coffee — Page 4

→ October 27, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/27/18.

My most recent piece for ESPN+ subscribers wrapped up my Arizona Fall League stint, looking at 25 players from 13 organizations. I also had a free piece on ESPN with food, coffee, beer, and travel tips for Boston and Los Angeles leading into the World Series. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

My latest board game review for Paste looks at Nyctophobia, a one-versus-many game where most players play with blackout glasses. Only the villain can see the board; everyone else must play by touch and by talking to their teammates.

If, like Dave Gahan, you just can’t get enough, you can sign up for my free email newsletter, with more of my writing, appearing whenever the muse moves me.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This 2013 essay by Adam Cayton-Holland on his sister’s suicide, his own grief, and trying to heal was the best piece I read this week.
Dinosaurs took over the world thanks to a massive climate change event that ended the Triassic period; within that period came the Carnian Pluvial Episode, a smaller climate catastrophe that opened the door for dinosaurs to rule, likely caused the eruption of oceanic volcanoes that pushed carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and acidified the oceans … which should sound familiar.
GoodFundies looks at the history of media reports of the Wilpons’ meddling in baseball operations in a very, very long post that briefly mentions my comments on the Jeurys Familia trade fiasco. Shorter version: They’ve meddled so often, and so much to the team’s detriment, that you can see why so many candidates appear to have declined to interview.
In the wake of multiple revelations about Donald Trump’s businesses and his inheritance from his father, the New Yorker asks if fraud is simply embedded in Trump’s business model. It’s a feature, not a bug.
Why are some folks so threatened by transgender people? Because that threatens their beliefs that there are only two genders, while perhaps undermining the prejudiced person’s sense of self as a man or woman, according to some recent research on the subject.
The United States is withdrawing from the International Coffee Agreement, continuing this Administration’s policies of anti-globalization and protectionism, which will hurt American consumers and international coffee producers (including farmers who depend on export markets for their livelihoods).
The former Secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Financial Institutions wrote a piece titled I Respected Scott Walker. Then I Worked for Him. in the Atlantic. It’s as damning as you’d expect: Walker pushed policies that would hurt middle and lower class Wisconsinites because he thought it would play well with the national party.
South Carolina is asking the Administration to allow ‘faith-based’ foster care agencies to discriminate against Jewish or other non-Christian parents who wish to foster children. This is theocracy in motion, in a state where more than 20% of residents identify as something other than Christian.
Alt-right trolls are very mad online over posters in New York City that are actually satirical street art, not official city posters. The artist in question, Winston Tseng, appears to have deleted his entire Internet presence in the last 48 hours – his Twitter account is gone, his Instagram is locked, his website has vanished.
Voting machines in Texas are changing some voters’ choices, either making their Senate choices blank or in some cases switching their vote from Beto O’Rourke (D) to Ted Cruz (R). The state agency overseeing the election has said it’s aware of the problem and is powerless to fix it.
ProPublica has reported on voter intimidation in Texas during early voting, such as “a partisan poll watcher looking over voter’s shoulders as they cast their ballots and questioning voters on their politics.” (That person was eventually removed from the property by police.) The ACLU has a guide on what to do if you face voter intimidation at the polls.
Meanwhile, in Georgia, Republican gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp, the leader of the state’s attempt to subvert democracy, took off his hood this week when he said he was concerned about Georgians exercising their right to vote. In DeKalb County, nearly 5000 requests for absentee ballots were “lost” by county officials, according to a complaint by the local Democratic Party branch. Meanwhile, a local investigation found that Kemp owes over $800,000 in loans to a bank he helped create, but won’t answer any questions about the loans, such as the terms of the agreement.
Iowa Republican Steve King went full white nationalist in an interview with a far-right Austrian outlet, talking about his belief in the “Great Replacement,” where immigrants from Latin American and Asian countries will ‘replace’ white Americans (or Europeans) in their – “their” – home countries.
An Idaho-based white supremacist group is making racist robocalls to support Florida Republican gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis, whose opponent, Andrew Gillum (D), is African-American.
And then there’s North Dakota, which is working like hell to disenfranchise Native American voters, as New York Times reporter Maggie Astor explains in this unrolled Twitter thread.
There’s been a lot of news and opinion about vaccine deniers this week. Endocrinologist Lubna Mirza writes that fear and misinformation drive non-vaccinators, and says that spreading such nonsense is “irresponsible, to say the least.” In Texas, a Republican backed by anti-vaccine nuts is running for House District 114; she’s also dropped some racist dog-whistles along the way, so if you live there, vote for John Turner, her Democratic challenger. The Republican candidate for Governor in Connecticut was caught on video saying of vaccinations that “We shouldn’t be dumping a lot of drugs into kids for no reason,” which is wrong on at least three points (vaccines aren’t drugs; they’re not being dumped; there’s a very good reason, preventing debilitating and often fatal diseases). That’s why Dr. David Gorski, also known as “Orac,” writes that the Republican Party has become the anti-vaccine party: Not all vaccine deniers are Republicans, but the Party has chosen to pander to anti-vaxxers on local, state, and national levels.
Physicist and prominent atheist writer Lawrence Krauss stands accused of multiple instances of sexual harassment and has agreed to resign at the end of the academic year. He’s denying the claims, although I find his rebuttal weak and that he fails to understand why what he’s accused of doing was wrong.
Microplastics are so pervasive in our environment that they’re showing up in our excrement.
Seattle’s minimum wage law has helped many workers but may have hindered new entrants to the labor market, according to a second study by the same authors whose paper a year ago implied that the law hurt workers on the whole. As with many economic policies, there are winners and losers, and the crux will be whether there are more of the former and if that outweighs the societal costs paid by the latter.
A Guardian essay asks if reading is really helpful for depression. I am fortunate in that, while I’ve felt the black dog on my shoulder, I have never been so depressed that I felt unable or unwilling to read.
Hawai’i got a bit smaller this week as a hurricane washed tiny East Island off the map, a potential disaster for sea turtles that nested on the 11-acre island.
The white man who killed two black people in a Louisville Kroger’s has a schizoaffective disorder and had previously lost his right to own firearms due to previous violent incidents.
A city commissioner in Lakeland, Florida, who shot and killed a shoplifter in his store, has been charged with murder after his ‘stand your ground’ claim was rejected. That’s nice to hear, but if ‘stand your ground’ convinced the killer to pull the trigger, then the problem with the law remains.
Starling Games, the publishers of Everdell, have a new Kickstarter up for Anomaly, the second game from designer Thomas Dagenais-Lespérance.
Finally, the Tweet of the Week:

FOUNDING FATHER: we must always have an electoral college and 2 senators per state

ME: ok but what if 40 million people live in california

FOUNDING FATHER (spits out tea prepared by a slave): there’s HOW many people in WHAT

— Ben Rosen (@ben_rosen) October 22, 2018

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, climate change, coffee, Economics, environment, florida, guns, links, mental health, mental illness, metoo, north dakota, racism, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines, voter suppression, wisconsin

→ July 18, 2018
→ By keith

DC eats, 2018 edition.

The Futures Game was more or less in my backyard this year, a shade over two hours away in Washington DC, so I drove down there on Saturday before my event at Politics & Prose (many thanks to the 120-plus of you who came to see Jay Jaffe and me speak) and then drove home on Monday morning, in time to get my daughter from camp and head to the Wilmington Blue Rocks game with her that night. That did limit the amount of time I had for culinary exploration, but I did try three new spots.

Little Pearl is the third outpost in the Rose’s Luxury empire, taking the little daytime café concept from the front of Pineapple & Pearls and spinning it out into its own location, which was buzzing on Sunday morning despite the heat and Little Pearl’s small, eclectic menu. Their daytime menu includes six “sandwiches,” including the gravlax toast, in which the cured salmon comes cubed and tossed with avocado, heirloom tomato, a little crème fraîche, capers, dill, and pepitas, on a thick slice of sourdough bread. I’m a sucker for any sort of smoked or cured salmon (or, if I’m somewhere I trust, even raw), and this was really spectacular, satisfying with the combination of fats, with just a little acidity from the tomatoes and the capers to balance it out. The salmon used for the gravlax must be of extremely high quality given how clean and bright its flavor was; sometimes curing can accentuate fishier flavors in salmon, which is an oily fish to begin with, but Little Pearl’s was bright and fresh. I also tried the potato donut, which was incredibly light and airy, benefiting from the reduction in gluten that comes from swapping out some wheat flour for potato. (It does not taste like potato, if you’re wondering.) The menu also includes spicy fried chicken, a novel twist on a burger, a few salads, gelato, and some grab-and-go items like a yogurt parfait or banana bread (which is cake, really). They use Passenger coffee from Lancaster for their coffee bar, which includes a full array of espresso options.

Tail Up Goat opened in 2016 in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of DC and has already earned a Michelin star. The menu changes often, but I believe their crispy salt cod croquettes are a regular fixture, with good reason, as they hit exactly the right note of the distinctive and, yes, salty flavor of that classic peasant food (what you might know as bacalhao in Portuguese or baccalà in Italian), whipped with potato until smooth, here served with smoked cauliflower and pickled onion. Salt cod is going to have a fishy note, but whether it’s a pleasant one depends on how it’s prepared, and here it’s prepared exceptionally so you’re almost getting the memory of that note rather than the overpowering flavor of badly prepared fish. The new potatoes with romano beans and herbs were perfectly cooked although eating them at the same time as the salt cod was probably our mistake.

The stracciatella with peaches, shallots, basil leaves, and pepitas was another highlight; the cheese, similar to the center of burrata but worked more to develop the stretchy curds that give the cheese its name, shone like a fresh ricotta, and although it’s a little early around these parts for peaches – I believe our local pick-your-own place has one variety that’s ready – these were sweet like peak-season fruit. We tried two of the pasta dishes, a spring pea agnolotti with chanterelles and roasted carrots as well as a tagliatelle with sausage and an herb pesto, with the agnolotti the better of the two, with more tooth to the dough and a higher filling/pasta ratio than you’d find with other agnolotti, which benefited the dish since the peas’ flavor is subtler than that of red meat. The tagliatelle was rolled a little thinner than I like that cut of pasta, which I think is best when you really have something to sink your teeth into, but that’s a matter of personal taste. They also make a daiquiri with Neisson Rhum Agricole, a 100 proof rum made from sugar cane rather than molasses, and Smith & Cross traditional rum, as well as lime, orange, and cardamom, but it’s really rum-forward rather than losing those flavors in citrus or sweetening agents. As for the name, it’s from a saying on the co-owner’s birthplace in the Virgin Islands: “Tail up goat, tail down sheep.”

I was fortunate enough to be invited by the Fangraphs crew to Timber Pizza on Saturday night, after Jay and I finished our signing and we’d all had beers at Comet Ping-Pong (the basement was closed for a private event, to our dismay). They call their pizza “Neapolitan-ish,” which is only accurate in that the crust is thin, but the style is really quite different – the crust’s edges aren’t puffy and charred, and the center isn’t wet – so this is somewhere more like Roman-style pizza, with a thinner, crispier crust than you’d get at a true Neapolitan joint. It’s all still good, just a matter of what you like in your pizza. I was particularly impressed by the quality of the cured meats Timber used, especially the pepperoni, something I almost never eat because I find it too salty and greasy and a source of immediate regret. Theirs was none of those things, least of all the last part, and I’d order it again, although I also loved their green pizzas with basil pesto, including the Penelope (fresh mozzarella, mushrooms, bacon, and smoked paprika) and the Green Monster (fresh mozzarella, feta, kale, and zucchini). If you’re into pizza and in DC, I do have a bit of bad news: 2 Amy’s is closed for the foreseeable future after a pipe burst in their kitchen on July 7th, flooding the place and causing substantial damage everywhere. They haven’t been able to give a projected date for a re-open.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: breakfast, coffee, pizza, washington

→ April 1, 2018
→ By keith

Raleigh and Durham eats, 2018 edition.

Downtown Raleigh has seen a huge renaissance over the last few years, especially in the area where Ashley Christensen’s main restaurants are. Now just one block over on Blount Street are two of the best new restaurants in the Triangle, according to Eater, in Mofu Shoppe and Bharvana Brewery.

Mofu Shoppe grew out of the Pho Nomenal Dumplings food truck whose owners won season 6 of something called the Great Food Truck Race and invested their winnings in their first brick and mortar location, with their signature pork and chive dumplings on the menu. I went with small plates so I could try more things at every place I tried for dinner this week, which here included those dumplings, crispy Brussels sprouts with sweet sriracha sauce and bacon, and the pork belly rice bowl. The dumplings are superb, pleasantly chewy, with the right amount of filling and very even flavors of chive and garlic. The Brussels sprouts were my favorite, even though they’re about a grade spicier than I would typically eat; the bacon lardons are thickly sliced and stand up to the sprouts well, but I didn’t care for the crème fraîche served underneath, which was too tangy, like sour cream. The pork belly rice bowl is a great concept, although I ended up liking it less than I expected. The idea seems to be to take the flavors of German potato salad and put them into a dish similar to bibimbap, so you get rice, a poached egg, pork belly, and a slaw with a mustardy vinaigrette. The dressing on the slaw overwhelmed the other flavors in the dish, unfortunately. For dessert, I went with the Vietnamese coffee mousse, which is just what it sounds like; imagine the texture of softly whipped cream and the flavor of good coffee ice cream.

Just across the street is Bhavana Brewery, a combination brewery, restaurant, book store, and flower/home decor store. (That’s not an April Fool’s Day joke.) The owners also run a Laotian restaurant next door and this menu is heavily East Asian-influenced, although it doesn’t adhere to any particular tradition from that continent. Again going with small plates, I took my server’s suggestions and ordered the steamed soup dumplings (xiao long bao), the vegetable gyoza, the seafood dumplings in mushroom sauce, and the duck egg rolls (that was my one pick among the four). The soup dumplings were the best dish, filled with a mixture of crab and pork meat, with a good balance of broth, meat, and dough, with the crab balancing out what could have been a fairly heavy filling had it been only pork. The vegetable dumplings were my least favorite, with a grassy note and a flat flavor that needed some heat and probably more salt/umami to boost it. The server did recommend the scallion pancake with bone marrow, but that sounded way too heavy for me. They do indeed brew their own beers, with a wide and rotating selection, but unfortunately their limited book selection did not include Smart Baseball.

The Lakewood is the new restaurant from the chef-owner of Scratch Bakery, which closed its downtown Durham location about a month ago and reopened in the space adjacent to this new restaurant just off Chapel Hill Road a little west of downtown. The Lakewood has a straightforward menu of small plates and sides that are more vegetable/seafood-focused and a half-dozen meat-centric main plates, plus, of course, fantastic desserts. I stuck with small plates once more and went with the roasted cauliflower with salsa verde, the parsnip pierogis with radishes, and the shrimp toast, the last of which was the star of the meal, coming drenched in a slightly sweet soy-sesame sauce. The cauliflower was a bit of a miss, as it was unevenly seasoned and underdone in the center of some of the florets; I probably should have caved to my baser instincts and ordered the Brussels sprouts with bacon jam instead. I chose the weirdest dessert on the menu, a rice tart with roasted carrot sorbet, which came in a traditional French tart crust with a thick custard in it that had some broken rice grains and was not terribly sweet, since the sweetness came from that carrot sorbet. That was the best thing on the plate, with a deep, earthy sweetness and a gorgeous deep orange color.

Jubala Coffee in Raleigh serves Counter Culture Coffee with multiple single-origin options, even offering two for espresso drinks in addition to the regular blend. They also offer sweet biscuits with various options, including egg and bacon or sausage sandwiches, with the eggs cooked to order; I prefer biscuits without that sweetness, but the texture of these was still excellent and the over medium egg was cooked perfectly. On the Durham side of the triangle, Cocoa Cinnamon, a recommendation from a co-worker of mine, roasts its own coffee (under the 4th Dimension label) and offers a couple of pour-over options, as well as churros at their Lakewood location, although I went to a different shop and didn’t think churros for breakfast was the most sensible plan.

I did hit two places I’ve been before: Durham’s Nanataco, which has never failed me yet and had one of my favorite special meat options, hog jowl, as a monthly feature; and Raleigh’s Beasley’s for fried chicken.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: coffee, dim sum, dumplings, durham, north carolina, raleigh

→ March 2, 2018
→ By keith

Miami eats, 2018 edition.

I hadn’t spent any time in Miami since I went to the U to see Yasmani Grandal and Matt Harvey face each other back in 2010 – Grandal took him deep – but have now been there twice inside of nine months, for last year’s Futures Game and now to see the University of Florida’s two first-round pitchers pitch against the Canes.

The big novelty of the trip was the brand new St. Roch Food Market in the Design District just north of downtown, not far from Wynwood. This is the second St. Roch, with the original in New Orleans, and I believe this location has different vendors with the same concept – a 10,000 square foot open area with about a dozen different stalls along the walls, selling all kinds of food, including a salad stand, a noodle bar, a pasta/Italian stand, a Japanese stand with cooked and raw fish preparations, a coffee/tea bar, and a vegan bakery. You pay at each stand as you order, and at least in my case someone brought the food to my table since I was sitting nearby. I ate at the Japanese stand first, getting a seaweed salad and a grilled freshwater eel dish over rice with radishes and allegedly cucumbers (which were nowhere to be found). The vegan bakery is better than you’d expect, or than I expected, with an excellent shortbread-only version of a Linzer tarte called a ‘compassion cookie’ because they intend to donate a portion of the proceeds from its sale to animal shelters. The coffee stand uses Counter Culture beans and a high-end tea purveyor I hadn’t heard of. The whole concept is fantastic – it’s fresh food, mostly made to order, with great inputs – but on day one their execution was spotty. Another stand didn’t have one of its main proteins ready, and didn’t tell me until I’d paid and the order had gone to the cook. I’m hoping that was just Opening Day jitters.

I ate two meals down in Coral Gables, both above average. The Local is on the Miracle Mile pedestrian-only street, serving southern-inspired dishes, a lot of them takes on bar food, with an extensive cocktail list as well. Their cornmeal-crusted catfish was outstanding, perfectly crispy on the outside and hot enough that it had to have come right from the fryer; it’s served on a mild remoulade with hand-cut fries on the side that had probably been sitting a little while before I was served. They have about a half-dozen craft cocktails of impressive complexity as well.

Shelley’s is a very unassuming seafood bar very close to the Canes’ stadium, with maybe 2/3 of the menu items including fish or shellfish. I went with the server’s suggestions for both starter and main; the mofongo fritters were lighter than I expected, served with both a sugar cane compound butter and a clear garlic-chili sauce, while the rum-glazed scallops were perfectly cooked as well, but I thought the whole combination of scallops with house-cured ham and candied pecans overpowered the delicate flavor of the scallops themselves.

I mentioned Panther Coffee in my wrap-up last July, and went there twice on this trip, also grabbing a bag of beans from Finca La Illusion, a Nicaraguan farm, to bring home. I don’t know how long they’ll have it but it’s excellent, big bodied with some warm berry notes and a mild cocoa note too.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: coffee, florida, Food, miami, southern cooking

→ January 20, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/19/18.

I only wrote three things this week that you can see anywhere right now: Two posts for Insiders on the Andrew McCutchen trade and the Gerrit Cole trade; and a review of the movie Call Me By Your Name.

Everything else I wrote will go up next week as part of the top 100 prospects package. The top 100 itself is scheduled to run on Monday and Tuesday – I’m still working on the order – followed by the “just missed” column on Thursday and one page ranking all 30 farm systems on Friday, which means that last writeup will be more concise than last year’s. The org reports will run the week after. If you’re curious, I haven’t written anything besides the top 100 capsules yet. So, yeah, things are just great.

And now, the links…

Longreads: The Guardian looks at a Youtube host who fought back against revenge porn posted by her ex and eventually won.
The Detroit News has a lengthy investigation into Michigan State’s role in covering up Larry Nassar’s serial abuse. It is quite clear that MSU President Lou Anna Simon needs to step down. ThinkProgress has a shorter piece identifying his enablers, many of whom are still in the jobs where they protected a known child molester.
ESPN’s Outside the Lines and ESPN the Magazine also published a detailed report on the many institutional failures that allowed Nassar to prey on teenaged and preteen girls for decades.
Aly Raisman gave a victim impact statement on Friday and she took no prisoners.
WIRED looks at the search for new antibiotics in a drug-resistant age, combining old searches in the soil with new techniques from metagenomics.
Also from the Guardian: A profile of Social Chain, a British “meme factory” that advises firms on creating content that will spread across social networks.
Business Insider goes into depth on Yale’s failures to handle sexual misconduct cases, with an assist in incompetence from the New Haven Police Department.
Tom Nichols writes for the Washington Post that the Trump presidency is damaging our entire democracy, including aiding extremists on the left who wish to control the Democratic party.
A Boston Globe investigation argues that the Maine Republican Party is behind anonymous attacks on opposing candidates, pushing fake and misleading stories that cost at least one candidate a likely electoral victory.
Some alt-right trolls clipped a talk given by psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker to make it appear that he was praising the people in that cesspool, and the edited video quickly spread through social media, a new example of the harm that such networks can do to our collective intelligence.
A new rule proposed by the Department of Health and Human Services would allow doctors to refuse to treat transgender patients and to otherwise hide behind claims of religion.
A supposedly “independent” watchdog group in Chicago called Project Six is actually bankrolled by the far right according to a joint investigation by ProPublica and the Chicago Sun-Times.
The accusation against Aziz Ansari has spurred lots of thinkpieces, many of them terrible. I thought Vox’s piece gave a balanced, nuanced take on the story, which doesn’t fit neatly into the “sexual assault” or “harassment” buckets we’ve been filling to surfeit of late.
Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid’s Tale, asks in an essay on the #MeToo movement, “Am I a Bad Feminist?“
Barbara Kingsolver, author of The Poisonwood Bible, argues in the other direction that women need to ‘get ugly’ and voice their anger, asserting their rights and continuing to force these uncomfortable conversations about how men treat women in our society.
NPR looks at Italy’s disappointing response to the #MeToo movement, as the largely Catholic country still adheres to the idea that victims must have deserved or provoked their assaults.
Somaliland, a self-declared independent country in the northern part of what the international community still recognizes as Somalia, passed a law outlawing rape and banning rapists from marrying their victims as a way to escape punishment, while also giving life sentences to rapists who give their victims HIV.
The NCAA answers to nobody, so this story shouldn’t surprise anyone: A college basketball player player who was expelled from Findlay College after a false rape accusation was denied a waiver to play for Duquesne because the NCAA rules by divine right.
Billboard looks at the legal questions behind Radiohead’s copyright infringement claims against Lana del Rey.
The Four Barrel Coffee saga continues to twist, as the owners announced a name change and plans to become an employee-owned company, then a decision to keep the Four Barrel name, and a settlement to the harassment lawsuit that brought the company’s unacceptable environment to the light.
A Tempe “naturopath” (a practitioner of pseudoscience) is suing a blogger who called out her bogus claims about healing cancer, which include injecting cancer patients with vitamin C and baking soda, telling them to go sugar-free, and other stuff that won’t work … while also telling them not to undergo chemo or radiation therapy. The lawsuit is clearly a SLAPP attempt, and you can donate to the blogger’s defense fund set up by the Australian Skeptics. Noted debunker Orac calls the naturopath’s suit “legal thuggery.”
Greater than Games is running a series of raffles and promotions for their Multiverse Month. The publisher’s main titles include Bottom of the 9th, Sentinels of the Multiverse, and Spirit Island.
I can’t figure out if food writer Tamara Adler’s diary is real or satire, because if it’s real, it’s the most pretentious thing I’ve read in years.
At the Gates, one of the founding acts of the Gothenburg school of melodic death metal, announced its new album will be released in May. To Drink from the Night Itself will be the band’s first record without founding guitarist Anders Björler.
And finally, a video I rather enjoyed from Twitter:

?#PositiveNewsWeekend

I love these Strandbeests: wind-propelled kinetic sculptures created by Dutchman Theo Jansen. #art #beach #animals #fun pic.twitter.com/0fIsmpVnQx

— Alexander Verbeek ? (@Alex_Verbeek) January 13, 2018

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: coffee, links, metoo, Music, pseudoscience, stick to baseball

→ January 6, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/6/18.

I’ve had no new content off the dish this week, as baseball is boring, and I’m working on my top 100 prospects package, which will run later this month. I will have a new board game review up on Paste next week, however.

Feel free to sign up for my email newsletter, which costs you nothing and totters somewhere between occasional and infrequent. And, of course, thanks to everyone who bought Smart Baseball for themselves or as a Christmas gift, or as a Christmas gift for themselves.

And now, the links…

Longreads: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, whose book The Food Lab I’ve recommended a few times around here, will open his first restaurant, Wursthall, in the next few weeks, and expectations are very high.
BBC News tells the story of a woman whose father, a Catholic priest, doesn’t even want to know her.
The Guardian looks at why paper hasn’t disappeared in a digital world.
In local news, the Delaware River Valley Commission has proposed a permanent ban on fracking in the region, but would still allow the dumping of fracking wastewater in the river basin.
The UK is experiencing a measles epidemic because of anti-vaxxer scaremongering. The MMR vaccine does not cause autism; it is both safe and very effective.
Meanwhile, in California, there’s a network of doctors willing to issue bogus medical exemptions to the state’s vaccination laws. The group is led by Bob Sears, who has profited handsomely from selling the lie that vaccines are harmful, including pushing an “alternative” vaccine schedule (with no benefit, just increased risk of exposure), and is facing a licensing hearing over one such exemption he issued. The state’s board of licensing needs to clamp down on these doctors abusing their privileges.
Computer science pioneer Barbara Simons wants an end to electronic voting because she believes such machines can’t be as secure as paper ballots. I guess she hasn’t seen Election.
Ad targeters are now pulling data from your browser’s password manager – all the more reason to not use that feature.
Women constitute nearly half of Iceland’s Parliament, so it’s no surprise that they passed a law making it illegal to pay women less than men.
Science-Based Medicine offers the top ten signs your ‘detox’ program might be a scam. There’s only one real detox or ‘cleanse’ program that works, and it’s happening in your liver already.
The EPA has hired a guy banned for life from the banking industry to oversee the Superfund program. As much damage as we’re seeing to our country’s institutions across the board right now, it pales compared to the massive rollbacks in environmental protections, which will take years and probably cost billions to clean up if and when we get the chance to do so. Yet another example: A tax on crude oil that generated $500 million per year to fund oil-spill cleanup efforts expired last week, a huge windfall for oil producers.
“Swatting,” the practice of phoning police with prank calls that lead authorities to send a SWAT team to someone else’s house, turned deadly last week with a man in Kansas getting shot by police after someone in LA made just such a bogus phone call. The suspect had a history of calling in false threats.
Coffee stuff: Is pour-over dead? Probably not, but I do expect to see more third-wave shops offer faster drip-coffee options for folks who don’t want to wait the 5+ minutes for hand-poured.
Four Barrel Coffee has long been among my favorite third-wave roasters in the country. Four former employees have said Four Barrel co-founder Jeremy Tooker sexually assaulted or harassed them.
Coachella’s owner, Philip Anschutz, gave nearly $200K to anti-LGBT and anti-abortion candidates in 2017, which seems at odds with the political stances of many of the artists who play the event.
National Review‘s Kyle Smith wrote that the publication’s support of stop and frisk was wrong. There’s still a bizarre swipe at New York Mayor Bill De Blasio for merely appearing in the same parade as a paroled Puerto Rican terrorist.
I enjoyed this Filipino teenager’s video explaining relativity in simple terms, which won her $400,000 in the annual Breakthrough Junior Challenge.
FiveThirtyEight gets it right by calling Tom Brady out on his pseudoscience bullshit.
People are getting very sick from taking rattlesnake pills. Today I learned that there is such a thing as rattlesnake pills, which are indeed made from ground-up rattlesnakes.
David French of the National Review wrote last week about how concerns over Trump’s mental state aren’t just about ‘tone’ or ‘style,’, which seems prescient in light of the President’s tweets Saturday morning.
In the wake of the release of Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff’s instant best-seller about the first year of this Administration and the chaos within, James Fallows writes for The Atlantic that none of this is news to anyone in Washington.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: coffee, environment, links, pseudoscience, science, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ December 16, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/16/17.

The MLB winter meetings were a bit slow this year, but I did have five new Insider pieces this week, covering:

• The Dodgers/Atlanta salary swap and the Matt Moore trade
• The Santana and Cozart signings, plus the Galvis trade
• The Piscotty and Kinsler trades, and the Shaw/McGee signings
• The Marcell Ozuna trade
• A quick take on a few interesting Rule 5 picks
• The Giancarlo Stanton trade

My ranking of the top ten new board games of 2017 went up at Paste on Sunday evening. My latest game review for the site covers Ex Libris, a fun, light strategy game that’s extremely well balanced, and made my top ten as well.

The holidays are upon us! Stick a copy of Smart Baseball in every stocking.

And now, the links…

Longreads: WIRED looks at the three Minecraft-playing entrepreneurs whose DDoS botnet caused the October 2016 Internet outage in the eastern United States.
ESPN’s Outside the Lines and ESPN The Magazine, an investigation of how adidas money took over the University of Louisville.
The Boston Globe Spotlight team looks at the evidence behind Boston’s reputation as a racist city and finds that … yep, it’s racist. I lived in the Boston suburbs for about 18 years, including my time in college, and my personal experience was that the city was highly segregated: There was a large black population, but they all lived Somewhere Else. Diversity in whiter neighborhoods was limited to people from east or south Asia, but rarely included African- or Latino-Americans.
Also from WIRED, a look at the big money effort to build a professional e-sports league around the game Overwatch.
A former sharecropper in Lowndes County, Alabama, a majority-black county with a population just over 10,000, spends every Election Day encouraging and driving her neighbors to the polls, one of the many great stories emerging after Doug Jones’ surprise victory over the Ayatollah of Alabama on Tuesday.
Slate argues that the new concealed-carry reciprocity law is unconstitutional. It was also widely opposed by law-enforcement groups, and the inevitable lawsuits to stop it are going to waste a lot of everyone’s time and money.
The Trump Administration told the Centers for Disease Control they can’t use the words fetus, diversity, transgender, evidence-based, or science-based in upcoming budget request documents. That’s yet another reason to support efforts to elect scientists to public office, such as 314 Action.
Salon calls the Republican Party the American Taleban in response to the party’s massive rollback of policies of previous administrations, with the goal of keeping a portion of the population “undereducated.”
New York‘s Jonathan Chait claims that the Mueller investigation is in great peril; I’m just not informed enough to know if this is valid, melodramatic, or a bit of both.
USA Today‘s editorial board, hardly a bastion of the left, called out Trump’s implication that Senator Kirsten Gillibrand would trade sex for campaign donations, saying “A president who would all but call Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand a whore is not fit to clean the toilets in the Barack Obama Presidential Library or to shine the shoes of George W. Bush.” You’d think Republican women in Congress would be outraged, but nah.
The New York Times compared the blatant falsehoods told by Presidents Obama and Trump, finding that Trump is offering lies at 60 times the rate of his predecessor, telling more lies in less than a year in office than Obama did in eight. (They list the specific falsehoods, if anyone wants to cry “fake news.”)
The US Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a hospital worker fired for refusing a flu shot can’t claim religious discrimination, as the court ruled that anti-vaccination beliefs are not religious in nature, and that the scientifically accepted view is that vaccines are not harmful.
Celebrity chef & Food Network icon Mario Batali has now been outed as a sexual harasser & groper, and has been fired by The Chew as a result. He issued a weak apology that ended with a cinnamon roll recipe.
Ken Friedman, the co-owner of West Village restaurant The Spotted Pig, has been accused by several former employees of harassment and assault, another great piece of investigative work from the New York Times. The Spotted Pig is co-owned by chef April Bloomfield, who is accused of blowing off complaints from female employees about Friedman.
Salma Hayek’s piece on how Harvey Weinstein harassed her and nearly derailed her career in retaliation is just brutal to read. Director Peter Jackson revealed that Weinstein forced him to drop Mira Sorvino and Ashley Judd from the Lord of the Rings movies in further retaliation against the women for rejecting his advances.
Thrillist’s Dan Gentile listed the 21 best coffee roasters in the country, and based on my experience it’s quite a credible list. I’ve tried nine of these, and would probably not have included La Colombe of those on the list, but would vouch for the rest. I’d also add Archetype (Omaha), Cartel (Phoenix), and Bird Rock (San Diego/La Jolla).
In July, the podcast Startup interviewed the Yemeni-American behind the $16 cup of coffee that made headlines in 2016. His story is remarkable, as he’s had to educate Yemeni farmers and then process and ship the beans out of an active war zone.
In the wake of the Keaton Jones story (and the milkshake duck epilogue), Teen Vogue looks at how the traumas of young black girls don’t get the same kind of public empathy. She also argues for greater mental health treatment for traumatized young kids, which is a core tenet of the book I reviewed yesterday, The Body Keeps the Score.
Yet another former Facebook exec has come out against the power and effects of his old employer and social media in general, saying it’s “ripping apart society.” I agree social media is showing some rather pernicious effects, but I also feel like this talking point is a very good way to make money on the speakers’ circuit when you used to work there.
This New York Times story on the alt-right’s attempts to build a parallel social media world is mostly funny but a bit scary that they could even find funding for all of these failed efforts.
Paste posted its ranking of the top 30 video games of 2017. I’ve heard of maybe five. I did just buy a new laptop that’s supposed to be quite good for gaming, so maybe I’ll dive in this year.
Thames and Kosmos has two new titles out just in time for the holiday with Legends of Andor: The Last Hope and the Ken Follett-inspired A Column of Fire. I probably won’t be reviewing these, but do have a stack of games to review to take me well into February; that should include Majesty: For the Realm, the brand-new title from the developer of Splendor.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: boardgames, coffee, links, mental health, Sports, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines, video games

→ November 25, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/25/17.

The biggest piece I wrote this week was actually right here, the tenth annual ranking of my top 100 boardgames, including a list (at the bottom) of my favorite titles for two players. And you’ll see in the comments there are still plenty of good games out there I haven’t played.

For Insiders, I broke down MLB’s penalties for Atlanta, looking at the players set free and the impact of the league’s actions for the long term, and also looked at how the top few free agents might end up overpaid this offseason. My next scheduled piece will cover Shohei Otani and will run December 2nd, the day he hits the market for real, assuming there isn’t another roadblock between now and then.

No Klawchat this week on account of the holiday.

Buy Smart Baseball for all your loved ones this holiday season! It makes a great gift. By which I mean it’s great for me when you give it as a gift.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New York Times found that civilian casualties from the U.S. airstrikes against ISIS are much higher than reported. I can’t shake the notion that the last fifteen-odd years of bombings, especially by drone, are merely incubating a new generation of potential terrorists who hate us.
Buzzfeed blew the doors off the Congressional fund that pays off sexual harassment complaints against legislators and certain other federal employees, with $17 million paid out over 264 complaints. There’s so much wrong here, including the allegations against Rep. John Conyers (who needs to resign immediately), including the fact that taxpayers are covering this expense, and that settlements aren’t automatically made public.
The Washington Post interviewed 25 North Korean defectors about life under the current dictator, Kim Jong Un, who has slightly liberalized the economy while further cracking down on any semblance of individual rights. The biggest takeaway for me: It’s no longer famine driving people to defect, but an increased awareness of the freedom of the world outside of North Korea’s borders.
The Guardian has a long, entertaining, and wide-ranging look at the British prepared sandwich industry, which is a much bigger deal than I realized. The lack of time to eat a proper meal, however, is an issue here and in many other developed economies, even though it’s probably hurting our physical and mental health.
Forbes, that bastion of liberal economic thought, says the current GOP tax bill “will be the start of a decades-long economic policy disaster unlike any other that has occurred in American history.” I rarely discuss economic policy here, feeling rather unqualified to do so, but I will say that I think this bill is a poor facsimile of a failed macroeconomic policy proposal, trickle-down economics, that instead is merely a massive transfer of wealth to the highest income earners. I might actually benefit from the bill, depending on the fine print, but I thoroughly oppose it, because it will make so many people worse off and drag our country into a length economic malaise it will be tough to escape. (Also, tax breaks on private jets? What possible rationale is there for that?)
The Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center’s analysis also shows the bulk of the benefits going to higher income brackets, with the biggest gainers those in the 95th to 99th percentiles for income.
Fake news in action: You’ll see many alt-right accounts (bots) and sites pushing the story of a Saudi princess whose tell-all interview with Le Monde revealed tales of orgies, white slavery, and other debauchery among the Saudi ruling class. The problem, according to Le Monde, is that the interview never happened (article in French). The fabrication is so pervasive that the esteemed French newspaper felt compelled to author a refutation, blaming the Iranian news service and a Sri Lankan paper for promulgating the lie.
People with diabetes are dying because they can’t afford insulin, a situation created by the current nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar. While Azar headed up Eli Lilly, he more than tripled the cost the company’s insulin product over ten years, even though the product’s patent expired. The company is also under investigation for price-fixing, and settled a set of cases over off-label marketing of its drug Zyprexa for over $1.4 billion.
The Administration and the conservative wing of the Republican Party are trying to pack the courts with conservative judges, a threat to civil liberties and more for decades, even after the current occupant of the White House is out.
The Attorney General of New York says the commenting process on net neutrality was compromised, and the FCC won’t provide the documents to help him investigate it. One researcher claims over a million of the comments were fake. It doesn’t really matter; Ajit Pai, the new FCC head, was going to axe net neutrality regardless of the public reaction. One of the minority Democrats on the FCC board wrote a piece imploring the public to keep the pressure on by contacting other board members. We should all do this, but you’ll have to forgive my cynicism: if the three conservative board members can physically get to the vote on December 14th, net neutrality is dead.
Media consolidation erodes the myth of “liberal” media as large conglomerates pull major outlets to the right, according to Poynter.
The Turkish dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan has banned all gay assemblies in the capital, Ankara, including forums, festivals, and film screenings, part of an ongoing crackdown on LGBT rights in the supposedly secular nation. Also, our current President loves Erdogan.
Another tyrant, Robert Mugabe, has resigned after ruling Zimbabwe since its independence in 1980. The problem is that his successor was implicated in one of Zimbabwe’s deadliest massacres. The new boss is the same as the old boss.
The hell is wrong with western Canada? One family of anti-science nutters lets their kid die of meningitis without seeking medical treatment, and they’re still raving about their rights. Now another mother is going to jail for failing to get medical help for her son, who had strep throat – easily treatable with antibiotics, as Streptococcus doesn’t readily develop resistance – and died after she treated it with bullshit. Yes, the story says “holistic remedies,” but there is no such thing, and the Tribune Media Wire author(s) behind the piece should be fired. Meanwhile, a “naturopathic doctor” (no such thing, folks) in Medicine Hat is pushing the “sanitation and hygiene” crap while ranting against vaccines on Twitter. I don’t know Canadian law, but if there’s a licensing board in Alberta, someone should ask them to strip his.
Conservatives and the highly religious are more likely to endorse myths about rape, including victim-blaming, disbelieving accusers, or saying it’s only rape if the victim fought back. Pro tip: If your religion tells you that a woman can ask for rape, or that date rape is acceptable, then it’s time you found a new religion or none at all.
The “Church” of Scientology covered up the rape of one of its members by actor Danny Masterson, telling her it wasn’t rape because they were in a relationship. I’d say this is yet another point in favor of stripping the cult of its tax-exempt status.
I reviewed Ed Yong’s wonderful book I Contain Multitudes, about the microbiome in our ecosystem and all over our bodies, back in March. In a later chapter, he discusses the proposal to release male Aedes albopictus mosquitoes infected with a strain of the Wolbachia pipientis bacterium into the environment; when they mate, the eggs laid by the female mosquitoes won’t hatch because of the bacterial infection. Earlier this month, the EPA approved a proposal to do just that in 20 states and Washington DC. It could prove a game-changing advance in the fight against mosquito-borne diseases like yellow fever, Zika, dengue, and chikungunya. (Malaria is transmitted by a different genus of mosquito, Anopheles.)
Coral researchers are coping with the effects of watching the reefs they cover die out as a result of ocean acidification and climate change.
Three cups of coffee a day may have health benefits. I could confirm this, but I’d be in the bathroom all day long if I tried.
If you know someone who’s both celiac and anti-GMO, ask them if they’d eat gluten-free flour made from genetically modified wheat that can’t form the key proteins that appear to trigger celiac disease. The genetic modification comes via CRISPR rather than gene transfer from an unrelated species.
I travel quite a bit every year, enough to get premium status on at least one airline, and I’ve begun carrying a refillable water bottle on every trip now that many airports have refilling stations of filtered tap water, including the Philadelphia airport, which doesn’t have a ton to recommend it but does have a lot of these fountains.
A leader of the Indian ruling party, as a bit of an overreaction to the forthcoming film Padmavati, has offered a bounty for anyone who beheads the star actress and the film’s director.
The FBI and Department of Justice are investigating the St. Louis police force’s conduct during protests in September after the acquittal of a white officer who killed an unarmed black man in 2011. The police department is also under a temporary order blocking the use of chemical agents and dispersal orders, pending mediation.
The Baseball Project is a supergroup comprising five well-known musicians who happen to be big baseball fans, including REM’s Peter Buck and Mike Mills and two former members of the Dream Syndicate. The fifth member, Scott McCaughey, had a significant stroke earlier this month, and there’s a GoFundMe to help cover his medical expenses. McCaughey is/was also a member of the Minus Five and the Young Fresh Fellows.
The Verge looks at an ongoing Venmo scam that has netted the crooks over $100K, largely because the victims hear a chance to get a guaranteed, immediate profit, and don’t demand cash or use a more secure payment system.
Bad headline, good piece: A NY Times editorial examines the increasing desire to find balance between our digital and analog lives.
WIRED profiled one of New York’s most successful professional Dungeon Masters, known to D&D players as a “DM.”
At PAX Unplugged last week, I met with a rep from a company called Shapeways that allows you to create your own meeples and dice.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: climate change, coffee, Economics, Food, links, rpgs, science, stick to baseball, taxes, vaccines

→ November 11, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/11/17.

I have a new boardgame review at Paste, covering the card-drafting game Skyward. I also had two Insider posts go up earlier this week, one previewing some potential offseason trade targets, the other ranking the top 50 free agents this winter. And I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Feel free to sign up for my free email newsletter, which I send out … I guess whenever I feel like it. I aim for once a week, although I’ve gone as long as two weeks between issues when I haven’t had much to say. You can see past issues at that link.

Also, don’t forget to buy copies of Smart Baseball for everyone on your Christmas list! Except for infants. They might eat the pages. Get them the audiobook instead.

And now, the links…

Longreads: You probably saw this remarkable New Yorker piece by Ronan Farrow on how Harvey Weinstein used PIs and former spies to track and harass his accusers. If he could do that, think of the other rich, powerful men who stand accused (or have yet to be accused) of sexual harassment and assaults, including a former president and a current one both accused of similar acts. They’ve probably done it too.
This 2015 piece from the Guardian details a failed effort to turn the Comoros into a citizenship-for-sale destination for Bidoon, stateless Arabs living in wealthy countries without actual citizenship or even documentation. The Comoros are a desperately poor island country between Madagascar and mainland Africa, beset by repeated coups since they became independent of colonial France in 1975. Needless to say, the plan didn’t work out well for the the tiny nation.
ProPublica details how right-wing trolls harassed three of its reporters via low-cost methods like filling their inboxes with subscriptions to newsletters.
James Bridle went very long on algorithm-driven kids’ videos on Youtube and more, arguing that such pablum is damaging our kids. (I would also suggest that parents not give their kids unfettered access to any part of the Internet, but that’s just me.)
Scientific American gives us Journey to Gunland, on how more guns do not mean less crime, even though many Americans believe the opposite. The more guns in a state, the more violent crimes, including shootings and rapes. They also ran a rebuttal from a pro-gun social scientist they mentioned, and then (scroll down from there) a rejoinder from the original author.
Are American private colleges and universities making inequality worse as tuition increases and income gaps in the population of potential students grow?
Roy Moore, who believes gays should be jailed or killed and Muslims banned from Congress, sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl in 1979 and behaved inappropriately with several other women in their teens. Several leading Republicans called on Moore to withdraw from the Senate race if the allegations are true.
David French of the National Review cautions conservatives not to dismiss or ignore the allegations. David Leonhardt writes in the New York Times about the cowardice of the “if true” admonitions, which leave the speakers a perfect out.
Utah Representative Rob Bishop is close to his goal of “invalidating” the Endangered Species Act.
Trump’s voter “fraud” commission, which is itself based on a fraudulent premise that pervasive voter fraud exists, has been sued by one of its members, alleging violation of transparency laws and other malfeasance by the Republican members.
A Trump nominee for a lifetime appointment to the federal bench who was unanimously ranked “not qualified” by the American Bar Association was approved in a party-line vote by the Senate Judiciary Committee this week. The judge referred on his blog to “Hillary Rotten Clinton” last year and pledged support for the NRA. If you have a Republican Senator from your state, this would be yet another good reason to call and ask him/her to vote against Talley’s confirmation from the full body.
The swamp is so swampy that minor imbroglios like, say, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross lying about $2 billion in personal wealth just sort of slip under the radar.
They did, however, force one unqualified nominee to withdraw: Michigan state legislator Tim Kelly has his nomination pulled after it was revealed he wanted all Muslims banned from air travel. He’s also said that women aren’t interested in STEM careers, and efforts to encourage girls to pursue such careers are a waste of money. This leaves unanswered the question of what the hell his home district in Michigan is thinking.
One of my Senators, Chris Coons, is demanding an explanation for the ‘resignation’ of U.S. Attorney Dana Boente just days before Robert Mueller announced the first criminal charges in his investigation of the President’s campaign ties to Russia. Attorney General Jeff Sessions asked for Boente’s resignation in late October.
A Kansas City Star investigation led Antonio “Rico” Soave to end his campaign for Congress, as the story uncovered multiple instances of graft while Soave was the state’s Commerce Secretary – and forced Kansas Governor Sam Brownback to admit he’d fired Soave in June.
A fungus called coffee rust threatens the world’s arabica crop, exacerbated by climate change that extends the fungus’ active season.
Climate change is killing farm workers around the world, contributing to the rise of a deadly kidney disease or disorder of unknown cause. I heard about this from a reader who saw in my email newsletter that I like Flor de Caña rum; he mentioned to me that working conditions for their sugar harvesters are abysmal, and they’ve had a rash of deaths due to this disorder.
Also from the Guardian, those supposedly financially disciplined folks in Congress destroyed an expensive Arctic ice probe rather than pay to store it … because the probe would facilitate research on climate change. You read that right: They threw away a major investment because they didn’t want further proof we are warming the planet.
Louis C.K.’s film I Love You, Daddy has been pulled from distribution before its release due to revelations of his past sexual harassment of women. Meanwhile, Mel Gibson’s latest movie is out in theaters, even though he’s a pretty terrible human being too.
Paste calls on all comedians repped by 3 Arts’ Dave Becky to drop him as their manager, as he is accused of facilitating Louis C.K.’s sexual harassment of other comedians.
Tom Colicchio wrote a widely-praised open letter to male chefs urging them to do more to change the culture of restaurant kitchens, which he argues accept harassment as standard operating procedure and thus stymie the efforts of young female (or, I’d imagine, LGBT or nonbinary) chefs to advance in the industry.
Some baseball links: Fangraphs’ Jeff Sullivan asks if the pitch-framing market efficiency is closing.
Baseball America‘s Teddy Cahill looks at increasingly early college commitments from teenaged players, a practice everyone dislikes but no one wants to address.
Lindsey Adler (at Deadspin) had the best piece I saw on the Baseball Prospectus writer who didn’t exist. Ryan Schultz was the online persona of a girl, who started the act at age 13 and is now 21, who catfished numerous readers and writers via social media and later multiple sites.
Mike Tanier writes on Bleacher Report that the NFL has passed the point of no return with Colin Kaepernick as teams give quarterback jobs to vagrants grabbed off the streets rather than call the principled former 49er.
The World Health Organization is now advising farmers to avoid using antibiotics in healthy animals, given the practice’s contribution to the evolution and spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Why hasn’t California cracked down on anti-vaccination doctors? These quacks are exploiting “medical exemptions” rules, but so far, none has been charged with any form of fraud. If you live there, call your state rep or senator to demand real action on this, before there’s another measles outbreak.
There’s a new shingles vaccines that is vastly more effective in older patients than any previous vaccine. It uses a new type of adjuvant that might change how vaccines, especially those for patients over 50, are developed.
Michigan Republicans are pushing forward bills to allow concealed carry in churches and schools.
Cincinnati politicians are trying to gift FC Cincinnati team owners with a publicly-funded stadium in the town’s Oakley neighborhood. Call your local reps and tell them you know what a colossal waste this is.
I agree with President Trump! The federal government needs to revoke the Church of Scientology’s tax-exempt status. It’s a real-estate holding company running a long con on members, and harassed its way into this status in the first place.
Is vermouth making a comeback? Sales are on the rise, largely due to the wine’s use in certain cocktails, like the Negroni and the Manhattan, which are seeing revivals as well.
A Macallan 1878 bottle reported to be worth $300,000 has been exposed as a fake, likely produced between 1970 and 1972.
Astronomers have discovered the first known star to survive a supernova, eventually exploding five separate times over a two-year period.
Mental floss looks at how the death of a chemist in 1996 changed how labs handle dangerous chemicals forever.
Five tips for helping your anxious child (or yourself). They check out for me at least.
Anti-abortion activists are very successful on Twitter, says a pro-choice writer for DAME magazine. Much of what she describes here, like hashtag hijacking, reflects a flaw in the machine, exploited well by one side.
Necessity breeds invention: Food shortages in North Korea have boosted a black market in privation foodstuffs, many of which are made from soybeans.
The 7 Wonders app, in development for at least two full years, will be released for iOS this Tuesday, November 14th, with an Android release coming on December 20th.
An English reporter who happens to be black interviewed white supremacist Richard Spencer on camera, and he let the racist show his true colors. If anything, I wish Younge had let Spencer keep talking; he’s hardly the well-groomed intellectual he pretends to be.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alcohol, anxiety, baseball, chemistry, climate change, coffee, food safety, links, longreads, rum, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ September 16, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/16/17.

For Insiders this week, I wrote two pieces, one on eight top 100 prospects who had disappointing years in 2017, and my last minor-league scouting notebook of the season, covering Yankees, Pirates, Nationals, and Cardinals prospects. I held my regular Klawchat on Thursday. My next column for ESPN will be my annual “players I got wrong” piece; if you have suggestions, throw them in the comments. I try to stick to players who’ve beaten expectations for more than just one season, although sometimes I waive that if there’s a particular story I want to tell.

Over at Paste I reviewed Yamataï, the new boardgame from Days of Wonder, which hasn’t fared that well critically or commercially but which all three members of my family really liked. It’s also a gorgeous game, which never hurts around here.

My book, Smart Baseball, is out and still selling well (or so I’m told); thanks to all of you who’ve already picked up a copy. And please sign up for my free email newsletter, which is back to more or less weekly at this point now that I’m not traveling for a bit.

I have a ton of links from the NY Times this week, which requires a subscription above a certain number of free articles. I normally try to spread my links out across many sources, but the NYT had so much great content this week that I stuck with it. I’ve tagged a few of them as such for those of you who don’t subscribe (I do, obviously). And now, the links…

I stand with Jemele Hill, absolutely and unequivocally. The coverage of this – and ESPN’s handling of it, with which I do not agree – has been extensive, but Charles Pierce had the best piece I saw, with Dave Zirin’s a close second.
Professional douchebro “Pewdiepie,” who has a history of anti-Semitic behavior in his videos, dropped the n-word this week, and Garrett Martin explains at Paste why this has nothing to do with free speech. (Garrett is my editor at Paste as well.)
Meanwhile, the robotic responses of Trump supporters earned mention in the NY Times this week, notably how so-called “evangelicals” are fine forgiving unethical behavior by their President. This may be related to the Administration’s fervor for enacting regulatory policies favored by evangelicals (also NY Times), in spite of claims that they’d be a “hands-off” government.
Hard to avoid contrasting the Administration’s response to Hill’s criticisms with Canadian politician Jameet Singh showing how to handle a heckler who can’t even figure out that he’s not Muslim.
Longread: White residents of Alabama towns are seceding from their integrated local school districts, primarily to get their kids away from black students. (NY Times)
The leader of the DC-based group Smash Racism says Nazis shouldn’t feel safe in public. This is the kind of idiocy that allows neo-Nazis and their friends to talk about how the violence and hatred is “on both sides.” It doesn’t help that Newsweek tabs the founder of one tiny group as “a leader of the antifa.”
Politico wrote that Democrats’ attacks on Trump aren’t working according to polls and focus groups. Are those the right barometers here? I feel like polls and focus groups led most experts astray in November.
Meanwhile, a soi-disant Catholic politician in England has argued that abortion should be strictly outlawed, even in cases of rape or incest; the Guardian argues that this has nothing to do with faith and everything to do with the religious right’s obsession with sex. (Ted Cruz almost had this right!)
The Virgin Islands were hit particularly hard by Hurricane Irma, with St. John, which is mostly covered by a national park, absolutely devastated by the storm.
My alma mater had a tough week in the news. First, the rescinding of an admissions offer to convicted murderer Michelle Jones (NYT) earned the university criticism, but the coverage seems to dismiss the stated reason for the change – that Jones glossed over the fact that she beat and starved her son to death, focusing instead on the process by which she was accepted and then rejected. I’m not saying Harvard was right or wrong here, but that the story is complicated and opens a lot of questions about what we expect of people who’ve committed violent crimes but served long prison sentences and appear to be rehabilitated.
Then Harvard disinvited Chelsea Manning to be a visiting fellow at the Kennedy School of Government, sparking former CIA director Michael Morell’s resignation as a fellow there. Manning has implied strongly that this is about her being a trans woman, but that’s disingenuous at best; again, it’s complicated, and that papers over the real questions of when someone is truly acting as a whistleblower and when they’re putting their country at risk.
The least-covered major story of the week was the revelation that Brazilian miners slaughtered ten members of an ‘uncontacted’ Amazonian tribe. The broader issue here is that the Brazilian government has slashed funds and efforts to protect these indigenous groups.
This old mental floss post resurfaced this week but I think it’s worth sharing – it contains several good, simple tips for making better coffee at home. The one thing I would add, however, is to buy better beans: The time between roasting and grinding can be a matter of days or a matter of months, and there’s a huge difference between the two.
Nestle is buying a majority share in specialty coffee company Blue Bottle (NYT), which makes my favorite espresso blend ever – the sweetest-tasting coffee (in the literal sense) I have ever had. I feel like this probably isn’t good news.
And one reason of many is that climate change is hurting global coffee production. So as artisanal coffee roasters expand, the supply of quality beans is shrinking. Also, if you like coffee you should make sure you vote for candidates who accept that climate change is real and plan to do something about it.
Climate change is also making plants less nutritious for us. This exacerbates an existing trend, where Big Ag has bred plants for higher yields and aesthetic qualities, rather than flavor or nutrition. The article includes a quote from science-denier Lamar Smith, who chairs the House Committee on Science, showing that he couldn’t science his way out of a paper bag. So, we should eat less meat overall because most meat production contributes to climate change, but climate change is making plants less nutritious for us to eat.
There’s a new type of chocolate called ruby chocolate, developed by Swiss chocolatier Barry Callebaut (NYT), with a different, sweet-tart flavor … and the color of Spam. Really, look at those pictures and tell me that doesn’t look like some sort of extruded raw pork product.
Chefs love to use sea salt and praise it over ordinary table salt, even though I’d guess 99% of people, chefs included, couldn’t tell the difference in blind taste tests. New tests show that sea salt is contaminated by microplastics too. Since one argument for sea salt over table salt has been the latter’s inclusion of iodine, I’m not sure this is good news for salt snobs.
Animal feed is helping spread antibiotic-resistant genes around the world.
Denmark reduced food waste by 25% thanks in part to the efforts of one woman, who emigrated from Russia to Denmark and was appalled at how much food was produced and trashed.
The failed state of Venezuela tried to tell residents to raise and eat rabbits so they’d have enough food to eat, only to find residents keeping the rabbits as pets. The country is devolving into a western Somalia thanks to the extreme socialist policies of its dictator, who, along with his predecessor, nationalized all industries, fixed the money supply, and pretended that oil prices would never drop (they have).
This Phoenix New Times editorial, written by a Phoenix native who moved to Portland, Oregon, argues that Phoenix is the better food town of the two.
Speaking of Phoenix, Motel 6 operators in the area appear to be providing ICE with lists of their guests to aid in arrests and deportations. Do they leave the light on for you after you’ve been sent to Mexico?
Siddhartha Mukherjee, who won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for his book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, writes in the New Yorker how looking at how the body may help cancer take root and grow may present a new approach to fighting the disease.
FiveThirtyEight shows, yet again, that September performance doesn’t matter in baseball any more than performance in any other month does. There is no “momentum” in baseball, there’s no “peaking early,” and there’s no benefit to “finishing hot.” Stop it.
I missed this when it happened a few weeks ago, but a Brewers minor leaguer, Julio Mendez, suffered a heart attack when he was hit by a pitch.
Julie DiCaro writes in the Washington Post about saying goodbye to youth football because of the risk of serious brain injury.
A man whose wife left him because he was abusive killed her and seven of her friends in Plano last week. When you hear someone ask why an abuse victim “doesn’t just leave,” well, here’s one reason.
Metallica’s Kirk Hammett told The Hub in Boston that Soundgarden’s Louder than Love inspired the “Enter Sandman” riff.
The Cassini spacecraft ended a successful 13-year mission by crashing into Saturn this week. The craft was originally only supposed to operate for three years, but went a decade longer and sent back over 400,000 photos of the sixth planet, its rings, and its many moons.
Boardgames! Two big new titles on Kickstarter this week. Cerebria, one of the best new titles I saw at GenCon, hit Kickstarter on Tuesday and surpassed its funding goal in the first 24 hours.
Greenbrier’s fantasy/tabletop game Champions of Hara has also beaten its funding goal, with 12 days left in the campaign.
Also, the boardgame Evolution is heading to your computer in videogame form.
Codito is updating some of its great iOS boardgame apps for the 64-bit OS, and has put their titles on sale for 99 cents each, including Tigris & Euphrates, Le Havre, and Reiner Knizia’s Ra. I recommend all three, especially at that price.
A Pennsylvania state legislator said he’d be fine killing a protester who was blocking his path on the road.
Academics claim to have rediscovered thirty “lost” English words, such as quacksalver, rouzy-bouzy, and the very relevant sillytonian.

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