→ August 30, 2025
→ By

Stick to baseball, 8/30/25.

Over at Endless Mode, I wrote about how educators are using off-the-shelf board games in their classrooms for all sorts of didactic purposes.

I held a Klawchat on Thursday. I also appeared on The Menschwarmers podcast, which (obviously) is about the intersection of Judaism and sports, to talk about the Core Jackson story.

I moved my free email newsletter over to Kit this week, and the transition seems to have gone smoothly. If you were already signed up on Substack before Wednesday, you should have received the new edition. If you haven’t signed up, or signed up on Substack after that, you can sign up on my new site at Kit.

And now, the links…

  • Long(ish) reads first: A BBC investigation found that images and videos of child sexual abuse are easily found on X/Twitter, including those of a woman who is one of those victims and has directly asked Elon Musk to stop it. Third parties based overseas are using X to advertise the images for sale, then switching to other platforms to exchange them.
  • Josephine Riesman ’08 wrote in the Harvard Independent, for which I wrote while I was there, that we should avoid the building that bears her family’s name, the Riesman Center for Harvard Hillel, because that organization has ignored the genocide happening in Gaza and said nothing about the Administration’s attacks against the university.
  • ICE detained a mother in Massachusetts for 10 days over a 2003 cannabis charge for which she’d been pardoned. The woman is here legally, and the offense is no longer even a crime in Massachusetts. She was released on August 20th.
  • Alderac’s Kickstarter for Into the Machine has a novel structure – there are all sorts of expansions for their other titles here as well, and the more items you pledge, the greater the discount you get.
  • I’m intrigued by the game Le Vent Rouge, with a relaunched Kickstarter up now, as it looks like a dice-rolling and bag-building game, but a heavier one, with a play time listed at 60-120 minutes.

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→ April 26, 2025
→ By

Stick to baseball, 4/26/25.

I had two posts for Athletic subscribers this week, a draft scouting notebook on Ethan Holliday, Eli Willits, and JoJo Parker; and a minor league scouting post on some Mets and Orioles prospects in high A. I’m very worried about what I saw from Carson Benge. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I’ve updated the top 50 pizzerias post from yesterday to reflect two places that closed (one just within the last five months).

And now, the links…

  • Harvard is fighting back, suing the Trump Administration over the latter’s (likely illegal) attempts to cut funding to research programs the school conducts on behalf of the government. The Times has more on the conservative twits on the Harvard Board of Oversees who wanted to make a deal with Trump – even though Columbia tried that and it got them nothing.
  • Vox has the story of grid-scale batteries and how they might help green energy sources replace more fossil fuels … if the Administration doesn’t stop it.
  • The damage from President Trump’s irrational and ever-changing tariff … uh, are they even policies? … may be irreparable and will certainly last well beyond his term.
  • Mississippi was on a heater last week in its effort to prove it’s the most backward state in the union. Their Supreme Court ruled that a transgender teen can’t legally change their name until they’re 21, because that’s the age of majority in that state. (For reference, the age of consent in Mississippi is 16. Real consistent there, fellas.) And then their Governor declared April Loser Heritage Month.
  • The Guardian has a story on former Royals minor leaguer Tarik El-Abour, who played four games in the Arizona Rookie League in 2018, making him the first player in the history of affiliated ball who was known to be autistic. (I don’t know what the best phrasing is for that, but I hope the point is clear.) El-Abour responds to the hateful, ignorant comments from the Secretary of Health and Human Services where he painted autistic people as a burden on society.
  • Texas’s House passed a school vouchers bill despite broad opposition from the public, because Trump bullied a number of legislators into voting for Gov. Abbott’s pet project. The program seems very likely to drain funds from public schools that need it and allow wealthy Texans to send their kids to private schools on the taxpayers’ dime.
  • The six brownshirts who forcibly removed a woman from a town hall in Idaho last month have been charged with various crimes, five of them with battery and four with false imprisonment.
  • Greater than Games has effectively shut down as a result of President Trump’s futile tariff war. Their most popular game is Sentinels of the Multiverse.
  • Bitewing Games has a Kickstarter up for two travel-sized board games, Gingham and Gazebo, the latter of which is from designer Reiner Knizia.

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→ April 5, 2025
→ By

Stick to baseball, 4/5/25.

One piece from me this week at the Athletic, but it’s a long ’un, as I rounded up all of the draft prospects I’d seen in the previous three weeks, covering Arkansas/Vandy, Arizona State, and high school prospects from Arizona, Florida, Alabama (Steele Hall), Nevada (Tate Southisene), and New York. I also held a Klawchat on Wednesday.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: Sarah Harman writes about how she spent years hiding the fact that she was a mother from her colleagues and bosses at the TV network where she used to work because she understood the discrimination, overt and covert, that targets mothers and pregnant people in the workplace. It’s especially sobering to read this when anti-discrimination laws are being rolled back willy-nilly.
  • Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, a crank and anti-vaxxer, has a faculty post at the public University of Florida. He’s barely done anything since he got the job, according to an investigative report in The Alligator. I thought we were supposed to be rooting out corruption and waste.
  • The Guardian’s Timothy Snyder writes how JD Vance’s ridiculous posturing in Greenland was more than just embarrassing – it was a huge strategic blunder.
  • A Michigan woman was assaulted at work and reported it to the police. The police then alerted ICE that she was in the U.S. illegally, and she’s almost certainly going to be deported. If the police can do this, then people in the U.S. without authorization won’t go to the police when they’re victims of crime, and that makes them perfect targets.
  • That left-leaning tabloid … uh, The Economist described Trump’s tariffs as “mindless” and said they’ll cause “economic havoc.” I mean, yeah. Any first-year econ student could tell you they’re going to hurt the U.S. more than anyone else. This is the same publication that said France should allow the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen to run for President again, just to give you some sense of their perspective.
  • These economically destructive tariffs are going to cause carnage in the board game industry, where most of the manufacturing takes place in China and small businesses don’t have the margins to absorb the tariffs – nor does anyone expect consumers to spend more money to end up with fewer games.
  • Stonemaier Games is releasing a new edition of Tokaido, an all-time top 100 game for me and a classic from the designer of 7 Wonders.

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→ March 9, 2025
→ By

Stick to baseball, 3/8/25.

I had two columns this week for subscribers to The Athletic – a ranking of the top 30 prospects for this year’s draft, and a scouting notebook on Oregon State, Auburn, and high school shortstop Kayson Cunningham.

I’m on the run, so let’s get to the links…

  • Musk’s goons disbanded the technology office known as 18F, which existed to develop projects designed to improve government efficiency. Some of the former employees have set up a site to explain and defend their work.
  • The Texas A&M Board of Regents voted to ban all drag shows at the entire campus network, a pretty clear First Amendment violation. FIRE has sued to block the ban.
  • Our genius President referred to Lesotho as a country “nobody has ever heard of,” so the BBC published a story with nine facts about the tiny African country, which is entirely surrounded by South Africa.
  • Phoenix Children’s Hospital – where my daughter received care multiple times in the two-plus years we lived out there – has put a halt to gender-affirming care in obeisance to Trump’s (probably unconstitutional) executive orders. Absolute cowardice.
  • Louisiana’s Department of Health is ending its mass vaccination programs and banning promotion of seasonal vaccines like the one against the flu. That measles outbreak in Texas and New Mexico has already killed at least three people with over 200 confirmed cases, by the way.
  • People who voted for Trump are now losing their government jobs. I really find it hard to muster any sympathy for these folks; if they claim they didn’t know what they were voting for, they weren’t paying enough attention before they went to the booth.

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→ April 13, 2024
→ By

Stick to baseball, 4/13/24.

I’ve got some new content coming up this week, with a new draft ranking due to run on Thursday and a draft scouting blog probably running Monday or Tuesday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the collectible card game Star Wars: Unlimited – Spark of Rebellion, which I enjoyed even though I’m not generally a fan of deckbuilders.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter, detailing a rather ridiculous dinner I had at the bar at The Publican, an acclaimed Chicago restaurant where, to say the least, one does not belch as loudly as one can.

I’m going to be on a new TV show, Diamond Dreams starting on Monday, April 15th, on the streaming channel Stadium. The show is a half-hour look at prospects around the minors and for the draft, and will be followed by a show on collectibles where I’ll also offer some comments on the prospects they’re discussing. You can watch via the app on pretty much any platform.

And now, the links…

  • There’s a big scam going around that has tricked a number of content creators into ceding control of their Facebook pages. It starts with what seems to be an invitation to appear on a big podcast, which of course is very appealing to most people trying to build their online audience.
  • Former SCOTUS justice Steven Breyer wants everyone to get along, like his former colleagues on the high court, even though some of those colleagues are busy destroying Americans’ basic civil rights, writes Elie Mystal of The Nation.
  • The Atlantic’s David Graham describes the “Trump two-step:” say something outrageous, claim that’s not really what he said or meant, and then quietly embrace the original statement.
  • Mehdi Hasan wrote in the Guardian that Justice Sonja Sotomayor needs to retire from the Supreme Court so President Biden can appoint a replacement, avoiding the possibility that Trump would get to appoint a fourth justice and give the court a 7-2 majority that would likely last decades. I’m not sure if I agree, but he at least offers a solid argument.
  • Here’s a great summary and index of economic research showing how consistently these sports stadium deals fail to live up to economic promises. If you’re writing about the topic, or know a journalist who is, this is invaluable, because the pro-stadium forces will always trot out fabricated numbers from consultants who give them what they want.
  • A senior editor at NPR wrote a bad-faith, error-filled critique of the public radio outlet on Bari Weiss’s blog. NPR responded, defending its hiring practices and its philosophy. You can find many takedowns of Uri Berliner’s original piece, but one fact that got me was that he accused NPR of downplaying or ignoring the lab-leak theory behind COVID-19’s origins, even when the evidence in favor of a zoonotic spillover kept mounting.
  • WFLA has the story of a young boy with autism who can no longer receive health services because Florida kicked him off Medicaid. We need more stories like this, showing everyday people getting badly hurt by state policies that cut funding for essential services like health care, education, and even school lunches for underprivileged people.
  • Chicago police killed Dexter Reed during a traffic stop where he fired first, injuring one officer, after which the cops fired 96 rounds in less than a minute. The Sun-Times reports that the five officers involved in the incident have been investigated a total of 41 times since 2019, and that the area where they stopped Reed has a disproportionate number of traffic stops. The cops have said they pulled Reed over because he wasn’t wearing a seat belt.
  • Delaware State Senator Sarah McBride is running to be our at-large Representative, vying to become the first trans person elected to Congress. She’s one of at least three Democrats hoping to win the primary, which is tantamount to winning the election in our very blue state. Full disclosure: I’ve met Sen. McBride and we often see each other at our local Brew Haha coffee shop.
  • Is social media really driving a surge in mental illness among teenagers, as Jonathan Haidt claims in his new book? The evidence is mixed at best, according to this review in Nature.
  • Eric Hovde, who is running for Senate in Wisconsin as a Republican, is now facing backlash over his comments from a previous campaign where he called for cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits, attacked single mothers, said alcohol should never have been legalized, questioned whether farmers work hard, and lots of other great stuff.
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→ January 6, 2024
→ By

Stick to baseball, 1/6/24.

I took a few weeks off from these posts around the holidays, but I did write one piece for subscribers to The Athletic over the break, looking at the Chris Sale trade and Lucas Giolito signing.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the games Daybreak, a cooperative game about fighting climate change; and Wandering Towers, the best new family game of last year. Both games were on my ranking of the ten best new board games of 2023.

My free email newsletter will return today (most likely). Several of you have pledged to support me if the newsletter were to go paid; I have no immediate plans to do so, but if that happens 1) I’ll give everyone a ton of notice and 2) I’ll move it off Substack.

And now, the links…

  • Writer Tom Scocca’s piece in New York about his sudden, unsolved medical mystery is the best thing you’ll read all week. It’s well-written, of course, and combines the deeply personal with an inherent attack on our broken health-care system.
  • The New Yorker looks at board games with serious themes, profiling Amabel Holland, a trans woman who co-owns the publisher Hollandspiele and designed the Iron Rails series of games.
  • Stuart Thompson of the New York Times looks at how anti-vaxx ghouls latched on to the death of a 24-year-old man, who showed no symptoms of myocarditis after his COVID-19 vaccination but whose parents think the vaccine gave him myocarditis anyway. George Watts, Jr., had an enlarged spleen – over six times the normal size for that organ – which is a sign of long-term heart failure, chronic inflammation in his brain, and signs of late-stage pneumonia in his lungs.
  • Why do pundits like Jonathan Chait and Nate Silver say outrageous things? Because it’s effective, at least when you consider that attention is their goal.
  • Overtime pay for NYPD officers working the city’s subway stations went from $4 million to $155 million between 2022 and 2023, reducing “major crimes” by 2% but primarily leading to more arrests and fines for fare-jumping. That’s a lot of money to fight a handful of skipped $2.90 charges.
  • Amanda Todd was 15 when she killed herself in 2012 after three years of cyberstalking by a Dutch man who blackmailed her with threats to send nude images of her to her friends and family. He was sentenced to 13 years by a Canadian court, but a Dutch court cut the sentence in half to match that country’s legal standards.
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→ October 6, 2023
→ By

The Sum of Us.

Heather McGhee was the head of Demos, a think tank that aims to “power the movement for a just, inclusive, multiracial democracy,” for four years before stepping aside in part to work on her first book, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Prosper Together, which came out in March of 2021. It’s a clear-eyed, evidence-based argument that public policies that aim to reduce racial or gender inequity actually benefit society as a whole, including white people and men, even though political opponents of those policies will try to paint them as anti-white or anti-male.

McGhee’s topic might seem incendiary, and in her rhetoric about modern conservatives, the Republican Party as a whole, and the race-baiting Trumpists and MAGA adherents in particular, she does not shy away from calling out the racist attitudes behind their arguments and beliefs. When making her arguments about the societal benefits of these policies, however, she sticks to the facts, and allows the shock value of just how much white conservative Americans are voting against their own self-interest to speak for her.

There are plenty of arguments, and quite a bit of evidence, that diversity in and of itself brings broad benefits to communities and companies, such as the way demographic diversity leads to increased creativity and productivity in the workplace. McGhee largely avoids that line of thinking in favor of more tangible benefits from particular policies that conservatives tend to oppose, such as Medicaid expansion. The states that have rejected expanded Medicaid funds from the federal government have lower life expectancies than the states that have accepted it. There are actual lives in the balance, and the excess deaths in the states that refuse to take the extra Medicaid money, declining it for political gain only, are not limited to people of color, although of course those communities are more adversely affected than white communities are. McGhee uses example after example to show why policies that are often depicted as favoring people of color would in fact be beneficial for substantial portions of the white populations of states or the country as a whole.

The first full chapter of The Sum of Us is titled “Racism Drained the Pool,” a fantastic bit of wordplay that has a literal meaning, referring to the closing of public pools across the country, even outside of the South, after courts required them to integrate. The results are still evident today; cities and towns filled in their old pools rather than allow Black kids to swim there, or converted those pools to private “swim clubs” that Black residents were less likely to be able to afford, but public pools never came back, so now everyone suffers. Where I live in northern Delaware, most people who have the means belong to some sort of private pool, and I can say from experience, as someone who has belonged to two different pools, that they’re not exactly integrated affairs. If you’re poor, you don’t get to swim – or to learn to swim, which is a life skill, not just a matter of recreation. The visible segregation is racial, but the invisible sort is economic.

McGhee explores these policy questions across most of the major spheres of public-economic life, including health, education, real estate, and the environment. Environmental racism and real estate redlining might be the best known examples, but McGhee points out, with data and research, that these inequities do not only affect people of color, regardless of what politicians who oppose stronger environmental regulations or greater controls on banks and lenders. Most of the policies she covers end up adversely affecting all poor people, regardless of race or ethnicity, but politicians and pundits try to sell these policies as somehow good for white people because they’re supposed to be worse for people of color. This is the ‘sum’ of the book’s title: These aren’t zero-sum policies, and in all of the cases she covers, the rising tide will lift all races. If we tighten environmental regulations, everyone benefits from cleaner air and water, with better health outcomes, better education outcomes, and so on. If we improve access to education with greater public investment, lower tuition, or greater reimbursements or grants, then we get a more educated populace, which improves the economy as a whole through increased productivity while also reducing crime.

The book goes through example after example of policies that would benefit wide swaths of the population but that die at the state or federal level through opposition from so-called “fiscal conservatives” who depict public aid or other public spending (e.g., infrastructure) as wasteful, as well as from politicians and activists who lean more into the language of white grievance by painting such government spending as “handouts.” They try to cut it completely, as the extreme right wing of the House is doing right now with the federal budget, or tie it to so many criteria that it’s difficult or impossible for people in need to benefit from it. McGhee points to the medieval Medicaid policies in Texas, where adults are not eligible at all for this need-based health coverage if they don’t have kids, and a family of four can’t have household income over $3900 a year to remain eligible. That’s not a typo – if you work 40 hours a week for the minimum wage in Texas (which is $7.25 an hour, the lowest legal amount, of course) for 14 weeks, you lose eligibility for Medicaid in Texas. Over three quarters of a million people in Texas go without health insurance because of these restrictions, and that population is not limited by race or gender or national origin or party affiliation. The Sum of Us makes a compelling argument to rid ourselves of the zero-sum thinking that says a gain for non-white people is a loss for white people, and recognize that in many, if not all, areas of the economy, raising the tide will lift all boats.

Next up: I just finished Martin Amis’s book The Zone of Interest, although I understand the upcoming film of that name has a very loose connection to the novel.

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→ May 20, 2023
→ By

Stick to baseball, 5/20/23.

I had two new posts this week for subscribers to the Athletic – a minor league scouting notebook on prospects with the Brewers, Pirates, and Phillies; and a draft scouting notebook looking at Max Clark, Dillon Head, Mac Horvath, and more.

My guests on the Keith Law Show the last two weeks have been Max Bazerman, discussing his new book Complicit: How We Enable the Unethical and How to Stop; and Russell Carleton, talking about his upcoming second book The New Ballgame: The Not-So-Hidden Forces Shaping Modern Baseball. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Just a reminder you can also find me on Spoutible and Bluesky as @keithlaw.

And now, the links…

  • The science behind reverse osmosis filtering was unclear, until a paper published in April upended the previous model and opened up the possibility of new membranes that make filtration, including desalination, more energy-efficient.
  • A conservative “foundation” recruited fifteen men at a Poughkeepsie homeless shelter to pretend they were veterans kicked out of a hotel to make room for migrants coming up from New York City. The plan fooled state Assemblyman Brian Maher (R), who fed the outrage machine until he had to admit he’d been had.
  • Bryan Slaton has resigned his post in the Texas legislature after it emerged that he’d behaved inappropriately with an intern. The Republican once introduced legislation to ban children from attending drag shows, claiming it was some form of grooming.
  • I agree with everything in this Mary Sue post about the disappointing S3 of Ted Lasso, which has none of the things that made the show good in its first two seasons. But at least the episodes are longer!
  • The Arab League has quietly reinstated Syria, more than a decade after the nation and its murderous dictator President Bashad al-Assad were expelled for violent reprisals against protestors leading up to the country’s 12-year civil war.
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→ March 13, 2022
→ By

Stick to baseball, 3/13/22.

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

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

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

And now, the links…

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→ December 6, 2021
→ By

Stick to baseball, 12/6/21.

We had a busy weekend of decorating the house, including acquiring the largest tree I’ve ever owned (since we have one room with exceptionally high ceilings, it seemed irresponsible to fail to take advantage of it), which means this post is late. I had a whole slew of posts for subscribers to The Athletic last week, however, including

Over at Paste, I reviewed The Crew: Mission Deep Sea, the sequel to the 2019 Kennerspiel winner, and I think a small but significant improvement over the original. At Ars Technica, I contributed twenty new entries to their Ars Technica’s ultimate board game gift guide.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter last week, with a story about being too judgmental and learning to get past it. And finally, with Christmas just three weeks away, here’s another reminder that I have two books out, The Inside Game and Smart Baseball, that would make great gifts for the readers (especially baseball fans) on your lists.

And now, the links…

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