florida — Page 3

→ December 2, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/2/23.

I had one new post for subscribers to The Athletic this week, looking at the free-agent signings of Sonny Gray and Kenta Maeda plus some thoughts on what the Twins might do next. Some readers got very mad that I don’t think Chris Paddack will be a mid-rotation starter when he hasn’t been anything close to that since 2019.

Over at Paste, I ran through eight new board games that would be great stocking stuffers. I’ll do my year-end post for them the week of December 11^th. Also, here on the dish, I updated my ranking of my top 100 games all-time.

On the Keith Law Show this week, I spoke with Nik Sharma, author of the new cookbook Veg-Table and the also wonderful cookbooks Season and The Flavor Equation. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

My free email newsletter is moving from Tinyletter (which Mailchimp is shutting down) to Substack. If you already subscribed as of Tuesday of this past week, you’re fine – I was able to export the subscriber list and import it to Substack with no issues.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The best headline of the week, and maybe the best obituary of the year, comes from Rolling Stone: “Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies.”
Republican state laws targeting LGBT people, pushing book bans, and wiping out reproductive rights are already leading to a brain drain from their jurisdictions.
The New York Times had a fascinating profile of Stephanie Courtney, the actress who plays Flo in Progressive’s commercials.
Tim Grierson interviewed the directors of the three seminal nuclear war films of 1983-84: Testament, The Day After, and Threads.
The Harvard Law Review asked a human rights attorney getting his doctorate at the school to write about the ongoing massacre happening in Gaza for the review’s blog, then refused to run the piece, for what seems to be fear of a backlash from faculty and members of the public sympathetic to Israel. The Nation ran the column instead.
Conspiracy theories around health and wellness ran rampant during the pandemic, and the far right and the far left have found common ground in them.
You probably saw this, but Futurism caught Sports Illustrated running AI-generated articles under fake bylines with stock AI-generated photos of the writers.
Paul Lynch won the Booker Prize this year for his novel Prophet Song, which I have not yet read, but I found this commentary on how the book is dismal and a sign of the Booker’s decline quite interesting – many literary awards seem to overvalue factors like the social importance of the subject, rather than just awarding it to the best book.
The head of the Florida GOP has been charged with sexual battery by a woman who claims she was involved in a threesome with him and his wife, who was part of the state’s Moms for Liberty chapter and worked to support the state’s “Don’t Say Gay” anti-LGBT bill.
Oh, and the (male) outreach director for the Philadelphia Moms for Liberty chapter served time in prison for sexually abusing a 14-year-old boy.
Meanwhile, a failed candidate for the school board in Downingtown, Pennsylvania, posed as the non-existent “Society of College Medicine” to challenge books in the district.
Americans’ desire for avocados is driving deforestation and violence in Mexico.
Penguin Random House, the largest teachers’ union in Iowa, and four authors (including Jodi Picoult, who went to the same elementary school I attended) are suing to overturn Iowa’s book-banning law, on the heels of another lawsuit over the law filed by the ACLU.
Meanwhile, Ohio Republicans are threatening to target judges, possibly with impeachment, who rule in favor of voters’ choice to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution.
Teen girls targeted by AI deepfakes have little recourse through the law beyond ordinary cyberharassment complaints, which do little to address the lasting damage these pictures and videos can do.
The Columbia Journalism Review looked at how two major newspapers covered political races and issues in 2016 and 2022.
Measles cases are rising around the world thanks to anti-vaxxers and the online proliferation of false information about vaccines.
A woman in Texas who claimed reading one book with a “a single kiss” when she was 11 years old led to her to become a pornography addict actually works for a right-wing publisher that’s trying to compete with Scholastic to sell books to schools.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: book banning, booker prize, environment, florida, iowa, links, longreads, ohio, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ November 11, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/11/23.

Nothing new from me at the Athletic as I wait for some real news, a trade or signing, that I can break down. I’ve also begun the offseason prospect work, although those rankings won’t run until late January or early February.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the wonderful game Fit to Print, which has a real-time aspect like Galaxy Trucker where players grab various tiles, then some tile-laying like Patchwork, as players try to fill out their woodland newspapers – with some hilarious text and art on the tiles – with articles, photos, and ads, playing over three rounds to represent three days of issues.

On the Keith Law Show, I spoke with Robert Kolker, author of Hidden Valley Road and The Lost Girls, primarily about the first book, which deals with a family where six of their twelve children developed schizophrenia, although we touched on his update to the latter since the case may have been solved. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I also appeared on NPR’s Marketplace, talking about Moneyball and the data revolution in baseball in the last twenty years. You can catch it on iTunes on the Marketplace Tech podcast.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter last Saturday and will do another this weekend as I try to make this a weekly thing, although I might shift to Monday since that tends to be the slowest day of my week (in more ways than one).

Two longreads from ProPublica: The first is an appalling story of how white Louisiana judges on the 5^th Circuit decided to deny all petitions from prisoners who couldn’t afford attorneys, many of them Black men who claimed they were unjustly convicted – over 5000 such petitions in total, over a period of 12 years. It first became public when the staff director for the court wrote a confessional note before killing himself, but the judiciary managed to clamp down on the story and there have been no consequences for any of the judges or others involved. Oh, those prisoners still had to pay the $300 fee to file those petitions that judges wouldn’t even read. Many of the affected prisoners are still incarcerated.
The second looks at the twenty farming families who use more than half of the water taken from the Colorado River by farms, and 1/7 of all of the water that flows through the river’s Lower Basin each year.
Climate change is pushing the insects that spread tropical diseases further north, into Europe and the United States. Europe had as many cases of dengue in 2022 as they did in 2010 through 2021 combined. California just reported two cases of local transmission last week.
Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian wrote the best piece I read this week on the Israel-Hamas war, arguing that both sides have to fight their own extremists to get us to a sustainable peace.
BlueTriton, the company that owns Poland Spring, quashed a bill in Maine’s legislature to cap the length of water-pumping contracts at seven years. A lobbyist for BlueTriton wrote an amendment that friendly legislators introduced, killing the bill.
Just a day before they got spanked in school board elections in Iowa and Pennsylvania, the pro-censorship group Moms for Liberty demanded that Florida cops arrest a school librarian because there was a fantasy novel that they alleged had risqué content available in the school library.
Hold your surprise: Nine of the 12 members of a Congressional committee that advises the nation on its nuclear strategy have financial ties to weapons manufacturers.
Wounded Falling Bird Ron DeSantis (R) removed commissioner Oren Miller from office in The Villages from office in 2021 after Miller fought a property tax that benefited a local developer, then forced a bogus perjury charge against Miller as well. A three-person panel of Republican judges not only threw out the conviction, they ordered the lower court to find Miller “not guilty.”
Also in Governor WFB’s Florida, the plan to remake the tiny, once-liberal New School into a bastion of conservative something will cost taxpayers $600,000 per student.
The NY Times’s Katherine Miller looks at Nikki Haley’s campaign, and how her fight against Trump may turn “brutal.”
Did anyone else notice that Trump threatened to call in troops to put down protests and arrest dissenters if he wins the Presidency next November?
A student at the University of Pennsylvania who had Long QT syndrome, a form of cardiac arrythmia, died after having a Charged Lemonade at Panera, as she was unaware that it contained as much caffeine as four cups of coffee. Her family is suing, and Panera has added new warning language around the drinks. I go to Panera probably 4-5 times a year, and I’ve seen those drinks, but I had no idea they had that much caffeine, which is more than I have ever had in a single day in my life as far as I know.
Parents demanding that their kids skip once-mandatory childhood vaccinations are doing so at the highest rate ever, raising the risk of outbreaks of preventable diseases like measles and mumps.
Yusef Salaam, one of the falsely accused Central Park Five who was arrested at age 15 and served nearly seven years in prison before his exoneration, was elected to the New York City Council on Tuesday.
Your second COVID-19 infection increases your risk of getting long COVID, and it appears to also increase the odds that you never fully recover. Less than 10% of Americans have gotten a COVID-19 vaccine booster this fall. I did, and you should too. Also, now I’m magnetic wheeee!
Paper straws are everywhere in the UK, but they’re not clearly better for the environment than plastic ones. How about you just skip the straw if you’re able and we save them for folks who require them?
Israel has killed yet another Palestinian journalist, appearing to target Mohammad Abu Hasira this week, running the count of journalists killed in Gaza to at least 37.
Director of the National Counterterrorism Center Christine Abizaid used Hamas’ terrorist attacks on October 7^th as an argument to urge Congress to renew FISA Section 702, which allows our government to spy on us if the purpose is to gather “foreign information.”
The Last Dinner Party have been anointed a Next Big Thing by many critics. The BBC talked to the quintet about what that’s been like, including weird accusations that they were a fabricated band like a K-Pop act.
Board game news: There’s a new site devoted to video and board game content called Aftermath. It’s a writer-owned subscription site that hopes to follow the Defector model, and includes Luke Plunkett, who spent many years at Kotaku, and whom I met on the Shelf Stories podcast this summer.
The Kickstarter for Undergrove, the newest game from Wingspan designer Elizabeth Hargrave (co-designed with Mark Wootton), is already over $250K in just three days.
Alley Cat Games has a Kickstarter for a fresh printing of the 2017 game Calimala, designed by Fabio Lopiano (3 Ring Circus, Merv).

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, climate change, environment, florida, links, longreads, louisiana, maine, Music, new york, stick to baseball, vaccines, water crisis

→ October 7, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/7/23.

I’ve had one post up for subscribers to the Athletic since the last roundup, with my hypothetical postseason awards ballots for 2023. I do have another story filed for Sunday, so keep an eye skinned for that.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Votes for Women, a (mostly) two-player, asymmetrical game about the fight for women’s suffrage. It’s fantastic, and I also love that this review went up the week that Glynis Johns turned 100.

On the Keith Law Show this week, my guest was MLB’s Sarah Langs, talking about the season that was, who she would vote for in the various awards, and what excited her about this year’s playoff teams. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Rolling Stone’s Sean Williams writes about being conned by a con artist who tried to get the journalist to write a long profile/feature on him to further a movie deal, only for Williams to discover that the fraudster had as many as 200 victims of various romance and other scams over the last forty years.
The Washington Post looks at how climate change increases the demand and need for air conditioning, which in turn contributes more to climate change. Cooling a world that’s getting hotter requires increasing levels of energy, and we still rely far too much on energy-production methods that pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
An effective vaccine against tuberculosis would save millions of lives; it’s the deadliest infectious disease in the world, killing 1.6 million people a year. When pharmaceutical company GSK developed a vaccine for it, they chose instead to use the technology for a shingles vaccine, keeping the TB vaccine off the market for years.
Workers in California who cut stone countertops are coming down with silicosis, an incurable and terminal disease.
Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull gave a very candid interview to the San Diego Union-Tribune ahead of the band’s concert last month in that city.
Dr. Peter Hotez warns that antiscience conspiracy theorists are growing in power and organization, threatening public health and the scientists working on projects like new vaccines – such as the brand-new vaccine against malaria, potentially one of the biggest global health breakthroughs in decades.
SARS-CoV-2 infects coronary arteries and arterial plaque, which increases the risk of heart attack and stroke in people who have or had COVID-19.
NBC News’s Ben Collins may have found a clue to why Elon Musk bought Twitter only to destroy it. Musk also wiped out the company’s election integrity team and cut the group targeting disinformation on the site.
Rumble host Stew Peters called for the execution of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. Media Matters found ads for the NFL appearing on Peters’ Twitter account, including one near a link to the video of his death threat.
Fact-checking had a big moment between the 2020 election and the pandemic, with news organizations hiring more fact-checkers and more independent groups combating misinformation online, but nothing has really changed and now the effort has stalled.
Italy’s right-wing government has moved to erase LGBTQ+ people, especially parents, from their society.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has spent millions of taxpayer dollars defending his “anti-woke” laws targeting LGBTQ+ rights, public education, Disney, and more, only to lose repeatedly in the courts.
Harris County, Texas, taxpayers are in a similar boat, having paid over $1 million to people roped into County DA Kim Ogg’s (D) prosecutions of public officials with whom she’s feuded.
Republicans in North Carolina passed a bill to grab power from the Governor so they can control elections in the state, which already has a gerrymandered legislative map. Gov. Roy Cooper (D) vetoed Senate Bill 749, but the body is set to override his veto on Tuesday.
Delaware became the 17^th state to ban the “gay panic” defense, where a defendant accused of a violent act claims the act is justified because their victim was LGBTQ+.
A city commissioner in Anchorage, Alaska, who had a previous history of fraud, has been indicted for fraudulently taking $1.6 million in COVID-19 relief funds. She and her husband are accused of using the money to buy cryptocurrency, pay taxes, and for other personal matters.
The mayoral race in Franklin, Tennessee, got even more bizarre last week when a bunch of self-proclaimed white nationalists showed up to support candidate Gabrielle Hanson at a campaign event.
People of Praise, the extreme Catholic group that counts SCOTUS Justice Amy Coney Barrett as a member, is facing an FBI investigation into a cover-up of sexual abuse in the sect.
A rare bit of good news on the environment – Antigua & Barbuda has transformed the nation’s uninhabited third island, Redonda, from a lifeless rock into a thriving fountain of biodiversity.
An activist group is suing the EPA on behalf of a largely Black community in West Virginia’s “Chemical Valley,” arguing that the agency hasn’t done enough to protect residents from ethylene oxide pollution from a Union Carbide plant there.
The capitalists will let you drown. There’s money for cops and sports stadiums, but not for housing, or for infrastructure that might have prevented the flooding that plagued New York City eight days ago.
Speaking of which, just ten New York City cops were responsible for $68 million in payouts to victims of their misconduct, yet all ten are still on the public payroll.
A cop in Pennsylvania tried to strangle his ex-girlfriend and then used his authority to have her involuntarily committed.
The conservative newsletter/site The Dispatch argues that Trump and his supporters in office are devoid of moral leadership, and as Trump’s rhetoric worsens, too few people in his party seem to notice or care. Indeed, Trump called for the execution of General Mark Milley, and it barely made a ripple.
Did Hasan Minhaj go too far in fabricating autobiographical details in his standup routine? Brian Logan, comedy critic for the Guardian, says he did. The controversy seems likely to cost Minhaj a shot at the hosting job for the Daily Show.
Your brain sees winning streaks everywhere, even in random sequences. Scientific American looks at why.
Did the James Webb Telescope discover galaxies older than the projected age of the universe? Maybe, explains astrophysicist Katie Mack.
Some board game Kickstarters of note: Diatom is a tile-laying, pattern-making game based on an old Victorian art form.
And there’s a Kickstarter for the roll-and-write Merchants of Magick game, which is in the same universe as Set a Watch, along with two new expansions.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alaska, antiscience, board game news, climate change, cognitive psychology, delaware, environment, florida, frauds, health, italy, lgbt rights, links, longreads, Music, north carolina, physics, police, social media, stick to baseball, tennessee, texas, vaccines

→ September 9, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/9/23.

Nothing new this week other than two contributions to headlines on the callups of Jordan Lawlar and Evan Carter, but I’ll be back next week with the players I got wrong column. I did hold my first Klawchat in ages, though.

On The Keith Law Show this week, I spoke with Jonathan Abrams, New York Times reported and author of the 2022 book The Come Up: An Oral History of the Rise of Hip-Hop, which comes out in paperback on October 3^rd. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: “The Dungeons and Dragons Players of Death Row,” from the New York Times’s Keri Blakinger, is one of the best things I’ve read this year.

Rolling Stone has an exposé on Anti-Flag lead singer Justin Sane, who now stands accused of rape by at least thirteen women. Anti-Flag and Sane (born Justin Geever) himself made feminism and progressive ideology a core part of their public images.

A Peter Thiel-backed startup is supposedly planning to found its own libertarian city-state … somewhere, I guess. Fyre City?

Vulture exposes the corruption behind Rotten Tomatoes’ algorithm as studios and publicists have paid small-time reviewers, who are often inexplicably included in the site’s calculations, to post positive reviews or withhold negative ones. I’m not included in RT’s metrics and I’m not paid by any studios or publicists, so you can always trust my reviews, even if they’re not any good!

Parents of trans kids who spoke to the New York Times’ Azeen Ghorayshi spoke out against the reporter and how they felt used and misled by her actions. Ghorayshi wrote a fairly uncritical piece about the so-called whistleblower at a St. Louis clinic for trans kids, but didn’t accurately reflect the sentiments of the parents she spoke to, while the whistleblower appears to have fabricated or inflated most of her claims.

Regulatory changes may spell the end of Airbnb and similar short-term rentals in New York City. There’s some evidence that these sites are driving down housing stock in already depressed urban supplies.

Warming oceans due to climate change are allowing the flesh-eating bacterium Vibrio vulnificus to expand its habitat further north, killing three people in the New York area this summer.

The Florida town of Mount Dora established a program where businesses can declare themselves safe spaces for LGBTQ+ people and display a decal in their window to that effect. Several Florida Republicans are vowing to stop the program, because they are apparently opposed to the First Amendment, or too stupid to understand why it applies here.

Goodreads sucks. Even best-selling author R.F. Kuang says so – okay, sort of.

Christian nationalist commentator Matt Walsh, who doesn’t understand the biology of gender, decided to dunk on a single woman for a Tiktok video about her Saturday routines, and even the National Review said it was a bit much. Walsh’s view is that women exist solely for procreation, so it’s unsurprising that Julia Mazur’s unmarried, childless lifestyle would be so confusing to him.

One of the only pediatric cardiologists in the state of Louisiana is leaving the state because of its anti-LGBTQ+ legislation. Well well well.

The Kids Online Safety Act isn’t about protecting kids, at least not for its Republican backers – it’s about blocking LGBTQ+ content online, according to sponsor Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R). It has broad bipartisan support, however, and I contacted both of Delaware’s Senators to voice my opposition, even though both are sponsors of the bill as well.

Two Texas billionaires who’ve made their fortunes from fracking are using their gains to fund climate denial and conservative indoctrination sites like PragerU and the Daily Wire. Florida has now approved the use of PragerU materials in its K-12 schools. The Guardian has more on the lies and misinformation of PragerU, which is just doing what its backers pay it for.
Prison officials fired the guard who didn’t see Danelo Cavalcante escape from Chester County Prison by crabwalking up two walls, leading to a manhunt for the convicted murderer that is now entering day ten. Another inmate escaped the same way back in May, so I’m unclear why the guard is getting the blame rather than the officials who didn’t think to, say, use anti-climb paint to prevent a recurrence?

South Korean teachers have been protesting after one of their own committed suicide due to extensive bullying by her students’ parents.

Astrophysicist Katie Mack uses a baseball analogy to explain quantum tunneling.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: climate change, florida, lgbt rights, links, longreads, louisiana, metoo, misinformation, south korea, stick to baseball, trans rights

→ September 2, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/2/23.

Nothing new this week at the Athletic beyond contributing notes on the callups of Jasson Dominguez and Ceddanne Rafaela.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the board game Bamboo, a cute medium-box game that’s a pretty meaty game at heart.

I appeared on two podcasts this week, talking to Jim Margalus of Sox Machine about the White Sox’ front office turmoil and to Chris Crawford about eight prospects who’ve had surprising years, four positive and four negative.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The writer Naomi Klein writes in the Guardian about being confused with the crackpot Naomi Wolf and how people fall for conspiracy theories online, part of her upcoming book Doppelganger.
Albanian youths bought into the hype of influencers who claimed they’d found riches elsewhere, leading to a shortage of young people staying in the town of Kukes.
The Atlantic profiles the latest Presidential candidate/grifter, Vivek Ramaswamy, who seems to think January 6^th was something other than an insurrection of idiots and might be a 9/11 truther. He also claims he’s not “bought and paid for” but is a major investor in companies fighting climate change policies.
Florida state officials sought opposing viewpoints on slavery while reviewing the AP African-American Studies curriculum. The Tampa Bay Times has more details on how Gov. Ron DeSantis’s “anti-woke” policies have led to this embarrassing situation.
In the late 1950s, Spain built a dam that should have flooded the thousand-year-old town of Granadilla, leading authorities to evacuate it. Sixty-odd years later, the town remains above water, but residents and their descendants still can’t return.
ProPublica exposes a Chicago cop who’s lied under oath at least 44 times, putting dozens more cases at risk.
Do you follow a doctor or scientist on social media who’s always promoting their subscription newsletter? The BMJ ran an opinion piece on how those pose a conflict of interest.
The San Francisco Chronicle looks at how the New York Times has covered (badly) the national assault on trans rights.
Try to contain your surprise, but Republicans blocked a bill that would have required dark money groups to reveal their donors’ identities.
The Katy ISD in Texas has halted all new book purchases for its schools because of objections to any books with LGBTQ+ themes.
Disgraced Spanish soccer official Luis Rubiales is facing a national inquiry over his forced kiss of a Spanish women’s national team player; meanwhile, his mother is going on a hunger strike over what she claims is unfair treatment of her creep son.
Atlanta magazine has lost much of its editorial staff after its publisher and editor-in-chief told writers to cut back on “woke” coverage of one of the south’s most diverse cities.
Azerbaijani forces have blocked food shipments to the Armenian exclave of Nagorno-Karabach, leading to a massive humanitarian disaster.
The Gabonese military overthrew the country’s latest leader, the third in the line of the Bongo family that had ruled the country for 55 rules. Is it a real change in power or more of the same?
Big Gay Ice Cream was one of the hottest brands in the company before the pandemic hit, but mismanagement and a fight for control have reduced the brand to just one NYC outpost and left the future of the company in doubt.
Billy Bragg tore apart country singer Oliver Anthony’s faux working class song “Rich Men North of Richmond” for the Guardian and recorded his own response track calling on people to join and support labor unions if they actually care about the plight of blue collar workers.
Saudi Arabia has sentenced a critic of the regime to death for his tweets. Very nice for an ally of the United States and a primary owner of the site formerly known as Twitter.
When VICE declared bankruptcy, its executives still got paid even when its employees didn’t.
I missed this in June but a unique Magic: the Gathering card representing the One Ring from the Lord of the Rings trilogy was valued at over $2 million by companies offering a bounty for whoever pulled the card.
If you’re having trouble falling asleep, cognitive behavioral therapy may help.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: florida, frauds, links, longreads, police, social media, stick to baseball, texas, trans rights

→ August 19, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/19/23.

I’ve got a piece filed to run on Monday or Tuesday at The Athletic, and another review coming up this week at Paste, but had nothing new up this week. My podcast will be back this week with an episode I recorded on Friday. So … sorry? But I’ll have a lot of content up in the next few days.

A few weeks ago, I appeared on the video podcast Shelf Stories to discuss ethics in board game media and questions of integrity and professionalism among folks who review games or otherwise cover the space, along with former Kotaku writer Luke Plunkett. It’s a long discussion but I greatly enjoyed it.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New York Times has a long adaptation from an upcoming book about how a California high school was torn apart by an Instagram account that posted racist memes about students there.

Nature discusses the impact of scientists leaving or cutting back on Twitter use, allowing anti-science and denialism to fester there – and that ran before Elon threatened, again, to terminate the site’s block function.

The Times also had a piece about three weeks ago looking into the continuing mystery over the origins of COVID-19, arguing that the public’s greater belief in the lab-leak conspiracy theory – any hypothesis of a lab leak remains stubbornly unsupported by evidence – is a function of distrust of authorities and the competition between narratives, not a question of facts.

By now you’ve likely read about Kansas cops raiding the offices of a small, local newspaper, after which the paper’s 98-year-old owner died. It turns out that the cops did so to try to prevent the paper from writing about a local restaurant owner’s DUI, which would have prohibited the woman, Kari Newell, from obtaining a liquor license. The county attorney has said there was insufficient evidence to support the warrant the cops obtained, and there’s now a complaint against the judge, Laura Viar, who signed it. The editorial boards of the Kansas City Star and Wichita Eagle co-published an editorial calling the raid “an intolerable overreach.”

Why did a Missouri judge grant a restraining order preventing the St. Louis Post-Dispatch from publishing details of an accused cop killer’s mental health evaluation? This seems like a First Amendment violation.

Meanwhile, Wisconsin State Senator Cory Tomczyk, a Republican, called a 13-year-old kid a homophobic slur at a county meeting in August of 2021, according to several people who witnessed it, but he’s trying to sue a local newspaper out of existence just for reporting on it.
I don’t know why this story has received so little attention: A 3-year-old girl who was trafficked by Texas state officials died while on a a so-called “migrant bus.” I couldn’t find articles on this in the Times (either one) or Washington Post, for example.

The Los Angeles Times looks at the people who actually lived near the nuclear test sites depicted as remote and unpopulated in Oppenheimer.

NPR summarizes some of the indoctrination awaiting Florida public school students as they return to the classroom this month.

A Montana judge ruled in favor of young climate-change activists who sued the state, arguing that Montana’s policy preventing state agencies from considering greenhouse gas emission potential when evaluating permits for fossil fuel development is unconstitutional. It’s largely symbolic, but could present a path for similar suits elsewhere.

The Baltimore Banner’s Kyle Goon tears apart Orioles failson/owner John Angelos’s bid for more state money along with a land grab around Camden Yards. Meanwhile, Orioles announcer Kevin Brown issued a statement nobody believes that tried to defuse reports that he was suspended for citing facts about the team’s past performance. In the Orioles’ best season in a decade, leave it to John Angelos to muck it up with this clownery.

A new state tax in Massachusetts that levies an extra 4% on incomes over a million dollars will raise $1 billion for FY2024, and the proceeds will pay for free school lunches for all kids in the state, among other things (I assume). Unfortunately, this article’s author confuses wealth with income, referring to “the state’s wealthiest residents.” Income and wealth are not the same thing, and taxing each is a very different process.

From last month, Katherine Miller wrote in the New York Times about the farcical No Labels party, which won’t reveal its funding sources and seems more interested in re-electing Donald Trump than pushing an actual new “centrist” platform (as if Democrats weren’t closer to the center than the progressive left anyway).

The Atlantic points out that asking why people keep moving to the Phoenix area ignores the broader questions of cheap energy and housing that drive it.

Board game news: The Kickstarter for Perch launched this week and is already about 250% funded.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, baseball, board game news, coronavirus, first amendment, florida, kansas, links, longreads, massachusetts, missouri, social media, stick to baseball, taxes, texas, wisconsin

→ July 16, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/16/23.

For subscribers to the Athletic, here’s an index to my draft coverage from this past week:

My pick-by-pick analysis for the first 39 selections
My AL team draft recaps
My NL team draft recaps
My post-draft Q&A
My final mock draft, if you’re curious

I also recapped the Futures Game and wrote a brief note on the call-up of Pirates’ right-hander Quinn Priester.

I had Joe Sheehan back on the podcast last week, before the draft, and then skipped this week to write all that stuff above. You can listen & subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I’m a little pressed for time so let’s get to the links:

Longreads first: Well, not quite a longread, but here’s the GQ article on David Zaslav that he pressured the publication to pull after it was published online.
ProPublica reports on how the EPA has banned the pesticide chlorpyrifos for food crops in the U.S. but worked against a global ban on the chemical.
Unfortunately, ProPublica continues to seriously screw up its coverage of the research on the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Did an elite private school in New York City drive a student to suicide by asking him to leave?
Yet another story of the increasing harm from online romance scams, this time about how they’re driving victims to attempt suicide.
Elie Mystal argues that SCOTUS’s affirmative action ruling kicks the door open to Jim Crow-style bigotry.
Even before RFK Jr. revealed himself as an antisemite and Sinophobe, he was pushing an old anti-vaccine lie about “saline placebos” as part of his denialist messaging.
Reason asks why so many soi-disant libertarians are backing RFK Jr.
Giant hog farms are an environmental and animal-welfare disaster. They also make horrendous neighbors, but recent laws and court rulings have favored these factory farms over individual homeowners’ rights.
This is from last August but a Pew Research survey found American right-wingers are absolutely more insane in their climate change denial than even right-wingers in other countries. Meanwhile, the planet may be hitting the climate change point of no return.
Half the police force in Golden Valley, Minnesota, quit after the town hired a Black police chief. Crime went down.
Florida’s various laws repressing educator speech may already be driving a brain drain out of the state.
And the state of Florida is also going after voter registration groups, threatening them with thousands of dollars in fines for helping citizens exercise their constitutional right.
Moms for Liberty is an extremist group and Republican politicians are lining up to court their support.
Elon helped spread a conspiracy theory that claimed an innocent 22-year-old college student was a federal agent posing as a neo-Nazi to infiltrate hate groups.
Elon appears to be accelerating the enshittification of Twitter.
Rep. Clay Higgins (LA-R) suggested that the government close public libraries and replace them with “church owned” libraries instead.
Sen. Josh Hawley (MO-R) shared a quote that he claimed was from Patrick Henry but actually came from a virulently antisemitic magazine.
The WGA strikers may have been wobbling, but an anonymous comment from a studio exec seems have to given their strike new energy.
A US labor judge ruled that Starbucks illegally shut down a unionized store in Ithaca, New York, and ordered the company to reopen it.
A Muslim student from a Delaware high school was arrested outside his graduation ceremony by University of Delaware police.
As Substack and other sites become festering holes of homophobia and transphobia, Medium came out with a statement in support of LGBTQ+ rights.
Conservative activists didn’t stop at abortion – now they’re targeting birth control.
Conservative activists didn’t stop at trans kids – now they’re trying to ban gender-affirming care for adults.
Archaeologists think they’ve found the hidden entrance to what the Zapotec civilization believed was a path to the underworld. Nobody needs another Indiana Jones film, thanks.
India has a large sugar industry, and now a native rum industry is emerging by distilling better-quality spirits and exploring the liquor’s flavor profiles.
The ice in your cocktail has a significant cost in climate impact, so some bartenders and cocktail bars are trying to reduce its use and waste.
GQ did actually publish a fascinating look at one of the world’s most prolific and weirdest art thieves.
Jen Ramos Eisen wrote about what it was like to be a survivor of intimate-partner abuse at Domingo Germán’s perfect game.
Kevin Johnson wrote why he, as a Black man, has chosen not to review Morgan Wallen’s concerts in St. Louis given Wallen’s past, free use of the n-word.
Know a student affected by book bans? They can sign up for free to get access to a huge library of such titles via the Seattle Public Library.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-semitism, antiscience, climate change, coronavirus, environment, florida, lgbt rights, links, longreads, rum, scotus, stick to baseball, unions, vaccines

→ July 1, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/30/23.

I posted my 2023 Mock Draft v3.0 this week, and as usual did a Q&A to take your questions on it. Going forward, I’ll have the last Big Board update later this upcoming week and then mock 4.0 on Saturday, the morning I fly to Seattle to cover the Futures Game and then the draft. I also did a just-for-fun piece on who I’d put on the All-Star rosters, and then I avoided the comments entirely. I was a lot more active in the comments on the other pieces, including my scouting blog on Jackson Holliday and Brady House. And I weighed in on Friday night on the two players going to Kansas City in the Aroldis Chapman trade.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Rebuilding Seattle, a midweight economic game with some polyomino tile-laying aspects, an imposing game on the table that plays pretty quickly and doesn’t have that many rules to learn.

And now, the links…

Longreads: The LA Times looks at solar farms in the deserts of the American southwest and the complex forces shaping their construction and spread, from environmentalists to monopoly utilities.
At The Intercept, Ilyse Hogue looks at the founding of the nationalist group The Federalist Society, which sparked the 40-year battle to end abortion access in the U.S.
The Atlantic profiles RFK Jr., calling him the first MAGA Democrat for his misinformation-filled anti-science platform, in a piece that, to rational readers, makes him look insane. I just hope reporters keep asking him which vaccines he deems safe.
Another U.S. government report concluded that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was not at the Wuhan lab before the pandemic began. The conspiracy theorists, including some authors who have profited by spreading the lab-link hoax, were not happy.
Speaking of RFK Jr., his drive to “debate” a scientist over vaccines is also misleading, because what he really wants is a platform to shout his views. Denialists are big fans of the Gish gallop, where you say so much that’s false in a short period of time that you drown your opponent, making rebuttals impossible.
You know who might hate RFK Jr. more than I do? Autistic people, whom he’s mocked and demonized for decades, spreading outdated and dangerous stereotypes about the neurodivergent.
Did a relative of yours send you one of those scaremongering stories about a new study showing that sucralose was “genotoxic” and causes cancer? Yeah, it’s not and it doesn’t. That study’s authors have misrepresented their data, and journalists who aren’t science literate – or choose not to be – ran with it.
All this anti-science and the associated distrust of public health comes at a substantial cost to society.
Striking reporters at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Business Insider have gone old school and started their own strike papers, which, like Defector, give people a look at what worker-owned publications might look like.
All that money the U.S. spent to go find the remains of the Titan submersible will come from you, me, and all other American taxpayers.
The BBC looks at Community Violence Interventions, which may have prevented one or more revenge shootings in Chicago quite recently. It’s a better, cheaper approach to violence reduction in cities than spending more on police, which has no impact on violent crime rates.
A 53-year-old man who grew up with anti-LGBTQ+ views and has come around decided to go sit on the sidewalk at the Denver Pride parade with a sign saying “Recovering Bigot. I Am Sorry! Free Hugs.” The Washington Post interviewed him as he described the positive, inclusive, and forgiving environment he found.
Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs (D) signed an executive order banning conversion therapy in the state, making it the 27^th to do so.
Did you hear about the imbroglio around New York City’s plans to force some of its pizzerias to clean up their ovens to reduce carbon emissions? That’s wrong. The plan isn’t new and the target is particulate emissions, not carbon dioxide, which should resonate with everyone who’s been in the path of wildfire smoke this summer.
Florida Governor and Presidential candidate Ron DeSantis (R-) used Texas taxpayer resources on a recent campaign trip there.
DeSantis keeps losing – in court, as a judge blocked the state’s ban on drag shows as likely unconstitutional.
Groomer alert: A Texas pastor convicted of sexually assaulting 14 girls was released from prison early for good behavior. But drag shows!
And then we have Justice Sam Alito, who took a trip to Rome paid for by a group that has filed briefs before SCOTUS, whose wife leased land to an oil and gas firm while the Department of Justice was fighting the EPA before the Court, and, of course, when he received questions from ProPublica about some of these improprieties, he ran to the Wall Street Journalandwrote a whiny pre-buttal instead of answering.
Keith Law Show guest Jason Kander, author of Invisible Storm: A Soldier’s Memoir of Politics and PTSD, is one of four veterans dealing with the disorder whose stories make up the new film Here. Is. Better. The New York Times gave it a positive review.
The Kingdom of Jordan wants to build a brand-new capital city in the Black Desert, where there is no infrastructure, no natural water access, nothing at all to sustain a city and its population.
Modern hunter-gatherers have a thriving gut microbiome compared to those of us who sit in a desk chair and write about baseball prospects and board games.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, arizona, crime, florida, frauds, health, jordan, lgbt rights, links, longreads, police, scotus, stick to baseball, unions, vaccines

→ June 10, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/9/23.

I posted my first Big Board of 2023, ranking the top 100 prospects in this year’s MLB Draft class, over at The Athletic this week. I wanted to do a chat of some sort but my afternoons weren’t clear, unfortunately. Next up will be the ten-year redraft posts I do every year, this time looking back at the very mediocre 2013 class, followed by a fresh mock draft on June 21st. I also had a minor-league scouting post looking at some Yankees and Nationals prospects, including Spencer Jones and James Wood.

On the board game front, I reviewed Heat: Pedal to the Metal, a 2022 racing game that earned just the second perfect grade of 10 I’ve given to any game since I started reviewing for Paste in 2014. Heat’s a blast to play, and if you ever played the bike-racing game La Flamme Rouge from about five years ago, you will know a little bit of the mechanics, as one of Heat’s designers also did that game. Vulture asked me to list the best new games of 2023 so far.

I had Jonathan Mayo on my podcast last week to talk mock drafts, then took this week off to finish the Big Board and take care of some personal stuff. I hope to be back next week. In the meantime, you can listen & subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I sent a fresh version of my free email newsletter out to subscribers on Friday. Why not sign up?

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Columbia Journalism Review has a story on Defector, a writer-owned website founded by Deadspin refugees that’s making its model work in a difficult landscape that is seeing many other sites flounder.
This is appalling on so many levels – parents are paying to have their high school students’ papers published in junk journals to burnish the kids’ college applications.
The Washington Post looks at the “revolt of the Christian home-schoolers,” as some evangelicals who’d been brainwashed into avoiding public education are sending their kids back to regular schools.
A former gun industry executive turned gun safety advocate talked to ProPublica about how the NRA and gun manufacturers radicalized American gun owners.
The New York Times has a great story on a couple of crypto con artists whose last firm, Three Arrow Capital, went bust, so they’v e l e f t t h e U S f o r Bali and Spain … and have already started another crypto outfit.
Dr. Peter Hotez wrote in the Houston Chronicle that not only is the current pandemic not over, there will be more coronavirus pandemics to come.
The mother of an 18-year-old who killed himself is suing the publisher of a newspaper that used the teen’s image to claim he died from the COVID-19 vaccine.
Fidelity has marked down its investment in Twitter by two-thirds since Elon Musk’s purchase of the site.
Maybe it’s because Twitter no longer bothers to remove most hate speech on the site.
Or because Musk himself has gone over the right rail, quoting a neo-Nazi and spreading an antisemitic conspiracy theory.
Charlie Warzel writes in the Atlantic that all of this and more prove that Twitter is just another far-right social network. Parler, Truth Social, Gab – none of these could get a critical mass of users, so instead a right-wing nut job bought a site that already had it, then shifted it hard to the right, betting that the audience and advertisers would stick around.
Bans on drag shows are unconstitutional, writes Elie Mystal in the Nation. Of course they are. My guess is many of the laws Republicans have passed in this culture war will fail in the courts, but it won’t make an iota of difference.
A woman in Tennessee had to undergo an emergency hysterectomy after doctors in that state refused to give her a medically necessary abortion because of the state’s neanderthal abortion ban.
Two groups cancelled conventions they planned to hold in Orlando in response to the state’s anti-LGBT, anti-free speech, and anti-everything policies.
A woman in Washington state has been arrested after refusing treatment for tuberculosis, which a judge ordered her to receive over a year ago.
Rex Huppke takes aim at entitled right-wing protesters screaming at employees and damaging merchandise in Target over the chain’s line of Pride Month merchandise.
Charlotte Clymer had a thoughtful take on this topic, pointing out that giving in to the right-wing outrage machine doesn’t work: they’ll never be satisfied, and they’ll forever be in a shrinking minority.
The President of the Temecula Valley School Board referred to Harvey Milk as “a pedophile” before voting to ban a book that discussed Milk’s life and legacy. He doubled down on the comments after Gov. Gavin Newsom called him out.
Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville (guess) has been so blatant in his support of white nationalists that his own brother is disavowing him.
We’re finally getting a film adaptation of the first Flavia de Luce novel, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, with Martin Freeman attached, I presume as Flavia’s father.
Board game news: The designers of Three Sisters, Motor City, and Fleet: The Dice Game opened a Kickstarter for their next roll-and-write game, French Quarter.
Days of Wonder announced an upcoming Ticket to Ride legacy game, with original designer Alan Moon joined by Rob Daviau (Pandemic Legacy, Return to Dark Tower) and Matt Leacock (Pandemic).

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, board game news, book banning, first amendment, florida, links, longreads, Media, social media, stick to baseball, tennessee, vaccines

→ May 27, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/27/23.

For subscribers to The Athletic, I posted my first mock draft of 2023, and answered a slew of questions from readers.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the roll-and-write game Motor City, from the brains behind Fleet: the Dice Game and Three Sisters.

My guest on the Keith Law Show this week was Scott McCaughey, founding member of the Young Fresh Fellows, the Minus Five, and the Baseball Project, the last of which are about to release a new album, Grand Salami Time! and tour in support of it.You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I owe everyone a fresh newsletter, which I’ve already started writing so I suppose I can at least share the link to sign up.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: New York profiles Nebraska legislator Michaela Cavanaugh, part of the filibuster against that state’s transphobic bill, who said on the floor “I want the bloody hands recorded” because the bill, now a law, will lead to the deaths of trans kids.

The New Yorker examines whether Planned Parenthood is doing enough to fight for abortion rights and the dwindling number of providers who offer this essential health care.

ProPublica looks at a man who believed his local school board was pushing “transgender bullshit,” got arrested for trespassing at a meeting, and was only further encouraged when the charges were dropped and he faced no consequences. Much of the rhetoric attributed to him in this article sounds like the same nonsense that so-called “sovereign citizens” have used to avoid paying taxes.

ProPublica also exposed the use of “family reunification camps,” which often force children to attend with parents who may have been neglectful or even abusive. After the article ran, Colorado became the first state to limit courts’ ability to use them.

Will Leitch wrote an op ed for the New York Times about how Trump running for President again means that families will be back to fighting again.

Who’s footing the bills for Ron DeSantis’s Presidential campaign? The Michigan nonprofit funding him won’t say where the money is coming from.

And who’s footing the bills for Kyrsten Sinema? Turns out the dark-money group behind her is funded a long of extreme right-wingers, like Harlan Crow, James Rupert Murdoch, and Nelson Peltz.

An Illinois state investigation found the Catholic Church lied about how many children its clergy abused, putting the actual number at nearly two thousand since 1950. These are actual groomers, people who have harmed kids and a tax-exempt organization that allowed it to continue.

If you live in Florida and want to restore reproductive rights, here’s a petition you can print out and sign to try to get abortion on the ballot there.

Meanwhile, Florida is going to arrest people in bathrooms regardless of their legal gender status. How anyone can miss the parallels to Germany under the Nazis is beyond me.

Ohio’s Senate passed a bill that will gut diversity initiatives in higher education in the state while curtailing academic freedom

The Washington Post examined book-banning requests across the country and found that the majority came from just eleven ~~cranks~~ people.

Lauren Boebert, she of good Christian family values and whatnot, is getting a divorce. It says a lot about why Republican men are pushing as hard as ever on their misogynistic policy goals.

Exavier Pope wrote about how Ja Morant was wrong, but the reaction to him says more about America’s fear of Black gun owners.

With a little sodium citrate, you can make any cheese into a silky-smooth cheese sauce, even cheeses that don’t ordinarily melt.

I actually backed Filler, a new storage system for small-box board games, on Kickstarter. When I first got the pitch, I thought it was silly, but then I realized how many of these games I own and how sloppy they tend to look on the shelves.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, board games, florida, food science, guns, illinois, links, longreads, nebraska, ohio, stick to baseball, the swamp, trans rights

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