environment — Page 6

→ June 2, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/2/18.

My third first-round projection for Monday night’s MLB Draft went up on Thursday for Insiders; I’ll do one more on Monday morning. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday, and will do another on Monday afternoon. I wrote a piece earlier in the week for Insiders on why players withdrawing from the draft is a terrible idea for them, benefiting no one but the college coaches encouraging them to do so.

Longtime Marlins scout Orrin Freeman and his wife Penny are both facing awful health problems and mounting medical bills, so Penny’s daughter has set up a GoFundMe to help offset some of these costs. You can expect MLB to try to help one of its own as well. Of course, universal health care would make a difference in cases like this – and it could happen to any of us in time.

My book Smart Baseball is now out in paperback! I’ll be at Washington DC’s famed bookstore Politics & Prose on July 14th, along with fellow author Jay Jaffe, to talk baseball, sabermetrics, and whatever else you kind readers ask about. I should be able to announce another event in the Boston suburbs for July 28th very soon.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Huffington Post’s Luke O’Brien finds the woman behind one of Twitter’s most vile Islamophobic accounts. The biggest question I have is why Twitter hasn’t kicked her off the service. Meanwhile, she’s directing her followers to attack O’brien, and various alt-right trolls are claiming her First Amendment rights were violated.
The Guardian‘s longread of the week looks at how American freedom of speech is threatened by white supremacists whose hate speech challenges even those who’ve sworn to defend that 1A right, including the ACLU. It’s easy to say neo-Nazis preaching hate are in fact inciting violence against marginalized groups, and that they’re beyond the boundaries of the First Amendment (since some forms of speech, like death threats, have long been criminalized), but moving the boundaries always creates new and unexpected quandaries.
New York has the hard-to-believe story of a 25-year-old con woman who fooled New York elites largely through social engineering and strategic cash drops in front of the right people.
I assume most of you have seen the Ringer’s exposé on 76ers GM Bryan Colangelo’s many secret Twitter accounts.
The BBC tells the story of six young stowaways put overboard on the ice in eastern Canada in 1868 by a sadistic British captain and his first mate. Four survived to tell their story, which was largely lost until now.
Also from the BBC, Maddy Savage looks back at when Sweden shifted drivers to the right-hand side of the road, a change that was literally enacted overnight after months of planning and public education.
Evan Grant wrote a fantastic piece for the Dallas Morning News on recent tragedies and challenges for the Rangers scouting staff. One area scout died in early April of a stroke; another lost his wife to cancer in February, and a third has just returned to the job after missing two years to care for his wife, who also had a stroke.
Rachel Herron writes for Vox about the frequent, overly racist calls she’d get as a 911 dispatcher.
Major media outlets gave disproportionate coverage to the Roseanne Barr controversy relative to the release of one estimate (since disputed) that the twin hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico and other Caribbean islands caused at least 4600 deaths in that one U.S. territory.
Eve Peyser writes for VICE that the ‘Twitter mob’ got it right on Roseanne, but that is an outlier on a site that is often “a toxic cesspool” and a “viral outrage” generator. She also points out, correctly, that, “as a journalist it’s a useful career tool.” I have my problems with the site too, including its apparent non-policing of harassment, hate, and fraud, but it’s also been a career boon, and I’ve made many new friends and professional contacts through the site as well.
Buried behind the Roseanne Barr and Puerto Rico stories this week: Newly released emails show EPA leaders worked with a climate change denial group to combat information on the reality of climate change and to “tout” Scott Pruitt’s leadership of the agency.
The Administration may try to order power grid operators to buy power from specific, failing coal and nuclear plants, including many operated by a major Trump donor. This sort of economic dirigisme is a hallmark of fascist economies, not the free market principles long espoused by the Republican Party.
As measles outbreaks spread throughout the country, including a recent one in Maryland and Virginia, New York is considering expanding the religious “exemption” from mandatory vaccination rules. Many of you live in New York state, so if you do, please call your state representatives Monday to oppose any such expansion. Multiple courts have ruled over the past 110 years that public health considerations override such so-called religious freedom concerns (which may not even be real, as with the Catholic mother quoted in the piece).
A Harvard Law School professor argues that the NFL’s ban on players taking a knee is ‘flatly illegal’ under U.S. labor law.
The Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to Arkansas’s anti-abortion law, handing a victory to opponents of women’s rights. The case is expected to return to a lower court for a trial.
My friend Jeb Lund writes for NBC News that Trump should be afraid of the Mueller investigation because he’s an outsider whom the Republican Party has largely run out of uses.
I’ve included many links about the rising threat of antibiotic resistance, largely from overuse or rapid evolution in bacteria. But this Guardian story has a new twist – supply of the drugs is running low too.
The Gainesville Sun looks back at the 1923 Rosewood massacre, where a dubious rape accusation against a black man led a white mob to torch an entire black neighborhood, killing as many as 27. No one was ever even charged with a crime, even though at least one black man was tortured and lynched.
Astronomers have identified dunes of methane on the surface of Pluto.
The BBC has been working quietly to speak to North Korean citizens about their government and Dear Leader, with two commenting that sentiment is improving towards him because of market reforms even as they individually criticized him. Their Inquiry podcast also looked at North Korea in a May 24th episode that examined whether North Korea is broke. The short answer is ‘no,’ but there’s quite a bit of detail on how and why the repressive regime has managed to stave off a second economic catastrophe in three decades.
With news that Illinois became the 37th state to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, leaving it just one state short of the required ¾ (after which we’ll have a debate over whether these votes are too late, I’m sure), Delaware’s Senate rejected a proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the state constitution. My state Senator, a co-sponsor of the amendment, was absent from the vote.
Monique Judge writes for The Root that Obama doesn’t owe this country anything as a former President, responding to a post on Splinter that criticized him for inaction in the face of a wave of racism and regressive policies.
The Splendid Table podcast looks at the burgeoning Philadelphia food scene, including two of the city’s preeminent chefs in Michael Solomonov (Zahav, Federal Donuts) and Eli Kulp (High St. on Market, my favorite restaurant in the city).
Board game news: Game Salute shared the draft Kickstarter for A War of Whispers, an area control game where players represent secret societies rather than armies.
Lil Cerebral Games also shared a draft Kickstarter, this one to bring back GAMES magazine Hall of Fame title TwixT, which has been out of print for some time.
Skyrim finally has that mod you’ve all been waiting for: You can now ride giant chickens and ducks. (Note: this piece’s author, Chris Livingston, and I went to high school together.)

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: astronomy, baseball, board games, climate change, con men, environment, first amendment, florida, links, philadelphia, puerto rico, science, social media, stick to baseball, the swamp, twitter, vaccines, women's rights

→ May 12, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/12/18.

This week brought the return of the redraft columns, where I go back ten years and ‘redraft’ the first round with full hindsight. This year’s edition redrafted the first round of 2008, led by Buster Posey and with several guys taken after the tenth round (one in the 42nd!) making the final 30; as well as an accompanying look at the 20 first-rounders who didn’t pan out. Both are Insider pieces, as is my column of scouting notes on Yankees, Phillies, Nats, and Royals prospects.

My review of the new Civilization board game is up at Paste this week. Civilization: A New Dawn takes the theme of the legendary Sid Meier video game franchise and simplifies it to play in about an hour to an hour and a half, but I felt like some of the better world-building aspects were lost in the streamlining.

Smart Baseball is now out in paperback! I’ll be at DC’s famed bookstore Politics & Prose on July 14th to flaunt the fruits of noble birth and, perhaps, sign copies of the book. I’m also working on a signing in greater Boston for later that month, so stay tuned for details. Also, please consider signing up for my free email newsletter.

I also wanted to mention a few new baseball books by folks I know that have come out in the last six weeks: Russell Carleton’s The Shift: The Next Evolution in Baseball Thinking, which I think goes well with my own book without covering much of the same ground; and two books on the Dodgers, Michael Schiavone’s The Dodgers: 60 Years in Los Angeles and Jon Weisman’s Brothers in Arms: Koufax, Kershaw, and the Dodgers’ Extraordinary Pitching Tradition, even though Jon liked the movie Moneyball and therefore was wrong about it.

And now, the links…

The authors of the forthcoming book A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things write for the Guardian‘s Long Read about how the chicken nugget is the true symbol of modern capitalism, a cheap, highly processed foodstuff that fuels inexpensive labor without regard for the cost on the environment or the people consuming them. The authors make many good points along the way, but I think none is more important than understanding that the meat we buy at supermarkets is already “processed.” The claim that “processed” foods are killing us ignores how much processing happens even in foods billed as “natural,” including meats, milk, yogurt, even some types of produce.
A junk study claiming the HPV vaccine caused neurological damage has been retracted by the journal that published it, two years after its release. The original publication led to a near total collapse of HPV vaccination rates in Japan.
The Washington Post‘s Michael Gerson argues that if you’re anti-GMO, then you’re anti-science.
The New Yorker published a lengthy investigative piece on New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s history of domestic violence, which led to his resignation within days. Contrast that to Missouri Governor Eric Greitens, a Republican, who has been accused of sexual assault and blackmail, and been indicted on felony invasion of privacy charges, but remains in office.
North Carolina is a ‘purple’ state, split fairly evenly between the two parties, but horrendous gerrymandering has given the Republicans a stranglehold on the state legislature. Meanwhile, Republicans in Michigan, Arizona, and Pennsylvania continue to push pro-gerrymandering cases and legislation to try to retain control of the legislatures in those states.
Mass shootings inevitably lead to calls for mental health policy reform, but there’s scant evidence linking these events to mental illness.
The Anti-Defamation League sent out a release saying that Twitter users sent over 4 million anti-Semitic tweets last year.
Weeks of protests in Armenia pushed Parliament to elect opposition leader Nikol Pashinyan as Prime Minister.
The Guardian‘s Kieran Devlin wrote about the songcraft of Frightened Rabbit’s Scott Hutchison in the wake of the singer’s death, presumably a suicide, at age 36.
In the last week, three teenaged girls in India have been raped and burned, one of whom was killed after threatening to report her attacker to her family.
Writing for the Hardball Times, Rachael McDaniel describes growing up queer and finding inclusion in baseball.
Young Turks are increasingly rejecting Islam, turning to deism or even atheism in the face of a repressive, pro-Islam dictatorship. Turkey had been a secular republic since 1928, but President Recep Tayyip Erdo?an has embraced Islamism as a way to strengthen his grip on power.
George Will writes that Trump is no longer the worst person in government; that title belongs to Mike Pence.
A Moroccan woman who was married to a Libyan dissident wrote about being kidnapped and tortured at a CIA “black-ops” site that might have been run by CIA director nominee Gina Haspel.
A student at James Madison University who was raped, reported it, and told her attacker did nothing wrong was also told speaking out about the incident could violate university policies. The school’s lawyer later apologized.
There’s a ‘crab crisis’ in Maryland due to a lack of workers for the seasonal industry, a result of the Administration’s hard line on immigration, but the affected fishermen refuse to make that connection. Cognitive dissonance is a real motherhecker.
Fordham Law professor Jed Shugerman explains how the Russian payments to Michael Cohen may prove collusion, at least enough to enable Mueller to obtain probable cause for further warrants.
California has once again surpassed Great Britain to be the world’s 5th-largest economy (if we treat California as independent of the rest of the U.S.), despite progressive policies like higher minimum wages and taxes or bans on certain types of pollution. The growth has brought other negative externalities that the state will have to face, including rising homelessness and the pollution and economic losses of traffic.
Z-Man Games, now an imprint of Asmodee, acquired the great little social game Love Letter, which takes a 16-card deck and makes for a fun deduction game with lots of interaction that you can play in five minutes with three or four people.
Two new board game Kickstarters of note: Darwin’s Choice, another evolution-themed game (hi, Curt!) that has already funded but is open through June 5th; and Last One Standing, a battle royale-style tabletop game that’s past the halfway mark to its goal.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Armenia, british music, chicken, environment, history of food, india, links, Music, stick to baseball, suicide, turkey, vaccines

→ March 31, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/31/18.

Three new Insider pieces since last week: My annual season predictions post, a Grapefruit League scouting roundup (including Phils, Tigers, O’s, Rays, Pirates, and Atlanta prospects), and a draft blog post on three possible first rounders. No chat this past week, as I’m in North Carolina for the NHSI and am headed over to East Carolina today to see the two big bats for Wichita State.

Smart Baseball is now out in paperback, just in time to put one in every Easter basket you hand out this year.

And now, the links…

Vox’s Ezra Klein dissects the insidious racism behind Sam Harris and Charles Murray’s claims that there are actual, inborn IQ differences between races. (There almost certainly aren’t.) Harris, perhaps more widely known for his atheist writings and advocacy, responded by throwing a tantrum where he revealed private emails between him and Klein that revealed Harris himself to be by turns intransigent and an expert goalpost-mover.
The Guardian’s long read of the week is by a woman suing over her “dream” internship with the publication Monocle for unpaid wages.
The Atlantic, an intellectual literary magazine with a progressive tradition that dates back well over 100 years, hired alt-right troll Kevin Williamson, who proposed hanging all women who’d had abortions and referred to a black kid as 3/5 of a person when he wasn’t referring to the kid’s “primate gestures.”
A Stoneman-Douglas student writes in the NY Times that her efforts to be kind to mass murderer Nicholas Cruz did nothing to prevent him from shooting up the school.
The Washington Post reports that the maker of Peeps is trying to end its pension, leading to a protracted fight with its union and an ongoing lawsuit.
Senator James Lankford (R) of Oklahoma spoke to NPR of continuing effort by Russian troll farms to sow dissent online in the U.S., often by weighing in on both sides of hot-button issues.
Indiana’s Republican government appears to wish to emulate other states to its south, first with the anti-LGBT bill of a few years ago and now with a new bill that stigmatizes any woman who’s had an abortion and later reports any physical or psychological problems related to it.
The plastic residues from take-out food containers are polluting the world’s waterways, as these single-use items don’t biodegrade, but instead break down into smaller and smaller particles of plastic.
More from the Washington Post – I subscribe, and I would recommend it to anyone interested in good journalism and current events – on how studies of the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum give researchers more evidence to fuel projections of the damage climate change will do to the earth.
Two great baseball articles this week, both connected to Nats players and authored by the Washington Post’s Chelsea Janes. The first is a superb profile of Bryce Harper as the young superstar begins his walk year before free agency. The second profiles Eireann Dolan and her husband Sean Doolittle, calling them baseball’s most ‘woke’ couple.
Former New York Giants player Corey Widmer withdrew his name from Montana Football Hall of Fame consideration because of the sport’s link to concussions and CTE.
Two-time Top Chef alum Mike Isabella is facing multiple sexual harassment accusations.
Staring at tiny screens is ruining our eyes — and perhaps also making us pay less attention than ever to the world around us.
Facebook’s ad-tracking scandal isn’t just limited to that site; Most online publishing relies on the technology, even the outlets who are busy writing about Facebook’s privacy ‘problem.’
Cancer researchers discovered lung tumors with rudimentary digestive tracts, which probably isn’t as terrifying as it sounds but would make a good starting point for a sci-fi/horror film.
Florida’s legislature just can’t stop making public education there worse, such as allowing creationism into classrooms and, now, through state lawmakers ignoring conflicts of interest in pushing school choice laws. The swamp you want to drain may be in Tallahassee.
My friend Kelly Swails, an author of fantasy and YA fiction, wrote about changing her lifelong baseball rooting interest as a result of love, life, and being in the right ballpark at the right time.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, climate change, environment, links, privacy, stick to baseball, top chef

→ January 13, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/13/18.

No new Insider content this week, as MLB appears to still be asleep and I was working on the top 100 prospects package, which is scheduled to start running on January 22nd. I did hold a Klawchat on Thursday.

My latest board game review for Paste covers Pandemic: Rising Tide, a standalone spinoff of the original Pandemic, this time pitting players against rising waters threatening to flood the Netherlands, so players must build dikes and pumps while trying to complete four hydraulic stations to win the game. We liked it, as it gives a new twist to the now-familiar cooperative mechanics of Matt Leacock’s various games.

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

And now, the links…

I Made the Pizza Cinnamon Rolls from Mario Batali’s Sexual Misconduct Apology Letter is everything I wanted it to be and more.
That “gay wedding cake” case that was in the news last month? The bakers, who lost in an appellate court, helped spur an ongoing harassment campaign against the gay couple they refused to serve, including posting the couples’ contact information. The couple claims to be Christian, of course, but I doubt Jesus would be doxing anyone.
The New York Times looks at a French woman who made propaganda videos for the Daesh, was captured when Raqqa fell, and now wishes to return home. The quandary of what to do with citizens who fought for or with terrorists in Syria and are now coming back is facing many European countries.
Electric vehicles require a lot of cobalt right now in their lithium batteries’ cathodes, but demand may soon outstrip supply for the metal, most of which comes from the barely functional Democratic Republic of the Congo, where mining for cobalt and coltan (also known as tantalite) has helped fund the last four decades of civil wars.
Pfizer announced it is folding its division working on treatments for Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases after several failures in those two areas. It surprises me to see a major drug company walk away from a market that seems likely to grow in an aging world, although I suppose they could wait for a smaller company to develop one and buy the firm; Pfizer did announce they will start a venture fund for such efforts.
Grass-fed beef is trendy now, but the grass cows eat is getting less nutritious. The article cites a few reasons, but other research supports its claim that climate change is a major cause.
Speaking of (John B. McLemore accent) climate change, Grist argues that we need to get nuclear power back in the mix for our energy supply. It’s cleaner than fracking for natural gas, more efficient than wind or solar, and of course superior to coal in almost every way, yet cheap gas prices have made nuclear less economically viable and coal is taking nuclear’s place in markets where fear of nuclear power has made it politically toxic.
Climate change is one of several suspects behind the ongoing mass extinction of insect species, according to this long read from the Guardian.
Jeb Lund (aka @mobute) wrote that something racist fell out of the President’s shithole for 50 States of Blue. One aspect of this disaster I haven’t seen mentioned: Many of those countries Trump labelled with that epithet have natural resources, like cobalt, that we’re going to need. Maybe antagonizing them isn’t just racist or evil, but bad economic policy too.
While we were distracted with vulgarities and porn stars, Trump waived a punishment for Deutsche Bank, to whom he owes $130 million.
Also brushed aside by more lurid scandals was the report that Trump’s work day runs about seven hours. I wasn’t aware running the country was a part-time job.
The Trump administration rolled back an EPA proposal to take the pesticide chlorpyrifos off the market. Now scientists say the chemical is killing endangered salmon and the orcas that eat them. Previous research has found that chlorpyrifos can harm the brain of a human fetus or young child.
You will often hear commentators on the right decrying abrogations of free speech rights on left-leaning college campuses, but The Chronicle of Higher Education writes that conservatives are the ones truly threatening freedom of speech at American universities, including harassment of faculty members that has cost some professors their jobs.
Asmodee Digital officially announced the upcoming Steam port of Scythe, one of the best-reviewed heavy strategy board games of all time.
This WIRED story from 2015 looks at the underappreciated art of extreme metal band logos.
Vulture took a look at the backlash against Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri after the film won the top prize at the Golden Globes. I still have The Florida Project atop my personal 2017 rankings, with at least three major candidates still unseen.
I don’t know much about the game play, but Everdell, which already blew past its Kickstarter goal, might have the cutest board game art I’ve seen.
Restoration Games’ Justin Jacobson blogged about the development process behind Fireball Island, the next in their series of reissues of classic games. Past titles have included Stop Thief!, Downforce, and Indulgence.
Calliope Games has launched a Kickstarter for The Mansky Caper, a press-your-luck game with a robbery theme.
Jason Holt wrote a retrospective on helping write/translate the rulebook for Galaxy Trucker.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: apps, board games, climate change, environment, links, stick to baseball, the swamp

→ January 6, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/6/18.

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

And now, the links…

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

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

→ December 30, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/30/17.

Since my last links post, I’ve written three Insider pieces, on Colorado signing Wade Davis, Cleveland signing Yonder Alonso, and San Francisco trading for Evan Longoria.

On the board game front, I reviewed Photosynthesis for Paste, and ranked my top ten board games of 2017 for them too. Over at Vulture I did another Best of 2017 list, looking at the best light game, heavy game, board game app, expansion, and more.

The Wall Street Journal asked me to contribute to their annual “Who Read What” series, where 50 avid readers provide one or two books that really stood out for them in the preceding year. I was specifically asked to name one work of fiction and one of non-fiction, and chose The Erstwhile and Betaball.

As always, feel free to sign up for my email newsletter, which costs you nothing and won’t clog your inbox; I’ve only sent three total in the last two months, so if anything, I should probably be sending more. And, of course, thanks to everyone who bought Smart Baseball for themselves or as a Christmas gift.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: ProPublica looks at the disastrous handling of criminal mental-health cases in Mississippi by focusing on one young man who spent four years in custody before receiving the requested psychiatric evaluation.
Tulum, a trendy vacation spot on Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula, is seeing violent evictions as part of land-grabs by wealthy developers looking to cash in on the coastal town’s newfound popularity among tourists looking for an ‘alternative’ getaway.
The Washington Post has been looking at the ongoing problem of teen suicides in the U.S.; this story of a 15-year-old boy’s suicide by cop was the most powerful in the series.
The Post also broke down how the Justice Department undercut a DEA investigation into McKesson’s role in the opioid epidemic, settling the case for a much smaller fine than expected and no facility closures or criminal indictments.
Automation is threatening blue- and white-collar jobs in the developed world, but in Sweden, workers don’t see it as a threat, thanks to the country’s social welfare system and a very different relationship between capital and labor.
The New Yorker exposes corruption, racism, and illegal activity at Turning Point USA, a conservative nonprofit active on college campuses, and one that is close to the Trump family.
Also from ProPublica, the explosive compound RDX is now polluting groundwater across the country near where it’s been manufactured. The Pentagon has fought efforts within the EPA to name RDX a “likely” carcinogen (up from “possible”) because it would produce substantial legal liability for the agency. Affected water supplies include Grand Island, Nebraska; Salt Lake City; Cape Cod; and sites in Virginia and California.
The Koch brothers are now funding legal efforts to fight government projects to roll out broadband, which can help address the problem of the digital divide, where people are locked out of job and educational opportunities if they lack sufficient access to the internet. It seems to be a philosophical issue for the Kochs, that the government shouldn’t be engaging in what I would at least consider an infrastructure investment.
The EPA is considering allowing a massive increase in the use of a bee-killing pesticide after a new application by the chemical’s manufacture, Syngenta. Thiomethoxam is a neonicotinoid, a class of pesticides suspected of playing a role in the ongoing collapse of bee colonies, impairing honeybees’ ability to fly and homing powers. No bees, no food.
The right-wing American Civil Rights Union, with help from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC, seen in an unflattering light in The 13th), is pushing state legislators to further crack down on voting rights by cross-checking voter rolls with jury duty summonses. This piece from the Memphis Daily News looks at Tennessee reps who appear to do ALEC’s bidding, pushing “model bills” in that state’s legislature.
Former sportswriter Lisa Olson writes for The Athletic about how the sports journalism world is long overdue for a sexual harassment reckoning. I doubt she knew when she wrote that piece that a photographer would tell the world Miguel Sano assaulted her in 2015. Deadspin’s Diana Moskovitz wrote just a week prior about her experiences working at the NFL Network, which has been hit with a sizable lawsuit over ongoing harassment of women in its workplace.
David Frum’s piece at The Atlantic was the best response I saw to the absurdity of the GOP tax bill, which appears to be a sop to party donors and a direct tax on Democratic constituencies while flying in the face of any economic theories on growth or job creation.
The current Administration has talked up reducing federal regulations as a way to boost the economy, which on the whole is a Bad Thing – I like clean water and air, for example – but the FDA is starting to look at regulating so-called ‘homeopathic’ remedies, which have previously been able to make all kinds of vague health claims without any proof. And they can’t prove any of it, because homeopathy is bullshit. If people want to buy this stuff anyway, that’s fine, but consumers deserve to know not only that the products don’t work, but that they can’t work.
An Australian mother and father have lost a court bid to prevent their three children from receiving vaccination against the measles. The father, who is apparently dumber than a pile of dogshit, claimed that because he had the measles as a kid, he’d passed on his “natural immunity” to his children.
Lab-grown meat is becoming a reality, as feeding seven billion people by raising livestock is just not a sustainable long-term solution. Will “real” beef become even more of a luxury good in the future?
Two more New York Times pieces of merit: how lawsuits are slowing research into health issues and technologies, and how unions are making inroads into digital media. I’m not a union member and I don’t believe anyone at ESPN is unionized.
This editorial asking why Americans don’t realize how poor their lives are is laughably awful. The author’s Europhilia has apparently distorted his views of that continent and of life in the United States.
A friend – okay, fine, it’s Chris Crawford – bought me a MoviePass, and I’ve already used it twice, saving almost what he spent for the three-month subscription. The movie theater industry is trying to figure out what to do with the new company, which lets you see one movie per day for free under the $10/month subscription.
I’m very excited for the upcoming board game adaptation of The Scarlet Pimpernel; The Player’s Aid interviewed the game’s designer, Brian Kelley.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: boardgames, environment, links, mental health, mexico, movies, stick to baseball, sustainability, vaccines

→ December 9, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/9/17.

For Insiders, I had four pieces this week (and may have another before the day is out). I wrote about what Shohei Ohtani’s deal with the Angels means for them and the AL West, Seattle’s trade for Dee Gordon, the signings earlier this week of Kevin Maitan, Mike Minor, and Miles Mikolas, and deals involving Welington Castillo, Aledmys Diaz, and Brad Boxberger. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

For Ars Technica, I looked at the upcoming virtual reality adaptation of the board game Catan.

If you missed them here on the dish, my annual cookbook recommendations, gift guide for cooks, and top 100 board game rankings are all up.

Also, here’s your weekly reminder to buy my book Smart Baseball for everyone on your holiday list.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Guardian looks at the ongoing controversy over ‘shaken baby syndrome’, which has sent many parents to jail but probably doesn’t even exist.
Bloomberg documented the quest of one victim of a debt-collection scam to track down the con artists hounding him, which also brought to light this entire shadow industry of people trying to collect on debts that were either already paid off or weren’t real to begin with. It’s a con that preys on vulnerable people who may not know their rights or understand that the calls might be fraudulent.
The Virginia Quarterly Review looks at the ‘Slenderman’ attempted murder, when two 12-year-old girls stabbed their friend 19 times and left her to die because they were trying to please that fictional character. The essay compares this crime to the murder of Honorah Parker by her daughter and a friend in New Zealand, the basis for the Peter Jackson movie Heavenly Creatures.
A VICE writer and provocateur gamed the system to make his backyard shed the top-rated restaurant on TripAdvisor, which led to all kinds of hilarity when people tried to call and make reservations at a restaurant that wasn’t real.
What do we mean when we speak of “freedom of speech?” The Atlantic looks at two competing definitions of the term as we grapple with the spread of white supremacists on the airwaves and touring college campuses.
Tim Grierson wrote about how some late-night talk show hosts have come of age by leading the criticism of the current Administration, notably Seth Meyers and Jimmy Kimmel.
Southeast Asian nations are now dealing with artemisinin-resistant malaria, meaning that the parasite responsible for the illness has evolved resistance to the first treatment option for people with the mosquito-borne disease. Meanwhile, the Administration has proposed a 44% cut to funding for the President’s Malaria Initiative.
Anti-vaxxer parents are overly concerned with notions of ‘liberty’ and ‘purity’, while pro-vaccine messaging tends to revolve around fairness and the harm of vaccine-preventable diseases. A new study shows that may be a factor in the rise in vaccine denialism: the cranks are hitting the right moral points in their comments, while the truth loses out.
The New York Times has a photo essay on Norilsk, the northernmost city with over 100,000 inhabitants, home to one of the most significant polluters in the world, MMC Norilsk Nickel. The Atlantic also ran a piece on Norilsk last month, featuring an 11-minute documentary called My Deadly, Beautiful City.
The Economic Policy Institute, which focuses on issues related to low- and moderate-income Americans, argues that there is no evidence that corporate tax cuts will lead to higher wages and will end up costing lower-income taxpayers more in the long run.
I found this Ars Technica beginner’s guide to bitcoin useful and well-written without condescending to an audience that might not grasp what “cryptocurrency” means or how a currency can exist without a government behind it. Point 7, about the massive amount of energy consumed by bitcoin’s blockchain, seems to be rising in prominence now that the speculation in the currency has brought its value into five-digit territory. I don’t own any bitcoins, though – my entire 401k is invested in tulips.
The death toll in Puerto Rico in the aftermath of two category five hurricanes is likely 16 times higher than the official tally, while the Administration tries to claim success in the recovery and restoration efforts there.
A former Catholic priest has been convicted of killing a young woman who came to him for confession in 1960, while he was still a member of the clergy in McAllen, Texas. The Catholic Church stands accused of helping cover up the murder.
Facebook is blocking women who call men “scum” under the guise of its policies about hate speech … but they don’t do much, if anything, about men harassing or threatening women on their site, and I’ve found they aren’t even very good or consistent about the hate-speech policy.
This post about a Newfoundland woman’s bread recipe, which really isn’t much of a recipe at all, was particularly interesting for its description of a touton, a local version of an English muffin where leftover bread dough is fried in butter.
A biochemistry major at Plymouth State University is now fielding calls from modeling agencies after a random photo of her, taking at Howard University’s homecoming event, went viral on Instagram.
Native American tribes are banding together to fight an Administration proposal to shrink the Bears Ears national monument by over one million acres, a move encouraged by a Canadian-owned uranium mining firm.
The teenagers in New Zealand metal band Alien Weaponry sing (or shout) their lyrics in Te Reo Māori to try to encourage listeners to learn the language and more about the Māori culture. There’s a very heavy Bay Area thrash influence to their music too.
Kim Davis made national news in 2015 for violating a federal judge’s order to issue same-sex marriage licenses. Now one of the men whose license she refused to issue is running against her for her seat as county clerk.
Boardgame news! Ancestree, one of my favorite games of GenCon 2017, has arrived at the warehouse and is shipping to Kickstarter backers. It should appear in stores shortly afterwards.
Rather Dashing Games announced a March release of Wakening Lair, a cooperative dungeon-crawl boardgame that promises an RPG-lite experience in under an hour.
IDW Games announced Masque of the Red Death, a deduction game based on the Edgar Allen Poe story.
My own ranking of the top ten board games of 2017 will be up this upcoming week at Paste; in the meantime, here’s a solid top ten from Smithsonian magazine, with two titles that’ll appear on my list and one more, Raiders of the North Sea, I would have ranked but found out it was originally released in 2015, so I dq’d it.
Fantasy Flight Interactive announced this morning that they’re developing a digital version of the Lord of the Rings card game (video), a Living Card Game™ from FFG in the same vein as Android: Netrunner and Arkham Horror.
Two lighter videos to end this dreadful week of news: An Australian MP proposed to his boyfriend from the House floor during the country’s same-sex marriage debate. Marriage equality was signed into law in that country this week, but the straight couple who said they’d divorce if same-sex marriage was legalized have reneged on that promise.
Canada’s absolutely true news outlet The Beaverton documents a new way doctors are convincing parents to vaccinate.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: bread, Economics, environment, first amendment, links, metal, science, stick to baseball, taxes, vaccines

→ September 23, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/22/17.

I wrote three pieces for Insiders this week: scouting notes on Yu Darvish, more notes on Aaron Nola and some young Phillies hitters, and my annual look at players I was wrong about. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I’m down to biweekly game reviews for Paste, so the most recent one is from last week, covering the great Days of Wonder-published title Yamataï, by the same designer who won the Spiel des Jahres (game of the year) this year for his game Kingdomino.

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

And now, the links…

Our federal government and many state governments continue to deny that anthropogenic climate change exists, even as multiple U.S. states and territories are battered by hurricanes (possibly) made worse by warming oceans. Our military, however, has accepted climate change for over 25 years and is planning around it, given its attendant security risks and operational challenges.
The New York Times reports that a massive drop in international travel to the U.S. cost our economy $2.7 billion just in the first quarter of this year. This kind of economic contraction hits everyone, including lower-income people in the service industries that gain directly from tourism spending.
Longreads: Indy Week, a North Carolina alternative newspaper, ran a three-part investigative series this July on the environmental and quality-of-life damage wrought by industrial pig farms in that state. I reviewed Barry Estabrook’s book Pig Tales, on the rise of Big Pig, this summer; he detailed how the North Carolina state government bent over backwards to remove regulations on industrial pork producers. This is the result: The swamp you want to drain is actually full of pig feces.
The Guardian offers a long, deep look at Luxembourg’s attempt to move from tax haven to space-mining haven, courting investors who wish to privatize celestial assets like asteroids. The piece touches on many subjects, including the tiny European duchy’s odd history and questions of sovereignty.
The Verge looks at climate change, India, and the war against heat. Climate change will affect the entire planet, but heavily populated tropical countries may take the worst hit.
And my last longread of the week is on Longreads itself: a thorough look at the history, purpose, and problems with the federal Freedom of Information Act. Among other notable bits: why are fourteen federal ‘food boards,’ like the American Egg Board, now exempt from open records requests? (Because they might be breaking the law, of course.)
If you have kids, you need to ensure they get vaccinated against meningitis. A mother in England whose daughter died of meningitis type W shares her story; the girl came home from school very sick, but the telltale MenW symptoms weren’t there, and she died the next day.
Florida Power & Light has written – literally – state regulations that helped it to $1.7 billion in profits in 2016, including rules that forbid homeowners from powering their own houses with solar panels. And if the power grid goes out, you have to turn your solar panels off. In one of the sunniest states in the country, you can’t power your own goddamned house because the power company said no. I wonder if FPL is okay with candles.
The classic real-time strategy videogame series Age of Empires will return this fall with a new edition, and Ars Technica has a very long look at the history of the genre, including a lot of obscure titles I didn’t know. I loved the original AoE and AoE II but never could beat the thing on Emperor level.
Roy Moore is running for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Jeff Sessions, and has a real chance of winning, despite a total disregard for the doctrine of the separation of church and state, and such views on people of color as referring to Native Americans and Asians as “reds and yellows”.
A similar reactionary conservative is running in Arizona against incumbent Republican Senator Jeff Flake, who was a critic of Trump prior to the election but has cheerleaded many of the President’s nominations and orders, including that of Betsy DeVos, as Flake and DeVos share an antipathy towards public education.
Meanwhile, the swamp is rank: Health & Human Services Secretary Tom Price, a member of a fringe, anti-science doctor’s group, was caught billing taxpayers for expensive charter flights when commercial routes would have saved tens of thousands of dollars. Then he got caught doing it more. Vox has an overview of how he bilked taxpayers out of $300,000 by doing so.
And it’s getting ranker: the President has nominated a lobbyist who fought regulations to keep certain chemicals out of consumer goods to lead that regulatory program in the EPA.
Oh, I’m not done: he’s also nominated unqualified campaign workers to fill science-oriented positions at the US Department of Agriculture. The USDA is often useless, but this practice might gut the little it does to help ensure a modicum of safety in our food supply, or to stop rampant pollution from food producers like the pig slaughterhouses mentioned in the longread above.
The coalition governing Iceland collapsed last week due to revelations of pardons its leaders were giving to convicted child molesters.
Tim Grierson looks at the fabricated mystique of “unplugged” concerts and albums.
A Royals fan in southern California donated a kidney to a Giants fan, and the donor told the recipient (they were friends already) with some help from the Giants and AT&T Park.
If you didn’t see this when I tweeted it last week, this story on the research grant that led to BRCA1 is absolutely remarkable and it too has a baseball connection.
Also from last weekend, Amber Tamblyn is done with men refusing to believe women, retelling the story of how James Woods tried to pick her up when she was just 16 years old.
This sounds like abuse, not love: actor Ian Somerhalder, whom I’d never heard of till Friday, threw out his wife’s birth control pills so she would get pregnant.
The rehabilitation of Sean Spicer is already well underway, according to Lauren Duca, with his Emmy appearance and tour of the talkshow circuit. Maybe we should pump the brakes, says Jay Willis at GQ.
Garrett Martin, my editor at Paste, asks Jimmy Kimmel to keep up the righteous anger and dispense with the jocular asides that detract from his very real, important message.
Gwyneth Paltrow’s Store Full of Bullshit is now selling psychic vampire repellent. At least they’ve moved on from selling things for women to stick up their vaginas.
Should a restaurant that’s been awarded 3 stars by the Michelin Guide be allowed to withdraw its entry from the critical publication? The chef-owners say they want to cook their style of food without worrying about meeting someone else’s standard or maintaining the rating.
A neo-Nazi was walking around Seattle wearing a swastika armband and screaming at people on the street; various people, some of whom identify themselves as “antifa,” used social media to spread the word and find him, after which one of the activists knocked him unconscious with one punch.
Pete Wells of the New York Times named Razza in Jersey City as New York’s best pizza, which resulted, according to my sources, in a three-hour wait this past Wednesday night.
The late John Saunders, also of ESPN, wrote in his memoir of how his abusive father turned his best day into one of his worst.
Is The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness author Nassem Taleb a racist using flawed beliefs to justify investing in the Syrian regime? There’s some background to this, including links from within that piece, that was new to me; I thought Taleb was still a darling of pop-intellectual circles since his first two books became bestsellers. (I read The Black Swan and enjoyed it.)
Some white dude on Facebook, a friend of a friend of mine, posted a meme about how blacks owned slaves in antebellum America, so stop claiming it’s all racism or some such nonsense. The thing is it’s a lot more complicated than that, as Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates wrote in a 2013 post at the Root. Even better was the other white dude who responded that “slavery ended 150 years ago. Get over it!” Easy when those weren’t your ancestors in chains, I suppose.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: climate change, environment, florida, india, links, Music, pizza, pork, racism, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines, video games

→ September 8, 2017
→ By keith

Half-Earth.

Biologist E.O. Wilson has won two Pulitzer Prizes for Non-Fiction, including one for, of all things, a textbook on ants, along with numerous other awards for his lengthy bibliography of popular and scholarly works on evolution, sociobiology, ecology, and conservationism. His 2016 book Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life falls into the last category while drawing on multiple fields of expertise to make his case that we should preserve half of the area of the planet for conservation to maintain biodiversity and fight climate change, but for a work by a great scholar and professor, Half-Earth feels half-hearted, as if Wilson knows what he wants to argue but couldn’t be bothered to support his side sufficiently to sway the unconvinced.

The idea of preserving half of the planet, land and sea, for conservation isn’t new nor is it Wilson’s; he credits Tony Hiss with coining the term “half-earth” to describe the concept in a Smithsonian magazine article in 2014. And there’s little doubt that man’s impact on the planet – its environment and the millions of other species on it – has been a net negative for everyone but man, with the pace of change only accelerating as we continue to alter the compositions of the planet’s atmosphere, soil, and water supply. Wilson does well when describing what we might lose or have already lost as a result of our mere presence or our industrial activities, talking about habitats we’ve razed or species we’ve driven to extinction deliberately, through the introductions of invasive species, or through other changes to the environment. But he assumes that the reader will see these losses as significant, or even see them as losses, without sufficiently detailing why it matters that, say, we’re wiping out the world’s rhinoceros population, or various island birds and rodents have been exterminated by the introduction of non-native snakes.

What’s missing even more from the work, however, is a consideration of the costs of an endeavor like the one Wilson is proposing. Man is fairly well distributed across the planet, and setting aside 50% of its land mass for conservation would require resettling hundreds of thousands of people, possibly millions, many of them members of indigenous populations who live in the least-altered environments on the planet. Crowding the planet’s seven billion people (and rising) into less of the space will trade some environmental problems for others, as various forms pollution rise with population density, and many large urban areas already struggle under the weight of their people, with third-world megacities paralyzed by traffic and its attendant problems. Relocating people is expensive, difficult, and traumatic. There’s also the very real question of feeding those seven billion people and supplying them with fresh water, which we’re already struggling to do; if you reserve half of the world’s land and half of its oceans for conservation, those tasks become more difficult and likely more expensive – a cost few people will be willing to bear directly. It might be necessary, but Wilson glosses over the practical problems his solution would create.

There is, however, one good reason to read Half-Earth right now, at least in the United States, where the current federal administration is rolling back environmental protections left and right, including cutting funds for wildlife area acquisition and management. But I thought Elizabeth Kolbert’s Pulitzer-winning book The Sixth Extinction made the same general case more powerfully and thoroughly, describing the current, anthropogenic mass extinction that could rival the K-Pg event for sheer number of species exterminated if we don’t do anything about it. Kolbert goes into greater depth with more concrete examples of how man’s activity has altered the planet and moved species around to extinguish some species and threaten others, including a lengthy discussion of chytrid fungus, a thus-far incurable ailment that is killing off tropical frog species with alarming speed.

I think Wilson also fell into the trap that William Easterley (among others) has identified in charitable and other “good intentions” efforts – aiming impossibly high, so that you can never meet your stated goal. You want to end world hunger? That sounds great, but it’ll never happen, and the only outcome will be the creation of a giant organization that absorbs donations without ever accomplishing much of anything. Micro-efforts yield more tangible results, and increase accountability for workers and donors alike. So while saying “let’s reserve half the planet to save it” is an admirable goal, and may even be the right strategy for the long term, it ain’t happening, and talking about it doesn’t get us any closer to solutions. If you want to help save the planet, work towards small, achievable goals. And right now, that probably means working for change in Washington.

Next up: Nina George’s 2013 novel The Little Paris Bookshop.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: climate change, environment, evolution, history of science, non-fiction, science

→ June 27, 2017
→ By keith

The Windup Girl.

Paolo Bacigalupi’s 2010 novel The Windup Girl, which won the Hugo and Nebula Awards for the best sci-fi novel of that year, manages to be both fantastical and realistic, with an all-too-believable setting in a world after a series of environmental catastrophes where food supplies are controlled by “calorie” companies and nations have fallen under their extortionary practices. The title character is a genetically modified human, grown in a lab in Japan as a sort of modern servant and concubine, whose mistreatment will lead to the fall of the Thai government and a shift in the area’s ongoing power struggle. Bacigalupi’s story is violent and his worldview bleak, but in a time when the world’s largest economy is pulling out of a worldwide agreement to try to slow man’s effect on the global climate, it seems entirely plausible – and his take on corporate ownership of genes and species doesn’t seem quite so cynical as it might have even seven years ago.

The multifacted plot gives us Anderson Lake, ostensibly an American managing a foreign factory in Thailand but in reality a researcher hunting for unusual genes and species bred or developed by Thai scientists – especially the location of the country’s seedbank, a potential goldmine of new genes for Lake’s employer to use to create new species of grains and other plants to resist the latest waves of diseases and pests. (Bagicalupi has created a rather terrifying-sounding array of these biological threats, including the evocative “blister rust.”) The factory Lake oversees uses animal power to create kink-springs that are used in this post-petroleum world as portable power sources, while also growing species of algae to help generate power to be stored in these springs. He stumbles on Emiko, the “windup girl” of the title, who is now owned by a strip club owner after her original Japanese owner decided to abandon her in Thailand rather than pay the dirigible fare to fly her back to Tokyo. The Thai government’s power is split between two warring factions, Trade and Environment, each of which plays a role in protecting the insular kingdom from outside threats and influences – like the importation of plants carrying new diseases – with each requiring its own sets of bribes and connections before shipments of outside goods can enter the country. When one of Trade’s enforcers, Jaidee, goes too far in punishing an importer who hasn’t paid sufficient bribes, it sets off a chain reaction that will eventually envelop Lake, Emiko, Jaidee’s forces, the heads of Trade, Environment, the army, and the queen’s regent in a political cataclysm that threatens to bring the country down.

The story is violent, especially to Emiko, often way beyond anything necessary for the plot to move forward. While the one major scene where she’s raped and forcibly sodomized leads to a revenge sequence that is integrated into the political storyline, there’s just more detail of her degradation than any reader should need – or than any author should want to offer. It engenders sympathy for her character, but she’s already such a pariah in this society that this is superfluous. Instead it seems like pandering to the worst elements of the audience.

Yet beyond Emiko, is there really a compelling character anywhere in the book? Lake is a blank page; his compassion for Emiko doesn’t fit with the rest of his behavior, and if it’s just sexual attraction, that doesn’t exactly explain the compassion either. There’s no explanation for why he’s one person in his work mode and someone else entirely once he encounters Emiko and ends up saving her from officials chasing her in the street a day or two later. The closest thing to a fully-developed second character in the book is Kanya, Jaidee’s top lieutenant who ends up taking over his squad and finds the agency that Emiko lacks. Their paths don’t intersect – Kanya has a marked disdain for the windup who temporarily helps her hunt for Emiko – but they do represent contrasting sides of the issue of women establishing any sort of control over their lives in a male-dominated world.

Post-environmental catastrophe novels have been around a long time – A Canticle for Leibowitz, set after what appears to have been a nuclear disaster, won the Hugo over forty years earlier – but Bacigalupi manages to fold a number of current problems or concerns into his setting that make it seem immediate where others in the subgenre have been remote. Global temperatures have risen with predictable consequences like higher sea levels. Food insecurity is a political destabilizer in this world, and food shortages are exacerbated by more tumultuous weather patterns and new plagues that evolved around monocultures foisted on the world by GMO food monopolies. Petroleum is gone, presumably exhausted, and methane use is tightly regulated. That means airplanes are gone and cars are luxury items. Air conditioning doesn’t seem to exist, which is particularly relevant to Emiko, who has been designed with smaller pores that mean she can’t sweat properly to cool her body. None of this seems that improbable or that far off, especially with our current government backpedaling on virtually all initiatives to protect the environment.

This novel winning major awards makes sense given the themes it tackles and the level of detail Bacigalupi has invested in his world, but I don’t think it’s that great of a novel in a literary sense due to the lack of compelling central characters. It’s thought-provoking, as many of the great sci-fi novels are, and there’s an immediacy here that stories of interstellar travel or time-shifting can’t bring. After I finished, however, I found the characters had completely vanished from my mind – the setting stuck, but none of the individuals did. That keeps it from the top echelon of sci-fi novels I’ve read in my run through the Hugo winners.

Unrelated, but “Bacigalupi” sounds like something the Hoobs would say.

Next up: I’ve run through three short books since finishing this, including Fritz Lieber’s Hugo-winning novella The Big Time, which is free for the Kindle because it’s in the public domain but which I found boring, and am now reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: american literature, dystopian, environment, hugo award, nebula award, science fiction

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