harvard — Page 2

→ 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

→ June 22, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/21/19.

No new ESPN+ content this week, although that will change next week after I get to a few more minor league games. I did hold a Klawchat on Friday.

On the board game front, I had two pieces up at Paste this week. One is a straight review of Corinth, a new roll-and-write game from Days of Wonder that is sort of Yspahan: the Dice Game, but with a new theme and much altered rules. The other recaps the day and a half I spent at the Origins Game Fair, running through all the new games I saw or played.

On July 8th, the night after the Futures Game, I’ll be at the Hudson Library and Historical Society in Hudson, Ohio, talking baseball, taking questions, and signing copies of my book Smart Baseball.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Atlantic‘s William Langewiesche examines the unsolved disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370, and the uncomfortable but almost certain conclusion of who was responsible. EDIT: A rejoinder from the Daily Beast.
E. Jean Carroll says Donald Trump raped her in 1996. The party of family values will ignore her.
Conditions at the contractors’ offices where Facebook moderators work are dismal. I have become almost totally convinced that user-generated content sites can’t police themselves. People will say and post the worst things, but the sites have little incentive to remove anything that isn’t outright illegal, and the sheer volume of bad content (and reports) makes policing it infeasible.
A mapping error gave Under Armour billionaire Kevin Plank a huge tax break, with a boost from Maryland Governor Larry Hogan (R).
Noted left-wing publication (checks notes) Scientific American ran an editorial demanding that transphobes stop using phony science to defend their deviant beliefs. Sex and gender aren’t binary, scientists have known this for at least a half-century, and yet we still have troglodytes trying to uphold the two-bathroom paradigm.
A couple of Harvard alums have started a firm dedicated to growing high-quality shiitake mushrooms, viewing them as a sustainable, more healthful alternative to meat. I guess it’s unsurprising, but I never considered how the growth medium would affect the flavor and nutrition of mushrooms, just as soil quality affects that of vegetables.
Islanders goalie Robin Lehner won the Bill Masterson Trophy for his public discussion of his bipolar disorder and substance abuse.
Writing for Forbes, Bruce Y. Lee asks why actress Jessica Biel, who has no medical background, is fighting a pro-vaccination law that will crack down on doctors who give out bogus medical exemptions to existing vaccination mandates.
You know, like California Dr. Bob Sears, who is accused of giving out bogus medical exemptions while already on probation for giving out bogus medical exemptions. He should lose his medical license, permanently. He should probably be in jail.
New York millionaires Bernand and Lisa Selz are funding the anti-vaccine movement, donating over $3 million to groups that fight vaccination laws and spread misinformation about vaccines. I hope other outfits that have taken donations from the Selzes, like the Brooklyn Museum and the Frick Collection, turn them away.
An adult with autism, writing only as Max, explains how the anti-vaccine movement offends him and others with autism spectrum disorders.
The anti-vaccine movement is also fueled by Russian operations on social media, according to former DHS official and current Kennedy School lecturer Juliette Kayyem, speaking in this Q&A on the current measles outbreak and anti-vaccine sentiment.
An LA police officer, while off duty, used his service weapon to shoot a developmentally disabled, non-verbal man who pushed him in a local Costco, killing the man and hitting both the man’s parents, with the mother still in a coma.
The University of Michigan’s baseball team is headed to the CWS finals; Tony Paul wrote about Wolverine player Joe Donovan and his late brother, Charlie, who was also a Michigan recruit but died before reaching Ann Arbor.
Martin Feldstein, one-time chair of the President’s Council of Economics Advisers – Reagan fired him for opposing the supply-side strategy of deficit spending – and my Economics 10 professor at you-know-where died last week at age 79. There’s really no party or even subgroup of either party pushing for the policies he espoused.
Tens of thousands of Indian villages are facing water shortages, with no end in sight. Climate change and overpopulation are leading us down a death spiral when it comes to the global supply of clean water.
I’ve included songs from YONAKA on multiple playlists the last two years, including three songs on my top 100s of 2017/2018; NME profiled the band and their debut album’s focus on toxic masculinity and mental health topics.
This is an older post but I found it this week while googling something unrelated: a former member of the extremist Christian sect that also counts the Duggars as members writes of growing up “Quiverfull” and escaping the cult.
Speaking of cults, the folks proselytizing about the evils of wheat – not celiacs, mind you, but people who avoid wheat by choice – will often claim modern wheat varieties are worse for the environment, but a new study debunks that myth, showing that modern wheat requires less everything, including fertilizers, water, and fungicides.
In Alaba … no, wait, this time it’s Indiana, where the school district did the right thing but one teacher couldn’t handle it. An Indiana teacher resigned rather than accept a school policy to refer to trans students by their desired names and pronouns, but now he’s suing for his job back, backed by the Alliance Defending Freedom, a hate group that wants to criminalize homosexuality and transgenderism.
The New York Times took a break from profiling Trump supporters to … actually, to profile more Trump supporters, but this time it’s to shine a light on racist whites in Minnesota, angry at Somali refugees for being black, Muslim, and nearby.
Ryan Thomore writes for Cubs Insider about how Pride Days at the ballpark matter to LGBTQ+ fans.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alternative, baseball, food science, harvard, lgbt rights, links, longreads, minnesota, racism, stick to baseball, vaccines, water crisis

→ May 18, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/17/19.

For ESPN+ subscribers this week, my look back at the 2009 draft went up, with a redraft of the first round and a look at the first-round misses. I also wrote a scouting post on some Orioles, Royals, Yankees, and Blue Jays prospects, including the top prospect in each of the first three organizations coming into the year. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Guardian looks at the ongoing and now renewed investigation into the assassination of Olof Palme, the Swedish Prime Minister who was shot and killed on a Stockholm street in 1986.
The New Yorker goes deep on the question of land ownership and redistribution currently roiling South Africa, which has some of the greatest economic inequality in the world.
Also from the Guardian‘s Long read program, why depression is not merely a disease of affluent countries, and how developing nations need more resources to focus on citizens’ mental health.
New York looks at how the wildfire season in California has become unending thanks to climate change.
Dr. James Hamblin explains the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, and why it doesn’t mean vaccines are unsafe, at The Atlantic. The VICP is a favorite talking point of anti-vaxxers, who refuse to understand how the program works or that it exists because litigious parents nearly drove vaccine manufacturers out of the market.
Alabama’s new abortion ban is akin to torture, mimicking a popular war crime we’ve seen recently in Bosnia and the Congo. I said on Thursday that I will not cover the SEC tournament this year or in the near future because of this law.
Austin, Fort Worth, and Houston are all at risk of measles outbreaks thanks to the hard work of anti-vaxxers (and their friends in the extreme religious right, like state Rep. Jonathan Stickland).
Members of a closer anti-vaxxer group on Facebook are calling for the violent overthrow of the U.S. government in response to rational, science-based laws that make it harder for parents to refuse to vaccinate their school-aged children.
Former evangelical Christian Sara Olson writes of learning about science after growing up in a denialist household.
Truthdig examines how an innocuous BBC interview exposed the vacuous nature of Ben Shapiro, who accused the conservative host of being a bias left-winger before abruptly ending the interview.
A sci-fi author showed how not to deal with someone about to publish a negative review of your book.
The recent imbroglio at my alma mater over a law professor being removed from his post as Winthrop House faculty dean involves far more serious charges than the Harvey Weinstein narrative implies. Prof. Ronald Sullivan joined the legal defense team for Weinstein, which did spur some outrage by students, but his removal comes after a long series of allegations of inappropriate behavior on his part as head of the upper-class student house.
A white Tennessee pastor raped his adoptive daughter for several years, but a white male judge sentenced him to just twelve years, rather than the 72 years prosecutors sought – even though the now-convicted rapist continues to deny guilt in the face of her allegations and DNA evidence.
San Francisco pie shop Mission Pie has refused to do business with food delivery services over their high surcharges, which they would have to subsidize by raising prices for customers dining in-store.
Virginia Del. Danica Roem (D) has ended up in the spotlight after her surprise win in 2018, and she’s using it to try to help other Democrats across the state get elected.
Anti-gay, anti-Semitic, totally American preacher Steven Anderson was denied entry to Ireland under a previously-unused immigration statute, with the Irish Minister for Justice citing “the interests of public policy.”
Israel’s ruling party is in turmoil over claims Prime Minister Netanyahu is trying to reduce their Supreme Court’s power to protect himself against three ongoing corruption cases.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who churns out policy proposal after policy proposal, has also proposed a 2% wealth tax above $50 million and an additional 1% on wealth over $1 billion. If enacted, it will likely be challenged as unconstitutional, and the outcome of such a case is an open question.
Monsanto has now lost three straight jury trials over glyphosate (the main ingredient in Roundup) despite a lack of any scientific evidence that the chemical is harmful to humans; David Bernstain of the Volokh Conspiracy (at Reason) explains why these verdicts are so outrageous.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: climate change, gilead, harvard, links, longreads, mental health, science, stick to baseball, sweden, texas

→ April 21, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/21/18.

My one Insider post from this week is my ranking of the top 50 draft prospects for this June’s MLB draft, a strong year without a lot of clarity up top after #1 overall prospect Casey Mize.

Here on the dish, I ranked all 90 Pulitzer Prize winners in the Fiction/Novel category in advance of Monday’s announcement of this year’s winners. I’ve now read the newest entry, Less, and will update the ranking next week.

I have a new event to announce: on July 14th, the day before this year’s MLB Futures Game, I’ll be speaking at Politics & Prose, a Washington, DC, independent bookstore that is legendary for its author appearances. I’ll be signing copies of Smart Baseball, which is now out in paperback.

And now, the links…

SI‘s Greg Bishop tracked down former NFL QB Jake Locker, who opens up about why he retired in 2015. Locker was a first-round talent in baseball, too, but he says in this piece he never had the same passion for it that he had for football.
Liberty University, run by extreme right-wing conservative Jerry Falwell, Jr., has built a $1 billion empire by aggressively recruiting students for its online degree programs, according to this expose from ProPublica and the NY Times.
ProPublica also released a long investigative piece on how waste from burning coal has contaminated drinking water in nearby communities. The current Administration is pushing increased reliance on coal and rolling back environmental regulations on its use.
Lindsay Gibbs looks at the continuing institutional failures at Michigan State in the wake of the school’s two-decade refusal to consider complaints about Larry Nassar’s sexual abuse of patients on campus. MSU continues to deny any wrongdoing in the mishandling (or non-handling) of investigations into Nassar, even as one of his victims revealed that now interim MSU President John Engler tried to bribe her into staying silent.
New York ran a very long Q&A with many architects of the modern Internet, who then “apologize” for the way the stuff they built has been used to ruin everything.
Gizmodo’s John Cook argues that journalists should not be cheering the Sean Hannity-Michael Cohen revelation, as it’s deleterious to the operation of the free press. Hannity, meanwhile, has been busy promoting a company in which he holds an ownership stake, disguised by the use of a shell company, and may have violated federal securities laws.
Twitter accounts of questionable origin are pushing fake conspiracy theories around Syria, such as claiming the Assad regime didn’t use chemical weapons on its own people and calling it a ‘false flag’ operation.
Several Sandy Hook parents are suing Alex Jones & InfoWars for defamation in response to his repeated claims that the massacre was staged.
Surprising nobody, FiveThirtyEight reported that umpire calls in extra innings are biased towards ending the games. I wouldn’t really mind this if, say, the strike zone changed equally for both teams, but that doesn’t appear to be the case.
The Marlins, having already scammed Florida taxpayers for a new stadium, are now trying to dodge a lawsuit from the state over profits from the recent sale of the team, are claiming they’re actually based in the British Virgin Islands … but Marlins Man found their ‘office’ there is just a PO box.
Prince’s estate released an early recording of his song “Nothing Compares 2 U,”, which, of course, later became a global hit for Sinead O’Connor.
Commencement Day speakers at my alma mater have tended toward the famous and dreary, but this year’s class will get a treat: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Nigerian author of several novels, including the superb Half of a Yellow Sun.
Grand Forks, North Dakota, may be about to elect a white supremacist to its school board. Be better, North Dakota.
Chef and charcutier Matt Hinckley writes for Food & Wine about getting sober after years of drinking, which he had justified as part of his job working in busy restaurant kitchens and brewing/distilling at home.
A junk study in a predatory journal pushes, again, the bullshit claim that vaccines cause autism, as Skeptical Raptor breaks down on his site.
The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled unconstitutional an Indiana law restricting abortion rights. The law would have prohibited abortions based on potential disabilities in the fetus – so, if genetic testing found that the fetus had Tay-Sachs disorder, the woman would not have been able to abort the pregnancy even though infantile Tay-Sachs kills most victims before age 4.
Wisconsin’s Attorney General told a radio host last week that Trump carried the state because of its voter ID law, which primarily disenfranchised voters in heavily Democratic areas.
Eagle-Gryphon announced a Kickstarter for Fleet! The Dice Game, a spinoff of their popular 2012 game Fleet! (which I have not played)

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, football, harvard, links, stick to baseball, vaccines, voter suppression

→ March 24, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/24/18.

My column identifying some potential breakout players for 2018 is up for Insiders. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Reiner Knizia’s Sakura, a light, quick-playing game where players all chase the lead ’emperor’ token, but where you can move your opponents as well and try to push them into the emperor, costing them points and sending them to the back of the queue.

Smart Baseball is out in paperback! U.S. Residents can enter a sweepstakes from HarperCollins to win a copy of the book and a phone call with me.

And now, the links…

Former Utah State basketball player Jalen Moore explains in an essay on the Players’ Tribune why he walked away from the NBA to deal with what sounds like crippling panic disorder.
Writing for the New Yorker, Andrew Marantz went inside to see how Reddit is coping with trolls, abuse, and harassment while also considering the need to allow users to express themselves (or else they might not have a business). My personal experiences on Reddit have been largely negative, so while I have an account there, I rarely even open the site.
The Guardian looks at “joint enterprise” laws in the U.K., which led to eleven people earning jail sentences for one murder, even though only one of the eleven actually participated in the killing. The piece argues that the laws’ application particularly targets young black men.
Mari Uyehara writes for GQ about the ‘free speech’ grifters decrying so-called “PC culture” on campuses.
This longread on a snake-oil saleswoman pushing fermented cabbage juice belongs in an April Fool’s joke post.
Here’s an easy tip on how to turn off “platform sharing” on Facebook, now that we all have some evidence that Facebook never bothered to protect users’ data from illicit use.
Brian Wansink, the Cornell food “scientist” who has been repeatedly accused of p-hacking and otherwise manipulating data to produce misleading reports and headlines, appears to have fraudulently accused Joy of Cooking of promoting unhealthy eating.
FEMA ignored requests for fuel from Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands after Hurricanes Irma and Maria, so thousands of tons of food went to waste for lack of refrigeration.
The New York Times sent travel writers to five islands devastated by the pair of hurricanes to see how their tourism industries have rebounded, if at all. Most hotels and restaurants have yet to reopen on St. John, St. Martin, and other islands that were hit by both storms.
The newest nominee to lead the Centers for Disease Control is a virologist with a long track record of research into HIV and AIDS … and accusations of scientific misconduct as well as support for abstinence-only sex education, writes Ed Yong for the Atlantic. Robert Redfield also has virtually no public health experience, unprecedented for a CDC director.
The San Luis Obispo Tribune investigates the death in police custody of a schizophrenic man who was restrained, tortured, and who then died while officers watched. An FBI investigation appears to be ongoing.
Will Leitch looks back at baseball’s “tepid” offseason for New York and asks if we’re leaded for labor strife after 2021.
Former Congressman Joe Walsh, now a conservative talk radio host/provocateur, has become one of Trump’s most vocal critics from the hard right. Walsh has defended the Mueller investigation, argued against selling the 2017 tax bill to voters (saying it won’t have any impact for most people), and criticized Trump’s attacks on the press.
Pennsylvania Republicans are trying to impeach the state’s Supreme Court in retaliation for the latter’s ruling against the GOP’s gerrymandering the state’s Congressional districts. I feel like PA residents should send diapers to these clowns’ offices. Pennsylvania had repeatedly shown up in analyses of the most gerrymandered states, as the Republican Party there split up the heavily Democratic southeastern portion of the state to tilt those seats to themselves.
Michigan State Senator and now Republican gubernatorial candidate Patrick Corbeck is a pseudoscience-spouting loon, a creationist anti-vaxxer who is now touting baseless conspiracy theories about electromagnetic radiation.
Harvard Professor Jorge Dominguez, accused by ten women of sexual harassment who also say the school knew about Dominguez’s transgressions and did little or nothing, is retiring, although the investigation continues. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
An Alabama sheriff *legally* siphoned off $750,000 in public money meant to feed prisoners in his jurisdiction and used it to buy a beach house – and then he retaliated against the source behind a local newspaper’s investigation. Maybe this is just me, but I think any locale where this is legal and supported would qualify as a “shithole.”
I’ve criticized Arizona’s government many times for its general lack of urgency on issues related to the environment, including water usage and climate change, but the state’s utility regulatory commission did something very good, demanding that utility APS stop new natural gas projects and boost renewable energy sources. The commission, which comprises five Republicans, has long been a mere rubber-stamp group for the companies it regulates. The state is now in a drought that has been going on since 1996.
France is experiencing an uptick in measles again, yet more damage wrought by Andrew Wakefield’s debunked, fraudulent paper and the various idiots who still think vaccines cause autism. France made MMR vaccination for infants mandatory as of January 1st, so let’s hope that puts an end to this outbreak.
The House passed “right to try” legislation this week, even though it’s not going to help anyone and may just spread false hope while reducing patient access to these drugs through existing, more realistic programs.
The open-access journal Scientific Reports, published by the same group behind Nature, finally retracted a paper nearly two years after they learned parts of it were plagiarized — and after a dozen of its board members resigned in protest that it wasn’t retracted a year ago.
Biohacking is bullshit and probably dangerous too.
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker lost a lawsuit over his refusal to call special elections to fill vacated legislature seats in his state, a policy that would have left some residents without representation in at least one body for over a year.
Georgia Republicans are pushing a bill to restrict voting hours in heavily Democratic Atlanta. I assume next they’ll introduce literacy tests and a poll tax.
Opponents of abortion rights like to claim that the procedure is dangerous so they can pass laws that require doctors who provide abortions to have admitting privileges at a hospital or even to perform the procedures at hospitals or surgical centers. Five states require doctors to contradict known science and tell women there’s a link between breast cancer and abortions. (There isn’t, in case that wasn’t clear.) A new study finds that abortion in the United States is safe, which underscores that these laws are about religion, not about protecting women.
I just discovered that Elena Ferrante, the pseudonymous Italian author behind the bestselling Neapolitan Quartet, writes a weekly column for the Guardian. Her latest entry argues that everything in women’s lives has been “codified by male needs.”
No, there was not a Ku Klux Klan rally at the 1924 Democratic Convention. That didn’t stop people from spreading the lie on social media – or Breitbart from repeating it.
Gateway Pundit, another far-right blog – with White House press credentials – repeated a different lie, this one libeling the Democratic Sheriff Scott Israel of Broward County after the Parkland massacre.
If you own a VR device like Oculus Rift, you can now play the board game Catan on the platform. I tried a beta version back in November and it was novel, but still the same game.
Please enjoy this delightful Miyazaki-inspired tourism ad for the lovely state of Oregon:

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anxiety, arizona, baseball, guns, harvard, links, longreads, pseudoscience, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ March 3, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/3/18.

I’ve had one Insider post in the last week, this one on the MLB Draft, looking at Florida starters Brady Singer and Jackson Kowar, as well as several other prospects from the Gators and the Miami Hurricanes. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Chris Crawford and I did an impromptu podcast previewing Sunday night’s Oscars, looking at about a dozen categories with our picks of who should win and our very-much-outsider guesses on who will win. It looks like a few hundred of you have already indulged us by listening and we both appreciate it.

Smart Baseball drops in paperback in just ten days! Buy copies or see more details on HarperCollins’ site.

And now, the links…

Long reads first: Harvard blew off sexual harassment charges against a notable professor in 1982, allowing him to remain on faculty to this day and apparently discouraging other women from coming forward. They know now, but haven’t even responded to this article that I can see.
The Guardian looks at the link between processed meats and cancer that appears to come from the use of nitrates and nitrites in curing, which the author argues is about color and flavor rather than safety.
I’m surprised anyone takes Turning Point USA, a college conservative front group for some major right-wing donors, seriously, but it seems that it took a man in a diaper to alert anyone to the group’s bizarre and unpopular stances.
The Washington Post looks at the problems that arise from testing huge backlogs of rape kits, including widespread misunderstandings of what law enforcement must do in such cases.
The Huffington Post has the scoop on how the New York Times’ editorial page is justifying itself to the rest of the staff. This piece just reinforced my decision to cancel my digital subscription.
Alex Pareene wrote more about this for Splinter, saying that Bennet lacks an important qualification for his job as the Times‘ editorial page head: He can’t seem to understand readers’ reactions to the columns he runs.
Matt Martin, who served as an infantryman in Afghanistan, argues eloquently that arming teachers is insane. I thoroughly agree and would not want my daughter in a school with weapons already present. The hilarious idea of installing metal detectors at school entrances and then putting weapons INSIDE the building can’t make sense to anyone but the manufacturers of guns and metal detectors.
Vox looks at the lack of evidence or research on emotional support animals.
How did Melanie Trump land an EB-1, informally called the “Einstein visa,” to stay in the US back in 2001? (My favorite conservabot response to this is “she speaks five languages!” Honey, in Europe, they call that “average.”)
Alt-right news outlets ran with the claim that CNN “scripted” questions in its town hall show on gun control after one of the kids involved claimed they rejected his question. He was lying, of course, but I haven’t seen many corrections from those same publications.
The Dallas Observer covers Rangers broadcaster CJ Nitkowski’s latest meltdown, including his denial that he knew he was following a white supremacist group & liking their tweets. By siding with Nitkowski, the Rangers and their TV partner Fox Sports Southwest have made their preferences quite clear.
Several “Instagram stars” have taken substantial steps to hide their connection to noted racist Pamela Geller, whose comments have been labeled “hate speech” by the Southern Poverty Law Center. They’ve already lost a TV show on Verizon’s Oath channel, as a result of this piece and the discovery of anti-Islamic tweets they’d posted years ago. My main question: What on earth makes someone who just posts other people’s content an “Instagram star?”
Max Boot, now a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, decries the decline in the conservative movement from intellectual roots to “owning the libs.”
Researchers believe they’ve discovered the pathogen responsible for acute flaccid myelitis, which has caused hundreds of cases of polio-like paralysis in the last few years.
A new book details how yeast made modern civilization possible, even in foods and drinks you don’t associate with the fungi, like chocolate and coffee.
Two posts to prep you for Sunday night’s Academy Awards ceremony: a list of important “firsts” among this year’s nominations, and how a rule change may have screwed independent animated films – giving Boss Baby a nod over better but less-known features.
I don’t think I’ve ever linked to an advice column before, but this answer on how to deal with a classmate who won’t stop touching you (in a non-sexual but still non-consensual way) is excellent, and I think can be generalized to a lot of situations where someone is doing something that makes you uncomfortable.
Please enjoy this too-perfect mashup of Ratt’s Round and Round with Marvin Gaye’s I Heard It Through the Grapevine.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: bacon, food safety, food science, guns, harvard, links, science, stick to baseball

→ November 18, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/17/17.

I had one Insider column this week, on Friday, looking at a few free agents who might sort of possibly perhaps be bargains this offseason. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday; that will be the last chat until after Thanksgiving.

If you’re at PAX Unplugged in Philly this weekend and have a copy of Smart Baseball, I’ll be signing on Saturday afternoon at 3:30 pm.

Feel free to sign up for my free email newsletter, which I send out … I guess whenever I feel like it. I aim for once a week, although I’ve gone as long as two weeks between issues when I haven’t had much to say. You can see past issues at that link.

And now, the links…

Longreads: The Daily Beast on the murder of a Navy SEAL by two of his comrades in Mali after the victim realized his eventual killers were stealing cash.
I didn’t realize that Second Life still exists, with a small but loyal user base. I tried it once for maybe an hour and gave up. I found it both annoying and hard to use.
Texas Monthly profiles Tania Joya, the ex-wife of a Texas man who became a Daesh fighter and propagandist. She’s now back in the US after a hellish experience in Syria with her then husband and their three kids.
WIRED examines a long-running case of digital harassment that nearly ruined the victim’s life and still hasn’t quite ended despite a seven-figure civil judgment.
Also from the Atlantic, a consistent producer of great longreads, the search for the origins of racist troll Andrew Anglin, who runs a popular neo-Nazi website and actively encourages the doxing and threatening of his critics.
Michael Lewis looks at Trump’s dismantling of the USDA from the inside in a long piece for Vanity Fair. The process here is inexcusable, but the USDA has not been very good at many of its responsibilities, including policing safety in our food supply.
A former lobbyist for the pesticide industry is at the Department of Agriculture and fighting to deregulate these chemicals, granting wide and possibly unethical access to her former colleagues on the industry side. It may not be safe to go back in the water.
Author Rebecca Traister says we are all implicated in the current reckoning on sexual abusers, observing how we still worry for the fates of the men accused more than the women they victimized.
In my review of City of Ghosts, I mentioned the liberation of Raqqa last month. Well, it turns out the “liberation” involved buying off Daesh fighters, bribing them and letting them leave the city safely.
The New Yorker looks at the bullying tactics behind the shutdown of DNAinfo and Gothamist by Joe Ricketts, who opposed the writers’ desire to unionize.
The Colombian soda industry, with help from the country’s government, has silenced a consumer group that was raising awareness of obesity, fighting for a tax on the sodas and running ads linking them to obesity. I am not a fan of sugar taxes, but this is beyond heavyhanded for a country that is trying to present itself to the world as a functioning, modern democracy.
The Kansas City Star has been doing important investigative work on malfeasance in Governor Brownback’s administration, with this latest piece asking why the government is blocking even basic transparency with constituents. There’s no good reason for any government to hide this kind of information from voters. There are many bad ones.
American oil and gas companies no longer have to disclose how much money they’ve given to foreign governments, opening the door to unfettered, unreported bribery.
Actress Mara Wilson, who played the title character in Matilda, wrote about how society sexualizes young girls, as she found out as a prepubescent movie star.
With all due respect to Blake Shelton, Shepherd Smith became the sexiest man alive this week.
I included a post last week about disturbing Youtube videos aimed at kids; the site responded quickly and plans to age-restrict such content.
There’s a beautiful minor-league ballpark in Camden, New Jersey, just over the bridge from Philly, without a tenant, and it might be torn down. NJ.com looks at how the $35 million taxpayer expense has gone for naught.
Bruce Arthur wrote about how Jays fans need to “get over” the loss of Alex Anthopoulos, who exit from Toronto was mishandled by the team’s ownership.
The faculty at my alma mater rejected a motion that would have allowed single-gender social groups at the school. Harvard does not have fraternities and sororities, but has long-standing, off-campus “finals clubs” that serve a similar purpose. (I was not a member of one and barely even saw evidence of their existence while there.)
Astronomers found a planet that might be suitable for life just 11 light-years away from us. The EPA responded by issuing blanket permits for drilling and mining for the new body.
The abusive parents in Canada who were convicted of failing to get medical help when their toddler had meningitis – which killed him – still don’t get it and are ranting about the justice system. They’re anti-vax, anti-science people who are now expecting another child whom they won’t vaccinate or provide with modern medicine.
A stem-cell researcher hopes to run against Republican Dana Rohrabacher for California’s 48th Congressional district.
A Trump judicial nominee wrote about politics on a sports site and didn’t disclose it. That’s the same guy I mentioned last week, whom the ABA rated “not qualified” for the bench.
I saved a slew of links on the Alabama special election, but it’s just been so well-covered elsewhere that I’ll only include two here: conservative columnist George Will endorses Doug Jones and calls Roy Moore “an embarrassment,” and David French, also a conservative, explains why “due process” is not a reasonable standard when considering candidates. Also, there’s a site that shows which politicians have supported, renounced, or waffled on Moore since the revelations of his sexual assaults against young women appeared.
And by the way, Al Franken groped a woman and otherwise forced his attentions on her in 2006, and he should resign.
The Atlantic also published an expose on the correspondence between Donald Trump, Jr., and Wikileaks during the 2016 campaign.
FEMA contracted with a tiny Georgia company to send “meals” of junk food to hurricane victims in Puerto Rico.
The FDA issued a warning about herbal supplement kratom, which is used as a pain treatment and as a possible way to fight opiate addiction, but which is unregulated and can thus be laced or tainted with unlisted, toxic ingredients.
TLC has given a forum to a quack healer who claims he can cure infections and chronic diseases through energy healing.
I’ve never been a Brand New fan, but I know many of you are; their lead singer stands accused of inappropriate contact with minors, including soliciting nudes.
Ars Technica looks at some of the hottest new games from Essen SPIEL 2017, the world’s biggest boardgame convention, with over 1000 new titles introduced there.
Handelabra Games is currently running a Kickstarter for a Steam adaptation of One Deck Dungeon.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alabama, astronomy, baseball, harvard, links, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

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