board game news

→ January 6, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/6/24.

I took a few weeks off from these posts around the holidays, but I did write one piece for subscribers to The Athletic over the break, looking at the Chris Sale trade and Lucas Giolito signing.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the games Daybreak, a cooperative game about fighting climate change; and Wandering Towers, the best new family game of last year. Both games were on my ranking of the ten best new board games of 2023.

My free email newsletter will return today (most likely). Several of you have pledged to support me if the newsletter were to go paid; I have no immediate plans to do so, but if that happens 1) I’ll give everyone a ton of notice and 2) I’ll move it off Substack.

And now, the links…

Writer Tom Scocca’s piece in New York about his sudden, unsolved medical mystery is the best thing you’ll read all week. It’s well-written, of course, and combines the deeply personal with an inherent attack on our broken health-care system.

President Biden won’t just be facing Donald Trump or another GOP opponent in the 2024 election – he’ll be opposed by the News Corp misinformation machine, too. (Related: The Washington Post’s Philip Bump wrote of how journalism needs to defend itself in the face of bad-faith actors. He might start with his own paper’s opinion section.)

The New Yorker looks at board games with serious themes, profiling Amabel Holland, a trans woman who co-owns the publisher Hollandspiele and designed the Iron Rails series of games.

Parenting is hard. It’s been harder thanks to the pandemic. That and other factors have led to the rise of the “accidentally permissive” parent, especially in my age cohort.

Stuart Thompson of the New York Times looks at how anti-vaxx ghouls latched on to the death of a 24-year-old man, who showed no symptoms of myocarditis after his COVID-19 vaccination but whose parents think the vaccine gave him myocarditis anyway. George Watts, Jr., had an enlarged spleen – over six times the normal size for that organ – which is a sign of long-term heart failure, chronic inflammation in his brain, and signs of late-stage pneumonia in his lungs.

mRNA vaccines do not cause cancer, and there is no such thing as “turbo cancer.”

Measles is on the rise around the world thanks to vaccine denialists and misinformation peddlers like RFK, Jr.

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D) has introduced two bills to block military aid to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates due to both nations’ atrocious human rights records. Omar is Muslim, and Islam is the official religion of both nations. Just imagine a similar scenario with Judaism or Christianity instead of Islam.

Meanwhile, Israel has censored its press on eight topics relating to the war on Gaza.

On the coordinated attacks against now former Harvard President Claudine Gay: It was never about plagiarism, but about DEI (from Don Moynihan); American Jews’ moral panic over Gay’s and two other college Presidents’ answers to Congress is misplaced (from The Forward); and Gay’s own editorial in the New York Times on what happened, which I thought was far too reticent.

Why do pundits like Jonathan Chait and Nate Silver say outrageous things? Because it’s effective, at least when you consider that attention is their goal.

The science is clear: Masks work to reduce the spread of COVID-19 and similar viruses, no matter what the misinformation merchants tell you.

The Guardian looks at the unfunny punching-down comedy specials from Dave Chapelle and Ricky Gervais. Chapelle was so groundbreaking at his peak that it’s sad to see him pitching with an 80 mph fastball now.

A list of all 673 books removed from classrooms in Orange County, Florida. I don’t know how anyone with the means to move could still live there. Even if you send your kids to a quality alternative school, your tax dollars are supporting this anti-education.

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) declined federal food aid to provide lunch to schoolchildren over the summer, making a specious argument about obesity. This is free money for the state, and they would rather turn it down than feed poor children in Iowa.

NYC Mayor Eric Adams (D) has drained the city payroll of over $24 million to pay for 293 “special assistants,” many of them major donors to his campaign.

Adams (still D) also tried to kill a bill that requires police to report when they stop anyone on the street to ask for identification, promising to restore budget cuts to other programs if council members voted against it. The bill passed anyway.

Overtime pay for NYPD officers working the city’s subway stations went from $4 million to $155 million between 2022 and 2023, reducing “major crimes” by 2% but primarily leading to more arrests and fines for fare-jumping. That’s a lot of money to fight a handful of skipped $2.90 charges.

New York bookstore Bluestockings is facing eviction for providing Narcan to save people who have overdosed on opioids.

Amanda Todd was 15 when she killed herself in 2012 after three years of cyberstalking by a Dutch man who blackmailed her with threats to send nude images of her to her friends and family. He was sentenced to 13 years by a Canadian court, but a Dutch court cut the sentence in half to match that country’s legal standards.

The Las Vegas Business Journal announced a new editorial policy that it will not publish economic impact estimates for stadium projects and other events unless they can see the methodology and criteria used to reach those estimates (which, in my view, are usually bullshit).

Francis Howell School District in St. Charles, Missouri, has seen white conservatives take over its school board; the board recently backed off a plan to eliminate all Black History and Black Literature courses after massive opposition, including from the NAACP. The same white conservatives are trying to ban trans students from using the appropriate bathrooms. School board elections matter, folks.

Speaking of Missourah, a St. Louis cop crashed his car into an LGBT bar, Bar:PM, and then cuffed one of the owners, who was later charged with a felony. The police didn’t do a toxicology test on their colleague, and now they’re trying to hush up any investigation and refusing to release body cam footage to the public.

Shoegaze had its moment in the early 1990s as a subgenre of alternative music, mostly heard from British acts like My Bloody Valentine, Ride, and Slowdive. It’s had a huge comeback thanks to TikTok.

The data from Insomniac Games released by hackers shows that big-game video game development is not sustainable, per Nathan Grayson of Aftermath, a great new site covering video and tabletop gaming.

I own a fantastic sweater and very warm hat from Quince, specialists in inexpensive cashmere clothing items. It turns out that cheap cashmere has a stark environmental cost.

The seams on a baseball have a higher-than-expected effect on the trajectory of the ball in flight.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, board games, Economics, environment, florida, harvard, iowa, journalism, links, longreads, misinformation, missouri, Music, new york, new york city, parenting, police, science, shoegaze, stick to baseball, vaccines, video games

→ November 11, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/11/23.

Nothing new from me at the Athletic as I wait for some real news, a trade or signing, that I can break down. I’ve also begun the offseason prospect work, although those rankings won’t run until late January or early February.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the wonderful game Fit to Print, which has a real-time aspect like Galaxy Trucker where players grab various tiles, then some tile-laying like Patchwork, as players try to fill out their woodland newspapers – with some hilarious text and art on the tiles – with articles, photos, and ads, playing over three rounds to represent three days of issues.

On the Keith Law Show, I spoke with Robert Kolker, author of Hidden Valley Road and The Lost Girls, primarily about the first book, which deals with a family where six of their twelve children developed schizophrenia, although we touched on his update to the latter since the case may have been solved. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I also appeared on NPR’s Marketplace, talking about Moneyball and the data revolution in baseball in the last twenty years. You can catch it on iTunes on the Marketplace Tech podcast.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter last Saturday and will do another this weekend as I try to make this a weekly thing, although I might shift to Monday since that tends to be the slowest day of my week (in more ways than one).

Two longreads from ProPublica: The first is an appalling story of how white Louisiana judges on the 5^th Circuit decided to deny all petitions from prisoners who couldn’t afford attorneys, many of them Black men who claimed they were unjustly convicted – over 5000 such petitions in total, over a period of 12 years. It first became public when the staff director for the court wrote a confessional note before killing himself, but the judiciary managed to clamp down on the story and there have been no consequences for any of the judges or others involved. Oh, those prisoners still had to pay the $300 fee to file those petitions that judges wouldn’t even read. Many of the affected prisoners are still incarcerated.
The second looks at the twenty farming families who use more than half of the water taken from the Colorado River by farms, and 1/7 of all of the water that flows through the river’s Lower Basin each year.
Climate change is pushing the insects that spread tropical diseases further north, into Europe and the United States. Europe had as many cases of dengue in 2022 as they did in 2010 through 2021 combined. California just reported two cases of local transmission last week.
Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian wrote the best piece I read this week on the Israel-Hamas war, arguing that both sides have to fight their own extremists to get us to a sustainable peace.
BlueTriton, the company that owns Poland Spring, quashed a bill in Maine’s legislature to cap the length of water-pumping contracts at seven years. A lobbyist for BlueTriton wrote an amendment that friendly legislators introduced, killing the bill.
Just a day before they got spanked in school board elections in Iowa and Pennsylvania, the pro-censorship group Moms for Liberty demanded that Florida cops arrest a school librarian because there was a fantasy novel that they alleged had risqué content available in the school library.
Hold your surprise: Nine of the 12 members of a Congressional committee that advises the nation on its nuclear strategy have financial ties to weapons manufacturers.
Wounded Falling Bird Ron DeSantis (R) removed commissioner Oren Miller from office in The Villages from office in 2021 after Miller fought a property tax that benefited a local developer, then forced a bogus perjury charge against Miller as well. A three-person panel of Republican judges not only threw out the conviction, they ordered the lower court to find Miller “not guilty.”
Also in Governor WFB’s Florida, the plan to remake the tiny, once-liberal New School into a bastion of conservative something will cost taxpayers $600,000 per student.
The NY Times’s Katherine Miller looks at Nikki Haley’s campaign, and how her fight against Trump may turn “brutal.”
Did anyone else notice that Trump threatened to call in troops to put down protests and arrest dissenters if he wins the Presidency next November?
A student at the University of Pennsylvania who had Long QT syndrome, a form of cardiac arrythmia, died after having a Charged Lemonade at Panera, as she was unaware that it contained as much caffeine as four cups of coffee. Her family is suing, and Panera has added new warning language around the drinks. I go to Panera probably 4-5 times a year, and I’ve seen those drinks, but I had no idea they had that much caffeine, which is more than I have ever had in a single day in my life as far as I know.
Parents demanding that their kids skip once-mandatory childhood vaccinations are doing so at the highest rate ever, raising the risk of outbreaks of preventable diseases like measles and mumps.
Yusef Salaam, one of the falsely accused Central Park Five who was arrested at age 15 and served nearly seven years in prison before his exoneration, was elected to the New York City Council on Tuesday.
Your second COVID-19 infection increases your risk of getting long COVID, and it appears to also increase the odds that you never fully recover. Less than 10% of Americans have gotten a COVID-19 vaccine booster this fall. I did, and you should too. Also, now I’m magnetic wheeee!
Paper straws are everywhere in the UK, but they’re not clearly better for the environment than plastic ones. How about you just skip the straw if you’re able and we save them for folks who require them?
Israel has killed yet another Palestinian journalist, appearing to target Mohammad Abu Hasira this week, running the count of journalists killed in Gaza to at least 37.
Director of the National Counterterrorism Center Christine Abizaid used Hamas’ terrorist attacks on October 7^th as an argument to urge Congress to renew FISA Section 702, which allows our government to spy on us if the purpose is to gather “foreign information.”
The Last Dinner Party have been anointed a Next Big Thing by many critics. The BBC talked to the quintet about what that’s been like, including weird accusations that they were a fabricated band like a K-Pop act.
Board game news: There’s a new site devoted to video and board game content called Aftermath. It’s a writer-owned subscription site that hopes to follow the Defector model, and includes Luke Plunkett, who spent many years at Kotaku, and whom I met on the Shelf Stories podcast this summer.
The Kickstarter for Undergrove, the newest game from Wingspan designer Elizabeth Hargrave (co-designed with Mark Wootton), is already over $250K in just three days.
Alley Cat Games has a Kickstarter for a fresh printing of the 2017 game Calimala, designed by Fabio Lopiano (3 Ring Circus, Merv).

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, climate change, environment, florida, links, longreads, louisiana, maine, Music, new york, stick to baseball, vaccines, water crisis

→ October 28, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/28/23.

Nothing new from me at the Athletic this week as I’ve been working on my top 50 free agents rankings, which will run on Wednesday. My only new content outside of this site was a review of the game Forest Shuffle over at Paste Magazine; it’s got some lovely art but it’s a heavy thinker for a game that’s entirely made up of a large deck of cards. I do like it, though.

My guest on the Keith Law Show this week was Dr. Lee McIntyre, a philosopher at Boston University who discussed his new book On Disinformation: How to Fight for Truth and Protect Democracy. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Robert Kolker, author of Lost Girls and Hidden Valley Road, revisits the topic of the former book, the recently-solved Long Island serial killer case, in a long story on how Suffolk County police botched the investigation for over a decade thanks to infighting, corruption, and incompetence. The story mentions the murder of John Pius, which happened in my hometown when I was about five. Kolker is going to appear on my podcast in November to discuss Hidden Valley Road, about a family with ten sons, six of whom developed schizophrenia.
The CBC has a long investigative piece on singer Buffy Sainte-Marie’s claims to indigenous heritage, which appear to be false based on her birth certificate showing two white European-descended parents. Sainte-Marie’s public and commercial image were very closely tied to her claimed native identity, including a much-loved appearance on Sesame Street in1975.
Vermont’s Woodside Juvenile Rehabilition Center was closed in 2020 after years of allegations of abuse and neglect of the young people in the center’s care. Seven Days has the harrowing story of one young woman whose life was destroyed by her time at the facility.
Another police misconduct story, this one from Dallas, where a Black man who had the same name as a suspect at large found himself assaulted by cops and then arrested on a bogus charge, triggering a cascade of events that cost him his job and his house. He’s suing the police department and the city, neither of which has compensated him in any way for the actions of their officers.
I’d never heard of the pop artist Devon Rodriguez, but I have now, after an art critic who reviewed his work found himself the target of an online mob stirred up by Rodriguez himself, who appears to have skin thinner than tengujo paper.
A site aimed at helping people commit suicide, even connecting them with people who’d sell them the drugs to do it, was ignored for years by UK authorities, leading to 50 or more preventable deaths.
CVS revealed it won’t sell cold medicines with phenylephrine, since the so-called decongestant doesn’t actually work. So why are they still selling so-called “homeopathic” remedies that also don’t work?
My editor at Paste, Garrett Martin, visited Dubrovnik, Croatia, recently, and writes that it’s lovely and is being strangled by tourism.
Clarence Thomas took a loan from a friend for $267,230, and then the friend just flat-out forgave it before Thomas paid down any principal. Thomas, of course, never reported this on financial disclosure reports.
Dr. Hala Alyan, a Palestinian writer and clinical psychologist, writes in the New York Times on how Palestinians are, in her words, expected to “audition” for empathy and compassion.
Also in the Times, Jamelle Bouie writes that the rightward shift as voters get older is happening less with each succeeding generation. One effect of making it harder for people to buy houses (and thus get mortgages) is that they don’t experience the drift towards fiscal conservatism/desire to pull up the ladder behind them. Oh well!
The skin disease leishmaniasis is now endemic in the United States. It’s spread by sandflies, and their habitats are expanding thanks to climate change.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson wants to ban no-fault divorce. This is disastrous for people in abusive marriages, but also, my marriage is none of your fucking business.
Historian Kevin Kruse is leaving Twitter, which matters because he was one of the more prominent voices countering political disinformation on the site, which, as he says, is undergoing enshittification and becoming a white nationalist utopia like Truth Social and Gab. NBC has a story on how LGBTQ+ people are leaving Twitter as well, citing the site’s increasingly toxic atmosphere and Musk’s decisions to allow deadnaming, misinformation, and hate speech to run rampant on the platform. I’ll be there as long as many of you are, but I’m on Bluesky (@keithlaw.bsky.social), Threads (@mrkeithlaw, same as Instagram), and Spoutible (@keithlaw) as well.
The Times had a good story on how sports Twitter is still hanging in there, relatively speaking.
Dr. Peter Hotez, author of the new book The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science, received the inaugural Anthony Fauci Courage in Leadership Award from the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
Board game news: The Kickstarter for Nocturne, the latest game from the publishers of Cascadia and Fit to Print, is live now and already at $64K with 41 days to go.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, board game news, frauds, health, links, longreads, mental health, police, pseudoscience, scotus, social media, stick to baseball, texas, true crime, vermont

→ October 21, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/21/23.

My second Arizona Fall League notebook went up on Monday, covering everyone of note whom I hadn’t written up in the first one. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I appeared on TSN 1050 in Toronto to talk about the League Championship Series and the Blue Jays, including prospect Ricky Tiedemann and the controversial decision to replace José Berrios with Yusie Kikuchi in what turned out to be their last playoff game.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has profited by spreading lies and half-truths about vaccines for twenty years now. A book his group, Children’s Health Defense, and his publishing partner Skyhorse put out about the COVID-19 vaccines used the photo of a 12-year-old who died when a malformed blood vessel burst in his brain on its cover, claiming he’d died from the vaccine. He was unvaccinated, and of course they used his photo without his family’s permission. This Associated Press story talks to several families hurt by Kennedy’s lies and his so-called activism.
A Koch-funded right-wing site, Cowboy State Daily, is injecting climate denial and transphobic rhetoric into Wyoming politics, crowding out legitimate news sites that adhere to basic journalistic standards. It’s part of the national Metric Media network, which has over 1200 sites across the country and also takes funding from the Koch family’s DonorsTrust foundation.
Arizona continues to deny native tribes water rights they were promised under a 1908 treaty with the federal government. A third of homes on the Navajo reservation do not have access to clean water.
The Los Angeles Times’ Michael Hiltzik looks at how anti-vaxxers are exacting a personal and professional toll on scientists, and we’re losing the war against such disinformation. Dr. Peter Hotez notes within the story the death threats, doxing, and other intimidation tactics he’s seen as a vaccine developer and advocate for vaccination and science in general.
Meanwhile, a new study in BMJ estimates that 27 would-be mothers in the UK died during the pandemic because of confusion over the safety of COVID-19 vaccines during pregnancy.
The Minnesota Reformer has a story on how small businesses in Minneapolis are pressured to hire off-duty cops as “security” in what sure sounds like a protection racket to me.
Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen (R) owns a conglomerate of hog farms that are dumping huge amounts of nitrates into ground water in the state, but when a local journalist published an exposé in the Flat Water Free Press, Gov. Pillen attacked her personally by saying “the author is from Communist China. What more do you need to know?” I think I need to know when he’s going to clean up his hog farms, and I hope more journalists there put his pig’s feet to the fire.
Barbers Hill ISD in Texas suspended an 18-year-old Black student for wearing dreadlocks and is now forcing him to attend an alternative high school, despite the fact that Texas passed its own CROWN Act, prohibiting discrimination based on hairstyle, and the district already lost a lawsuit over the same issue in 2020. The district’s superintendent and deputy superintendent are both white, in case you were wondering.
Book-banning zealots in Iowa are having a field day by targeting any books with a ‘sex act,’ including numerous important works of literature like, ironically, the dystopian novels 1984 and Brave New World.
The federal government has begun distributing the $100 billion in funding for climate change mitigation projects under the Inflation Reduction Act, but it’s taking much longer than expected.
Trump, with the help of The Heritage Foundation, has a plan to gut the federal civil service and replace tens of thousands of employees with Trump sycophants in a return to the “spoils system” of the 1800s.
My friend Tim Grierson has a long, entertaining interview with Eddie Izzard on Cracked.com.
Scientific American looks at the “Sleeping Beauty problem” in probability, which has generated arguments like the Monty Hall problem and the question of that dress’s color.
A professor at UC-Davis tweeted a fairly overt threat against the lives of Jewish journalists, spurring an investigation by the university.
If ChatGPT can do much of the work in academic grant writing, does that tell us that the grant-writing process is broken?
Police in Newton, Iowa, have twice arrested a local resident for speaking out against the police at town meetings, so he’s suing them for violating his First Amendment (and other) rights.
The Azeri-Armenian conflict may move to Meghri, an Armenian town in a strip of land that separates Azerbaijan from its Nakhchivan exclave. Azerbaijan calls it the Zangezur corridor, and it borders Iran, which opposes any changes to the current structure, while Turkey and Russia appear to favor some alteration that would connect the two parts of Azerbaijan even at a reduction in Armenia’s sovereignty.
The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland argues that Benjamin Netanyahu has walked into Hamas’s trap, and Israel needs to remove him from power before the situation gets even worse.
Twitter Blue subscribers have become “super-spreaders” of misinformation about the Israel-Palestine conflict according to a brief analysis from the independent group NewsGuard, which attempts to rate the reliability of news sites.
The New York Times’ Katherine Miller writes about the rambling, repetitive speeches of Donald Trump as he pounds his false claims that the 2020 election was rigged.
St. Louis County police appear to have ignored erratic, threatening behavior from one of their own in the days leading up to him firing shots in the air at a trunk-or-treat event and shouting “you’re all going to die!”
Deepfake porn videos are spreading too fast for the available tools, and far faster than any government is moving to stop them. Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-NY) did introduce a bill to ban deepfakes and step up enforcement, revising a similar bill she’d introduced in 2019, but it’s only at the committee stage and all sponsors are Democrats.
David Roth writes about how Michael Lewis was taken in by fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, as Lewis’ reputation continues to take hits after his cringy response to Michael Oher’s lawsuit against the Tuohy family. (Oher appears to have no dispute with Lewis over the book The Blind Side.)
The Chicago man who stabbed a 6-year-old Palestinian boy 26 times, killing him, and stabbed the boy’s mother as well appears to have been radicalized by right-wing media. The spread of disinformation and hate has real consequences.
Board game news: The Kickstarter for the roll-and-write game Merchants of Magick is 3x funded and still up for six more days.
This year’s Essen Spiel convention was the largest ever, bringing nearly 200,000 people to the German city for the biggest board game con in the world.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, anti-semitism, arizona, Armenia, board game news, environment, first amendment, iowa, israel, links, longreads, math, minnesota, nebraska, palestine, police, social media, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines, wyoming

→ October 7, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/7/23.

I’ve had one post up for subscribers to the Athletic since the last roundup, with my hypothetical postseason awards ballots for 2023. I do have another story filed for Sunday, so keep an eye skinned for that.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Votes for Women, a (mostly) two-player, asymmetrical game about the fight for women’s suffrage. It’s fantastic, and I also love that this review went up the week that Glynis Johns turned 100.

On the Keith Law Show this week, my guest was MLB’s Sarah Langs, talking about the season that was, who she would vote for in the various awards, and what excited her about this year’s playoff teams. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Rolling Stone’s Sean Williams writes about being conned by a con artist who tried to get the journalist to write a long profile/feature on him to further a movie deal, only for Williams to discover that the fraudster had as many as 200 victims of various romance and other scams over the last forty years.
The Washington Post looks at how climate change increases the demand and need for air conditioning, which in turn contributes more to climate change. Cooling a world that’s getting hotter requires increasing levels of energy, and we still rely far too much on energy-production methods that pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
An effective vaccine against tuberculosis would save millions of lives; it’s the deadliest infectious disease in the world, killing 1.6 million people a year. When pharmaceutical company GSK developed a vaccine for it, they chose instead to use the technology for a shingles vaccine, keeping the TB vaccine off the market for years.
Workers in California who cut stone countertops are coming down with silicosis, an incurable and terminal disease.
Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull gave a very candid interview to the San Diego Union-Tribune ahead of the band’s concert last month in that city.
Dr. Peter Hotez warns that antiscience conspiracy theorists are growing in power and organization, threatening public health and the scientists working on projects like new vaccines – such as the brand-new vaccine against malaria, potentially one of the biggest global health breakthroughs in decades.
SARS-CoV-2 infects coronary arteries and arterial plaque, which increases the risk of heart attack and stroke in people who have or had COVID-19.
NBC News’s Ben Collins may have found a clue to why Elon Musk bought Twitter only to destroy it. Musk also wiped out the company’s election integrity team and cut the group targeting disinformation on the site.
Rumble host Stew Peters called for the execution of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. Media Matters found ads for the NFL appearing on Peters’ Twitter account, including one near a link to the video of his death threat.
Fact-checking had a big moment between the 2020 election and the pandemic, with news organizations hiring more fact-checkers and more independent groups combating misinformation online, but nothing has really changed and now the effort has stalled.
Italy’s right-wing government has moved to erase LGBTQ+ people, especially parents, from their society.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has spent millions of taxpayer dollars defending his “anti-woke” laws targeting LGBTQ+ rights, public education, Disney, and more, only to lose repeatedly in the courts.
Harris County, Texas, taxpayers are in a similar boat, having paid over $1 million to people roped into County DA Kim Ogg’s (D) prosecutions of public officials with whom she’s feuded.
Republicans in North Carolina passed a bill to grab power from the Governor so they can control elections in the state, which already has a gerrymandered legislative map. Gov. Roy Cooper (D) vetoed Senate Bill 749, but the body is set to override his veto on Tuesday.
Delaware became the 17^th state to ban the “gay panic” defense, where a defendant accused of a violent act claims the act is justified because their victim was LGBTQ+.
A city commissioner in Anchorage, Alaska, who had a previous history of fraud, has been indicted for fraudulently taking $1.6 million in COVID-19 relief funds. She and her husband are accused of using the money to buy cryptocurrency, pay taxes, and for other personal matters.
The mayoral race in Franklin, Tennessee, got even more bizarre last week when a bunch of self-proclaimed white nationalists showed up to support candidate Gabrielle Hanson at a campaign event.
People of Praise, the extreme Catholic group that counts SCOTUS Justice Amy Coney Barrett as a member, is facing an FBI investigation into a cover-up of sexual abuse in the sect.
A rare bit of good news on the environment – Antigua & Barbuda has transformed the nation’s uninhabited third island, Redonda, from a lifeless rock into a thriving fountain of biodiversity.
An activist group is suing the EPA on behalf of a largely Black community in West Virginia’s “Chemical Valley,” arguing that the agency hasn’t done enough to protect residents from ethylene oxide pollution from a Union Carbide plant there.
The capitalists will let you drown. There’s money for cops and sports stadiums, but not for housing, or for infrastructure that might have prevented the flooding that plagued New York City eight days ago.
Speaking of which, just ten New York City cops were responsible for $68 million in payouts to victims of their misconduct, yet all ten are still on the public payroll.
A cop in Pennsylvania tried to strangle his ex-girlfriend and then used his authority to have her involuntarily committed.
The conservative newsletter/site The Dispatch argues that Trump and his supporters in office are devoid of moral leadership, and as Trump’s rhetoric worsens, too few people in his party seem to notice or care. Indeed, Trump called for the execution of General Mark Milley, and it barely made a ripple.
Did Hasan Minhaj go too far in fabricating autobiographical details in his standup routine? Brian Logan, comedy critic for the Guardian, says he did. The controversy seems likely to cost Minhaj a shot at the hosting job for the Daily Show.
Your brain sees winning streaks everywhere, even in random sequences. Scientific American looks at why.
Did the James Webb Telescope discover galaxies older than the projected age of the universe? Maybe, explains astrophysicist Katie Mack.
Some board game Kickstarters of note: Diatom is a tile-laying, pattern-making game based on an old Victorian art form.
And there’s a Kickstarter for the roll-and-write Merchants of Magick game, which is in the same universe as Set a Watch, along with two new expansions.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alaska, antiscience, board game news, climate change, cognitive psychology, delaware, environment, florida, frauds, health, italy, lgbt rights, links, longreads, Music, north carolina, physics, police, social media, stick to baseball, tennessee, texas, vaccines

→ September 23, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/23/23.

For subscribers to The Athletic, I posted my annual Minor League Player of the Year column this week, as well as my last regular-season scouting notebook of 2023, covering prospects I saw from the Red Sox, Orioles, and Nationals. I’ll head to Arizona in October for Fall League coverage, of course. My podcast will be back next week and I’ve already filed my next review for Paste.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas didn’t just take a bunch of free trips from billionaire Harlan Crow; he also attended donor parties hosted by the billionaire Koch brothers, as reported here by ProPublica.
The New York Times reports on child labor at Perdue and Tyson chicken-processing plants, where immigrant kids are exploited by factory officials willing to look the other way and who claim ignorance when these children are seriously injured on the job. The Department of Labor only investigates when they receive a tip, and fines top out at $15,000.
Penn Medicine hired a new facilities director for its hospital without checking his background, which included a five-year federal prison sentence for wire fraud and misuse of a social security number. Larry Butler was fired four days into his tenure as COO of a hospital in Oregon in 2022, but Penn still hired him in July of 2023, only for him to “resign” four weeks later.
The Indian state of Kerala is experiencing yet another outbreak of the Nipah virus, which causes severe respiratory illnesses in humans and appears to have jumped the species barrier from pigs about 25 years ago. This is the fourth such outbreak in Kerala in the last five years.
Elon Musk’s grandfather was an antisemite and avid supporter of South Africa’s racist apartheid system, according to this lengthy story from The Atlantic, which contradicts Musk’s own mythmaking.
The U.S. media continues to fuck up its coverage of the Presidential race, treating Trump as some sort of entertainment vehicle – as they did in 2015-16 – while playing into dubious narratives around President Biden’s age or his son’s behavior.
The daughter of Dennis Rader, the serial killer who called himself “BTK,” is an adult now and is trying to use her knowledge of her father to help police close more cases.
The Sound of Freedom was a surprise box-office hit this summer and sits in 10^th place this year for U.S. receipts thanks to a broad effort by conservative and Christian groups to sell tickets, but the subject of the film, Tim Ballard, was ousted from his anti-human trafficking organization after an investigation into sexual misconduct, and now the film’s producer also stands accused of sexual assault, in this case of a minor.
The all-Muslim city council in Hamtramck, Michigan, banned the display of any Pride flags on public property during June (Pride Month) this year, after LGBTQ+ groups had supported the Muslim immigrant groups when they arrived in the city. The issue came back up this past week when Mayor Amer Ghalib refused to march near the city’s queer alliance in a Labor Day parade.
South Africa is facing a new, xenophobic movement called Operation Dudula that is targeting foreigners in the country and blaming them for the rise in drug addiction, especially the drug known as nyaope, a form of black tar heroin that sellers claim contains antiviral properties. The group’s beliefs and philosophy seem to mirror those of right-wing, anti-immigrant groups in the U.S. and Europe.
Azerbaijan has reclaimed the majority-Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh after the region’s separatist government, which called itself the Republic of Artsakh, agreed to disarm and to seek reintegration with the surrounding nation. This should end the looming humanitarian crisis in the region but may lead to a large exodus of ethnic Armenians; it also may further reduce the influence of Russia, which had backed Armenia’s interests with military aid, in the Caucasus.
Russell Brand’s agency learned three years ago that a minor accused him of sexual assault, and they ignored her. Tavistock Wood dropped Brand from its roster with the revelations this month that three other women also accuse him of rape or sexual assault, and they’re claiming they knew nothing about it.
Gabrielle Hanson, a Republican and Trump-supporting candidate for Mayor of Franklin, Tennessee, used images of women culled from social media in campaign materials, claiming these women – many of them women of color – were her supporters. The women were actually selected seven years earlier for an ad campaign for the clothing brand The Limited and had posted photos of themselves at a celebratory brunch, which Hanson and her now ex-campaign manager Erin Mazzoni used without their permission. That link has an incredible video where journalist Phil Williams interviews Mazzoni, who sounds, to put it kindly, completely bonkers.
Alabama Republicans continue to fight to preserve their gerrymandered legislative map that suppresses the power of Black voters (who make up 27% of the state’s population), and they’re doing it with the backing of Leonard Leo’s dark-money network. Just this summer, Congressional Republicans blocked a bill that would have required such dark-money groups to come into the light and disclose their donors.
Both The New Yorker and Paste ran stories on The Baseball Project, the fun supergroup with members of R.E.M., Dream Syndicate, and the Minus Five, where all of their songs are about baseball. They’re great live, by the way.
Anti-vaccine misinformation is highly effective: More Oklahoma parents are skipping safe, effective childhood vaccinations against dangerous and incredibly contagious viruses like measles.
Climate change may cause 39 million U.S. homeowners to lose access to home insurance, including many homeowners who don’t accept the reality of climate change and vote for the one party that also denies it.
New York editor Katy Schneider describes “the pandemic skip,” the way we all lost about two years to the pandemic but may not have fully realized or internalized the passage of that time.
A sketchy group calling itself “NY Citizens Audit” has received a cease-and-desist letter from the New York Attorney General’s office, accusing the group of intimidating voters by posing as election officials to knock on doors and accuse people of committing voter fraud.
Australian officials visited D.C. this week to call on the United States to drop its prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing leaked documents, a call echoed here by the Freedom of the Press Foundation because the same overbroad reading of the Espionage Act could easily be used against all sorts of journalists anywhere on the political spectrum.
Believing transphobic things does, in fact, make you a transphobe.
Board game news: Undergrove, the next new game from Wingspan designer Elizabeth Hargrave, will go up on Kickstarter in November, and you can save the page now to be notified when it’s live.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alabama, board game news, climate change, coronavirus, frauds, free speech, health, labor rights, lgbt rights, links, longreads, metoo, oklahoma, scotus, south africa, stick to baseball, tennessee, vaccines, voter suppression

→ September 16, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/16/23.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I wrote my annual column on players I was wrong about, and I weighed in on the Red Sox’ firing – and perhaps scapegoating – of Chaim Bloom. I held a Klawchat again on Friday.

On the board game front, I reviewed the excellent new game 3 Ring Circus over at Paste, and updated my list of the best new games so far in 2023 over at Vulture.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Why the actual fuck has Columbia University spent years protect an OB/GYN who abused hundreds of patients while working at the school – and even let him return to practice for five weeks after a patient went to the police, accusing him of sodomizing her, during which period he assaulted at least eight more patients. Columbia refused to cooperate with an earlier prosecution that resulted in a plea arrangement that kept him out of jail. And the Columbia leaders who oversaw all of this have gotten off scot-free, unlike the leadership at Penn State or Michigan State. Dr. Robert Hadden was convicted, finally, in January, of four counts of sexual abuse involving interstate travel (making it a federal case). Columbia still has not notified his former patients that he’s a sex offender. There are over 240 additional women who say he molested or abused them while under his care. If I had gone to Columbia, I wouldn’t give them another fucking dime.

There’s a million-dollar Kickstarter up for a series of expansions and enhancements to the hit game Terraforming Mars, from Indie Game Studios, which bought TM’s original publisher Stronghold Games when the latter’s founder retired a year or two ago. Kickstarter requires now that creators disclose what parts of the project are generated by AI projects, and it turns out that Indie decided to use AI for a whole bunch of the art in the new game – and Indie’s President Travis Worthington is completely unapologetic about this, even in the face of some pretty direct questions from Polygon’s Charlie Hall. What I find most distasteful about this is that they’re charging more for the product while their costs are going down, since they’re not paying actual artists for actual art. This is straight-up profit-taking. (Full disclosure: I’ve written for Polygon and Charlie was my editor.)

Vanity Fair has a story from author and journalist James David Robenalt on the upcoming book by and revelations from former Secret Service agent Paul Landis, who claims that he found another bullet lodged loosely in the seat behind President John F. Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy right after the President’s body was removed from the car. The implication, if we accept this story, is that there was a second shooter. It’s a long story, and I think Robenalt doth protest too much, but he’s also arguing against 60 years of government reports and denials.

The Daily Beast explains how Barstool built up its audience and social media presence by using burner accounts to avoid DMCA-related suspensions of their actual accounts.

The affirmative action policy you haven’t heard about: With enrollment of boys declining at colleges across the country, many have been finding ways to tip the scales in favor of male applicants. Weird that I don’t hear any protests from the right about this. It’s a mystery!

The Zulu prince and South African politician Mangosothu Buthelezi died last week at age 95. The BBC looks at his lengthy and complicated legacy. He served as president of one of the country’s “Bantustans,” puppet states within South Africa that claimed to give autonomy to Black citizens living under apartheid, then allied with the African National Congress in the fight for equality, only to split with the ANC over whether armed action was necessary or whether to ask for international sanctions.

Georgia the state is trying to become less democratic than Georgia the country, as they’ve made protests over the Cop City development a felony. I think this is a 1A violation, but I’m obviously not a lawyer.

Charles S. Pierce weighs in on how Clarence and Ginni Thomas are making a mockery of our democratic system.

Republican politicians who decried “indoctrination” in schools and passed laws banning materials like the 1619 Project from classrooms are now happily allowing students to be indoctrinated by the ahistorical nonsense from the right-wing disinformation outfit PragerU, because this is where censorship inexorably ends up.

Meanwhile, the GOP’s extreme wing is trying to shoehorn further abortion restrictions, including banning the safe, effective abortion pill, into various unrelated bills, and it’s backfiring on Rep. McCarthy and other Republican leaders already – to say nothing of what it might do next November. The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent also looks at how what he calls the “MAGA doom loop” may kill their chances in key battleground states next year.

Argentina is trying to get Italy to extradite a priest who helped the military junta torture dissidents in the 1970s. Franco Reverberi fled Argentina to return to his native country when it became clear he might be called to account for assisting torturers, sitting in the room while these abuses took place and even telling victims that God wanted them to reveal their secrets.

Convicted murderer Danelo Cavalcante escaped from Chester County Prison, about eleven miles from where I live, and was on the run for two weeks before a police dog found him. You know who didn’t find him or even remotely help in the search? All of the random idiots who went out to search for him or “report” on the search as so-called citizen journalists.

The library director and another library official in Sterling, Kansas, were fired in July after displaying a rainbow image at the entrance to the library because a few “Christians” complained it was promoting a “gay agenda,” even though the image was about neurodivergent people. I can’t with these people. Your religion is your business but it is not an excuse for hate, ignorance, or just being an asshole.e

A mathematical puzzle unsolved for fifty years, about the minimum dimensions for a Möbius strip, has been solved.

The asymmetric coop game Flock Together hit its funding goal in a few hours and is already 300% funded, over $150,000, just a few days into the campaign.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, argentina, board game news, georgia, kansas, kickstarters, links, longreads, metoo, police, scotus, south africa, stick to baseball

→ August 19, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/19/23.

I’ve got a piece filed to run on Monday or Tuesday at The Athletic, and another review coming up this week at Paste, but had nothing new up this week. My podcast will be back this week with an episode I recorded on Friday. So … sorry? But I’ll have a lot of content up in the next few days.

A few weeks ago, I appeared on the video podcast Shelf Stories to discuss ethics in board game media and questions of integrity and professionalism among folks who review games or otherwise cover the space, along with former Kotaku writer Luke Plunkett. It’s a long discussion but I greatly enjoyed it.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New York Times has a long adaptation from an upcoming book about how a California high school was torn apart by an Instagram account that posted racist memes about students there.

Nature discusses the impact of scientists leaving or cutting back on Twitter use, allowing anti-science and denialism to fester there – and that ran before Elon threatened, again, to terminate the site’s block function.

The Times also had a piece about three weeks ago looking into the continuing mystery over the origins of COVID-19, arguing that the public’s greater belief in the lab-leak conspiracy theory – any hypothesis of a lab leak remains stubbornly unsupported by evidence – is a function of distrust of authorities and the competition between narratives, not a question of facts.

By now you’ve likely read about Kansas cops raiding the offices of a small, local newspaper, after which the paper’s 98-year-old owner died. It turns out that the cops did so to try to prevent the paper from writing about a local restaurant owner’s DUI, which would have prohibited the woman, Kari Newell, from obtaining a liquor license. The county attorney has said there was insufficient evidence to support the warrant the cops obtained, and there’s now a complaint against the judge, Laura Viar, who signed it. The editorial boards of the Kansas City Star and Wichita Eagle co-published an editorial calling the raid “an intolerable overreach.”

Why did a Missouri judge grant a restraining order preventing the St. Louis Post-Dispatch from publishing details of an accused cop killer’s mental health evaluation? This seems like a First Amendment violation.

Meanwhile, Wisconsin State Senator Cory Tomczyk, a Republican, called a 13-year-old kid a homophobic slur at a county meeting in August of 2021, according to several people who witnessed it, but he’s trying to sue a local newspaper out of existence just for reporting on it.
I don’t know why this story has received so little attention: A 3-year-old girl who was trafficked by Texas state officials died while on a a so-called “migrant bus.” I couldn’t find articles on this in the Times (either one) or Washington Post, for example.

The Los Angeles Times looks at the people who actually lived near the nuclear test sites depicted as remote and unpopulated in Oppenheimer.

NPR summarizes some of the indoctrination awaiting Florida public school students as they return to the classroom this month.

A Montana judge ruled in favor of young climate-change activists who sued the state, arguing that Montana’s policy preventing state agencies from considering greenhouse gas emission potential when evaluating permits for fossil fuel development is unconstitutional. It’s largely symbolic, but could present a path for similar suits elsewhere.

The Baltimore Banner’s Kyle Goon tears apart Orioles failson/owner John Angelos’s bid for more state money along with a land grab around Camden Yards. Meanwhile, Orioles announcer Kevin Brown issued a statement nobody believes that tried to defuse reports that he was suspended for citing facts about the team’s past performance. In the Orioles’ best season in a decade, leave it to John Angelos to muck it up with this clownery.

A new state tax in Massachusetts that levies an extra 4% on incomes over a million dollars will raise $1 billion for FY2024, and the proceeds will pay for free school lunches for all kids in the state, among other things (I assume). Unfortunately, this article’s author confuses wealth with income, referring to “the state’s wealthiest residents.” Income and wealth are not the same thing, and taxing each is a very different process.

From last month, Katherine Miller wrote in the New York Times about the farcical No Labels party, which won’t reveal its funding sources and seems more interested in re-electing Donald Trump than pushing an actual new “centrist” platform (as if Democrats weren’t closer to the center than the progressive left anyway).

The Atlantic points out that asking why people keep moving to the Phoenix area ignores the broader questions of cheap energy and housing that drive it.

Board game news: The Kickstarter for Perch launched this week and is already about 250% funded.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, baseball, board game news, coronavirus, first amendment, florida, kansas, links, longreads, massachusetts, missouri, social media, stick to baseball, taxes, texas, wisconsin

→ June 24, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/24/23.

I released my second mock draft for 2023 this week for subscribers to the Athletic. I also did a Q&A to answer your draft questions.

My guest on the Keith Law Show this week was Michael Ruhlman, author of Ruhlman’s Twenty and the brand-new The Book of Cocktail Ratios: The Surprising Simplicity of Classic Cocktails, which is an essential guide for any home bartender. You can listen & subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New Yorker’s Louisa Thomas has a tremendous story on the vicissitudes of Daniel Bard’s career, as he’s had at least two distinct comebacks already in his baseball life. (There’s also a mention of Keith Law Show guest Sian Beilock, author of Choke.)

Defector has the story of con artist John Rogers, who scammed people out of millions through his business of buying and digitizing photo archives from major newspapers and professional photographers.

NPR affiliate KNKX looks at how Christopher Rufo, who made “critical race theory” an electoral rallying cry and is now going after trans people, went from a little-known City Council candidate to a right-wing influencer with links to two Presidential candidates.

The new chief of the 1100-person Grand Caillou/Dulac Band of Native Americans in Louisiana is a 25-year-old coastal scientist who wants to help his tribe fight climate change and preserve their way of life.

Water recycling is the next big thing in building and urban planning, from commercial to residential properties.

Meanwhile, the state of Arizona is making it way too hard for native populations to access their guaranteed water rights.

The Guardian spent three days interviewing the Kenyan Nobel Laureate Ng?g? wa Thiong’o, author of Wizard of the Crow and A Grain of Wheat.

The BBC has a rare look at the famine and increased repression taking place right now in North Korea.

NBC News’s Brandy Zadrozny interviewed putative Presidential candidate and science denier Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who shows just how divorced from reality he is, claiming that the powers-that-be prolonged the pandemic, that the vaccines killed more people than they saved (they did not), and that the CIA killed his father. He also still doesn’t understand that the mercury found in fish and the mercury that used to be found in vaccines were in completely different forms that the human body handles differently.

RFK Jr. is not a doctor or scientist; he’s a lawyer, with no medical or scientific background whatsoever. This TIME editorial explaining how and why RFK Jr. is “dead wrong” about vaccines was co-authored by a doctor and professor of global health.

Still not convinced? RFK Jr.’s anti-vaccine group, the misleadingly-named Children’s Defense Fund, has been reaching out to neo-Nazi and white nationalist users to drum up support for him. Very fine people.

The Washington Post has more on how a fringe, Christian doctors’ group has spurred Republicans’ renewed war on abortion, transgender rights, and more.

The same billionaire who lavished gifts on SCOTUS Justice Clarence Thomas has also donated over $450,000 to Republican Senators who might vote on judicial ethics reform.

The British government is holding over 60 migrants, mostly Tamils, in a makeshift detention camp on Diego Garcia, with conditions deteriorating and what seems like an end-run around refugee rights because the Brits are claiming the island, which houses a military base, isn’t actually part of the UK.

Two old morons accused a nine-year-old girl of being trans at a track meet, stopping the event and demanding proof that the girl was cis. This is what comes of right-wingers spreading fear and hate of trans people just to gain political currency.

Writing in the Observer, Kathryn Bromwich argues for a more inclusive feminism and less focus on the distraction of transphobia, as there are far more pressing and practical issues confronting women today.

Starbucks caved to pressure from bigots and removed Pride décor from many of its stores. Workers from over 150 locations are going on strike to protest the move.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who uses a wheelchair, vetoed a bill to make it easier for people with disabilities to vote by mail. He also approved a law that bans cities and counties in Texas from mandating water breaks for construction workers in the heat.

The BBC has the story of a Texas woman who was denied an abortion for a nonviable pregnancy and nearly died as a result of the state’s draconian, misogynistic abortion ban.

The Speaker of the North Carolina House, Tim Moore (R), stands accused of using his position to gain sexual favors, including “engaging in group sex” with people looking to benefit politically.

The British newspaper The Times ran a story claiming that COVID-19 came from a lab leak, although they didn’t provide any evidence. It’s right in line with the paper’s AIDS denialist stance from the 1980s.

Elon Musk joining in and encouraging an attack against vaccine developer Dr. Peter Hotez has many scientists looking for the exit from Twitter.

Can you wash and reuse plastic zip-top bags? Yes, several times.

Barbara Kingsolver became the first author to win the Women’s Prize for Fiction twice.

PEN America referred to the removal of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s memoir Between the World and Me from a South Carolina school’s AP course list as “an outrageous act of government censorship.”

NBC News reporter Ben Collins received a Walter Cronkite Award for TV Political Reporting, earning special recognition for his “incisive reporting from the trenches of the information war,” and gave a great speech about fighting misinformation and the need to stand up for the truth.

Truthout has some details on billionaire Leonard Leo’s operation to try to buy up the American judiciary and impose a hard-right agenda on the country.

Looks like CNN and MSNBC learned one tiny lesson, refusing to broadcast Trump’s post-arraignment speech live, since they couldn’t fact-check it in real time.

A whole bunch of Trump supporters claimed they’d respond to his arraignment with violence. They did not. You can’t cave to these people.

Meanwhile, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R) sent out a fundraising email for a “Trump Defense Fund” that would actually funnel most of the money to her.

On the bright side, Delaware’s at-large Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D) announced that she’s running for the Senate seat soon to be vacated by Tom Carper’s retirement. Delaware has never had a female Senator or a Senator of color.

Writer/activist Michael Harriot exposes some of the hypocrisy of Nikki Haley’s views and statements on race.

Verge explains the Reddit shutdown last week where multiple subreddits went dark for days to protest the company’s new policies.

The astroturfing group Moms for Liberty, which is pushing book bans and other anti-LGBTQ+ policies, quoted Hitler … again.

Board game news: A new version of the 1980s classic game Crossbows & Catapults is now up on Kickstarter.

Tangerine Games launched a Kickstarter for yet another bird-themed game, the very pretty Nestlings.

Thiefdom, a new game from the designers of Clans of Caledonia, is now also up on Kickstarter. I don’t like Clans of Caledonia anywhere near as much as the consensus – I find it a rather soulless economic Euro – but this appears to be a totally different sort of game.

Waypoints, a print-and-play game for $5, is also up on Kickstarter for one more week.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: african literature, anti-science, baseball, board game news, book banning, con men, delaware, links, longreads, misinformation, north carolina, north korea, refugees, scotus, social media, stick to baseball, texas, trans rights, vaccines, water

→ June 10, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/9/23.

I posted my first Big Board of 2023, ranking the top 100 prospects in this year’s MLB Draft class, over at The Athletic this week. I wanted to do a chat of some sort but my afternoons weren’t clear, unfortunately. Next up will be the ten-year redraft posts I do every year, this time looking back at the very mediocre 2013 class, followed by a fresh mock draft on June 21st. I also had a minor-league scouting post looking at some Yankees and Nationals prospects, including Spencer Jones and James Wood.

On the board game front, I reviewed Heat: Pedal to the Metal, a 2022 racing game that earned just the second perfect grade of 10 I’ve given to any game since I started reviewing for Paste in 2014. Heat’s a blast to play, and if you ever played the bike-racing game La Flamme Rouge from about five years ago, you will know a little bit of the mechanics, as one of Heat’s designers also did that game. Vulture asked me to list the best new games of 2023 so far.

I had Jonathan Mayo on my podcast last week to talk mock drafts, then took this week off to finish the Big Board and take care of some personal stuff. I hope to be back next week. In the meantime, you can listen & subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I sent a fresh version of my free email newsletter out to subscribers on Friday. Why not sign up?

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Columbia Journalism Review has a story on Defector, a writer-owned website founded by Deadspin refugees that’s making its model work in a difficult landscape that is seeing many other sites flounder.
This is appalling on so many levels – parents are paying to have their high school students’ papers published in junk journals to burnish the kids’ college applications.
The Washington Post looks at the “revolt of the Christian home-schoolers,” as some evangelicals who’d been brainwashed into avoiding public education are sending their kids back to regular schools.
A former gun industry executive turned gun safety advocate talked to ProPublica about how the NRA and gun manufacturers radicalized American gun owners.
The New York Times has a great story on a couple of crypto con artists whose last firm, Three Arrow Capital, went bust, so they’v e l e f t t h e U S f o r Bali and Spain … and have already started another crypto outfit.
Dr. Peter Hotez wrote in the Houston Chronicle that not only is the current pandemic not over, there will be more coronavirus pandemics to come.
The mother of an 18-year-old who killed himself is suing the publisher of a newspaper that used the teen’s image to claim he died from the COVID-19 vaccine.
Fidelity has marked down its investment in Twitter by two-thirds since Elon Musk’s purchase of the site.
Maybe it’s because Twitter no longer bothers to remove most hate speech on the site.
Or because Musk himself has gone over the right rail, quoting a neo-Nazi and spreading an antisemitic conspiracy theory.
Charlie Warzel writes in the Atlantic that all of this and more prove that Twitter is just another far-right social network. Parler, Truth Social, Gab – none of these could get a critical mass of users, so instead a right-wing nut job bought a site that already had it, then shifted it hard to the right, betting that the audience and advertisers would stick around.
Bans on drag shows are unconstitutional, writes Elie Mystal in the Nation. Of course they are. My guess is many of the laws Republicans have passed in this culture war will fail in the courts, but it won’t make an iota of difference.
A woman in Tennessee had to undergo an emergency hysterectomy after doctors in that state refused to give her a medically necessary abortion because of the state’s neanderthal abortion ban.
Two groups cancelled conventions they planned to hold in Orlando in response to the state’s anti-LGBT, anti-free speech, and anti-everything policies.
A woman in Washington state has been arrested after refusing treatment for tuberculosis, which a judge ordered her to receive over a year ago.
Rex Huppke takes aim at entitled right-wing protesters screaming at employees and damaging merchandise in Target over the chain’s line of Pride Month merchandise.
Charlotte Clymer had a thoughtful take on this topic, pointing out that giving in to the right-wing outrage machine doesn’t work: they’ll never be satisfied, and they’ll forever be in a shrinking minority.
The President of the Temecula Valley School Board referred to Harvey Milk as “a pedophile” before voting to ban a book that discussed Milk’s life and legacy. He doubled down on the comments after Gov. Gavin Newsom called him out.
Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville (guess) has been so blatant in his support of white nationalists that his own brother is disavowing him.
We’re finally getting a film adaptation of the first Flavia de Luce novel, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, with Martin Freeman attached, I presume as Flavia’s father.
Board game news: The designers of Three Sisters, Motor City, and Fleet: The Dice Game opened a Kickstarter for their next roll-and-write game, French Quarter.
Days of Wonder announced an upcoming Ticket to Ride legacy game, with original designer Alan Moon joined by Rob Daviau (Pandemic Legacy, Return to Dark Tower) and Matt Leacock (Pandemic).

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, board game news, book banning, first amendment, florida, links, longreads, Media, social media, stick to baseball, tennessee, vaccines

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