frauds — Page 5

July 18, 2020 · 16 comments

Stick to baseball, 7/18/20.

I didn’t write anything this week other than the review here of Patrick Radden Keefe’s book Say Nothing and my review of the lovely little light strategy game Walking in Burano. I will do a season preview with some picks for breakout candidates this week for subscribers to The Athletic, as well as a new game review for Paste, and a Zoom Q&A session on The Athletic’s site on Thursday at 3 pm ET. I answered reader questions on a mailbag episode of my podcast last week.

My book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, is out now, just in time for Opening Day (okay, three months before, but who’s counting). You can order it anywhere you buy books, and I recommend bookshop.org. I’ll also resume my email newsletter this week once I have some new content.

I’ll be speaking at the U.S. Army Mad Scientist Weaponized Information Virtual Conference on Tuesday at 9:30 am ET, talking about topics from The Inside Game. You can register to watch the event here.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Data scientist David Shor, fired for tweeting that nonviolent protests tend to push public opinion leftward (a conclusion based on data), spoke at length to New York about what the data say about the Democrats’ chances in 2020 and beyond. It’s sobering, but comes with evidence-based recommendations that start with not taking any swing states for granted in October.
The Guardian looks at the rise and fall of Nespresso, which faces low-price competition, criticism of environmental impact, and growing consumer awareness.
Politico has a long profile on Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D), a first-term representative from Michigan running for re-election in her purple district, and what lessons she may have to offer Democrats nationwide.
The inspiration for the original text-based adventure game Colossal Cave Adventure (often just abbreviated as Adventure) was Patricia Crowther, ex-wife of the game’s co-creator, who didn’t credit her with the cave mapping that he used to design the game.
Orac looks at the controversy over airborne transmission of COVID-19. His conclusions: the virus can be spread via respiratory aerosols, but we already guessed that, and mandating masks and physical distancing is part of the solution.
Cases have been rising, but deaths weren’t, which isn’t the good news it might appear to be, writes Alexis Madrigal for the Atlantic. The death rate has begun to rise since Madrigal’s piece went up, though.
The CDC’s longtime status as an agency beyond the reach of partisan politics has left it defenseless against attacks from the science-deniers in the White House.
Vox looks at why Arizona has the nation’s worst outbreak of COVID-19, and may be undercounting cases since they have so little testing. They closed too late, reopened too soon, people didn’t take the masks and distancing guidelines seriously.
The New Yorker looks at how Texas Republicans politicized the coronavirus pandemic, leading to an ongoing outbreak, and over 600 deaths in just the last four days.
An Alabama jail refused to give masks to prisoners because, jail officials claimed, the prisoners would eat them.
There’s a threat to American democracy beyond that posed by the President and his sycophants – the ongoing disappearance of local news outlets. When nobody watches local officials, they can get away with a whole lot more.
Why are federal law enforcement agents arresting protestors in Oregon, using unmarked vehicles? When did the feds start looking at the Sicherheitsdienst as a model?
Multiple employees of color at ESPN spoke to the New York Times about racism behind the camera at the company, from limited career opportunities to a lack of diversity in leadership. I can’t say I ever witnessed any of this, or heard about it from people affected, but given the ways you get into leadership positions at ESPN, a lack of diversity is a feature rather than a bug.
Authorities in Selah, Washington, including the city leaders, are trying to criminalize speech in the form of chalk writing of “Black Lives Matter.”
Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler (guess!) is running against Black Lives Matter, opposing the WNBA’s use of the term (she owns part of the WNBA’s Atlanta Dream) and claiming that BLM harbors anti-Semitic and anti-Christian views (they don’t, as BLM is not a single, coherent organization). Here’s a list of some major companies that donated to her while proclaiming support for Black Lives Matter and efforts to fight structural racism.
Three articles on the additional challenges working mothers are facing during the pandemic: “They Go to Mommy First,” from Jess Grose in the New York Times; Parents Can’t Wait Around Forever, by author/economist Emily Oster in the Atlantic; and how a lack of childcare options is keeping women unemployed, in Politico.
A woman who had been tested for COVID-19 but didn’t self-isolate while she waited to get her results dropped off her child at a day care facility in upstate New York. She tested positive and gave it to 16 other adults and children.
A meeting in Utah to discuss requiring students to wear masks in schools was postponed because dingbats without masks filled the room, some carrying signs opposing the mask requirement. Their ‘arguments’ mirror those of anti-vaxxers’, which should be reason enough to overrule them.
An activist couple who support Palestinian causes found themselves attacked online in columns appearing in the Jerusalem Post and The Algemeiner by a student at the University of Birmingham named Oliver Taylor … except that Oliver Taylor doesn’t exist, and seemingly accurate photos of him are just well-made deepfakes.
A Toronto health official has the right to intervene in the case of two children whose dipshit mother doesn’t want to get them vaccinated. Vaccines work. They are safe and effective, and it turns out that the MMR vaccine may even protect you against some of the worst symptoms of COVID-19.
Walt Disneyworld is permanently closing three attractions, two rides and a show, none of which will be particularly missed.
Board game news: Renegade Game Studios announced a new line of puzzles based on art from four popular board games, including Raiders of the North Sea and Arboretum, with pre-orders now open.
Grail Games has a Kickstarter up for Whale Riders, a new game from Reiner Knizia, which is always of interest to me. I’m not sure about this theme, though; those look like Inuit people, and there’s no reason to use them in the artwork.
Marvel Villainous, the new standalone game in the Villainous line from Ravensburger, is available for pre-order exclusively through Target. I have a review copy and have played it once; it’s quite good, with five new villains from the MCU, but can’t be played with any of the 15 villains from the previous four boxes in the series.

Tagged alabama, arizona, board game news, coffee, coronavirus, disneyworld, frauds, links, longreads, michigan, stick to baseball, utah, vaccines, video games

January 18, 2020 · 3 comments

Stick to baseball, 1/18/20.

I’ve written five pieces for the Athletic so far over the two weeks since I joined. In reverse chronological order, they are a ranking of the ten best prospects to change organizations this winter; a breakdown of the Josh Donaldson signing; a breakdown of last week’s Rays-Cardinals trade; notes on what I look for when evaluating players; and my introductory post. I also held a Klawchat this week.

Over at Paste, I reviewed The Taverns of Tiefenthal, the newest game from Kennerspiel des Jahres winner Wolfgang Warsch, who also designed The Mind, That’s Pretty Clever!, and The Quacks of Quedlinburg, all of which are quite good.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, is due out on April 21^st from Harper Collins, and you can pre-order it now via their site or wherever fine books are sold. You can also sign up for my free email newsletter for even more non-baseball content.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Slate has the story of a credible allegation of rape against three Mets from the spring of 1991, with Doc Gooden, Daryl Boston, and Vince Coleman all accused. None was ever charged.
The Root and the Young Turks detail outright racism in the South Bend police force under Pete Buttigieg. The details herein, and Mayor Pete’s unwillingness to answer basic questions about them, are quite damning.
Did an Oxford classics professor steal and sell ancient pieces of papyrus, including one that would be the oldest known piece of the gospels, to the billionaire owners of Hobby Lobby? (Also, how can you be a billionaire and a devout Christian? I’m reasonably sure Jesus said those two things could not be true at the same time.)
The New Yorker looks at a woman who can’t feel physical or emotional pain due to a genetic mutation, and whether the extent to which we feel pain is really an essential part of being human.
The New York Times describes how a recently-deceased real estate ‘star’ lied about her entire biography.
Peter Hotez, author of Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism, writes about how sick you’re going to get if you catch various vaccine-preventable diseases. It’s not pretty, and it’s all the more argument for tightening vaccination laws for schoolchildren.
Here’s a shocker: Gwyneth Paltrow’s new GOOP show on Netflix is a mixture of pseudoscience, bullshit, and tedium, including an episode with a so-called “energy healer” (which is not real) and another with a self-proclaimed psychic (also not real).
Michigan state senator Peter Lucido, who has delusions of governorship, told a woman journalist trying to interview him that a group of high school boys “could have a lot of fun” with her. As of Friday, he’s issued a half-assed apology, but remains in office.
The New Yorker talks to the two people behind the great @NJGov twitter account.
Writing for VICE, Laura Wagner (ex-Deadspin) writes about the Facebook ‘sponsored post’ fiasco at Teen Vogue.
A British Columbia court ruled that two young children must be vaccinated over their mother’s objections. The mother tried to cite one of the most vocal anti-vaccine cranks on Twitter, Toni Bark, who claimed the measles wasn’t a highly contagious disease (it’s considered the most or second-most contagious virus humans can catch).
Perhaps “cocktails” of multiple antibiotics aren’t as good of an idea for the long term as we thought, as one new study shows that they may accelerate antibiotic resistance.
Tabatha Southey writes for McLean’s about Watergate, my #3 game of 2019, and what a future board game of the Donald Trump presidency and impeachment might look like.
I’ve got four new board game Kickstarters to share this week. First is the one I tweeted about on Tuesday, Restoration Games’ Return to Dark Tower, which is already clear of $2.25 million pledged as of Friday afternoon. It’s an update to the 1981 cult classic, and I was hooked when I saw the demo at PAX Unplugged.
Next is AlderQuest, an area-control game from Rock Manor Games and Mike Gnade (Set a Watch, Brass Empire). Rock Manor pulled the original Kickstarter from before the holidays and restarted it; it’s about 2/3 of the way to its funding goal as I write this. Full disclosure: I met Mike this week to play an upcoming Rock Manor title, Lawyer Up, as he lives a stone’s throw from me.
Leder Games has the newest game from designer Cole Wehrle (Root, Pax Pamir), Oath: Chronicles of Empire and Exile, already more than 13 times past its initial goal.
Vesuvius Media has a Kickstarter up for Pacific Rails, a route-building/worker-placement game based on the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869.
Finally, here’s an intriguing game of dirty popes: Habeamus, which the publishers describe as “a game for ending 2-4 friendships. This is the farthest from its goal of these five Kickstarters right now.

Tagged board game news, frauds, links, medicine, metoo, social media, stick to baseball, vaccines

November 6, 2019 · 1 comment

Standard Deviations.

While working on my own forthcoming book The Inside Game (due out April 21st from HarperCollins; pre-order now!), I stumbled across a chapter from Prof. Gary Smith’s book Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie with Statistics, a really wonderful book on how people, well-meaning or malicious, use and misuse stats to make their arguments. It’s a very clear and straightforward book that assumes no prior statistical background on the part of the reader, and keeps things moving with entertaining examples and good summaries of Smith’s points on the many ways you can twist numbers to say what you want them to say.

Much of Smith’s ire within the book is aimed at outright charlatans of all stripes who know full well that they’re misleading people. The very first example in Standard Deviations describes the media frenzy over Paul the Octopus, a mollusk that supposedly kept picking the winners of World Cup games in 2010. It was, to use the technical term for it, the dumbest fucking thing imaginable. Of course this eight-legged cephalopod wasn’t actually predicting anything; octopi are great escape artists, but Paul was just picking symbols he recognized, and the media who covered those ‘predictions’ were more worthy of the “fake news” tag now applied to any media the President doesn’t like. Smith uses Paul to make larger points about selection bias and survivorship bias, about how some stories become news and some don’t, how the publish-or-perish mentality at American universities virtually guarantees that some junk studies (found via p-hacking or other dubious methods) will slip through the research cracks, and so on. This is more than just an academic problem, however: One bad study that can’t survive other researchers’ attempts to replicate the results can still lead to significant media attention and even steer changes in policy.

Smith gives copious examples of this sequence of events – bad or corrupt study that leads to breathless news coverage and real-life consequences. He cites Andrew Wakefield, the disgraced former doctor whose single fraudulent paper claimed to find a link between the MMR vaccine and autism; the media ran with it, many parents declined to give their kids the MMR vaccine, and even now, twenty years and numerous debunking studies later, we have measles outbreaks and a reversal of the eradication the hemisphere had achieved in 2000. Smith chalks some of this up to the publish-or-perish mentality of American universities, also mentioning Diederik Stapel, a Dutch ex-professor who has now had 58 papers retracted due to his own scientific misconduct. But these egregious examples are just the tip of a bigger iceberg of statistical malfeasance that’s less nefarious but just as harmful: finding meaning in statistical significance, journals’ preferences for publishing affirmative studies over negative ones (the file drawer problem), “using data to discover a theory” rather than beginning with a theory and using data to test it, discarding outliers (or, worse, non-outliers), and more.

Standard Deviations bounces around a lot of areas of statistical shenanigans, covering some familiar ground (the Monty Hall problem and the Boy or Girl problem*) and less familiar as well. He goes after the misuse of graphs in popular publications, particularly the issue of Y-axis manipulation (where the Y axis starts well above 0, making small changes across the X-axis look larger), and the “Texas sharpshooter” problem where people see patterns in random clusters and argue backwards into meaning. He goes after the hot hand fallacy, which I touched on in Smart Baseball and will discuss again from a different angle in The Inside Game. He explains why the claims that people nearing death will themselves to live through birthdays or holidays don’t hold up under scrutiny. (One of my favorite anecdotes is the study of deaths before/after Passover that identified subjects because their names sounded “probably Jewish.”) Smith’s reach extends beyond academia; one chapter looks at how Long-Term Capital Management failed, including how the people leading the firm deluded themselves into thinking they had figured out a way to beat the market, and then conned supposedly smart investors into playing along.

* Smith also explains why Leonard Mlodinow’s explanation in Drunkard’s Walk, which I read right after this book, of a related question where you know one Girl’s name is Florida is incorrect, and thank goodness because for the life of me I couldn’t believe what Mlodinow wrote.

I exchanged emails with Smith in September to ask about the hot hand fallacy and a claim in 2018 by two mathematicians that they’d debunked the original Amos Tversky paper from 1986; he answered with more detail that I ended up using in a sidebar in The Inside Game. That did not directly color my writeup of Standard Deviationshere, but my decision to reach out to him in the first place stems from my regard for Smith’s book. It’s on my list now of books I recommend to folks who want to read more about innumeracy and statistical abuse, in the same vein as Dave Levitan’s Not a Scientist.

Next up: About halfway through Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Calculating Stars.

Tagged anti-science, data science, frauds, highly recommended, junk science, non-fiction

November 2, 2019 · 5 comments

Stick to baseball, 11/2/19.

This isn’t quite new, but I put out a formal announcement this week that my second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, will be out on April 21, 2020. You can pre-order it now on HarperCollins’ site.

On the board gaming front, I ranked the top 25 board games of the 2010s for Paste this week, and also wrote about some recent programming games, where players issue instructions as if they were writing code, over at Ars Technica. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

You can get more of me by signing up for my free email newsletter, which I send out irregularly but definitely not often enough to bother you.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: A ProPublica investigation found billionaire Dan Gilbert got a huge tax break with the help of the Trump Administration after making large donations to Trump’s campaign. The tax break in question involved “opportunity zones,” incentives aimed at spurring new development in disadvantaged urban areas – not, as in Gilbert’s case, for investments already made.
One dollar of every $10 spent on AmazonBasics products is spent on batteries. One writer tried to track where those batteries come from and what their impact is on the environment. She found a few answers, but not enough, and a lot of opacity from a company that is already under fire for labor concerns, climate impact, and its logistics operation’s effect on road safety.
Allie Conti, writing for VICE, describes discovering a vast, nationwide hosting scam on AirBnB that costs unsuspecting guests hundreds of dollars and leaves them without a place to stay.
The well-titled article “The Fight Over a Shitty Rock” has a very serious point: There’s a dispute roiling over Rockall, a tiny and uninhabitable islet in the North Atlantic claimed by the United Kingdom, and whether the islet extends the UK’s fishing rights against the wishes and claims of Ireland.
The chocolate industry has already been criticized for its use of child labor and even slaves; now the Washington Post points out that cacao farmers in West Africa are decimating forests, accelerating climate change, while western chocolate producers talk about sustainability without addressing this issue at all.
Spotify’s dominance in the streaming industry is still tenuous and hasn’t led to consistent profits, which explains in part the company’s acquisition of podcast producers Gimlet Media.
Anti-vaxxer nuts send racist, violent threats to people who post pro-vaccine messages, and Facebook does absolutely nothing about it. The people running these sites – Twitter is no better – talk a big accountability game when it comes to abuse and harassment, but they don’t back it up with actions.
Facebook also lets right-wing propaganda site The Daily Wire violate its rules by using sock puppet accounts to promote its content. Again, Facebook does … nothing. And they blocked pro-vaccine ads while letting anti-vaxxer ads run. It’s okay if we’re still getting paid.
Anti-vaxxers love to claim that measles is ‘benign,’ but there’s growing research on just how harmful a bout of the viral disease can be in the long term. New evidence shows that causes ‘immune amnesia’ in survivors, whose immune systems must relearn how to fight infections because measles wiped out 11% to 73% of antibodies already present in that person’s blood.
The anti-vaxxer faux-documentary Vaxxed has a sequel, but the producers aren’t saying where it’s playing for fear rational people will try to stop it, so keep your eyes open, rational people, and demand any theater near you that tries to show Vaxxed 2 pull their screenings.
An evidence-based technique called motivational interviewing is proving useful in addressing vaccine-hesitant parents. It involves one-on-one conversations between parents and trained counselors who don’t tell the parents what to do, but “simply talk through parents’ fears and goals, and let them decide what to do.”
Louisa Thomas wrote of the ‘stories’ the Houston Astros have told, which don’t always align with reality, in the New Yorker. I know of at least three more departures from their baseball operations department in the last few months, only one of which, longtime Jeff Luhnow lieutenant Oz Ocampo, is public.
Michael Stipe and Mike Mills spoke to the BBC about their album Monster on the 25th anniversary of its release.
Writing for Paste, Annie Merkley writes about what it’s been like as an American in the midst of the protests in Chile, a piece that also explained to me what the protests have been about.
It’s from June of 2018, but John Pavlovitz’s “Now You Want Civility?” post seems apropos after all the pearl-clutching over Nationals fans booing President Trump last Sunday. And, by the way, one of the clutchers was Delaware Senator Chris Coons, a Democrat I’m hoping gets primaried the next time he’s up.
VICE asks if sex addiction is real, or a misidentification of people who have sexual habits or preferences that might vary from the median.
A Spanish court acquitted five men of rape because the victim was drunk, so they didn’t have to use force. This is separate from the “Wolf Pack” rape case that led to protests earlier this year.
A legislator from Cobb County, home of your Atlanta Braves, is trying to make it a felony for trans kids to get gender reassignment via surgery or drugs. In two thousand and fucking nineteen, we are still doing this. This isn’t ‘protecting kids,’ as she claims; it’s going to do nothing but increase suicides.
Deep sleep may help protect the brain against Alzeimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases by triggering electrical pulses, according to one new study.

Tagged chocolate, climate change, frauds, georgia, lgbt rights, links, longreads, sleep, social media, stick to baseball, vaccines

October 26, 2019 · 21 comments

Stick to baseball, 10/25/19.

My one ESPN+ piece this week covered the possibility of realigning the minor leagues, possibly contracting several dozen teams or demoting them to nonaffiliated leagues. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Era: The Medieval Age, the new game from Pandemic designer Matt Leacock. It’s a roll-and-build game that reimplements his own Roll Through the Ages: The Bronze Age, but gives it better components and a spatial aspect absent from the first game.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, will be out on April 21st, 2020, from HarperCollins. You can pre-order it now through that link (and please do so!).

You should also subscribe to my my free email newsletter, because I said so.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Shane Mitchell writes for Bitter Southerner about the long transatlantic history of okra, a global plant that came to the west a few hundred years ago from Africa and that is now essential to the cuisines of the American south. I love it dipped in cornmeal and fried, or in a deep brown gumbo.
Why do people hate vegans? They’re a convenient punchline, says George Reynolds of the Guardian, but their dietary choices force us to confront harsh environmental and medical realities about the meat-centric diet of the west while also running up against a longstanding association of meat with prosperity.
Psychologist Hans Eysenck’s work has been highly influential but also criticized on multiple grounds, including his dubious support of work that claimed there was a link between race and IQ. Cosmos details a bigger scandal, that Eysenck and a longtime collaborator may have faked data and conclusions, including studies that claimed your personality could influence your chances of getting cancer or heart disease. If all 61 papers co-authored by Eysenck are eventually retracted, he would become, per Retraction Watch, the most retracted psychology researcher of all time.
Jerome Groopman writes in the New Yorker about brain science and successful ways to break bad habits. I don’t think these are panaceas, but they’re more likely to work than negative reinforcement, self-shaming, or just trying to beat bad habits with willpower. Excuse me, I feel like I need some Oreos after typing that…
Since Prince’s death in 2016, his estate has been releasing some of the trove of unreleased material the singer and multi-instrumentalist left behind – even though he was very protective of the same music while he was alive. Paste‘s Richard Aaron looks at the ethics and implications of listening to this music, some of which has been quite good, while some was clearly never intended to see the light of day.
In my chat this week, a reader sent a link arguing that wealth taxes failed in Europe. This is at least misleading, if not outright false, according to this editorial from the Washington Post, which highlights how much easier it is in Europe to evade taxes, how loophole-ridden their wealth taxes were, and how competition across the borderless EU made it easier to just pick up and move.
Philly magazine looks at the rise of food co-ops in the city, asking how well they actually serve the communities in which they’re located.
Amazon has spent nearly $1.5 million to defeat a socialist incumbent on Seattle’s city council. Kshama Sawant led the push for Seattle’s higher minimum wage, but lost (in the end) a battle to tax large corporations on a per-employee basis and use the funds to serve the city’s large population of homeless people.
Gun sellers at a show on the Iowa State fairgrounds used Nazi symbols and racist/anti-Semitic imagery to sell guns and explosives. The state fair’s CEO passed the buck, saying that they don’t control what independent companies that rent the space do once they use it.
Author Alex Berenson name-searched himself and showed up in my replies to harass one of my longtime readers on Twitter this week. I wasn’t familiar with him or his work before, but it appears that the scientific consensus on his book about cannabis is that it’s alarmist and highly misleading.
A new California law designed to curb abuses in the so-called ‘gig economy’ appears to hurt freelance writers more than anyone else because it would set such a low bar for the number of pieces someone could write before they’d have to be considered a full-time employee.
“Prime editing” could correct up to 89% of disease-causing errors in our genes, although the research and techniques are in their infancy. As someone with an inborn error of metabolism, I’m intrigued, but can we ‘fix’ one gene (two, in my case, since it’s autosomal recessive) without causing any other unforeseen consequences?
California’s state medical board has now targeted a second doctor accused of writing bogus vaccine exemptions for schoolchildren, asking that her license be suspended or revoked entirely.
Residents of Newtok, Alaska, are moving – yes, all of them – to a new village as climate change has eroded much of the land in Newtok and threatens to make the entire town unlivable.
Antibiotic resistance – and evolution – in real time: It took just three weeks for a ‘superbug’ to evolve resistance to the drug of last resort.
Board game news: Cities Skylines, the tabletop version of the popular citybuilder video game from Paradox Interactive, is now out from Thames & Kosmos. It’s a cooperative game, whereas I believe the video game version is competitive. I saw an early prototype last year, but at that point the game wasn’t co-op yet.

Tagged climate change, drugs, evolution, frauds, links, longreads, prince, southern cooking, stick to baseball, vaccines, vegan

July 22, 2019 · No comments yet

Billion Dollar Whale.

When I reviewed Bad Blood a few months ago, one of you recommended Tom Wright and Bradley Hope’s book Billion Dollar Whale, since it’s in a similar vein – another story about a con artist who took very wealthy people for a substantial ride. While Elizabeth Holmes got caught, and may even stand trial next year (although I hold out little hope of serious punishment), Jho Low, the “whale” at the heart of this book, remains a fugitive from justice, and still has a lot of the proceeds of his massive scam – maybe the biggest in world history.

Low was a Malaysian nobody with a little bit of family money who somehow talked his way into the good graces of Malaysian President Najib Razak and some of his myrmidons, and thus ended up in control of a new sovereign wealth fund in Malaysia called 1MDB. Low, with the help of other officials in Malaysia and co-conspirators in the United Arab Emirates, managed to loot the fund of several billion dollars, using the proceeds to party his way around the world, but also to invest in or start legitimate businesses. He invested in EMI Music, bought real estate in the United States and the United Kingdom, and even funded a Hollywood production company called Red Granite Pictures, co-founded by the stepson of President Razak, which produced the Oscar-nominated film The Wolf of Wall Street as well as Daddy’s Home and Dumb and Dumber To. Meanwhile, Low kept his position of power by providing Razak’s wife with millions of dollars in gifts and jewelry, while using state funds to drum up support to keep Razak in office. He did all of this with the help of major western investment banks, notably Goldman Sachs, which profited handsomely from Low’s looting of the Malaysian government’s supposed investment fund, as well as a Swiss bank called BSI.

Wright and Hope spin an unbelievable yarn here, going from Low’s childhood to his years at Wharton, where he already showed the sort of pretension and penchant for not paying his debts, through his rise and partial fall as the de facto leader of 1MDB. Low befriended Leonardo DiCaprio, giving him millions of dollars of art as gifts, and dated supermodel Miranda Kerr, giving her $8 million in jewelry. (DiCaprio and Kerr forfeited all of those gifts, voluntarily, once the FBI began its investigation into 1MDB.) He also hung out with Jamie Foxx and producer Swizz Beatz, the husband of singer & musician Alicia Keys; Swizz Beatz in particular continued to support Low even when it was clear that the latter had come by all his money via fraud.

Low’s con was really simple as cons go – he covered up his pilfering of the till with a series of paper transactions, doing so with the cooperation of other con men in Malaysia’s government and with the sovereign funds of Arab nations, all of whom took payouts to participate in the scam. What is hard to fathom, and what Wright and Hope spell out so well, is how thoroughly Low et al bamboozled western banks and accounting firms – or how little they cared about the provenance of the funds as long as they were getting paid. Billion Dollar Whale could be a textbook in a class on “Know Your Customer” rules, and what happens when banks fail to follow those procedures. Low skated repeatedly at points when someone should have told him no, simply because he could get someone else to forge a letter to support him.

Wright and Hope try to explain some of Low’s personality and choice to go into a life of fraud, but largely end up stymied by how bland he was – socially awkward and introverted, granted access to famous people and women by his money but still every bit as inscrutable. He also studiously avoided attention throughout his tenure with 1MDB, so there was minimal press coverage of him, and he didn’t start to appear in the media coverage of the scandal until after several stories had already appeared. So it’s not a biography of Low in any sense, but a story of a con – a completely fascinating one because of how many people either went along with it (to get rich) or failed in their fiduciary or legal duties to stop it.

A huge part of Low’s ability to get away with this scam for years was the tie to Razak, who was finally ousted from office in an election in 2018, after which he and his wife were arrested for corruption. Just this week, prosecutors in his trial showed that his wife spent over $800,000 in one day on jewelry, spending that went through the 1MDB fund; I assume this is the same story Wright and Hope tell of Low taking Razak’s wife to a famous jeweler. Low, however, fled to China and appears to still be running around the country with access to at least some of his ill-gotten gains, which means the Chinese government is, for some reason, okay with him doing so in spite of an Interpol warrant out for his arrest.

Next up: Laura Cumming’s The Vanishing Velázquez: A 19th-Century Bookseller’s Obsession with a Lost Masterpiece.

Tagged con men, finance, frauds, highly recommended, malaysia, non-fiction

June 8, 2019 · 4 comments

Stick to baseball, 6/8/19.

Of course, most of my content this week was around this year’s MLB draft, but my biggest piece is actually free for everyone to read – my oral history of the drafting of Mike Trout, as told by the people who were there. For ESPN+ subscribers, you can read my draft recaps for all 15 AL teams and all 15 NL teams. I also held a Klawchat during day two of the draft and a live Periscope chat on Friday.

I really am trying to take time off this weekend, but I still plan to send out a new email newsletter to subscribers (it’s free, you just have to sign up) by Monday.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: That mass-market chocolate product you bought was probably the product of child labor, according to an extensive Washington Post report that documents the chocolate industry’s attempts to avoid accountability for sourcing its raw material. Desperate poverty in Burkina Faso and near-zero enforcement in Côte d’Ivoire have also contributed, and third-party certifications like FairTrade aren’t as reliable as they claim to be. The ultimate solution lies with consumers: Don’t buy cheap chocolate. Buy from companies that can identify their cacao sources.
Just four companies control 60% of global seed sales. This is bad news for our planet and our plates, writes chef Dan Barber, author of The Third Plate and now a seed activist of sorts. We’re reducing biodiversity at a time when we need plants to evolve to cope with our destruction of the environment; we’re reducing the nutrition and flavor of the plants we eat (or the meat we eat, which feeds on those plants).
The New York Times‘ editorial writers Bret Stephens (an Islamophobe and a climate change denier) and Bari Weiss have taken to extreme concern trolling over restrictions on free speech on campus, repeating the same tired (and misleading) talking points the paper has pushed for over a century.
It’s a shame the Times runs such drivel on its editorial page, because its investigative work remains top-notch, as in this piece on former alt-right devotee Caleb Cain and how Youtube helped indoctrinate him into that movement of hate.
We often hear about the mass extinction caused by anthropogenic climate change and other activities of man, but the death of one species can be a boon for another. Bullhead City, Arizona, has been overrun by caddisflies because man has gutted the populations of its predators by damming the Colorado River.
Joe Biden’s first Presidential run in 1988 was sunk in part by the revelation that he’d plagiarized parts of campaign speeches, as well as his habit of embellishing past accomplishments. The New York Times looks back at that disastrous campaign as Biden has begun to repeat his mistakes, such as plagiarizing parts of his climate change policy plan from other outlets.
Arizona cancer quack Colleen Huber, who tells patients she can cure cancer with baking soda and vitamin C, has lost her defamation suit against activist Britt Marie Hermes, a former naturopath who now works to expose the inherent fraud of ‘naturopathic medicine,’ which isn’t actually medicine at all. If you live in Arizona, perhaps consider asking your state attorney general to look into Ms. Huber’s business?
An exclusive Guardian report found that at least 200 quacks in the U.S. are using a sham therapy called ‘Cease’ on children, claiming it can prevent the measles and cure autism.
The Chicago journalist who has investigated R. Kelly’s sexual misconduct for nearly 20 years spoke to the BBC about his work and his new book on the singer, Soulless.
The S&P has performed much worse under Trump than it did under his predecessor. Populism and protectionism are not sound economic policies.
Sudan’s military toppled the country’s dictator this spring, but they’ve since cracked down on pro-democracy groups, arresting three opposition leaders this week and killing dozens of protesters in Khartoum. The coup leaders are relying on the same paramilitary forces that led the genocide in Darfur. Instability here is bad news for the region – and could make the country safe for Islamic terror groups again.
A Delaware man (originally from Queens) and former Army veteran went to York County, Pennsylvania, to try to clear up an outstanding warrant on a DUI charge. He ended up dead in a York jail, and his body was returned to the family missing several organs, including parts of his throat. The County tried to bury its response to the article by releasing a statement late on Friday afternoon.
The University of Alabama returned a $21.5 million gift from a donor who opposes the state’s anti-abortion law, even removing his name from the university’s law school. In the backwater swirling, there are some things that will never change.
The Guardian announced it will stop using inaccurate language to describe anti-abortion bills that supporters label, incorrectly, “heartbeat” bills. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says this term is inaccurate; a fetus of six weeks has no heart or cardiovascular system.
I’ve noticed in a few hotels this year that the little plastic toiletry bottles have been replaced by larger refillable containers affixed to the shower walls. It’s part of a larger movement including legislation in California that banned them in hotels of more than 50 rooms.
California’s Assembly passed a bill that would make some workers for companies like Lyft and Uber employees, rather than independent contractors, giving them greater protection from labor abuses.
The Washington Post‘s Erik Wemple urged media outlets not to fall for Carlson’s bad-faith “praise” of part of Elizabeth Warren’s economic platform. And then Carlson went on air and attacked the “tyranny” of the metric system, the origin of which seems to be foreign to him.
Reading a lot of fiction improves social cognition and makes people more empathetic.

Tagged alabama, arizona, chocolate, climate change, cost of food, frauds, links, pennsylvania, vaccines, white nationalism

May 3, 2019 · 7 comments

Bad Blood.

Theranos was one of the hottest tech startups of the last fifteen years, at least in terms of the breathless coverage afforded to the company’s putative blood-testing technology and young founder and CEO, Elizabeth Holmes. As you know by now, the entire thing was a giant fraud: the technology never worked, the company ducked or lied to regulators, and Holmes in particular lied to the press and investors who plowed a few hundred million dollars into the company before it collapsed. That implosion came about thanks to a few whistleblowers from inside the firm and the diligent reporting of Wall Street Journal journalist John Carreyrou, who tells the entire history of the scam in his book Bad Blood. The book is thorough, gripping, and infuriating: how did one inexperienced college dropout manage to con so many ostensibly intelligent people into believing her bullshit?

Theranos’s claim was that they could run over a hundred tests on just a single drop of blood drawn by a fingerstick by using a relatively minuscule device, first one called the Edison and later one called the miniLab, that could live in a doctor’s office, a pharmacy clinic, or even a patient’s home. This included routine tests like those for blood cholesterol levels as well as more complex tests that would ordinarily require a lot more blood, which would have to be drawn from a vein. None of this ever worked, and Theranos hid the fraud by taking blood samples back to its headquarters and running the samples on larger machines made by Siemens, all the while making increasingly grandiose claims about its technology, forging nine-figure partnerships with Walgreens and Safeway, and continuing to solicit investments at valuations that eventually crossed $5 billion, making Holmes a paper billionaire.

The media coverage of Theranos in general and Holmes in particular was willfully credulous, none more so than the Fortune cover story “This CEO’s Out for Blood,” a fawning profile that bought all of Holmes’ lies wholesale with what appears to be no attempt to independently validate any of her claims. (The writer, Roger Parloff, eventually admitted he’d been duped.) Holmes appears to have had a strategy for executing this con by co-opting the reputations of powerful, older men: she managed to pack her board with major political figures, including George Schultz and Gen. James Mattis, who all tended to be old white men with zero scientific or technical background, but whose presence carried a lot of weight with the media. She also hired attorney David Boies, eventually giving him shares in the company and a board seat, to stage scorched-earth attacks on anyone who dared criticize the company, which included intimidating former employees who might reveal that Theranos’ technology didn’t work. She even landed a spot as an Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship for the Obama Administration, only stepping down months after the fraud was revealed.

Carreyrou didn’t buy it, and he didn’t back down, all of which shows in his WSJ articles that dismantled the company’s house of lies and again shows in Bad Blood, which is meticulous in reconstructing the genesis and perpetuation of the fraud, with information gleaned from over 150 interviews with employees and others close to Theranos. He particularly benefited from information from Tyler Schultz, George Schultz’s grandson and a Theranos employee for about a year, who realized that Theranos’ technology didn’t work and that they weren’t properly verifying their results (but were still making the same claims of accuracy to the public), and who reported the company to regulators despite intense pressure and outright threats from Theranos, its lawyers, and his own family. (Schultz, who will turn 99 later this year, was a true believer in Theranos and in Holmes until well after the fraud was made public.) Bad Blood is full of details of internal interactions from Theranos that depict Holmes and COO Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani as vindictive, paranoid bullies who didn’t care that the technology didn’t work, or simply refused to accept that it didn’t, and thought they could steamroll anyone who tried to get in their way – and for about a decade, it worked.

The overwhelming sense Bad Blood gave me is that so very many of the people involved in the scam belong in jail. Holmes and Balwani, who was also her boyfriend when she hired him, come across as sociopaths who relentlessly bullied employees and the media; both are still facing criminal charges, while Holmes settled SEC fraud charges while Balwani is fighting them. They had many allies in their scheme, from Boies (whose behavior seems unethical, at least) to the various marketing and PR flacks inside and outside Theranos who helped perpetuate the con. Does Chiat Day, the major advertising agency Theranos hired to build its image, bear any responsibility for helping disseminate untruths about the company? What about Theranos’ marketing employees or in-house attorneys, the former repeating the lies Holmes and Balwani told them, the latter using dubious tactics to intimidate former employees into signing agreements against their own interests? If Holmes and Balwani actually serve jail time – I’m skeptical, but there’s still a nonzero chance of that – it may deter some future mountebanks, but the biggest lesson of Bad Blood seems to be how many people happily went along with the scheme because they thought Theranos was going to make them rich, and because there was little direct cost to them. Patients could have died from errant medical directions that came from Theranos’ inaccurate test results, yet just about every person involved in promulgating the swindle walked away with nothing worse than a bad name on their resumes.

Carreyrou raises the most salient point that investors and reporters missed during Theranos’ days as a high-flying simurgh: the venture capital firms backing Theranos focused on high tech, but not on biotech or medical devices. The VCs with expertise in medical investments were absent. Carreyrou argues that that should have set off alarm bells for other investors or for reporters racing to laud the company or its female founder/CEO, who benefited from the media’s desire to find a rare woman among Silicon Valley leaders, from her photogenic looks, and from her overt attempts to channel Steve Jobs (which come off as delusionally creepy in the book). Con artists will never lack for marks, but when the people who would ordinarily be most interested in backing a venture head in the other direction, it should serve as at least a prompt to ask more probing questions before putting the CEO on your magazine’s cover.

Next up: I’m preparing for the upcoming amazon series by reading Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman’s novel Good Omens.

Tagged frauds, highly recommended, history of science, medicine, non-fiction

March 2, 2019 · 13 comments

Stick to baseball, 3/2/19.

For ESPN+ subscribers this week, I wrote three pieces, breaking down the Bryce Harper deal, ranking the top 30 prospects for this year’s draft, and offering scouting notes on players I saw in Texas, including Bobby Witt, Jr. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

On the gaming front, I reviewed the Kennerspiel des Jahres-winning game The Quacks of Quedlinburg for Paste, and also reviewed the digital port of the game Evolution for Ars Technica.

I went on the Mighty 1090 in San Diego with Darren Smith to talk Manny Machado, Olive Garden, and the Oscars, and on TSN 1050 in Toronto to talk about Ross Atkins’ strange comments on Vlad Jr.. I also spoke to True Blue LA about Dodgers prospects, and joined the Sox Machine podcast to talk White Sox prospects.

I’m due for the next edition of my free email newsletter, so sign up now while the gettin’s good.

High Street on Market’s Sandwich Battles begin this Monday, with tickets available for $25. They’re my #1 restaurant in Philly, in large part because their breads are otherworldly.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: GQ has a length profile of the prolific and highly disturbed art thief Stéphane Breitwieser, who stole artworks valued at over $1 billion but never sold anything.
21st Century Fox was hit with a $179 million penalty by an arbitrator over a wide scheme to defraud the actors and producers of Bones of residuals from streaming on Hulu. Fox lied about the profits they were receiving from Hulu, of which Fox owns 30%, and at one point a Fox executive signed both sides of a deal between the two companies.
MLB.com’s Mike Petriello, who was a huge help to me when I was working on Smart Baseball, has a superb primer up on the Rapsodo and Edgetronic devices that are revolutionizing player development, especially in the area of ‘pitch design,’ where coaches and pitchers can work together to change or develop pitches by using real-time data that show how changes in grips or release points affect a pitch’s velocity and spin. Driveline Baseball, mentioned in Mike’s piece, has a blog post up on gaze research, or tracking how hitters see the ball. Technology has allowed teams and players to measure things that were either estimated by scouts/coaches in the past or that were simply brushed off as unmeasurable.
Little Falls, Minnesota, has found success in fighting opioid addiction by treating it as a disease, rather than as a crime or a personal failing. It’s an approach that has worked in other countries – Portugal is a paragon in this area – but goes against the Puritanical strain in American culture that sees addicts as degenerates.
What if climate change leads to enough cloud loss to further accelerate the warming of the planet? The odds of this are higher than we previously realized.
Why is California’s Attorney General refusing to release a list of cops convicted of crimes? Xavier Becerra, running for re-election this year, has even rejected public records requests from his own agency, which has led to lawsuits and would appear to violate open-records laws.
Marcela García writes in the Boston Globe how the should-have-won-Best Picture film Roma has exposed the deep racism within Mexican society.
A popular talking point among Republicans right now is that doctors are “killing babies” right after they’re born. The President said it in his State of the Union address, and it’s been repeated ad nauseam over the last month. Dr. Jen Gunter, an OBGYN who herself gave birth to a son so premature he could not survive, points out what a dangerous lie this line is.
Anti-vaxxer Forest Maready, who likes to depict people with autism as “tragedies,” has a new book coming out that resurfaces the debunked myth that vaccines cause autism. Amazon and Apple are planning to sell it, but I signed this petition asking them to pull the title from their stores. Meanwhile, an inquiry from Rep. Adam Schiff led amazon to pull six anti-vaccination “documentaries” from prime video.
Anti-vaxxer groups on Facebook are harassing pro-vaccine doctors by trashing their Yelp and Google ratings as well as flooding those doctors’ Facebook posts with comments. Facebook has done little to nothing to combat the problem. The Atlantic points out that the Facebook anti-vax community is quite small, just loud, and banning them would be easy for the platform.
WIRED argues that amazon’s anti-vaxxer problem is worse than Facebook’s.
A Nova Scotia chiropractor lost her license for spreading anti-vaccine information and making other unfounded claims. We should strive for the same kinds of laws around chiropractors, naturopaths, and even the rare medical doctor who embraces this sort of bullshit.
CNN also weighed in on tech outlets failing to police the anti-vaxx bullshit on their platforms.
The Washington Post looks at how anti-vaxxers are responding to the overdue public backlash against their efforts, as well as bills in various state legislatures to end religious and/or philosophical exemptions to mandatory vaccination requirements.
Scientific American presents public policies we can use to fight anti-vaxxer lunacy.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch‘s Kevin McDermott asks why so many Americans are rejecting science in the face of incontrovertible evidence.
Italian researchers used CRISPR to create a genetically modified version of a malaria-carrying mosquito; if released, it should lead to collapses of that specific species and thus reduce malaria transmissions.
Paste‘s Jacob Weindling noticed that CNN stacked its phony ‘town hall’ for Bernie Sanders with political operatives/lobbyists posing as regular folks.
LA Times movie critic Justin Chang wrote that Green Book is the worst Best Picture winner since Crash, calling the vapid white-savior film “an embarrassment,” “insultingly glib and hucksterish,” “a self-satisfied crock,” and a “palatable brand of godawful.”
Late Night with Seth Meyers rather perfectly sent up the film with their ‘trailer’ for White Savior.
And apparently Green Book producer sent critic Jenni Miller a condescending, tone-deaf email where he doesn’t even know the main character’s real name.
In a bit of things coming full circle, Pig Destroyer’s John Jarvis has formed a new baseball-themed grindcore band, Kolten Wong City, a name that alludes to Kowloon Walled City, whose bassist, Ian Miller, is part of baseball-themed grindcore band Puig Destroyer, whose name alludes to … well, you get it now.
Why are progressive artists still working with Morrissey despite his embrace of far-right causes and outright racist statements?
Talk Talk’s singer and main songwriter Mark Hollis died this week at age 64. His last release was a solo album in 1998, after which he retired from music to spend time with his family.
Splinter writer Samer Kalaf released an email exchange he had with conservative NY Times writer Bret Stephens, without Stephens’ permission, but I think Kalaf comes off far worse here than he realizes.
Roland’s Market, a collaboration between Chris Bianco and the couple behind Tacos Chiwas, closed without warning last month. The location will be converted into a larger outpost of Bianco’s Pane Bianco.
The former editor of the Rocky Mountain News writes of his fear that local journalism will continue to fade and die as newspapers are plundered by hedge-fund owners.
Charlotte Riley describes the game Patriarchy Chicken in a column subtitled “why I refuse to move out of the way for men.”
The FTC is finally cracking down on scammers who buy fake reviews on amazon, going after the seller of a bogus weight-loss ‘supplement.’
In board game news, Disney’s Villainous: Wicked to the Core hits Target tomorrow; it’s exclusive there for a month and will later roll out to other outlets. I’ve played it, and it’s as good as the original, but with rules that are much clearer for first-time players, enough that you might do better to start with this before going back to the first game. (This is a standalone expansion that you can combine with the original.)
Renegade Game Studios has Hex Roller, a new roll-and-write game that I haven’t seen yet, up for preorder.
Days of Wonder announced a few weeks ago that their next title will be Corinth, an update/retheme of the game Yspahan that alters some core rules and eliminates the caravan (which was a dominant strategy in Yspahan).

Tagged 2018 movies, addiction, anti-science, art, baseball, boardgames, california, climate change, frauds, links, movies, oscars, pseudoscience, social media, stick to baseball, vaccines

February 16, 2019 · 14 comments

Stick to baseball, 2/16/19.

No ESPN+ content this week, but my entire prospect ranking package is now up for subscribers, including the top 100, farm system rankings, and in-depth rankings for all 30 teams, with at least 15 prospects ranked in each system. Before my vacation I wrote up the J.T. Realmuto trade. I also held a Klawchat this Thursday and another back on February 6th.

My most recent board game review for Paste covered the light, fun engine-builder Gizmos, by the designer of Bärenpark and Imhotep, a very family-friendly title with no text to worry about that takes the engine-builder concept and boils it down to a simpler game that plays in well under an hour.

I also resumed my email newsletter, so feel free to sign up for that if you just can’t get enough Klaw in your life.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Jessica Luther and Dan Solomon have a massive piece up at Deadspin looking at how Baylor football became a haven for sexual assault, building on their great work over the last few years at Texas Monthly.
The Verge interviews Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan, who has made millions of scientific papers available ‘free’ online, violating copyrights to do so – but should scientific research not just be copyrighted, but held behind prohibitive paywalls that may slow the progress of other research by denying people access? Should copyright laws, which predate the idea of research journals and existed to protect the rights of publishers and content creators, treat scientific papers the way they treat novels or films?
SkepticalRaptor has a long review of a bad book from last fall that claims the HPV vaccine isn’t safe. The book’s authors aren’t scientists, but two lawyers and a homemaker, so nobody with a science background, and it shows in the text.
Amanita phalloides, the deadly mushroom colloquially known as the death-cap, is spreading across North America.
My friends Tim Grierson and Will Leitch ranked every film that won the Oscar for Best Picture. I’ve probably seen only 20 or so of these, but I at least agree with their praise of numbers 1, 3, 6, 12, and 17.
Why don’t we have a vaccine for streptococcus A, the aftereffects of which, including rheumatic heart disease and sepsis, kill half a million people a year? It’s a combination of a regulatory screwup, successful medical interventions in developed countries, and the low profit margins of vaccines.
In a Guardian longread, Tom Yarwood writes about surviving being sexually molested by a music teacher when he was a child. He’s specific about the nature of the abuse, in case you might find this triggering.
The BBC looks at how Helsinki ended street homelessness through progressive policies designed to get such people off the streets into stable housing, even if they have substance-abuse problems.
Laura Snapes writes in the Guardian that the Ryan Adams allegations are just the start in a field where such “beta male misogyny” is rampant.
Measles is on the rise in Europe thanks to anti-vaxxers, and our state laws here need to keep up by eliminating all non-medical exemptions for schoolchildren.
Facebook’s role in spreading vaccine-denial bullshit has come under fire in two directions – the rise of closed groups that freely share false information against vaccines, and now anti-vaxxer groups using Facebook ad targeting to serve ads to pregnant women scaring them away from vaccines.
Some unvaccinated teens are now going around their parents to get vaccinated or doing so as soon as they’re of age. I’d drive any unvaccinated kid to the doctor if they had the legal side sorted out to get their shots.
There’s a measles outbreak in the Philippines, including the capital city of Manila, with nearly 13 million people in its metropolitan area.
Now some especially dumbshit parents are refusing the vitamin K shot for newborns. It’s essential to help newborns’ blood clot properly, so look for a bunch of babies bleeding to death needlessly because their parents are morons and the law lets them stay that way.
Climate change may melt most Himalayan glaciers in the next 80 years, which, I don’t know, sounds like a national emergency to me.
Scientific American looks at proposed policies to combat rising temperatures in Phoenix, although I notice water conservation, an outright failure of the city and state governments there, isn’t mentioned.
Math geeks may enjoy this paper (PDF) on the Sheldon Conjecture, based on an episode of the Big Bang Theory where that character says 73 is the perfect prime number – and it’s possible that the writers were more right than they knew.
Harvard professor Jill Abramson stands accused of plagiarism as well as inaccurate quotes in her latest book, and she seems to think she’s above the fray. I’ve emailed multiple deans at Harvard to ask for any sign they’re even aware of these problems – she teaches seminars on writing there, for crying out loud – but so far I’ve had no response.
Instagram “influencer” Rachel Hollis has also been accused of plagiarizing quotes on her social media account.
Bernie 2020? Not so fast, if you look at his history of embracing pseudoscience.
Julian Edelman’s title as Super Bowl MVP exposes our ‘selective morality’ on performance-enhancing drugs in sports, Hunter Felt writes for the Guardian.
Oh, we back on that again? New York’s City Council is considering a ban on foie gras, based again on a misunderstanding of how the delicacy is actually produced. I’m not a huge fan myself, at least not commensurate with its reputation among foodies, but this is a needless regulation, and shouldn’t be near the top of anyone’s priority list of rules on food production and sale.
I shouldn’t laugh, but I did: “Investors” in a cryptocurrency exchange might be out $137 million because the founder died and no one knows his passwords.
Jane Coaston wrote in Vox about conservative pundits’ bad faith arguments around Gov. Ralph Northam while also arguing that the governor, who appeared in blackface in a yearbook photo from his time in graduate school, should resign. I feel like we should just turn Virginia off and turn it back on again.
George Will argues in the Washington Post that Democrats can bail out Trump by nominating someone too liberal/progressive in 2020. I don’t agree, but I think Will makes a cogent argument about the center (without, I think, considering voters on the far left who might have abstained in 2016).
A great podcast from the BBC explains why we don’t care about the war in Yemen, which we support by funding our ‘friends’ the Saudis.
Two unrolled Twitter threads worth reading: Harvard professor Juliette Kayam depantsed Rep. Dan Crenshaw over border security and the wall.
Writer Anand Giridharadas was invited to fill in as guest speaker at a dinner, only to have the ‘liberal’ crowd defend the Koch brothers. The dinner took place at The Players, a private social club founded by Edwin Booth, which has also been accused of labor law violations (detailed within).
Board games! Floodgate Games’ Bad Maps is now available for pre-order.
The board game Evolution is now out as an app for iOS, Android, and Steam. I have a review coming for Ars Technica, but I’ll report here that it’s pretty great – it looks fantastic and I think it’s easy to read, learn, and play on a tablet screen.
Villainous: Wicked to the Core, is a new standalone expansion to last year’s hit game Villainous, and will be available exclusively through Target starting on March 3rd, with pre-orders through that link. I’ve played it five times already, and it’s more of the same but with better rules explaining each villain character’s unique powers and victory conditions. This comes with three new characters – the Evil Queen, Doctor Facilier, and Hades (no James Woods, thank goodness) – and may be combined any way you like with the six villains from the original game.

Tagged board game news, boardgames, climate change, frauds, links, math, metoo, oscars, vaccines, virginia

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