet or the sounds of nature are particularly good for our brains.
The Guardian asks why American pedestrian fatalities are going back up, and says it’s not just because the victims were distracted by their phones or because of driverless cars.
For The Athletic ($), Pablo Maurer looks at the broken promises of the soccer stadium in Chester, Pennsylvania, a very disadvantaged exurb of Philly that has seen no benefit from the facility’s existence.
The same dumb British newspaper ran two columns this week touting diametrically opposed claims on the safety of consuming processed meat. David Speigelhalter explains the three questions readers should ask when confronted with this kind of journalistic malfeasance.
This is from 2007 but I only saw it this week when Langdon Cook referred to it in The Mushroom Hunters: Those “truffled” dishes at restaurants probably contain no truffles or anything made from truffles, but use truffle oil that gets its flavor from the synthetic flavoring agent 2,4-dithiapentane.
The Atlantic‘s James Hamblin writes about identity fusion and why it might explain Trump supporters’ irrational devotion to him even as he’s accused of committing further crimes and continues to stoke fear and prejudice.
John Holdren, professor of environmental science and policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School and at the university’s Department of Planetary and Earth Sciences, says that that recent IPCC report on climate change understates how much danger we’re in, particularly if we ignore this problem long enough to let the permafrost in earth’s polar regions melt, releasing tons of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere.
The Washington Post‘s Samantha Schmidt examines both sides of the question about dress codes and norms for teenaged girls. Is ‘revealing’ clothing empowering, or playing to harmful societal standards of beauty?
From the same paper, AirPods aren’t just short-lived, but they can’t be repaired or have their batteries replaced; they’re just trash and Apple needs to do better.
The Hutchins Center at Harvard hosts The Hip Hop Archive, including a list called 24 albums with annotated lyrics, including entries from Eric B. & Rakim and A Tribe Called Quest, as well as a broader collection of 200 albums deemed seminal to the genre’s history.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution‘s Bill Torpy calls for the Braves to get rid of the Tomahawk Chop, a racist, ignorant gesture that has outlived its welcome.
I love third-wave coffee but didn’t realize the term had a known originator. Trish Rothgeb coined the phrase while working in Oslo in 2002, and is now leading the push to make coffee more inclusive without compromising the new genre’s emphasis on quality.
Floodgate Games’ Cosmic Colonies is now on Kickstarter.
James Mickens’ tenure announcement is probably the funniest such piece you’ll ever see.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, board game news, climate change, coffee, environment, food science, harvard, hip-hop, journalism, links, longreads, pollution, psychology

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