coronavirus — Page 9

→ May 9, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/9/20.

I was back writing this week, with three new pieces for The Athletic: how MLB’s decision to cut the draft to five rounds hurts players and the sport; a look back at the 2004 draft and what might have happened had the Padres taken Justin Verlander at #1 overall; and a profile of Dodgers prospect Brandon Lewis, who changed his diet and conditioning habits to transform his body and become a fourth-round pick .

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, is now out, and you can buy it anywhere you buy books, like here via bookshop.org, which supports independent bookstores directly or by providing logistics and delivery for them. I’m donating my proceeds from sales of my book through my affiliate account there to charity, sending $100 this week to the Food Bank of Delaware, our local food pantry.

WIRED excerpted part of the first chapter of The Inside Game, on anchoring bias and why it tells us to move to an automated strike zone; the link made Pocket’s Best Of list this week. I also spoke to Inside Science about the book.

I appeared on the Poscast this week with Joe Posnanski and Ellen Adair, which you can listen to on The Athletic, Apple, Spotify, or Stitcher; and on the Inquiring Minds podcast, which you can get on Apple or Stitcher. On The Keith Law Show, I had Meghan Montemurro, our Phillies writer, on to talk about that team and the Athletic’s ongoing OOTP simulation of the 2020 season; you can listen on The Athletic, Apple, Spotify, or Stitcher.

I sent out another edition of my email newsletter this week to subscribers – it’s free, and easy to sign up, and no one has ever complained that I send it too often.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Donald Trump has long claimed he was a top high school baseball player who was scouted by a couple of MLB teams. Leander Schaerlaeckens looked into this at length for Slate, and found the answer is “not bloody likely.” The piece includes a quote from me in reaction to hearing some of the stats Schaerlaeckens was able to unearth.
ExplainCOVID.org is a new site, launched by Emily Oster, Professor of Economics at Brown, and Galit Alter, Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, designed to answer common questions about the virus, how to protect yourself, and what you should (or shouldn’t) believe in the news.
The LA Times ran with a story last week about how SARS-CoV-2 had already mutated into a new, more dangerous strain … but that report was wildly premature, says Ed Yong, author of We Contain Multitudes and an essential writer on anything COVID-19 right now.
Coronavirus cases continue to spike in Arizona, but the state is already reopening as if everything were fine. This could have a huge impact on MLB’s schedule – it’s hard to imagine the season restarting if Arizona is in an unplayable state.
This is after the state government in Arizona told university researchers to stop modeling COVID-19 outcomes and limited the researchers’ access to data, presumably because the models showed the Arizona government to be making reckless policy decisions that will lead to more deaths and serious illnesses.
If you’re pushing to reopen the economy, you probably don’t need or care about child care.
Texas is also reopening, too soon, and the governor even admitted in a private phone call that the reopening will lead to a new surge in cases. They don’t care how many people die, as long as they’re okay financially.
Anti-vaxxers are trying to use COVID-19 to recruit more people to their delusional cause.
Why do Republicans keep comparing COVID-19 public health policies to the Nazis? Pennsylvania State Rep. Chris Dush (R) did it, and now multiple Ohio legislators have done the same.
A Native American health center in Seattle asked the federal government for COVID-19 medical supplies. The Trump Administration sent them body bags.
Mosquitos infected with the fungal parasite Microsporidia MB may have total immunity to the genus of parasites that causes malaria, Plasmodium, notably P. Falciparum, which is the most common and lethal agent of transmission. It’s an early study but notable in that Microsporidia MB has many biological and ‘lifestyle’ similarities to Wolbachia, a gram-negative bacterium that protects mosquitos from many viruses and has potential to limit their ability to spread malarial agents as well.
Six people were killed in March 2019 when a flawed pedestrian bridge built by FIU in Sweetwater, Florida, collapsed just five days after it had been raised. FIU just announced plans to replace it, although nobody has actually been held accountable for what appear to be multiple failures in the design and construction process last time around.
I felt personally attacked by this (parody) column called “No One Wants to Play Your Weird German Game About Trains, Dude.” Russian Railroads is a fine game and I don’t care what you say.
Days of Wonder announced Ticket to Ride: Amsterdam, the third mini-TtR game after New York and London.
Two Kickstarters of note: High Noon, a tactical card game that promises to be easy to learn but takes 1-2 hours to play, already passed its goal this week; while the narrative board game Sea of Legends funded in just six hours after launching the same day.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, board game news, coronavirus, links, science, stick to baseball

→ May 2, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/2/20.

I was busy this week promoting The Inside Game, my new book, now available from bookshop.org and other fine retail outlets. As of Thursday, Midtown Scholar in Harrisburg had signed copies for sale. I’m especially thrilled to see how positive the reviews have been, from a starred review in Publishers Weekly to this glowing writeup in the Maine Edge. Library Journal also “highly recommended” the book, although the review is only for subscribers.

WIRED has an excerpt from The Inside Game on its site, a portion of the chapter on anchoring bias that discusses a major reason why the automated strike zone would be an improvement over human umps.

I appeared on several great podcasts this week, including:

Jeremy Schaap’s The Sporting Life: ESPN Podcenter, Apple, Spotify, Stitcher
Inquiring Minds: Apple; Stitcher
Wharton Moneyball: Apple, Spotify, Stitcher
Sox Machine: Apple, Spotify, Stitcher
KPCC Airtalk: Apple, Spotify, Stitcher (around the 93:00 mark)

On my own podcast this week, I had board game designer & Blue Jays fan Daryl Andrews (Sagrada, Bosk), talking about his latest games, designing & playing during self-isolation, and his Toronto fandom. You can subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or Stitcher.

I was interviewed by my friend Tim Grierson for MEL Magazine, talking about my new book and life in self-isolation.

Also, my first book, Smart Baseball, is now available in Korean. If you’re in South Korea, you can pick it up here on Kyobo.

I reviewed the game Half Truth, a fun party/trivia game designed by Ken Jennings and Richard Garfield, for Paste this week, and reviewed the digital adaptation of the great dice-drafting game Sagrada for Ars Technica.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Can we just give Ed Yong a Pulitzer Prize for his essay in the Atlantic called “Why the Coronavirus is So Confusing?” It is clear, coherent, comprehensive, and serious without being alarmist. It makes clear the role disinformation is playing in the pandemic, lays appropriate blame for the U.S.’s poor and late response, and discusses the structural problems that made a pandemic of some sort inevitable. It’s the best piece I’ve read this year.
CNN has the story of the man who spent 46 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, the longest such wrongful sentence in U.S. history.
Gabrielle Hamilton, chef-owner of Prune and author of Blood, Bones, and Butter, wrote a poignant, self-searching editorial in the New York Times asking if her restaurant really is “essential” and whether she’ll have the energy or the funds to reopen.
Writing for SB Nation, Shakeia Taylor looks at the curious life of Effa Manley, Negro Leagues owner and Baseball Hall of Famer, and, according to multiple sources, a white woman who passed herself off as black when it was convenient to do so.
Why does Belgium have such a high COVID-19 fatality rate? One major reason is that they’re being more honest in reporting such deaths.
It’s “doubtful” that COVID-19 was accidentally released from a Wuhan lab, but that won’t stop conspiracy-mongers and xenophobes from spreading a probable lie.
Those two Bakersfield ER docs you might have seen on Youtube calling for states to reopen their economies? They’re quacks, pushing a bogus epidemiology, which I presume is for attention.
Progressive women politicians are being offered “a poisoned chalice” when it comes to Joe Biden, who faces a serious allegation from Tara Reade that he sexually assaulted her in the 1990s. Meanwhile, Biden, obviously taking this very seriously, appointed notorious partier Chris Dodd, himself involved in sexual assault allegations (with Ted Kennedy) in the 1980s, to serve on his VP selection committee.
Tennessee restaurants re-opened as the state saw its biggest one-day jump in COVID-19 cases. The states that were the slowest to shut down or refused to do so will compete with the states that rushed to re-open for the worst spikes in COVID-19 cases, and I expect they’ll ask the federal government to bail out their incompetence, too.
Iowa is one of those states that never closed, but governor Kim Reynolds (R) is already loosening restrictions, even though COVID-19 cases there are surging.
Cosplayers stormed the Michigan Capitol this week, armed with small-penis symbols, and some called for the Governor’s murder, to which state Republicans have said … nothing.
The shutdown is changing how people buy books, and has given a huge boost to the startup bookshop.org, which I have begun using for all affiliate links to books on this site.
Tim Grierson also interviewed the director of A Secret Love, a wonderful new Netflix documentary about two women, one a former AAGPL star, who were a couple for nearly 70 years but hid their relationship even from close family until the very end.
Why did billionaire Monty Bennett get $96 million in Payroll Protection Program loans that his company, Ashford Inc., does not appear to plan to pay employees? It’s a bit of a shell game, as Ashford merely “advises” two hotel companies Bennett owns.
Why did my undergraduate alma mater maintain such close ties with Jeffrey Epstein even after his conviction for sex crimes against a minor?
Betsy Levy Paluck writes in the Washington Post about how she gave birth by herself during this pandemic, but she never felt alone.
No board game news this week, but I know of two interesting Kickstarters coming on Tuesday and will tweet about them when they launch.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, bookstores, coronavirus, harvard, iowa, links, longreads, metoo, michigan, restaurants, stick to baseball, tennessee

→ April 25, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/25/20.

The Inside Game is out! You can buy the physical book on Bookshop.org to support independent bookstores or get the Kindle version on amazon. (Some of my biggest fans have already left one-star reviews!) Audible named it one of their top picks in History/Nonfiction for the spring of 2020 too.

To promote the book, I did a live ‘virtual’ bookstore event with help from Nats reliever and voracious reader Sean Doolittle, which you can watch if you registered and bought the book through Politics and Prose. I also appeared on several podcasts:

Grierson & Leitch: Conversations (Apple, Spotify, Stitcher)
Baseball by the Book (Apple, Spotify, Stitcher)
Birds All Day (Athletic, Apple, Spotify, Stitcher)
Creative Nonfiction (Apple, Stitcher)
The Good Phight’s Hittin’ Season (Apple, Spotify, Stitcher)

There are also some very positive reviews for The Inside Game out already on Throneberry Fields, Farther Off the Wall, and Porchlight Books. It also made a Wall Street Journal roundup of three recommended baseball books for the spring and was recommended by Inside Hook.

I did a Q&A at the Athletic on Thursday, and part two of my diptych on scouting, covering pitcher grades, with Eno Sarris is also up for subscribers. The Athletic ran an excerpt from The Inside Game on base-rate neglect and why teams draft too many high school pitchers in the first round.

My own podcast this week featured Dr. Paul Sax of Harvard Medical School & Brigham and Women’s Hospital, talking about COVID-19 and baseball fandom. You can listen to it on The Athletic, Apple, Spotify, and Stitcher.

I did send out a new edition of my newsletter last week, and I’ll be back on it more often now, I think; you can sign up for free here.

And now, the links…

Those of us in the United States are living in a failed state.
This editorial on Eater London explains how restaurants have to adapt to survive what could be another year and a half of “corona time,” with two important takeaways for us: Doing what you can to support restaurants still operating during the shutdown is critical to their survival, and we are not going to see fans in ballparks any time soon.
Scientists are tired of explaining that COVID-19 was not made in a Chinese lab.
Are you having stranger dreams during the pandemic than you usually would? National Geographic looks at reasons why that is happening to so many of us.
Governors talking about reopening their states – or actually doing it, in the case of Georgia – are being way too cavalier, as the pandemic is not under control yet, according to this New York Times editorial by Professor Aaron E. Carroll of the Indiana University School of Medicine.
Nationalist groups are using COVID-19 to push their agendas to reduce civil liberties, consolidate power, and spread hate and distrust of marginalized populations.
Why did Nikola Motor, whose CEO just bought a $32 million ranch, get a $4 million payout from the COVID-19 small business fund?
Those Facebook groups pushing anti-lockdown protests are largely just astroturfing by the Dorr brothers, a family of conservative pro-gun activists whom Republican lawmakers have called “scam artists.”
Are COVID-19 mortality rates higher than they need to be because so many developed nations’ citizens are fundamentally unhealthy?
The New York Times looked athow children’s shows are responding to kids’ needs during the shutdown, such as Sesame Street’s episode with a virtual playdate for Elmo and various real and Muppet friends. (I especially enjoyed Cookie Monster’s appearance.)
A few German citizens are protesting lockdown measures under the guise of liberty or some nonsense.
Rep. Donna Shalala (D-FL) failed to disclose stock sales in 2019 while she was serving in Congress, violating federal law.
Board game news: Renegade is now taking pre-orders for Viscounts of the West Kingdom, the third game in the West Kingdom trilogy, for delivery at Gen Con (if the convention takes place).
I don’t know much about the upcoming game Sea of Legends other than that it’s narrative-based and looks like it has a great theme.
Boardgamegeek’s annual Golden Geek Awards balloting has now opened. I do wonder if Wingspan will suffer any backlash to its crossover success in the voting. I’d vote for it for Game of the Year, Innovative Game, Strategy Game, and Family Game of the Year; Watergate for two-player game of the year; and either Res Arcana or Point Salad for Card Game; plus Evolution for best app.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, coronavirus, links, podcasts, stick to baseball

→ April 18, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/18/20.

My book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, will be out in three days! You can buy it wherever you can buy books right now, but allow me to recommend bookshop.org, which sources books from independent bookstores or just gives some of their proceeds from direct sales to indie stores.

For The Athletic subscribers this week, Eno Sarris and I examined the five tools for position players from both scouting and analytical perspectives. There will be another piece for pitchers, which I hope to get done this week (I think Eno’s well ahead of me for his part). On my own podcast, I spoke with former Angels scouting director Eddie Bane about Mike Trout, all-time draft busts Bill Bene and Kiki Jones, and more. You can subscribe here on Apple and Spotify.

On the board game front, I reviewed Oceans, the new standalone sequel to the game Evolution, over at Paste this week. For Vulture, I looked at pandemic-themed games, including the one by that name, with thoughts on why diseases are such a popular theme.

I did a virtual bookstore event with Harrisburg’s Midtown Scholar on Thursday, which you can watch here if you missed it. I’ll do another such event on Friday, April 24th, with Sean Doolittle via DC’s Politics & Prose; you can sign up by buying a copy of The Inside Game here.

I spoke to Ryan Phillips of The Big Lead about The Inside Game and my move to the Athletic, among other topics, appeared on the Sports Information Solutions podcast with my former ESPN colleague Mark Simon to talk about the book, and talked about boardgames during quarantine on the Just Not Sports podcast.

And now the links…

Longreads first: This WIRED piece on the neurological decline of a brilliant young coder is devastating and kind of hopeless, yet so well-written.
John Horton Conway died this week of complications from COVID-19; this Guardian profile of the master mathematician from 2015 gives you a sense of his works and his persona. Conway invented the zero-player game The Game of Life, which proceeds according to fixed rules from whatever starting position you create. It’s famous in mathematical and computer science circles, at least.
The economic pain from the pandemic will be unfairly distributed. This piece from the New Yorker makes some strong points, although there’s a bit of a survivorship bias angle to the conversations with an investor who claims he saw the pandemic coming and profited heavily from investments around it.
Republicans are trying to use the pandemic as cover to remove thousands of voters from the registration rolls, with Wisconsin a prominent example of how they’re targeting voters of color too.
Anti-vaxxers are already spreading disinformation about COVID-19 and preparing to fight vaccinations if and when a vaccine is developed for it – but there are also signs that some vaccine hesitant people are reconsidering their views.
Dr. Grace Farris, the chief of medicine at Mount Sinai West in New York and author of some very clever cartoons on her Instagram account @coupdegracefarris, wrote a bittersweet piece in the New York Times about how she hasn’t seen her kids in four weeks to try to keep them away from the coronavirus while she’s working at the hospital.
No matter what Fox News tells you, there is no evidence that COVID-19 came out of a laboratory in China or anywhere else.
South Dakota’s Republican governor is one of five who’ve resisted issuing stay-at-home orders, and now the state has one of the nation’s worst hotspots for COVID-19.
Ohio Republicans are trying to get the state’s governor, Mike DeWine (R), to reopen the state’s economy. This is becoming a trend across the Midwest and south, despite public health experts’ recommendations that the states remain closed.
And we may not be able to reopen at all until we start testing a lot more people – especially those who aren’t visibly sick.
An email chain involving experts inside and outside the government shows just how far behind the curve Trump and even the CDC were in preparing for the pandemic here.
Why did a company with no employees and no history of producing medical equipment get a $55 million contract to make N95 masks for the federal government?
Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker (D) has had to arrange covert shipments of protective masks from China to avoid the federal government seizing them, since the feds haven’t provided enough masks to the state in the first place.
Molly Roberts, writing in the Washington Post, looks at the problems the Tara Reade allegations pose for Democrats looking to support Joe Biden (or who simply want to defeat Trump in November).
Bill Simmons bought a $16 million home outside L.A., and Variety reported on it but took the story down within hours.
There’s a GoFundMe open to support Oakland’s Marcus Books, the nation’s oldest black-owned independent bookstore.
CMON’s Kickstarter for Ankh: Gods of Egypt, the newest game from designer Eric Lang (Blood Rage, Rising Sun), has already crossed $1.25 million.
Jupiter Disco, a Brooklyn cocktail bar owned by a friend of my partner, has a Kickstarter out (already funded) for a new cocktail zine called PRESERVATION! to help keep the bar afloat during the shutdown.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, bookstores, coronavirus, links, longreads, south dakota, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines, voter suppression

→ April 11, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/11/20.

I didn’t publish anything this week at the Athletic, but hope to have two pieces up next week, as well as a new review at Paste and possibly new pieces at Ars Technica and Vulture as well. I did hold a short Persicope video chat on Friday.

My publisher is holding a contest where one winner will get a 30-minute chat with me before the baseball season starts, and several other entrants will win free copies of The Inside Game. You can enter for free here.

Also, check out my free email newsletter, which I say I’ll write more often than I actually write it.

I appeared on the Big Fly Baseball podcast this week and spoke with WHB’s Soren Petro about the shutdown, the draft, and the Royals for almost a half an hour.

And now, the links…

Longreads: The New Yorker looks at how cervical cancer is on the rise in the developing nation of Alabama, where sex education and Medicare/Medicaid coverage both lag behind most other states.
ProPublica finds that white nationalist authors have a haven on Amazon’s self-publishing platform for their racist and anti-Semitic works.
It’s hardly worth calling it a dilemma. If the President is going to lie and equivocate when talking to the public about COVID-19, the press should not give him a platform to do so. Don’t cover his ‘speeches’ when they contain disinformation or outright bullshit (like his touting of hydroxychloroquine or claims that the virus has ‘outsmarted’ antibiotics).
Scientific American looks at what developing antibodies to COVID-19 might actually mean – maybe two years of immunity, but perhaps less, and almost certainly not lifelong immunity as with some other, unrelated viruses.
“A fiasco of incredible proportions:” Epidemiologists tell The Guardian how Trump abdicated his responsibilities as President, dithering for six weeks over testing, a failure that will lead to thousands of needless deaths. Compare the U.S. debacle to the New Zealand government’s swift, decisive actions to shut the country down, thus far avoiding any significant outbreak of the virus.
Daniel Kahneman spoke to the New Yorker about why the scope of the pandemic is so hard for humans to grasp.
The Federalist – funded by nobody knows who, although their talking points often mirror those of Koch-funded entities – has engaged in dangerous coronavirus trutherism throughout the pandemic.
Clay Travis, a football/gambling writer turned meninist conservative heel, has also become a COVID-19 denialist – apparently because doing so is quite profitable.
Sean Hannity is trying to paint Trump as some sort of heroic leader – but his own statements serve as an indictment of Trump’s botching of the crisis, including multiple moves to undercut his own people.
Kansas Republicans overturned the Governor’s order to limit religious gatherings to no more than ten people, so that more people can get sick and die this Easter.
East Asian countries that successfully stopped the first wave of COVID-19 infections have seen new cases pop up as people brought the virus back in from outside countries – a huge warning for the U.S. not to let our guard down whenever we finally do get to a point where we might reopen things.
Here’s the apology Donald Trump should issue to the American public for his failure to act early enough to slow the pandemic and for his promulgation of false or misleading information as it has spread. I wouldn’t hold my breath for this to happen.
Helen Rosner explores the ethics of ordering take-out during the pandemic … and concludes that it’s okay to do so, but if you do you should order directly from the restaurant.
“If there were ever a time to take a few extra moments to order through your local bookstore, it’s now.” Dave Eggers writes for McSweeney’s about the need to save local bookstores.
Afar.com listed 25 independent bookstores in the U.S. that they love. I’d add Phoenix/Tempe’s Changing Hands and D.C.’s Politics and Prose as well.
Ars Technica found that 80% of Steam games earn under $5000 in their first two weeks – which certainly doesn’t bode well for developers’ long-term business outlooks.
The Athletic’s Nando di Fino remembers Glen Waggoner ($), one of the original members of the first Rotisserie Baseball League and the author of several of the books that first described the game.
Finally, if you’re still confused about the role that our Administration played in making the pandemic more severe in the U.S. than in any other country, well:

Other countries responded quickly and aggressively to combat the spread of coronavirus.

Trump failed to do the same—and now the U.S. has the most cases in the world. pic.twitter.com/JpYn0okt2j
— CAP Action (@CAPAction) April 9, 2020

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alabama, bookstores, coronavirus, fantasy sports, links, racism, stick to baseball, video games

→ April 4, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/4/20.

I had two new pieces for subscribers to the Athletic this week, one on the great 1980s video game Earl Weaver Baseball (for which I spoke to one of its lead developers), and one with the latest on MLB’s plans for minor league realignment and contraction.

On the gaming front, I had nothing new this week but have a few more pieces filed. Last week, I reviewed ClipCut Parks, a new “flip-and-cut” game that is great for younger kids who love using scissors but not much of a game for older players, for Paste. For Vulture, I updated my ranking of the top 25 board game apps available on mobile platforms. For Ars Technica, I reviewed the new app version of the legacy game Charterstone.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, is due out on April 21^st from Harper Collins, and you can pre-order it now via their site or wherever fine books are sold. Also, check out my free email newsletter, which I say I’ll write more often than I actually write it. To be perfectly honest, I just haven’t felt up to writing that lately.

And now, the links…

The most distressing this I read this week was the Washington Post‘s story on how attempts to re-open Wuhan after two weeks of no new (reported) cases of coronavirus failed miserably as new infections came back immediately. The Chinese government was able to enforce much more draconian measures than we’ll ever see here, and yet they couldn’t corral the virus; what does that imply about what June and July will be like here in the U.S.?
A Guardian longread asks how our world will change permanently in the wake of the pandemic, highlighting decreasing civil liberties and the potential of a new response to climate change as two possible outcomes.
A column in Foreign Policy calls the COVID-19 pandemic the worst intelligence failure in U.S. history. Ken Klippenstein wrote in the Nation that the U.S. military knew years ago that a pandemic caused by a “novel respiratory disease” was likely on the horizon, so was the failure of intelligence or of the President’s response to it?
This New York Times longread investigates how a failure to test early in the U.S. – again, due to the Administration’s choice to ignore information it received – led to the pandemic and probably thousands of needless deaths.
The right-wing dark money group Americans for Prosperity, founded by neoconservative billionaire Charles Koch, pushed a $1 billion cut to the Centers Disease Control’s funding and is now attacking shelter-in-place orders for harming businesses.
Social distancing can’t last forever, and we need a comprehensive testing-and-tracing plan in place when the restrictions are inevitably eased.
Arizona Governor Doug Ducey finally issued a stay-at-home order on Monday, after weeks of dithering and dismissing the concerns about COVID-19’s risks. Senior citizens make up 17.5% of the state’s population.
On the other side of the coin, Washington Governor Jay Inslee (D) and Ohio Governor Mike DeWine (R) have both earned praise for their fast, definitive moves to try to slow the virus’s spread in their states.
Kentucky, South Dakota, and West Virginia have used the cover of COVID-19 restrictions to criminalize mass protests, including those against fossil-fuel projects like Dakota Access.
Senator Kelly Loeffler (GA-guess) sold millions of dollars in shares after receiving a confidential briefing on COVID-19 in early February, and bought shares in a company that makes protective equipment.
Kara Swisher at the New York Times delineates how Fox News spread disinformation and downplayed the threat of COVID-19 to its viewers, even though they were taking significant precautions behind the scenes.
We have it bad here in the U.S., but the impact of the pandemic and attempts to stop it will lead to massive suffering in the developing world, such as a lack of shelter or food for millions in India.
A charity run by Franklin Graham, who has a long history of anti-gay commentary, has refused to allow LGBT people to volunteer in its tent hospital in New York’s Central Park.
Meanwhile, the President is going to go golfing again.
And he’s allowing a reporter from OANN – an extreme right-wing ‘news’ outlet that openly supports the Administration – to flaunt the White House Correspondents’ Association’s rules on social distancing. OANN didn’t belong in the press room in the first place.
LitHub ranked 75 different covers of The Master & Margarita from around the world, and commented on them. I’ve had #25, #8, and #3 over the years.
Hackers or pranksters have been breaking into random Zoom meetings and defacing peoples’ screens. The FBI has warned that the platform isn’t secure.
Powell’s, one of the best independent bookstores in the United States, had laid off 100+ workers when the shutdown first hit Oregon, but has rehired them to meet a surge in online orders – one of which was from me, buying The Mirror and the Light as a birthday gift for my girlfriend’s mother. You can pre-order The Inside Game from them as well.
Progressive/instrumental metal band Town Portal and post-metal act Kowloon Walled City worked together on a live mashup of Solange’s “Rise” and Kaki King’s “Jessica” when the bands met up last summer, and just released it on YouTube to support Town Portal’s record label Small Pond.
Rock Manor Games’ two-player game Lawyer Up is in its last few days on Kickstarter. I’ve actually played this game with co-designer Mike Gnade, who lives near me, and would definitely recommend it based on that one play of a finished prototype.
And finally, some tweets of note from the week:

Fauci just admitted that if the Trump Administration had not fumbled the ball so badly on testing many fewer Americans would die from coronavirus.
— Dan Pfeiffer (@danpfeiffer) March 31, 2020

Friends, I learned last night over Zoom drinks that ya'll're baking so much that there's a shortage of yeast?! I, your local frumpy yeast geneticist have come here to tell you this: THERE IS NEVER A SHORTAGE OF YEAST. Here's where I'm a viking. Instructions below.
— Sudeep Agarwala (@shoelaces3) March 29, 2020

powerful https://t.co/QuwBc7G42J
— Daniel Uhlfelder (@DWUhlfelderLaw) March 31, 2020

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baking, board game news, coronavirus, links, longreads, stick to baseball

→ March 28, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/28/20.

One new article this week for subscribers to The Athletic, looking at what the agreement between MLB and the players’ union might mean for this year’s draft. It’s not very good for the draft prospects themselves, unfortunately. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday and a Periscope (where my voice gave out!) on Tuesday.

On the gaming front, I had four new pieces this week. For Paste, I reviewed ClipCut Parks, a new “flip-and-cut” game that is great for younger kids who love using scissors but not much of a game for older players. For Vulture, I updated my ranking of the top 25 board game apps available on mobile platforms. For Ars Technica, I reviewed the new app version of the legacy game Charterstone.

And now, the links…

Matt Leacock, the game designer behind Pandemic, wrote an op ed for the New York Times about how no one can win this real-life pandemic ‘game’ by themselves.
Who funds the Federalist? It would be nice to know that, after the extremist site ran a column from an unlicensed dermatologist calling for people to hold ‘coronavirus parties,’ as VICE’s Laura Wagner writes. Twitter briefly locked the site’s account for posting the link.
The preacher who leads Bible study for members of Trump’s Cabinet claims that coronavirus is God’s wrath on people for allowing homosexuality and environmentalism to exist. His fans in government include Vice-President Mike Pence and Senator Joni Ernst. I wonder how much of our tax dollars go to enabling this hatemongering.
Delusional politicians and right-wing media members are making scientists developing statistical models of coronavirus’s spread harder by implying or outright claiming such models are hoaxes.
The Trump Administration has been citing a retracted paper to defend its early opposition to expanding COVID-19 testing, a policy that will likely lead to tens of thousands of needless deaths. Meanwhile, their plan involves blaming China for a ‘cover-up’ that never happened rather than coming up with a viable plan for slowing the pandemic.
Surgeons are increasingly reluctant to perform operations in this environment, due to equipment shortages, fear of infection from asymptomatic patients, and the possibility that doctors might be at higher risk for the most serious form of the disease.
“Mothers are held responsible for every detail — large and small — of their children’s well-being.” Jess Grose explains how coronavirus has exposed the ‘great lie’ of modern motherhood.
The owner of a Philadelphia hospital – who shuttered the facility last year – demanded $6 million in rent for the city to use it for six months to house COVID-19 patients.
Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey (guess) voiced opposition to the $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus bill because sending the unemployed or underemployed money “creates incentives not to work.” Toomey is repeating a popular conservative myth, probably because it sells.
Longreads: The Ford Motor Company purchased the Michigan Central train station in downtown Detroit, part of that city’s ongoing revitalization, the story of which is the subject of this BBC longread.
A ProPublica investigation found that the Chinese government is using tens of thousands of hacked or fake Twitter accounts to spread pro-Beijing propaganda on issues ranging from the Hong Kong protests to the government’s COVID-19 response.
Texas Monthly looks at how the H-E-B supermarket chain prepared for the pandemic several weeks ahead of just about any other company or government authority.
Writing for Billboard, Natalie Weiner looks at how two hits from 2000 that told of women getting revenge on their abusers elicited entirely different public reactions. My real issue with “Goodbye Earl” is that there is no “midnight redeye flight” from Atlanta that would put you anywhere in the United States.
Ann Forsyth, director of Harvard’s Healthy Places Design Lab, writes about how COVID-19 may alter the future of urban and home life.
Harvard finally reversed course and will pay its furloughed dining-hall workers. The University has a miserable history of failing to reasonably compensate the people who keep the place running.
Americans are stocking up on various dry goods, but also on jigsaw puzzles. I have quite a few in the house but never seem to choose them over a board game or a movie.
I didn’t realize that gay marriage is still illegal in South Korea, where there’s still a terrible social stigma around homosexuality in some parts of the country.
This ad, lambasting Trump for his late and inadequate response to this crisis, is superb.

what an ad. pic.twitter.com/yZV9KJCOEn
— Florida Chris (@chrislongview) March 25, 2020

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: coronavirus, detroit, harvard, links, longreads, south korea, stick to baseball

→ March 21, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/21/20.

My one new piece at The Athletic this week looked at the top 30 prospects for this year’s MLB draft, which is itself up in the air, although I am inclined to doubt that the draft would be completely cancelled because I think there’d be a flurry of lawsuits from players (and their advisors).

In response to many reader requests, I posted a ranking of my favorite board games for two players – some are just two-player games, some play more but work quite well for two. I have more board game content in the works for Paste, Vulture, and Ars Technica in the next few weeks as well.

And now, the links…

Coronavirus stories first … Here’s the most aggravating thing you’ll read this week: Texas Monthly looks at anti-vaxxers so deranged they’re already trying to avoid a COVID-19 vaccine, even with mortality rates thousands of times higher for the virus than for any vaccine we have.
Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) voted against the coronavirus relief bill because it provided sick leave to same-sex domestic partners.
The Washington Post details how the federal government fouled up the coronavirus testing situation so badly, allowing the virus to spread much faster than it might have otherwise. The Post‘s Jennifer Rubin calls Trump’s response to the pandemic the biggest blunder in Presidential history.
Trump said this week he didn’t know about the White House Pandemic Response Team but there’s video of him bragging about dismantling it.
The BBC’s The Inquiry podcast looked at how the USA failed in our initial response to the virus. The short answer: Incompetence.
STAT looks at how some other countries have been successful at beating back the pandemic.
At least five Senators appear to have dumped stocks after a confidential hearing about how unprepared the U.S. was for the COVID-19 pandemic. Intelligence Committee Chair Richard Burr (R-NC) sold up to $1.7 million in stock even as he reassured the public we were prepared. Senator Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) sold hundreds of thousands of dollars of shares as well, and bought shares in Citrix, which makes software used by employees working from home.
Italian author Igiaba Scebo writes from Rome “Dear Americans, Please Stay Inside.”
As the Administration discusses bailing out airlines and cruise ship operators, the restaurant industry has received no response to its own pleas for financial assistance, despite employing more people and lacking the airlines’ history of massive stock buybacks and seven-figure CEO salaries.
J. Kenji López-Alt posted a lengthy guide to food safety and coronavirus.
Longreads: This New York Times story about fabricated sexual harassment claims against a professor at Arizona State is both fascinating and infuriating. The worst part is that the author, one of the targets of the scheme, can’t name the perpetrator, who is now free to do this again to someone else.
The BBC has the story of a reporter who worked with an English man to try to reunite an Afghan mother with the daughter taken from her by the father when he fled to the UK as a migrant.
An editorial in Scientific American discusses the growing problem of harassment of scientists and others who promote knowledge on social media, on topics as diverse as vaccines, climate change, evolution, and mental health treatment.
The Trump Administration overruled the EPA and other scientists who used evidence to show that the widely-used chemical trichloroethylene is linked to fetal heart defects.
ChefsFeed offers six tips on how you can help local restaurants try to survive the shutdown. Many are opening fundraising pages to help employees who need emergency assistance, like the wonderful 5&10 in Athens, Georgia, has.
A member of the far-right hate group the Proud Boys ended up appointed to the city commission in Latinx-majority Fennville, Michigan, because he didn’t disclose his affiliation and the commissioners didn’t do their due diligence on his social media accounts.
Board game news: Two Kickstarters of note this week. The first is for Holi, an area control game coming soon from Floodgate games.
The second is for Ark: Awakening, an engine-builder with a modular board where each player has a unique faction (which sounds a bit like Root).

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, coronavirus, environment, links, longreads, stick to baseball, the swamp

→ March 14, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/14/20.

I have one new post for The Athletic subscribers this week, looking at what might happen to the draft when there are no games to scout. I will have a ranking of the top 30 prospects for the draft on Monday; I’m not sure what my draft coverage might look like from here on out, as it depends on whether anyone’s playing and if the draft date moves.

Over at Paste, I reviewed PARKS, one of the most popular new games of 2019, featuring artwork from the Fifty-Nine Parks series.

And now, the links…

Coronavirus first, unfortunately: The White House has repeatedly sought to minimize the facts about the virus’ spread, and even ordered federal health officials to make their deliberations classified, which just further slowed the response … The Singapore government’s strategy in response to the virus has won praise from the WHO while the United States’ strategy has been insufficient … The former head of the White House pandemic office explains what the department did before Trump closed it for no apparent reason at all. He won’t answer questions about the decision, of course.
Two longer reads on the virus: How the Chinese scientist known to colleagues as the “bat woman” has identified dozens of virii in that family (similar to the ones that cause COVID-19 and SARS) by searching in bat caves … James Hamblin, whose work for the Atlantic has been some of the best writing on the pandemic, points out that staying home if you start coughing is not a sufficient plan.
Longreads: The BBC had three great longreads this week. The first is on the twenty-year quest to solve a murder in Idaho Falls, one for which an innocent man spent nearly all that time in prison because he was railroaded by police interrogators.
The second is by a woman who tried to get investigators to track down a child abused in a pedophilia video.
And the third is about efforts by victims of sexual assault to get videos of their attacks removed from porn sites.
ProPublica found that the Republican National Committee has handed out big contracts to companies linked to Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel’s husband and her political bankers.
The media needs to stop treating Trump’s inaccurate and often incoherent statements as normal political copy.
While we’re all distracted by the growing pandemic, Congress is considering a bill that would give law enforcement a back door into encrypted communications, giving the government far greater surveillance powers.
The National Labor Relations Board is trying to remove non-discrimination language from its contract with professional attorneys, eliminating protections against discrimination based on race, sex, religion, and sexual orientation.
NPR’s Short Wave has a 12-minute audio clip on anti-matter and attempts to create it.
Worsening relations between Estonia and Russia have split the Seto ethnic minority with an increasingly impassable border.
Board game news: Capstone Games announced a new game, New York Zoo, from designer Uwe Rosenberg (Agricola, Patchwork, Cottage Garden).
Viscounts of the West Kingdom, the third game in the second trilogy from designer Shem Phillips (Architects of the West Kingdom, Raiders of the North Sea), is at nearly $600,000 as it ends its Kickstarter run.
Dire Wolf Digital’s port of Sagrada is now in Early Access on Steam; I’ve played it a few times and it’s very strong, as all of DWD’s adaptations have been.
Finally, this is just … special.

Seeing some incredible takes about Public Enemy today pic.twitter.com/ag2zk7DhHg
— Wild Geerters (@steinkobbe) March 2, 2020

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, coronavirus, links, longreads, physics, science, stick to baseball, the swamp

→ February 29, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/29/20.

My top 100 prospects package began to run this week on The Athletic, with the global top 100 running Monday, the column of guys who just missed on Tuesday, and then the American League org reports running the rest of the week. (Here’s the Rangers’ report, and the Royals’, for example.) You can access everything via this index page. I also held a Klawchat this Thursday.

My brand-new podcast, The Keith Law Show (also on iTunes), debuted this past week as well, with a guest appearance from Fangraphs’ lead prospect writer Eric Longenhagen. My thanks to all of you who’ve subscribed and/or left five-star ratings.

I’ve also got at least five signings scheduled at independent bookstores already, with two announced on the stores’ pages: April 24^th at Politics & Prose in DC and April 25^th at Midtown Scholar in Harrisburg.

And now, the links…

This week’s must-read piece is from James Hamblin in the Atlantic, on how we are all likely to get coronavirus. A vaccine won’t arrive in time to stop the outbreak, with U.S. policy failures a big reason why, and the virus’s long incubation period and 2% fatality rate ensure it will continue to spread despite containment efforts. We should try to get all our red city cards to the Scientist.
Of course, our Dear Leader referred to concerns about coronavirus and the media coverage of it as a hoax, and then offered some false statements on the virus’s spread.
Longreads: This history of the failure of the startup Homepolish is fascinating if entirely familiar. A fast-talking, highly educated con man convinced a lot of seemingly smart people to fund his company-without-a-business.
GQ has the story of “the Great Buenos Aires bank heist,” meticulously planned and executed, only to collapse because of one gang member’s infidelity to his wife.
The Guardian looks at the lasting influence of Copenhagen restaurant Noma, which continues to alter the global food scene with its ethos of local, sustainable cuisine.
Writing for VICE, the great ex-Deadspin writer Laura Wagner details testimony in a lawsuit over the NYPD’s racist policing practices.
Pippa Norris, Harvard political scientist and director of the Electoral Integrity Project, discusses the rise of authoritarian populism as a response to social change and why populism lends itself to authoritarian impulses.
How Gmail filters emails from various candidates may affect how those candidates fare in the primaries.
The mass murderer who killed nine Turkish immigrants outside Frankfurt was a Trump-loving, QAnon believer.
Bloomberg profiled Restoration Games and founder Rob Daviau fresh off the company’s blockbuster Kickstarter effort for the Return to Dark Tower, a reboot of a cult classic game from the early 1980s, which raised over $4 million. Daviau is also the inventor of the “legacy game” concept, which turned Pandemic Legacy into one of the most acclaimed and highest-rated board games ever released.
Celtics rookie Grant Williams loves him some Settlers of Catan.
Jon Melli goes inside the campers where two Orioles pitching prospects make their homes.
Learning another language can alter your perception of time.
You can only be a writer if you can afford it.
Plaid Hat Games, acquired several years ago by Asmodee, has been sold back to founder Colby Dauch, although much of its catalog of games will stay with Asmodee.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, coronavirus, history of food, links, longreads, stick to baseball

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