harvard

→ May 31, 2025
→ By keith
→ 11 Comments

Stick to baseball, 5/31/25.

For subscribers to The Athletic this week, I re-ranked the top 50 prospects still in the minors, updating the list to reflect various graduations and some of the new information from the small sample of 2025 so far. I also did a Q&A on the site to answer questions about it.

I’m due for another newsletter but got a little caught up with the top 50; you can subscribe here for whenever I send the next one out, hopefully over the weekend.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Seattle Times does a deep dive (pun intended) on how humans have pushed the Columbia River to its limit through overfishing, hydroelectric power projects, irrigation projects, and mismanagement.

A sheriff’s deputy in King County, Washington, has been arrested and charged with raping a teenaged girl in the department’s Police Explorer program – at least the second such incident I’ve read about in a program of that sort, along with another cop in Massachusetts who killed the girl he raped and staged it as a suicide.

A Mississippi man left his citizenship hearing only to have ICE arrest him and threaten to deport him. Kasper Eriksen is a Danish national, married to an American woman with four kids and another on the way. He’s still in custody, but the family has no money coming in because he’s their sole source of income. Abolish ICE.

Utah Republicans ordered a study on gender-affirming care for trans youth, and it says they’re all full of shit and should leave trans kids alone. Of course, the same politicians are lining up to dismiss the study.

Elon Musk’s legacy in Washington is “disease, starvation, and death,” writes Michelle Goldberg (accurately) in The New York Times. Musk’s decision to unilaterally shut down USAID programs has killed thousands, and may end up killing many more, around the globe.

Trump’s crypto scam – I mean, that’s redundant, all crypto is a scam – is a $4 billion self-enrichment scheme, explains the Philly Inquirer.

Trump pardoned a tax cheat after the man’s mother paid the $1 million to attend one of Trump’s fund-raising dinners. I’ve said this before, but this is the most corrupt Presidency in the history of our country and nobody is doing anything to stop it. Well, Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD) is trying, at least.

Sen. Jodi Ernst (R-Iowa), who is up for re-election next year, responded to a constituent’s question about SNAP and Medicaid cuts by saying “we’re all going to die.” This clip should appear in every Iowa Democrat’s campaign ad from now until November 2026, regardless of what office they’re running for.

A Texas cop searched national license-plate cameras to track a woman who he said “self-administered” an abortion.

Ohio State Rep. Rodney Creech (R) was accused by his own daughter of sexually abusing her, yet his Republican colleagues – who knew of the investigation – backed him for re-election last November. Let me repeat that: Ohio Republicans backed a candidate who may have molested his own daughter.

As a man who often eats alone in restaurants, I loved this Times piece on how weird people get when women dine alone. Some of it was familiar to me, but of course much of this never happens to me because I’m a man. People in restaurants or bars who serve me or sit next to me often just assume I’m traveling for work. Clearly that is not the assumption people make about women. Also, eating alone can be a wonderfully restorative experience.

Zohran Mamdani’s poll numbers are rising and he appears now to only trail the $60 million man Andrew Cuomo – who resigned as Governor after multiple women came forward to say he sexually harassed them in the race to be NYC’s next Mayor.

In The Harvard Crimson, Yona Sperling-Miller ’27 offers to fight our A-1 Secretary of Education Linda McMahon in a televised cage match, with the winner getting the $2.7 billion in federal grants that the Administration is threatening to cancel. This wonderful piece is simply titled, “Come at Me, Bro.”

This short excerpt from Marcus du Sautoy’s new book Blueprints: How Mathematics Shapes Creativity on how prime numbers have helped create some memorable pieces of music made me add the book to my wishlist … although it’s not out until September.

25^th Century Games has a new Kickstarter up for two space-themed games, Observatory and Star Gazers.

Only two days remain in the Restoration Games Kickstarter for Battle Monsters: Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah, a remake/update of the 1992 game Battle Masters.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, environment, harvard, immigration, links, longreads, math, mississippi, new york, ohio, stick to baseball, the swamp, trans rights, utah

→ May 24, 2025
→ By keith
→ 26 Comments

Stick to baseball, 5/24/25.

My first Big Board, ranking the top 100 prospects for this year’s draft, is now up for subscribers to The Athletic; I held a Q&A on Thursday to take questions about it and other prospects. I also posted a minor-league scouting notebook from my recent looks at Andrew Painter, George Lombard, Jr., Jhostynxon “The Password” Garcia, Mikey Romero, and others.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the game Diatoms, which has some incredible art and high-quality components, and almost plays too quickly – I wanted a few more rounds to keep building patterns.

I’ve now sent out two issues of my free email newsletter in the last two weeks, which I think counts as a streak.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The best thing I’ve read this month is this San Francisco Chronicle story by their food critic, MacKenzie Chung Fegan, about her experience eating at The French Laundry and how chef-owner Thomas Keller treated her. It is nuanced, thoughtful, and ultimately allows the reader to draw their own conclusions.

The Columbia Journalism Review has an extensive investigative report on the multiple allegations of sexual misconduct against journalist Wesley Lowery.

The Guardian has an excerpt from the new book that their reporter Dom Phillips was writing when he was murdered, along with indigenous Brazilian activist Bruno Pereira. The two were investigating the illicit destruction of the Amazonian rain forest and the threat to indigenous peoples in the region. The book, How to Save the Amazon: A Journalist’s Deadly Quest for Answers, will come out on May 27^th.
The New Republic has the full story of the state-sponsored executions of four American nuns in El Salvador in 1980. The Reagan Administration, by the way, kept gaslighting the public by claiming the nuns were secretly communist sympathizers or activists. Today they’d just claim the nuns were MS-13.

AI’s energy consumption is completely out of control, surpassing cryptocurrency mining and massively increasing carbon emissions from big tech firms.

Trump tried to stop Harvard from taking in any students from outside the U.S., and Harvard sued and immediately got a temporary injunction. Do not comply in advance.

A man shot and killed two Israeli diplomatic staff near the Jewish Museum in DC in an apparent act of terrorism. He later shouted “Free Palestine” after his arrest. Reuters has more on the victims and the suspect.

The Administration is trying to intimidate progressives in Congress with the charges against Rep. LaMonica McIver. Progressives need to stand up and fight for her, writes Elie Mystal in The Nation.
The vaccine denialists running the FDA are saying they won’t approve COVID boosters for healthy people under 65, despite all of the evidence showing those are effective and no evidence showing they’re not safe.

Nathan Fielder’s show The Rehearsal stumbled on a technique used in Europe to help facilitate communication between pilots on commercial flights and prevent accidents … but it’s not used in the U.S.

Matthew Cherry won an Academy Award for his short film Hair Love, which then turned into a book and an animated series on HBO Max. He’s now working on a new short film, an animated musical project called Time Signature, and has a Kickstarter up for it.

An unusual genetic mutation explains the coloring of orange cats, but it doesn’t explain why they are completely bonkers.

My editor at Paste, Garrett Martin, reviewed a new video game called Despelote that is about sports but not specifically a sports video game. It sounds fascinating.

Two new boardgame Kickstarters this week: Tangerine Games has one for Sauros, a dinosaur-themed trick-taking and tile-laying game.

Board & Dice, which specializes in heavy Eurogames, has one for a new edition of Trismegistus, which is very highly rated on BGG but also has a game weight rating of 4.18/5.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, brazil, climate change, harvard, israel, links, longreads, metoo, movies, restaurants, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ April 26, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/26/25.

I had two posts for Athletic subscribers this week, a draft scouting notebook on Ethan Holliday, Eli Willits, and JoJo Parker; and a minor league scouting post on some Mets and Orioles prospects in high A. I’m very worried about what I saw from Carson Benge. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I’ve updated the top 50 pizzerias post from yesterday to reflect two places that closed (one just within the last five months).

And now, the links…

Harvard is fighting back, suing the Trump Administration over the latter’s (likely illegal) attempts to cut funding to research programs the school conducts on behalf of the government. The Times has more on the conservative twits on the Harvard Board of Oversees who wanted to make a deal with Trump – even though Columbia tried that and it got them nothing.

Vox has the story of grid-scale batteries and how they might help green energy sources replace more fossil fuels … if the Administration doesn’t stop it.

The damage from President Trump’s irrational and ever-changing tariff … uh, are they even policies? … may be irreparable and will certainly last well beyond his term.

Trump has also deported at least two U.S. citizen children with cancer. This appears to be on top of the illegal deportation of a two-year-old girl, also a citizen, with “no meaningful process” in the words of a federal judge in Louisiana.

It looks like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) may have misappropriated public funds, moving $10 million earmarked for … into his personal campaign fund.

A former Tesla engineer says that when she pointed out a safety issue with the breaks in the company’s cars, Elon Musk threatened to deport members of her team.

Mississippi was on a heater last week in its effort to prove it’s the most backward state in the union. Their Supreme Court ruled that a transgender teen can’t legally change their name until they’re 21, because that’s the age of majority in that state. (For reference, the age of consent in Mississippi is 16. Real consistent there, fellas.) And then their Governor declared April Loser Heritage Month.

The Guardian has a story on former Royals minor leaguer Tarik El-Abour, who played four games in the Arizona Rookie League in 2018, making him the first player in the history of affiliated ball who was known to be autistic. (I don’t know what the best phrasing is for that, but I hope the point is clear.) El-Abour responds to the hateful, ignorant comments from the Secretary of Health and Human Services where he painted autistic people as a burden on society.

A group of scientists have banded together to form the Vaccine Integrity Project with the goal of countering vaccine misinformation coming from our own federal government. It comes as the Administration replaced the official site for information on COVID-19 with a page promoting the debunked lab-leak theory of its origins.

Texas’s House passed a school vouchers bill despite broad opposition from the public, because Trump bullied a number of legislators into voting for Gov. Abbott’s pet project. The program seems very likely to drain funds from public schools that need it and allow wealthy Texans to send their kids to private schools on the taxpayers’ dime.

The six brownshirts who forcibly removed a woman from a town hall in Idaho last month have been charged with various crimes, five of them with battery and four with false imprisonment.

Two German backpackers were handcuffed, held in dirty holding cells, and deported from Hawai’i because customs officers thought they were sneaking into the U.S. to work. Travel into the U.S. from overseas is tumbling. I’m not clear how cutting the billions foreign tourists spend here is supposed to help our economy.

In a largely symbolic move, two Delaware legislators, including my representative Krista Griffith (D), introduced a bill to inhibit local attempts to ban books from school or public libraries.

Thanks to the reader who pointed me to this Times story about the massive monthly board game night in NYC hosted by Richard Ye, which topped 500 people in March.

Greater than Games has effectively shut down as a result of President Trump’s futile tariff war. Their most popular game is Sentinels of the Multiverse.

Bitewing Games has a Kickstarter up for two travel-sized board games, Gingham and Gazebo, the latter of which is from designer Reiner Knizia.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, delaware, Economics, environment, florida, harvard, immigration, links, longreads, mississippi, police, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines

→ April 19, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/19/25.

I posted my top 50 prospects for this year’s MLB Draft and then held a Q&A on the column, along with a draft scouting notebook on Jamie Arnold and the NHSI tournament, all for subscribers to the Athletic.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Creature Caravan, a fantastic new game from the designer of Above & Below and Roam.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New York Times has a story on a man held captive by his stepmother for twenty years who only recently escaped by lighting a fire in his room. The now 32-year-old man weighed just 68 pounds when he was rescused by firefighters. It is a horrifying read on an unimaginable crime.

NPR spoke to a dozen Zambians living with HIV whose access to life-saving medications has been cut off by Trump/Musk’s illegal decision to close USAID’s clinics there. Ending this aid is killing people around the world, and those lives are not somehow worth less than American lives.

A Mormon therapist who claimed to be able to help gay members of the LDS church has been sentenced to prison for sexually abusing those patients over a 15-year period. No drag queens were involved in the case.

GQ profiled activist-journalist turned Congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh and her efforts to revive the corpse of the national Democratic Party. I don’t know if she’s even likely to win a primary if the incumbent in the district where she’s running, 80-year-old Jan Schakowsky, decides to run for a fourteenth term, but I’m hopeful her efforts and the very favorable media coverage so far encourage more young liberals to run.

Andrew Cuomo, who resigned in disgrace after multiple women accused him of sexual harassment and other inappropriate behavior, is mounting a run for Mayor of New York City, and two labor unions just endorsed him despite that history. Eric Adams has been a fiasco, and Cuomo might be worse. New York state taxpayers have spent over $60 million on legal fees for Cuomo since the allegations began.

The Philly Inquirer’s Will Bunch writes that when (if) this is all over, all of these officials responsible for human rights abuses – like sending innocent men to rot in El Salvador prisons – must be tried for crimes against humanity.

Gazans arrested by occupying Israeli forces spoke to the BBC about how Israeli forces tortured them while in detention.

Israel killed a Palestinian photojournalist and her entire family in a targeted strike on their home, weeks before a documentary that features her and her work is set to premiere at Cannes.

A man attempted to kill Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) by setting fire to the Governor’s home, claiming he was doing it because of Shapiro’s support for Israel. The man’s family says they tried to have him committed in the days before the attack as his behavior became extremely erratic.

U.S. immigration officers detained an attorney who is representing a student who has been charged for participating in a pro-Palestine protest while he was returning from a family vacation.

Good people in Tennessee formed a human chain to protect one of their neighbors from an ICE attempt to detain the man despite the lack of any warrant.

The right-wing claim that illegally deported Salvadoran man Kilmar Abrego Garcia was a member of the MS-13 gang comes from a crooked cop. So far we have seen no other evidence supporting the claim.

Immunologists Daniel Altmann & Angela Rasmussen wrote in Nature on how scientists need to respond to the existential threat against global health and science.

Kavitha Davidson writes about how Pat McAfee’s decision to drag a college student on his show over a false rumor is just the tip of the sports-media iceberg. The smearing victim is suing multiple outlets who went after her; Barstool already issued several public apologies, while neither ESPN nor McAfee has said anything about their mistake.

In the New Republic, Parker Molloy wrote about how mainstream media outlets downplayed the mass protests of April 5^th.

My alma mater did the right thing, for once: Harvard declined to comply with Trump’s demands, including ending all diversity efforts and a million other ridiculous things, after which he threatened to revoke the university’s tax-exempt status. The Times has the story on why the university decided to fight. I donated to them for the first time in years and said it was specifically because they chose not to capitulate.

Phoenix Children’s Hospital, where my daughter received excellent care multiple times when we lived there and once while we were visiting, folded like a cheap suit and will no longer provide gender-affirming care to trans kids after threats from Trump.

The Mississippi Library Commission deleted two research collections to try to comply with the state’s anti-diversity laws, continuing Mississippi’s steady march back to the 19^th century.

RFK, Jr., is using a new study on autism rates to push his false narrative about vaccines. This came on top of his extremely derogatory comments about autistic people that claimed they were just burdens on society, unable to work or pay taxes or enjoy life.

Christian and Muslim fundamentalists are trying to get the Supreme Court to bring “don’t say gay” to public classrooms across the country.

A guest columnist for the Seattle Times wrote about why airline passenger behavior seems to be getting worse; it’s more assertion than argument, but I share the feeling that these are becoming more common. Playing audio loudly without headphones has gone from near-never before pandemic to at least once every day I’m at an airport. It happened on Friday, in fact.

Put your phone in airplane mode when they tell you too, by the way. It’s not just the law, but it’s better for the pilots and for your phone.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, gaza, harvard, lgbt rights, links, longreads, media criticism, mississippi, new york, pennsylvania, phoenix, Sports, stick to baseball, trans rights, vaccines

→ March 30, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/30/25.

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

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

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

And now, the links…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

→ March 16, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/15/25.

At the Athletic this week, I posted my annual column of potential breakout players, a draft scouting notebook from seeing UNC-Stanford, and a scouting notebook on the Mariners-Guardians Breakout game with some notes on some Brewers guys. I’ll also have a scouting notebook up shortly on the Giants-Rangers Breakout game.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: WIRED has the most comprehensive look so far at the “digital coup” being staged by Elon Musk and his DOGE toadies.

A doctor at Brown Medicine went to Lebanon to visit her family, and on her return, she was – and still is being – held at Logan Airport for deportation.

The Atlantic’s Tom Bartlett spoke to the Mennonite father whose six-year-old daughter died of the vaccine-preventable disease known as the measles.

A website with AI-generated content accused a scholar at Yale of having connections to a terrorist group, without evidence or any apparent involvement from a human writer or editor. Yale suspended her anyway.

Two professors at my alma mater argued in The Harvard Crimson that it is time for the university to stand up against the Trump regime, and then wrote a similar piece on Columbia’s capitulation and Harvard’s continued silence.

More Harvard news: former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett spoke at Harvard Business School and joked that he’d give pagers to people protesting the war on Gaza, a reference to the Israeli government’s murder of several dozen people in Lebanon via exploding pagers.

Rep. Keith Self (R-TX) deliberately misgendered my Representative, Sarah McBride (D-DE), leading her to refer to him as “Madam Chair” and for ranking Democrat Bill Keating (MA) to actually stand up for her, something Democrats have barely bothered to do since Republicans started their attacks on her.

Robert Morris, a megachurch pastor in Texas who was a “spiritual advisor” to Donald Trump, was indicted in Oklahoma on five counts of lewd and indecent acts with a child. He was a major force behind Texas’s bill banning trans people from using the correct bathrooms, arguing that it would – get the irony – protect children from sexual abuse.

Armenia and Azerbaijan might be ready to sign a peace agreement that would end nearly 30 years of hostilities between the two neighboring nations, both former USSR Republics. Azerbaijan took control of the Armenian exclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in the fall of 2023, but the two share a complicated border; Armenia separates Azerbaijan proper from its constituent republic Nakhchivan, and there are several tiny exclaves along the shared border between Armenia and Azerbaijan proper.

Sarah Spain, my former colleague at ESPN, was honored for her efforts to promote gender equity in sports coverage. I admit I hadn’t heard of the award before and don’t know anything about it, but Sarah has worked very diligently for a very long time in an industry that remains male-dominated and just generally allergic to change, all in the name of promoting women’s voices. She deserves the accolades.

A Seattle chef and Top Chef contestant announced he’s closing his last restaurant, Taku, citing his other non-restaurant obligations, including appearances on Food Network’s Tournament of Champions.

Bernd das Brot is a “depressed loaf of bread” that appears on a German kids’ TV show and has developed a cult following over the last 25 years.

Three board game Kickstarters to highlight this week. Space Lion 2 is a standalone version of last year’s Space Lion that’s specifically designed for two-player games. POND is a deckbuilder with area control elements that the designer says was inspired by Root. And The Great Harbor is a worker placement and dice-drafting game from the designer of 2022’s Magna Roma.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, fascism, harvard, links, longreads, seattle, stick to baseball, top chef, vaccines

→ November 11, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/11/24.

We updated my ranking of the top 50 free agents in baseball this offseason on Monday after all options were declined or exercised to reflect the actual free agent pool. My next article there will probably come when we have a big transaction.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter, covering my feelings on the election, on Saturday.

I locked my Twitter account earlier in the week due to the site’s change to allow blocked users to see your posts. At this point, I will only post links to my work there, and I’ll be more active on Bluesky and Threads. Of course, I’ll still be here, and in the comments under my articles on The Athletic.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Does the NIL era mean the end of Ivy League athletics? I think it does, at least as we have known it. And maybe that’s fine.

Fine, here are some of the better post-election pieces I’ve seen, bearing in mind I’ve skipped a lot of the blame game going around. The New Republic has had the best content in the wake of the election disaster, including Kat Abughazaleh’s story saying the Democrats need to clean out their party leadership after losing to Trump twice in three elections, a Greg Sargent column on how Trump voters don’t realize how he actually hurt the economy and reproductive rights, and a podcast with Sargent and the Philly Inquirer’s Will Bunch on Jeff Bezos sucking up to Trump after the election. In The Nation, Elie Mystal wrote what I also believe, that Trump is not a fluke, but that this is what the United States is. In The Atlantic, Lora Kelley wrote about how the economy ended up more important than the issues on which the Democrats focused, including abortion rights and democracy itself. The Texas Tribune wrote about the rightward shift of the southern part of that state. Just before the election, Tom Nichols wrote in The Atlantic that Trump needs help, as we had even more evidence that the former and now incoming President might be losing his grip.

Scientific American covered how catastrophic a Trump Presidency will be for climate action.

There were some tiny, isolated bits of good news from Election Day, including Arizonans defeating three GOP-led ballot measures to restrict voting rights; my state of Delaware electing Sarah McBride to be the first openly trans member of Congress (I’ve met her and I’m a big fan); and abortion rights passing everywhere except in a rigged vote in Florida, where the ballot measure got 57% of the vote, but the Republicans moved the goalposts to 60%.

Iowa tried to purge alleged noncitizens from voter rolls after early voting had already begun. Sounds fair. It’s not like they had any warning that an election was coming.

A court in Maricopa County, Arizona, cancelled the registrations of some voters based on errant information that they had been convicted of felonies.

The Guardian’s Arwa Madhawi writes that we are witnessing the final stage of genocide in Gaza, citing historian Omar Bartov. The Associated Press covered Israel’s renewed attacks on hospitals in Gaza, buildings that Israel has already previously bombed.

A dismaying story from the Times on older folks giving all their money to scammers while their kids have no way to stop them from doing so. This isn’t people with (diagnosed) cognitive decline or impairment, but people who are perhaps a little more credulous because of their age and unfamiliarity with the digital world.

NPR has a story on attorney Victoria Burke, who helps victims of sexual assault fight defamation suits filed against them by the accused. Such lawsuits can become a way to silence victims and make it harder for them to come forward or pursue their cases, and Burke has helped expand anti-SLAPP statutes in California to cover these cases.

Not all tech companies are bad: Apple quietly added a feature to iOS 18 to protect users’ data on phones seized by police from potentially unlawful searches. Phones that have remained in the lock state for four days will automatically reboot to their Before First Use state, making it harder for forensic analysts to break into them.

Multiple women have accused University of Florida men’s basketball coach Todd Golden of stalking and sexually harassing them, according to a report in the independent site The Alligator. The University received a Title IX complaint against Golden on September 27^th.

Jason Yates, an evangelical Christian who supports Trump and previously was CEO of the activist group My Faith Votes, was arrested on charges of possession of over 100 images of child pornography. No trans people were involved in the case.

Jamie Oliver wrote a children’s fantasy novel, and it turns out it has some really dated stereotypes of indigenous Australians. Worse, neither he nor his publishers even consulted with anyone on cultural sensitivity to maybe avoid this fiasco.

Swifties are fleeing Twitter for BlueSky, too.

A 13-year-old girl in Florida went to the police after she was raped by her adoptive father; the police didn’t believe her and charged her with lying. When he raped her again, she recorded it on her phone. Taylor Cadle, now 21, came forward this week in a PBS story on the police’s complete mishandling of the case.

Prof. Donald Fanger taught my favorite class at Harvard, Comedy and the Novel, where we read several novels I still love, including my all-time favorite, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. Prof. Fanger died this July at age 94.

I mentioned the letter urging a literary boycott of Israeli cultural institutions in an earlier roundup; there is now a countering letter opposing that boycott, with hundreds of signatories of its own.

I had a couple of short links about the shocking and untimely death of Amber Cook, who worked in marketing for several board game companies and was an avid gamer herself, last weekend. Her partner wrote a slightly longer note about her passing and some upcoming events to raise funds for Amber’s young son.

An 11-year-old girl in Alabama killed herself as a result of bullying, possibly after just one incident at school.

Two updates on elections in Eastern Europe: Molvoda’s pro-western President Maia Sandu won re-election despite a massive disinformation campaign by Russia, while outside observers say that the election results in Georgia (the country) make no statistical sense. The incumbent Georgian Dream party claimed victory, while opposition parties have alleged fraud and blame Russian involvement.

A new study in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia found a correlation between higher caffeine consumption and lower risk of memory impairment. This is just one study, and it showed correlation, not causation, but that’s none of my business (sips tea).

Rich countries, led by the EU, blocked a proposal to help poorer countries restore their environments at the COP16 global biodiversity summit in late October.

France is prosecuting seven people involved in spreading the lies that led to the beheading of a French teacher who had shown an example of the cartoons from Charlie Hebdo that Islamist terrorists cited as their reason for murdering 12 people at the magazine’s offices in 2015. The actual killer was shot dead by police shortly after he murdered the teacher, Samuel Paty; this trial is about the online “hate campaign” that took place before the attack.

Trump’s Truth Social platform outsourced coding jobs to Mexico even as he threatened companies with retaliation for sending jobs outside of the U.S. American Second to Profits.

The progressive voter mobilization group AllVote sent misleading and/or inaccurate text messages to voters in swing states claiming they had already voted or sending links to the wrong sites for voting information, according to state officials in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Arizona.

Elon Musk’s false or misleading claims about the election, including those about the major candidates, were viewed over 2 billion times, according to an analysis by CNN. I’m sure that had no effect on anyone’s voting choices, though.

Nearly 400 people have joined lawsuits alleging sexual abuse at state-run youth detention centers in Washington, with the allegations dating as far back as 1956.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alabama, arizona, board game news, climate change, coffee, delaware, europe, florida, france, gaza, harvard, iowa, links, longreads, metoo, police, social media, stick to baseball, suicide, technology, trump, voter suppression, washington

→ June 1, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/1/24.

Nothing new this week at the Athletic, but I have a top 50 pro prospect rankings update slated for Monday the 3^rd.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the roll-and-write game French Quarter, from the designers of Three Sisters and Fleet: the Dice Game. I think it’s fantastic, although it’s harder than any of their previous games to play well.

I’ll be back on Stadium on Monday at 2 pm ET for Diamond Dreams and somewhere in the 2:30 pm show Unpacked for one more segment. We’ll discuss some of my new rankings on the first show and have an interview with Colt Emerson lined up.

A million bonus points if you know what today is, by the way. I’ll accept two answers, although one is more obvious than the other.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: You’ve probably seen this Guardian longread on the so-called “pro-natalist” family who, among other things, think nothing of physically abusing their children in the name of “discipline.” My issue with the piece is this: The parents claim that their parenting is “evidence-based,” yet they then do many things, including smacking their children, that are unequivocally contrary to all available evidence – and the piece’s author does not push back in any way. That is your job as a journalist.

This New York Times retrospective on Cass Elliot and the vicious hoax about how she died is an empathetic and thoughtful look at a major figure in pop music history who was, unfortunately, best remembered for that false rumor.

WIRED has the story of Jane Willenbring, the victim of sexual harassment by disgraced Professor David Marchant while they worked in Antarctica, whose willingness to come forward led to Marchant’s firing and the renaming of the glacier that once bore his name.

Two stories on the 19^th century state of Mississippi: In DeSoto County, a hospital transfers some patients to jail while they await mental health treatment, with the results you would expect. Meanwhile, Mississippi Today also obtained transcripts of WhatsApp messages from the soi-disant “Goon Squad” of racist, abusive cops who terrorized a central Mississippi County – including torturing two Black men and shooting one in the face – for a generation.

A new working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found a strong positive correlation between public school expenditures and Black student achievement during school and later in life. They used data from that same backwards country of Mississippi, which has been busy trying to find ways to spend less on education.

A new paper in Nature shows how researchers used machine learning to help explain how insect wing hinges work. We know of four separate times when a species has developed the ability to fly, but insects are the only case where flight evolved without muscles or nerves in the wings.

Quanta has the story of two groups of physicists using machine-learning to try to understand the nature of the ‘missing’ dimensions required by superstring theory.

Splinter’s Jim Vorel looks at the slow death of QAnon and the even more virulent strains that have replaced it. There’s a strong sense of “When Prophecy Fails” here – when people realized they believed in a con, they don’t just come to their senses; they look for another con to believe.

Greenpeace sided with the anti-science crowd and blocked the introduction of the nutritious Golden Rice variety into the Philippines, claiming, among other things, a “human health risk” that has never been demonstrated with any genetically-modified foodstuff.

A nurse at NYU’s Langone Health hospital mentioned the genocide in Gaza during her speech accepting an award for her compassion in caring for mothers who’d lost their babies. The hospital fired her. They’ve said she was warned before “not to bring her views on this divisive and charged issue into the workplace.” The hospital took its name from Republican billionaire donor Kenneth Langone, who has previously compared critics of rising income inequality to Nazis.

UC-Irvine law professor David Kaye writes in the New York Times that we should allow the International Criminal Court to do its job after the Court announced charges against the leaders of Hamas and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. The U.S. has remained outside of the ICC for twenty years, even though we could do the most good by accepting its tenets and supporting its efforts to pursue war-crimes charges – as we have asked the ICC to do against Vladimir Putin.

Many students walked out of Harvard’s commencement last week, spurred by the University’s corporate board’s decision to overrule a faculty vote that would have allowed 13 students to graduate after they’d been suspended for their actions in the campus protests over the Israeli war on Gaza.

Even before Friday’s verdict, Greg Sargent noted that Trump’s anti-media rhetoric had turned more dangerous with the convicted felon’s apparent endorsement of a rant about how he’ll “get rid of all you fucking liberals.”

The Washington Post sat on the story of Samuel Alito hanging pro-insurrection and pro-nationalist flags at his house for several years. The New York Times has been reporting on the story now, including this very measured piece on what seems to have happened, including disputes over the order of some of the events in the neighborhood dispute.

The Republican candidate for Governor in North Carolina is a QAnon-touting, Holocaust-denying, antisemitic, anti-LGBT conspiracy theorist. Will he cost Trump a swing state he won in 2020?

A passenger on a United flight into Fresno this week has tested positive for measles. This should be a criminal offense – they put many, many other people at risk through their actions, like driving drunk.

Michael Hiltzik writes in the LA Times that now Democrats are just as bad at Republicans in putting political concerns over science, as Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-CA) continues his sham hearings promoting the debunked lab-leak hypothesis.

RFK Jr.’s turn into vaccine disinformation came after he spoke to and then totally ignored Dr. Paul Offit, co-inventor of the rotavirus vaccine.

Pope Francis apologized for using the Italian equivalent of the f-slur and saying there was too much of that in the priesthood when arguing against allowing celibate gay men to take orders. I think there’s too much emphasis here on the word choice and nowhere near enough on pretty much everything that lies behind it.

Two board game Kickstarters of note this week: 25^th Century Games (who published French Quarter) just put up a new crowdfunding effort for a four-pack of smaller games that you can back as a bundle or individually.

Luthier is the latest complex game from Paverson Games, publisher of last year’s excellent heavy game Distilled. There’s a full site up for the game but the crowdfunding link isn’t open yet. I saw Luthier at PAX Unplugged; it’s gorgeous and huge, but my guess is it’s too long a game for my personal tastes and attention span.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, board game news, environment, gaza, harvard, links, longreads, measles, metoo, mississippi, physics, police, religion, scotus, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ February 24, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/24/24.

My entire prospect rankings for 2024 are now up for subscribers to The Athletic, including:

I held a Klawchat earlier this week to take questions on the lists and more.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Apiary, the latest game from publisher Stonemaier Games (Wingspan, Scythe, Tapestry); The Search for Lost Species, a deduction game and sequel to my #1 game of 2020, The Search for Planet X; and The White Castle, my #1 game of 2023, designed by the folks behind The Red Cathedral.

I also sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter last week, about how we had to put our cat, Hexie, down when a blood clot traveled to his descending aorta and paralyzed his hind quarters. It’s been tough.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Religious zealot and billionaire Tim Dunn is behind the Texas GOP’s hard shift to the right as he tries to remake the state into a Christian theocracy. Imagine if a Muslim billionaire used his money in a similar way. It’s certainly not about following the teachings of Jesus – as does this Catholic charity in El Paso, which is now facing closure at the hands of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
I’ll also just mention here that religious ‘nones’ are now the largest single group in the U.S. The term refers to anyone who does not identify themselves as affiliated with a church or religion, including atheists, agnostics, ‘spiritual but not religious’ people, deists, and others.
The New York Times had an excellent story on the athletes recruited to The New School in Florida, as the state pours money into the once-liberal institution to try to turn it into a southern version of Hillsdale College. The kids are going to be all right, despite the adults’ best efforts.
Gary, Indiana, has an ongoing lawsuit against gun manufacturers over their tacit allowance of illegal gun sales. The Indiana Republican Party is trying to pass a bill that would invalidate the suit and protect gun manufacturers from liability.
A former minister in the Christian cult The Truth admitted to molesting a young boy through his role in the ‘church,’ part of a decades-long pattern of abuse and cover-ups in the home-based movement, also known as Two by Twos.
A doctor who went to Gaza to help victims of Israel’s ongoing assault wrote in the LA Times that what he saw “wasn’t war – it was annihilation.”
In the face of growing hate towards Palestinians, some chefs and restaurant owners who come from or trace their ancestry to Palestine are choosing to emphasize their identity
The 76ers’ proposed downtown arena is likely to cost the city millions in lost tax revenue while also risking Philly’s vibrant Chinatown neighborhood. Let the owners pay for it themselves.
There’s a huge measles outbreak in Florida thanks to parents rejecting universal medical advice and skipping the MMR vaccine. Florida’s Surgeon General is telling parents they can still send their unvaccinated kids to school. Measles is the most contagious virus that infects humans, and it can kill children and adults, either during the infection itself or up to a decade later due to an incurable neurological condition called SSPE. This is abject insanity. The MMR vaccine is safe, effective, and led to the (temporary) eradication of measles from the Americas, until Andrew Wakefield and the fucking idiots who follow him brought it back.
KFF Health News looks at how these fringe anti-science views became so dominant in American politics, and what it might mean this November.
Meanwhile, vaccine denialists are everywhere, downplaying the severity of measles. I see it every day on the disinformation hellhole of Twitter. Measles kills, maims, deafens, and more. It can lead to weeks of hospitalizations. I would love to see health insurers insist on vaccinations for coverage, because why should my premiums go up just because someone else was too dumb or misinformed to make the right choice?
West Virginia Republicans saw this outbreak and decided to exempt private schools from the state’s strict vaccination requirements, because I guess having the nation’s highest death rate from opioids wasn’t good enough!
Timor-Leste (formerly known as East Timor) is battling simultaneous outbreaks of three mosquito-borne diseases: Zike, dengue, and chikungunya. We need more releases of genetically modified mosquitoes and mosquitoes infected with Wolbachia bacteria to reduce their numbers before these diseases spread further.
Tim Burke, formerly of Deadspin, was indicted in Florida for allegedly hacking Fox News video streams of Kanye West and Tucker Carlson … that Burke says were unprotected by passwords or other encryption. This is a freedom of the press issue. You could contact your Representative or Senator, especially if any serve on their respective Judiciary Committees, as I’ve done. An attack on any journalist is an attack on all of us.
A Texas attorney poisoned his pregnant then-wife with abortion pills, which didn’t cause the pregnancy to terminate but caused enough damage to the fetus that their daughter has developmental delays. He was sentenced to merely 180 days in jail, because abortion bans are not about saving babies (or fetuses), but about subjugating and controlling women.
Abortion rights are a consistent, winning issue for Democrats, writes Ilyse Hogue in the New Republic, and the party needs to lean into that more.
We got an answer, belatedly, on the Hugo Awards’ exclusion of certain works, notably those by Chinese or Chinese-American authors, and it was craven submission to Chinese government involvement. Dave McCarty, a sci-fi fan who was head of the Hugo Committee for 2023, and others resigned and/or were censured. One of the winners, Adrian Tchaikovsky, has already said he will no longer cite or list the award among his honors.
This satirical column from The Crimson mocks national reporters’ obsession with campus life at Harvard.
Posts from the transphobic ‘activist’ LibsOfTikTok led to at least 21 bomb threats against schools, libraries, small businesses, and more. Twitter has done nothing to shut Chaya Raichik down, despite the real-world consequences to her actions.
Pamela Paul wrote an anti-trans editorial in The New York Times. It was riddled with inaccuracies.
The co-founder of the anti-LGBTQ, book-banning advocacy group Moms for Liberty engaged in threesomes with her husband and another woman. Bridget Ziegler is on the school board in Sarasota County, Florida, and her husband Christian (heh) was the former head of the Florida Republican Party. MfL’s influence appears to be waning as more people catch on to their radical agenda.
Seattle cops raided several LGBTQ+ bars in the city, taking photos of patrons, citing regulations banning “lewd conduct.” Owners and patrons fought back, and the state’s liquor board, which oversees such businesses, agreed to knock it off and end this collaboration with the police.
New York’s Nassau County issued an order banning teams with trans athletes from using public fields or arenas, yet another pointless, cruel rule pandering to bigots, a solution in search of a problem.
Republicans smeared Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) over comments she made – but they used a bogus translation to do so.
An old indie blog called The Hairpin that closed in 2018 has come back to life as a zombie clickbait farm.
A mother of four was shot and killed while driving to work in Philadelphia in November, and her family says the police aren’t doing enough to try to solve the case.
There’s a Kickstarter open for Conservas, a new solo bag-building game from designer Scott Almes (Tiny Epic Galaxes, Beer & Bread).

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, board game news, florida, guns, harvard, hugo awards, indiana, lgbt rights, links, longreads, new york, philadelphia, religion, seattle, social media, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines, west virginia

→ January 6, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/6/24.

I took a few weeks off from these posts around the holidays, but I did write one piece for subscribers to The Athletic over the break, looking at the Chris Sale trade and Lucas Giolito signing.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the games Daybreak, a cooperative game about fighting climate change; and Wandering Towers, the best new family game of last year. Both games were on my ranking of the ten best new board games of 2023.

My free email newsletter will return today (most likely). Several of you have pledged to support me if the newsletter were to go paid; I have no immediate plans to do so, but if that happens 1) I’ll give everyone a ton of notice and 2) I’ll move it off Substack.

And now, the links…

Writer Tom Scocca’s piece in New York about his sudden, unsolved medical mystery is the best thing you’ll read all week. It’s well-written, of course, and combines the deeply personal with an inherent attack on our broken health-care system.

President Biden won’t just be facing Donald Trump or another GOP opponent in the 2024 election – he’ll be opposed by the News Corp misinformation machine, too. (Related: The Washington Post’s Philip Bump wrote of how journalism needs to defend itself in the face of bad-faith actors. He might start with his own paper’s opinion section.)

The New Yorker looks at board games with serious themes, profiling Amabel Holland, a trans woman who co-owns the publisher Hollandspiele and designed the Iron Rails series of games.

Parenting is hard. It’s been harder thanks to the pandemic. That and other factors have led to the rise of the “accidentally permissive” parent, especially in my age cohort.

Stuart Thompson of the New York Times looks at how anti-vaxx ghouls latched on to the death of a 24-year-old man, who showed no symptoms of myocarditis after his COVID-19 vaccination but whose parents think the vaccine gave him myocarditis anyway. George Watts, Jr., had an enlarged spleen – over six times the normal size for that organ – which is a sign of long-term heart failure, chronic inflammation in his brain, and signs of late-stage pneumonia in his lungs.

mRNA vaccines do not cause cancer, and there is no such thing as “turbo cancer.”

Measles is on the rise around the world thanks to vaccine denialists and misinformation peddlers like RFK, Jr.

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D) has introduced two bills to block military aid to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates due to both nations’ atrocious human rights records. Omar is Muslim, and Islam is the official religion of both nations. Just imagine a similar scenario with Judaism or Christianity instead of Islam.

Meanwhile, Israel has censored its press on eight topics relating to the war on Gaza.

On the coordinated attacks against now former Harvard President Claudine Gay: It was never about plagiarism, but about DEI (from Don Moynihan); American Jews’ moral panic over Gay’s and two other college Presidents’ answers to Congress is misplaced (from The Forward); and Gay’s own editorial in the New York Times on what happened, which I thought was far too reticent.

Why do pundits like Jonathan Chait and Nate Silver say outrageous things? Because it’s effective, at least when you consider that attention is their goal.

The science is clear: Masks work to reduce the spread of COVID-19 and similar viruses, no matter what the misinformation merchants tell you.

The Guardian looks at the unfunny punching-down comedy specials from Dave Chapelle and Ricky Gervais. Chapelle was so groundbreaking at his peak that it’s sad to see him pitching with an 80 mph fastball now.

A list of all 673 books removed from classrooms in Orange County, Florida. I don’t know how anyone with the means to move could still live there. Even if you send your kids to a quality alternative school, your tax dollars are supporting this anti-education.

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) declined federal food aid to provide lunch to schoolchildren over the summer, making a specious argument about obesity. This is free money for the state, and they would rather turn it down than feed poor children in Iowa.

NYC Mayor Eric Adams (D) has drained the city payroll of over $24 million to pay for 293 “special assistants,” many of them major donors to his campaign.

Adams (still D) also tried to kill a bill that requires police to report when they stop anyone on the street to ask for identification, promising to restore budget cuts to other programs if council members voted against it. The bill passed anyway.

Overtime pay for NYPD officers working the city’s subway stations went from $4 million to $155 million between 2022 and 2023, reducing “major crimes” by 2% but primarily leading to more arrests and fines for fare-jumping. That’s a lot of money to fight a handful of skipped $2.90 charges.

New York bookstore Bluestockings is facing eviction for providing Narcan to save people who have overdosed on opioids.

Amanda Todd was 15 when she killed herself in 2012 after three years of cyberstalking by a Dutch man who blackmailed her with threats to send nude images of her to her friends and family. He was sentenced to 13 years by a Canadian court, but a Dutch court cut the sentence in half to match that country’s legal standards.

The Las Vegas Business Journal announced a new editorial policy that it will not publish economic impact estimates for stadium projects and other events unless they can see the methodology and criteria used to reach those estimates (which, in my view, are usually bullshit).

Francis Howell School District in St. Charles, Missouri, has seen white conservatives take over its school board; the board recently backed off a plan to eliminate all Black History and Black Literature courses after massive opposition, including from the NAACP. The same white conservatives are trying to ban trans students from using the appropriate bathrooms. School board elections matter, folks.

Speaking of Missourah, a St. Louis cop crashed his car into an LGBT bar, Bar:PM, and then cuffed one of the owners, who was later charged with a felony. The police didn’t do a toxicology test on their colleague, and now they’re trying to hush up any investigation and refusing to release body cam footage to the public.

Shoegaze had its moment in the early 1990s as a subgenre of alternative music, mostly heard from British acts like My Bloody Valentine, Ride, and Slowdive. It’s had a huge comeback thanks to TikTok.

The data from Insomniac Games released by hackers shows that big-game video game development is not sustainable, per Nathan Grayson of Aftermath, a great new site covering video and tabletop gaming.

I own a fantastic sweater and very warm hat from Quince, specialists in inexpensive cashmere clothing items. It turns out that cheap cashmere has a stark environmental cost.

The seams on a baseball have a higher-than-expected effect on the trajectory of the ball in flight.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, board games, Economics, environment, florida, harvard, iowa, journalism, links, longreads, misinformation, missouri, Music, new york, new york city, parenting, police, science, shoegaze, stick to baseball, vaccines, video games

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