delaware — Page 2

→ August 21, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/21/21.

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

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

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

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

And now, the links…

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

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

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

→ May 29, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/29/21.

I had two posts this week for subscribers to the Athletic: my first mock draft of 2021, and a scouting post on high school pitchers Chase Petty and Frank Mozzicato, both of whom will be day-one picks. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste last week, I reviewed Cryo, a really engaging new worker-placement game from the designers of Manhattan Project: Energy Empire, where resources are always limited and you have to build your board to maximize your resource collection.

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

And now, the links:

Longreads first: This New York Times story on Andrea Smith, a professor at UC Riverside who has been falsely claiming Cherokee ancestry for at least 20 years, is one of the best-reported pieces I’ve read this year – and maddening.
The Berglas Effect, an amazing card trick created by the magician David Berglas, still fascinates and mystifies even other magicians decades after he invented it.
A New York law firm is behind most of the lawsuits against workplace vaccine mandates and other efforts driven by anti-vaccine grifter Del Bigtree.
From April 2019: Matthew Salesses wrote about grief and how it distorts our sense of time after the passing of his wife.
A former employee of the Chaplain’s Office at a small ‘elite’ college writes of the disconnect between progressive values and western religions on campus. I’m not sure the piece led mew to the conclusion the author intended.
Rosella, a NYC restaurant that only serves sustainable fish, might be the future of sushi. I’ve wondered for at least a decade now how there could possibly be enough fish in the oceans to keep all of these sushi places – they’re everywhere in the country, in the suburbs now, far too many for a dwindling supply of fish – in business.
Delaware Democrats have introduced a bill to make it harder for police to use force against citizens, and to make any materials in misconduct complaints and hearings public. The bill would also require that authorities collect data on the races of all people involved when officers use deadly force. No Delaware cop has been charged for shooting a citizen in at least the last 16 years.
The United States has a strong history of ethnic cleansing of its own. Teen Vogue looks at how our government used the 1830 Indian Removal Act to displace hundreds of thousands of Native Americans, with thousands dying as a result.
The Associated Press fired a young writer, Emily Wilder, after conservative trolls complained about her social media activity from when she was in college (before she was hired), but AP employees have mutinied and their leadership is on the defensive.
Texas will allow the unlicensed carrying of handguns. We won’t just see a rise in suicides there if this lasts, but I would bet we’ll see a surge in random shootings in situations like this road rage incident in DC.
Florida Republicans are ripping power away from local authorities to try to keep the state red.
Oklahoma Republicans are pushing a bill that would ban the teaching of critical race theory in public schools, and one community college has already cancelled such a class before the bill has even become law. If you live in Oklahoma, anywhere, call your state rep and Senator – no matter how right-wing crazy they might be – and tell them you oppose this bill.
Pennsylvania Republicans, meanwhile, have introduced three bills aimed at punishing women who have miscarriages or try to get abortions. The Democratic Governor has promised to veto them.
An Islamophobic ‘vlogger’ in Canada was arrested for punching a store employee and trying to make a citizen’s arrest.
COVID-19 isn’t spread through fomite transmission (by touching a surface that an infected person touched), so it’s time to end the hygiene theater.
A shady advertising agency offered to pay a bunch of French social media influencers to spread fake news against the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines.
A new coronavirus – not a variant, but a different virus from SARS-CoV-2 – is making people sick in Malaysia, and it appears to have jumped species from dogs.
Seth Rogen had some smart comments on comedians and so-called ‘cancel culture.’
Eric Carle, whose book The Mixed-Up Chameleon was the first book I ever read by myself, died this week at age 91.
Board game news: Heroes of Barcadia, a “pun-tastic” dungeon crawler, is coming soon to Kickstarter.
Capstone Games announced the new Kiesling/Kramer title Savannah Park, available at Gen Con and Origins in September.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, coronavirus, delaware, florida, links, longreads, oklahoma, pennsylvania, social media, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ March 20, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/20/21.

I had one new post for subscribers to the Athletic this week, looking at some breakout candidates for 2021. A reader suggested Gavin Lux in the comments as well, and I agree with them – he’s also a very good bet to break out, especially since it seems like he’s going to get the playing time to do so.

On the Keith Law Show this week, I spoke to my friend Tim Grierson about his new book This is How You Make a Movie, the Oscar nominations, and his Cardinal fandom. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify.

For more of me, you can subscribe to my free email newsletter. Also, you can still buy The Inside Game and Smart Baseball anywhere you buy books; the paperback edition of The Inside Game will be out on April 6th.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Atlantic’s Helen Lewis looks at people who fake being members of underrepresented by minority groups, calling it “social Munchausen syndrome.”
The American Psychological Association issued a resolution opposing gender identity change efforts (GICE), as the evidence overwhelmingly shows that GICE – which, in lay terms, is trying to convince a trans person via bogus ‘therapy’ that they aren’t transgender but are suffering from some mental disorder – is harmful to patients.
Bloomberg BusinessWeek looks at the bizarre family feud between the owners of the only medical swab manufacturer in the U.S. – a company that has been handed a de facto monopoly by the pandemic.
The Biden Administration is terminating some hires with histories of marijuana use, even after telling them such details wouldn’t affect the. There’s no evidence-based argument to support this, and cannabis use is legal in so many places now that the policy seems even more out of step.
Here in Delaware, New Castle County – where I live, with Black residents making up 26% of the population – released body cam footage of the death of an unarmed black man at the hands of two cops, and the video contradicts the officers’ claims that the man drove his car at them before they fired. The police department didn’t want the video released, but County Executive Matt Meyer did so over their objections. Also of note: “A police officer in Delaware has never been found criminally liable for a shooting.”
Texas Republicans have introduced a slew of bills designed to keep people of color, or just Democrats in general, from voting, even as the state appears to be turning some shade of purple.
A Florida man is facing felony charges for putting up a sham candidate in a 2020 Congressional election, and while he and the candidate might end up doing time, the ploy worked. Frank Artiles is alleged to have paid Alex Rodriguez (not that one) to stand for the election against the incumbent José Javier Rodríguez (D) to confuse voters. Alex Rodriguez took over 6000 votes, and José Javier lost by only 32 votes.
A former anti-vaxxer wrote about his decision to get vaccinated against COVID-19, and why he’s encouraging others to do so. He doesn’t explain why he was opposed to all sorts of medicine before, although he may have been a Christian Scientist or in another similar cult.
A pair of internal medicine physicians wrote about the need for a unified response to vaccine disinformation.
The National Review decided to offer up a defense of the British monarchy. You know, the one we fought a revolution to escape.
In the ongoing trial of three St. Louis cops who beat a Black protestor who was, in fact, an undercover cop, the defense argument is essentially that the Black cop had it coming.
Board game news: Cheap manufacturing costs have led to a rise in counterfeit copies of popular board games, including Catan, Pandemic, and Clank!
Z-Man Games, now part of the Asmodee empire, announced in a lengthy post why they’re ending reprints of their Euro Classics line, which included updated versions of Samurai and Tigris & Euphrates, while also cancelling a scheduled update of Princes of Florence. It’s disappointing, as these are good games that I think are still finding new audiences, but in the flood of new games every year it’s also easy for games like these to get lost.
There’s a Kickstarter coming next week for a brand-new version of the 2005 game Fjords, with a redesign from one of my favorites, Phil Walker-Harding (Cacao, Gizmos, Silver & Gold, Imhotep).
And there’s an active Kickstarter for a cheeky-looking take-that game called CULTivate.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: coronavirus, delaware, florida, lgbt rights, longreads, police, stick to baseball, texas

→ January 31, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/31/21.

My ranking of the top 100 prospects in baseball ran this Thursday for subscribers to the Athletic; the column of guys who just missed the list will run on Monday. Subscribers can also read my breakdown of the Jameson Taillon trade. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday afternoon.

Over at Paste, my review of the game Cloud City, a disappointing game from a designer whose work I really love, is now up.

I joined my friend Eric Longenhagen on the Fangraphs Audio podcast this week to talk top 100s and the process of assembling them, especially in this weird year.

My most recent edition of my free email newsletter shared some details of my recent nuptials, and I’ll send another issue at some point this week. You can still buy The Inside Gameand Smart Baseball anywhere you buy books; the paperback edition of The Inside Game will be out in April.

And now, the links…

David Sirota weighs in on the New York Times‘ publication of what amounted to a GOP press release and other media nonsense in the wake of the terror attack on the Capitol.
The Times fired a reporter earlier this month for saying she got “chills” during Biden’s inauguration, but when reporter Don McNeil used the n-word and other offensive terms on a trip with students, they promoted him.
Scientific American looks at the most worrying mutations in five COVID-19 variants.
The BBC looks at the twenty-year search for the billions of dollars stolen by former Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha.
A former KGB agent alleges in a new book that the Russian agency cultivated Trump as an asset for nearly 40 years.
A white Ohio state Senator named Stephen Huffman (guess) questioned whether “the colored population do not wash their hands as well as other groups,” and now he’s leading the Ohio Senate Health Committee.
Dr. Peter Hotez, author of Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism, wrote that Biden’s new vaccine goal is good, but not ambitious enough.
Sen. Josh Hawley’s “ludicrous clean-up act,” to try to undo the damage done to his reputation earlier this month, is already underway.
A new study showed that some bacteria adapt to antibiotics by changing their shape, which can reduce the surface area for antibiotics to penetrate.
Delaware’s Senate passed our version of the CROWN Act, banning discrimination against people based on their hair or hairstyle. It has to pass the House and be signed by Gov. Carney, but both are extremely likely.
A Magic: the Gathering card sold for over $500,000 at auction last week.
Asmodee and Game in Lab announced a clinical study that showed that playing board games might help Alzheimer’s sufferers.
I haven’t seen or played the game Coffee Talk, but this one-year lookback makes it sound kind of weirdly fun. Then again, I bought Necrobarista two months ago and still haven’t played it, so maybe I won’t.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, coronavirus, delaware, links, ohio, science, stick to baseball, the grey lady

→ December 26, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/26/20.

I had one post this week for subscribers to the Athletic, looking at six of the players who impressed me or beat my expectations for them in the truncated 2020 season.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Tekhenu and Tawantinsuyu, two heavy, complex games from the publishers Board & Dice. Tekhenu made my top ten games of the year. I also have a post up at Vulture on the best board games of 2020 in various categories.

If you missed it here on the dish, I posted my annual rankings of my top 100 songs and favorite 15 albums of the year.

This link roundup is a bit skewed – I was fully possessed by the Christmas spirit this week and offline a good bit more than usual – but here are the links…

Longreads first: Actor Leonard Roberts detailed explicit and implicit racism from his time on the NBC series Heroes.
Ed Yong’s superb writing on the pandemic continued for the Atlantic with his latest column on how science defeated the virus, going from zero scientists studying the virus 13 months ago to multiple effective vaccines already delivered to first responders.
ProPublica detailed the misdeeds of a family court judge in Ohio who brought his own denialism of COVID-19 into the courtroom, including threatening to jail a mother for contempt of court if she got one her sons tested for the virus. He’s also collecting a salary and a pension by exploiting a loophole in Ohio laws, claiming he intended to retire but also running for re-election (which he won, running unopposed).
A new study out by two LSE economists shows that cutting taxes on the rich does not, in fact, create jobs for anyone. This had been a long-argued point by classical economists; I was taught it in college and business school. The evidence says otherwise.
A CNN/Bellingcat investigation identified the specific Russian agents who poisoned opposition politician Alexey Navalny.
The New York Times had a wonderful history of Chartreuse liqueur and how the spirit is surviving when most bars are closed.
Monopoly accounts for about 30% of mass-market board game sales – which excludes the hobby channel – and it got there in large part due to monopolistic behavior by Hasbro. Competition from new publishers, including the acquisitive, PE-owned Asmodee, might dent that stranglehold on the niche.
Denver’s Tattered Cover is now the country’s largest Black-owned bookstore.
Philly’s independent, listener-supported radio station WXPN counted down the top 2020 songs of all time, and the ranking reflected the eclectic nature of their audience. (If you just want the list, it’s here.)
NME ranked every Arctic Monkeys song ever.I’m not nearly as high on their #1 choice, and would put “R U Mine” in that spot, with “I Bet You Look Good on the Dance Floor,” “Arabella,” “Flourescent Adolescent,” “Do I Wanna Know,” and “From the Ritz to the Rubble” also in the top ten.
Two of the surviving members of the Waitresses told the Guardian about the making of their song “Christmas Wrapping.”
Megachurch leader and entrepreneur Joel Osteen received a $4.4 million PPP payment, from funds primarily intended for small businesses. Neither Osteen nor his wife, who also works for the church, received any of the payout.
New research shows that COVID-19 is much deadlier for younger people than previously believed.
Delaware’s New Castle County bought a local hotel and is turning it into a shelter for unstably housed persons.
The BBC has a video on the growing hole in the earth in Siberia, the result of the interaction between permafrost and the environment.
The new diplomatic agreement between Israel and Sudan, one of several trumpeted by the Trump Administration as a foreign-policy victory, threatens the status of Sudanese migrants in Israel.
Sen. Mitch McConnell bragged about being the “grim reaper” of Congress; the pandemic has made that nickname a reality.
One of the local leaders of the protests in Louisville in response to the police murder of Breonna Taylor was himself shot and killed on Friday.
From my colleagues at the Athletic ($), Omar Vizquel’s wife has accused him of domestic violence.
There’s just four days left in this Kickstarter for the Vindication board game’s new edition and its Chronicles expansion.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, bookstores, coronavirus, delaware, links, liquor, stick to baseball

→ December 12, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/12/20.

I wrote one piece this week for subscribers to The Athletic, looking at the Lance Lynn and Carlos Santana signings and the Angels’ trades for two guys named Iglesias.

For Paste, I ranked the top fifteen new board games of 2020, which range from a game suitable for kids as young as 4-5 to a crunchy two-hour dice-drafter.

My guest on this week’s episode of the Keith Law Show was Tony Paul, who’s covered the Tigers for ages for the Detroit News, talking about the Tigers, what it’s like to cover a bad team, and how baseball can improve its efforts on diversity.

I have two books out for the readers on your holiday shopping lists. The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, available in hardcover; and Smart Baseball, available in paperback.

You can also sign up for my free email newsletter for more essays from me and summaries of everything I’ve written between issues of the newsletter.

And now, the links…

Before I get to the longreads, two stories relevant to the Georgia runoffs: Sen. Kelly Loeffler’s husband bought stock in companies likely to benefit from the CARES bill while she was working on it, while Sen. David Purdue took $1.8 million from a board member of FINRA while they lobbied the Senate on a bill relevant to their industry by selling his house to her privately for above its market value. Both have a history of profiteering from their positions, in levels of corruption that should lead to criminal charges, not re-elections.
Now the longreads: The Hollywood Reporter‘s chronicle of Johnny Depp’s fall from grace is shocking in just how much Depp was the architect of his own demise.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein needs to resign if this article on her cognitive decline is even remotely accurate.
A new journal article in Science shows how fast COVID-19 spread in an unmitigated setting in the Brazilian Amazon. It’s not good.
The science supports that face coverings are saving lives during the pandemic, as this Nature article states, so why are people, like this half-witted Texas congressman, still fighting them?
A community in South Dakota that ignored the pandemic is now getting destroyed by it … and they couldn’t do more than pass a defanged mask mandate because of the idiotic opposition.
“What kind of country is this?” asked a woman looking at a lengthy food bank line in Orlando, one devastating line of many from this Washington Post look at theme park employees laid off by Disney, Universal, and other operators. Of note: Disney restored pay cuts to its senior executives just a few weeks before laying off 28,000 low-wage workers.
The scientist who came up with the idea for the polymerase chain reaction technique was also a serial harasser of women, making any attempts to grapple with his legacy complicated.
The Oregon Medical Board finally suspended the license of a Portland anti-vaxxer pediatrician who had thousands of patients (and whose antics I’ve highlighted here before).
What comes next for evangelicals who sold their souls to make a deal with the devil in the White House?
We need better advice than telling people not to see family at the holidays, because it’s not working.
Now we finally know who funds the Federalist. It’s the Uihleins, major conservative donors in Wisconsin who run the shipping and business supply company Uline and who contracted COVID-19 while attending a Trump party in November; and DonorsTrust, a fund that allows donors to give anonymously to conservative candidates and causes – like the $1.5 million they gave the white nationalist, anti-immigrant group VDARE.
An investigation by an independent government watchdog group found that Rep. Dan Crenshaw smeared a fellow veteran who alleged she was sexually assaulted at a VA facility. The Texas Congressman, who backed the failed attempt to get the Supreme Court to nullify the 2020 Presidential election, also refused to cooperate with the OIG’s investigation.
Florida whistleblower Rebakah Jones found herself the subject of a warrant and early-morning raid, as the state accused her of unauthorized access to an internal emergency alert system. Several legal experts have said the evidence to support the warrant was flimsy, and the warrant was the judge’s first act since he was sworn in by Gov. De Santis.
WIRED looks at the strange case of Google firing a researcher for her work on an uncontroversial paper about bias in AI algorithms.
Speaking of Florida, the Orlando Sentinel apologized for endorsing Rep. Michael Waltz, who also signed on to that abortive effort to subvert our democracy. Apparently his efforts to replace the progressive income tax with a regressive sales tax wasn’t enough reason not to endorse him before the election.
This New York Times article on Wilmington, Delaware, having a ‘moment’ because of Biden is actually pretty good except for the top photo of the Charcoal Pit, which is like a poor man’s Friendly’s.
A writer who has autism writes about the harm of Sia casting a neurotypical actor as a character with autism in her new movie.
Cris Collinsworth put his foot in his mouth by acting surprised that women might actually like and know about football, and later issued a half-assed apology.
The photos of the new underwater tunnel in the Faroe Islands are quite stunning.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: coronavirus, delaware, florida, links, longreads, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ October 17, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/17/20.

Just one piece this week for subscribers to the Athletic as I work on the top 40 free agents ranking, which will run a few days after the World Series ends: Nick Groke, our Rockies beat writer, asked me a bunch of questions about Colorado’s farm system, and I dutifully answered them. Klawchat, board game reviews, and dish posts should return next week.

My guest on this week’s episode of The Keith Law Show was my old partner-in-crime Eric Karabell, although Bias Cat did not make an appearance. My podcast is now available on Amazon podcasts as well as iTunes and Spotify.

I’m due to send out a fresh edition of my free email newsletter this weekend as well. We’ll see how that works out for me.

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

And now, the links…

The New England Journal of Medicine has just weighed in on the election, urging Americans to vote Trump out of office, the first time it’s done so in its 208-year history. This comes on the heels of Scientific American and Nature doing the same. The Lancet published an editorial calling on governments to act now in accordance with the science, attacking the so-called herd immunity approach and supporting continued attempts to control the virus’s spread.

Now some longreads: ProPublica details the fall of the CDC, undermined from above by the anti-science Trump Administration and from within by craven, spineless leadership.

David Wallace-Wells writes for New York that there’s still no plan to stop the pandemic, a third crest is approaching, and we’re basically waiting until January – and hoping that brings a functional government – to do anything about it. Imagine how quickly this Administration would have committed a few billion dollars to responding if 200,000 Americans died from terror attacks rather than a virus.

The President and his children have turned the government into a sort of personal ATM, as exposed by this New York Times investigative piece, which you’d think would be the sort of thing to turn off the very voters who said they wanted him to drain the swamp.

Sara Benincasa’s essay “Fred and Me” is just wonderful and I won’t spoil it in the least.

Scientists confirmed that a Nevada man caught COVID-19 twice, requiring assistance breathing the second time around, which has some unpleasant connotations for the future of the pandemic and should end any discussion of a strategy based solely around herd immunity.

Why has Germany handled COVID-19 better than its neighbors? By following the science, including implementing widescale, frequent testing.

Earlier in October, a group of people who’ve lost loved ones to the pandemic set up 200,000 chairs on a lawn facing the White House to protest the government’s inaction.

One of those who’ve died from COVID-19 was a 44-year-old husband and father of two young children in northern New Jersey. He leaves behind a two-year-old daughter and a six-month-old son.

QAnon, the batshit-crazy hoax embraced by multiple alt-right figures and now our sitting President, is tearing families apart as people become sucked into this utterly false conspiracy theory and alienate family members with their nonsense.

A new complaint alleges that ICE is torturing Cameroonian immigrants to try to coerce them into signing deportation documents.

A six-year period of horrendous weather may have exacerbated the 1918-19 Spanish flu pandemic.

Lauren Witzke, the Delaware GOP candidate for the Senate seat currently held by Democrat Chris Coons, appeared on white-nationalist, anti-immigrant hate site VDare last month, not long before saying the Proud Boys provide security at her events. She has no chance to win, but still, Delaware Republicans should revoke their endorsement of her.

Neal Karlen was a close friend of Prince and interviewed him many times over a period of about a dozen years earlier in the musician’s career. He’s written a biography of Prince called This Thing Called Life (natch) and this excerpt tells how Prince was the loneliest person he’d ever met.

Draining the swamp update: A former patent litigator became a federal judge and is openly advising patent trolls to come to his court. This lets those trolls abuse the patent system (which has its own problems, but still) for their own profit, and ultimately American consumers will end up paying the cost.

Project Veritas, the grift run by so-called journalist James O’Keefe, bribed the brother of a Minneapolis councilman to say he was harvesting ballots for Rep. Ilhan Omar, a popular target of Islamophobes.

There may be a new, more efficient method of answering the traveling salesperson problem, which makes use of the geometry of polynomials to improve the results. A truly efficient solution probably can’t be found in polynomial time, which refers to the P vs. NP problem described in the book The Golden Ticket.

HBO Max has a new series called Patria, based on the bestselling novel by Fernando Aramburu. The Guardian explains how a novel about Basque separatists’ decades-long terror campaign became a global success.

Paul Heaton, former lead singer for the Housemartins and the Beautiful South, made a large donation to help the staff of the shuttered music magazine Q.

Several people sent me this story from the New York Times on how local bookstores are struggling to survive in the pandemic and lockdowns.

Irina Slavina, a Russian journalist who reported on excesses of the government’s security apparatus, killed herself via self-immolation in front of the Interior Ministry headquarters earlier this month.

This 2018 piece from Smithsonian magazine details some of the science behind the flavors of chocolate.

Board game news: The Princess Bride Adventure Book Game is out and exclusively on sale at Target.

The Kickstarter for Flora, a “semi-cooperative” game based on the Voynich manuscript, launched this week.

Greenbrier Games’ cooperative story-based game Lost Ones funded its Kickstarter in the first day.

Cascadia, from the publisher and artist behind the game Calico (which I haven’t played but hear is quite good), has already blown past its tiny funding goal.

The role-playing game designer outfit Roll20 is holding a 3-day virtual gaming con with proceeds to benefit a charity focused on racial justice.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, bookstores, chocolate, coronavirus, delaware, hoaxes, links, longreads, math, Music, prince, russia, stick to baseball, the swamp

→ September 26, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/26/20.

Nothing new this week at the Athletic, but I’m hoping to write two pieces this upcoming week to make up for it.

I reviewed the light resource-management and tile-placement game Cosmic Colonies for Paste this week; it’s a fine enough game, but I was left a little underwhelmed because it didn’t offer anything I hadn’t seen before in other games.

My guest on The Keith Law Show this week was my colleague at the Athletic Kaitlyn McGrath, talking about what it’s been like covering a team (the Blue Jays) she can’t see in person because they’re playing in the U.S. You can also subscribe to my podcast on Amazon, iTunes, and Spotify.

I’ve been keeping up with my free email newsletter better recently; my thanks to those of you who’ve signed up and who’ve sent kind notes in response to some recent editions. That said, I didn’t send one this week since … well, I haven’t had the muse much at all lately.

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

And now, the links…

Longreads first: A new paper in the Annals of Internal Medicine details what we know about coronavirus transmission. The dominant route is respiratory; proximity is an extremely important variable; and proper ventilation appears to play a huge role in decreasing transmission. Also, “there is currently no conclusive evidence for fomite or direct contact transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in humans.” That topic came up in a few places recently, as the CDC posted and almost immediately deleted language that said that the virus could spread over distances of more than six feet.
My colleagues Britt Ghiroli and C. Trent Rosecrans wrote about MLB’s long-damaged relationship with the LGBTQ+ community in the wake of Reds announcer Thom Brennaman using a vile homophobic slur on air.
Authors David Mitchell (Utopia Avenue) and Jasper Fforde (The Constant Rabbit) appeared together on the Book Off! podcast to discuss their latest books and to recommend one book apiece for the show’s title segment.
The New York Times style magazine’s Ligaya Mishan looks at mushrooms, the “last survivors,” an increasingly popular source of food and raw material and, unfortunately, useless dietary supplements.
Scott Gottlieb and Mark McClellan, both former FDA Commissioners, wrote for the Wall Street Journal that the public can still trust an FDA-approved vaccine – as long as the agency isn’t bowing to political pressure in the approval process.
Dr. Paul Sax, who was a guest on my podcast back in the spring, wrote about the success of pro sports leagues in containing COVID-19 and what we can learn from them.
On the eve of the release of a trove of material from the recording sessions, the BBC has an oral history of Prince’s album Sign O’ The Times.
This is from May, but I hadn’t seen it before: the founder of JetBlue funded the highly dubious study out of Stanford that claimed that the infected rate in California was 85 times higher than reported. Prof. John Ioannidis failed to acknowledge that potential conflict of interest – and he continues to discourage governments, most recently Greece’s, from taking steps to control the pandemic.
Speaking of Stanford, new Trump adviser Dr. Scott Atlas was denounced in a public letter signed by roughly 100 of his former colleagues at Stanford’s School of Medicine. The letter calls out his “falsehoods and misrepresentations of science” regarding the COVID-19 pandemic. (Atlas is still at Stanford, now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute.)
MLB.com’s Alexis Brudnicki profiled Tom Burns, a scout for the Blue Jays, discussing his 30-year career in baseball. I worked with Tom at the end of my time in Toronto and he’s one of the best and kindest people I have met in this business.
Australian indie singer/songwriter Gordi had her spring tour with Bon Iver cancelled, so she returned to her previous career as a physician, offering her services to hospitals around Melbourne as they fight the pandemic.
Oliver Burkeman, author of The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking, writes about telling the difference between what you want and what you need.
Even before we had the likely name of the new SCOTUS nominee, Harvard Kennedy School political scientist Maya Sen indicated that the appointment would likely move the court far to the right.
Some small bit of good news on the electoral front: Four Delaware progressives defeated Democratic incumbents in this month’s primaries, and that doesn’t include Sarah McBride, who is likely to become the highest-ranking transgender elected official in the country, or Kyle Evans Gay, who won the Senate primary in my district and for whose campaign I have volunteered. What’s most interesting about the primary upsets is the common theme that the incumbent Democrats were out of touch with the will of their constituents.
Multiple publicly traded companies used PPP funds, given out so firms hit hard by the pandemic would retain and pay employees, to buy back stock and/or pay out dividends to shareholders.
Mike Doughty is back with a new band, Ghost of Vroom 2, and just released an EP under that name. It’s definitely the most Soul Coughing-like stuff he’s recorded since that group broke up after El Oso. He spoke to Stereogum about the new project.
Board game news: There’s one Kickstarter for two new games from Pandasaurus, Dinosaur World and Dinosaur World: Rawr ‘n Write. It’s already at over 18 times its goal as of Thursday night.
The app version of the asymmetrical game Root is now available on iTunes, Android, and Steam.
The Kickstarter for Embarcadero has another week to go.
No link yet, but I got a review copy of the Princess Bride Adventure Game, which will go on sale on October 4th exclusively at Target.

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

→ July 5, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/4/20.

For subscribers to The Athletic, I looked at the prospects who made their teams’ 60-player pools – and some notable prospect omissions as well. I held a Klawchat on Friday.

My latest podcast episode was one of my favorites so far. Dr. Akilah Carter-Francique of the Institute for the Study of Sport, Society, and Social Change at San Jose State University joined me to discuss her research on Black athletes’ experiences, their obstacles to playing and becoming coaches after playing, and what leagues and universities can do to break down structural barriers these athletes face.

My thanks to all of you who’ve already bought The Inside Game. If you’re looking to pick up a copy, you can get it at bookshop.org or perhaps at a local bookstore if they’re reopening near you.

I’m due for another issue my my email newsletter. You can sign up for free here.

And now, the links…

“We have been the Republican Party’s useful idiots,” say social conservatives who voted for Trump, thinking that he’d deliver judges who’d overturn Roe v. Wade and otherwise push through policies the evangelical right favors.
Also at Vox, why Hamilton is so compelling and stirs up so much critical commentary. Having now seen the film, at least, I would agree with Minister Darrick Jackson’s comments near the end of this piece – and I think anyone who thinks that the play lionizes Hamilton isn’t paying enough attention to the story.
What the U.S. asks of working parents is impossible. This is very much a function of American capitalism, and our lack of support (like subsidized day care) for working parents.
Khruangbin’s third album, Mordechai, is one of the best new records of 2020. NME interviewed the trio for their latest cover story.
SELF has tips for how to deal with friends or family members who won’t let go of conspiracy theories about COVID-19 or anything else. Most valuable: “Know when to walk away.”
The Washington Post‘s Ashley Spencer has a wonderful story about the progressive nature of the new Netflix series The Babysitters Club, which was produced by my friend Naia Cucukov (quoted in the article).
The Texas Tribune reports on what it’s like right now inside hospitals overrun with COVID-19 cases in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley.
Springfield, Massachusetts, fired a police officer within days for posting something on social media that supported BLM protesters. It’s just weird that they fired an officer without waiting or massive street protests.
COVID-19 parties are not a thing. Every journalist who shared that obviously bogus story about a party at the University of Alabama where students competed to catch the virus first should read this – and make it very clear that the story they shared was false.
The BBC has a video on “doughnut economics” and how Amsterdam city leaders are trying to redevelop their urban center around this new model of circles in which residents can live and work and reduce their impact on the environment.
Fans of apocalyptic films may be more emotionally prepared for the present pandemic.
There’s a monument to Confederate soldiers, including a Confederate flag, in southern Delaware (“slower Lower”). You can sign a petition to call upon the Georgetown Historical Society and the Museum for Nutters – excuse me, the Nutter Marvel Carriage Museum – to remove this shameful monument to slavery and men who fought for it.
Netflix and Hulu pulled a Community episode that showed Ken Jeong in black facepaint while playing Dungeons & Dragons. He was supposed to be a member of the Drow race, who are extremely dark-skinned. I never made a connection between the Drow and Black people, or any actual race, really; I’m curious if any D&D players among you felt the fictional race was offensive in any way.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: amsterdam, coronavirus, delaware, links, Music, texas, tv

→ August 3, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/3/19.

Busy week on the baseball front; I had five pieces reacting to deadline trades, on the Stroman trade, the Bauer/Puig/Trammell trade, the Greinke deal, the Jesus Sanchez/Trevor Richards trade, and some smaller moves that didn’t merit full writeups. No chat this week as I’m at Gen Con.

I’ll resume my free email newsletter on Monday; I had one mostly written but never had time to finish and send it before the deadline, and while I love TinyLetter it doesn’t work correctly on my iPad.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This academic paper, co-written by reader Dr. Mike Sonne, finds in a review of existing literature that pitchers’ mechanics and performance break down with fatigue, with the effects apparently interdependent (fatigue leads to mechanical breakdown, which can lead to declining performance and increased stress on joints, leading to more fatigue and performance declines, etc.).
An ESPN Outside the Lines investigation uncovered track coach Conrad Mainwaring’s forty-year history of molesting athletes, often children, under his command.
A podcast helped get parole for a black man in Texas whom prosecutors railroaded into a murder conviction.
The Guardian looks at modern slavery in the United Kingdom and the government’s mistreatment of these victims of human trafficking, focusing on a Vietnamese boy who was abducted and forced to work on a cannabis farm.
Novelist and writing teacher CJ Hauser wrote a harrowing essay on how she called off her wedding ten days before the date after realizing her fiancé had been extensively gaslighting her and denying her the most basic level of emotional attention.
Cultural appropriation is endemic in board game design, but the industry got some needed pushback this spring over a game called Scramble for Africa, which treated the colonization and pillaging of the continent as fodder for game play, gamifying the enslavement and massacres of entire peoples. Maybe it’s not okay to take massive tragedies and turn them into fun?
The fraudulent “documentary” Vaxxed has been disappearing from streaming platforms, with Vimeo the latest to pull it, because it’s full of falsehoods that may scare parents into denying their children vaccines. Skeptical Raptor explains why the film is so bad and lauds Vimeo’s decision.
Films like that exist because spreading anti-vaccine propaganda is very profitable. It’s late-stage capitalism at its worst, and the solution is to attack it on both ends: constricting supply by closing channels, reducing demand through education.
Washington Post advice columnist Carolyn Hax answers a reader who overheard a man she hoped to date grossly objectifying her body.
Because Florida: The state Board of Education’s new chair is a dimwitted creationist who thinks evolution is “only a theory” (you keep using that word…) and shouldn’t be taught in schools.
Right near me in Delaware, vandals removed a new memorial to the lone confirmed victim of lynching in Delaware history. George Lynch was accused of murdering a white person, and a local pastor encouraged residents to break him out of jail and kill him, which they did by burning him alive, taking pieces of his charred body as souvenirs.
Diabetes sufferers are going without insulin because of rising prices; one 22-year-old woman died because she aged out of a state assistance program and couldn’t afford insulin on her own.
The Colorado Rapids cancelled a postgame fireworks display because there’s a plague outbreak on a nearby nature reserve.
The New York Times ran an essay from Timothy Winegard’s upcoming book on how mosquitoes are our apex predator.
A tiny town in Texas, near the Louisiana border, has stirred controversy by declaring itself a “sanctuary town” for fetuses.
There’s new hope for a peaceful settlement to the conflict in Sudan.
Phoenix restaurateur Sam Fox, whose portfolio includes Culinary Dropout and the original Zinburger, sold his company to the Cheesecake Factory, although for now he’ll stay on as head of the group.
I am shocked, shocked I tell you to read that affluent parents are gaming the system of accommodations for students with ADHD or learning disabilities.
The Onion had a good baseball post on Instagram.
If you love the Deep Water Games flip-and-write title Welcome To, which I did, check out their expansion pads showing different themed neighborhoods, like this Halloween edition.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, anti-science, baseball, board game news, colorado, delaware, evolution, florida, links, longreads, phoenix, vaccines

Tags

Archives