first amendment

→ November 15, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/15/25.

Nothing new from me at the Athletic this week as I wait for a trade or signing to write up. I did hold a Klawchat on Thursday here on the dish.

At Endless Mode, I reviewed Vantage, the new open-world cooperative game from designer Jamey Stegmaier (Tapestry, Scythe); it’s like the old Choose Your Own Adventure books converted to the tabletop, but despite incredible art and a massive amount of content in the box, I found it frustrating to try to play.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter this week, finally. I’ve gotten a bit stuck with one or two of the ideas I’ve had for newsletters and I think that held me back from writing one.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: A group of New York-based investors used a loan program designed to help revitalize disused properties in Baltimore to borrow over $100 million to buy properties, and then default on the loans, screwing over lenders, tenants, and the Baltimore housing market in general.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent used a tax dodge to avoid paying over $900,000 in taxes from 2021-23. He now oversees the IRS.

Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem steered a $220 million contract to a firm to which she is closely tied, skipping the competitive bidding process by claiming there’s an “emergency” at the border with Mexico.

I don’t understand why this has received so little attention, but the Senate passed a bill that would wipe out the U.S. cannabis industry, which will do significant economic harm to a nascent industry and to the states that have benefited from taxing an activity that is just going to move underground anyway.

KFF Health News looks at the destruction wrought by Russ Vought, the architect of Project 2025, on our public health infrastructure. Holding these people accountable if and when they ever lose power is going to be crucial to preventing a recurrence.

Canada culled a flock of ostriches where at least some were infected with the H5N1 avian flu, despite some ridiculous interference and protests from anti-vax nut jobs. The ostrich farmers in question tried to hide the infections and didn’t follow requirements for basic biosafety.

Meanwhile, two longtime anti-vax grifters are now overseeing the FDA’s vaccine regulation program.

The unionized writers at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette have been on strike for over three years now, but finally got their day in court and won a ruling that covers management’s violations back to 2020.

Child rapist and cult leader Warren Jeffs went to prison over a decade ago, but the harm he inflicted on his community continues, as measles has swept through Colorado City because he preached that vaccines were part of a government plot to make people infertile.

The resident of a home in Whitestown, Indiana, shot and killed a cleaning woman who went to the wrong house. Police have yet to name the shooter, who could (should!) face criminal charges.

A corrupt police chief in Marion County, Kansas, abused his power to raid the offices of a tiny local newspaper there in 2023 to prevent the Marion County Record from publishing a story about a local restaurant owner who may have lied on her liquor license application. This week, the county agreed to pay $3 million to the paper’s publisher and several of the journalists. The chief, who later resigned, is still facing criminal charges.

The husband of Michigan Secretary of State and gubernatorial candidate Jocelyn Benson (D) is the VP of development for a company planning to build a massive data center in the state over objections from the local community. At best, it’s a huge conflict of interest.

This is how you write a fair and honest obituary: James Watson “co-discovered DNA’s structure but later engaged in rank racism and sexism.” We do not have to paper over the misdeeds of the deceased to comply with some dated sense of decorum. Watson was part of one of the most significant discoveries of the 20^th century. He was also a racist asshole.

A 13-year-old girl in Louisiana was expelled (and later reinstated on probation) for hitting a classmate who made and distributed a deepfake porn image of her. Her parents notified the school, which appears to have taken no action against the boy.

This LitHub piece is well worth reading if only for how it explains why the phrase “Critics say” should not appear in serious journalism. You need to name those critics and show what they’re saying and why it might be valid.

Alex Berenson, dubbed “the pandemic’s wrongest man” for his consistently incorrect predictions about first the spread of the virus and then the effectiveness and safety of the vaccines against it, lost his lawsuit claiming the federal government “censored” him when Twitter nuked his account in 2021. He’s still making bank from his Substack newsletter, though.

A student from Colorado Academy applied early decision to Tulane and was accepted, but later backed out. The university then punished the entire school with a one-year ban on early-decision applications.

Chile named its Miss World winner this past week, which is newsworthy because Ignacia Fernández is also a death-metal vocalist for the band Decessus and even gave a performance as such in the finals. There are very few female vocalists in that particular subgenre; I could only name two without searching, Arch Enemy (Alissa White-Gluz) and the defunct Nuclear Death (Lori Bravo).

The Climate-Colored Goggles newsletter writes about the Dodgers’ partnership with Phillips 66, a fossil-fuel company driving the same climate change that’s feeding the devastating wildfires that hit California just about every year.

Mystic Lands, the sequel/update to the card-crafting game Mystic Vale, has six days left on its successful Kickstarter (although I am surprised it hasn’t raised more money given the original’s popularity).

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, baltimore, board game news, cannabis, cults, death metal, first amendment, frauds, guns, kansas, links, longreads, louisiana, michigan, science, stick to baseball, the swamp, unions, vaccines

→ November 1, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/1/25.

My ranking of the top 50 free agents this offseason will run on Monday over at the Athletic, and I’ll do a Q&A that day or the day after, depending on my schedule.

Over at Endless Mode, I reviewed the new two-player game Leaders, which is pretty meh in his basic mode but really shines in expert mode, where players get to draft the character tokens they’ll use in the game versus the semi-random setup in the original.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: ProPublica goes deep on the delusional born-again Christian in charge of the North Carolina Supreme Court.

The best piece I’ve read this week, and one of the best all year, is this New York Times investigative report on the underpowered fight against sex trafficking on Figueroa Street in Los Angeles. It’s a very humanist look at the real victims here, the trafficked girls, and how they end up coerced into sex work.

Suriname has long been a carbon-negative country, as the nation’s share of the Amazon rain forest absorbs more carbon dioxide than the poor population of the country can produce. That may change as the country pursues an offshore oil-drilling initiative, claiming they’ll use the funds to build a sustainable green economy.

Salon’s Amanda Marcotte explores how the far-right group the Proud Boys invented antifa.

Radley Balko explores how false accusations of child molestation destroyed a preschool teacher’s life, even after they were ruled unfounded. Jordan Silverman ended up losing custody of his sons and saw his health and career wrecked by the allegations and vindictive parents who wouldn’t accept the official ruling.

The Intercept reports on a Tennessee man who was jailed for posting memes mocking murdered right-wing demagogue Charlie Kirk. The great Phil Williams of News Channel 5 interviewed the sheriff involved, who did not acquit himself well and seems unaware of what the Constitution says.

Videos circulating online appear to show mass executions in Sudan’s Darfur region after the Rapid Support Forces, a breakaway faction of the country’s military, took control. Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab estimates that the RSF killed 10,000 people in three days.

The BBC looks at the probably stolen election in Cameroon, where dictator Paul Biya, who has ruled the African nation for 43 years, claimed victory and a new term that will run until he’s 99 years old. An opposition leader who also claimed victory has led the country, and there have been protests for at least the last three days.

The lab-leak conspiracy theory was already dead, but here’s another nail for its coffin: Scientists found another Covid virus in Brazilian bats, proving that the mutation that allowed SARS-CoV-2 to infect humans is a natural phenomenon.

The Guardian obtained a leaked document showing that Amazon sought to hide how much water its data centers use. Crypto, AI, they’re all disasters for the environment.

Get your flu shot.

Bacteria are evolving to become resistant to antibiotics faster than we’re developing the drugs.

Meanwhile, Florida is trying to kill its own citizens by ending all childhood vaccination mandates. It took less than a year for rollbacks in vaccination rates and mandates to lead to measles outbreaks. Florida is going to be the epicenter of outbreaks of multiple diseases within the next twelve months, and there’s no keeping them within the state’s borders.

I mentioned last week how Indiana University had shut down its student newspaper because the paper dared to print the news. Many alumni pulled their donations in response, and the school relented. You have the power to do something, somewhere.

Middlebury College student Lia Smith, a trans woman, was found dead last week after she committed suicide. Middlebury had kicked her off their swimming and diving team as they complied in advance with the Administration’s war on trans people.

A white man in Alabama planned attacks on multiple synagogues and possibly public figures, and then planned to commit suicide by cop, according to officials involved in his arrest this past week.

The Guardian also has the details on a maybe-new scam where moped riders bump a potential mark’s car and then demand to see the victim’s driver’s license and/or insurance documents so they can open up new insurance policies in the victim’s name and submit bogus claims. I say “maybe-new” because this sounds like a twist on several other scams involving staged accidents.

John Roberts’ legacy as Chief Justice may be determined by one ruling he made in 2024 – and it’s probably not the legacy he thinks he’ll leave.

Board game news: The Kickstarter for Cascadia: Alpine Lakes, a standalone follow-up to the Spiel-winning Cascadia, is already over $200K and has a month to go.

The Kickstarter for Wonderland’s War Duel, a two-player version of the acclaimed (and very hard to find) 2022 game Wonderland’s War, has just five days left.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, anti-science, board game news, coronavirus, environment, first amendment, health, indiana, links, longreads, north carolina, scams, scotus, stick to baseball, tennessee, trans rights, vaccines

→ September 27, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/27/25.

For subscribers to The Athletic, I wrote my annual column with my ballots for the awards I don’t have this year. A record number of people didn’t read the intro this year.

At Endless Mode, I reviewed the two-player game Naishi, which is a solid enough game, but which is yet another example of white European designers & illustrators using Japanese culture and history as a theme, and in this case they really misused it in a way that I couldn’t get past.

I sent out another edition of my free email newsletter on Friday, touching on (waves hands pathetically) all of this happening around us.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: A team of Bloomberg reporters gained access to 18,000 emails from Jeffrey Epstein’s Yahoo account, and found that a number of prominent lawyers and academics continued to help him even after his crimes against children were first exposed.
For Pioneer Works, Lauren Markham describes how climate change is already making parts of Greece uninhabitable in the summers, with fires and temperatures topping 110 degrees.
Texas Monthly examines the water wars in the eastern part of Texas, as politicians, residents, and carpetbagging investors try to claim the increasingly scarce resource.
ProPublica exposes how a Florida donor got Kristi Noem to fast-track disaster aid for a tourist pier in Naples. Drain the swamp!
Jamelle Bouie calls out the MAGA movement’s complete disinterest in debate, despite the disingenuous claims to the contrary in the last two weeks.
The Stranger reports on the rise in attacks on trans women in the Seattle area, part of a larger increase in attacks on LGBT people in general.
Writing in Stat News, Arthur Caplan, head of the Division of Medical Ethics at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, says that Americans can no longer trust their government’s so-called health advice.
As you may have seen already, White House border czar Tom Homan accepted $50,000 in a CAVA bag from FBI agents posing as business executives in 2024, but Trump’s DOJ and FBI shut the investigation down. Drain the swamp!
Antibiotic-resistant Enterobacteles infections rose 461% in U.S. hospitals from 2019 to 2023; while still rare overall, it’s a “nightmare” bacterium due to the lack of treatments and high fatality rate.
Bill Berrien, a Republican candidate for Governor in Wisconsin, followed a number of sexually explicit accounts on social media until reporters from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel asked him about it. He has, of course, taken up the party line in attacking trans people.
Ryan Walters, the Republican superintendent of public instruction in Oklahoma, resigned to take a job with a reactionary nonprofit that he says is going to “destroy the teachers’ unions.” Walters tried to force Oklahoma teachers to teach the Bible in public classrooms, but all he really did was drive Oklahoma’s national education ranking down even further, while also facing allegations that he was watching porn in his office.
ICE agents held a five-year-old girl hostage to try to get her father to surrender to them.
A Los Angeles-area woman with bipolar disorder gave her life savings to scammers, even selling her house to send them money, because she fell for their AI videos showing a soap opera actor saying he was in love with her.
After The Guardian revealed that Israel was using Microsoft cloud and AI services to conduct mass surveillance on Palestinians, the software company blocked the country from using at least some of those services. Meanwhile, more experts have come out to call Israel’s actions in Gaza genocide.
The Concho Observer reports on the fear and confusion at Angelo State University due to Texas’s transphobic law that prohibits faculty from mentioning the fact that there are more than two genders, discussing anything relating to transgender people, or using trans students’ correct names.
Meanwhile, an anonymous Texas A&M professor wrote an open letter to students there, asking them to be agents of change and fight the state and federal governments’ attempts to bowdlerize their education.
Task & Purpose tracked down the flag-bearing marine in this viral photo at the protests outside of ICE’s Chicago facility last week.
The Trump Administration is gutting the Fair Housing Act in addition to all of the other havoc and harm they’re causing.
Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) voted against the resolution to “honor” Charlie Kirk last week, saying that Kirk “resurrected dangerous prejudices of a dark past” and that the activist’s “rhetoric was divisive, disparaging, and too often rooted in grievance.”
The Dean of Harvard’s School of Public Health took $150,000 to lie under oath by claiming that Tylenol causes autism.
Slovakia’s right-wing leader pulled the country further from the west with a constitutional amendment that only ‘recognizes’ two genders, putting EU aid at risk and earning condemnation from Amnesty International.
Chicago will pay $90 million to victims of one crooked cop, Sgt. Ronald Watts, who planted drugs on suspects, falsified reports, and threatened to charge people with drug-related crimes if they weren’t paid off. The city faced over 170 lawsuits related to Watts’ conduct and those of officers who served under him.
Three really exciting board game Kickstarters launched this week. Container is a ‘grail game’ that’s been out of print for years; it’s an economic game about shipping containers and people freaking love it. The Voynich Puzzle is a heavy-ish Eurogame from the designer of Barcelona and Windmill Valley. Kalypso is a midweight tile-laying game from a first-time designer and from the publisher of Earth.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, climate change, first amendment, greece, harvard, health, immigration, lgbt rights, links, longreads, oklahoma, police, scams, stick to baseball, texas, the swamp, vaccines, water crisis, wisconsin

→ September 20, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/20/25.

At the Athletic this week, I wrote my annual Prospect of the Year column, giving the nod to the Pirates’ Konnor Griffin and mentioning a handful of other prospects who had great years.

For Endless Mode, I reviewed the cooperative card game Beasts, another limited-communication game that I thought was perfectly fine, but not novel or interesting enough to unseat better games in this genre for me.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter on Friday. I feel like that’s going to be the best place for my thoughts on the state of things for now.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: WIRED’s Katie Drummond interviewed Cloudflare CEO Matt Prince, who has some wildly progressive views on content, AI, and the future of the Internet.

In Vanity Fair, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote how pundits and politicians are sanitizing the legacy of Charlie Kirk.

The Times reported on two deals that allowed the Trumps to pocket billions from their cryptocurrency while giving the U.A.E. access to computer chips.

Guardian columnist Helen Pidd attended the far-right rally in the UK led by white nationalist Tommy Robinson and wrote that this dangerous movement is only going to grow from here.

Quanta explains an unsolved problem in computer science for the longest-running six-rule computer program, known as the Busy Beaver Challenge.

Defector reports on the sketchy goings-on at the Savannah Bananas’ charity arm.

NY Times reporter Michael Wilson details how he nearly fell for a phone scam, where the caller purported to be from Wilson’s bank, spoofing the bank’s phone number, with other plausible details.

The Washington Post, formerly a great American newspaper, fired editor and columnist Karen Attiah for speaking out about gun violence in the wake of the shooting of Kirk.

Israel has committed genocide in the Gaza Strip, according to a UN Commission report released this week. Undeterred, Israel continued moving ground forces into Gaza City, displacing thousands more Palestinians.

Former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan was a Republican who refused to go along with Trump’s attempts to steal the 2020 election. He left the party entirely due to the harassment that ensued, and now he’s running for Governor as a Democrat.

Disney’s decision to bow to the Trump Administration and take Jimmy Kimmel off the air is further evidence of the assault on the First Amendment. So are the dozens of teachers and professors fired for their comments on Kirk and his death.

Meanwhile, even though Kirk’s (alleged) murderer was a white man, Black Americans are receiving death threats over it, writes Elie Mystal in The Nation.

Chicago Public Media’s WBEZ reached out to all 48 Illinois college instructors on Turning Point USA’s “watchlist” and detailed the harassment they’ve received as a result, including death threats.

The Department of Education is ending discretionary funding to multiple grant programs for colleges that primarily serve minority students, because DEI.

The attorneys general of nine blue states have joined the National Women’s Law Center to pledge to fight to protect the rights of trans students, just as the ultra-right Heritage Foundation wants the Administration to brand trans activistists as terrorists.

Physicists at the University of Colorado-Boulder published a paper about how they managed to create visible time crystals, a strange state of matter that was only proposed in 2012 and had never been seen at the macroscopic level until now.

Board game Kickstarters: Disco Heist Laundry is indeed a heist game, set in the early ‘80s; full disclosure: I know the publisher pretty well, as our kids go to the same school … Dinosaur Island: Fully Charged is an upgraded version of the 2017 tile & worker placement game, with better components and some rules tweaks to improve the game’s balance … I don’t know anything about this publisher but I’m intrigued by the game, Smallfolk, a “cozy” tableau-builder … I can’t remember if I linked this one before, but Bézier is publishing a new title called The Game Makers, featuring the images and names of 300 actual board games that you’ll compete to make.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: artificial intelligence, board game news, disney, first amendment, frauds, gaza, georgia, great britain, links, longreads, physics, stick to baseball, the swamp, trans rights

→ September 14, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/14/25.

I had two articles for subscribers to The Athletic this week, my annual look at players I got wrong (which, of course, generated a bunch of comments from people who said I was wrong about players who had a decent half-season) plus a preview of the Arizona Fall League rosters (which seem to have changed already since I got the preliminary ones, alas).

And now, the links…

In The Atlantic – not my employer – Charlie Warzel writes that the Epstein birthday book is “a nightmare” and shows that the conspiracy theorists were at least partly right. It appears many, many of Epstein’s friends knew of his crimes against children and joked about it.

The Times ran an editorial by Ezra Klein with the headline that Charlie Kirk was “practicing politics the right way.” Here are some rejoinders to Klein’s take from 404 Media, from Mother Jones’ David Corn, from The Nation’s Elizabeth Spiers, and from the Times’ Jamelle Bouie.

Zeteo posted a story with 17 quotes from Kirk, with sources, but no additional commentary.

Also from Mother Jones, right-wing provocateurs immediately called for retribution against the left, including violence, after Kirk’s death, before any details about his alleged killer emerged.

They were also targeting and doxing people they thought were celebrating Kirk’s murder, including getting many people fired, including a professor at Austin Peay University who allegedly just posted a quote from Kirk.

A child in the Los Angeles area contracted measles as an infant, before they were old enough to receive the first dose of the MMR vaccine, some years ago, and died this month of the side effect known as SSPE, which can show up a decade after the measles infection and causes dementia, dystonia, and eventually cardiac or respiratory arrest. I wonder if 1) this child was infected during the 2014-15 epidemic and 2) if they got it from an unvaccinated person, which seems almost certain.

Texas A&M fired a professor and two administrators after the professor distributed materials that indicated recognition that there are more than two genders (which there are), claiming they were complying with Texas law (that does not exist) and President Trump’s executive order (which I don’t think binds them to do anything).

A Tacoma man who went to the house of a QAnon follower to serve her an order to leave the foreclosed house where she was living was cleared of wrongdoing after she shot at him and he returned fire, killing her.

The disposable face masks we all used during COVID-19 – and some of us still use – are leaching chemicals into the ground and oceans, as there is still no real process in place to capture and recycle them. I did buy masks several times from a company called VIDA that will take them back for recycling, although I don’t know what they actually do with them.

Massive protests in Nepal, including the burning of government buildings and the chase of a half-naked government minister into a river, led to the resignation of the Prime Minister and the appointment of Shushila Karki as the first woman to lead the landlocked Asian nation.

Israel continued its assault on Gaza City, striking a hospital and killing at least 12 children.

A rare happy story: A couple wondered for years who the awkward-looking guy in a bunch of their wedding photos was. They finally found him, and the reason why he was in the pictures is wonderful.

I really enjoyed the tiny-box game Soda Jerk when I played it at Gen Con; pre-orders just went up at Allplay. (I don’t get any commission from this.)

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, conspiracy theories, environment, first amendment, gaza, links, measles, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ May 3, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/3/25.

I had one post for subscribers to The Athletic this past week, a draft scouting notebook on Riley Quick, Kyle Lodise, some UVA bats, and three college hitters who could be top ten picks in 2026.

At Paste, I reviewed the two-player game Floristry, which is important as I think it’s the first two-player title to use an auction mechanic that really works, but unfortunately that doesn’t have enough game beyond that.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New York Times has the bonkers story of how a bunch of college-aged and high school kids stole nearly $250 million in crypto from one guy, and then got caught within a month because they were so sloppy about it. It includes a real-world kidnapping story that demonstrates how this stuff can and will spill over into physical danger, even for people not directly involved in the scams. (Also, the victim of the original theft is a ding-dong, falling for some of the most obvious tricks to get him to divulge his passwords.)

Elon Musk’s xAI is operating 35 gas turbines in Tennessee with no permits for all pollution they’re spewing into the air. AI is an environmental disaster as it is, but Musk using his dubious position in Washington to skip any and all regulations is making the problem worse.

The author/owner of Recipe Tin Eats wrote about how influencer and cookbook author Brooki Bellamy copied several of her recipes, and those of other recipe sites, in Bellamy’s best-selling new book. Nagi refers to it as plagiarism, which is probably inapt, but Bellamy at least appears to have swiped the recipes and very slightly reworded the instructions to avoid copyright claims.

A group of religious zealots called My God Votes are trying to turn Texas into a Christian theocracy (they have lots of help, unfortunately), positively pissing on any notion of the separation of church and state in this country.

And Texas is also threatening to go after bookstores that sell whatever it is that the religious right deems “obscene,” allowing a minor to claim damages from such books.

As Trump and Musk ignore Congress by eliminating federal funding and firing workers, Trump’s golf trips are costing taxpayers tens of millions of dollars. I thought these guys wanted to eliminate government waste. I just found a whole lot of it. Yet food banks across the United States are running desperately short now that Trump/Musk have cut off funding and supplies.

ICE agents raided a house in Oklahoma City … but they had the wrong place. Instead they traumatized a mother and three daughters who had just moved there from Maryland when twenty armed agents broke down the door and seized the family’s computers, phones, and cash. The Philly Inquirer’s Will Bunch writes that people who were called crazy for saying we should abolish ICE were right all along.

AI-generated slop sites are proliferating across the internet; Futurism’s Maggie Harrison Dupré writes about one such site that used an old domain associated with Emerson College’s radio station to appear legitimate while churning out fake ‘news’ stories.

Polygon, the great gaming-news site that was under the Vox umbrella, was decimated after Vox sold it to a content-farming group, with nearly all Polygon staffers laid off. It’s now part of the same company that runs clickbait sites like ScreenRant. I wrote two pieces for Polygon in 2021-22, but if those disappear I’ll repost the reviews here for posterity.

Scientific American reports on the mass-brainwashing effort around measles, spearheaded by the Republican Party and specifically the Trump Administration, pushing the twin lies that the measles vaccine causes autism (again, it does not) and that measles isn’t that harmful (it has already killed two children in the U.S. this year, and can cause the fatal condition SSPE in people who recover from the infection).

The same anti-vaccine lunacy has led to a jump in pertussis cases – over 8400 already in the U.S. this year. Whooping cough kills about 1% of infants under one, children too young to be vaccinated, who contract the bacterial illness.

And bird flu continues to spread, with more people getting infected, raising the specter of another pandemic. If only we had some sort of government agency that could track and respond to this sort of thing.

The NIH has rolled out new rules that prohibit grants to anyone working on programs related to diversity, equity, or inclusion. Like so many other executive orders and federal mandates of the last four months, it’s probably not legal, but it won’t matter. They’ve already caused the chaos they sought.

A mathematician in Australia seems to have solved the problem of finding a generalized solution to polynomial equations of power 5 or greater. I keep seeing the same headline for this one story, but nothing further about the method, or whether other mathematicians agree with what sounds like a controversial approach (among other things, he says he “doesn’t believe in irrational numbers,” which…).

Two board game Kickstarters of note, even as the Trump tariffs threaten the entire industry: Flamecraft Duals, a two-player version of the hit game Flamecraft that promises to be more directly competitive; and Nippon: Zaibatsu, a brand-new edition of a heavy game from 2015 just called Nippon.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, crime, cryptocurrencies, first amendment, immigration, links, longreads, math, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ March 30, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/30/25.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I posted my annual just-for-fun predictions column and a roundup of a few prospects I saw on the back fields in Florida this week. I also put together a post (with my editor’s help) with the preseason scouting reports and a sentence or two on the 2025 outlook for all top 100 & just missed guys who made Opening Day rosters.

At Paste, I reviewed the Ticket to Ride legacy game, Legends of the Old West, which is one of the best legacy games I’ve tried. It’s true to the original game and doesn’t load it up with too many new rules or twists (there are some, of course).

I appeared on NBC News This Morning and NPR’s All Things Considered on Thursday to discuss Opening Day and the upcoming MLB season; I was also on CNN that evening but I don’t think it’s online. I also discussed the Guardians on WHBC 1480.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: ProPublica reports on how a gay man in Idaho built a following on Telegram that encouraged followers to kill LGBTQ+ people and commit acts of terror in the name of white nationalism.

Florida is going to make it easier for companies to employ and exploit children now that the rush to deport immigrants is hitting the state’s work force.

Three senior partners at the law firm Keker, Van Nest & Peters exhort other law firms to join them in fighting the Trump Administration in an op ed in the New York Times, coming in the wake of two major firms completely capitulating to the President and his vindictive executive orders.

My alma mater, with over $50 billion in its endowment and quite a few alumni in powerful positions around the world, also bent the knee by dismissing the leaders of its Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

Hamilton Nolan writes in his Substack that the federal government is going to destroy labor unions if we don’t stop them, after Trump signed an executive order (which, to be clear, is just that, not a law) saying the federal government won’t recognize the unions that represent most of its employees.

Republicans in North Carolina continue their legal fight to steal a state Supreme Court seat, arguing that the right to vote is not absolute as they try to invalidate over 65,000 votes.

Arizonans voted in November to protect reproductive rights, but Republicans in their legislature don’t care and are trying a backdoor method to defund clinics by preventing them from even discussing abortion as an option with patients.

Another pregnant woman died in Texas because the state’s abortion ban meant doctors couldn’t perform a procedure to save her life.

Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) appears to have spent campaign money on businesses that don’t exist, just the latest in a series of financial improprieties uncovered by Phil Williams at Nashville’s NewsChannel 5. Williams previously reported on how Ogles fabricated details of his resume and background.

An immigrant to the United States appears to have broken Wisconsin law by offering $1 million via a lottery to anyone who voted in the state’s Supreme Court race. Unfortunately a judge in that state denied the Attorney General’s request for an emergency injunction to stop the lottery.

A barber in Texas who came to the United States from Liberia when he was two years old is now facing deportation to that country because he committed a crime for which he was pardoned. ICE also arrested and detained an indigenous Mexican farmworker and activist in Washington, allegedly because of his activism, although in his case ICE claims he was ordered to leave the country by a judge in 2018.

At Objective Journalism, James Salanga argues that authorities in the U.S. have always treated speech in favor of Palestinians’ rights differently than other forms of speech, whether it’s the federal government, universities, or journalistic outlets.

Mathematicians solved another century-old puzzle, this one on whether you can divide a triangle into fewer than four pieces and assemble those into a square. The answer is that you can’t – four is the lowest number.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, arizona, first amendment, florida, free speech, harvard, immigration, links, longreads, math, north carolina, tennessee, wisconsin

→ March 9, 2025
→ By keith

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…

The New York Times looks at the rising tide of the working homeless – people who work critical but low-wage jobs in wealthy areas where they can’t afford housing.

Elon Musk is pouring money into an Wisconsin Supreme Court election, and the Republican candidate he’s backing said just this week that women are too emotional to rule on abortion cases.

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.

More obedience in advance – the University of Virginia voted to dissolve its office of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Lindsey Boylan, the first woman to come forward to report on Andrew Cuomo’s history of sexual harassment, wrote a piece in Vanity Fair decrying the disgraced ex-Governor’s intended candidacy for mayor of New York City. Cuomo and his legal team have spent years hounding Boylan and his other accusers to try to discredit them.

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.

I don’t do a lot of feel-good stories here, but this one is exceptional: The owner of the last video-rental store in Pocatello, Idaho, closed down his shop, but preserved a little bit of it in the corner of his convenience store especially for one customer, a woman with Down syndrome who’s been renting from him for 15 years.

The Seattle Times explains why coffee has gotten much more expensive lately, and is likely to continue to get even more so.

Fox News anchors are suddenly panicking about the “weakening” economy under Trump, as if this is any sort of surprise.

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.

A Mississippi State alumna writes about the Trump Administration’s attempts to threaten universities into historical denialism, including her own alma mater’s shameful history of racial discrimination.

A cop in Vermont who struck and killed a cyclist was watching a right-wing Youtube video while driving.

Some ongoing board game Kickstarters: Point City & Propolis is still going for three more weeks, and there’s another for a 10^th anniversary edition of Champions of Midgard with about the same time left.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, board game news, coffee, Economics, first amendment, idaho, links, louisiana, mississippi, new york, phoenix, police, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines, wisconsin

→ March 1, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/1/25.

Two new posts this week at the Athletic, one looking at the top 25 prospects just for potential 2025 impact, and another draft scouting notebook from my trip to San Diego, looking at Tyler Bremner, Gavin Fien, and Nick Dumesnil.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the game Harvest, a big update to a smaller-box game of the same name from the defunct publisher Tasty Minstrel Games. I’m a huge fan of the new version.

I keep pushing back another issue of my free email newsletter because I’ve been writing so much other stuff, but it’ll come … soon. No promises, though.

And now, the links…

The Administration appears to be on the verge of firing anyone who’s LGBTQ+ (and out) in the federal government.

And they’ve already begun the process of banning trans people from obtaining visas to enter the United States. The absolute war on this tiny, highly vulnerable population should make everyone nauseous. It is just evil.

I’m embarrassed to say I did not know that many counties charge prison inmates “lodging fees” or “room and board” or some other bullshit – even if the convictions were later overturned. Pennsylvania’s Dauphin County has not only ended this practice, but forgiven over $65 million in such debts “owed” by past prisoners.

COVID-19 began with zoonotic spillover, but from what species? An increasing body of evidence points to raccoon dogs, which, come on, they just sound like trouble.

An unvaccinated child died from measles in Texas, the first death in the ongoing measles outbreak there that resulted from high vaccine-denialism rates there. The measles vaccine, part of the MMR shot, is extremely effective in preventing illness, and even if you survive a measles infection you can die years later from an incurable, degenerative neurological condition called SSPE.

So of course West Virginia is trying to weaken its vaccination requirements for schoolchildren, spurring this editorial in MetroNews arguing against this dangerous bill.

Meanwhile, RFK Jr. is already implementing his vaccine-denialist views, pausing an effort to develop a new COVID-19 vaccine and cancelling a critical meeting to help develop next season’s flu vaccines.

Three western Attorneys General are going to hold a series of town halls to highlight how these mass firings and funding freezes are affecting Americans. This should be happening everywhere, in every blue state, at least.

That Mississippi town (Clarksdale) that sued a local paper to force them to remove an editorial they didn’t like backed down under public pressure, withdrawing their lawsuit.

The current Supreme Court is very friendly to states that want to kill prisoners, but they issued a surprising ruling in one recent case of an Oklahoma man who wasn’t even accused of killing anyone and where the prosecutors withheld critical evidence.

Indiana Republicans are trying to ban the use of student IDs for voting, because the youths won’t vote for fascism! Remember, voter fraud isn’t a thing.

Captives freed from Myanmar scam centers – where pig-butchering and other phishing text & call scams originate – are now living in dire conditions in makeshift camps along the Myanmar-Thai border.

Pinterest is the latest site to be overrun by AI slop, according to this report from Futurism. AI-generated recipes, decorating tips, etc. are all over the site, drawing readers back to sites full of junk ads.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: death penalty, first amendment, indiana, links, measles, our dying democracy, prison culture, scams, stick to baseball, texas, trans rights, vaccines, voting rights, west virginia

→ October 26, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/26/24.

I spent last week in the Arizona Fall League and filed three scouting notebooks, one with some initial observations, a second was all about pitching, and a last one that wrapped up a bunch of additional position players.

I sent out another issue of my free email newsletter this week; with Twitter increasingly overrun with misinformation and white nationalists, I’m there less and less, and the newsletter or one of the Twitter alternatives (Threads, Bluesky) are better ways to keep up with my work.

I appeared on All Things Considered’s Weekend Edition on NPR to preview the World Series (before the LCS actually ended!) and then did the same on NBC Morning News yesterday. One of my tweets made this SI roundup of people mocking former Reds infielder Zack Cozart’s incredible ignorance.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Archconservative billionaire Leonard Leo’s ongoing effort to take over the American judiciary might bankrupt Planned Parenthood and gut women’s health care in the U.S. This Guardian report looks at the long tentacles of Leo’s judicial network, and how he’s managed to tilt the scales of justice in his favor.

A far-right Texas judge has shown other reactionaries a playbook for how to consolidate power and use local government to push their agendas, even in a purple county like Tarrant.

Two stories from ProPublica: Arizona’s school voucher program is supposed to help low-income families, but they’re not the ones using the vouchers – it’s wealthy parents doing so. A claimed lack of prosecutors in Anchorage is leading to dozens of cases, some involving serious crimes like domestic violence or child abuse, being dismissed without trial. Other dismissed cases include 270 people arrested for suspected DUI.

The Washington Post explains how the Russian-backed head of the International Boxing Association roiled the Olympics with the bogus “scandal” over the identities of two female boxers. Meanwhile, a Russian propaganda unit spread a false story smearing Tim Walz, and the conservative ecosystem ate it up without bothering to fact-check it (again, it’s false). WIRED has more on Russia’s disinfo machine, including how it is threatening democracy in tiny Moldova, where Putin has supported a separatist movement for decades.

Thanks to Arizona’s 15-week abortion ban, a pregnant woman who learned at 18 weeks that her fetus had a very high likelihood of spina bifida had to travel to Las Vegas for an abortion and ended up recovering in a casino hotel room. Abortion is health care.

This week in Bad Decisions: a doctor leading a large study on transgender youth said she didn’t publish her research findings because the results might be weaponized by anti-trans forces – which, of course, got out, and was promptly weaponized by anti-trans forces, even though the key quote here is this: “Puberty blockers did not lead to mental health improvements, (the doctor) said, most likely because the children were already doing well when the study began.” It’s also news that the children on puberty blockers didn’t get worse. Regardless of the results, her decision to withhold the results hasn’t helped anyone at all.

A Florida judge ruled that that state’s letters threatening TV stations that aired ads supporting a November abortion rights ballot question were unconstitutional – and he called Florida officials “stupid” for trying it.

A Black man alleges that Michigan police racially profiled him and tried to plant drugs on him during a traffic stop.

Phoenix police tased and punched a deaf Black man who has cerebral palsy – and now he’s the one charged with aggravated assault. They targeted the man based on a false tip.

Israel threatened a Palestinian teen reporter, telling him to stop filming in Gaza, and when he didn’t, they killed him.

A Palestinian man whose wife and children burned to death in a tent hit by an Israeli missile asks why the West sees their suffering and yet stays silent. Related: Israel’s assault on Gaza is happening with weapons made in the United States.

Elon Musk’s gambit of a lottery to try to drum up support for Trump may run afoul of U.S. election law. Of course, it doesn’t matter because he’s rich and the government doesn’t seem to have any desire to hold the rich accountable for their crimes. The Philly Inquirer has more on Musk’s campaigning in the state.

Three red states are suing again to try to limit access to mifepristone, a drug used in medical abortions, despite the recent Supreme Court ruling – and they’re going to the same rogue judge in Texas who sided with them the first time. If you live in Missouri, Kansas, or Idaho, is this where you want your tax dollars going?

The editorials page editor of the Los Angeles Times resigned after the paper’s owner blocked the editorial board from endorsing Kamala Harris for President; two more members of the board followed her lead. The Washington Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, blocked his paper from doing the same. Are these outlets doing so out of fear of retaliation from Trump? It sure looks like “anticipatory obedience” – kowtowing to the whims of a would-be autocrat before he’s even in power.

On the other end of the spectrum, the Boston Globe wrote about the clear signs of Trump’s cognitive decline and asked why the press isn’t holding him to the same standard they used for President Biden?

Trump praises Hitler and his sycophants rush to excuse it.

Tens of thousands of Christian nationalists went to DC for an anti-trans rally hosted by a self-styled “apostle” and former multi-level marketing hawker – and they held it on Yom Kippur, no less.

Another day, another church leader charged with sexually abusing children. No trans people or drag queens here.

A SuperPAC affiliated with Trump sent out mailers that looked like Medicare cancellation notices to try to scare older voters from voting for VP Kamala Harris.

The Central Park 5 are suing Trump again after he defamed them during the Presidential debate.

The country of Georgia is also heading for a pivotal election, and the pro-Russian incumbent may still win a plurality, with fears rising of actual election fraud.

The Times has an interview with author Susanna Clarke, who just released a new short story called The Wood at Midwinter, set in the world of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.

Defector’s Neil deMause writes about what a bad deal the proposed downtown arena for the 76ers will be for Philadelphia, on top of destroying what’s left of historic Chinatown.

Stanford held a conference on the pandemic that was full of grifters and purveyors of misinformation.

The hypothesis that Barnard’s Star, the second-closest star to our own, might have a planet orbiting it dates back at least to when I was a little kid. Now there might actually be some proof.

Japandroids just released their fourth and final album, Fate & Alcohol, eight days ago. Drummer David Prowse talked to Kerrang! about the ten songs that changed his life.

A new Kickstarter from Bitewing Games has raised over $200K for three new games from the master designer Reiner Knizia.

The Onion’s Point/Counterpoint this week: We Need To Take Trump’s Rhetoric Seriously, But Not Literally vs. Have That Guy Killed.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, alaska, arizona, astronomy, board game news, disinformation, education, first amendment, florida, gaza, links, longreads, michigan, Music, olympics, police, russia, science, stadium scams, stick to baseball, trans rights, voting rights

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