board game news — Page 16

→ May 9, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/9/20.

I was back writing this week, with three new pieces for The Athletic: how MLB’s decision to cut the draft to five rounds hurts players and the sport; a look back at the 2004 draft and what might have happened had the Padres taken Justin Verlander at #1 overall; and a profile of Dodgers prospect Brandon Lewis, who changed his diet and conditioning habits to transform his body and become a fourth-round pick .

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, is now out, and you can buy it anywhere you buy books, like here via bookshop.org, which supports independent bookstores directly or by providing logistics and delivery for them. I’m donating my proceeds from sales of my book through my affiliate account there to charity, sending $100 this week to the Food Bank of Delaware, our local food pantry.

WIRED excerpted part of the first chapter of The Inside Game, on anchoring bias and why it tells us to move to an automated strike zone; the link made Pocket’s Best Of list this week. I also spoke to Inside Science about the book.

I appeared on the Poscast this week with Joe Posnanski and Ellen Adair, which you can listen to on The Athletic, Apple, Spotify, or Stitcher; and on the Inquiring Minds podcast, which you can get on Apple or Stitcher. On The Keith Law Show, I had Meghan Montemurro, our Phillies writer, on to talk about that team and the Athletic’s ongoing OOTP simulation of the 2020 season; you can listen on The Athletic, Apple, Spotify, or Stitcher.

I sent out another edition of my email newsletter this week to subscribers – it’s free, and easy to sign up, and no one has ever complained that I send it too often.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Donald Trump has long claimed he was a top high school baseball player who was scouted by a couple of MLB teams. Leander Schaerlaeckens looked into this at length for Slate, and found the answer is “not bloody likely.” The piece includes a quote from me in reaction to hearing some of the stats Schaerlaeckens was able to unearth.
ExplainCOVID.org is a new site, launched by Emily Oster, Professor of Economics at Brown, and Galit Alter, Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, designed to answer common questions about the virus, how to protect yourself, and what you should (or shouldn’t) believe in the news.
The LA Times ran with a story last week about how SARS-CoV-2 had already mutated into a new, more dangerous strain … but that report was wildly premature, says Ed Yong, author of We Contain Multitudes and an essential writer on anything COVID-19 right now.
Coronavirus cases continue to spike in Arizona, but the state is already reopening as if everything were fine. This could have a huge impact on MLB’s schedule – it’s hard to imagine the season restarting if Arizona is in an unplayable state.
This is after the state government in Arizona told university researchers to stop modeling COVID-19 outcomes and limited the researchers’ access to data, presumably because the models showed the Arizona government to be making reckless policy decisions that will lead to more deaths and serious illnesses.
If you’re pushing to reopen the economy, you probably don’t need or care about child care.
Texas is also reopening, too soon, and the governor even admitted in a private phone call that the reopening will lead to a new surge in cases. They don’t care how many people die, as long as they’re okay financially.
Anti-vaxxers are trying to use COVID-19 to recruit more people to their delusional cause.
Why do Republicans keep comparing COVID-19 public health policies to the Nazis? Pennsylvania State Rep. Chris Dush (R) did it, and now multiple Ohio legislators have done the same.
A Native American health center in Seattle asked the federal government for COVID-19 medical supplies. The Trump Administration sent them body bags.
Mosquitos infected with the fungal parasite Microsporidia MB may have total immunity to the genus of parasites that causes malaria, Plasmodium, notably P. Falciparum, which is the most common and lethal agent of transmission. It’s an early study but notable in that Microsporidia MB has many biological and ‘lifestyle’ similarities to Wolbachia, a gram-negative bacterium that protects mosquitos from many viruses and has potential to limit their ability to spread malarial agents as well.
Six people were killed in March 2019 when a flawed pedestrian bridge built by FIU in Sweetwater, Florida, collapsed just five days after it had been raised. FIU just announced plans to replace it, although nobody has actually been held accountable for what appear to be multiple failures in the design and construction process last time around.
I felt personally attacked by this (parody) column called “No One Wants to Play Your Weird German Game About Trains, Dude.” Russian Railroads is a fine game and I don’t care what you say.
Days of Wonder announced Ticket to Ride: Amsterdam, the third mini-TtR game after New York and London.
Two Kickstarters of note: High Noon, a tactical card game that promises to be easy to learn but takes 1-2 hours to play, already passed its goal this week; while the narrative board game Sea of Legends funded in just six hours after launching the same day.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, board game news, coronavirus, links, science, stick to baseball

→ April 25, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/25/20.

The Inside Game is out! You can buy the physical book on Bookshop.org to support independent bookstores or get the Kindle version on amazon. (Some of my biggest fans have already left one-star reviews!) Audible named it one of their top picks in History/Nonfiction for the spring of 2020 too.

To promote the book, I did a live ‘virtual’ bookstore event with help from Nats reliever and voracious reader Sean Doolittle, which you can watch if you registered and bought the book through Politics and Prose. I also appeared on several podcasts:

Grierson & Leitch: Conversations (Apple, Spotify, Stitcher)
Baseball by the Book (Apple, Spotify, Stitcher)
Birds All Day (Athletic, Apple, Spotify, Stitcher)
Creative Nonfiction (Apple, Stitcher)
The Good Phight’s Hittin’ Season (Apple, Spotify, Stitcher)

There are also some very positive reviews for The Inside Game out already on Throneberry Fields, Farther Off the Wall, and Porchlight Books. It also made a Wall Street Journal roundup of three recommended baseball books for the spring and was recommended by Inside Hook.

I did a Q&A at the Athletic on Thursday, and part two of my diptych on scouting, covering pitcher grades, with Eno Sarris is also up for subscribers. The Athletic ran an excerpt from The Inside Game on base-rate neglect and why teams draft too many high school pitchers in the first round.

My own podcast this week featured Dr. Paul Sax of Harvard Medical School & Brigham and Women’s Hospital, talking about COVID-19 and baseball fandom. You can listen to it on The Athletic, Apple, Spotify, and Stitcher.

I did send out a new edition of my newsletter last week, and I’ll be back on it more often now, I think; you can sign up for free here.

And now, the links…

Those of us in the United States are living in a failed state.
This editorial on Eater London explains how restaurants have to adapt to survive what could be another year and a half of “corona time,” with two important takeaways for us: Doing what you can to support restaurants still operating during the shutdown is critical to their survival, and we are not going to see fans in ballparks any time soon.
Scientists are tired of explaining that COVID-19 was not made in a Chinese lab.
Are you having stranger dreams during the pandemic than you usually would? National Geographic looks at reasons why that is happening to so many of us.
Governors talking about reopening their states – or actually doing it, in the case of Georgia – are being way too cavalier, as the pandemic is not under control yet, according to this New York Times editorial by Professor Aaron E. Carroll of the Indiana University School of Medicine.
Nationalist groups are using COVID-19 to push their agendas to reduce civil liberties, consolidate power, and spread hate and distrust of marginalized populations.
Why did Nikola Motor, whose CEO just bought a $32 million ranch, get a $4 million payout from the COVID-19 small business fund?
Those Facebook groups pushing anti-lockdown protests are largely just astroturfing by the Dorr brothers, a family of conservative pro-gun activists whom Republican lawmakers have called “scam artists.”
Are COVID-19 mortality rates higher than they need to be because so many developed nations’ citizens are fundamentally unhealthy?
The New York Times looked athow children’s shows are responding to kids’ needs during the shutdown, such as Sesame Street’s episode with a virtual playdate for Elmo and various real and Muppet friends. (I especially enjoyed Cookie Monster’s appearance.)
A few German citizens are protesting lockdown measures under the guise of liberty or some nonsense.
Rep. Donna Shalala (D-FL) failed to disclose stock sales in 2019 while she was serving in Congress, violating federal law.
Board game news: Renegade is now taking pre-orders for Viscounts of the West Kingdom, the third game in the West Kingdom trilogy, for delivery at Gen Con (if the convention takes place).
I don’t know much about the upcoming game Sea of Legends other than that it’s narrative-based and looks like it has a great theme.
Boardgamegeek’s annual Golden Geek Awards balloting has now opened. I do wonder if Wingspan will suffer any backlash to its crossover success in the voting. I’d vote for it for Game of the Year, Innovative Game, Strategy Game, and Family Game of the Year; Watergate for two-player game of the year; and either Res Arcana or Point Salad for Card Game; plus Evolution for best app.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, coronavirus, links, podcasts, stick to baseball

→ April 4, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/4/20.

I had two new pieces for subscribers to the Athletic this week, one on the great 1980s video game Earl Weaver Baseball (for which I spoke to one of its lead developers), and one with the latest on MLB’s plans for minor league realignment and contraction.

On the gaming front, I had nothing new this week but have a few more pieces filed. Last week, I reviewed ClipCut Parks, a new “flip-and-cut” game that is great for younger kids who love using scissors but not much of a game for older players, for Paste. For Vulture, I updated my ranking of the top 25 board game apps available on mobile platforms. For Ars Technica, I reviewed the new app version of the legacy game Charterstone.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, is due out on April 21^st from Harper Collins, and you can pre-order it now via their site or wherever fine books are sold. Also, check out my free email newsletter, which I say I’ll write more often than I actually write it. To be perfectly honest, I just haven’t felt up to writing that lately.

And now, the links…

The most distressing this I read this week was the Washington Post‘s story on how attempts to re-open Wuhan after two weeks of no new (reported) cases of coronavirus failed miserably as new infections came back immediately. The Chinese government was able to enforce much more draconian measures than we’ll ever see here, and yet they couldn’t corral the virus; what does that imply about what June and July will be like here in the U.S.?
A Guardian longread asks how our world will change permanently in the wake of the pandemic, highlighting decreasing civil liberties and the potential of a new response to climate change as two possible outcomes.
A column in Foreign Policy calls the COVID-19 pandemic the worst intelligence failure in U.S. history. Ken Klippenstein wrote in the Nation that the U.S. military knew years ago that a pandemic caused by a “novel respiratory disease” was likely on the horizon, so was the failure of intelligence or of the President’s response to it?
This New York Times longread investigates how a failure to test early in the U.S. – again, due to the Administration’s choice to ignore information it received – led to the pandemic and probably thousands of needless deaths.
The right-wing dark money group Americans for Prosperity, founded by neoconservative billionaire Charles Koch, pushed a $1 billion cut to the Centers Disease Control’s funding and is now attacking shelter-in-place orders for harming businesses.
Social distancing can’t last forever, and we need a comprehensive testing-and-tracing plan in place when the restrictions are inevitably eased.
Arizona Governor Doug Ducey finally issued a stay-at-home order on Monday, after weeks of dithering and dismissing the concerns about COVID-19’s risks. Senior citizens make up 17.5% of the state’s population.
On the other side of the coin, Washington Governor Jay Inslee (D) and Ohio Governor Mike DeWine (R) have both earned praise for their fast, definitive moves to try to slow the virus’s spread in their states.
Kentucky, South Dakota, and West Virginia have used the cover of COVID-19 restrictions to criminalize mass protests, including those against fossil-fuel projects like Dakota Access.
Senator Kelly Loeffler (GA-guess) sold millions of dollars in shares after receiving a confidential briefing on COVID-19 in early February, and bought shares in a company that makes protective equipment.
Kara Swisher at the New York Times delineates how Fox News spread disinformation and downplayed the threat of COVID-19 to its viewers, even though they were taking significant precautions behind the scenes.
We have it bad here in the U.S., but the impact of the pandemic and attempts to stop it will lead to massive suffering in the developing world, such as a lack of shelter or food for millions in India.
A charity run by Franklin Graham, who has a long history of anti-gay commentary, has refused to allow LGBT people to volunteer in its tent hospital in New York’s Central Park.
Meanwhile, the President is going to go golfing again.
And he’s allowing a reporter from OANN – an extreme right-wing ‘news’ outlet that openly supports the Administration – to flaunt the White House Correspondents’ Association’s rules on social distancing. OANN didn’t belong in the press room in the first place.
LitHub ranked 75 different covers of The Master & Margarita from around the world, and commented on them. I’ve had #25, #8, and #3 over the years.
Hackers or pranksters have been breaking into random Zoom meetings and defacing peoples’ screens. The FBI has warned that the platform isn’t secure.
Powell’s, one of the best independent bookstores in the United States, had laid off 100+ workers when the shutdown first hit Oregon, but has rehired them to meet a surge in online orders – one of which was from me, buying The Mirror and the Light as a birthday gift for my girlfriend’s mother. You can pre-order The Inside Game from them as well.
Progressive/instrumental metal band Town Portal and post-metal act Kowloon Walled City worked together on a live mashup of Solange’s “Rise” and Kaki King’s “Jessica” when the bands met up last summer, and just released it on YouTube to support Town Portal’s record label Small Pond.
Rock Manor Games’ two-player game Lawyer Up is in its last few days on Kickstarter. I’ve actually played this game with co-designer Mike Gnade, who lives near me, and would definitely recommend it based on that one play of a finished prototype.
And finally, some tweets of note from the week:

Fauci just admitted that if the Trump Administration had not fumbled the ball so badly on testing many fewer Americans would die from coronavirus.
— Dan Pfeiffer (@danpfeiffer) March 31, 2020

Friends, I learned last night over Zoom drinks that ya'll're baking so much that there's a shortage of yeast?! I, your local frumpy yeast geneticist have come here to tell you this: THERE IS NEVER A SHORTAGE OF YEAST. Here's where I'm a viking. Instructions below.
— Sudeep Agarwala (@shoelaces3) March 29, 2020

powerful https://t.co/QuwBc7G42J
— Daniel Uhlfelder (@DWUhlfelderLaw) March 31, 2020

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

→ March 21, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/21/20.

My one new piece at The Athletic this week looked at the top 30 prospects for this year’s MLB draft, which is itself up in the air, although I am inclined to doubt that the draft would be completely cancelled because I think there’d be a flurry of lawsuits from players (and their advisors).

In response to many reader requests, I posted a ranking of my favorite board games for two players – some are just two-player games, some play more but work quite well for two. I have more board game content in the works for Paste, Vulture, and Ars Technica in the next few weeks as well.

And now, the links…

Coronavirus stories first … Here’s the most aggravating thing you’ll read this week: Texas Monthly looks at anti-vaxxers so deranged they’re already trying to avoid a COVID-19 vaccine, even with mortality rates thousands of times higher for the virus than for any vaccine we have.
Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) voted against the coronavirus relief bill because it provided sick leave to same-sex domestic partners.
The Washington Post details how the federal government fouled up the coronavirus testing situation so badly, allowing the virus to spread much faster than it might have otherwise. The Post‘s Jennifer Rubin calls Trump’s response to the pandemic the biggest blunder in Presidential history.
Trump said this week he didn’t know about the White House Pandemic Response Team but there’s video of him bragging about dismantling it.
The BBC’s The Inquiry podcast looked at how the USA failed in our initial response to the virus. The short answer: Incompetence.
STAT looks at how some other countries have been successful at beating back the pandemic.
At least five Senators appear to have dumped stocks after a confidential hearing about how unprepared the U.S. was for the COVID-19 pandemic. Intelligence Committee Chair Richard Burr (R-NC) sold up to $1.7 million in stock even as he reassured the public we were prepared. Senator Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) sold hundreds of thousands of dollars of shares as well, and bought shares in Citrix, which makes software used by employees working from home.
Italian author Igiaba Scebo writes from Rome “Dear Americans, Please Stay Inside.”
As the Administration discusses bailing out airlines and cruise ship operators, the restaurant industry has received no response to its own pleas for financial assistance, despite employing more people and lacking the airlines’ history of massive stock buybacks and seven-figure CEO salaries.
J. Kenji López-Alt posted a lengthy guide to food safety and coronavirus.
Longreads: This New York Times story about fabricated sexual harassment claims against a professor at Arizona State is both fascinating and infuriating. The worst part is that the author, one of the targets of the scheme, can’t name the perpetrator, who is now free to do this again to someone else.
The BBC has the story of a reporter who worked with an English man to try to reunite an Afghan mother with the daughter taken from her by the father when he fled to the UK as a migrant.
An editorial in Scientific American discusses the growing problem of harassment of scientists and others who promote knowledge on social media, on topics as diverse as vaccines, climate change, evolution, and mental health treatment.
The Trump Administration overruled the EPA and other scientists who used evidence to show that the widely-used chemical trichloroethylene is linked to fetal heart defects.
ChefsFeed offers six tips on how you can help local restaurants try to survive the shutdown. Many are opening fundraising pages to help employees who need emergency assistance, like the wonderful 5&10 in Athens, Georgia, has.
A member of the far-right hate group the Proud Boys ended up appointed to the city commission in Latinx-majority Fennville, Michigan, because he didn’t disclose his affiliation and the commissioners didn’t do their due diligence on his social media accounts.
Board game news: Two Kickstarters of note this week. The first is for Holi, an area control game coming soon from Floodgate games.
The second is for Ark: Awakening, an engine-builder with a modular board where each player has a unique faction (which sounds a bit like Root).

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, coronavirus, environment, links, longreads, stick to baseball, the swamp

→ March 14, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/14/20.

I have one new post for The Athletic subscribers this week, looking at what might happen to the draft when there are no games to scout. I will have a ranking of the top 30 prospects for the draft on Monday; I’m not sure what my draft coverage might look like from here on out, as it depends on whether anyone’s playing and if the draft date moves.

Over at Paste, I reviewed PARKS, one of the most popular new games of 2019, featuring artwork from the Fifty-Nine Parks series.

And now, the links…

Coronavirus first, unfortunately: The White House has repeatedly sought to minimize the facts about the virus’ spread, and even ordered federal health officials to make their deliberations classified, which just further slowed the response … The Singapore government’s strategy in response to the virus has won praise from the WHO while the United States’ strategy has been insufficient … The former head of the White House pandemic office explains what the department did before Trump closed it for no apparent reason at all. He won’t answer questions about the decision, of course.
Two longer reads on the virus: How the Chinese scientist known to colleagues as the “bat woman” has identified dozens of virii in that family (similar to the ones that cause COVID-19 and SARS) by searching in bat caves … James Hamblin, whose work for the Atlantic has been some of the best writing on the pandemic, points out that staying home if you start coughing is not a sufficient plan.
Longreads: The BBC had three great longreads this week. The first is on the twenty-year quest to solve a murder in Idaho Falls, one for which an innocent man spent nearly all that time in prison because he was railroaded by police interrogators.
The second is by a woman who tried to get investigators to track down a child abused in a pedophilia video.
And the third is about efforts by victims of sexual assault to get videos of their attacks removed from porn sites.
ProPublica found that the Republican National Committee has handed out big contracts to companies linked to Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel’s husband and her political bankers.
The media needs to stop treating Trump’s inaccurate and often incoherent statements as normal political copy.
While we’re all distracted by the growing pandemic, Congress is considering a bill that would give law enforcement a back door into encrypted communications, giving the government far greater surveillance powers.
The National Labor Relations Board is trying to remove non-discrimination language from its contract with professional attorneys, eliminating protections against discrimination based on race, sex, religion, and sexual orientation.
NPR’s Short Wave has a 12-minute audio clip on anti-matter and attempts to create it.
Worsening relations between Estonia and Russia have split the Seto ethnic minority with an increasingly impassable border.
Board game news: Capstone Games announced a new game, New York Zoo, from designer Uwe Rosenberg (Agricola, Patchwork, Cottage Garden).
Viscounts of the West Kingdom, the third game in the second trilogy from designer Shem Phillips (Architects of the West Kingdom, Raiders of the North Sea), is at nearly $600,000 as it ends its Kickstarter run.
Dire Wolf Digital’s port of Sagrada is now in Early Access on Steam; I’ve played it a few times and it’s very strong, as all of DWD’s adaptations have been.
Finally, this is just … special.

Seeing some incredible takes about Public Enemy today pic.twitter.com/ag2zk7DhHg
— Wild Geerters (@steinkobbe) March 2, 2020

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, coronavirus, links, longreads, physics, science, stick to baseball, the swamp

→ March 8, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/8/20.

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

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

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

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

Stick to baseball, 2/29/20.

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

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

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

And now, the links…

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

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

→ February 1, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/1/20.

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

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

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

And now, the links…

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

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

→ January 25, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/25/20.

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

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

And now, the links…

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

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

→ January 18, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/18/20.

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

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

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

And now, the links…

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

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

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