harvard — Page 2

→ February 4, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/4/23.

My top 100 prospects ranking ran on Monday for subscribers to The Athletic, followed by the players who just missed the list, and then my ranking of all 30 farm systems. I held a Q&A on Monday, which the site excerpted for a separate article. I also held an old-fashioned Klawchat here on Friday. The team-by-team top 20s will start to run on Monday.

On The Keith Law Show, I spoke with Steve Ives, writer and director of the upcoming documentary Ruthless: Monopoly’s Secret History, which will run on PBS’s American Experience and stream online on February 20^th. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I’ve been keeping up better with my free email newsletter recently, and I’ll get back to it again this upcoming week once I get through the last nine team reports.

And now, the links…

The Atavist has the story of a family caught up in the world of YouTube influencers, including one star’s mother accused of inappropriate behavior against a number of her daughter’s co-stars.

Mother Jones looks at the troll site Kiwi Farms, and how driving it offline hasn’t worked to stop its users’ campaigns of doxing and harassment.

The new emerging microbe threat around the world? Infectious fungi taking advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic by exploiting people with damaged immune systems.

Cory Doctorow examines what he calls the “enshittification” of TikTok and other sites that built up massive user bases on one premise and then switched to another model to make some money – a digital bait and switch of sorts.

The New Yorker looks at NY Times opinion columnist Pamela Paul, whose columns seem designed to push buttons and have often engaged in TERF-like arguments.

Chuck D spoke to Rolling Stone about the new documentary series Fight the Power: How Hip Hop Changed the World, available now via PBS.

Even a mild case of COVID-19 leads to a massive increase in heart disease risk.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) announced a plan to block all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs at state colleges.

Dan Rather wrote about DeSantis’ platform of white grievance.

Florida teachers are removing all books from their classroom for fear of prosecution by the white police state. Here’s more on the policy behind this.

Meanwhile, the craven College Board, whose entire business model is built around making it more expensive for students to go to college, bowed to pressure from DeSantis and eviscerated its A.P. African American Studies curriculum.

Republicans continue to push anti-abortion laws, proposing 105 bills and counting just this year alone, even subverting democratic norms to do so. They’re also forum-shopping to try to ban the abortion pill.

Abortion bans often include exceptions for rape or incest. They’re mostly meaningless, there to make people feel better about discriminatory laws against providing medical care.

Utah passed a law banning transition health care for trans kids.

Arizona’s legislature passed a law allowing lawmakers to delete all emails after 90 days, which isn’t suspicious at all.

Some businesses are warning Missouri lawmakers their culture war is going to harm the state’s economy.

An off-duty cop in Providence, RI, shot an unarmed kid, and a jury acquitted him of all charges.

Georgia cops killed a protestor fighting the construction of a massive training facility in the woods around Atlanta. They’re claiming he shot first. I do not take the word of police as truth.

Texas election deniers raised funds to build a mobile hospital in Ukraine. They failed, and it’s not clear where the donated money went.

Harvard Prof. John Comaroff has been accused of sexual harassment by multiple women, leading to a mass walkout of his first class back from suspension last week.

Tom Verlaine, founder of the essential American art-punk band Television, died last week at age 73.

Many consumers say that tipping is getting out of control. This isn’t a yes/no question, really; I think you can say tipping for some services is obligatory, and for others is unnecessary.

Noted free speech absolutist Elon Musk took down a video critical of India’s hypernationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the government’s request.

The FBI infiltrated a major ransomware group called Hive, gaining the group’s decryption keys to allow victims to recover their locked files.

Rolling Stone’s EJ Dickson asks, “Can we please just let the M&M’s fuck?”

The Guardian looks at Daybreak, the upcoming cooperative board game about climate change co-designed by Matt Leacock (Pandemic, Forbidden Island).

The role-playing game based on the Hugo-winning novel The Fifth Season is now on Backerkit.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, arizona, board game news, coronavirus, georgia, harvard, links, longreads, missouri, police, science, social media, stick to baseball, texas, trans rights, utah

→ August 29, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/29/20.

I had one column this week for subscribers to The Athletic, with scouting notes on Triston McKenzie, Sixto Sanchez, Wil Crowe, and Joey Bart. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

For Paste this week, I reviewed Succulent, a solid new game of tile-laying and set collection, and would have given it an even higher grade had I not had issues with some of the art and graphics.

My guest on this week’s episode of The Keith Law Show was Orioles reliever Dillon Tate, talking about youth baseball and overcoming the obstacles he faced on his path to the majors. You can also subscribe on iTunes – and if you do, please leave a rating and review.

You can still get my book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, where fine books are sold, like on bookshop.org. I’m also planning to send out another edition of my free email newsletter this weekend.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Guardian looks at the case of one Nigerian woman who fought back against the sex traffickers who enslaved her in Italy, and how difficult it is for authorities to prosecute such cases.
Harvard magazine has an excerpt from Prof. Daniel Lieberman’s new book Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding, looking at how exercise might help reduce the odds of age-related maladies from senescence to diabetes to Alzheimer’s, even cutting your chances of dying relative to others your age. One key message is that no matter how old you are it isn’t too late to gain these benefits from regular exercise.
Blockchain is “an amazing solution for almost nothing,” a widely-lauded technology that combines horrendous energy inefficiency with a lack of apparent benefits to end users.
The CTC Sentinel, published by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, has a long explanation of QAnon as an emerging domestic terror threat. I have recently tried to explain the QAnon conspiracy theory to two different people who are not extremely online, and even trying to say it out loud makes me feel crazy. It’s like Scientology and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion had some sort of demon offspring. Anyway, this paper argues that “QAnon has contributed to the radicalization of ideologically motivated violent extremists,” which should make you a lot more nervous than the imagined threat of ISIS or similar terrorist groups infiltrating the United States.
If someone tries to argue with you that masks don’t work, here are 70 studies showing that they do.
A new case report published in the Lancet describes an 11-year-old girl who died one day after admission to the hospital of COVID-19-related cardiac failure. The condition is called multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS), and while rare, it is killing a very small number of children who contract COVID-19.
Several people who survived COVID-19 infections but continue to feel aftereffects are connecting online to try to gather data on and study their conditions so they can provide more information to others suffering the same problems.
There’s a surge in COVID-19 cases in Paris, so the French Prime Minister has mandated masks and stepped up testing. This is what a competent leader and evidence-based policymaking look like, in case you’d forgotten and were thinking about staying home on November 3^rd.
“Gullible” White House negotiators overpaid by up to $500 million for ventilators from the Dutch conglomerate Royal Philips N.V., paying about four times what the Obama Administration had contracted to pay. I thought that Trump was supposed to get the best deals.
Harvard Professor of Anthropology Gary Urton was effectively forced into retirement after multiple students accused him of sexual harassment.
A Florida couple who believed that COVID-19 was some sort of hoax ignored advice to observe distancing guidelines and wear masks. They caught the virus; both ended up in the ICU, and one of them died of complications from the disease. The lesson here isn’t that they’re stupid, but that they fell victim to all of the misinformation spread online by hoaxers, trolls, and by people speaking at this week’s RNC.
Speaking of the RNC, Madison Cawthorn, a Republican candidate for the state house in North Carolina, has a long history of fabrications and multiple accusations of sexual assault. He was lauded on Twitter by right-wing blue checkmarks as the future of the GOP.
The FDA ruled that all distilled spirits are gluten-free, because science.
Hardly surprising, but this New York Times piece finds evidence of discrimination against Black homeowners in the home appraisal process.
A Washington Post editorial asks where the sympathy is for Megan Thee Stallion after the rapper was shot by another rapper, Tory Lanez, pointing out that if a black man had shot a white woman the outrage would probably be much louder.
A new study from Ohio State researchers says that the Greenland ice shelf will melt due to climate change regardless of what we do to try to stop the warming trend.
Another book excerpt, this time from Reverend William Barber’s Winning the Green New Deal: Why We Must, How We Can, on the history and roots of environmental racism.
Why 2020 will be the death of the working mother.
Board game news: I have seen the game Maracaibo at PAX Unplugged but never played it, given its weight and time required, which meant it wasn’t going to get much play in my house. I’m thrilled to see it’s coming to digital next year.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, climate change, coronavirus, harvard, italy, links, longreads, racism, stick to baseball, the swamp

→ May 2, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/2/20.

I was busy this week promoting The Inside Game, my new book, now available from bookshop.org and other fine retail outlets. As of Thursday, Midtown Scholar in Harrisburg had signed copies for sale. I’m especially thrilled to see how positive the reviews have been, from a starred review in Publishers Weekly to this glowing writeup in the Maine Edge. Library Journal also “highly recommended” the book, although the review is only for subscribers.

WIRED has an excerpt from The Inside Game on its site, a portion of the chapter on anchoring bias that discusses a major reason why the automated strike zone would be an improvement over human umps.

I appeared on several great podcasts this week, including:

Jeremy Schaap’s The Sporting Life: ESPN Podcenter, Apple, Spotify, Stitcher
Inquiring Minds: Apple; Stitcher
Wharton Moneyball: Apple, Spotify, Stitcher
Sox Machine: Apple, Spotify, Stitcher
KPCC Airtalk: Apple, Spotify, Stitcher (around the 93:00 mark)

On my own podcast this week, I had board game designer & Blue Jays fan Daryl Andrews (Sagrada, Bosk), talking about his latest games, designing & playing during self-isolation, and his Toronto fandom. You can subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or Stitcher.

I was interviewed by my friend Tim Grierson for MEL Magazine, talking about my new book and life in self-isolation.

Also, my first book, Smart Baseball, is now available in Korean. If you’re in South Korea, you can pick it up here on Kyobo.

I reviewed the game Half Truth, a fun party/trivia game designed by Ken Jennings and Richard Garfield, for Paste this week, and reviewed the digital adaptation of the great dice-drafting game Sagrada for Ars Technica.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Can we just give Ed Yong a Pulitzer Prize for his essay in the Atlantic called “Why the Coronavirus is So Confusing?” It is clear, coherent, comprehensive, and serious without being alarmist. It makes clear the role disinformation is playing in the pandemic, lays appropriate blame for the U.S.’s poor and late response, and discusses the structural problems that made a pandemic of some sort inevitable. It’s the best piece I’ve read this year.
CNN has the story of the man who spent 46 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, the longest such wrongful sentence in U.S. history.
Gabrielle Hamilton, chef-owner of Prune and author of Blood, Bones, and Butter, wrote a poignant, self-searching editorial in the New York Times asking if her restaurant really is “essential” and whether she’ll have the energy or the funds to reopen.
Writing for SB Nation, Shakeia Taylor looks at the curious life of Effa Manley, Negro Leagues owner and Baseball Hall of Famer, and, according to multiple sources, a white woman who passed herself off as black when it was convenient to do so.
Why does Belgium have such a high COVID-19 fatality rate? One major reason is that they’re being more honest in reporting such deaths.
It’s “doubtful” that COVID-19 was accidentally released from a Wuhan lab, but that won’t stop conspiracy-mongers and xenophobes from spreading a probable lie.
Those two Bakersfield ER docs you might have seen on Youtube calling for states to reopen their economies? They’re quacks, pushing a bogus epidemiology, which I presume is for attention.
Progressive women politicians are being offered “a poisoned chalice” when it comes to Joe Biden, who faces a serious allegation from Tara Reade that he sexually assaulted her in the 1990s. Meanwhile, Biden, obviously taking this very seriously, appointed notorious partier Chris Dodd, himself involved in sexual assault allegations (with Ted Kennedy) in the 1980s, to serve on his VP selection committee.
Tennessee restaurants re-opened as the state saw its biggest one-day jump in COVID-19 cases. The states that were the slowest to shut down or refused to do so will compete with the states that rushed to re-open for the worst spikes in COVID-19 cases, and I expect they’ll ask the federal government to bail out their incompetence, too.
Iowa is one of those states that never closed, but governor Kim Reynolds (R) is already loosening restrictions, even though COVID-19 cases there are surging.
Cosplayers stormed the Michigan Capitol this week, armed with small-penis symbols, and some called for the Governor’s murder, to which state Republicans have said … nothing.
The shutdown is changing how people buy books, and has given a huge boost to the startup bookshop.org, which I have begun using for all affiliate links to books on this site.
Tim Grierson also interviewed the director of A Secret Love, a wonderful new Netflix documentary about two women, one a former AAGPL star, who were a couple for nearly 70 years but hid their relationship even from close family until the very end.
Why did billionaire Monty Bennett get $96 million in Payroll Protection Program loans that his company, Ashford Inc., does not appear to plan to pay employees? It’s a bit of a shell game, as Ashford merely “advises” two hotel companies Bennett owns.
Why did my undergraduate alma mater maintain such close ties with Jeffrey Epstein even after his conviction for sex crimes against a minor?
Betsy Levy Paluck writes in the Washington Post about how she gave birth by herself during this pandemic, but she never felt alone.
No board game news this week, but I know of two interesting Kickstarters coming on Tuesday and will tweet about them when they launch.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, bookstores, coronavirus, harvard, iowa, links, longreads, metoo, michigan, restaurants, stick to baseball, tennessee

→ March 28, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/28/20.

One new article this week for subscribers to The Athletic, looking at what the agreement between MLB and the players’ union might mean for this year’s draft. It’s not very good for the draft prospects themselves, unfortunately. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday and a Periscope (where my voice gave out!) on Tuesday.

On the gaming front, I had four new pieces this week. For Paste, I reviewed ClipCut Parks, a new “flip-and-cut” game that is great for younger kids who love using scissors but not much of a game for older players. For Vulture, I updated my ranking of the top 25 board game apps available on mobile platforms. For Ars Technica, I reviewed the new app version of the legacy game Charterstone.

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. Also, check out my free email newsletter, which I say I’ll write more often than I actually write it.

And now, the links…

Matt Leacock, the game designer behind Pandemic, wrote an op ed for the New York Times about how no one can win this real-life pandemic ‘game’ by themselves.
Who funds the Federalist? It would be nice to know that, after the extremist site ran a column from an unlicensed dermatologist calling for people to hold ‘coronavirus parties,’ as VICE’s Laura Wagner writes. Twitter briefly locked the site’s account for posting the link.
The preacher who leads Bible study for members of Trump’s Cabinet claims that coronavirus is God’s wrath on people for allowing homosexuality and environmentalism to exist. His fans in government include Vice-President Mike Pence and Senator Joni Ernst. I wonder how much of our tax dollars go to enabling this hatemongering.
Delusional politicians and right-wing media members are making scientists developing statistical models of coronavirus’s spread harder by implying or outright claiming such models are hoaxes.
The Trump Administration has been citing a retracted paper to defend its early opposition to expanding COVID-19 testing, a policy that will likely lead to tens of thousands of needless deaths. Meanwhile, their plan involves blaming China for a ‘cover-up’ that never happened rather than coming up with a viable plan for slowing the pandemic.
Surgeons are increasingly reluctant to perform operations in this environment, due to equipment shortages, fear of infection from asymptomatic patients, and the possibility that doctors might be at higher risk for the most serious form of the disease.
“Mothers are held responsible for every detail — large and small — of their children’s well-being.” Jess Grose explains how coronavirus has exposed the ‘great lie’ of modern motherhood.
The owner of a Philadelphia hospital – who shuttered the facility last year – demanded $6 million in rent for the city to use it for six months to house COVID-19 patients.
Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey (guess) voiced opposition to the $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus bill because sending the unemployed or underemployed money “creates incentives not to work.” Toomey is repeating a popular conservative myth, probably because it sells.
Longreads: The Ford Motor Company purchased the Michigan Central train station in downtown Detroit, part of that city’s ongoing revitalization, the story of which is the subject of this BBC longread.
A ProPublica investigation found that the Chinese government is using tens of thousands of hacked or fake Twitter accounts to spread pro-Beijing propaganda on issues ranging from the Hong Kong protests to the government’s COVID-19 response.
Texas Monthly looks at how the H-E-B supermarket chain prepared for the pandemic several weeks ahead of just about any other company or government authority.
Writing for Billboard, Natalie Weiner looks at how two hits from 2000 that told of women getting revenge on their abusers elicited entirely different public reactions. My real issue with “Goodbye Earl” is that there is no “midnight redeye flight” from Atlanta that would put you anywhere in the United States.
Ann Forsyth, director of Harvard’s Healthy Places Design Lab, writes about how COVID-19 may alter the future of urban and home life.
Harvard finally reversed course and will pay its furloughed dining-hall workers. The University has a miserable history of failing to reasonably compensate the people who keep the place running.
Americans are stocking up on various dry goods, but also on jigsaw puzzles. I have quite a few in the house but never seem to choose them over a board game or a movie.
I didn’t realize that gay marriage is still illegal in South Korea, where there’s still a terrible social stigma around homosexuality in some parts of the country.
This ad, lambasting Trump for his late and inadequate response to this crisis, is superb.

what an ad. pic.twitter.com/yZV9KJCOEn
— Florida Chris (@chrislongview) March 25, 2020

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: coronavirus, detroit, harvard, links, longreads, south korea, stick to baseball

→ December 14, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/14/19.

I was busy these last two weeks, with numerous reaction pieces for ESPN+ subscribers.

I also held a Klawchat, probably my last of 2019, on Friday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the new small-box game Ankh’or, which plays up to four but works nicely with two, and wrote up the best games I saw in two days at PAX Unplugged (before my daughter got sick and we had to skip day three #sadface).

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, comes out on April 21^st, 2020. You can pre-order it here, and I have tentative appearances for that week at Politics & Prose (DC), Midtown Scholar (Harrisburg), and One More Page (Arlington, VA).

My free email newsletter will return in the next few days – sorry, I got sick, then the winter meetings happened – and you can sign up here.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This New York Times piece on two woman artists, Celia Paul and Cecily Brown, is devastating in multiple ways as it explores divers forms of misogyny in the art world.
Former major-league pitcher Bobby Jenks opens up about years of substance abuse and pitching through pain.
A GP writes in the Guardian about things he’s learned from his suicidal patients, with a discussion of the death of Frightened Rabbit lead singer Scott Hutchison.
The Verge reveals the toxic work environment at the trendy luggage maker Away.
Multiple researchers and publishers worked together to try to come up with a definition of predatory publishers.
Nouns in romance languages have genders, and when a plural noun refers to a group of people that includes men and women (or any non-men), the default is to use the masculine plural. So a group of 100 teachers, 99 of them women and just one a man, would still be “los profesores.” Teenagers in Argentina are fighting to change that in favor of gender-neutral language.
I love The Monster at the End of this Book, having read it many times to my daughter (complete with my Grover impression), so of course I enjoyed author David Burr Garrard’s essay on how that book opened his mind to the world of literature.
Deposed Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin has been busy pardoning murderers who contributed to his campaign, as well as pardoning a man convicted of beheading a woman and a teacher convicted of possessing child pornography.
The Washington Post looks at Israeli people trying to escape Ultra-Orthodox communities, which keep their members in cult-like isolation from the outside world.
David J. Roth, formerly of Deadspin, writes about the Astros’ McKinsey connections and mentality. McKinsey’s business practices are under scrutiny elsewhere as well, such as how they charge U.S. taxpayers $3 million per year for the work of a recent college graduate.
France has mounted an extensive information campaign to fight vaccine hesitancy in a country with some of the highest levels of vaccine stupidity … er, distrust in the world. One side note in the article describes two families, one from France and the other from the U.S., bringing unvaccinated kids carrying the measles into Costa Rica. If I’m Costa Rica, or any other country, I would start demanding vaccination records for idiot travelers from rich western countries with vaccination rates below the herd immunity threshold (95% for measles), and making it a crime to bring an unvaccinated child into a country and putting my local populace at risk.
“Samoa buries its children as measles outbreak worsens.” I think that says it all.
That measles outbreak is what happens when anti-vaxxers win, according to this LA Times editorial.
Anti-vaxxers hate your children. Dead kids don’t bother them; they’re so obsessed with their fantasies of vaccine ‘injuries.’
Aung San Suu Kyi stands accused of deliberately saying nothing while the Burmese government massacred the Rohingya people in an International Court of Justice trial over the genocide.
A first-grade teacher in Alameda County, California, teaches his students about race, class, and privilege.
If you missed the Thanksgiving Twitter backlash over a now-deleted Scientific American editorial that (in my view) was just a hit piece on Dr. Jen Gunter, Slate offers one balanced take on the situation, while the American Council on Science and Health called out SciAm’s embrace of “anti-medical” pseudoscience. The piece’s author, Jennifer Block, maintains that she did nothing wrong, despite hiding her conflict of interest in the matter.
Climate change deniers love to argue that past climate models have been wrong … but that’s not true.
House Democrats have passed nearly 400 bills that Mitch McConnell refuses to even consider in the Senate. I’m reasonably certain that this is not how the Framers intended for our legislature to work.
My alma mater screwed up, again, this time denying a popular and highly regarded Latina professor tenure. Harvard President Lawrence Bacow could do something about it, but says that’s just not how we do things around here. Why does it matter? Because the rejection may push other minority professors and grad students out of academia.
If you live in or near Clarksburg, Maryland, there’s an indie bookstore that needs your help. The owner has Parkinson’s disease and is struggling to keep the store afloat.
If you’re not constantly on Twitter, you may have missed this video of British citizens aghast at how expensive health care is in the United States. Basic health care is a right, not a privilege for the wealthy or the employed.
Board game news: Dire Wolf Digital’s app version of Reiner Knizia’s Yellow & Yangtze, a sequel/reimplementation of his hit game Tigris & Euphrates, is now live for iOS, Android, and Steam.
Z-Man Games has a bunch of mini-expansions for Stone Age, Cacao, First Class, NMBR9, and the Voyages of Marco Polo.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, climate change, france, harvard, israel, links, longreads, mental health, myanmar, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ October 12, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/12/19.

I’ll have an Arizona Fall League scouting post up Monday or possibly Sunday night, covering everything I’ve seen out here in the desert. No chat this week as I was traveling.

I did review Tapestry, the newest game from the mind of designer Jamey Stegmaier (Scythe, Charterstone), for Paste this week; it’s a quick-to-learn strategy game with a ton of potential decisions and paths for players, pitched as a civ-builder but playing more abstract than that.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves,
is now available for pre-order on the Harper Collins site and through major retailers. It’s due out in April 2020.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: From The Atlantic, technology is creating a massive noise pollution problem that nobody’s trying to stop, despite decades of research into the harms of excessive or incessant noise, as well as newer research that quiet or the sounds of nature are particularly good for our brains.
The Guardian asks why American pedestrian fatalities are going back up, and says it’s not just because the victims were distracted by their phones or because of driverless cars.
For The Athletic ($), Pablo Maurer looks at the broken promises of the soccer stadium in Chester, Pennsylvania, a very disadvantaged exurb of Philly that has seen no benefit from the facility’s existence.
The same dumb British newspaper ran two columns this week touting diametrically opposed claims on the safety of consuming processed meat. David Speigelhalter explains the three questions readers should ask when confronted with this kind of journalistic malfeasance.
This is from 2007 but I only saw it this week when Langdon Cook referred to it in The Mushroom Hunters: Those “truffled” dishes at restaurants probably contain no truffles or anything made from truffles, but use truffle oil that gets its flavor from the synthetic flavoring agent 2,4-dithiapentane.
The Atlantic‘s James Hamblin writes about identity fusion and why it might explain Trump supporters’ irrational devotion to him even as he’s accused of committing further crimes and continues to stoke fear and prejudice.
John Holdren, professor of environmental science and policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School and at the university’s Department of Planetary and Earth Sciences, says that that recent IPCC report on climate change understates how much danger we’re in, particularly if we ignore this problem long enough to let the permafrost in earth’s polar regions melt, releasing tons of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere.
The Washington Post‘s Samantha Schmidt examines both sides of the question about dress codes and norms for teenaged girls. Is ‘revealing’ clothing empowering, or playing to harmful societal standards of beauty?
From the same paper, AirPods aren’t just short-lived, but they can’t be repaired or have their batteries replaced; they’re just trash and Apple needs to do better.
The Hutchins Center at Harvard hosts The Hip Hop Archive, including a list called 24 albums with annotated lyrics, including entries from Eric B. & Rakim and A Tribe Called Quest, as well as a broader collection of 200 albums deemed seminal to the genre’s history.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution‘s Bill Torpy calls for the Braves to get rid of the Tomahawk Chop, a racist, ignorant gesture that has outlived its welcome.
I love third-wave coffee but didn’t realize the term had a known originator. Trish Rothgeb coined the phrase while working in Oslo in 2002, and is now leading the push to make coffee more inclusive without compromising the new genre’s emphasis on quality.
Floodgate Games’ Cosmic Colonies is now on Kickstarter.
James Mickens’ tenure announcement is probably the funniest such piece you’ll ever see.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, board game news, climate change, coffee, environment, food science, harvard, hip-hop, journalism, links, longreads, pollution, psychology

→ August 10, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/10/19.

One ESPN+ post this week, a scouting blog entry on Luis Robert, Nick Madrigal, Deivi Garcia, Triston Casas, and more. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the delightfully named card game Point Salad, which mocks the trend towards complicated scoring by giving you over a hundred different ways to earn points as you collect vegetable cards from the table.

My latest email newsletter edition went out on Tuesday, after I returned from Gen Con. You can sign up here for free to get more of my personal writing.

And now, the links … I assembled this on Thursday night before leaving for vacation, so it’s shorter than usual and anything that happened on Friday won’t be reflected here.

Longreads first: This piece in Rolling Stone describes some of the history behind Prince’s new album of original versions of songs he gave to other artists. At least four songs he wrote became massive hits for others: Chaka Khan’s cover of “I Feel 4 U,” which hit #1 on the U.S. R&B and dance charts; Sinead O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” which spent four weeks at #1 on the U.S. singles chart; the Bangles’ “Manic Monday,” which reached #2 on the singles chart; and Sheila E’s “The Glamourous Life,” which hit #1 on the dance chart and the top ten on the pop and R&B charts.
The Guardian Long Read has an excerpt from Caroline Fraser’s upcoming book on the cult known as Christian Science, which eschews all modern medicine, including vaccines, claiming that illness is merely a manifestation of bad thoughts and the real world is an illusion. Her father died in agony as a result of the cult’s practices, which are still legal in most of the U.S. and can even be covered by Medicare.
The creator of the anarchic forum site 8chan told the New York Times the site should be shut down given its prominence among white nationalist shooters.
Marianne Williamson is an anti-science crank who doesn’t belong anywhere near the Democratic nomination for President, or any office that has influence on science policy. She’s expressed bogus doubts about vaccines, claimed clinical depression is a “scam” diagnosis, and said the AIDS virus “is not more powerful than God.” She needs to leave the stage to the adults.
I saw a game called Ceylon, where players compete to build tea plantations on that island after the coffee crop has been wiped out by disease, last week at Gen Con. A little googling led me to this NPR piece on how coffee leaf rust devastated the island’s main export back in the 19th century, and how it could happen elsewhere.
My friend Tim Grierson wrote about The Sixth Sense and how the real twist is Bruce Willis’ character’s workaholism.
Jumia is trying to be “the Amazon of Africa,” but faces challenges on a continent without western-style infrastructure.
Ohio representative Candice Keller (guess) blamed recent mass shootings on “drag queen advocates” and open borders, even though the perpetrators have nearly always been straight, angry white men.
The Foxconn con just keeps getting worse for Wisconsin, as attempts to ‘fix’ the deal for the state still won’t solve its fundamental problem: It’s a giant boondoggle for the company at state taxpayer expense.
This made me embarrassed to be a male human: several studies have found that pro-environment behavior is seen as more feminine, so men who do things like bringing reusable bags to the grocery store are more likely to be seen as gay. This is so fucking dumb (and yes, I bring my own bags, call me whatever orientation you like).
Harvard biologist George Church has apologized for his contacts with pedophile Jeffrey Epstein even after the latter’s conviction and prison sentence in 2008 for soliciting a minor for prostitution.
The Guardian looks at Cosmo Park, a village built on top of a mall in Jakarta.
Fans of N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, which made her the first author to win three straight Hugo Awards for Best Novel, may be excited to hear that Green Ronin Publishing is turning it into a role-playing game, due out in the fall of 2020.
I made the Wigan Today‘s post on Wigan Athletic’s new mascot.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, environment, harvard, movies, Music, religion, stick to baseball

→ July 27, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/27/19.

My two ESPN+ posts this week covered a slew of low-A and short-season prospects for the Yankees, Phillies, Red Sox, and Orioles, including Roansy Contreras and a third look at Grayson Rodriguez; and my wrapup of this year’s Under Armour game, full of high school prospects for the 2020 draft. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

At the moment, it looks like I’ll be in Bristol on Wednesday for ESPN’s Trade Deadline special, driving home that night and flying out to Gen Con the following morning. That probably spikes a chat for this week, but I’ll return for one on the 7th or 8th.

You can still subscribe to my free email newsletter to get additional writing, typically of a more personal nature than what you find elsewhere. My deepest thanks to all of you who sent such kind replies to my most recent newsletter, and a seriously-fuck-off to the one guy who decided it was a good time to be an ass to me.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Atlantic looks at why so many rape cases go unprosecuted or even uninvestigated: Because men still don’t believe women.
“The Most Gullible Man in Cambridge,” from New York‘s The Cut, lives up to its title and then some – it’s a con story, but also a head-scratcher that an intelligent man could be such an easy mark.
Say it ain’t so, Mo: Mariano Rivera is a Trump supporter and has aligned himself with an anti-Semitic pastor who says Jews deserve blame for their own genocide at the hands of Nazi Germany. Rivera spoke to the New York Daily News after the first story appeared but reaffirmed his views.
Women face a substantial obstacle in their careers, regardless of type: gender roles in our society give them little time to themselves. Women are still expected to handle the lion’s share of the family responsibilities, even at the expense of their vocations or creative potential.
Dutch parents have long engaged in “dropping” their teenaged children, sending them into the woods in small groups at night and telling the kids to find their own way back to base camp.
Wyoming Valley West school district, northwest of Philadelphia, made news by threatening to send kids to foster care over unpaid school lunch debts, and then turned down a $22,000 offer from the founder of La Colombe Coffee to clear those debts. Maybe it’s not about the money after all.
Ed Kilgore’s piece in New York on the argument against impeaching Trump even if you believe he’s guilty of obstruction is worth reading, even though I still come down on the side of impeachment.
Three Ole Miss students posed with guns in front of a shot-up Emmett Till memorial, which somehow doesn’t violate the school’s code of conduct.
Singer Nick Cave had a rather wonderful response after someone referred to his fans as “pretentious fat lesbians.”
Rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, a major driver of anthropogenic climate change, also lead to reduced nutrition levels in rice.
Your bagged salads or lettuces may, on rare occasions, also include reptiles or amphibians, alive, dead, or perhaps in pieces.
I was relieved to see my friend Will Leitch had a very positive review of Tarantino’s latest film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
The Hidden Brain podcast had an episode on vaccine refusal and other kinds of denialism called Facts Aren’t Enough.
Renegade Games announced an upcoming title based on Katie O’Neill’s graphic novel The Aquicorn Cove. It’s a cooperative title listed for ages 10+, although the book is aimed at readers aged 7 and up.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, climate change, harvard, links, mississippi, nutrition, racism

→ July 13, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/13/19.

I had two ESPN+ pieces this week: my midseason ranking of the top 50 prospects in baseball and my Futures Game wrapup. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I’d planned to send a newsletter out yesterday but I’m so backed up on life things from being sick for ten days (I’m recovered now, just dealing with a mild cough). I’m going to try to do that in the next few days, though, and you can still sign up here.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Author David Epstein argues for generalization, not specialization, against the current trope that experts in any endeavor need 10,000 hours of experience or practice to reach that level of competence. This is good for me as I do not have the discipline or attention span to do anything for 10,000 hours other than sleep.
The BBC looks at how NBA star Giannis Antetokounmpo went from a stateless migrant to a Greek icon, including the racism he faced growing up and even after he was drafted by the Bucks, and how he’s helped ease the path for migrant children born and educated in Greece.
The Washington Post dives into how Sandy Hook parents are fighting back against hoaxers who claim the massacre was faked.
The Seth Rich murder conspiracy theory, widely pushed by Fox News personalities, was in fact a hoax planted by Russian intelligence, according to an investigative report from Yahoo News.
The Huffington Post reports that “progressive” baby boomers are fighting affordable housing projects in cities, a rather blatant “not in my backyard” mentality that masks both self-interest (preserving artificially high real estate values) and racism: Just look at the photo of Orange County, California residents fighting the placement a sober living facility.
Justin Gest, an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at George Mason, proposes an evidence-based overhaul of immigration policy, one that considers factors both economic and humanitarian.
Biotech executive Michael Becker is dying of neck cancer at age 49, and is using his remaining time to urge parents to get their teenagers vaccinated against HPV. While HPV causes nearly all cervical cancers, it’s also responsible for many other cancers, including more than 70% of oropharyngeal cancers in the United States.
ICE has just opened three new migrant detention centers, flouting limits placed by Congress in February. They’re run by private prison companies, who, of course, profit the more we lock people up in their facilities.
“Healing crystals” are pseudoscientific bullshit. They’re also the new “blood diamonds,” often mined in war-torn areas or mined by children as young as seven.
Harvard just suspended economist Roland Fryer for two years and closed his lab in response to sexual harassment claims.
The Miami-Herald‘s Julie K. Brown, whose investigative reporting helped lead to the re-arrest of alleged child rapist & human trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and resignation of Alex Acosta from the Cabinet, writes that more than a dozen additional victims of Epstein have come forward since his latest arrest.
Mashable tries to explain the cult of Wawa. I don’t think they really get at just how much people in the mid-Atlantic love the chain of convenience stores, including their coffee and sandwiches.
Yet another new tick-borne disease, the Bourbon virus, has shown up in the United States, thanks to climate change and global travel.
Virginia state Senator Amanda Chase (guess) said in a comment on her office’s Facebook page that rape victims were naïve and unprepared. She’s only barely backed off of the comments since then, using them instead to justify carrying a firearm in public.
Veterans’ rights activist Paul Rieckhoff, himself a veteran of the Iraq War, posted an excellent tweet thread about the invective and outright racism hurled at Kamala Harris, which came his way after he said he agreed with Harris’s statements on Trump’s ridiculous July 4th display. He singles out Laura Ingraham for her role in fomenting the racist and misogynist commentary.
An extreme right-wing gubernatorial candidate in Mississippi denied a woman reporter access to his campaign because of her gender, and then played white nationalist bingo on Twitter to defend himself, citing the “liberal left,” “socialism,” and “putting men in women’s bathrooms.” I think the answer is simple: don’t cover him. He just played the media and got exactly what he wanted: free coverage of his theocratic worldview.
The Kingston Whig-Standard posted the first of a three-part series on the impending global water crisis. The BBC’s The Inquiry podcast looked at the same topic through the lens of the water shortage happening now in Chennai, a city that relies on monsoon rains for its water supply.
A Nebraska midwife faces homicide charges after delivering a baby who died two days later. The midwife actually did not have a certification to practice as one, and even if she had, state law prevents midwives from delivering babies at home. The newborn in this case was born breech and died from oxygen deprivation during the delivery. Hospitals seem like good places for births, but that’s just me.
Remember how the GOP tax bill was supposed to boost our economy? The deficit just jumped 23% in the last year even as GDP growth is slowing.
This tweet is from October but rather nicely sums up conservatives’ claims of “censorship” on social media.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: climate change, harvard, hoaxes, links, longreads, migrant crisis, pseudoscience, the swamp, vaccines, water

→ July 6, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/6/19.

My one ESPN+ post this week looked at a few of the top names in the July 2nd market, including Jasson Dominguez (Yankees) and Robert Puason (A’s). I also co-hosted the Baseball Tonight podcast twice this week, on Monday with guests Eric Karabell and Eric Longenhagen, and on Tuesday with guests Dr. Meredith Wills and Sarah Langs.

My latest board game review for Paste covers Bosk, a beautiful game that unfortunately is very slow to play, with needlessly complicated scoring.

You can get more of my rants and raves – mostly rants – if you sign up for my free email newsletter, which appears two to four times a month, or whenever my spirit guide tells me what to say.

I’ll be appearing in Hudson, Ohio, at the Hudson Library and Historical Society this Monday evening, July 8th, at 7 pm, talking about baseball and other topics, then signing copies of Smart Baseball. I’ll also be at the Futures Game at Jacobs Field (yes, I know, I’m still calling it the Jake) on Sunday evening, and will tweet about a meetup with fans before first pitch.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: WIRED tells the harrowing story of a cyberstalker in New Hampshire who was extorting teenaged girls for nude photos, and the effort to find and arrest him. (They did.)
The Washington Post looks at how easily cancer patients can find bogus and even dangerous “treatments” online, including bullshit cures like baking soda and an alkaline diet.
News coverage of a spate of “suspicious” deaths of U.S. tourists in the Dominican Republic is a textbook case of base-rate neglect, with journalists and members of Congress alike reacting to a story that isn’t there.
Microsoft shut down its electronic book store – store of electronic books? – which serves as a reminder that we don’t own the digital content for which we’ve paid. It would be more accurate to say you’re leasing it, under the terms of the agreements you’ve made (when you clicked Agree) with the iTunes store or amazon or other purveyors.
My alma mater’s Kennedy School of Government keeps putting its foot in it with some of the invitations they’ve offered to former government officials, but former Michigan Governor Rick Snyder bailed them out by withdrawing from a one-year fellowship after criticism of the appointment. Snyder was governor during the period when the city of Flint experienced the still-ongoing crisis in its water supply. I suppose the folks at the Kennedy School don’t have Google.
Arizona Governor Doug Ducey filled his diaper over Nike’s decision, threatening to pull some state funding for a new Nike facility in Goodyear, but his tweets were probably a meaningless attempt to score political points, playing to his base and trying to raise his national profile.
White Sox pitcher and first-time All-Star Lucas Giolito spoke to the Chicago Sun-Times about his progressive views on immigration.
Prof. Noam Chomsky spoke to Truthout about Trump’s efforts to create an alliance of far-right leaders around the world, although I wonder if this is the efforts of the people below Trump.
Former U.S. Deputy Attorney General Donald Ayer, who served under George H.W. Bush, writes in The Atlantic about the dangerous plan of current AG Bill Barr to give the President unchecked power.
Also in The Atlantic, a pediatrician who examined children at a Border Control camp found evidence of malnutrition, infections, and psychological trauma. We should be far more outraged as a society than we actually are.
Two New Jersey judges ruled for leniency for privileged teenaged boys accused of rape, although both rulings were overturned or revised by higher courts.
The Tennessee Smokies, the double-A affiliate of the Chicago Cubs, tweeted and then deleted a series of pictures mocking Colin Kaepernick over his counsel to Nike to recall shoes with the Betsy Ross United States flag on them. It was a particularly tone deaf tweet, given the presence of multiple players of color on their roster.
I rather enjoyed WNBA star Sue Bird’s rant on the Players’ Tribune, titled So the President F*cking Hates My Girlfriend. (Her girlfriend is USWNT star Megan Rapinoe.)
I’ve been adopted into Phish phandom, and just learned about the clever, elaborate hoax the band pulled around its Halloween 2018 concert.
Board game news: Plan B Games announced pre-orders for Century Eastern Mountains, a special edition of Century Eastern Wonders with a new theme and artwork to dovetail with their Century Spice Road Golem Edition.
A reprint of Die Macher, the first game ever entered into the BoardGameGeek database, is about to wrap up a run on Kickstarter.
Tweet of the week: I feel like everyone should watch this clip from Love Has No Labels, in which John Cena shares some thoughts on what it means to be American.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, harvard, links, longreads, new jersey, pseudoscience

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