coronavirus — Page 3

→ August 20, 2022
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/21/22.

I’m returning from a long vacation to England and Wales, one in which I was barely online and enjoyed this tremendously. A couple of folks reached out to see if my absence from the internet was due to something unfortunate, and I appreciate that you checked in.

Before I started this break, I had a slew of articles for subscribers to The Athletic, including a ranking of the top 60 prospects in the minors that included recent draftees; some thoughts on which teams did best and worst at the trade deadline; and breakdowns of the Juan Soto trade, the Frankie Montas trade; the Josh Hader trade; and some smaller deals from that final day. I held a Q&A at the Athletic on August 1st.

Before this vacation, I took a few days to head to Indianapolis to go to Gen Con, the largest board game convention in North or South America, and wrote about it in two posts for Paste – one ranking the ten best games I played there, and another discussing everything else I tried or saw. I also reviewed the very disappointing new Stranger Things game, Attack of the Mind Flayer.

My podcast will return this upcoming week, as will my newsletter.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New York Times details the numerous allegations against former Gravity Payments CEO Dan Price, who had become a media darling for his decision to raise his company’s minimum salary to $70K a year (which, to be clear, is still good!) and his tweets about excessive CEO pay and living wages.
Bob Nutting, owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates, bought the Aspen Times newspaper, and in what appears to be a concerted effort with a Russian oligarch, suppressed negative coverage in the 140-year-old paper, according to a former editor.
Climate change is causing a mass movement of people from the worst-hit areas, and we need to prepare for it.
NBC News has the story of a Texas mom campaigning to ban LGBTQ+ themed books from school libraries – even though her own son is gay.
Texas’ abortion law made one woman’s wanted pregnancy a medical nightmare. Republicans trying to ban abortion are worse at failing to anticipate consequences than Bud Selig was.
The BBC looks back at the failure of Disney and Miramax to sell Hayao Miyazaki’s film Princess Mononoke to American audiences.
Dr. Angela Rasmussen, one of the authors of the recent studies that showed that COVID-19 almost certainly had a natural origin, discussed the toxic “lab-leak” discource on social media, one pushed by bad actors, including people with books to sell.
Dan Szymborski wrote about how the Fernando Tatis suspension is a loss for baseball, not just for Padres fans.
Two billionaires, Jeff Yass and Dick Uihlein, are funding a far-right election denier in Nevada’s Senate race. Uihlein’s money comes from U-Line, his closely held packaging company. If I get a package in an U-Line box, I ask the shipper or vendor to use someone else for their packaging needs.
A Nigerian doctor tried to warn the world about monkeypox back in 2016, but nobody listened.
President Biden has almost completely stopped drone attacks in Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, and Syria, compared not just to his immediate predecessor but to President Obama as well.
This was inevitable: some sore-loser parents used Utah’s anti-trans law to question the gender of the girl who beat their daughters in a track event.
Meanwhile, far-right transphobes are harassing Boston Children’s Hospital employees over false claims that the hospital is conducting gender-affirming surgeries on trans kids.
Reader Dr. Paul Sax wrote a personal piece about why abortions are medical care.
The Washington Post wrote about how Indy Star reporters showed that the story of a pregnant 10-year-old who had to travel out of Ohio to Indiana for an abortion was, in fact, not a hoax. (And then Indiana banned all abortions, because that state is also a theocracy.)
Board game news: The Kickstarter for Trailblazers, a short, portable family game about hiking and kayaking, funded in less than two hours.
Level Up Dice made custom polyhedral dice from metal melted down from a German WWII tank, and then had to apologize for it.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, baseball, board game news, censorship, coronavirus, links, longreads, metoo, stick to baseball, trans rights, utah

→ July 2, 2022
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/2/22.

For subscribers to the Athletic this week, I had a minor league scouting blog post on the Giants’ Kyle Harrison and several other Giants, Red Sox, and Pirates prospects. I’ll have another one on Monday on some Phillies, White Sox, and Orioles prospects. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

My guest this week on The Keith Law Show was Jason Kander, author of the new book Invisible Storm: A Soldier’s Memoir of Politics and PTSD. You can subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I’ve been holding off on sending out my free email newsletter because the bad news hasn’t stopped and I’m not really sure what to say at this point, but I’ll do it soon. Also, my two books, Smart Baseball and The Inside Game, are both available in paperback, and you can buy them at your local independent book store or at Bookshop.org.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: “It is unconscionable that politicians would label it as child abuse,” says Dr. Laura Edwards-Leeper about gender-affirming care for trans and nonbinary minors. The cover story in the latest issue of the American Psychological Association’s Monitor on Psychology looks at the importance of such care and the role that psychologists should play in it.
In the New Yorker, Andrew Marantz asks if Hungary under its tyrannical leader Viktor Orbán gives us an idea of what our authoritarian future might look like.
Also in the New Yorker, Jia Tolentino writes that we are not going back to pre-Roe, but to some place much worse.
After the SCOTUS ruling dismantling women’s reproductive rights came down, right-wing influencers spread rumors of impending violence from those angered by the ruling, including the supposed activist group Jane’s Revenge. The violence never occurred, and I still can’t find hard evidence Jane’s Revenge is an actual group.
Dana Milbank of the Washington Post writes of the Supreme Court’s “radicals” sowing maximum chaos with their inconsistent use of precedent and selective applications of history.
Adam Serwer of the Atlantic writes that the Constitution is whatever the right-wing says it is, regardless of the document’s text or judicial precedent, calling it “undead constitutionalism.”
Vox’s Ian Millhiser says Neil Gorsuch lied about the facts of the Kennedy v. Bremerton case to gift a victory to the religious right.
The New York Times’s Paul Krugman tweeted his disdain for the recent run of SCOTUS decisions.
CNN’s Jill Filipovic wrote that “the Republican Party has a rape problem” about the spate of abortion bans that don’t even try to make an exception for victims of rape or incest.
The arrest of Lizelle Herrera in Texas for having a miscarriage is far from unique and likely to become more common in the wake of the SCOTUS ruling.
Mexican abortion clinics are preparing for an influx of patients from the United States, especially with two border states trying to completely ban the medical procedure.
A ten-year-old girl in Ohio who was six weeks and three days pregnant had to travel to Indiana to get an abortion because Ohio banned the procedure for anyone, for any reason, after six weeks. I just want to restate that the pregnant person here was a ten-year-old girl.
A major Kansas City area health system has stopped providing Plan B contraception in its Missouri facilities after the state banned all abortions, even for victims of sexual assault.
Marcus Stroman was one of many MLB players to criticize the SCOTUS ruling overturning Roe v. Wade.
President Biden appears to have struck a deal with Sen. Mitch McConnell to put an anti-abortion judge on the federal bench in Kentucky
On the Athletic, Hockey Canada is losing sponsors after it came out that they covered up an incident where eight of their players sexually assaulted a woman, who sued the organization and signed an NDA when they settled.
Mental Floss writes of the 600-year history of the singular ‘they.’
Angeli Rose Gomez, the Uvalde mother who rushed into the elementary school to save her two boys during the massacre there, has been harassed by police and had to move out from her sons to protect them. She’s suing the department now.
Police in New Haven, Connecticut, put a Black man in handcuffs, threw him in a van without a seatbelt, and then made an abrupt stop while driving, which threw him within the van and made him a quadriplegic. He’s on a respirator, eating through a feeding tube, and is suing the department.
Two Virginia politicians, both Republicans, filed a lawsuit seeking to have a graphic memoir called Gender Queer declared obscene. The ACLU, PEN America, the Virginia Library Association, the Authors Guild, Barnes & Noble, and several other groups all signed a letter opposing the suit.
Alan Henry, author of the new book Seen, Heard, and Paid: The New Work Rules for the Marginalized, spoke to Objective Journalism about his career as a Black man in traditional journalism, including some negative experiences at the New York Times.
California is considering a bill that would give their state medical board more power to discipline doctors who spread medical misinformation, and of course anti-vaxxers are unhappy about it.
I regret to inform you that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is once again feuding with a Muppet.
This video of highlights from the Wyoming Republican House primary debate is … something.
The price of Turkey agreeing to admit Sweden and Finland into NATO is Turkey’s demand now that those two nations extradite 33 opponents of the Turkish regime, including members of the banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party and followers of an exiled cleric whom Turkey blames for a failed 2016 coup attempt.
The group Check My Ads is targeting Fox News’ advertisers as the network’s hosts have been downplaying the January 6^th insurrection.
It’s rare, but we have our first confirmed case of a human getting SARS-CoV-2 from a cat.
Board game news: NPR’s Throughline podcast does a deep dive on the history of Monopoly, from its disputed origins to its flawed depiction of the American dream. (Not discussed is why the game is actually terrible.)
Stonewall Uprising, a two-player game about the watershed moment in gay rights in the United States, is on Kickstarter and already almost 400% funded.
Stonemaier Games teased the next expansion, Asia, for Wingspan, although it won’t be available for several more months.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, board game news, coronavirus, hockey, hungary, links, longreads, metoo, police, scotus, stick to baseball, trans rights, turkey, vaccines, wyoming

→ May 22, 2022
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/22/22.

For subscribers to The Athletic, I posted my first mock draft for 2022, and took reader questions in a Q&A on the site that afternoon.

On the Keith Law Show, I spoke with Jonathan Higgs of the band Everything Everything about their new album Raw Data Feel, which came out on Friday. You can subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I do send out a free email newsletter about twice a month, and for those of you who said you would attend an in-person event with me in London, it’s in the works now, so thank you all for responding. Speaking of books, Smart Baseball and The Inside Game are both available in paperback, and you can buy them at your local independent book store or at Bookshop.org.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: A new “war on terror” is the wrong approach to fighting domestic terrorism, but would just further curtail our civil liberties withot making us any safer.
A politically connected testing lab earned contract after contract for COVID testing in Nevada, but its tests didn’t work.
In an extra from her memoir, Selma Blair talks about first learning she had multiple sclerosis.
Miami’s mayor is a crypto advocate, and got the city involved with one such scheme – and the coin’s value has since dropped 95%. The article doesn’t even mention the environmental impact of cryptocurrency mining, which would seem especially important to a city like Miami.
Texas’s General Land Officer, led by Commissioner George P. Bush, diverted federal hurricane relief funds away from coastal communities to inland ones that are whiter and more likely to vote Republican.
The New York Times ran a story commemorating the 50^th anniversary of Dr. John Fryer’s speech to the American Psychiatric Association, where he revealed he was gay, doing so while wearing a disguise and without revealing his real name. The speech led to the removal of homosexuality from the APA’s Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). The excellent documentary Cured covers this story at greater length.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ed Yong points out that modest hospitalization numbers don’t tell the whole story about how much stress COVID-19 has put on our health care system.
Why are there gigantic blobs of molten rock and water in the Earth’s lower mantle?
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has the inside story on how the Rams’ ownership worked the NFL to secure the team’s move back to Los Angeles.
Pennsylvania Republicans who helped pass a mail-in voting law are now trying to get it thrown out.
The deaths of two Ohio State students due to fake Adderall that contained fentanyl gave rise, once again, to the myth that there’s fentanyl-laced cannabis in the wild.
Police in Highland Park, Michigan, seized a privately-owned building on dubious grounds, and then demanded that the owners buy the department two new police cars for its return. The department did give the building back to its owners without the ransom, but what are the consequences for the officials involved in this extortion?
Now right-wing politicians and media figures are targeting comedians who mock them, sending a torrent of threats and abuse their way.
A Twitter exec posted some thoughts on how much spam there actually is on the site, and what the company is doing to combat it.
The Society for Academic Emergency Medicine held its annual convention in New Orleans, and they posted (and deleted) a tweet from there showing members unmasked at an indoor concert.
A couple of right-wing nutjobs who also happen to hold office in the Virginia Beach area are suing Barnes and Noble to get specific LGBTQ+ books removed. I’m sure the party of laissez-faire capitalism will put a stop to its own people doing this any minute now!
These ridiculous laws in the American South that prohibit teachers from discussing racism are now making it very difficult for them to discuss the white nationalist who shot up a grocery store in a majority-Black Buffalo neighborhood.
The assaults on voting rights and abortion rights are inextricably linked, writes Brandon Tensley at CNN. It’s clear that the theocratic minority is more than happy to subvert the will of the majority if it suits their superstitious purposes.
The highly polarized public debate over abortion does not accurately reflect the nuanced views of the public, writes Christine Emba at the Washington Post.
Board game news: I didn’t know that a new version of Can’t Stop!, Sid Sackson’s addictive push-your-luck game, had come out from Eagle-Gryphon.
I backed the campaign for a new solitaire game called Resist!, based on the rebels who fought the fascist regime in Spain after the Spanish Civil War.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, board game news, coronavirus, first amendment, football, health, links, longreads, nevada, police, racism, science, social media, stick to baseball, texas

→ April 16, 2022
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/16/22.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I had one new post this week, a roundup of top 2022 draft prospects I’ve seen, including Druw Jones, Termarr Johnson, and the now-injured Dylan Lesko.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Cascadia, one of the best new games of 2021, from the same publisher as Calico. It’s another hex tile-laying game but simpler to learn and play, with variable rules you can fine-tune to allow kids to join.

My own podcast returned with the Productive Outs guys – Ian Miller of Kowloon Walled City and Riley Breckenridge of Thrice – as guests. You can subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I’m due for another issue my free email newsletter this upcoming week. You can find both of my books, Smart Baseball and The Inside Game, in paperback anywhere books are sold, including Bookshop.org.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Child welfare workers in Texas are resigning rather than enforce the state’s hateful law denying medical treatment to trans kids.

Vanity Fair has a long investigative piece on EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit that has been at the center of the discredited lab-leak hypothesis, showing how EHA’s leader, Peter Daszak, made the situation worse both before the pandemic began and after the search for SARS-CoV-2’s origins began.

Firearms have surpassed motor vehicle crashes as the leading cause of deaths for U.S. children and adolescents.

Writing in the New Yorker, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Elizabeth Kolbert writes about how two Florida lakes are suing to stop a development that would destroy nearly 2000 acres of wetlands. The lawsuit includes one actual human, as well as a marsh and a stream, and is the first of its kind in the U.S.

The CEO of Flutterwave, a Nigerian online payments and financial services company with a $3 billion valuation, may have engaged in fraud and insider trading to enrich himself at the expense of shareholders and employees with stock options.

The Texas Observer, a progressive investigative journalism magazine that had a particular focus on Indigenous affairs, lost most of its staff in the last six months due to a series of bungled situations and a divide over the periodical’s mission.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) worked to try to overturn the 2020 Presidential election, according to texts he sent to Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.

Biologist David Sabatini resigned his tenured professorship at MIT after three senior officials at the school recommended revoking it in the wake of sexual harassment allegations against him and concerns over his behavior towards other members of his lab. He is still, however, suing one of the women who has accused him of harassment.

David French writes in The Atlantic that the American right has “lost the plot” on free speech.

The British national who killed MP Sir David Amess was a “textbook example of radicalization” who started reading extremist propaganda online during the Syria conflict.

The cops who shoved a 75-year-old man to the ground for protesting were cleared of all wrongdoing. Because of course they were.

Meanwhile, a panel on the Fifth Circuit of the US Court of Appeals ruled that police who tortured a teenage girl in custody didn’t violate her rights.

Former St. Louis police officer Luther Hall, who was beaten by his fellow officers while working undercover during protests in the city in 2017, spoke out about his desire to leave the city and the lack of justice for his attackers.

There’s very strong evidence that the Epstein-Barr virus causes multiple sclerosis, although why some infected people develop the autoimmune disorder and others don’t isn’t clear.

Why aren’t Democrats doing anything to combat the GOP’s deranged claims that Democrats are all pedophiles and groomers?

South Dakota AG Jason Ravsnborg, who killed a man in a hit-and-run accident, may face consequences after all as the Republican-led legislature has voted to impeach him.

Texas is a shitshow in so many ways. Gov. Greg Abbott’s political stunt at the border has led truckers to demand that he stop inspections of every truck, a move he put in place due to baseless claims about border security. For a party that claims to be pro-business, this is a hell of a way to show it.

Climate change is contributing to the spread of Japanese encephalitis in Australia.

Techdirt decries major newspapers’ continuing failure to grasp social media.

Opinion journalism is beset by structural problems and bad actors. There are ways to fix both of these issues, from better labeling of opinion vs. news pieces to proper editing (in a world where most publications have reduced editorial staff substantiall).

Ukrainian hackers have published a tremendous amount of personal data on Russian troopse fighting in the current war, as have other activists seeking additional ways to fight back against Russia’s pointless invasion of its neighbor.

The Titans’ new state-funded stadium will cost about $2 billion, and the economic impact figures the team has given the legislature appear to have been created out of thin air. Great use of public funds in a state that offers below-average education to its citizens.

A Toronto man amassed a huge cache of guns and killed two men at random before his arrest, which may have prevented a mass shooting given the arsenal he had in his apartment.

Board game news: Birds of a Feather is back on Kickstarter, and while it’s clearly meant to capitalize on Wingspan’s runaway success, it’s also a much lighter game aimed at a different audience.

The newest game from publishers Lucky Duck Games (Chronicles of Crime) to hit Kickstarter is The Dark Quarter, a co-op narrative game set in New Orleans.

Postmark Games has a print-and-play game called Voyages that just requires you to bring your own dice.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, climate change, coronavirus, environment, frauds, health, links, longreads, metoo, police, south dakota, stick to baseball, tennessee, texas

→ April 2, 2022
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/2/22.

I had three posts for subscribers to the Athletic in the last ten days, two scouting notebooks from the Cactus League (here’s one, here’s the other), and my annual breakout candidates post. That last one is shorter than usual because I just couldn’t confidently back any other names for it.

I’m working on the next edition of my free email newsletter. You can find both of my books, Smart Baseball and The Inside Game, in paperback anywhere books are sold, including Bookshop.org.

And now, the links…

This is an extremely long read, even by longread standards, but if you want to understand why the vast majority of scientists accept a zoonotic origin for SARS-CoV-2 as the most likely explanation, read Philip Markolin’s post.
The University of Pennsylvania engaged in an unconscionable witch hunt against one of its own students, a victim of physical and sexual abuse whose mother appears to have told the school her daughter lied on her applications there and to the Rhodes Scholarship program. She is suing the school, which has not responded publicly to this article.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott loves to brag about his so-called “border initiative,” but the evidence doesn’t support his claims.
The Guardian has a look inside online cryptocurrency communities (although I suppose an offline one would be a bit weird), examining the sorts of people involved in that world, many of whom don’t fit the stereotypes.
Leonard Leo is stepping down as head of the arch-right, Uihlein-funded opinion site The Federalist to found a new conservative advocacy group, probably funded by more dark money. Leo had disproportionate influence in the conservative takeover of the federal judiciary.
The “CHEST” protocol supposedly used large doses of vitamin C to fight sepsis. It appears that the protocol’s creator, Dr. Paul Marik, fabricated his results.
The editorial board of Nature argues that this is a terrible time to stop tracking COVID-19.
Bitcoin is a disaster for our environment. Can we stop it?
With scientists under attack for nothing more than doing their jobs, who will step in to defend and protect them?
It’s no longer the main story from the awards, but Justin Chang pointed out that the improvement in the quality of Oscar nominees has come with the telecast’s increasing disdain for those same movies.
Don’t Look Up was terrible, and director/co-writer Adam McKay really doesn’t get why.
Meanwhile, the Hollywood Reporter published commentary from an Oscar voter who remained anonymous but was willing to show himself as a racist, retrograde asshole. I’m not sure why the Academy wouldn’t sift through the ballots to identify the voter and ban him from voting.
The Governor of Utah vetoed the state’s bill against trans athletes, and his letter explaining why is worth reading. The transphobic theocrats in the state legislature overrode his veto, though. This was all over one athlete, by the way.

South Dakota Republicans declined to impeach their attorney general even though he killed a man in a hit-and-run accident. He’s going to get off with zero consequences for the homicide.
The University of Texas-Austin denied tenure to a pregnant professor and now has to pay her $3 million after losing a lawsuit. That’s good, but will it discourage them or any other university from doing it again?
A Tennessee nurse made a medication error that killed a patient, admitted it immediately, and was still found guilty of homicide by a jury. I’m not sure how this helps medical safety. I do think it might deter people from becoming nurses in Tennessee.
There’s a new wave of specialty coffee shops in India, a country that would traditionally export its best coffee to developed countries.
Children are bearing the brunt of Russia’s brutal war on Ukraine.
A Wilmington, Delaware, teacher who mentored dozens of kids and became a popular advocate for students from the city died in a motorcycle accident last month.
NEON announced that its film Memoria will go on permanent tour in cinemas around the country, which is incredibly ableist – many people can’t go to movie theaters for COVID-19 or other reasons.
Board game news: The legacy game Jurassic World: The Legacy of Isle Nublar has one more week on Kickstarter.
Nightmare Cathedral, what appears to a midweight area control and worker-placement game from the publishers of Teotihuacan and Tekhenu, is on Gamefound for another 11 days.
Stefan Fatsis has a fun story about a ridiculous coincidence in competitive Scrabble.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, coronavirus, cryptocurrencies, dark money, delaware, frauds, links, longreads, oscars, stick to baseball, tennessee, texas, utah

→ March 19, 2022
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/19/22.

I had a surprisingly busy week, writing five pieces for The Athletic about some of the big trades and signings since the lockout ended

My podcast guest this week was old friend Joe Sheehan, talking about the CBA and what transactions had already taken place at the time we spoke on Monday afternoon. Listen via The Athletic or subscribe on iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Over at Paste, I reviewed MicroMacro Crime City, the Spiel des Jahres winner for 2021, a mystery game that asks you to solve a series of 16 cases by examining a giant map and answering a set of questions. It’s fun and novel, but it’s one-and-done – once you finish the 16 cases, you’ve completed the game.

And now, the links:

Koch Industries, whose owner, Charles Koch, is probably the biggest dark-money donor in U.S. politics, is refusing to cease doing business in Russia. This is the same Charles Koch who funds all kinds of astroturfed efforts against LGBT rights and CRT in schools so he can keep his taxes low and regulation to a minimum.
The completion of a highway in the western Amazon, first started in the 1970s to connect the otherwise isolated Manaus (2.2 million people) to Porto Velho (539,000), is leading to deforestation and now killings of residents by those seeking to profit from the construction.
As Florida’s death-loving Governor claims you shouldn’t vaccinate kids against COVID-19, the evidence and the experts agree that this advice is wrong.
David Gorski takes on DeSantis and the Great Barrington Declaration grifters by pointing out that there’s a long, dark history of this kind of thinking, rooted in eugenics.
One-third of all U.S. child COVID-19 deaths came during the omicron surge this winter, in case you’re still on the fence about vaccinating your kids.
We have yet more evidence that ivermectin doesn’t help COVID-19 patients at all.
State government health policies are driving increasing gaps in health outcomes, notably in the varying state responses to COVID-19.
Duchess County, New York, decided to spend $12.5 million in federal COVID-19 aid funds to renovate the Hudson Valley Renegades’ stadium.
Netflix cancelled The Baby-Sitters Club after two seasons, with the first season taking seven Emmy nominations and two wins. Vulture spoke to one of the show’s executive producers about the service’s decision. Slashfilm did as well, with more focus on the loss it represents for female audiences.
Tennessee State Rep. Gloria Johnson (D) tweeted through a list of some of the alarming, hate-filled, anti-science bills coming in that state.
Like the law in Texas preventing schools from talking about race, a bill that was designed to stop the teaching of critical race theory even though it wasn’t actually being taught anywhere.
Board game news: Birdwatcher, a fast-playing competitive game from first-time designer Zakir Jafry, is available for pre-order. I’m going to have a hard time not thinking this was at least inspired by Wingspan, though.
The Villainous game universe will get its first set of Star Wars villains this summer. I’m slightly disappointed at the absence of Cad Bane, though.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, brazil, coronavirus, florida, links, longreads, new york, stick to baseball, tennessee, texas, tv

→ March 13, 2022
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/13/22.

I released my first ranking of draft prospects for 2022 over on The Athletic, and held a live Q&A to take questions about it. I also wrote up the two trades from Saturday night, involving Chris Bassitt and Isiah Kiner-Falefa/Mitch Garver.

Over at Paste, I reviewed The Adventures of Robin Hood, a narrative game from the designer of the Legends of Andor, but with simpler mechanics and a clever encounter system with a two-layered board.

I spoke with the Locked On Dodgers podcast in a two-part interview you can watch here and here. I also sent a new issue of my free email newsletter, talking about Monty Python and the development of my sense of humor.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New York Times asks what it means that even Americans are consuming less beef.
Vanity Fair has a fascinating article on Grimes, talking about her persona, her upcoming concept album, and that guy.
Kathryn Schulz, who appeared on my podcast a few weeks ago, wrote about the complicated history of Bambi, the book, as it enters the public domain.
ProPublica reports on barbaric conditions in Louisiana’s largest juvenile detention facility in Louisiana, part of the race in the Deep South to see which state can get to the 19^th century fastest.
Conservative billionaires pushing fake news are becoming a major US export, as now a single South Korean oligarch is pushing conspiracy theories to keep the two Koreas at war.
Vulture has a wonderful interview with Murderville showrunner Krister Johnson on the “treasure chest” of in-jokes, Easter eggs, and other small gags on Homestar Runner.
Melissa Rodriguez, the former executive chef at Del Posto, is now opening three new restaurants in that space, including a high-end pizzeria. Resy interviewed her about the venture, the pandemic, and the end of Del Posto (which was good, but wildly overpriced).
Several research papers still in the pre-print stage have put more nails in the coffin of the lab-leak hypothesis have appeared in the last two weeks. The New Republic looks at how we can learn from this to try to prevent the next zoonotic pandemic.
The best path forward now is for institutions to work to improve mitigation efforts, including encouraging further vaccinations.
Cobb County is taking a big loss on its public funding of Truist Park. This Axios piece has a quick summary of the same.
Stop acting like pediatric deaths from COVID-19 don’t matter because of their numbers. Those children had names.
Mask requirements in schools reduced COVID-19 cases. We’re going to see increases in cases again now that schools everywhere are lifting mask mandates.
I don’t understand how asking people to harass a journal editor to try to short-circuit the peer review process is remotely ethical, but Alina Chan, who wrote a book that pushes the lab-leak hypothesis, is long gone around the bend at this point.
The Philadelphia Inquirer had a long article on where to eat and what to do in Wilmington, hitting our big 3 fine-dining restaurants (Le Cavalier, La Fia, and Bardea), and several other favorite spots of ours (Swigg, Wilma’s, De.co Food Hall, The Queen), although they whiffed badly with some of their inclusions (Mrs. Robino’s, Wilmington Country Store).
ABC News ran a long segment (about 12 minutes) on the lack of any evidence to support the use of ivermectin against COVID-19.
Now bot accounts are using false fact-checks to spread fake news about the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee appointed an arms dealer who sold ammunition to the Aurora mass shooter to the state’s board of education, not long after appointing a 9/11 hoaxer to the state’s “textbook commission.” What a shitshow.
Brandon Tensley writes at CNN about how and why the GOP is targeting LGBTQ+ rights across the south and far west. I think the answer is simple: They’re pandering to their evangelical base. This is why the raving lunatics running Idaho want life in prison for anyone providing gender-affirming care to trans kids.
And in Texas, a family that once invited Attorney General Ken Paxton and his wife to dinner found themselves the target of one of the state’s witch-hunt investigations into families with trans kids. Shame on anyone who votes Republican in Texas this year. This policy is going to lead to more suicides and grievous harm to vulnerable people, all to satisfy a small population of bigots.
Disney has been censoring same-sex affection in Pixar’s films, according to several employees, who wrote a letter also demanding that the company stop donating to Florida legislators who voted for the state’s “don’t say gay” bill.
A Georgia man took an $85,000 SBA loan for his business, and then spent two-thirds of it on a rare Pokémon card.
An American man wanted on rape and sexual assault charges in Utah is accused of faking his own death and pretending to be someone else in a COVID ward in Scotland, where he’s since married a British woman. The man, suspected of being George Rossi, has been identified by his tattoos, and his adoptive father also says that it’s him.
A Trump-appointed judge dismissed a complaint against Rep. Madison Cawthorn, alleging that his support of the January 6^th insurrection made him ineligible to run for office, because people might take up arms otherwise.
Apparently Trump has been holding “contests” where small-donor dollars would win trips to meet him, but then they never award the prizes, according to a report from the Washington Post.
Board game news: Former Z-Man Games employees have founded a new publisher, Moon Crab Games, and announced their first game, Leviathan Wilds, a cooperative, tactical game of movement on various boards representing massive creatures the players try to climb.
Hamlet, a cute town-building game from the designer of the lovely game Petrichor, is fully funded already on Kickstarter.
So is Tiwanaku (formerly known as Pachamama), a Minesweeper-inspired board game from the publishers of Magic Maze.
And so is Envelopes of Cash, a game about corrupt recruiting in college football (so, you know, reality), designed by a reader of mine.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, board game news, coronavirus, delaware, Economics, frauds, idaho, lgbt rights, links, longreads, louisiana, pizza, russia, stick to baseball, tennessee, texas, the swamp

→ March 5, 2022
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/5/22.

I answered some questions on the Blue Jays’ farm system this week, which was a transcription of my appearance on our Spin Rates podcast. The Klawchats returned this week. I’m planning to start written draft coverage this upcoming week with a top 30.

On my own podcast, my guest was author and journalist Kathryn Schulz, talking about her wonderful new memoir Lost and Found, about the death of her father and how she met and married her wife, the author Casey Cep. Listen via The Athletic or subscribe on iTunes, Amazon, that other site, or wherever you get your podcasts. I appeared on the Romantic About Baseball podcast as well.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Why are Wisconsin judges charging women who accuse their husbands of abuse? ProPublica documents the case of one woman who did just that and lost custody of her four kids because the judge charged her with contempt four times and ordered her arrest.
The New Yorker has a tremendous interview with J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, conducted by Helen Rosner, as his new book The Wok hits shelves on Tuesday.
My friend Tim Grierson wrote about Tears for Fears’ enduring hit “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.”
I don’t know if this New York Times piece, on how RFK Jr.’s family friends feel about his descent into anti-vaxx grifting, is helpful or not.
Two new pre-prints show more evidence for a zoonotic origin for the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. There’s also a follow-up thread that underscores one of the findings that wasn’t well-covered in that article. Needless to say, the lab-leak grifters were quick to attack – the author of a book that depends on the lab-leak hypothesis asked her followers on twitter to harass one of the journal’s editors to try to stop publication, and is trying increasingly desperate attacks on the pre-prints.
Also, a new journal article found that gender-affirming care improved mental health outcomes in transgender children. Just in case you weren’t clear on what was going on in Texas and anywhere the Republican Party is in charge. Oh, Texas Children’s Hospital has paused hormone therapies for trans kids, thanks to the state’s directive. These could be your kids. We should all be outraged.
Of course, now pro-Putin propaganda is flooding anti-vax groups online, along with the usual anti-science and anti-Semitic nonsense.
There’s no evidence that wearing a mask leads to physical or psychological harm for kids. They don’t cause carbon dioxide poisoning, don’t lead to developmental delays, and help prevent the spread of COVID-19.
The Biden Administration’s most recent moves have killed our collective approach to slowing the pandemic, by taking measures designed to protect the most vulnerable members of society and making them into personal decisions.
Now anti-vaxxers are trying to convince parents not to take their kids to the pediatrician.
Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey and state Sen. Wendy Rogers are both directly connected to white nationalist Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes. The connection may be part of why Ducey declined to run for the U.S. Senate this week.
Supreme Court nominations have become a farce because of a Supreme Court ruling, writes Dana Milbank of the Washington Post.
While nobody was paying much attention, Trump endorsed a right-wing plan to take over the GOP – and steal an election or two.
The newly-elected government of Honduras is going to ban open-pit mining, a profitable but environmentally disastrous practice.
A small bit of good environmental news: the scourge of purple sea urchins that has devastated the California coast’s kelp forests has led to a new industry that harvests and farms the urchins to sell uni, the roe of sea urchins often found at sushi restaurants, in turn easing some of the pressure on the kelp forests.
Missouri lawmakers are rushing to legalize sports betting, but only in casinos and sports stadiums. So who’s funding them?
Legendary video game designer Sid Meier (Civilization, Pirates!, Railroad Tycoon) warned of the dangers of the industry’s shift towards in-game purchases.
My friend Zabe Bent was quoted in a brief NY Times piece on how best to design bike lanes in cities.
Board game news: Capstone Games opened pre-orders for the Terra Mystica: Big Box, including the base game, two expansions, and a solo “Automa” mode, for $149.95.
Library Labyrinth, a cooperative library-themed board game from the left-wing publisher Dissent Games, is now on Kickstarter.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, coronavirus, environment, links, longreads, missouri, Music, russia, stick to baseball, the swamp, video games

→ February 26, 2022
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/26/22.

No new content directly from me this week for subscribers to the Athletic, but if I can shake this cold I have right now – the first time I’ve been sick since we all started masking just under two years ago – I’ll have a draft piece this upcoming week. I have done Q&As with our beat writers who cover the Orioles, Dbacks, Pirates, Red Sox, Twins, and Royals, and subscribers can also see all parts of my prospects ranking package here.

My guest on the Keith Law Show this week was Matthew Murphy, lead singer and songwriter of the Wombats, talking about their latest album Fix Yourself, Not the World; his unusual lyrics; and mental health. Listen via The Athletic or subscribe on iTunes, Amazon, that other site, or wherever you get your podcasts. My free email newsletter returned last week as well, catching those of you who subscribe up on various things from my life from the last month as well as links to all the things I have written since the start of 2022.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The wife of a Supreme Court justice was active in the efforts to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 Presidential election. Ginni Thomas is also active in the fight to ban abortion in the United States, while her husband, Justice Clarence Thomas, has been flouting ethics guidelines for decades by attending events for her pet causes.
Forbes writer Laura Shin identifies the man likely behind a 2016 crypto hack that stole abouto $11 billion in Ethereum.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered the head of the state’s power grid to keep wholesale power prices at their maximum level, tossing billions in extra revenue to power companies, during the state’s deep freeze last winter.
Two separate research teams used machine-learning tools to identify the same two men as the likely initiators of the QAnon hoax. Ron Watkins, one of the two men, has been identified by previous efforts as well.
Reuters explains how a glitch in software used to hack a Saudi activist’s iPhone revealed how the Israeli company NSO Group was helping governments spy on their own citizens across the world.
Even a mild case of COVID-19 can lead to much higher heart disease risk after the infection is over.
Another grifter has emerged in the COVID-19 denial world – Marc Girardot, who wants you to subscribe to his substack even though he evinces ignorance of basic chemistry.
China employed thousands of fake Twitter accounts to push propaganda around the recent Winter Olympics.
Tucker Carlson started backpedaling after years of his praise for Vladimir Putin showed up on state-run TV in Russia this past week. Then the Fox News host said putting Ketanji Brown Jackson on the Supreme Court would make the U.S. like Rwanda, his go-to country for white nationalist commentary even though Rwanda has a lower homicide rate than the United States.
A California couple faces charges of bilking $2.8 million from Grand Rapids School District using some pretty basic phishing techniques.
The Baltimore Museum of Art hired some of its security guards to curate special exhibitions of artworks the guards selected from the collection.
Singer Isobel Campbell offered her tribute to former Screaming Trees singer Mark Lanegan, who died this week at age 57.
The Lord of the Rings series has sparked ridiculous criticism over its casting of nonwhite actors as (checks notes) dwarves and elves and such.
My editor at Paste got to check out the new Disney hotel/LARP experience the Galactic Starcruiser, writing about the juxtaposition of being in a fictional war setting while an actual war was going on; as did a writer for Gizmodo, who noted that a two-day stay for a family of four will run you $6000.
The cooperative board game The Warriors: Come Out and Play, based on the cult classic film from 1979, is now on sale.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, coronavirus, cryptocurrencies, disneyworld, hoaxes, links, stick to baseball, texas, the swamp

→ February 19, 2022
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/19/22.

My prospects ranking package is now all posted for subscribers to the Athletic. Here’s the complete rundown of everything that ran:

The top 100 prospects
The prospects who just missed the top 100
The ranking of all 30 farm systems
The org top 20s:

Baltimore	Houston	Chicago Cubs
Boston	LA Angels	Cincinnati
NY Yankees	Oakland	Milwaukee
Tampa Bay	Seattle	Pittsburgh
Toronto	Texas	St. Louis
Chicago White Sox	Atlanta	Arizona
Cleveland	Miami	Colorado
Detroit	NY Mets	LA Dodgers
Kansas City	Philadelphia	San Diego
Minnesota	Washington	San Francisco

I also did two Q&As over at the Athletic, one the day the farm rankings went up and one the day the top 100 went up.

Since my last stick to baseball post, I’ve reviewed several board games over at Paste as well, including Nidavellir, one of my favorite games from 2021; Equinox, a new version of Reiner Knizia’s game Colossal Arena; The Rocketeer: Fate of the Future, a two-player game based on the 1991 cult classic; and Wilson & Shep, a cute bluffing game for players as young as five.

I’ve done a bunch of podcasts and radio things related to the top 100, including the Seattle Sports Union; the Update with Adam Copeland (talking Giants prospects); Press Box Online (Orioles); Sox Machine (White Sox); and Karraker & Smallmon (Cardinals).

My own podcast returned in late January, with three episodes since my last roundup: Michael Schur, author of How to Be Perfect and creator of the show The Good Place; the post-punk band Geese, an episode where I answered a bunch of reader questions on the top 100 too; and union labor lawyer Eugene Freedman, who gave his thoughts on the MLB lockout. You can subscribe via iTunes, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: There is no evidence that wearing masks in school harms children’s mental health or educational development. None. I’ll repeat: There is no fucking evidence, people. Every one of those anti-mask grifters you see on Twitter hawking their $80 a year substack is full of shit.
In 2003, a woman in Australia was convicted of smothering all four of her babies to death. Several researchers believe she is innocent, and that a mutant gene was the real cause of the tragedy.
MIT Technology Review has a very long piece on the scientist at the center of the lab-leak conspiracy theory.
The scourge of private equity is now causing rapid inflation in housing prices, with PE firms buying up apartment buildings, hiking rents, and skimping on or even forgoing basic services to tenants.
WIRED looks at how personal finance apps are making phone scams even easier.
The Harvard Gazette ran an excerpt from Kevin Birmingham’s 2014 book on Ulysses’ long and tortuous road to publication. I reviewed The Most Dangerous Book back in 2016.
MEL gives us the subterfuge behind the surprise pop hit “Tubthumping,” and how the anarcho-communist band Chumbawamba used its success for their own ends.
Are you getting cardboard shipping boxes from U-Line? Not only does the family that owns U-Line fund the far-right site The Federalist, they’ve given millions to other right-wing extremists, including some of January 6^th terrorists. If you use U-Line in your business, find another vendor. If you get a package in a U-Line box, contact the shipper and ask them to use someone else for their boxes.
Space elevators are a staple of hard science fiction novels and stories, but if one breaks, it’s a massive and potentially fatal disaster. The plot of Green Mars includes the sabotage of a space elevator, and while I don’t care for the novel, Kim Stanley Robinson does a reasonable job of getting the science right on what happens when the broken cable hits the ground.
REI sent this union-busting email to all of its employees, then published a podcast full of dubious rationalizations for its anti-union efforts.
The Washington Post profiled the woman who led the first successful effort to unionize a Starbucks store.
COVID-19 becoming “endemic” doesn’t mean it’s becoming harmless.
In fact, there’s evidence that the claims that the omicron variant is less severe than prior ones are due to greater population immunity, not to any reduced ability of the virus to cause serious illness. Also, there’s a subvariant of concern, too, although once again, vaccination confers substantial benefits.
COVID denialists on the right seem to think the virus is actually a person – at least in the language they use to minimize it.
Right-wing pundits, including Jordan Peterson, were up in arms because a Boston hospital denied a heart transplant to a man who refused the COVID-19 vaccines – but such rules are routine to increase the likelihood of the patient’s survival.
Anti-vaccine loon Christiane Northrup has become a major donor to Maine Republican candidates, including former Governor Paul LePage.
Two Long Island nurses have been charged with selling fake vaccine cards and entering the false information into vaccination databases, taking home $1.5 million in the process. But what happens to the people who bought them?
An inevitable consequence of all of this anti-vaccine misinformation is that now measles vaccination rates are falling in the UK.
Meanwhile, Republicans in 14 states are pushing bills that would block medical boards from censuring doctors who spread misinformation; in Tennessee, the Know-Nothings in the state legislature even pressured the medical board into removing language from its website discouraging such doctors.
Speaking of foundations of misinformation, Fox News was happy to talk to an anti-vax state trooper … until he died of COVID-19.
A New Jersey police officer was driving drunk when he struck a pedestrian … and then put the body in his car and drove home with it. He didn’t call 911. He now faces a dozen felony charges.
The story about the Los Angeles train robbery a few weeks ago, which made news across the country and even in Europe, is really about how Union Pacific laid off 4/5 of its security force – and how the mainstream media increasingly just buys whatever corporations are selling.
This is horrifying: San Francisco police used DNA from a woman’s rape kit to identify her as a suspect in another crime. And we wonder why women don’t come forward to report their assaults. I’ve already reached out to two state Senators in Delaware, and to the Attorney General, to see what can be done to make sure this does not occur here.
Over 650 Philly cops who claim they’re too sick or injured to work are fine holding down other jobs.
A tax cheat and father of a child murderer has bankrolled a right-wing streaming network that has given Steve Bannon a platform again. It’s available through most major streaming platforms, too.
A tremendous piece of local journalism led to the resignation of the police chief of Brookside, Alabama, who had set up a racket that scammed drivers out of over $500,000 a year in fines and forfeitures – often when they were no closer to the town than the local interstate.
A Republican state senator in Texas has sworn in a declaration that the state’s Republicans violated federal voting rights laws in a recent redistricting.
Minneapolis police insisted on a no-knock warrant in a predawn raid – raid, a word that should be reserved for war, or perhaps when there’s a lost ark involved – on an apartment in the city. They ended up murdering an innocent civilian sleeping in that apartment.
Spokane district attorney Larry Haskell is under fire, again, for his wife’s long history of racist and white nationalist comments online. It’s more disturbing that voters keep electing him.
Families in West Virginia are suing a school that held a Christian revival on campus during school hours, with some teachers forcing students to attend. This isn’t the first such incident in this school district.
I liked Encanto, and assume it’s going to win the Oscar for best animated film, but I noticed the script glossed over the weird power dynamic between the Madrigals and the townsfolk. Jim Vorel wrote about that very topic for Paste.
Hannah Keyser has a great piece at Yahoo! Sports asking why people get so mad over Hall of Fame voting. The abuse was worse than ever this year.
Ohio’s extreme gerrymandering leads to more extreme laws from legislators who don’t have to worry about re-election, even though the laws are often opposed by a majority of Ohio voters.
The mayor of Ridgeland, Mississippi, a suburb of Jackson, decided to order the city’s libraries to remove all LGBTQ+ materials before he’d release their funding. The city’s leaders are denying this is what’s happening, but a local nonprofit group has raised all of the missing funds from donations.
This feels like old news now, but McMinn County, Tennessee, banned Maus, the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, from its school curricula because there are naked mice in it.
Who’s behind all the book-banning movements? Major conservative dark-money donors, of course.
And they’re also pushing educational gag orders across the country, with over 120 such bills introduced in the last 13 months.
Like the one in Florida, supported by the death-loving governor there, that wants to force LGBTQ+ kids back in the closet. (DeSantis can’t even bring himself to condemn a neo-Nazi rally in Orlando.)
Or the laws targeting the chimera of critical race theory in schools, which threatens teachers’ livelihoods and even their freedom.
LZ Granderson writes about the extreme illogic of Michelle Tafoya leaving the media to campaign against racism education, when she herself lives in a town that has become majority white thanks to racial covenants in housing contracts.
The British government recently moved to make something called “virginity repair” surgery illegal. I didn’t know this was a thing, but it is clearly founded in some seriously deranged religious beliefs.
Matt Walsh, espouser of misogynistic and homophobic views under the guise of Christianity, tried to trick a bunch of trans people into participating in a documentary attacking trans rights.
This is from before the Oscar nominations were announced, but the LA Times‘ Justin Chang implored the Academy to nominate Drive My Car for Best Picture – which they did.
Craig Calcaterra continues to expose New Albany, Ohio, school board member Philip Derrow as a science-denying history-ignorant turnip.
Is a building at Florida State University causing cancer in the people who work there? Cancer clusters are often matters of chance, but in this case, there’s evidence of actual carcinogens in the air ducts, and the school has closed the building to investigate.
Missouri’s Attorney General Eric Schmitt courted snitches among parents opposed to mask mandates, setting off a series of pointless, expensive battles that probably did way more to harm kids than wearing a mask ever could.
Instagram is doing nothing to suspend or block accounts promoting hate speech.
I don’t often agree with Jennifer Rubin’s editorials in the Washington Post, but I think her take here is correct: The only way Democrats can hope to fight Republican voter-suppression efforts is to change the venue to local elections and referenda, taking the message directly to voters – and even that may not be enough.
I can’t love this tweet enough.
Board game news: I saw a prototype of Earth, a tableau- and engine-building game from Inside Up Games, at PAX Unplugged, and from what I saw it looks right up my alley. It’s on Kickstarter now.
So is Trekking Through History, the third Trekking game (following Trekking the National Parks and Trekking the World) from Underdog Games.
And so is Rolling Heights, the new roll-and-write game from the designer of Mystic Vale.
Tiwanaku, the game previously known as Pachamama, will relaunch on Kickstarter on March 9^th.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, board game news, coronavirus, dark money, florida, free speech, links, mississippi, missouri, movies, Music, philadelphia, police, san francisco, science, stick to baseball, texas, unions, vaccines, voter suppression, washington state, west virginia

Archives