board game news — Page 14

→ 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

→ October 5, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/5/19.

Nothing new from me this week other than a Klawchat and a Periscope video as I try to finish off the first draft of my upcoming book The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, now available for pre-order. My next ESPN+ column will be a dispatch from the Arizona Fall League.

And now, the links – fewer than usual, for the same reasons, but these should get back to normal by the end of the month:

Longreads first: This New York Review of Books review of Tim Alberta’s book American Carnage doubles as a look at how the Republican Party was heading for this Trumpian moment for a half-century.
Haruki Murakami writes about memories of his father and their declining relationship for the New Yorker.
Deadspin has the inside scoop on how TheMaven plans to gut Sports Illustrated by turning it into a lousier version of SBNation or SI‘s own FanSided.
GQ takes readers inside the brutal dictatorship ruling Burundi, a tiny country in the heart of Africa, the southern neighbor of Rwanda. Burundi’s sectarian violence hasn’t become a global story like the Rwandan civil war and genocide did, but that doesn’t make its current regime’s crimes any less heinous.
The American Prospect looks at the novel campaign of West Virginia gubernatorial candidate Stephen Smith, which focuses more on philosophy than the candidate himself.
The BBC has a not-quite longread on the international heist of Saudi jewels, including the “blue diamond,” that has caused a rift between Saudi Arabia and Thailand, and that ultimately involved multiple murders.
Nestlé, whose products you should already think about avoiding given their exploitation of water resources, is now complaining that they don’t want to comply with Australian requirements to report on whether they rely on slavery in their chocolate supply chain, claiming it would cost consumers more money in the end. I mean, I’m good paying another dime for chocolate if it means the cacao wasn’t harvested by an eight-year-old slave in Côte d’Ivoire.
Susanna Clarke, author of one of my all-time favorite novels in Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, will release her second novel in September of 2020, sixteen years after her bestselling, critically-acclaimed, Hugo-winning debut.
Plastic tea bags release billions of plastic microparticles into your tea. I’ll stick with loose leaf teas at home, thanks.
Two women in New Zealand lost their pregnancies because they contracted measles. Remember that when someone tells you that measles is a benign childhood illness.
From 2017, the chief of the Guardian‘s Melbourne bureau, Melissa Davey, wrote that we need to teach science and health literacy in schools so those kids don’t grow up into gullible adults who fall for pseudoscience and anti-science myths they read online.
An “Actually Disabled” person penned an open letter to Andy Richter about the dangers of assuming someone who looks able-bodied is feigning a disability.
Why are Customs and Border Protection agents harassing journalists as they re-enter the United States? Probably for the same reason the U.S. has fallen to “problematic” on the World Press Freedom index.
Board game news: Reiner Knizia’s Yellow & Yangtze, which he calls his “spiritual successor” to Tigris & Euphrates, is coming to digital platforms and just hit Early Access on Steam. It’s from Dire Wolf, who did such great work on digital ports of Raiders of the North Sea and Lanterns.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, board game news, british literature, chocolate, food safety, longreads, murakami, science, stick to baseball, west virginia

→ September 28, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/28/19.

My one piece for ESPN+ subscribers this week had my six postseason player award ballots, all hypothetical as I didn’t have any vote this year. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday and another Periscope video chat on Tuesday.

At Paste, I reviewed Silver and Gold, a tremendous new flip-and-write game from the designer of Gizmos and Bärenpark, where players fill in polyomino shapes on their own cards, trying to complete as many cards as possible while racking up various bonuses. It’s due out in late October.

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 all the usual sites. The release date is April 21, 2020.

You can also get more updates from my free email newsletter; the next edition will go out some time this week, before I head to Arizona for an abbreviated trip to the Fall League.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Royals pitcher Danny Duffy opened up to the Kansas City Star about his anxiety, depression, and panic disorder, with a little about what he has done to combat it.
Texas Monthly has the story of the hunt for a serial killer in Laredo last year; the culprit was actually a member of the Border Patrol.
The backlash against so-called “cancel culture” among comedians is nothing but a big con. Most figures in entertainment who’ve supposedly been “cancelled” continue to perform or publish, and to make money, while other comedians have found an audience by railing against minority groups and “cancel culture” itself.
Writer Prachi Gupta remembers her brilliant, late brother, who had become red-pilled and died under hard to fathom circumstances in Italy two years ago.
Amid an apparent rise in suicides and cases of mental illness at British universities, the Guardian‘s Samira Shackle asks why it’s happening, what can be done, and if it’s the schools’ jobs to fix it at all.
Author Matt Goulding examines the culture of Neapolitan pizzas in Tokyo, where multiple pizzaioli pursue pizza perfection, even if they’ve never been to Italy themselves.
Anti-vaxxer groups are targeting moms who lost children and convincing them vaccines killed their kids, then turning the moms into “crusaders” and the kids into talking points. Dorit Reiss takes a closer look at the newest such case, a baby who suffocated while sleeping in her parents’ bed.
The Atlantic looks at a proposal to make 988 the suicide prevention hotline number, and some of what we know about how and why such lifelines work.
Rakim has a new book out on creativity and NPR excerpted a portion of it.
A new study found that gluten doesn’t make you sick if you don’t have celiac or a wheat allergy. “Gluten sensitivity,” “leaky gut,” and other pseudoscience diagnoses are just that – pseudoscience.
The New York Times has really had a bad week. They published key details on the Ukraine whistleblower. Opinion columnist Bari Weiss’s new book on anti-Semitism got a damning review in Jewish Currents. And the New Republic exposed the haughty history of Bret “Bedbug” Stephens, who likes to write as if he knows what “ordinary” (his word, and his quotes) Americans are thinking.
The World Health Organization is holding back doses of the one existing Ebola vaccine during the ongoing epidemic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, spurring criticism from Doctors Without Borders.
Ravensburger just announced an upcoming Minecraft board game called Minecraft: Builders and Biomes, due out worldwide on November 15th.
(chef’s kiss)

pic.twitter.com/lURLRFJhR9

— ed (@macaulaybalkan) September 26, 2019

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, board game news, links, longreads, mental health, mental illness, pizza, vaccines

→ September 21, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/21/19.

My one ESPN+ column this week looked at players I was wrong about, including Shane Bieber and Jeff McNeil. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday and a Periscope video chat on Tuesday.

I discussed details of my new book, due out in April 2020 from HarperCollins, in this week’s edition of my free email newsletter. You can pre-order the book already on amazon.

I joined the East Village Times podcast to talk about the Padres’ farm system this week.

And now, the links…

Longreads: WIRED has the story of a murderer undone by data on the victim’s Fitbit.
New documents have revealed Israel and the United States’ complicity in the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre of hundreds, possibly thousands, of Palestinian and Lebanese Shi’ite civilians. It seems like a precursor to modern attacks on civilian targets in the name of fighting terrorism.
Serious Eats’ J. Kenji Lopez-Alt wrote about how he helped his daughter become a better eater, even as a toddler. Two of his tips for which I can vouch: Repeated exposure to foods helps, and shopping and cooking with my daughter raised her interest in eating what we made.
Sandy Hook Promise has a powerful, harrowing new PSA to encourage more parents to push for sensible gun law reforms.
Most of the links I provide here are ones I recommend, but occasionally I include something I find interesting because of how egregiously bad it is. This link falls in the latter category: An author complains about how she totally mismanaged the money she earned from writing, and when her advances dwindled, she wasn’t prepared for the funds to dry up like that.
A reader of mine, Brian Godish, shared this story about his son, a cancer survivor already at age 9, and pitcher Michael Kopech.
I enjoy potable bitters, particularly Amaro Meletti and Amaro Montenegro, but had never heard of Amer Picon, which has a strange pocket of fans in western Nevada even though the spirit is not exported from France.
Rob Tannenbaum gives the history of A-ha’s song and video “Take On Me”, which has over a billion views on YouTube and over half a billion spins on Spotify.
I feel like every parent wants to see their children become readers; the Atlantic looks at some factors that actually matter in encouraging your kids to enjoy reading.
I haven’t watched Netflix’s Unbelievable yet, but the reviews are very strong, and it’s based on a true story of a serial rapist who was caught after Washington state cops coerced one victim into recanting her claims.
SkepticalRaptor has a new post countering some key flu vaccine myths, with a mention of yours truly when he drops a baseball analogy.
I’ve read two great books in the last year on the Chicxulub impact, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs and T. Rex and the Crater of Doom. This week scientists released new information from drilling into the crater to try to learn more specifics about the impact.
Pennsylvania state Senator Mike Folmer (R) resigned this week after he was arrested for possessing and disseminating child pornography. Last year, Folmer “opposed a bill that would have made it easier for survivors of child sex abuse to sue their perpetrators by extending the statute of limitations.”
The Department of Education is threatening to pull funding from programs at Duke and UNC because the programs show Islam in too positive a light.
Will Wilkinson writes in the New York Times why certain conservatives are so up in arms (pun intended) over an assault weapons ban. I think he’s right on the nose here.
Philadelphia magazine is suing the Governor of Pennsylvania for his office’s attempts to curtail the magazine’s access in retaliation for their coverage of the wasteful DROP program.
Violence and harassment against abortion clinics, providers, and patients is on the rise, according to a new CBS News report.
Facebook took down a fact-checking report on medically necessary abortions, part of how forced birthers are waging war on abortion rights the same way anti-vaxxers are trying to wage war on vaccinations: through disinformation and abuse of social media sites’ own policing.
Those of you in academia may appreciate this Twitter thread on bots infiltrating research surveys and tips for blocking them.
Slice Out Hunger is holding its annual Dollar Slice Night fundraiser in NYC on October 3rd.
Board game news: A group of gaming industry folk have created the American Tabletop Awards and named their inaugural winners, including the Quacks of Quedlinburg and Root.
They’re already 2000% funded (!) but there are two new Everdell expansions on Kickstarter.
Tweet of the week:

Teacher: Can someone give me an example of white privilege?
Student: Oh come on! I don’t want to talk about white privilege.
Teacher: Excellent job. Anyone else?

— Abbi Crutchfield (@curlycomedy) September 20, 2019

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, board game news, first amendment, guns, israel, links, stick to baseball

→ September 7, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/7/19.

I had one ESPN+ piece this week, looking at the best or most interesting September prospect callups. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

For Paste, I reviewed Planet, a simple tile-laying game where you place those tiles on your own polyhedron planet, so you get to hold the whole world in your hands.

Now that this piece is done and I’ve already filed my ESPN column for next week (Prospect of the Year), I’ll work on my next email newsletter. You can sign up for free any time.

I’m selling off some of my board games, and once again I’m donating all proceeds to the Food Bank of Delaware. You can see the games I’m selling here. Thanks to those of you who’ve already bought some of my games, I’ve donated over $330 to the Food Bank.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Dan Piepenbring, writing in the New Yorker, describes the time he spent with Prince just before the singer’s death as the two collaborated on what would have been Prince’s autobiography.
Amazon’s private delivery network has led to accidents and fatalities, but the retailer hides behind its use of third parties to avoid any liability.
The Guardian‘s Nesrine Malik argues that there is no free speech crisis – there’s a hate speech crisis, and she puts particular blame on social media sites that do little to nothing to stop it.
Scientific American looks at how misinformation spreads and why we fall for it, using a model from economics called the network epistemology framework and discussing the human tendency towards conformism. The piece also puts some blame on social media.
Also from the New Yorker, emails from longtime GOP operative Thomas Hofeller show just how racially-motivated the Republican Party’s gerrymandering was across the country.
The New York Times examines the role Youtube’s algorithms played in helping radicalize Brazil, aiding the rise of their Trump-like, far-right leader Jair Bolsonaro.
STAT News describes the new effort to create and market a vaccine against Lyme disease and asks if the public will be more open to it than it was 20 years ago.
Saveur profiles the families that make L’Etivaz cheese in Switzerland, a sort of spinoff from Gruyère cheese that preserves older methods and is now protected by a national law.
Last month, the FDA approved a new, novel antiobiotic that can defeat extensively- and multi-drug resistant tuberculosis caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis.
School dress codes are a nightmare for parents and for educators, and they often directly or indirectly disfavor girls, especially girls of color. Now some young girls of color in Washington, D.C., are fighting back against rules that discriminate against them.
Adele Lim, co-writer of the script for Crazy Rich Asians, has left the project for the sequel after discovering that her white male counterpart was offered eight to ten times her pay. Warner Brothers explained to Lim’s representatives that making an exception to the standard industry pay scales “would set a troubling precedent in the business,” which ignores how those pay scales were first set (and by whom) or the disadvantages women writers or writers of color have from the start in an industry that has tended not to utilize them.
NPR looks at the ongoing fallout from the “shitty media men” list, including author Stephen Elliott, who wants everyone to know that he’s not a shitty media man who has assaulted women and is suing the list’s creator to ensure that nobody finds out that he was on it.
James Smyth has a great Twitter thread explaining how Mike Minor is leading AL pitchers in Baseball-Reference’s WAR.
A St. Louis police officer pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and a grand jury about an assault by cops on an undercover officer in the wake of the 2017 protests after the acquittal of officer Jason Stockley on a murder charge.
David Karpf responds to Bret “Bedbug” Stephens’ screed, published on the editorial pages of the New York Fucking Times, to say that Stephens has merely proved Karpf’s own point by comparing him to Nazi propagandists. Karpf’s best question is why the Times’ editorial page editor James Bennet allowed Stephens’ garbage column to see the light of day.
The third Azul game, called Azul: Summer Pavilion, is now available to pre-order. It’s a must for me given how much I loved the original Azul and the second game in the series, Stained Glass of Sintra.
Tapestry, the new civilization-building game from Scythe and Charterstone designer Jamey Stegmaier, sold out its first printing pre-orders in just a few days, but you can still reserve a copy from your Friendly Local Game Store.
And finally, happy 51st anniversary to my parents. I wouldn’t be the person I am without you two.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, baseball, board game news, brazil, free speech, links, longreads, medicine, metoo, prince, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ 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

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