florida — Page 6

→ December 12, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/12/20.

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

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

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

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

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

And now, the links…

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

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

→ November 14, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/14/20.

For subscribers to The Athletic, I wrote about the major rule changes in MLB in 2020 that might stick around, and which ones might be worth keeping. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed The Search for Planet X, a deduction game that is one of the best board games I’ve played all year.

My guest on this week’s episode of The Keith Law Show was Fangraphs managing editor Meg Rowley, talking with me about the state of baseball, free agency, and some recent managerial hires. My podcast is now available on Amazon podcasts as well as iTunes and Spotify.

I’m due for another edition of my free email newsletter, this weekend, I hope.

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

And now, the links…

Longreads first: In Arkansas, tenants who fall behind on their rent can end up in jail, because apparently that state is still operating like the setting of a Dickens novel. The law dates back to the turn of the last century and even prosecutors say it’s probably unconstitutional. ProPublica examines the law and cases where people, often women and people of color, have been further victimized by it. Arkansas voted overwhelmingly red this month, giving Trump, his sycophant Sen. Tom Cotton, and three of their four Representatives at least 60% of the vote, while elections in the two chambers of their state legislature went more than 3 to 1 for Republicans.
An extensive disinformation campaign run by Russian and Syrian intelligence agencies led to the suicide of the founder of Mayday Rescue, best known as the group that helped create Syria’s White Helmets.
Scientists may have solved the information paradox of black holes, which was first described by Stephen Hawking. Black holes appear to be able to ‘shed’ information, rather than simply absorbing (and thus destroying) all information that enter them. This goes against Einstein’s theory of general relativity, instead relying on quantum gravity.
From September of 2019, this Washington Monthly story profiles a far-right Youtube hatemonger whose rise in popularity has been a nightmare for establishment conservatives – yet they have no problem courting that audience’s votes come elections.
Protocol has a brief history of Discord, the popular social media app for gamers (which I’ve used several times to demo board games with publishers), although it’s still not really clear how the company can monetize this large audience.
Taiwan’s 2014 Sunflower Revolution led to a change in how its democracy works, powered by a new platform called vTaiwan that facilitates discussion of policy matters and encourages consensus rather than the chaos typical of social media.
Rev. Raphael Warnock is a Democrat running against Sen. Kelly Loeffler in one of the two runoff elections in Georgia in January, and Republicans are attacking him for a 2002 arrest for obstruction of justice … which was for objecting to police interrogating minors without a lawyer or guardians present. The investigators later apologized.
Meanwhile, multi-millionaire Sen. David Perdue (R), facing Jon Ossoff (D) in the other runoff, is a climate change denier who owns a beachfront mansion in a neighborhood that has taken extensive steps to protect itself from rising sea levels.
And major GOP donors are pouring money into the state to try to preserve the GOP’s advantage in the Senate.
Several State Senate candidates in Florida were fake candidates funded by dark money to confuse voters into not voting for Democrats – such as an Alex Rodriguez running against the Democrat Jose Javier Rodriguez in a district the Republican won by just 31 votes.
This was published the day before the election, but Vox described some activist groups’ plans to fight back when Trump refused to concede the election, some of which we’ve seen already in action.
A Republican firm run by a top aide on Trump’s campaign sent out mass, unmarked tests to Philly supporters urging them to protest vote-counting in the city.
From Nate Silver: Joe Biden won pretty convincingly in the end.
Jennifer Rubin (writing in the Washington Post) writes that changing demographics spell trouble for the Republican Party going forward as their path to the Presidency gets narrower.
The same paper reports on the shift of Latinx voters in the Rio Grande valley towards Trump, even as the state as a whole moved towards Biden, underscoring the diversity of the Latinx population, especially when it comes to what issues and policies matter to each voter, and the Democrats’ messaging failure in that region.
Roxane Gay wrote for the New York Times that the continued support for Trump is a disgrace, but that she’s energized and ready to fight for a better future. I don’t understand how 70 million Americans can see (gestures wildly around self) this and say they want four more years of it.
This Twitter thread undercuts any arguments in favor of the Electoral College, asking whether its defenders even understand what they’re defending.
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito went on a steeply partisan rant while speaking at the Federalist Society. Not for nothing, but the house impeached SCOTUS Justice Samuel Chase in 1804 on grounds that he was too partisan.
Public health experts and scientists say Utah’s government is ignoring their calls for action to stop the state’s COVID-19 surge, with an infection rate of 1.17, 81.3 daily new cases per 100,000 residents, and less than 25% of their ICU beds available.
Meanwhile, Florida hired an unqualified, conspiracy theory-touting sports blogger for its COVID-19 task force. He showed up in my mentions one time with some bullshit about masks being ineffective (fun fact – they are, and the CDC just updated their recommendations to say that masks offer the wearer more protection than previously believed).
WHYY’s The Pulse podcast looks at the ongoing efforts to develop a COVID-19 vaccine and the upcoming battle to get people to trust it.
Have you seen the claim that suicides are up 200% due to the lockdown, often cited as an argument against a second closing of the economy? It’s false, and it’s gross to try to use suicide, a very real problem, to fight policies designed to reduce the spread the coronavirus.
The Cut looks at several youngish Americans who are ignoring the pandemic and guidelines for limiting its spread by traveling around the world without regard to the consequences of their selfish actions.
High Street on Market, my favorite restaurant in Philadelphia, has closed temporarily but plans to relocate and open again in 2021. Their sibling restaurant Fork is still open, with outdoor seating, as they had a different lease and landlord.
Geneva now has the world’s highest minimum wage, about US$25 an hour, to allow the many service workers in its city to pay their rent and feed themselves without having to rely on public assistance or food pantries. It’s the same problem facing low-wage earners in many U.S. cities like San Francisco – they can’t afford to live in or near the city where they work.
Chris Archer wrote on the Players Coalition site about how absurdly hard it was for him to vote.
Vogue offered a quick appreciation of Stacey Abrams’ role in turning Georgia blue – which may matter even more in those upcoming runoffs. You can volunteer to help the Democrats try to win those seats or donate to Abrams’ Fair Fight.
VICE explores the history of the Great Barrier Hotel, once floating near the reef of that name but now moored and disused on the coast of North Korea.
Sarah McBride became the highest-ranking trans elected official in the U.S. when she won election to the state Senate here in Delaware this month.
This Inside Hook article on The Strand bookstore is the most balanced look I’ve seen at the controversy around the store’s actions this year with its workforce and PPP loan. (The owner’s purchase of shares in Amazon is a red herring, mentioned to get an emotional reaction but logical for any high net worth investor during a pandemic.)
The New York Times‘ nepotista Maggie Haberman has made a career out of normalizing and excusing Donald Trump and many of his supporters; Drew Magary skewers her, the Times, and the paper’s bizarre decision to run a profile of her in its own pages.
The Court of Master Sommeliers, Americas has failed in its response to dozens of claims from women that they were manipulated or sexually abused by men on that certification body, which certifies Sommeliers and Master Sommeliers in the U.S. and Canada. They’re on their second apology already.
Philadelphia was prepared for post-election violence, but street protests turned into dance parties. That was no accident, but was the result of planning efforts by the Working Families Party, a pro-labor, semi-progressive political party mostly active in the northeast.
Board game news: Asmodee introduced Connect and Play, guides for playing some of its games over Zoom or other remote communication services, including Just One and Dixit.
Satish Pillalamarri, one of the co-founders of North Star Games (publishers of Evolution and the Quacks of Quedlinburg), passed away this month at the age of 42 due to cancer.
Quined Games, a European publisher of primarily mid-weight to heavy games like Agra and Keyflower, announced that the new game Carnegie will hit Kickstarter on November 23^rd. It’s from the designer of Carson City and co-designer of Troyes.
Z-Man Games has released Pandemic Legacy: Season 0, the final installment in this trilogy, this one a prequel to the other two games and thus not a continuation of that storyline.
Evolution, which has been out for Steam and tablets since late 2019, is coming to Nintendo Switch in December.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, florida, georgia, links, longreads, philadelphia, physics, social media, stick to baseball, syria, taiwan, utah, voter suppression

→ October 31, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/31/20.

My ranking of the top 40 free agents this offseason went up on Thursday morning for subscribers to the Athletic. I also answered some questions for Kaitlyn McGrath, our Blue Jays beat writer, on the state of the Blue Jays’ farm system.

My guest on this week’s episode of the Keith Law Show was Taylor Trammell, Mariners outfielder and author of a column on the Players Tribune called “Baseball Is Not Black Enough.” He was an outstanding guest, and I think this is one of the best interviews I’ve had, which is all to Taylor’s credit. You can subscribe to my podcast on iTunes, Spotify, and now Amazon podcasts. I appeared on TSN 1040 in Vancouver on Wednesday to talk about the World Series and the role of analytics in the sport, in which I think I expressed my views on the subject pretty well.

I sent out another edition of my free email newsletter on Friday to subscribers. Thank you all for the kind feedback, as always.

Here’s my weekly reminder that my books The Inside Game and Smart Baseball make excellent gifts for the baseball fan or avid reader in your life and you should buy lots of copies for everyone you know, like your Secret Santa person, or that annoying guy at work who thinks he knows everything there is to know about sportsball.

And now the links…

Longreads first: “It’s not an accident that, every cycle, the boogeyman of the Democrats is a woman.” The Vanity Fair cover story and profile of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is well worth reading, despite the non-troversy over what she wore in the photos.
The Washington Post explores how several companies issued six- and seven-figure bonuses to executives, then filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, stiffing creditors and laying off thousands of employees.
The New York Times has the story of how the Wall Street Journal‘s news reporters’ debunking of their own editorial page’s claims that the Hunter Biden laptop story was some big deal, concluding that Joe Biden had nothing to do with it, thus foiling the Trump campaign’s last-ditch attempt to attach a scandal to their opponent. (The “dossier” in question is fake, and the alleged author doesn’t exist.)
Also from the Grey Lady, the story of Trump’s sketchy relationship with Deutsche Bank, and his avoidance of taxes on $287 million in forgiven debts.
Amy Coney Barrett is the least experienced SCOTUS judge in 30 years – which is what the GOP wanted, since she’s likely to give them decades of loyal service.
Author Mona Eltahawy writes that Barrett is a five-star general in the army of the patriarchy.
QAnon’s predictions – like JFK Jr. coming back on October 17^th at a Trump rally – haven’t come true, so how will the movement survive this failure of prophecy?
This Washington Post investigative report found that during Trump’s term, millions of government and GOP dollars have flowed to his properties, so I suppose he drained the swamp right into his own coffers.
Many states and countries are moving to eliminate daylight saving(s) time, in line with increasing evidence that the practice does more harm than good.
Travis Roy, the BU hockey player who broke his neck in one of his first games in college and was paralyzed from the neck down, died this week at age 45.
Philly police smashed the windows of an SUV, beat the driver, and then pulled a toddler from the backseat … and the National Fraternal Order of Police claimed that an officer had found the child wandering around barefoot.
A judge in Florida’s Duval County resigned from the county’s voting board after a local paper reported that he’d donated 12 times to Trump’s campaign and had multiple Trump signs in his yard – which the judge’s wife claimed were on “her side” of the property.
A professor at Northeastern wrote an open letter to the school’s students as the university tries to force all professors there to teach classes in person in the spring semester.
Facebook employees say the company manipulated the news that users saw to favor right-wing sites in an effort to appease Republicans.
Easter Island defeated the coronavirus without causing a deep division among its people by invoking their cultural practice of tapu, which gives us the English word taboo.
Côte d’Ivoire has its own presidential election this year, with a current president running for a third term that might not be constitutional, and a rival whose refusal to leave that same office in 2010 led to a civil war and an ongoing trial at the Hague.
A British-Australian academic has been held in Iranian prisons for two years after she was arrested while attending a conference in Tehran. Kylie Moore-Gilbert was moved from a notorious women’s prison, Qarchak, to a secretive ward elsewhere in Tehran.
Board game news: Renegade Game Studios announced that they’re taking pre-orders for Atheneum: Mystic Library.

Please, if you are a U.S. citizen and you haven’t already done so, vote. Vote this anti-science, racist, authoritarian Administration out, so we can get back to arguing over whether Yadier Molina is a Hall of Famer instead.

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

→ August 15, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/15/20.

I had one column this week for subscribers to The Athletic, looking at the demotion calculus in a short season with no minor leagues, plus notes on Spencer Howard, Ryan Castellani, and Luis Basabe. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

My podcast guest this week was Dr. Angela Duckworth, author of Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, discussing concepts from her book and how baseball scouts and executives might apply them – and how to avoid the pitfalls of using “intangibles” as a cover for more insidious biases. You can buy Grit here via bookshop.org.

You can also buy my new book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us about Ourselves, which came out this April, via the same site. I’ll send out the next issue of my free email newsletter as soon as my fall board game preview comes out over at Paste.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Carina Chocano spent hours taking MasterClass sessions and wrote about the product for The Atlantic, asking what it is they’re really selling since they’re not selling actual education.

At Slate, William Saletan lays out the timeline of how Trump’s bad decisions have led to over 171,000 U.S. deaths from COVID-19.

Current Affairs’ Nathan J. Robinson points how, increasingly, verifiable information is behind paywalls while alt-right bullshit is free, and looks at the consequences of that dichotomy.

Novelist Chimamanda Adichie suffered a concussion earlier this year, and wrote about the experience, including the introspection that came with the temporary loss of part of her brain function.

The World Health Organization has created a one-stop shop for correct answers to common myths about COVID-19.

The Delaware Interscholastic Athletic Association made the correct decision to delay fall sports until February. Some parents are pushing a petition to demand they reverse this, and the comments from parents in that article drip with ignorance and privilege.

A Florida church leader has been arrested for pushing the fake cure known as “miracle mineral solution” (MMS), which is really just bleach.

Mom influencers on Instagram are spreading anti-mask propaganda. Instagram is owned by Facebook and neither site seems willing to clean up their own shit.

Almost a third of elite sportswomen reported harassment or trolling on social media according to a survey by BBC Sport.

The opposition to masks is beyond belief at this point. You probably read about the sheriff in Marion County, Florida, who banned masks in his offices, and banned his deputies from wearing them. He eased those restrictions slightly after the backlash, but really, why is anyone objecting to mask mandates at this point other than ignorance or selfishness?

Putting more healthful, nutritious foods into school lunches appears to have improved health outcomes like obesity for children who receive them – so of course the Trump Administration’s USDA has rolled back those changes.

A major Iowa Republican donor who ‘somehow’ won a no-bid contract to provide PPE from China to the state is now under investigation for prostitution and possession of child pornography.

The Massachusetts Democratic Party helped a college group orchestrate a campaign to entrap and smear a local Democratic candidate for the state’s 1^st Congressional District.

That Georgia high school that suspended a student for taking a picture of all of the maskless kids packed in the halls as they resumed classes? They had to shut down for several days due to an outbreak.

Reproductive rights took a huge hit this week at the Supreme Court thanks to John Roberts’ conservative majority and their decision to allow several anti-abortion and outright misogynistic laws in Arkansas to stand.

There’s a massive oil spill in progress on the Indian Ocean island nation of Mauritius.

A telling comparison of the different speaker lists at anti-vaxx and pro-vaccine conferences.

We watched season one of Perry Mason on HBO and I agree with everything Alan Sepinwall said about it.

Board game news: There’s an Umbrella Academy card game in the works, for fans of that Netflix series.

I’ve never played Arkwright given its length and complexity, although it’s pretty highly regarded. Now there’s a simpler version coming as a card game, on Kickstarter this week.

I enjoyed Elizabeth Hargrave’s Designer Diaries around her newest game, Mariposas, due out later this month.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arkansas, board game news, coronavirus, florida, georgia, iowa, links, longreads, massachusetts, reproductive rights, stick to baseball, tv, vaccines

→ August 3, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/3/19.

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

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

And now, the links…

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

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

→ November 10, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/10/18.

I didn’t have any new ESPN+ posts this week, with my free agent rankings going up on November 2nd and my trade market overview due to run this upcoming Monday. I did hold a Klawchat on Thursday, and did a Periscope video chat on Wednesday (and even played a little something on guitar).

My latest board game review for Paste covers the cute, competitive, asymmetric game Root, where cuddly forest creatures fight battles for control of the forest, and each player has unique pieces, abilities, and paths to victory. It’s quite clever.

Feel free to sign up for that free email newsletter I keep talking about and occasionally remember to send out.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Undark exposes the conservative groups fighting climate chance education in Florida classrooms, as well as how they wage this war and their efforts to bring it to other states. The irony of failing to teach the reality of anthropogenic climate change in a state that might be the most adversely affected by it should not be lost on you.
Working conditions in the Tesla factory would make Upton Sinclair blush; medical staff are “forbidden from calling 911 without permission,” and five former clinic employees told The Center for Investigative Reporting’s writers that the on-site clinic’s practices are “unsafe and unethical.” One source was fired in August by the clinic, which she says is because she raised concerns about the clinic’s treatment of workers. Tesla’s pricing starts around $35,000 for its model 3 sedan to over $140,000 for its Model X P100D SUV.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was still working in a Manhattan Taqueria when she began her campaign for Congress, and Bon Appetit spoke to her there about the intersection between food and politics. She points out that food is intertwined with climate change, minimum wage laws, immigration, health care, education, and more (I’d add trade policy/protectionism, other environmental regulations, and water rights to the list.)
Anti-vaccine PACs helped shape this week’s midterm ballots, as those groups fought to defeat Republicans who weren’t sufficiently anti-vax during primary races. Dr. Paul Offit, who helped develop the rotavirus vaccine, wrote about how he’d like to answer anti-vax loons who still argue that vaccines cause autism.
Ninety-eight year old Roger Angell penned this wonderfully angry essay on the power of voting for the New Yorker, which ran it the day before Election Day.
The deputy editorial page editor for the Washington Post writes that new acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker is a crackpot.
Wisconsin Republicans are trying to strip the incoming Democratic governor of much of the office’s power right now, which is particularly sad given the mess the outgoing Scott Walker leaves in the state’s education budget. Most notable is that he gave Taiwanese company Foxconn up to $4 billion in subsidies and tax breaks, a deal that would have resulted in the state paying about $230,000 per job created … if it had even created the number of jobs promised, which it hasn’t. That money would have filled the education budget gap and then some.
If Brian Kemp wins the gubernatorial race in Georgia, his victory would need an asterisk, according to Prof. Carol Anderson, who has written a book on voter suppression called One Person, No Vote. I said in my Periscope chat this week that when leaders in less-developed countries steal elections, the citizens take to the streets in peaceful protests and workers strike. I never thought we’d need that here, but that may be the only response Georgians have here.
The Kansas City Star exposes the overconfidence and disorganization that sank Kris Kobach’s campaign and gave Kansas its first Democratic win for a statewide office in 12 years.
The Houston Chronicle has had to retract eight stories written by Austin bureau chief Mike Ward after discovering that he’d fabricated dozens of people he quoted in those articles.
Adam Serwer writes in the Atlantic that America’s problem is not tribalism, but base racism, given how one of our two major parties seems to rely on race-baiting and trafficking in stereotypes to rally its base. And it works.
Trump mouthed off last week about making the Federal Reserve less independent; Venezuela’s experience demonstrates why that’s a foolish notion. Of course, Trump also blamed the three eastern Baltic nations for starting the war in Yugoslavia, so I don’t think we’re dealing with the brightest bulb in the chandelier here.
A giant supernova named Cow appeared without warning in June and has given scientists a rare look at the birth of either a black hole or a neutron star.
Oakland chef Charlie Hallowell, whose restaurant Pizzaiolo I visited and really enjoyed, is trying to come back to his old life after more than a dozen women came forward to say he sexually harassed them. He’s facing some backlash, but also getting frankly unwarranted support from other men in the business who seem to gloss over his behavior. The landlord for his newest restaurant, Western Pacific in Berkeley, is Lakireddy Bali Reddy, who pled guilty to human trafficking, bringing underage girls from India to the United States so he could have sex with them.
A mob of protesters gathered outside Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s house and threatened his safety. Reason argues it’s not just wrong, but actively harmful to the cause. I have zero sympathy for Carlson, who has chosen this life of fomenting bigotry for profit, but I agree with the column. Don’t threaten him or his family. You want to make him stop? Go after his advertisers. Cut your cable subscription. Ask public places you frequent to stop showing Fox News. But threatening journalist won’t help … although one protester says the reports of threats are highly embellished.
Dr. Christine Blasey Ford continues to face death threats, moving four times this year, while the man who assaulted her gets to sit on the Supreme Court and decide how the rest of us can live our lives.
A fake doctor in California who promises a “miracle cure” for cancer using baking soda was sued by a patient and hit with a $105 million judgment. The money seems tangential – the point here is that these charlatans prey on the desperate, and the law seems too slow or simply unequipped to stop them.
Dr. Devah Pager died earlier this month of pancreatic cancer at age 46. Her work helped demonstrate that being black in the job market was, in effect, as big of a negative as having a felony conviction was
Comedian Patrick Monahan (no, not the Train guy) wrote about Louise Mensch’s legendary tweet about Steve Bannon possibly getting the death penalty for New York magazine’s The Cut. I take no pleasure in reposting this.
New York beverage director, author, and bitters expert Sother Teague writes about how he uses his role to espouse important causes, as with his NYC bar Coup, where proceeds go to groups fighting the worst policies of this administration. I appreciated this quote in particular: “Diminishing language such as ‘stick to sports’ holds no place and only serves to display the ignorance of those who say it.”
In the last two years, two mental health professionals in Monterey County have taken their own lives, including David Soskin, who drove off Highway 1 at Hurricane Point in June. Less than two years previously, a colleague with whom Soskin had clashed, Robert Jackson, took his own life, having left his job with the county after accusing Soskin of creating a hostile work environment.
This (unrolled) Twitter thread shows the bonkers elections in Alaska from Tuesday, with ties going back 40-plus years. Don Young won re-election yet again; he’s been Alaska’s at-large Representative since 1972, before I was born, after losing the election but taking the seat because his opponent died before election day. Young is still just the fourth Representative in the state’s history, even though he refuses to hold town halls and holds many views best left in the 19th century.
My employer did a nice thing for longtime employees, shutting down the Magic Kingdom for a night to allow Disney cast members of 40-plus years of service to enjoy the park for themselves.
Finally, this magic trick won for the best close-up trick at the International Federation of Magic Societies’ 2018 World Championship of Magic, and it’s dazzling:

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: astronomy, climate change, disney, education, florida, frauds, georgia, journalism, kansas, links, metoo, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines, voter suppression, wisconsin

→ October 27, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/27/18.

My most recent piece for ESPN+ subscribers wrapped up my Arizona Fall League stint, looking at 25 players from 13 organizations. I also had a free piece on ESPN with food, coffee, beer, and travel tips for Boston and Los Angeles leading into the World Series. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

My latest board game review for Paste looks at Nyctophobia, a one-versus-many game where most players play with blackout glasses. Only the villain can see the board; everyone else must play by touch and by talking to their teammates.

If, like Dave Gahan, you just can’t get enough, you can sign up for my free email newsletter, with more of my writing, appearing whenever the muse moves me.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This 2013 essay by Adam Cayton-Holland on his sister’s suicide, his own grief, and trying to heal was the best piece I read this week.
Dinosaurs took over the world thanks to a massive climate change event that ended the Triassic period; within that period came the Carnian Pluvial Episode, a smaller climate catastrophe that opened the door for dinosaurs to rule, likely caused the eruption of oceanic volcanoes that pushed carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and acidified the oceans … which should sound familiar.
GoodFundies looks at the history of media reports of the Wilpons’ meddling in baseball operations in a very, very long post that briefly mentions my comments on the Jeurys Familia trade fiasco. Shorter version: They’ve meddled so often, and so much to the team’s detriment, that you can see why so many candidates appear to have declined to interview.
In the wake of multiple revelations about Donald Trump’s businesses and his inheritance from his father, the New Yorker asks if fraud is simply embedded in Trump’s business model. It’s a feature, not a bug.
Why are some folks so threatened by transgender people? Because that threatens their beliefs that there are only two genders, while perhaps undermining the prejudiced person’s sense of self as a man or woman, according to some recent research on the subject.
The United States is withdrawing from the International Coffee Agreement, continuing this Administration’s policies of anti-globalization and protectionism, which will hurt American consumers and international coffee producers (including farmers who depend on export markets for their livelihoods).
The former Secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Financial Institutions wrote a piece titled I Respected Scott Walker. Then I Worked for Him. in the Atlantic. It’s as damning as you’d expect: Walker pushed policies that would hurt middle and lower class Wisconsinites because he thought it would play well with the national party.
South Carolina is asking the Administration to allow ‘faith-based’ foster care agencies to discriminate against Jewish or other non-Christian parents who wish to foster children. This is theocracy in motion, in a state where more than 20% of residents identify as something other than Christian.
Alt-right trolls are very mad online over posters in New York City that are actually satirical street art, not official city posters. The artist in question, Winston Tseng, appears to have deleted his entire Internet presence in the last 48 hours – his Twitter account is gone, his Instagram is locked, his website has vanished.
Voting machines in Texas are changing some voters’ choices, either making their Senate choices blank or in some cases switching their vote from Beto O’Rourke (D) to Ted Cruz (R). The state agency overseeing the election has said it’s aware of the problem and is powerless to fix it.
ProPublica has reported on voter intimidation in Texas during early voting, such as “a partisan poll watcher looking over voter’s shoulders as they cast their ballots and questioning voters on their politics.” (That person was eventually removed from the property by police.) The ACLU has a guide on what to do if you face voter intimidation at the polls.
Meanwhile, in Georgia, Republican gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp, the leader of the state’s attempt to subvert democracy, took off his hood this week when he said he was concerned about Georgians exercising their right to vote. In DeKalb County, nearly 5000 requests for absentee ballots were “lost” by county officials, according to a complaint by the local Democratic Party branch. Meanwhile, a local investigation found that Kemp owes over $800,000 in loans to a bank he helped create, but won’t answer any questions about the loans, such as the terms of the agreement.
Iowa Republican Steve King went full white nationalist in an interview with a far-right Austrian outlet, talking about his belief in the “Great Replacement,” where immigrants from Latin American and Asian countries will ‘replace’ white Americans (or Europeans) in their – “their” – home countries.
An Idaho-based white supremacist group is making racist robocalls to support Florida Republican gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis, whose opponent, Andrew Gillum (D), is African-American.
And then there’s North Dakota, which is working like hell to disenfranchise Native American voters, as New York Times reporter Maggie Astor explains in this unrolled Twitter thread.
There’s been a lot of news and opinion about vaccine deniers this week. Endocrinologist Lubna Mirza writes that fear and misinformation drive non-vaccinators, and says that spreading such nonsense is “irresponsible, to say the least.” In Texas, a Republican backed by anti-vaccine nuts is running for House District 114; she’s also dropped some racist dog-whistles along the way, so if you live there, vote for John Turner, her Democratic challenger. The Republican candidate for Governor in Connecticut was caught on video saying of vaccinations that “We shouldn’t be dumping a lot of drugs into kids for no reason,” which is wrong on at least three points (vaccines aren’t drugs; they’re not being dumped; there’s a very good reason, preventing debilitating and often fatal diseases). That’s why Dr. David Gorski, also known as “Orac,” writes that the Republican Party has become the anti-vaccine party: Not all vaccine deniers are Republicans, but the Party has chosen to pander to anti-vaxxers on local, state, and national levels.
Physicist and prominent atheist writer Lawrence Krauss stands accused of multiple instances of sexual harassment and has agreed to resign at the end of the academic year. He’s denying the claims, although I find his rebuttal weak and that he fails to understand why what he’s accused of doing was wrong.
Microplastics are so pervasive in our environment that they’re showing up in our excrement.
Seattle’s minimum wage law has helped many workers but may have hindered new entrants to the labor market, according to a second study by the same authors whose paper a year ago implied that the law hurt workers on the whole. As with many economic policies, there are winners and losers, and the crux will be whether there are more of the former and if that outweighs the societal costs paid by the latter.
A Guardian essay asks if reading is really helpful for depression. I am fortunate in that, while I’ve felt the black dog on my shoulder, I have never been so depressed that I felt unable or unwilling to read.
Hawai’i got a bit smaller this week as a hurricane washed tiny East Island off the map, a potential disaster for sea turtles that nested on the 11-acre island.
The white man who killed two black people in a Louisville Kroger’s has a schizoaffective disorder and had previously lost his right to own firearms due to previous violent incidents.
A city commissioner in Lakeland, Florida, who shot and killed a shoplifter in his store, has been charged with murder after his ‘stand your ground’ claim was rejected. That’s nice to hear, but if ‘stand your ground’ convinced the killer to pull the trigger, then the problem with the law remains.
Starling Games, the publishers of Everdell, have a new Kickstarter up for Anomaly, the second game from designer Thomas Dagenais-Lespérance.
Finally, the Tweet of the Week:

FOUNDING FATHER: we must always have an electoral college and 2 senators per state

ME: ok but what if 40 million people live in california

FOUNDING FATHER (spits out tea prepared by a slave): there’s HOW many people in WHAT

— Ben Rosen (@ben_rosen) October 22, 2018

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, climate change, coffee, Economics, environment, florida, guns, links, mental health, mental illness, metoo, north dakota, racism, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines, voter suppression, wisconsin

→ August 11, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/11/18.

Just one Insider post this week, with scouting notes on some Yankees, Pirates, and Orioles prospects. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

My Gen Con wrap-up is filed to Paste and I’ll update this post with the link when I get it.

You can sign up for my free email newsletter, which I’ve been sending out every ten days or so. And my book, Smart Baseball, is now just $9 on Kindle.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Eater exposes the toxic workplace culture at Estela and other restaurants operated by chef Thomas Carter.
ProPublica exposes the unelected officials who are running the VA from the shadows of Mar-a-Lago.
Dale Murphy, former Atlanta Braves superstar and near-Hall of Famer, wrote the best piece I have seen to date on players’ social media gaffes, such as the extremely bigoted tweets from Josh Hader and Trea Turner. Murphy gets it, and speaks with the gravitas folks like me simply can’t muster. Over at Medium, Justin Megahan asked about the baseball culture that produces young men who think this shit is funny, although I think it’s not specific to baseball, but a function of societal views of masculinity.
A major investigation by liberal rag … um Forbes found that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross may have stolen over $120 million from investors, and lied about his assets and business activities on ethics disclosure forms when he was nominated. He’s still employed as of Saturday afternoon. Drain the swamp, indeed.
Twitter’s attempt to remain apolitical by refusing to ban conspiracy theorist and snake oil salesman Alex Jones is in itself a political choice. Parker Malloy writes here that Twitter still can’t figure out what kind of platform it wants to be; I don’t like the platform it has become.
WIRED‘s Issie Lapowsky writes that tech companies can’t win their war against Jones. That may be true, but doesn’t excuse inaction.
Also writing for WIRED, Clive Thompson offers thoughts on how to slow the spread of online hate. Doing nothing or disengaging are not good options.
Slate examines four hypotheses on why Twitter hasn’t moved against Jones yet, none of which is terribly satisfying.
Laura Ingraham went full white nationalist on Fox News this week; the Atlantic called her out on it, both in that her love of “country” seems to ignore this country’s founding principles, and that the population as a whole doesn’t agree with her.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the darling of the progressive left, but her increased media presence has just led to her producing a lot of bullshit answers, including the same kind of myth-repeating that characterizes the alt-right. Her policy proposals are at least interesting enough to discuss, but her sound bytes don’t reveal any depth to her ideas.
The Italian Senate is trying to delay the country’s new mandatory vaccination rules that arose in response to an ongoing measles epidemic in the supposedly developed country.
I’ve never had any use for PETA, and they reminded me why when they attacked Impossible Foods for testing its burgers on rats to satisfy federal safety requirements. If PETA’s interest is in improving the lives and welfare of animals … well, it’s not, as evidenced here. Their interest is in generating headlines. I guess they got their wish.
A couple in New Mexico appear to have stolen a $100 million painting just to keep it in their apartment, and perhaps stolen and sold other art works to finance a lifestyle beyond their apparent means. None of this was discovered until after their deaths, and family members still can’t believe it’s true.
The FDA has approved the first new malarial preventive drug in over 18 years.
One of my Senators, Tom Carper, wrote an editorial assailing the Trump administration’s plans to end emissions standards for cars. It’s going to take years to undo the environmental damage wrought by this regime.
Attorney General Jeff helped block an EPA action against Drummond Coal, one of his biggest donors, while he was still in the Senate, according to testimony in a recent bribery trial of a Drummond executive and a prominent Alabama law firm, both of whom had close ties to .
The sugar industry in Florida is under attack now for its role in pollution that is feeding toxic algae blooms; they’ve also got a long history of labor rights abuses and using tariffs to restrict sugar imports and raise consumer prices. The Florida GOP has historical ties to Big Sugar, and one leading gubernatorial candidate, Adam Putnam, has taken over $8 million in contributions from Big Sugar and its PACS.
Mike Salk, program director for ESPN Seattle 710 and longtime host of the Brock & Salk show, as well as a friend of mine, wrote about how Jim Abbott helped inspire him after an accident damaged his hand at age 12.
The online editorial comics site The Nib has a Kickstarter for them to start a print version of the publication. Some of the best editorial cartoonists online have appeared in the Nib or will appear in the magazine, including Matt “We Should Improve Society Somewhat” Bors.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alabama, baseball, environment, florida, health, links, science, social media, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ June 9, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/9/18.

The 2018 MLB Rule 4 draft has come and gone and I have recaps up for all National League teams and all American League teams. I also wrote my reactions to day one on Monday night, and held a Klawchat on Tuesday after the fourth round, while teams continued drafting.

You can find more details on my top 100 prospects for the draft on my Big Board, and can see my final first-round mock from Monday afternoon, which had 9 picks on the dot and flipped Arizona’s first two picks.

Over at Paste, I recapped what I saw at Paradox Interactive’s PDXCON in Stockholm last month, where they announced tabletop versions of four of their popular video game titles: Crusader Kings, Cities Skylines, Europa Universalis, and Hearts of Iron.

My free email newsletter is back and I hope it’ll be more or less weekly again now that the draft is over; I’m planning to send the next issue this afternoon or tomorrow morning.

Smart Baseball is now out in paperback! I will be at Politics and Prose in Washington, DC, on July 14th, joined by my friend Jay Jaffe (The Cooperstown Casebook), and hope to announce a signing in the Boston area for the weekend of July 28th shortly.

And now, the links…

Kat Kinsman had the best piece I read on his suicide & what it means for the industry and society overall. (I’m sure there were many great pieces I didn’t read, too.)
Bourdain’s 1999 piece for the New Yorker on the dirty secrets of restaurant kitchens is what launched his career as a writer and eventually a celebrity (ex-)chef.
WIRED gives us a hybrid profile/book review around former DNI James Clapper, who just wrote a memoir that is highly critical of the current Administration and the societal trends that enabled it.
As a lifelong fan of the Muppets, I greatly enjoyed Slate’s group interview with several Muppeteers and execs as well as a TV critic and even a therapist who offers insights on the Kermit/Miss Piggy relationship.
The California judge who sentenced Stanford rapist Brock Turner to just six months in jail – reduced to three months for good behavior – has been recalled by voters, the first judge to be recalled in that state in 86 years. Julia Ioffe wrote a long piece for the Huffington Post on how Stanford law professor Michelle Dauber led the recall effort, citing the judge’s history of considering the needs of the rapists and abusers in his court over the impact of their crimes. Dauber also identifies Stanford as “one of the most unfriendly, if not the most unfriendly school to victims of sexual assault.”
Alia Shawkat (Maeby on Arrested Development) spoke to Vanity Fair about her disappointment in her co-stars’ comments in a recent New York Times interview that broached Jeffrey Tambor’s inappropriate behavior on set.
South Dakota Rep. Michael Clark said businesses should be able to turn away customers of color if they want. He later apologized and admitted the comment was racist, although Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. compared the moment to a hood being removed.”
Florida gubernatorial candidate Adam Putnam likes to brag about being an “NRA Sellout.” While he was Commissioner of the state’s Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, his office stopped running background checks for concealed carry permits for nearly a year … because an employee couldn’t log on to the national database to run the checks. Thirty-odd other states, including Delaware, honor these permits under reciprocal agreements.
Florida is also one of the states that denies voting rights to convicted felons, and Governor Rick Scott, also a Republican, has made it even harder than ever for those citizens to regain that Constitutional right, often dismissing petitioners’ applications in mere minutes.
Thousands of Poles demonstrated against mandatory vaccination laws. A measles outbreak in Romania has already killed dozens of children, with 200 new cases a week. Some cretin named Kat Von D announced to the world she won’t vaccinate her as yet unborn child. We all deserve to die in a plague for creating this world.
Jess McHugh wrote about the societal expectation that women should smile, which is both very American and relatively new.
Kansas gubernatorial candidate Kris Kobach rode in a local parade with a replica .50 caliber gun in the car alongside him. It didn’t go over well.
You’ve probably seen coverage of the increased numbers of scientists running for political office this year; the Washington Post documents a new wave of teachers doing the same, and they’re not all running as Democrats (as just about all scientists are).
The Guardian interviewed first-time author Elaine Castillo about her debut novel America is Not the Heart and issues of race and cultural appropriation.
The UN’s human rights investigator on extreme poverty has found that America’s poor are becoming even worse off under Trump. I’d like to see what portion of that underclass voted for Trump and/or other Republicans in 2016.
The Harvard Business Review offers some brief tips on how to be a more productive learner.
This NPR piece on raising better eaters by skipping the kids’ menu is generally good advice, even acknowledging that cost and time become factors in what we feed our kids. My daughter is an adventurous eater with a broad palate. When servers in restaurants compliment me on her taste, I tell them I can only take so much credit; I introduced her to lots of foods, but she was willing to try everything.
A rare bit of positive news in the fight against climate change: the cost of removing CO₂ from the atmosphere has plummeted. Now we just need to devote more public funds to the effort.
Doctor/scientist Edzard Ernst writes about realizing that homeopathy isn’t just useless, but actively harmful in the way it misleads patients and can steer them away from effective medical treatment. It’s not just that homeopathy has failed every test of whether it works, but it isn’t chemically possible for it to work.
Board game news: Game Salute’s new Kickstarter for A War of Whispers is nearing its $30,000 goal.
Asmodee Digital announced it’s going to bring some of its board game titles to Nintendo Switch.
Acram Digital released a new 30-second trailer for the Istanbul app, due by the end of the month for iOS and Android.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board games, climate change, florida, guns, kansas, links, mental health, muppets, south dakota, stick to baseball, suicide, vaccines

→ June 2, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/2/18.

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

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

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

And now, the links…

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

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

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