board game news — Page 13

→ August 24, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/24/19.

I’ve got notes stored up for an ESPN+ piece but it probably won’t run until Monday. My daughter returns to school this week too, which will mean the return of Klawchat on Thursday.

My massive article on all the games I saw at Gen Con 2019, including my ten favorites, went up at Paste this week.

My free email newsletter will also return this week once I’ve written a few more things around the interwebs.

I’m selling off a number of my superfluous board games again this year, so if you’re interested, check out my inventory page on Boardgamegeek. Thanks to Sean Lopolito of Lops Brewing in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, who just bought eight games from me last week. I’ll be donating the $150 proceeds to the Food Bank of Delaware.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Guardian long read looks at how an online community devoted to the Columbine murderers fed a murder plot in Halifax, Nova Scotia. A tip to police stopped a potential massacre.
The New Yorker‘s Isaac Chotiner interviewed Penn Law professor Amy Wax, who espouses what certainly sound like white nationalist talking points, dressed up in finer clothing.
This piece in Palladium by a recent Yale grad saying that free speech isn’t the problem at that school, that the behaviors of elites are the real issue, is all over the place, and kind of hard to stay with to the end, but along the way Natalia Dashan raises a lot of good points, many of which ring true even based on my own experience at a similar college over 25 years ago.
Afghanistan veteran and sometime political candidate Jason Kander, writing with his wife, Diana, addresses five lies people tell themselves about trauma and PTSD.
Activists on the Greek island of Paros are fighting to make the island plastics-free, citing the massive damage plastics, which break down into microplastic particles that end up in the bodies of marine life and eventually us, are doing to their environment. This article claims that 95% of waste in the Mediterranean Sea is plastic.
Evgeny Morozov writes in the New Republic how his literary agent, John Brockman, helped connect Jeffrey Epstein with scientists and other intellectuals, many of whom are now, belatedly, being called to account for their relationships with the deceased pedophile.
Speaking of Epstein, it’s time to kill the phrase “underage woman.” Epstein didn’t prey on underage women; he raped children.
Loretta Ross, a black feminist, writes in the New York Times that call-out and cancel culture are themselves toxic, arguing that there are better ways to address most public displays of prejudice or ignorance.
India’s Constitution has protections aimed at ending the country’s longstanding caste system, with a 1989 law aiming to prevent atrocities against those born into ‘lower’ castes, but it hasn’t prevented the perpetuation of some parts of the caste system; the parents of a bride who married a man from the so-called “untouchables” caste hired an assassin and had her husband killed.
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson ordered steps to try to stop the spread of measles in that country, which lost its measles-free status three years after eradicating the virus. Researchers there have discovered a new link between children getting measles and their parents being ‘morons.’
The President’s Chief Economic Adviser, Larry Kudlow, says he doesn’t see a recession coming, but he has a long history of making predictions that turn out completely wrong, including numerous public statements and articles leading up to the 2008-09 downturn where he dismissed any possibility of an economic slowdown.
Trump nominated a lawyer who has argued for ethnic homogeneity and written screeds against LGBT rights groups for a seat on a federal appeals court.
In response to our bloviating leader’s claims that he wants to buy Greenland from Denmark, Denmark has inquired about buying the United States from Russia.
Board game news: Wavelength, now on Kickstarter, is an upcoming game co-designed by Wolfgang Warsch, the brains behind The Mind, That’s So Clever, and The Quacks of Quedlinburg.
Jamey Stegmaier, designer of Scythe and Charterstone, has a new civilization-building game coming out this fall called Tapestry. His designer blog has a ton of information on the game, including that the rulebook is just four pages, and that there’s very little luck or randomness involved.
Stronghold Games opened pre-orders for fall titles, including Amul and the re-issue of Coffee Roaster, a solitaire game I just reviewed this week.
This Twitter thread about a D&D player who taught his grandmother the game when she was 75, only to have her get incredibly into it, was very sweet.
Brilliant, highly nerdy board game tweet:
Someone placed their first tile in Terraforming Mars. @StrongholdGames https://t.co/b680qwgiRn

— Jess (The Valkyrie of Gameosity) (@miniktty) August 22, 2019

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, Economics, environment, india, links, longreads, metoo, ptsd, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ August 17, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/17/19.

I was on vacation with my girlfriend last weekend, taking a few days to go offline while at a resort in Jamaica (my first trip there, so $countries_visited++;), and while I did go see a game right after I got back, I haven’t written this week. My parents also came to visit for a few days, so I had to skip the chat this week. I’ll do one either Tuesday or Wednesday of this upcoming week instead.

I did an interview a few weeks back with a site called the Good Men Project which ran while I was away. I don’t think that makes me a Good Man but I can hope.

Thank you to everyone who has signed up for my free email newsletter and sent kind, thoughtful replies to my last few editions. I’ll send another one later this week after I’ve written some more content around the interwebs.

And now, the links…

Before I get to the longreads, I’ll start with this wonderful piece on the Saturday Evening Post about the culture of inclusion evident at Gen Con, North America’s largest convention dedicated to tabletop gaming. I’ve gone for four years now, speaking and moderating panels at the associated writers’ symposium for the last two, and can’t get over how open and friendly the environment is. I went from thinking “have a good con!” was a vaguely ridiculous salutation (I hear “con” and I think The Sting) to saying it as a matter of course. My Gen Con wrapup should be up any day now for Paste.
Now, the longreads: the New Yorker‘s Jelani Cobb profiles Stacey Abrams and her fight for voting rights, while also detailing why so many people, myself included, believe Georgia Governor Brian Kemp stole the election last year – such as their policy of cancelling registrations of voters who hadn’t voted in seven years, even though such registrations may still have been valid.
The Guardian‘s Long Read describes the pointless fretting over the “decline” of the English language. I’m more prescriptivist than descriptivist, I think, but arguing that language should be static flies in the face of linguistic history.
“For all our careful sorting, less than 5 percent of plastic in the U.S. gets recycled. That’s not a typo.” There are over 75 million metric tons of plastic in the world’s marine environments and it’s only getting worse. Outside‘s Rowan Jacobsen went on an ocean summit between environmentalists and corporate executives designed to help find solutions to address our global plastics problem.
The New York Times has a series of columns on the origins and lasting effects of Gamergate, a massive campaign of cyberharassment dressed up to look like it was a bunch of (mostly) men who cared about ‘ethics in gaming journalism.’
Speaking of the Grey Lady, The Daily Beast has the scoop on a New York Times internal town hall meeting about the paper’s repeated missteps in covering the President and issues of race.
Dr. Jill Emanuele of the Child Mind Institute went on NY1 to talk about how to discuss mass shootings with your kids. Jill’s also my cousin.
My editor at Paste, Garrett Martin, wrote about the absurdity of Wal-Mart discontinuing sales of ‘violent’ video games while the chain still sells guns.
In the midst of a spreading Ebola outbreak in the northeastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo, there’s been some good news on scientific front between an effective vaccine and a new treatment for those infected, but that won’t be enough to stop the disease, caused by a filovirus that is highly infectious and easily transmitted.
Women are not better at multitasking than men; we just ask women to do more.
The Washington Post‘s Anne Applebaum looks at two Italian pro-vaccine activists who took different tacks in their fight against denialists and conspiracy theorists.
Two Italian researchers used endometriosis as a cover for a funded, peer-reviewed paper where they examined patients for their physical attractiveness, asking the patients to disrobe without explaining why. It was published in 2013 in Fertility and Sterility; the editors who published it have yet to so much as acknowledge that it might have been problematic.
Jeff Bezos’ $150 billion fortune is a policy failure, or, rather, a series of policy failures that took place over decades. The article does not mention a political party or faction behind those failures, but one party is behind nearly all of them.
Guardian football writer Nicky Bandini came out as transgender this week, explaining in her column how long it took her to accept that this is who she is.
There’s a new ‘lost’ album from John Coltrane coming out on September 27th.
Michael Chen, a current Harvard student from Honolulu, created a computer program that can predict drug resistance in a tuberculosis strain in under a second.
Board game news: Dire Wolf Digital released a trailer for its upcoming digital port of the dice-drafting game Sagrada.
Martin Wallace’s Struggle of Empires Deluxe Edition is on Kickstarter.
Renegade/Dire Wolf announced a new expansion for Clank! In Space! called Cyber Station 11.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, environment, jazz, linguistics, links, stick to baseball, vaccines, voter suppression

→ August 10, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/10/19.

One ESPN+ post this week, a scouting blog entry on Luis Robert, Nick Madrigal, Deivi Garcia, Triston Casas, and more. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the delightfully named card game Point Salad, which mocks the trend towards complicated scoring by giving you over a hundred different ways to earn points as you collect vegetable cards from the table.

My latest email newsletter edition went out on Tuesday, after I returned from Gen Con. You can sign up here for free to get more of my personal writing.

And now, the links … I assembled this on Thursday night before leaving for vacation, so it’s shorter than usual and anything that happened on Friday won’t be reflected here.

Longreads first: This piece in Rolling Stone describes some of the history behind Prince’s new album of original versions of songs he gave to other artists. At least four songs he wrote became massive hits for others: Chaka Khan’s cover of “I Feel 4 U,” which hit #1 on the U.S. R&B and dance charts; Sinead O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” which spent four weeks at #1 on the U.S. singles chart; the Bangles’ “Manic Monday,” which reached #2 on the singles chart; and Sheila E’s “The Glamourous Life,” which hit #1 on the dance chart and the top ten on the pop and R&B charts.
The Guardian Long Read has an excerpt from Caroline Fraser’s upcoming book on the cult known as Christian Science, which eschews all modern medicine, including vaccines, claiming that illness is merely a manifestation of bad thoughts and the real world is an illusion. Her father died in agony as a result of the cult’s practices, which are still legal in most of the U.S. and can even be covered by Medicare.
The creator of the anarchic forum site 8chan told the New York Times the site should be shut down given its prominence among white nationalist shooters.
Marianne Williamson is an anti-science crank who doesn’t belong anywhere near the Democratic nomination for President, or any office that has influence on science policy. She’s expressed bogus doubts about vaccines, claimed clinical depression is a “scam” diagnosis, and said the AIDS virus “is not more powerful than God.” She needs to leave the stage to the adults.
I saw a game called Ceylon, where players compete to build tea plantations on that island after the coffee crop has been wiped out by disease, last week at Gen Con. A little googling led me to this NPR piece on how coffee leaf rust devastated the island’s main export back in the 19th century, and how it could happen elsewhere.
My friend Tim Grierson wrote about The Sixth Sense and how the real twist is Bruce Willis’ character’s workaholism.
Jumia is trying to be “the Amazon of Africa,” but faces challenges on a continent without western-style infrastructure.
Ohio representative Candice Keller (guess) blamed recent mass shootings on “drag queen advocates” and open borders, even though the perpetrators have nearly always been straight, angry white men.
The Foxconn con just keeps getting worse for Wisconsin, as attempts to ‘fix’ the deal for the state still won’t solve its fundamental problem: It’s a giant boondoggle for the company at state taxpayer expense.
This made me embarrassed to be a male human: several studies have found that pro-environment behavior is seen as more feminine, so men who do things like bringing reusable bags to the grocery store are more likely to be seen as gay. This is so fucking dumb (and yes, I bring my own bags, call me whatever orientation you like).
Harvard biologist George Church has apologized for his contacts with pedophile Jeffrey Epstein even after the latter’s conviction and prison sentence in 2008 for soliciting a minor for prostitution.
The Guardian looks at Cosmo Park, a village built on top of a mall in Jakarta.
Fans of N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, which made her the first author to win three straight Hugo Awards for Best Novel, may be excited to hear that Green Ronin Publishing is turning it into a role-playing game, due out in the fall of 2020.
I made the Wigan Today‘s post on Wigan Athletic’s new mascot.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, environment, harvard, movies, Music, religion, stick to baseball

→ August 3, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/3/19.

Busy week on the baseball front; I had five pieces reacting to deadline trades, on the Stroman trade, the Bauer/Puig/Trammell trade, the Greinke deal, the Jesus Sanchez/Trevor Richards trade, and some smaller moves that didn’t merit full writeups. No chat this week as I’m at Gen Con.

I’ll resume my free email newsletter on Monday; I had one mostly written but never had time to finish and send it before the deadline, and while I love TinyLetter it doesn’t work correctly on my iPad.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This academic paper, co-written by reader Dr. Mike Sonne, finds in a review of existing literature that pitchers’ mechanics and performance break down with fatigue, with the effects apparently interdependent (fatigue leads to mechanical breakdown, which can lead to declining performance and increased stress on joints, leading to more fatigue and performance declines, etc.).
An ESPN Outside the Lines investigation uncovered track coach Conrad Mainwaring’s forty-year history of molesting athletes, often children, under his command.
A podcast helped get parole for a black man in Texas whom prosecutors railroaded into a murder conviction.
The Guardian looks at modern slavery in the United Kingdom and the government’s mistreatment of these victims of human trafficking, focusing on a Vietnamese boy who was abducted and forced to work on a cannabis farm.
Novelist and writing teacher CJ Hauser wrote a harrowing essay on how she called off her wedding ten days before the date after realizing her fiancé had been extensively gaslighting her and denying her the most basic level of emotional attention.
Cultural appropriation is endemic in board game design, but the industry got some needed pushback this spring over a game called Scramble for Africa, which treated the colonization and pillaging of the continent as fodder for game play, gamifying the enslavement and massacres of entire peoples. Maybe it’s not okay to take massive tragedies and turn them into fun?
The fraudulent “documentary” Vaxxed has been disappearing from streaming platforms, with Vimeo the latest to pull it, because it’s full of falsehoods that may scare parents into denying their children vaccines. Skeptical Raptor explains why the film is so bad and lauds Vimeo’s decision.
Films like that exist because spreading anti-vaccine propaganda is very profitable. It’s late-stage capitalism at its worst, and the solution is to attack it on both ends: constricting supply by closing channels, reducing demand through education.
Washington Post advice columnist Carolyn Hax answers a reader who overheard a man she hoped to date grossly objectifying her body.
Because Florida: The state Board of Education’s new chair is a dimwitted creationist who thinks evolution is “only a theory” (you keep using that word…) and shouldn’t be taught in schools.
Right near me in Delaware, vandals removed a new memorial to the lone confirmed victim of lynching in Delaware history. George Lynch was accused of murdering a white person, and a local pastor encouraged residents to break him out of jail and kill him, which they did by burning him alive, taking pieces of his charred body as souvenirs.
Diabetes sufferers are going without insulin because of rising prices; one 22-year-old woman died because she aged out of a state assistance program and couldn’t afford insulin on her own.
The Colorado Rapids cancelled a postgame fireworks display because there’s a plague outbreak on a nearby nature reserve.
The New York Times ran an essay from Timothy Winegard’s upcoming book on how mosquitoes are our apex predator.
A tiny town in Texas, near the Louisiana border, has stirred controversy by declaring itself a “sanctuary town” for fetuses.
There’s new hope for a peaceful settlement to the conflict in Sudan.
Phoenix restaurateur Sam Fox, whose portfolio includes Culinary Dropout and the original Zinburger, sold his company to the Cheesecake Factory, although for now he’ll stay on as head of the group.
I am shocked, shocked I tell you to read that affluent parents are gaming the system of accommodations for students with ADHD or learning disabilities.
The Onion had a good baseball post on Instagram.
If you love the Deep Water Games flip-and-write title Welcome To, which I did, check out their expansion pads showing different themed neighborhoods, like this Halloween edition.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, anti-science, baseball, board game news, colorado, delaware, evolution, florida, links, longreads, phoenix, vaccines

→ July 20, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/20/19.

No new ESPN+ pieces this week but I expect to have several next week. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Century A New World, the end of the Century trilogy that began with Spice Road and continued with Eastern Wonders.

If you read my free email newsletter, you learned at least two interesting things this week, one of which is that I’ve backed away from Twitter by logging out of it on my phone. I find the entire atmosphere on the site too toxic for my tastes, which even continued on Friday as I checked it on my laptop to find someone angry I didn’t tweet about a particular story that broke yesterday.

I’ll be at the Under Armour Game at Wrigley Field on Monday, a great event that showcases many of the high school players who’ll be drafted in the first round next June. It’s free to attend; you can request tickets ahead of time or just get them at the ticket windows that day. The game starts at 2 pm and I highly recommend it.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: If you enjoyed Fleabag, nominated for a slew of Emmy Awards this year, as much as I did, you’ll probably enjoy this GQ interview with star/creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge, conducted by Tina Fey.
The Guardian‘s The long read feature looks at the rise and fall of French cuisine, long considered the backbone of a culinary education, but now seen as stuffy and dated in many quarters.
I hate my lawn, other than the modest pleasure of mowing it (I listen to the Grierson & Leitch podcast, which correlates quite well with the time required to mow, and I use the cuttings in my compost pile), and I’m losing the battle to various native weeds. Lawn care in the U.S. is a $40 billion a year business, and it’s all a disaster for the environment. Maybe it’s time to turn away from grass; I’m faced with a decision this fall, as too much of my lawn has lost out to large and smooth crabgrass, a sign that my soil isn’t providing the real grass with the nutrients it needs, and don’t get me started on spurge.
The Guardian looks at the rise in audiobook sales, asking if it’s good, bad, or both.
I read & recommended Ed Yong’s book I Contain Multitudes about a year and a half ago; in the book, he described nascent efforts to combat mosquito-borne illnesses by using a Wolbachia bacterium to naturally sterilize mosquito populations in the wild. One such experiment in China has nearly eradicated Aedes albopictus from two islands,
For Athletic subscribers, I highly recommend the great Peter Gammons’ profile of the majors’ best rookie this year, Fernando Tatis, Jr.
I finally got to Razza in Jersey City this week, about a year and a half after the New York Times food critic said it was the best pizza in New York City. He recently revised that statement after Una Pizza Napoletana returned to Manhattan after several years in San Francisco. I went shortly before the move, and it was spectacular.
One of my favorite restaurants in the Phoenix area, Scottsdale’s Pig & Pickle, closed suddenly this week in what sounds like a dispute with a new landlord.
There’s an underreported scandal going on in Malaysia right now: ousted Prime Minister Najib Razak and his wife are on trial for corruption, and prosecutors showed his wife racked up $800,000 in jewelry charges on a credit card linked to a state-owned investment fund. President Trump welcomed Razak to the White House in 2017, when the embezzlement scandal had already become public but Razak had yet to be voted out of office.
LGBT rights are under attack in Poland too, as the right-wing party in power is cheering on towns creating “LGBT-free zones”.
An Arizona newscaster dropped an f-bomb on air after the Phoenix New Times wrote that she joined a far-right social networking site that has attracted several overt racists banned from Twitter. An Arizona Republic editorial wrote that it’ll probably make her more popular.
A Philadelphia pediatrician wrote about her attempts to empathize and reason with “vaccine-hesitant” parents, even though the best solution is to fire them into the sun.
Lots of board game news as we approach Gen Con (I’ll be there as usual): Ravensburger announced Villainous: Evil Comes Prepared, the second expansion to last year’s Disney’s Villainous. You can pre-order it exclusively through Target right now.
Dire Wolf is taking its free-to-play digital card game Eternal to tabletop, releasing a physical version of the game in August; you can pre-order it through Dire Wolf’s site.
Renegade Game Studios announced pre-orders for Paladins of the West Kingdom, the second game in Shem Phillips’ West Kingdom series and his fifth in the series of Viking-themed games that began with Raiders of the North Sea.
The role-playing game Gloomhaven is coming to Steam and just entered Early Access this week.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, baseball, board game news, lgbt rights, social media, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ July 6, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/6/19.

My one ESPN+ post this week looked at a few of the top names in the July 2nd market, including Jasson Dominguez (Yankees) and Robert Puason (A’s). I also co-hosted the Baseball Tonight podcast twice this week, on Monday with guests Eric Karabell and Eric Longenhagen, and on Tuesday with guests Dr. Meredith Wills and Sarah Langs.

My latest board game review for Paste covers Bosk, a beautiful game that unfortunately is very slow to play, with needlessly complicated scoring.

You can get more of my rants and raves – mostly rants – if you sign up for my free email newsletter, which appears two to four times a month, or whenever my spirit guide tells me what to say.

I’ll be appearing in Hudson, Ohio, at the Hudson Library and Historical Society this Monday evening, July 8th, at 7 pm, talking about baseball and other topics, then signing copies of Smart Baseball. I’ll also be at the Futures Game at Jacobs Field (yes, I know, I’m still calling it the Jake) on Sunday evening, and will tweet about a meetup with fans before first pitch.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: WIRED tells the harrowing story of a cyberstalker in New Hampshire who was extorting teenaged girls for nude photos, and the effort to find and arrest him. (They did.)
The Washington Post looks at how easily cancer patients can find bogus and even dangerous “treatments” online, including bullshit cures like baking soda and an alkaline diet.
News coverage of a spate of “suspicious” deaths of U.S. tourists in the Dominican Republic is a textbook case of base-rate neglect, with journalists and members of Congress alike reacting to a story that isn’t there.
Microsoft shut down its electronic book store – store of electronic books? – which serves as a reminder that we don’t own the digital content for which we’ve paid. It would be more accurate to say you’re leasing it, under the terms of the agreements you’ve made (when you clicked Agree) with the iTunes store or amazon or other purveyors.
My alma mater’s Kennedy School of Government keeps putting its foot in it with some of the invitations they’ve offered to former government officials, but former Michigan Governor Rick Snyder bailed them out by withdrawing from a one-year fellowship after criticism of the appointment. Snyder was governor during the period when the city of Flint experienced the still-ongoing crisis in its water supply. I suppose the folks at the Kennedy School don’t have Google.
Arizona Governor Doug Ducey filled his diaper over Nike’s decision, threatening to pull some state funding for a new Nike facility in Goodyear, but his tweets were probably a meaningless attempt to score political points, playing to his base and trying to raise his national profile.
White Sox pitcher and first-time All-Star Lucas Giolito spoke to the Chicago Sun-Times about his progressive views on immigration.
Prof. Noam Chomsky spoke to Truthout about Trump’s efforts to create an alliance of far-right leaders around the world, although I wonder if this is the efforts of the people below Trump.
Former U.S. Deputy Attorney General Donald Ayer, who served under George H.W. Bush, writes in The Atlantic about the dangerous plan of current AG Bill Barr to give the President unchecked power.
Also in The Atlantic, a pediatrician who examined children at a Border Control camp found evidence of malnutrition, infections, and psychological trauma. We should be far more outraged as a society than we actually are.
Two New Jersey judges ruled for leniency for privileged teenaged boys accused of rape, although both rulings were overturned or revised by higher courts.
The Tennessee Smokies, the double-A affiliate of the Chicago Cubs, tweeted and then deleted a series of pictures mocking Colin Kaepernick over his counsel to Nike to recall shoes with the Betsy Ross United States flag on them. It was a particularly tone deaf tweet, given the presence of multiple players of color on their roster.
I rather enjoyed WNBA star Sue Bird’s rant on the Players’ Tribune, titled So the President F*cking Hates My Girlfriend. (Her girlfriend is USWNT star Megan Rapinoe.)
I’ve been adopted into Phish phandom, and just learned about the clever, elaborate hoax the band pulled around its Halloween 2018 concert.
Board game news: Plan B Games announced pre-orders for Century Eastern Mountains, a special edition of Century Eastern Wonders with a new theme and artwork to dovetail with their Century Spice Road Golem Edition.
A reprint of Die Macher, the first game ever entered into the BoardGameGeek database, is about to wrap up a run on Kickstarter.
Tweet of the week: I feel like everyone should watch this clip from Love Has No Labels, in which John Cena shares some thoughts on what it means to be American.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, harvard, links, longreads, new jersey, pseudoscience

→ June 15, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/16/19.

I had one ESPN+ piece this week, looking at which teams just drafted their new #1 or #2 prospects in last week’s draft.

On July 8th, the day after the MLB Futures Game, I’ll be speaking at the Hudson Library in Hudson, Ohio, about Smart Baseball and signing books.

My free email newsletter is back, at least in the sense that I’ve sent it out twice in the last two weeks, so maybe sign up for that too.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Guardian has an excerpt on a book that argues there are harmful effects of the co-opting of mindfulness by those who push it as a panacea.
The New Yorker solved the mystery of the McCarthy campaign worker Pat Sylvester who impressed Robert F. Kennedy in an impromptu conversation (that included Taylor Branch, later to win a Pulitzer Prize) at the Indianapolis Airport just a month before Kennedy was assassinated.
This piece was free but went premium after I bookmarked it – the Chronicle of Higher Education looks at how the University of Utah failed to protect a student who was stalked and later killed by her former partner.
In the backwater swirling, update: Alabama banned abortion for rape victims but protects the parental rights of rapists. BBC’s The Inquiry podcast asked why is it always Alabama? in this week’s episode.
Former Congressional candidate Paul Nehlen has turned to advocating violence in favor of a whites-only state.
Nancy Bass Wyden, owner of New York’s iconic bookstore The Strand, penned an editorial opposing the city’s designation of the building and store as a landmark. Reason also has an editorial on the topic, pointing out the immense power the 11-person landmarks committee holds over New York City real estate.
Afghanistan veteran and former Missouri Secretary of State Jason Kander spoke to NBC News about his struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder.
A single mutation turned almonds from toxic to a major culinary item, as it removed the amygdalin (found in bitter almonds as well as the nuts at the hearts of peaches) from the nuts.
George Will says that young people have decided the GOP is ‘the dumb party,’ arguing that the Republicans have become the cult of Trump and are devoid of ideas. I tend to agree, but don’t think it’s a fait accompli that Democrats benefit – they need to counter with workable policy ideas of their own and to improve their ground game to capitalize.
Board game news: Renegade Studios announced a September release for Icarus, a collaborative storytelling game about the fall of a civilization.
Deep Water Games opened a Kickstarter for Soveriegn Skies, a midweight Euro that promises to play in 45 minutes.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alabama, board game news, food science, links, longreads, mental health, ptsd, stick to baseball, white nationalism

→ May 30, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/25/19.

For ESPN+ subscribers, I posted my 2019 MLB draft Big Board, ranking the top 100 prospects in this year’s draft class. I’ll tweak that before the draft but this is the last complete re-ranking. I also held a Klawchat on Friday.

I’m behind on just about everything else these days, but I’ll have a fresh game review up for Paste this upcoming week, and I swear there will be a new email newsletter issue soon. Really. I promise. Mostly.

And now, the links…

I tweeted about this story this week, but the report that set me off was Brandy Zadrozny’s article for NBC News about parents giving their kids bleach as a (fake) autism cure. The so-called MMS “cure” is just a fancy name for a toxic dose of chlorine dioxide, which is used to bleach wood pulp and paper.
The Washington Post examines how one right-wing activist has helped pack the nation’s courts with conservative judges. Why should any one person, regardless of political bent, have this kind of power over this branch of government? It’s likely to take decades to roll back the damage done to the country’s judiciary when it comes to fundamental issues like civil rights.
The Atlantic explores Sesame Street‘s introduction of a Muppet who lives with foster parents, and how the show’s writers try to teach viewers about dealing with traumatic events.
The editorial board of prestigious British medical journal The Lancet wrote this week that all doctors must fight to protect women’s rights and keep abortion safe and legal.
Anti-vaxxer activists are now working to spread their disinformation within communities suffering from measles outbreaks, including encouraging the orthodox to use (bogus) religious exemptions to skip mandatory vaccinations.
ProPublica shines a light on how the family of New Jersey political boss George Norcross benefited from over $1 billion in tax breaks, obtained through pressure on state officials that extended to one family lawyer helping write legislation to specifically benefit the Norcrosses.
Violence against trans people appears to be on the rise, so in response, the Administration is trying to roll back very basic protections for trans people, allowing homeless shelters to turn away people for being transgender and healthcare providers to freely discriminate against them.
Far far-right Arizona Rep. Kelly Townsend is trying again to pass a bill banning political speech in the classroom in a direct attempt to retaliate against teachers who fought last spring for higher pay and better working conditions in the #RedForEd movement.
Other far-right politicians attended a rally in Spokane to create a Christian state called Liberty State out of eastern Washington and northern Idaho. I’m sure the old Aryan Nations folks would be thrilled.
Deadspin’s Albert Burnenko writes that the idea that Trump wants to be impeached is absurd.
Trump entered office with more debt than any President in history, and last year added even more. So many of the core values that underpinned our democracy have died quiet deaths since his election; the failure to require Trump to divest from all his businesses feels like the worst of all the new precedents we’ve set.
Quentin Tarantino did not handle it well when asked a fair question about the limited dialogue for Margot Robbie in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
The Division 3 Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference is kicking out St. Thomas after 100 years of membership for being too good.
Lindsey Adler asked a number of Yankees players about the time each came closest to quitting baseball (subscription required).
Over at Baseball America, J.J. Cooper looks at what happens in pitching-poor drafts like this year’s when you choose to draft a pitcher. The short answer: it’s not good.
Alabama continues to roll back the clock as fast as they can, as Alabama public television refused to air an episode of Arthur that showed a same-sex wedding.
A Methodist pastor in Alabama had some strong words for forced-birth Republicans, but more importantly, doesn’t he look a lot like David Ross?
Britain’s Labour Party made this tremendous video arguing against UKIP’s politics of exclusion as part of its Labour Voices series.
Board game news: Pre-orders are up now for Era, the newest game from designer Matt Leacock (Pandemic, Forbidden Desert).
Asmodee announced a new division, Gamegenic, to design and sell accessories for games, items like card sleeves, playmats, and storage boxes.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alabama, arizona, baseball, board game news, lgbt rights, new jersey, pseudoscience, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines, white nationalism

→ May 5, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/5/19.

I had two ESPN+ posts last week, my ranking of the top 50 prospects in this year’s draft class and a scouting blog post covering a half-dozen top prep players (five of them on the top 50). My first mock draft of 2019 goes up on Monday. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I sent out the latest edition of my free email newsletter on Friday as well. I’ve been trying to time those to when I’ve got actual content to tell you all about, especially baseball things.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Cut looks at a small cult that operated within the Sarah Lawrence campus, as the father of a student there ended up crashing in her dorm and taking control of many of her roommates’ lives. The university’s reluctance to act is especially disturbing.
BuzzFeed talked to former white nationalist writer/provocateur Katie McHugh, a piece that tries to exonerate her (and fails, in my opinion) but that is instructive into how the alt-right social media machine works.
The Saudi government has regularly helped its citizens living in the U.S. escape prosecution for crimes by spiriting them out of the country, yet we do nothing about this because we continue to believe that the Saudis are our friends despite forty-plus years of evidence that they are not. First it was oil, now it’s help against terrorism, but there’s always an excuse for treating the Saudis as allies even when their actions say otherwise.
My friend Tim Grierson interviewed director/actor Werner Herzog on the eve of the German film giant’s new documentary Meeting Gorbachev.
Kavitha Davidson wrote in the Guardian about sexual assault in sports and society, focusing on Luke Walton’s attorney is trying to use #MeToo to denigrate the coach’s victim.
The New York Times explores eleven major food crops already affected by climate change, which, as the article notes, is widely denied by elected officials (always Republicans) from many of the states that rely on agriculture for employment and income.
The Washington Post profiles D’Arcy Carden, who plays Janet on The Good Place.
The Post also argues that anti-vaxxers should bear the financial costs of their actions when outbreaks occur.
The anti-vaxxer movement is also turning to increasingly violent rhetoric. We ignored this as a society when anti-abortion activists did it, and then when white nationalists did it, and both movements eventually turned to violence and terrorism.
Those same anti-vaxxers are harassing and threatening a Toronto mother whose son died of the flu as she has been advocating for greater use of the flu vaccine.
Measles had been eradicated in this hemisphere in 2000; it just reached its highest level in the U.S. in twenty years, entirely because of anti-vaxxers.
Meanwhile, science-denier Darryl Metcalfe, Pennsylvania’s representative for its 12th district (guess which party!), introduced a bill making it easier for parents to skip vaccinations by requiring doctors to treat unvaccinated children even if it poses risks to other patients.
Germany’s health minister proposed issuing large fines to families who don’t vaccinate their school-aged children. Add that to liability and you might extinguish enough of the deniers to stop these outbreaks.
Indonesia announced a plan to move the capital away from Jakarta because that city is sinking.
The political science valedictorian at Brigham Young University announced during his speech that he’s gay, a huge move given that the Mormon Church just announced a month ago that homosexuality was no longer considered apostasy.
Adam Serwer argues in the Atlantic that Nazis are and have always been trolls.
A National Geographic editorial argues that we must keep half of all land mass in its natural state to stop climate change. That may be true, but, uh, good luck with that.
A federal court ruled that Ohio Republicans violated Ohioans’ constitutional rights with a 2011 gerrymander. I know New Jersey Democrats did this too, but are all of the remaining gerrymanders this decade by Republicans?
Board game news: Plan B Games opened pre-orders for Century: A New World, the third game in Emerson Matsuuchi’s trilogy that also included Spice Road and Eastern Wonders.
Acram Digital announced that they’re developing a digital port of Charterstone, the tremendous legacy game that was my #2 title of 2018.
Asmodee announced the creation of a new fiction imprint to publish works based on or tied to its wide stable of board game and RPG titles.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, climate change, links, metoo, rape culture, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ February 16, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/16/19.

No ESPN+ content this week, but my entire prospect ranking package is now up for subscribers, including the top 100, farm system rankings, and in-depth rankings for all 30 teams, with at least 15 prospects ranked in each system. Before my vacation I wrote up the J.T. Realmuto trade. I also held a Klawchat this Thursday and another back on February 6th.

My most recent board game review for Paste covered the light, fun engine-builder Gizmos, by the designer of Bärenpark and Imhotep, a very family-friendly title with no text to worry about that takes the engine-builder concept and boils it down to a simpler game that plays in well under an hour.

I also resumed my email newsletter, so feel free to sign up for that if you just can’t get enough Klaw in your life.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Jessica Luther and Dan Solomon have a massive piece up at Deadspin looking at how Baylor football became a haven for sexual assault, building on their great work over the last few years at Texas Monthly.
The Verge interviews Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan, who has made millions of scientific papers available ‘free’ online, violating copyrights to do so – but should scientific research not just be copyrighted, but held behind prohibitive paywalls that may slow the progress of other research by denying people access? Should copyright laws, which predate the idea of research journals and existed to protect the rights of publishers and content creators, treat scientific papers the way they treat novels or films?
SkepticalRaptor has a long review of a bad book from last fall that claims the HPV vaccine isn’t safe. The book’s authors aren’t scientists, but two lawyers and a homemaker, so nobody with a science background, and it shows in the text.
Amanita phalloides, the deadly mushroom colloquially known as the death-cap, is spreading across North America.
My friends Tim Grierson and Will Leitch ranked every film that won the Oscar for Best Picture. I’ve probably seen only 20 or so of these, but I at least agree with their praise of numbers 1, 3, 6, 12, and 17.
Why don’t we have a vaccine for streptococcus A, the aftereffects of which, including rheumatic heart disease and sepsis, kill half a million people a year? It’s a combination of a regulatory screwup, successful medical interventions in developed countries, and the low profit margins of vaccines.
In a Guardian longread, Tom Yarwood writes about surviving being sexually molested by a music teacher when he was a child. He’s specific about the nature of the abuse, in case you might find this triggering.
The BBC looks at how Helsinki ended street homelessness through progressive policies designed to get such people off the streets into stable housing, even if they have substance-abuse problems.
Laura Snapes writes in the Guardian that the Ryan Adams allegations are just the start in a field where such “beta male misogyny” is rampant.
Measles is on the rise in Europe thanks to anti-vaxxers, and our state laws here need to keep up by eliminating all non-medical exemptions for schoolchildren.
Facebook’s role in spreading vaccine-denial bullshit has come under fire in two directions – the rise of closed groups that freely share false information against vaccines, and now anti-vaxxer groups using Facebook ad targeting to serve ads to pregnant women scaring them away from vaccines.
Some unvaccinated teens are now going around their parents to get vaccinated or doing so as soon as they’re of age. I’d drive any unvaccinated kid to the doctor if they had the legal side sorted out to get their shots.
There’s a measles outbreak in the Philippines, including the capital city of Manila, with nearly 13 million people in its metropolitan area.
Now some especially dumbshit parents are refusing the vitamin K shot for newborns. It’s essential to help newborns’ blood clot properly, so look for a bunch of babies bleeding to death needlessly because their parents are morons and the law lets them stay that way.
Climate change may melt most Himalayan glaciers in the next 80 years, which, I don’t know, sounds like a national emergency to me.
Scientific American looks at proposed policies to combat rising temperatures in Phoenix, although I notice water conservation, an outright failure of the city and state governments there, isn’t mentioned.
Math geeks may enjoy this paper (PDF) on the Sheldon Conjecture, based on an episode of the Big Bang Theory where that character says 73 is the perfect prime number – and it’s possible that the writers were more right than they knew.
Harvard professor Jill Abramson stands accused of plagiarism as well as inaccurate quotes in her latest book, and she seems to think she’s above the fray. I’ve emailed multiple deans at Harvard to ask for any sign they’re even aware of these problems – she teaches seminars on writing there, for crying out loud – but so far I’ve had no response.
Instagram “influencer” Rachel Hollis has also been accused of plagiarizing quotes on her social media account.
Bernie 2020? Not so fast, if you look at his history of embracing pseudoscience.
Julian Edelman’s title as Super Bowl MVP exposes our ‘selective morality’ on performance-enhancing drugs in sports, Hunter Felt writes for the Guardian.
Oh, we back on that again? New York’s City Council is considering a ban on foie gras, based again on a misunderstanding of how the delicacy is actually produced. I’m not a huge fan myself, at least not commensurate with its reputation among foodies, but this is a needless regulation, and shouldn’t be near the top of anyone’s priority list of rules on food production and sale.
I shouldn’t laugh, but I did: “Investors” in a cryptocurrency exchange might be out $137 million because the founder died and no one knows his passwords.
Jane Coaston wrote in Vox about conservative pundits’ bad faith arguments around Gov. Ralph Northam while also arguing that the governor, who appeared in blackface in a yearbook photo from his time in graduate school, should resign. I feel like we should just turn Virginia off and turn it back on again.
George Will argues in the Washington Post that Democrats can bail out Trump by nominating someone too liberal/progressive in 2020. I don’t agree, but I think Will makes a cogent argument about the center (without, I think, considering voters on the far left who might have abstained in 2016).
A great podcast from the BBC explains why we don’t care about the war in Yemen, which we support by funding our ‘friends’ the Saudis.
Two unrolled Twitter threads worth reading: Harvard professor Juliette Kayam depantsed Rep. Dan Crenshaw over border security and the wall.
Writer Anand Giridharadas was invited to fill in as guest speaker at a dinner, only to have the ‘liberal’ crowd defend the Koch brothers. The dinner took place at The Players, a private social club founded by Edwin Booth, which has also been accused of labor law violations (detailed within).
Board games! Floodgate Games’ Bad Maps is now available for pre-order.
The board game Evolution is now out as an app for iOS, Android, and Steam. I have a review coming for Ars Technica, but I’ll report here that it’s pretty great – it looks fantastic and I think it’s easy to read, learn, and play on a tablet screen.
Villainous: Wicked to the Core, is a new standalone expansion to last year’s hit game Villainous, and will be available exclusively through Target starting on March 3rd, with pre-orders through that link. I’ve played it five times already, and it’s more of the same but with better rules explaining each villain character’s unique powers and victory conditions. This comes with three new characters – the Evil Queen, Doctor Facilier, and Hades (no James Woods, thank goodness) – and may be combined any way you like with the six villains from the original game.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, board games, climate change, frauds, links, math, metoo, oscars, vaccines, virginia

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