climate change

→ April 20, 2024
→ By keith
→ 10 Comments

Stick to baseball, 4/20/24.

I updated my ranking of the top prospects for this year’s draft, going to 50 names but not without some difficulty; and posted a scouting notebook covering a half-dozen prospects in the class I saw over the previous ten days. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

As I mentioned in my chat the other day, the Athletic spiked my podcast and cut the daily baseball show to three a week, so I’m no longer doing any regular podcasts for them. I did make a guest appearance on the Windup on Friday, talking draft and prospect stuff.

I am now appearing weekly on the Stadium streaming channel, on the 2 pm show Diamond Dreams, which is entirely about prospects, with occasional appearances on their roundup show The Rally. You can get the app here. Right now, it doesn’t appear that shows are archived, but I’m looking into it.

Once this is done, I’m hoping to get another edition of my free email newsletter out this weekend, before I head back to Chicago for the next show.

Taylor Swift is on Threads now – but I was there first. I’m on Bluesky, too. I ended up re-verified on Twitter, which makes me eligible for a cut of ad revenues around my tweets; I’m going to donate all of it to the Trevor Project. My first and only payout so far was $16.64, which I’ve already donated.

And now, pop an edible (if it’s legal where you are) and enjoy the links…

Before I get to the longreads, this seems like the story of the week: The Supreme Court has declined to hear the appeal in McKesson v. Doe, which held that authorities may hold a protest’s organizer(s) liable if any attendee of the protest commits an illegal act. The decision effectively ends the right to assembly in at least three states. This should have been front-page news across the country.
An editorial in Haaretz argues that Netanyahu’s policies, from his brutal assault on Gaza and assassination of Iranian leaders, are endangering the long-term survival of Israel.
The billionaire co-founder of Cloudflare wanted to build an 11,000 square foot mansion in Park City over the opposition of residents. First he tried to slip a bill through the state legislature to allow the construction, but it failed. When the local paper ran stories critical of him, he bought it and installed his buddy as editor in chief.
Brandy Zarozny of NBC News reported from the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association conference, where speakers urged attendees to seize voting machines and investigate absurd conspiracy theories.
The New York Times reports on how Senate candidate Dave McCormick, a Republican running against Pennsylvania’s Bob Casey (D), appears to have fabricated details of his upbringing to downplay his privileged upbringing.
PressWatchers interviewed Chris Quinn of the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, who has made waves for his willingness to cover former President Trump accurately and for calling out the blatant bothsidesism happening across so-called mainstream media.
Candace Buckner of the Washington Post had a measured take on the outrage over Gregg Doyel’s odd treatment of Caitlin Clark. I’m with her: the story isn’t a non-troversy, but the level of vitriol here is out of proportion to the infraction.
Former federal prosecutor Terra Morehead will be disbarred in the wake of revelations that she helped a Kansas City cop frame an innocent man who then served 23 years in prison. Morehead was also a Wyandotte County prosecutor, and has been implicated in numerous incidents of prosecutorial misconduct.
USC announced that their valedictorian will not be allowed to speak at commencement this year as the university caved to anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian sentiment, including threats against the ceremony and school.
A St. Louis cop who was working undercover among protesters in the city in 2017 was badly beaten by his own colleagues; a judge just awarded him $23.5 million in compensation, which, ultimately, will be covered by taxpayers.
More fallout from Uri Berliner’s unverified column attacking NPR: The network suspended him, after which he resigned, presumably to start a Substack where he’ll rail against DEI and vaccines; while NPR’s Steve Inskeep wrote a detailed takedown of Berliner’s column, pointing out just how little fire there was behind the smoke. I’ll repeat what I’ve said before: Berliner’s argument that NPR didn’t give enough credence to the failed lab-leak hypothesis was a tell. Slate’s Alicia Montgomery, a former NPR staffer herself, has a much stronger critique of the problems at the network.
Louisiana Republicans voted to end mandatory lunch breaks for child workers, cut unemployment benefits, and reduce worker’s compensation.
Ocean acidification and climate change are causing a fourth mass bleaching episode in the world’s coral reefs. Coral reefs are essential to the marine ecosystem – including a lot of the fish we eat.
There are 806 billionaires in the United States. Their wealth exceeds that of the lower half of Americans’ total wealth combined, by a lot.
The great Phil Plait wrote about the declining odds that there is a ninth planet in our solar system, given how much of space we’ve checked without finding it. This is the subject of the fantastic deduction board game The Search for Planet X.
The Sundance Film Festival’s organizers are playing the sports stadium handout game, courting bids from cities to host the influential festival starting in 2027.
Kari Lake (R ), running for Senate in Arizona after voters there rejected her in the race for Governor in 2022, called on sheriffs to enforce the state’s 1864 abortion ban. That same territorial law also banned interracial marriage and set the age of consent for girls at 10.
Tennessee Rep. Scott Cepicky (R) confessed in a leaked conversation that his aim with a school-voucher bill is to “throw the whole freaking (public education) system in the trash.”
Dr. Allison Neitzel has become a target of anti-vaxx trolls for her pro-vaccine and pro-science activism; she responded on her newsletter with the wonderfully titled missive “I Will Continue to Piss Off Men.” If you want to read more about what amounts to harassment campaign against her from the soi-disant “journalist” Paul Thacker, you can go here. Thacker seems to focus on women in the pro-science movement, and I think it’s fair to ask if he’s really just a misogynist.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, arizona, astronomy, climate change, colleges, education, gaza, kansas, links, longreads, louisiana, misinformation, missouri, pennsylvania, police, stick to baseball, tennessee, utah, vaccines

→ April 13, 2024
→ By keith
→ 26 Comments

Stick to baseball, 4/13/24.

I’ve got some new content coming up this week, with a new draft ranking due to run on Thursday and a draft scouting blog probably running Monday or Tuesday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the collectible card game Star Wars: Unlimited – Spark of Rebellion, which I enjoyed even though I’m not generally a fan of deckbuilders.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter, detailing a rather ridiculous dinner I had at the bar at The Publican, an acclaimed Chicago restaurant where, to say the least, one does not belch as loudly as one can.

I’m going to be on a new TV show, Diamond Dreams starting on Monday, April 15^th, on the streaming channel Stadium. The show is a half-hour look at prospects around the minors and for the draft, and will be followed by a show on collectibles where I’ll also offer some comments on the prospects they’re discussing. You can watch via the app on pretty much any platform.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: How Elon Musk convinced MAGA partisans that hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) was a treatment for COVID-19 – which it absolutely is not – and set off four years of online misinformation around the pandemic.

Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote in the New York Times about how “colorblindness” has been hijacked by the white-grievance movement, in direct opposition to the original intent of the term, which meant ending racial discrimination against people of color.

Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote about how the Key Bridge disaster demonstrated the importance of immigrants to our society.

A hardcore conservative group is making it harder for Idaho school districts to renovate or upgrade their facilities.

There’s a big scam going around that has tricked a number of content creators into ceding control of their Facebook pages. It starts with what seems to be an invitation to appear on a big podcast, which of course is very appealing to most people trying to build their online audience.

Over half a million Arizonans signed a petition to put codifying abortion rights on the ballot this November. It’s part of a Democratic strategy to drive voters to the polls in purple states – and also, by the way, a basic human right. This comes on the heels of the GOP-packed Arizona Supreme Court reinstating the state’s 1864 abortion ban – yes, a law that predates Arizona’s statehood by almost 50 years.

The Guardian revealed that Boise State Professor Scott Yenor ran Action Idaho, an extreme right-wing site that attacked LGBTQ+ rights and accused Republicans of being insufficiently conservative. Yenor now also works for the Claremont Institute and just a month ago wrote a piece for the Federalist that said DEI had to die for Western civilization to survive.

ProPublica explains how authorities are trying to crack down on gift-card crime rings, where consumers often end up buying gift cards that appear new but that have already been drained of value by crooks.

Maria Bustillos writes in The Nation about the rise of journalist-owned news outlets amidst the ongoing bloodletting in the industry.

David Chang’s Momofuku company is trying to trademark the generic term “chili crunch” to describe a staple Chinese condiment best known as chili crisp – and they’re suing smaller firms to try to have their way.

Why is Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey (R – and not the former pitcher) doing the bidding of Elon Musk by suing Media Matters for reporting on Twitter’s failure to police hate on their site?

Voters in Enid, Oklahoma, removed Judd Blevins (R) from the city council after his ties to white supremacist groups were exposed.

The BBC has a first-person narrative from a woman who found deepfakes of herself online – and eventually learned it was a close friend of hers who made them.

This Twitter thread has some solid details on the IDF’s attack on the World Central Kitchen convoy in Gaza that killed seven WCK volunteers. I don’t know why those seven deaths should lead to more calls for a cease-fire when the 30,000+ Palestinian deaths before that haven’t … of course I do, let’s not kid ourselves.

Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket reposted a piece from the Kansas Reflector critical of Meta’s ad policy around climate change, and moments later, Meta removed all links to both sites from Facebook and Threads. After an outcry, Meta reversed the decision and blamed a “security error,” but, come on.

Landfills emit far more methane than previously believed, more bad news for the planet as methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

Before voters wisely rejected a stadium tax proposal to replace the two perfectly fine sports facilities outside of Kansas City, the KC Studio had a sensible op ed on what a waste tearing down Kaufmann Stadium would be.

Former SCOTUS justice Steven Breyer wants everyone to get along, like his former colleagues on the high court, even though some of those colleagues are busy destroying Americans’ basic civil rights, writes Elie Mystal of The Nation.

The BBC reports on exploitation of workers in Brazil who harvest the common ingredient carnauba wax, bordering on slavery.

Cleveland Plain-Dealer editor Chris Quinn explains why the paper treats Donald Trump differently from other politicians & candidates. Hint: It’s because he lies.

The Atlantic’s David Graham describes the “Trump two-step:” say something outrageous, claim that’s not really what he said or meant, and then quietly embrace the original statement.

The New Republic’s Greg Sargent details just how entrenched election denial, January 6^th denialism, and other insane conspiracy theories are within the Republican party right now.

Mehdi Hasan wrote in the Guardian that Justice Sonja Sotomayor needs to retire from the Supreme Court so President Biden can appoint a replacement, avoiding the possibility that Trump would get to appoint a fourth justice and give the court a 7-2 majority that would likely last decades. I’m not sure if I agree, but he at least offers a solid argument.

Fox News and several right-wing podcasters, including beanie-wearing Tim Pool, are now facing a lawsuit from a man they all falsely identified as a mass shooter. The man’s lawyer previously represented two Sandy Hook parents in their lawsuit against Alex Jones for his false claims that that mass shooting didn’t happen. Fuck ’em up, Socrates.

The Tampa Bay Times published a rare editorial pointing out that public subsidies for sports stadiums don’t work out for taxpayers, as the Rays try once again to soak Floridians for a new facility.

Here’s a great summary and index of economic research showing how consistently these sports stadium deals fail to live up to economic promises. If you’re writing about the topic, or know a journalist who is, this is invaluable, because the pro-stadium forces will always trot out fabricated numbers from consultants who give them what they want.

The PEN America awards are in a bit of a shambles after a number of high-profile authors withdrew their works from consideration or declined prizes in protest of the organization’s perceived bias towards Israel. The authors include Lorrie Moore, who just won the National Book Critics Circle’s Fiction award for I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home.

A senior editor at NPR wrote a bad-faith, error-filled critique of the public radio outlet on Bari Weiss’s blog. NPR responded, defending its hiring practices and its philosophy. You can find many takedowns of Uri Berliner’s original piece, but one fact that got me was that he accused NPR of downplaying or ignoring the lab-leak theory behind COVID-19’s origins, even when the evidence in favor of a zoonotic spillover kept mounting.

WFLA has the story of a young boy with autism who can no longer receive health services because Florida kicked him off Medicaid. We need more stories like this, showing everyday people getting badly hurt by state policies that cut funding for essential services like health care, education, and even school lunches for underprivileged people.

A former youth minister at a Baptist church in Bixby, Oklahoma, has been charged with sexual exploitation of a minor as well as possession and distribution of child pornography. No drag queens were involved.

Chicago police killed Dexter Reed during a traffic stop where he fired first, injuring one officer, after which the cops fired 96 rounds in less than a minute. The Sun-Times reports that the five officers involved in the incident have been investigated a total of 41 times since 2019, and that the area where they stopped Reed has a disproportionate number of traffic stops. The cops have said they pulled Reed over because he wasn’t wearing a seat belt.

The brightest cosmic explosion scientists have ever seen has now led to new questions about how some of the universe’s heaviest metals are formed. The supernova occurred about 2.4 billion years ago in a galaxy far, far away, producing a huge burst of gamma rays but none of the elements like gold or platinum that scientists expected to find.

Delaware State Senator Sarah McBride is running to be our at-large Representative, vying to become the first trans person elected to Congress. She’s one of at least three Democrats hoping to win the primary, which is tantamount to winning the election in our very blue state. Full disclosure: I’ve met Sen. McBride and we often see each other at our local Brew Haha coffee shop.

Is social media really driving a surge in mental illness among teenagers, as Jonathan Haidt claims in his new book? The evidence is mixed at best, according to this review in Nature.

Eric Hovde, who is running for Senate in Wisconsin as a Republican, is now facing backlash over his comments from a previous campaign where he called for cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits, attacked single mothers, said alcohol should never have been legalized, questioned whether farmers work hard, and lots of other great stuff.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, arizona, chicago, climate change, delaware, Economics, election denial, florida, gaza, idaho, links, longreads, Media, mental illness, misinformation, missouri, physics, police, scotus, social media, stick to baseball, wisconsin

→ March 2, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/2/24.

Nothing new this week at the Athletic, but I’ll have two draft-related pieces coming up next week.

At Paste, I reviewed Dragonkeepers, a new family-level game that I found really disappointing, with the wrong mixture of complexity and randomness.

I’ll have a new newsletter out in the next day or two, but you can sign up here – it’s free and always includes links to everything I write.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Color me shocked, but self-help ‘guru’ Jay Shetty has fabricated or embellished much of his background, according to this investigative piece by The Guardian.
Slate’s Chris Molanphy breaks down what the country chart success of Beyoncé’s “Texas Hold ‘Em” does and does not mean in actual impact on radio and with country listeners.
Will Leitch wrote about the culture-war takeover of the murder of Laken Riley, a University of Georgia student who was killed on the same running trail Will and his wife often take in Athens. Because her alleged killer entered the U.S. illegally, the case is now part of the yelling about the so-called “crisis” at the U.S-Mexico border – even though immigrants commit fewer crimes than U.S.-born people.
Florida’s measles outbreak is due to the state’s active campaigning against childhood vaccinations, so, of course, Fox News is blaming it on migrants.
The state of Indiana has blocked funding to the Kinsey Institute, the world’s top sex-research center, as part of that state’s war on LGBTQ+ rights.
Texas executed Ivan Cantu even though the foreman of the jury that convicted him wrote that he believed the sentence was unjust, as the prosecution hid key evidence that may have bolstered Cantu’s claims of innocence. Just another day in the Lone Star State.
What do you expect from a state where the party that controls all branches of government keeps cozying up to a prominent white supremacist?
A Dallas-area high school canceled a student production of The Laramie Project, about the killing of Matthew Shepard by two bigots because he was gay, after the district passed anti-LGBTQ+ rules last year.
Climate change is driving a surge in cholera cases in central Africa.
An unvaccinated nine-year-old boy in Singapore contracted COVID-19, developed myocarditis from it, and suffered a stroke. His mother says she declined the vaccine for her son because she was worried it would cause myocarditis, a good example of the harm that unfettered disinformation is doing to public health.
Some good medical news: An mRNA ‘vaccine’ to fight pancreatic cancer has entered stage 2 trials. I put the word vaccine in quotes because it’s not a preventative vaccine, but is tailored to specific recipients’ cancers to help train the immune system to fight the rogue cells, particularly those that remain after surgery or chemo.
You would think Arizona, the sunniest state in the U.S., would encourage residents to add solar panels, but the state is bowing to one of its major energy utility companies and adding a “punitive” charge to customers with solar panels. The Arizona Corporation Commission approved a request from utility APS despite failing to evaluate the full impact of these price hikes on consumers.
Missouri’s Attorney General is suing Planned Parenthood for “trafficking” minors to get abortions outside of Gilead.
The death of nonbinary teen Nex Benedict in Owasso, Oklahoma, after several girls beat them to the point where they blacked out, has received a lot of unclear and I think contradictory coverage from major outlets so far. Assigned Media has a solid summary of what we do and don’t know so far and a piece criticizing traditional media for accepting the police & school’s narratives without questioning them.
A married couple in Oregon who taught at Damascus Christian School have been charged with sexually abusing a child there. No drag queens or trans people were involved.
The BBC spoke to several Iranian women who are still protesting the theocratic regime’s requirement that they wear hijabs in public.
Mehdi Hasan announced his new media venture, Zeteo News, which sounds promising, although we’ve certainly seen and heard similar pitches before that haven’t panned out. His work with MSNBC was excellent and I expect him to continue to challenge disinformation and bigotry. I hope there’s enough support to allow him to build the news organization he envisions.
A Beverly Hills middle school is grappling with the spread of AI-generated nudes of students. This issue isn’t going anywhere and I doubt passing laws against the practice is going to do much at this level.
I know you’re shocked, but the construction of Elon Musk’s long-promised Hyperloop in Las Vegas is rife with safety violations.
Two twins from the country of Georgia were sold at birth and separated; they found each other as teenagers thanks to a TV talent show and to TikTok. Amy and Ano are two of thousands of babies who were stolen from hospitals in the Caucasus nation, their mothers told their babies had died, and sold to new families who were often unaware the adoptions were illegal.
Board game news: An expansion for the Restoration Games title Thunder Road is now on Kickstarter and has already cleared $1 million.
A roll-and-write game based on the wonderful board game Cascadia is also on Kickstarter and fully funded already.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, arizona, board game news, climate change, country music, death penalty, frauds, las vegas, links, longreads, missouri, oklahoma, social media, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines

→ January 27, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/26/24.

The top 100 prospects ranking will run on The Athletic on Monday, February 5^th, followed by the farm system rankings later that week, and the team top 20s start running on February 12^th.

My friend and one-time colleague Chris Crawford has had a tough year, losing his mother and just last week his stepfather while a site for which he was writing & producing podcasts decided to just not pay its people. He started a GoFundMe last week to help cover the mortgage on his parents’ house.

I’ve got a newsletter about 80% written and just need to finish it up this weekend. It’s free and you can sign up here.

And now, the links…
Longreads first: The New York Times reveals the extensive playbook behind the war on “wokeism” and DEI programs at major universities in red states. It’s a coordinated attack, much as the war on trans people and the war on abortion and the war on CRT, yet people keep falling for it – even people at major, nationally-read newspapers.
From the guardian Long Read, how the fact that so many hipster coffee shops look the same exemplifies the “tyranny of the algorithm.”
Martin Luther King, Jr., warned against the evils of militarism, racism, and poverty, yet the media outlets who praise him every January seem quite inured to the existence and impact of those three facets of our society.
Speaking of the death of journalism, a member of the family that runs the right-wing Sinclair Broadcasting Group – the same company that botched a bunch of MLB rights deals – bought the Baltimore Sun and immediately insulted the staff. This Twitter thread has more details on the meeting between David Smith and the Sun’s newsroom.
Right-wing troll Christopher Rufo’s push to oust Harvard President Claudine Gay cited the work of a data scientist with close ties to eugencists and so-called “race scientists.”
Climate scientist Michael Mann, who co-created the famous “hockey stick” graph showing the rapid warming of the planet, sued two conservative hacks who compared him to a serial child molester back in 2012. The case finally reached trial this week. One of the two, National Review’s Mark Steyn, stands by his comments, which I think tells you all you need to know.
Meanwhile, that bastion of leftist thought The Financial Times wrote that the world’s cities are not ready for climate change.
I reviewed R.F. Kuang’s Nebula-winning novel Babel earlier this week, right around the time that news broke that it had been declared ineligible for this year’s Hugo Awards – with zero explanation why. Those awards were held in China, and there’s reason to believe that she and at least one other author were targeted for their views by the Chinese Communist government. The head of the awards committee has steadfastly refused to provide any insight or further details on why it was declared ineligible; I reached out to the committee myself and have received no response. John Scalzi, himself a Hugo winner, wrote about it as well.
We are not ready for the onslaught of disinformation around the 2024 election that’s about to hit us, writes Brandy Zarozny for NBC News.
A midwife on Long Island (of course) faked vaccinations for 1500 children, giving them a worthless homeopathic pill, and won’t serve a day in prison, instead paying a $300,000 fine. I would much rather see her jailed for ten years than ever see someone behind bars for drug charges.
Jared Woodfill (R) is running for the Texas House of Representatives, with an endorsement from the state’s Attorney General Ken Paxton. A new lawsuit alleges that Woodfill covered up his former law partner’s Paul Pressler’s rapes of multiple boys even when alerted to Pressler’s crimes.
Big Tech will save no one but itself: Netflix caved to pressure from India’s Hindu nationalist movement by removing a film about a woman overcoming caste prejudice from its service.
Sam Altman really comes off like he has zero empathy for other humans in some of his latest comments about the future of AI.
Aaron Rupar interviewed the man behind the hilarious Twitter account New York Times Pitchbot.
Pitchfork reviewed the 25^th anniversary reissue of Swervedriver’s 99^th Dream album, which was plagued by label troubles and a rapidly shifting British music landscape. The title track is one of their best songs from any era or LP.
Can New Haven-style pizza spread beyond Connecticut? My guess is yes, of course, but most places will offer poor imitations of the real thing.
Asmodee and the LEGO Group jointly announced the fall release of a new board game, Monkey Palace, from two relatively new game designers.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, climate change, disinformation, diversity, hugo awards, india, journalism, links, longreads, pizza, racism, shoegaze, social media, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines

→ 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 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 9, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/9/23.

Nothing new this week other than two contributions to headlines on the callups of Jordan Lawlar and Evan Carter, but I’ll be back next week with the players I got wrong column. I did hold my first Klawchat in ages, though.

On The Keith Law Show this week, I spoke with Jonathan Abrams, New York Times reported and author of the 2022 book The Come Up: An Oral History of the Rise of Hip-Hop, which comes out in paperback on October 3^rd. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: “The Dungeons and Dragons Players of Death Row,” from the New York Times’s Keri Blakinger, is one of the best things I’ve read this year.

Rolling Stone has an exposé on Anti-Flag lead singer Justin Sane, who now stands accused of rape by at least thirteen women. Anti-Flag and Sane (born Justin Geever) himself made feminism and progressive ideology a core part of their public images.

A Peter Thiel-backed startup is supposedly planning to found its own libertarian city-state … somewhere, I guess. Fyre City?

Vulture exposes the corruption behind Rotten Tomatoes’ algorithm as studios and publicists have paid small-time reviewers, who are often inexplicably included in the site’s calculations, to post positive reviews or withhold negative ones. I’m not included in RT’s metrics and I’m not paid by any studios or publicists, so you can always trust my reviews, even if they’re not any good!

Parents of trans kids who spoke to the New York Times’ Azeen Ghorayshi spoke out against the reporter and how they felt used and misled by her actions. Ghorayshi wrote a fairly uncritical piece about the so-called whistleblower at a St. Louis clinic for trans kids, but didn’t accurately reflect the sentiments of the parents she spoke to, while the whistleblower appears to have fabricated or inflated most of her claims.

Regulatory changes may spell the end of Airbnb and similar short-term rentals in New York City. There’s some evidence that these sites are driving down housing stock in already depressed urban supplies.

Warming oceans due to climate change are allowing the flesh-eating bacterium Vibrio vulnificus to expand its habitat further north, killing three people in the New York area this summer.

The Florida town of Mount Dora established a program where businesses can declare themselves safe spaces for LGBTQ+ people and display a decal in their window to that effect. Several Florida Republicans are vowing to stop the program, because they are apparently opposed to the First Amendment, or too stupid to understand why it applies here.

Goodreads sucks. Even best-selling author R.F. Kuang says so – okay, sort of.

Christian nationalist commentator Matt Walsh, who doesn’t understand the biology of gender, decided to dunk on a single woman for a Tiktok video about her Saturday routines, and even the National Review said it was a bit much. Walsh’s view is that women exist solely for procreation, so it’s unsurprising that Julia Mazur’s unmarried, childless lifestyle would be so confusing to him.

One of the only pediatric cardiologists in the state of Louisiana is leaving the state because of its anti-LGBTQ+ legislation. Well well well.

The Kids Online Safety Act isn’t about protecting kids, at least not for its Republican backers – it’s about blocking LGBTQ+ content online, according to sponsor Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R). It has broad bipartisan support, however, and I contacted both of Delaware’s Senators to voice my opposition, even though both are sponsors of the bill as well.

Two Texas billionaires who’ve made their fortunes from fracking are using their gains to fund climate denial and conservative indoctrination sites like PragerU and the Daily Wire. Florida has now approved the use of PragerU materials in its K-12 schools. The Guardian has more on the lies and misinformation of PragerU, which is just doing what its backers pay it for.
Prison officials fired the guard who didn’t see Danelo Cavalcante escape from Chester County Prison by crabwalking up two walls, leading to a manhunt for the convicted murderer that is now entering day ten. Another inmate escaped the same way back in May, so I’m unclear why the guard is getting the blame rather than the officials who didn’t think to, say, use anti-climb paint to prevent a recurrence?

South Korean teachers have been protesting after one of their own committed suicide due to extensive bullying by her students’ parents.

Astrophysicist Katie Mack uses a baseball analogy to explain quantum tunneling.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: climate change, florida, lgbt rights, links, longreads, louisiana, metoo, misinformation, south korea, stick to baseball, trans rights

→ July 16, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/16/23.

For subscribers to the Athletic, here’s an index to my draft coverage from this past week:

My pick-by-pick analysis for the first 39 selections
My AL team draft recaps
My NL team draft recaps
My post-draft Q&A
My final mock draft, if you’re curious

I also recapped the Futures Game and wrote a brief note on the call-up of Pirates’ right-hander Quinn Priester.

I had Joe Sheehan back on the podcast last week, before the draft, and then skipped this week to write all that stuff above. You can listen & subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I’m a little pressed for time so let’s get to the links:

Longreads first: Well, not quite a longread, but here’s the GQ article on David Zaslav that he pressured the publication to pull after it was published online.
ProPublica reports on how the EPA has banned the pesticide chlorpyrifos for food crops in the U.S. but worked against a global ban on the chemical.
Unfortunately, ProPublica continues to seriously screw up its coverage of the research on the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Did an elite private school in New York City drive a student to suicide by asking him to leave?
Yet another story of the increasing harm from online romance scams, this time about how they’re driving victims to attempt suicide.
Elie Mystal argues that SCOTUS’s affirmative action ruling kicks the door open to Jim Crow-style bigotry.
Even before RFK Jr. revealed himself as an antisemite and Sinophobe, he was pushing an old anti-vaccine lie about “saline placebos” as part of his denialist messaging.
Reason asks why so many soi-disant libertarians are backing RFK Jr.
Giant hog farms are an environmental and animal-welfare disaster. They also make horrendous neighbors, but recent laws and court rulings have favored these factory farms over individual homeowners’ rights.
This is from last August but a Pew Research survey found American right-wingers are absolutely more insane in their climate change denial than even right-wingers in other countries. Meanwhile, the planet may be hitting the climate change point of no return.
Half the police force in Golden Valley, Minnesota, quit after the town hired a Black police chief. Crime went down.
Florida’s various laws repressing educator speech may already be driving a brain drain out of the state.
And the state of Florida is also going after voter registration groups, threatening them with thousands of dollars in fines for helping citizens exercise their constitutional right.
Moms for Liberty is an extremist group and Republican politicians are lining up to court their support.
Elon helped spread a conspiracy theory that claimed an innocent 22-year-old college student was a federal agent posing as a neo-Nazi to infiltrate hate groups.
Elon appears to be accelerating the enshittification of Twitter.
Rep. Clay Higgins (LA-R) suggested that the government close public libraries and replace them with “church owned” libraries instead.
Sen. Josh Hawley (MO-R) shared a quote that he claimed was from Patrick Henry but actually came from a virulently antisemitic magazine.
The WGA strikers may have been wobbling, but an anonymous comment from a studio exec seems have to given their strike new energy.
A US labor judge ruled that Starbucks illegally shut down a unionized store in Ithaca, New York, and ordered the company to reopen it.
A Muslim student from a Delaware high school was arrested outside his graduation ceremony by University of Delaware police.
As Substack and other sites become festering holes of homophobia and transphobia, Medium came out with a statement in support of LGBTQ+ rights.
Conservative activists didn’t stop at abortion – now they’re targeting birth control.
Conservative activists didn’t stop at trans kids – now they’re trying to ban gender-affirming care for adults.
Archaeologists think they’ve found the hidden entrance to what the Zapotec civilization believed was a path to the underworld. Nobody needs another Indiana Jones film, thanks.
India has a large sugar industry, and now a native rum industry is emerging by distilling better-quality spirits and exploring the liquor’s flavor profiles.
The ice in your cocktail has a significant cost in climate impact, so some bartenders and cocktail bars are trying to reduce its use and waste.
GQ did actually publish a fascinating look at one of the world’s most prolific and weirdest art thieves.
Jen Ramos Eisen wrote about what it was like to be a survivor of intimate-partner abuse at Domingo Germán’s perfect game.
Kevin Johnson wrote why he, as a Black man, has chosen not to review Morgan Wallen’s concerts in St. Louis given Wallen’s past, free use of the n-word.
Know a student affected by book bans? They can sign up for free to get access to a huge library of such titles via the Seattle Public Library.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-semitism, antiscience, climate change, coronavirus, environment, florida, lgbt rights, links, longreads, rum, scotus, stick to baseball, unions, vaccines

→ November 12, 2022
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/12/22.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I wrote a piece on the folly of the five-year deal for Edwin Díaz, based on the dismal history of deals of four years or longer for free-agent relievers. This was on the heels of last week’s ranking of the top 50 free agents this winter.

Over at Paste, I reviewed The Spill, a Pandemic-like cooperative game where players work to contain the damage from a Deepwater Horizon-like oil spill.

My free email newsletter returned last weekend, and with Twitter possibly on its way out, that’s one good way to keep up with everything I write. I’ve also set up accounts on counter.social and cohost, in case either of those proves a worthy alternative (the former is actually okay, if a bit quiet). Also, you can buy either of my books, Smart Baseball or The Inside Game, via bookshop.org at those links, or at your friendly local independent bookstore. I hear they make great holiday gifts.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Fiji is among the countries most at risk from the negative effects of climate change, so the country has begun moving entire villages before they end up drowned by rising sea levels. Meanwhile, Egypt is trying to discourage families from having more than two children because climate change is threatening its water supply.
Intelligencer has a long profile of Axel Springer CEO Matthias Döpfner, whose empire includes Politico, Business Insider, and the highly influential German tabloid Bild, calling him part Murdoch and park Musk.
Jane Gross was a pioneer among sportswriters, becoming the first woman allowed to enter an NBA clubhouse (to do her actual job) in 1975, paving the way for generations of women sportswriters who asked for nothing more than the same rights afforded to their male counterparts. Gross died this week at 75.
Four conservative Supreme Court Justices attended a party held by the arch-right Federalist Society this week. Charles S. Pierce calls the four “lackeys” of the group that helped former President Trump shove the entire federal judiciary to the right.
Molly Jong-Fast wrote about Twitter’s implosion and why she’s not leaving it (yet), while one of Twitter’s own lawyers warned that Elon Musk is putting the company at risk of incurring millions of dollars in fines.
The Washington Post has a story on how Twitter & Facebook gave a free pass to GOP election deniers this year.
Dr. Jen Gunter, author of The Vagina Bible, wrote about medical misinformation, social media, and the illusory truth effect, concluding with some advice on how to spot and deal with misinformation when you see it.
60 Minutes ran a segment last Sunday on how social media algorithms further polarize the electorate.
It doesn’t help when Fox News “sources” a bogus story from the misinformation-purveying Twitter account LibsOfTikTok. The claim attacked Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and ran the night before the election.
The midterm results were far better for Democrats than any polls or pundits indicated. Elie Mystal says that taking this as good news is the wrong response, given how Republican gerrymandering continued to artificially boost their results in the House and in state legislatures.
Indeed, four states used gerrymandered maps that courts had deemed illegal in this election, including Ohio, where Republicans have flat-out ignored multiple rulings saying that their map violated federal law.
Meanwhile, Tennessee has made it harder for people convicted of felonies to vote, resulting in over a fifth of its Black citizens losing this constitutional right. That’s on top of gerrymandering the shit out of Nashville to create a red district in a heavily blue city.
I’m sure most of you have already seen this, but the plaintiff in the suit to stop President Biden’s student loan forgiveness program themselves took a $50,000 PPP loan and accepted forgiveness for it rather than paying it back.
The lack of a response from fellow NBA players to Kyrie Irving spreading antisemitic propaganda on social media is disappointing, writes Candace Buckner for the Washington Post.
If you can get past the clickbait tone, there’s a good parenting tip in this article from the mother of the CEO of Youtube and the co-founder/CEO of 23AndMe.
Claims of an “immunity debt” from several years of masking and isolation are unsupported by science. Your immune system doesn’t just forget everything it learned because you weren’t exposed to more pathogens.
The Dragonfly 44 Galaxy appears to comprise 99% dark matter, which would challenge existing ideas of how galaxies evolve.
Board game news: Fit to Print, a new game from the publishers of Cascadia/Calico and the designer of Wormholes & Tiny Towns, is already over $100K raised on Kickstarter in just a few days. I just played Verdant, the newest game from Flatout (the publisher), last night, and it’s excellent.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-semitism, astronomy, board game news, climate change, gerrymandering, links, longreads, ohio, scotus, social media, stick to baseball, tennessee, the swamp

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