climate change

→ October 23, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/23/21.

My second (and final) Arizona Fall League notebook went up for subscribers to the Athletic on Monday; the prior one, with notes on MacKenzie Gore, Zach Thompson, and more, went up last Thursday. I held a Klawchat on Friday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed The Hunger, the newest game from designer Richard Garfield (King of Tokyo, Magic: the Gathering).

On my podcast this week, I spoke to Trevor Strunk (@hegelbon) about his new book Story Mode: Blah Video Games and the Interplay Between Consoles and Culture, which you can pre-order here. And you can subscribe to my podcast on Spotify or iTunes.

As the holidays approach, I’ll remind you all every week that I have two books out, The Inside Game and Smart Baseball, that would make great gifts for the readers (especially baseball fans) on your lists.

Longreads first: Nature spoke to scientists who say they’ve been subjected to the most vicious attacks ever during the pandemic, including death wishes and death threats.
A con artist scammed would-be adoptive families out of over a million dollars before she was finally caught. She preyed on their desire to have children, often taking thousands of dollars in “expenses” for pregnant women who placed their babies with other families or who never actually existed at all.
Tara Smith wrote about how to eradicate diseases back in December of 2019, just as SARS-CoV-2 was emerging. She tweeted this link this week to say that we’re not eradicating this virus as long as it has numerous, unknown animal reservoirs.
My colleague Adam Crafton wrote about the horrendous treatment of LGBTQ+ people in Saudi Arabia, the government of which now owns 80% of Newcastle United.
If we want to stop climate change, we have to stop burning things.
Normalize quitting, says Lindsay Crouse in a New York Times video.
There’s a real debate to be had over how powerful natural immunity from a COVID-19 infection is, but politics is derailing it. People screaming that it means they don’t need a vaccine cause those on the other side to dismiss the point entirely.
OK, Joy Pullman. You go first.
Why is Judge William Pryor advancing the career of a law student who has made blatantly racist statements?
Trump supporters in a north Texas county that TFG won by a 4-1 ratio still hounded an election administrator out of office, accusing her of having a liberal agenda.
The Trump Administration used its food aid program to give millions to connected firms and to promote the then-President. No one will ever be held accountable for this.
Netflix fired the organizer of the employee walkout to protest the transphobic content in the recent Dave Chappelle comedy special, claiming the employee leaked confidential data.
A white cop in Louisiana grabbed a Black woman by her hair and slammed her to the ground multiple times. ProPublica also has the story. The incident, of which there is video, occurred five weeks ago, and the officer has not been identified or, as far as anyone has reported, disciplined in any way.
Minneapolis schools using online survelliance software called Gaggle are outing LGBTQ+ students to their parents.
Sen. Bernie Sanders wrote an op ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail, calling out fellow Democrat Joe Manchin’s obstructionism and refusal to support climate-change mitigation policies that would benefit his constituents.
Paris Hilton (!) wrote an op ed in the Washington Post calling for regulation and reform of the “troubled teen” industry, which she says generates $50 billion in revenue per year.
St. Helena, one of the few places in the world that has yet to report a single COVID-19 case, is hoping to use that status to lure more tourists to the remote South Atlantic island.
Something’s rotten in Dover: Two Democratic state Senators here in Delaware are facing calls for their resignation, but the party is treating them differently. Gerald Brady used a horrible ethnic slur referring to people of east Asian descent in an email, while Darius Brown was arrested and charged with “offensive touching” and disorderly conduct after allegedly punching a woman in the face during an argument. Both need to go.
Evolution in action: Elephants in Africa evolved tusklessness when poachers targeted them for their ivory.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: climate change, coronavirus, cults, delaware, evolution, lgbt rights, links, longreads, louisiana, minnesota, science, stick to baseball, texas, the swamp

→ August 21, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/21/21.

Two new posts since the last roundup for subscribers to the Athletic – my list of the five farm systems that have improved the most since February; and a scouting blog from two weekends ago covering some Rays, O’s, Nats, and Tigers prospects. I’ve been unable to do much this past week due to an illness in the family, but hope to be back on the road this upcoming week.

On the board game front, I had three reviews go up earlier this month. At Paste, I reviewed the great new family game Juicy Fruits and the midweight game CloudAge. For Polygon, I reviewed the upcoming second edition of Great Western Trail, which is still the top-rated complex game on my overall rankings.

On of the Keith Law Show this week, I spoke to one of my favorite authors, Jasper Fforde, author of sixteen books, including The Constant Rabbit; and then had old pal Joe Sheehan as a guest this week.. And on The Athletic Baseball Show, I got the band back together with Eric Karabell. You can subscribe to my podcast on iTunes and Spotify.

My newsletter is getting back on track, although I didn’t send one this week since I didn’t write anything for any other sites beyond my own. You should sign up, though. Or you might consider buying my book, The Inside Game, now out in paperback.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Ed Yong, whose coverage of the pandemic for The Atlantic (not my employer) won him a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize, writes about how the pandemic is now likely to end: with a long, tapering whimper, rather than a bang. And much of it is our own stupid fault.
A new journal article in Cell looks at all of the evidence on the origins of SARS-CoV-2, and concludes that a zoonotic origin is far more likely than a so-called “lab leak.”
ProPublica reveals just how much some high-income donors saved in taxes by helping fund the 2017 GOP Tax Bill. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), a major science denialist, was particularly helpful to his wealthy supporters.
The Special Inspector General on Afghanistan Reconstruction has released their report, titled What We Need to Learn: Lessons from Twenty Years of Afghanistan Reconstruction. Setting aside the question of whether it goes as far as it needs to go, the report doesn’t shy away from blaming U.S. policymakers who believed we could build a nation, threw good money after bad, and had perhaps the most expensive case of the planning fallacy in history.
What can you do in the wake of last week’s apocalyptic report on the climate? Anything at all. Just do something.
A reader contribution: The Guardian profiles the woman who goes through NYC residents’ garbage and highlights their waste and profligacy on social media.
The Washington Post tells the awful story of a Missouri widow who lost her husband to COVID-19 and is now facing financial ruin.
I missed this in June, but a bill to legalize cannabis in Delaware failed over concerns that it wouldn’t create sufficient racial equity in the resulting system. Given how disproportionately cannabis laws have affected Black residents of Delaware (and all states), I think it’s worth crafting a bill that ensures they’ll share in the spoils of the new industry.
College officials are concerned about students showing fake vaccination cards rather than complying with vaccine mandates. The answer to that seems to be simple – use a fake card, get expelled, no refunds.
The Federation of State Medical Boards’ Board of Directors issued a statement that said that medical professionals who spread COVID-19 misinformation should lose their licenses. I’ll believe it when I see someone actually lose their license, but this is a good warning, at least.
A law professor writes that vaccine mandates are legal as well as based on solid science.
And that’s good, because the Nevada Board of Health just voted to require COVID-19 vaccines for college students in the state.
The anti-vaccine grift might be becoming untenable. The victims of cons are often unwilling to admit that they’ve been conned. A little help from law enforcement wouldn’t hurt, though.
Plenty of COVID deniers and minimizers like to claim that the virus has little effect on children (or did, pre-Delta). That’s highly misleading and takes advantage of a cognitive illusion called the contrast effect.
A spate of fabricated research papers hit certain academic journals this spring, and they were only caught because of certain “tortured phrases” (“colossal information” instead of “big data”) that caught other researchers’ eyes.
That Indiana doctor behind the viral video where he repeats anti-vaccine myths won’t even admit if he’s vaccinated and isn’t board-certified in any specialty. He should lose his license, though, because he’s full of shit.
Wilmington has a great little restaurant scene for such a small city, and for my money, Bardea is the best restaurant we’ve got. It’s improved even more since the pandemic began, as chef-owner Antonio DiMeo has been experimenting with koji and other fermentation techniques to boost flavors and create a more plant-forward menu.
The board game café chain Snakes & Lattes hired decorated chef Aaron McKay as COO as they try to establish the cafés as food destinations, not just board game spots where you get chicken tenders and soggy fries.
Chlorpyrifos, a pesticide that has long been linked to neurological damage in children, will finally be banned for use on food products after the Trump administration ignored scientists’ pleas to prohibit it.
This seems like it should be bigger news: A U.S. lab claims it has approached the goal of nuclear fusion ignition, using a laser to start a fusion reaction in hydrogen fuel that could become self-sustaining, providing enough heat to keep the fuel mass at a high enough temperature for fusion to continue. In theory, it’s a potential source of clean, limitless energy. It sounds too good to be true.
In a similar vein, did Google Labs really create “time crystals,” an entirely new phase of matter that would be a huge leap forward towards the goal of real quantum computing?
Board game news: Cranio Creations announced a new deluxe edition of the classic worker placement game Lorenzo il Magnifico.
Capstone announced pre-orders for Corrosion , a new game where your machines can rust and become useless, which I love as a concept and which also reminds me of a key plot point in Baldur’s Gate.
Publisher Tasty Minstrel Games (TMG) laid off its entire staff last week and appears to be entering bankruptcy.
I don’t remember the 2007 game Get Bit!, but it’s getting a brand-new edition, now on Kickstarter.
And finally, this was highly entertaining. What better way to mock a lunatic than by setting his deranged words to music? (There’s some great guitar work here, too.)

Full video here: https://t.co/xetcKyBuBK
— Christian Nightmares (@ChristnNitemare) August 17, 2021

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, climate change, coronavirus, delaware, environment, food science, frauds, links, longreads, science, stick to baseball, the swamp

→ June 5, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/5/21.

For subscribers to the Athletic this week, I did my annual redraft column, looking back at the best players from the 2011 draft class, as well as the first-rounders who didn’t work out.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Umbra Via, an afterlife-themed game with route-building elements that just did not click for us at all.

My free email newsletter has returned, with my first edition in over a month, where I explain why I just haven’t felt much like writing lately – an unusual feeling for me.

My second book, The Inside Game, is now out in paperback, and I don’t think I’m just being a buy-my-book marketing guy when I suggest that it would make a great Father’s Day gift. Midtown Scholar still has a few signed copies of the paperback available, and you can buy the book via bookshop or amazon or anywhere else you buy books.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: America has a drinking problem. Well, I don’t, but the rest of you do.

There’s growing evidence that UNC’s decision not to grant tenure to Nikole Hannah Jones was driven by the interference and objections of mega-donor Walter Hussman, Jr, for whom their journalism school is named. In one email to a board member, he wrote that “he was concerned about how Hannah-Jones’s work could clash with his vision for the school and what it teaches.”

These “leaked” intelligence stories are often based on dubious sources that the authors fail to explain or even question. Indeed, the now widely-spread claim that COVID-19 leaked from a Wuhan lab is still free of actual evidence to support it.

A group of unvaccinated staffers at a Houston hospital have filed a lawsuit against the hospital’s vaccine mandate, aided by a Houston lawyer with a long history of deranged legal actions including homophobic and anti-trans moves. I can’t speak to the legal issues here, but the plaintiff’s claims (e.g., that the vaccine can alter your DNA, which, come the fuck on already) are crazy, and if a hospital can’t mandate vaccinations, we are going to have to live with the pandemic forever.

Sharyl Attkisson, a faux-journalist who has spread anti-vaccine disinformation for years and made the news in 2020 when she tried to air an interview with a conspiracy theorist who claimed COVID-19 was the product of a secret a government plan, is threatening to sue Dr. Peter Hotez, author of Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism, for defamation, a baseless threat aimed at silencing one of the most vocal and erudite advocates of vaccination.

A new editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine explores incentives for increasing COVID-19 vaccine uptake, including mandating it in health care settings, requiring it for access to events that “involve close person-to-person contact,” and raising life and health insurance premiums for people who refuse to get the shot. I’m a big fan of the last approach: people respond strongly to financial incentives, and those of us who have gotten vaccinated shouldn’t be subsidizing those who won’t.

We loved Mare of Easttown, especially since we caught many of the local references, living just a mile or two away from the border between Delaware (state) and Delaware County. The show’s depictions of the residents of DelCo, however, isn’t very accurate. That county has historically been quite red, with deep racial tensions going back to the Civil War.

Texas, whose tourism board has adopted the slogan Where The Cruelty Is The Point™, is trying to pass voting restrictions that will disproportionately disenfranchise voters of color. Because that too is the point.

Arizona has wasted a bunch of taxpayer money “updating” its execution systems, including buying the ingredients to make the same gas the Nazis used to kill Jews, Roma, and other victims in concentration camps. You know what would be cheaper, and also less murdery? Ending capital punishment.

Democrats in the House and Senate are showing no sense of urgency in the face of attempts to undermine our democracy by the January 6^th insurrectionists and their enablers in Congress. Meanwhile, over 100 scholars in political science and the law signed a letter stating their concerns over threats to our democracy and lack of national voting and election standards.

Climate change is an emergency, so why can’t journalists call it one?

The best reaction I saw this week to the French Open telling Naomi Osaka that she can go fuck herself was from the Guardian‘s Jonathan Liew, arguing that we in sports media are not the good guys here, and that press conferences are problematic. Indeed, the day after Osaka withdrew, some asshole reporter asked 17-year-old Coco Gauff an insulting, racist question that should have gotten his credentials yanked. (Apparently that only happens if you dial into a press conference from a supermarket.) Scottish tennis coach Judy Murray, mother of two tennis champions in Andy and Jamie Murray, supported Osaka and talked about the absurd demands of the press on players.

Stanford Law toyed with preventing a student from graduating because he’d distributed a flier mocking the Federalist Society, spawning a complaint from campus snowflakes – er, conservatives. The school eventually dropped its investigation on free speech grounds.

New York Times health writer Tara Parker-Pope writes about four lessons we’ve learned in the last year for your anxious brain. Strengthening your connections seems like an especially valuable one in a year when most connections have become slack (pun intended).

Monster Couch announced that they’re releasing the iOS adaptation of Wingspan on July 21st, with pre-orders now open.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: academia, anti-science, anxiety, arizona, board game news, climate change, coronavirus, links, longreads, pennsyvlania, Sports, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ May 16, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/16/21.

I’ve had three posts up in the last week for subscribers to the Athletic: my ranking of the top 100 prospects for this year’s MLB Draft; a special Q&A about that ranking; and a post on my trip to see Vanderbilt and Alabama, when Jack Leiter was a very late scratch for his start. He did pitch yesterday and his velocity was completely normal.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Flourish, a new, quick-playing card game from the designers of Everdell.

If you’d like to buy The Inside Game and support my board game habit, Midtown Scholar has a few signed copies still available. You can also buy it from any of the indie stores in this twitter thread, all of whom at least had the book in stock earlier this month. If none of those works, you can find it on Bookshop.org and at Amazon.

For more of me, you can subscribe to my free email newsletter, which will return this week (tomorrow, I hope).

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Dyatlov Pass mystery may have a very mundane, anti-climactic solution.
The headline here doesn’t really summarize the article, but musicians are organizing to try to fight the vice grip Spotify has on the industry.
Policymakers ignored the United States’ near-total lack of child care infrastructure until the pandemic exposed this massive economic weakness. If you want to grow the economy, you need affordable child care.
The CDC’s statistic that “less than 10 percent” of COVID-19 transmission occurred outdoors is probably wildly misleading. The actual rate might be 1/100^th of that.
Adolescents can finally get their COVID-19 vaccines! My daughter got her first dose less than 24 hours after the approval came through. Her only complaint afterwards was two days of a sore shoulder. Go get your kids the shot.
Facebook deplatformed an Ohio-based anti-vaccine group, and then did the same to Erin Elizabeth, a major anti-vaccine wacko who is partners with longtime quack Joseph Mercola.
Activists opposed to syringe exchanges are just bizarre, but their work may lead a major success story in Indiana, which helped end an HIV outbreak, to close.
If the West Antarctic Ice Shelf collapses, the rise in sea levels will be 30% higher than originally thought.
The Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth may be misusing data from students’ electronic devices to accuse those students of cheating.
Frank Abagnale authored a best-selling memoir that became the movie Catch Me If You Can. It turns out that his story is probably a big hoax.
The cicadas are coming, so of course some folks suggest eating them.
Former UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s defence against a charge of improper lobbying is that he was undone by autocorrect. The lede here is spectacular.
Bari Weiss really took off her mask in a substack post that justified the killing of Palestinian children.
Two good op eds from the Washington Post this week on our current quaqmire: how two men named Joe (Biden & Manchin) hold the future of our democracy in their hands, and why democracy and cults of personality don’t mix.
I know Jonathan Chait’s reputation is … not great, perhaps, but I agree with him on the subject of Rep. Liz Cheney. She can be wrong on many issues, but she is right on Trumpism and the direction of the GOP, and we can acknowledge or even praise the latter without somehow tacitly supporting the former.
The bloated U.S. military budget isn’t just wasteful – its consequences disproportionately harm people of color.
Board game news: Board & Dice, publisher of some of really heavy Euro titles like Teotihuacan and Tekhenu, explained how and under what terms they’re continuing their relationship with designer Daniele Tascini, who made some insensitive comments on race last year. I think it’s a good blueprint for working with someone who might be too quickly ‘cancelled.’

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, climate change, coronavirus, hoaxes, longreads, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ January 23, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/23/21.

I had two columns this week for subscribers to the Athletic, on the George Springer signing and the Joe Musgrove trade. My top 100 prospects ranking will appear on Thursday, January 28^th, with the org rankings and team top 20s running the week of February 8^th.

For Paste, I reviewed New York Zoo, a light tile-placement game from Uwe Rosenberg, the designer of Patchwork, Cottage Garden, and Agricola.

I’ll send out another edition of my free email newsletter this weekend, with some exciting personal news. You can still buy The Inside Gameand Smart Baseball anywhere you buy books; the paperback edition of The Inside Game will be out in April.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Harvard magazine looks at the loneliness pandemic, which predated the COVID-19 one but has been exacerbated by the last ten months of shutdowns and isolation.

California’s public utilities regulator fired an employee who found $200 million due to disadvantaged state residents had gone missing.

Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in the Atlantic that now that Trump is gone, we need to reckon with how he got into office in the first place.

A vaccine-hesitant mom rushed to vaccinate her kids when the pandemic hit, and she talked to NPR about how she ended up hesitant based on bad information she found onilne.

Trump and a Justice Department lawyer were planning to oust the Attorney General and try to force Georgia to invalidate Joe Biden’s win there.

Some notes from the right-wing terrorist attack on the Capitol: Black police officers described the racism they faced and heard during the assault, while members of several well-known hate groups were spotted among the rioters. A non-participant who was in the crowd documented what he saw in words and pictures. The farthest-right groups are trying to use Telegram to further radicalize new recruits disaffected by Biden’s win – perhaps some of the QAnon adherents in “disarray” after their long-awaited Storm never happened.

One of Delaware’s Senators, Chris Coons (D), argued in the New York Times that we need to hold Trump accountable for encouraging the terrorists through his words and tweets.

Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) has lied to the public about many things in his very short life, and the latest is that he’s been lying about being a contender for the Paralympics in wheelchair racing.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) has been lying about having experience as an Army Ranger in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Why in the actual fuck did the federal government give PPP money to anti-vaccine groups in the middle of a pandemic?

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is an intelligent person and he’s wasted it backing Trump.

The Washington Post looks at the investigative journalism outfit Bellingcat, which helped crack the secret of Alexei Navalny’s poisoning, and their unorthodox methods.

The federal government executed Lisa Montgomery among their rush to kill as many prisoners as they could before Trump left office, in spite of her documented history as a victim of horrendous sexual and physical abuse. (Trigger warning.)

Uganda President Yoweri Museveni has stayed in power for 35 years, despite frequent claims of oppression, malfeasance, even spending international debt relief on a private jet. He appears to have won re-election this week, although his main opponent claims there was voter fraud.

Slate has an argument of why Parler getting wiped off the internet is bad for everyone. I don’t agree, but it’s a thought-provoking read.

Twitter bots have become a major source of disinformation on climate change, just as Pres. Biden has made fighting climate change a core policy.

I really liked the documentary Boys State, which is only available on Apple TV+, and one of the main participants wrote about attending the event in a New York Times editorial.

Board game news: The Kickstarter for the worker placement game Darwin’s Journey ends in five days.

Umbra Via, which won an award for unpublished games in 2019, is now available for pre-order from Pandasaurus.

Eagle-Gryphon has a Kickstarter for two new two-player games, Illumination and The Road to Canterbury.

Bézier Games posted a look at their games due out early in 2021.

Quined restarted its Kickstarter for the new game Carnegie, which looks like a heavy economic and routebuilding game from the designer of Troyes.

Casual Game Revolution is holding voting for the best casual game of 2020, with the candidates My City, Calico, and Back to the Future: Back in Time.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, board game news, climate change, links, longreads, social media, the swamp, vaccines

→ October 4, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/4/20.

I had two pieces for subscribers to the Athletic this week, one on the top 20 players under age 25 in the postseason (before the first round began), and one this morning with my hypothetical ballots for the six player awards. I also held a video Q&A for the Athletic on Friday.

Over at Paste, I ranked the ten best games with polyomino (Tetris) tiles as part of their mechanics, which is a fairly common thing in recent games, with a huge run of them hitting the market in 2019-20.

My guest on this week’s episode of The Keith Law Show was Nick Piecoro, who covers the Diamondbacks for the Arizona Republic and a longtime friend of mine, almost since I first got into the writing side of the business. My own podcast is now available on Amazon podcasts as well as iTunes and Spotify.

I’ll have a new edition of my free email newsletter on Monday, now that I have a few more articles to include.

As the holiday season approaches, I’ll remind you every week that my books The Inside Game and Smart Baseball make excellent gifts for the baseball fan or avid reader in your life.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: In the New Yorker, Patrick Radden Keefe, who won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Non-fiction for his book Say Nothing, explores the world of the modern private detective, including an anecdote of how PIs helped free Meek Mill.

By now you’ve probably seen the New York Times exposé on Donald Trump’s near-zero payment of income taxes and extensive use of questionable deductions to avoid paying. I paid more in federal income taxes in the last half of September than Trump did in all of 2017.

The USL, the country’s Division II professional men’s soccer league, had a serious issue in a game last week between Phoenix and San Diego, where a player on the former used a homophobic slur against a player on the latter. Two of my colleagues at the Athletic have the story on the incident and the fallout, where San Diego coach Landon Donovan pulled his team from the field and forfeited the match.

Also at the New Yorker, Jane Mayer, author of Dark Money, exposes the real reasons Fox News fired Kimberly Guilfoyle, including harassment and creation of a hostile work environment. Guilfoyle is now one of Trump’s main surrogates on the campaign trail and a big part of his attempts to reach women voters.

BBC News shows how the oil industry has spent over thirty years working to make people doubt the existence of climate change. It’s worked, and we’ve now lost valuable time we could have spent trying to slow or stop it.

One man who continued to go out in public for eight days after he first fell ill with COVID-19 has caused a cluster by exposing dozens of other people, at least nine of whom have tested positive, in upstate New York.

A different man flouted a mask mandate at a hotel frequented by visitors to the Cleveland Clinic, as did members of his family. That man has since tested positive for COVID-19, meaning that his actions last week potentially exposed dozens of people who are in close contact with patients to the virus.

Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) tweeted a thread on Russian interference in the 2020 election and the executive branch’s unwillingness to investigate it.

Editors and staffers at the NYU student newspaper The Washington Square News resigned en masse to protest a hostile work environment created by their faculty adviser, Keena Griffin. Their claims include racial insensitivity and transphobic comments. Dr. Griffin is the president of the College Media Association, and the CMA has announced its own investigation.

Jonathan Last writes in The Bulwark that President Trump showed in last week’s debate that he’s a sociopath – and that 60 million Americans like him that way.

Why did the CDC soften a report on safety conditions at meatpacking facilities in April, during the early days of the pandemic?

There’s a longstanding cultural movement in the two Congolese capitals of Kinshasa (the D.R.C.) and Brazzaville (The Republic of Congo), where people of all ages dress extremely snazzily, regardless of their circumstances or where they live. This BBC photo-essay shows these sapeurs in their stylish clothes, including people who break gender norms and children who found their love of fancy outfits early in life.

It took Youtube a few days but they finally removed a video by right-wing nutjob Josh Bernstein where he said that Ilhan Omar “should be executed,” referring to her as a female dog.

I watched the Spanish-language film Monos, which was Colombia’s submission for last year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature Film last year, this past week, and will write about it in the next few days. The Guardian had an interesting article from last October on how brutal the shoot was in the high-altitude jungles of southern Colombia.

McSweeney’s brings us “Hemingway writes The Baby-sitters Club,” which I appreciated more because I’ve seen the excellent adaptation of the books that debuted on Netflix this summer.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, climate change, coronavirus, detectives, food safety, links, longreads, soccer, stick to baseball, the swamp

→ September 19, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/19/20.

I had one post of my own this week for subscribers to The Athletic, on my disdain for MLB’s proposal to keep expanded playoffs beyond 2020. I also did a Q&A with our Royals writer Alec Lewis and answered some questions for our Nats writer Britt Ghiroli on each of those teams’ farm systems.

My guest on The Keith Law Show this week was my friend and former colleague Adnan Virk, talking about the season to date and some upcoming movies of interest to him (he hosts his own movie podcast called Cinephile). My own podcast is now available on Amazon podcasts as well as iTunes and Spotify.

Over at Paste, I ranked the five best board game reboots I’ve played, as a companion to last week’s review of Nova Luna, itself a reboot of an earlier game called Habitats.

I’ve been keeping up with my free email newsletter better recently; my thanks to those of you who’ve signed up and who’ve sent kind notes in response to some recent editions.

The holidays approach! My books The Inside Game and Smart Baseball make excellent gifts, or so I’m told by my editor and publicists.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The most likely way to get infected with COVID-19 is coming into airborne droplets that contain the virus – that is, breathing in what infected people breathed out. All of your Lysol wipes and closing schools/workplaces for “deep cleaning” is hygiene theater: You get COVID-19 from being in an enclosed space with someone who has it and isn’t wearing a mask.
The New York Times looks at the strange case of Ed Buck, who appears to have killed multiple gay Black men by overdosing them with meth. Buck pitched himself as a major Democratic donor in southern California, but the evidence is that he talked a big game but really wasn’t a big deal.
NPR exposes how “Big Oil” sold U.S. consumers on the lie that plastics would be recycled.
This Washington Post story highlights the dangers of medical misinformation by showing how one 26-year-old film editor fell prey to online conspiracy theories about COVID-19, masks, and vaccines. By the end of the story, he’s gone completely off the rails.
A former Facebook data scientist alleges that the company has ignored blatant manipulation by autocratic governments or other political parties, including those in Honduras, Azerbaijan, and Ukraine, and says she was fired for spending time on these matters.
Scientific American has endorsed Joe Biden for President, the first time in the publication’s 175-year history that it has endorsed a Presidential candidate.
A second Washington Post story highlights the battles over the US Postal Service and how the Trump Administration scotched a plan to distribute hundreds of millions of masks to Americans.
Dividing athletes into male and female groups requires imposing a clear binary on a messy reality. So says David Epstein, writing for Slate on the decision to ban Castor Semenya from women’s track unless she agrees to suppress her natural testosterone production. Vonnegut called this one in “Harrison Bergeron.”
Shere Hite, a pioneering sex researcher who first rose to prominence with her 1976 book The Hite Report, which discussed female sexuality and sexual experiences, died earlier this month at 77.
Another woman has accused Donald Trump of sexual assault and his adherents do not care…
…because so many of them care only about ending a woman’s right to choose.
The group “Democrat Voters Against Joe Biden” doesn’t have any actual Democrats in it.
Meanwhile, Turning Point USA, a pro-Trump cult led by Charlie Kirk, is paying teenagers to tweet disinformation on COVID-19 and mail-in voting or post similar information on Facebook. I’m not clear why those sites haven’t banned Kirk and TPUSA for running de facto troll farms.
Trump’s legal strategy to suppress the vote is continuing apace in Wisconsin and other swing states, right in plain sight of everyone who should care.
A nurse who worked at an ICE detention center alleged that women held prisoner there were being given hysterectomies without their consent. Some women who were in that camp have alleged that the nurse was complicit in those forced sterilizations.
Climate change is killing Americans and destroying our physical infrastructure, but the Republican Party says we can’t afford to try to stop it.
The UK government’s chief scientific advisor revealed that he was strongly rebuked for arguing for a stricter lockdown earlier this year.
This New England Journal of Medicine editorial advises us how to build trust in an eventual COVID-19 vaccine. Hint: It’s not by promising one will be out before the election.
Two more white women revealed (or were exposed) in the last week that they’ve been posing as Black. I feel like this is a bigger problem than the salacious coverage implies – this isn’t just a scandal, but it’s a serious case of fraud, as these women all have taken jobs or academic positions that should have gone to Black women, and thus probably slowed or derailed other women’s careers as a result of their fraud. The news coverage focuses more on the scandalous part, which leads to pointless claims about “racial dysphoria” or other nonsense, when these women are just frauds.
My friend and colleague Lindsay Adler wrote about Dak Prescott and her own experiences with depression (for subscribers to the Athletic).
The NYC bookstore Kitchen Arts & Letters, which sells books about cooking, food, and drink, has a GoFundMe up to try to help them survive the pandemic’s drastic effects on their business.
There’s a fight going on within Spotify over the company’s new, exclusive deal with Joe Rogan, because of many transphobic comments he’s made over the years, and appearances by guests who engage in transgender denialism.
Board game news: Embarcadero, a 2021 game co-designed by the designer of Scoville, is on Kickstarter and already well past its modest funding goal.
Infinity Gauntlet, a new variation of the fast-playing deduction game Love Letter, is now out from Asmodee.
Dire Wolf announced the forthcoming game Dune: Imperium, an officially licensed property with art from the new movie version of Frank Herbert’s novel.
This about sums things up for 2020.

We should probably call it a night pic.twitter.com/YJbU1QGJpn
— The Oatmeal (@Oatmeal) August 29, 2020

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, climate change, conspiracy theories, coronavirus, environment, gender issues, links, longreads, mental health, olympics, sexual assault, social media, the swamp

→ August 29, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/29/20.

I had one column this week for subscribers to The Athletic, with scouting notes on Triston McKenzie, Sixto Sanchez, Wil Crowe, and Joey Bart. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

For Paste this week, I reviewed Succulent, a solid new game of tile-laying and set collection, and would have given it an even higher grade had I not had issues with some of the art and graphics.

My guest on this week’s episode of The Keith Law Show was Orioles reliever Dillon Tate, talking about youth baseball and overcoming the obstacles he faced on his path to the majors. You can also subscribe on iTunes – and if you do, please leave a rating and review.

You can still get my book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, where fine books are sold, like on bookshop.org. I’m also planning to send out another edition of my free email newsletter this weekend.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Guardian looks at the case of one Nigerian woman who fought back against the sex traffickers who enslaved her in Italy, and how difficult it is for authorities to prosecute such cases.
Harvard magazine has an excerpt from Prof. Daniel Lieberman’s new book Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding, looking at how exercise might help reduce the odds of age-related maladies from senescence to diabetes to Alzheimer’s, even cutting your chances of dying relative to others your age. One key message is that no matter how old you are it isn’t too late to gain these benefits from regular exercise.
Blockchain is “an amazing solution for almost nothing,” a widely-lauded technology that combines horrendous energy inefficiency with a lack of apparent benefits to end users.
The CTC Sentinel, published by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, has a long explanation of QAnon as an emerging domestic terror threat. I have recently tried to explain the QAnon conspiracy theory to two different people who are not extremely online, and even trying to say it out loud makes me feel crazy. It’s like Scientology and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion had some sort of demon offspring. Anyway, this paper argues that “QAnon has contributed to the radicalization of ideologically motivated violent extremists,” which should make you a lot more nervous than the imagined threat of ISIS or similar terrorist groups infiltrating the United States.
If someone tries to argue with you that masks don’t work, here are 70 studies showing that they do.
A new case report published in the Lancet describes an 11-year-old girl who died one day after admission to the hospital of COVID-19-related cardiac failure. The condition is called multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS), and while rare, it is killing a very small number of children who contract COVID-19.
Several people who survived COVID-19 infections but continue to feel aftereffects are connecting online to try to gather data on and study their conditions so they can provide more information to others suffering the same problems.
There’s a surge in COVID-19 cases in Paris, so the French Prime Minister has mandated masks and stepped up testing. This is what a competent leader and evidence-based policymaking look like, in case you’d forgotten and were thinking about staying home on November 3^rd.
“Gullible” White House negotiators overpaid by up to $500 million for ventilators from the Dutch conglomerate Royal Philips N.V., paying about four times what the Obama Administration had contracted to pay. I thought that Trump was supposed to get the best deals.
Harvard Professor of Anthropology Gary Urton was effectively forced into retirement after multiple students accused him of sexual harassment.
A Florida couple who believed that COVID-19 was some sort of hoax ignored advice to observe distancing guidelines and wear masks. They caught the virus; both ended up in the ICU, and one of them died of complications from the disease. The lesson here isn’t that they’re stupid, but that they fell victim to all of the misinformation spread online by hoaxers, trolls, and by people speaking at this week’s RNC.
Speaking of the RNC, Madison Cawthorn, a Republican candidate for the state house in North Carolina, has a long history of fabrications and multiple accusations of sexual assault. He was lauded on Twitter by right-wing blue checkmarks as the future of the GOP.
The FDA ruled that all distilled spirits are gluten-free, because science.
Hardly surprising, but this New York Times piece finds evidence of discrimination against Black homeowners in the home appraisal process.
A Washington Post editorial asks where the sympathy is for Megan Thee Stallion after the rapper was shot by another rapper, Tory Lanez, pointing out that if a black man had shot a white woman the outrage would probably be much louder.
A new study from Ohio State researchers says that the Greenland ice shelf will melt due to climate change regardless of what we do to try to stop the warming trend.
Another book excerpt, this time from Reverend William Barber’s Winning the Green New Deal: Why We Must, How We Can, on the history and roots of environmental racism.
Why 2020 will be the death of the working mother.
Board game news: I have seen the game Maracaibo at PAX Unplugged but never played it, given its weight and time required, which meant it wasn’t going to get much play in my house. I’m thrilled to see it’s coming to digital next year.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, climate change, coronavirus, harvard, italy, links, longreads, racism, stick to baseball, the swamp

→ May 16, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/16/20.

I posted my first mock draft of 2020 on Wednesday for subscribers to The Athletic, since we are now just 26 days away from the first night of the draft, which will only be five rounds. I wrote last week about the impact of the shorter draft on players and the sport as a whole, and also did a “what-if” lookback at the Padres’ decision to take Matt Bush over Justin Verlander in 2004. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday, my first in ages.

My new book, The Inside Game, is now out and you can buy it everywhere fine books are sold, including here on bookshop.org; I’m donating my affiliate commissions from sales of my book through the site to my local food bank. The Eugene Register-Guard has a nice review of both The Inside Game and Brad Balukjian’s The Wax Pack.

My guest on this week’s episode of The Keith Law Show was San Francisco Chronicle baseball writer John Shea, whose book 24: Life Stories and Lessons from the Say Hey Kid, co-authored with Willie Mays, was released on Tuesday. I’m scheduled to have Cubs infielder/outfielder Ian Happ on the show this upcoming week to talk about his charitable endeavors with artisanal coffee. You can also subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and Spotify.

At Paste, I reviewed The Sherlock Files: Elementary Edition, a new card-based deduction game that played better than I expected, although the Sherlock character isn’t remotely involved in the game’s story or mechanics. My review of the excellent digital adaptation of Sagrada is up over at Ars Technica.

I sent out another edition of my email newsletter on Friday night to subscribers; it’s free and you can sign up here.

And now, the links…

Longreads … well, medium-reads first: The New Yorker has a look at the secret world of fungi, the botanical kingdom that goes way beyond the mushrooms you likely pictured when you read that.
ProPublica has a piece explaining how climate change is pushing up infectious disease rates, and making pandemics more likely in the future.
The Guardian looks at former US army sergeant’s abortive plot to overthrow Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro.
“For conservative zealots and media figures, the pandemic is quickly becoming just another culture war battleground — an axis of postmodern symbolic conflict, another vent for bottomless grievance, and fuel for a screeching victimhood complex.” This from The Week’s Ryan Cooper, who also points out that the United States’ response to COVID-19 has been the worst of any developed nation and argues that the problem of conservative victimhood has made governing the U.S. impossible.
Some countries are easing restrictions on movement and gatherings, but other nations are restoring such isolation measures because of increases in new cases.
Get ready for a massive disinformation effort against a COVID-19 vaccine; it has started online even though such a vaccine doesn’t actually exist.
A commentary in CalMatters, authored by two professors in the University of California system, gives helpful tips for journalists asked to cover anti-vaccine or anti-lockdown “protests,” most of which are very small and may be astroturfed events.
For example, Creative Loafing Tampa revealed that a “reopen Florida” rally was, in fact, organized by an anti-vaccine group – which multiple mainstream Tampa media outlets failed to mention in their coverage of the protest.
Various states’ lockdown efforts have led anti-vaccine groups to team up with pro-Trump agitators in some of these protests, the strangest of bedfellows other than their shared denial of science.
Many red states are now seeing cases surge even as Trump claims (falsely) the pandemic is subsiding.
GOP-controlled legislatures are up to some shit while we’re distracted by the pandemic, such as Missouri Republicans attempting to gut gerrymandering reform.
An interesting topic for debate: Do works by authors accused of sexual harassment belong in the classroom? I think the answer at the university level would mostly be “yes,” but what about high school? Junior high school? Can you have a serious discussion about separating artist from art, or about the specifics of any accusations, with 16-year-olds or 12-year-olds or younger kids?
Tribune Publishing is furloughing workers and cutting pay to save about $550,000 just months after distributing $9 million in cash to shareholders.
Nik Sharma, author of the wonderful cookbook Season, writes in the Washington Post on how to make a flavorful vegetable stock that contains just five ingredients other than water.
The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent warns that, as in 2016, too many media members lend credence to bullshit conspiracies and outright lies from the Trump camp through weasel wording.
From a few weeks ago: McSweeney’s hits rather close to home with “Emails from My Children’s School Before 8:00 AM During the COVID-19 Crisis.”
Jess Grose’s latest parenting column for the New York Times, on dealing with home-schooling burnout, has a note at the end from a name familiar to board game fans.
Renegade Game Studios are holding a virtual game convention on June 5-7 where they’ll announce a bunch of upcoming new games as well.
Cranio Creations has a Kickstarter up for their planned reissue of the 2004 Wolfgang Kramer/Michael Kiesling game Maharaja, reimagined by Simone Luciani (Tzolk’in, Grand Austria Hotel).

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, climate change, Cooking, coronavirus, links, longreads, metoo, missouri, mushrooms, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ February 8, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/8/20.

The Mookie Betts trade might be falling apart as I write this, but I did break down the reported three-team deal on Wednesday morning. I’ll update that as needed when the trade becomes final. Schedule conflicts prevented me from chatting but I did do a Periscope on Friday. My prospect rankings will run on The Athletic the week of February 24^th.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, is due out on April 21^st from Harper Collins, and you can pre-order it now via their site or wherever fine books are sold. Also, check out my free email newsletter, which I say I’ll write more often than I actually write it.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: I reviewed Colson Whitehead’s novel The Nickel Boys earlier this week. Read the Tampa Bay Times investigative report into the Dozier School for Boys, which inspired Whitehead’s book.

“Pro-Trump forces are poised to wage what could be the most extensive disinformation campaign in U.S. history,” according to this article by the Atlantic‘s McKay Coppins, who details the methods operatives use to fool people, especially via social media, into believing fabrications are the truth and the truth is merely fake news.

Rolling Stone‘s Ash Sanders spoke to adults who escaped the cult of Scientology and how they struggled to readapt to society.

People keep dying in Mississippi prisons, but Governor Tate Reeves just wants to “turn the page” on the state’s responsibility to its inmates.

Evenflo, one of the major manufacturers of child car safety seats, lied when marketing its “Big Kid” booster seats despite data showing kids in those seats could be injured or killed in side-impact crashes, according to this investigative report from ProPublica.

Mass shootings get the headlines and the calls for needed gun control, but far more Americans who die from guns are suicides.

The Economist‘s Nicholas Pelham tells his story of being detained in Iran in July 2019, despite his presence there on a journalist’s visa.

Why the fuck is the New York Times running editorials defending Gwyneth Paltrow’s pseudoscience show GOOPagainst the evidence-based criticisms of its content?

Developing countries with valuable internet top-level domains, such as .tv (Tuvalu), .ly (Libya), or .nu (Niue), have often missed out on the profits from those names, which instead flowed to programmers or entrepreneurs in the U.S. or western Europe.

Southern Methodist women’s basketball coach Travis Mays stands accused of telling players they should kill themselves if they didn’t want to work and of otherwise verbally abusing his players. So far, SMU has backed him, and not its players (who are unpaid, mind you). Here’s a crazy idea, though: why not hire a woman to coach a women’s sports team?

The Trump Administration is charging the Secret Service exorbitant rates as high as $650/night to stay at Trump’s hotels, yet another example of how Republican members of the executive branch are looting the American taxpayer.

An abortion cannot be “reversed,” but six states require that women seeking abortions receive counseling that this is possible. There are also three times as many “pregnancy crisis centers,” which somehow receive federal funding,” in the U.S. than abortion clinics. STAT News argues in this piece that abortion advice needs to be safe and evidence-based. The United States is not a theocracy.

US Bank came under (well-deserved) attack last week after news spread that they had fired an employee for giving a stranded customer $20 on Christmas Eve so he could get home, and fired her supervisor as well. They’ve said they offered to re-hire both women, although the first of the two says she still hasn’t received a formal offer or any apology for the way the company defamed her publicly.

“Attention residue” reduces our productivity and happiness. One proposed solution is to carve out GLYIO (Get Your Life In Order) times during which you handle administrative tasks, or work out, or do other things that are bothering you because they’re always on your mind or your to-do list.

The Facebook group Stop Mandatory Vaccinations, which has 178,000 members, urged a mother who reported that her unvaccinated four-year-old son had the flu not to give him TamiFlu. He died four days later. Facebook is a dumpster fire of anti-vaccine bullshit and other conspiracy theories, and they simply do not care about the real-world consequences of their choice to shield this content.

Facebook also doesn’t do anything to stop anti-vaxxers from flooding pro-vaccine advocates, such as pediatrician Nicole Baldwin (whose pro-vax TikTok video went viral in mid-January), with threats and hate comments. That’s why Shots Heard Round the World was formed to help pro-vaccine advocates fight back against these armies of ignorance.

C|Net has some advice on how to manage the information Google tracks about you.

The FCC did something good, for a change: They have proposed a $13 million fine against a robocaller who used the death of Mollie Tibbetts to spread white-supremacist messaging.

Miami, Florida, is the most vulnerable coastal city in the world as sea levels rise, yet Miami voters chose a Republican mayor, and the state has two Republican Senators and a Republican Governor – even though the GOP’s official stances on climate change range from opposing regulations on fossil fuels to outright climate denial.

I reviewed Matthew Walker’s book Why We Sleep a few years ago and praised it; I listened to the audio version and it seemed to be well-sourced and backed by evidence. Now there are claims that Walker manipulated the data in the book, and his responses so far have not come close to addressing the criticisms.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, climate change, cults, links, longreads, mississippi, pseudoscience, reproductive rights, social media, the swamp, vaccines

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