health — Page 2

→ September 23, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/23/23.

For subscribers to The Athletic, I posted my annual Minor League Player of the Year column this week, as well as my last regular-season scouting notebook of 2023, covering prospects I saw from the Red Sox, Orioles, and Nationals. I’ll head to Arizona in October for Fall League coverage, of course. My podcast will be back next week and I’ve already filed my next review for Paste.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas didn’t just take a bunch of free trips from billionaire Harlan Crow; he also attended donor parties hosted by the billionaire Koch brothers, as reported here by ProPublica.
The New York Times reports on child labor at Perdue and Tyson chicken-processing plants, where immigrant kids are exploited by factory officials willing to look the other way and who claim ignorance when these children are seriously injured on the job. The Department of Labor only investigates when they receive a tip, and fines top out at $15,000.
Penn Medicine hired a new facilities director for its hospital without checking his background, which included a five-year federal prison sentence for wire fraud and misuse of a social security number. Larry Butler was fired four days into his tenure as COO of a hospital in Oregon in 2022, but Penn still hired him in July of 2023, only for him to “resign” four weeks later.
The Indian state of Kerala is experiencing yet another outbreak of the Nipah virus, which causes severe respiratory illnesses in humans and appears to have jumped the species barrier from pigs about 25 years ago. This is the fourth such outbreak in Kerala in the last five years.
Elon Musk’s grandfather was an antisemite and avid supporter of South Africa’s racist apartheid system, according to this lengthy story from The Atlantic, which contradicts Musk’s own mythmaking.
The U.S. media continues to fuck up its coverage of the Presidential race, treating Trump as some sort of entertainment vehicle – as they did in 2015-16 – while playing into dubious narratives around President Biden’s age or his son’s behavior.
The daughter of Dennis Rader, the serial killer who called himself “BTK,” is an adult now and is trying to use her knowledge of her father to help police close more cases.
The Sound of Freedom was a surprise box-office hit this summer and sits in 10^th place this year for U.S. receipts thanks to a broad effort by conservative and Christian groups to sell tickets, but the subject of the film, Tim Ballard, was ousted from his anti-human trafficking organization after an investigation into sexual misconduct, and now the film’s producer also stands accused of sexual assault, in this case of a minor.
The all-Muslim city council in Hamtramck, Michigan, banned the display of any Pride flags on public property during June (Pride Month) this year, after LGBTQ+ groups had supported the Muslim immigrant groups when they arrived in the city. The issue came back up this past week when Mayor Amer Ghalib refused to march near the city’s queer alliance in a Labor Day parade.
South Africa is facing a new, xenophobic movement called Operation Dudula that is targeting foreigners in the country and blaming them for the rise in drug addiction, especially the drug known as nyaope, a form of black tar heroin that sellers claim contains antiviral properties. The group’s beliefs and philosophy seem to mirror those of right-wing, anti-immigrant groups in the U.S. and Europe.
Azerbaijan has reclaimed the majority-Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh after the region’s separatist government, which called itself the Republic of Artsakh, agreed to disarm and to seek reintegration with the surrounding nation. This should end the looming humanitarian crisis in the region but may lead to a large exodus of ethnic Armenians; it also may further reduce the influence of Russia, which had backed Armenia’s interests with military aid, in the Caucasus.
Russell Brand’s agency learned three years ago that a minor accused him of sexual assault, and they ignored her. Tavistock Wood dropped Brand from its roster with the revelations this month that three other women also accuse him of rape or sexual assault, and they’re claiming they knew nothing about it.
Gabrielle Hanson, a Republican and Trump-supporting candidate for Mayor of Franklin, Tennessee, used images of women culled from social media in campaign materials, claiming these women – many of them women of color – were her supporters. The women were actually selected seven years earlier for an ad campaign for the clothing brand The Limited and had posted photos of themselves at a celebratory brunch, which Hanson and her now ex-campaign manager Erin Mazzoni used without their permission. That link has an incredible video where journalist Phil Williams interviews Mazzoni, who sounds, to put it kindly, completely bonkers.
Alabama Republicans continue to fight to preserve their gerrymandered legislative map that suppresses the power of Black voters (who make up 27% of the state’s population), and they’re doing it with the backing of Leonard Leo’s dark-money network. Just this summer, Congressional Republicans blocked a bill that would have required such dark-money groups to come into the light and disclose their donors.
Both The New Yorker and Paste ran stories on The Baseball Project, the fun supergroup with members of R.E.M., Dream Syndicate, and the Minus Five, where all of their songs are about baseball. They’re great live, by the way.
Anti-vaccine misinformation is highly effective: More Oklahoma parents are skipping safe, effective childhood vaccinations against dangerous and incredibly contagious viruses like measles.
Climate change may cause 39 million U.S. homeowners to lose access to home insurance, including many homeowners who don’t accept the reality of climate change and vote for the one party that also denies it.
New York editor Katy Schneider describes “the pandemic skip,” the way we all lost about two years to the pandemic but may not have fully realized or internalized the passage of that time.
A sketchy group calling itself “NY Citizens Audit” has received a cease-and-desist letter from the New York Attorney General’s office, accusing the group of intimidating voters by posing as election officials to knock on doors and accuse people of committing voter fraud.
Australian officials visited D.C. this week to call on the United States to drop its prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing leaked documents, a call echoed here by the Freedom of the Press Foundation because the same overbroad reading of the Espionage Act could easily be used against all sorts of journalists anywhere on the political spectrum.
Believing transphobic things does, in fact, make you a transphobe.
Board game news: Undergrove, the next new game from Wingspan designer Elizabeth Hargrave, will go up on Kickstarter in November, and you can save the page now to be notified when it’s live.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alabama, board game news, climate change, coronavirus, frauds, free speech, health, labor rights, lgbt rights, links, longreads, metoo, oklahoma, scotus, south africa, stick to baseball, tennessee, vaccines, voter suppression

→ July 1, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/30/23.

I posted my 2023 Mock Draft v3.0 this week, and as usual did a Q&A to take your questions on it. Going forward, I’ll have the last Big Board update later this upcoming week and then mock 4.0 on Saturday, the morning I fly to Seattle to cover the Futures Game and then the draft. I also did a just-for-fun piece on who I’d put on the All-Star rosters, and then I avoided the comments entirely. I was a lot more active in the comments on the other pieces, including my scouting blog on Jackson Holliday and Brady House. And I weighed in on Friday night on the two players going to Kansas City in the Aroldis Chapman trade.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Rebuilding Seattle, a midweight economic game with some polyomino tile-laying aspects, an imposing game on the table that plays pretty quickly and doesn’t have that many rules to learn.

And now, the links…

Longreads: The LA Times looks at solar farms in the deserts of the American southwest and the complex forces shaping their construction and spread, from environmentalists to monopoly utilities.
At The Intercept, Ilyse Hogue looks at the founding of the nationalist group The Federalist Society, which sparked the 40-year battle to end abortion access in the U.S.
The Atlantic profiles RFK Jr., calling him the first MAGA Democrat for his misinformation-filled anti-science platform, in a piece that, to rational readers, makes him look insane. I just hope reporters keep asking him which vaccines he deems safe.
Another U.S. government report concluded that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was not at the Wuhan lab before the pandemic began. The conspiracy theorists, including some authors who have profited by spreading the lab-link hoax, were not happy.
Speaking of RFK Jr., his drive to “debate” a scientist over vaccines is also misleading, because what he really wants is a platform to shout his views. Denialists are big fans of the Gish gallop, where you say so much that’s false in a short period of time that you drown your opponent, making rebuttals impossible.
You know who might hate RFK Jr. more than I do? Autistic people, whom he’s mocked and demonized for decades, spreading outdated and dangerous stereotypes about the neurodivergent.
Did a relative of yours send you one of those scaremongering stories about a new study showing that sucralose was “genotoxic” and causes cancer? Yeah, it’s not and it doesn’t. That study’s authors have misrepresented their data, and journalists who aren’t science literate – or choose not to be – ran with it.
All this anti-science and the associated distrust of public health comes at a substantial cost to society.
Striking reporters at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Business Insider have gone old school and started their own strike papers, which, like Defector, give people a look at what worker-owned publications might look like.
All that money the U.S. spent to go find the remains of the Titan submersible will come from you, me, and all other American taxpayers.
The BBC looks at Community Violence Interventions, which may have prevented one or more revenge shootings in Chicago quite recently. It’s a better, cheaper approach to violence reduction in cities than spending more on police, which has no impact on violent crime rates.
A 53-year-old man who grew up with anti-LGBTQ+ views and has come around decided to go sit on the sidewalk at the Denver Pride parade with a sign saying “Recovering Bigot. I Am Sorry! Free Hugs.” The Washington Post interviewed him as he described the positive, inclusive, and forgiving environment he found.
Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs (D) signed an executive order banning conversion therapy in the state, making it the 27^th to do so.
Did you hear about the imbroglio around New York City’s plans to force some of its pizzerias to clean up their ovens to reduce carbon emissions? That’s wrong. The plan isn’t new and the target is particulate emissions, not carbon dioxide, which should resonate with everyone who’s been in the path of wildfire smoke this summer.
Florida Governor and Presidential candidate Ron DeSantis (R-) used Texas taxpayer resources on a recent campaign trip there.
DeSantis keeps losing – in court, as a judge blocked the state’s ban on drag shows as likely unconstitutional.
Groomer alert: A Texas pastor convicted of sexually assaulting 14 girls was released from prison early for good behavior. But drag shows!
And then we have Justice Sam Alito, who took a trip to Rome paid for by a group that has filed briefs before SCOTUS, whose wife leased land to an oil and gas firm while the Department of Justice was fighting the EPA before the Court, and, of course, when he received questions from ProPublica about some of these improprieties, he ran to the Wall Street Journalandwrote a whiny pre-buttal instead of answering.
Keith Law Show guest Jason Kander, author of Invisible Storm: A Soldier’s Memoir of Politics and PTSD, is one of four veterans dealing with the disorder whose stories make up the new film Here. Is. Better. The New York Times gave it a positive review.
The Kingdom of Jordan wants to build a brand-new capital city in the Black Desert, where there is no infrastructure, no natural water access, nothing at all to sustain a city and its population.
Modern hunter-gatherers have a thriving gut microbiome compared to those of us who sit in a desk chair and write about baseball prospects and board games.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, arizona, crime, florida, frauds, health, jordan, lgbt rights, links, longreads, police, scotus, stick to baseball, unions, vaccines

→ April 2, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/1/23.

Since the last roundup, I’ve written three new posts for subscribers to the Athletic – my annual predictions post, my first dispatch from spring training (mostly Cactus League), my annual breakout player picks, and a draft blog post on three potential first-rounders from Wake Forest and Miami.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the cooperative game Paint the Roses, which has simple rules but poses a difficult deductive challenge for players, working best with three or more.

I appeared on the streaming Scripps News Network to talk about why major-league salaries keep rising while minor leaguers’ haven’t, although this was recorded and aired before the recent CBA announcement.

My podcast will return now that my spring training travel is over, with David Grann lined up as my next guest. I did send out a new edition of my free email newsletter about two weeks ago.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Chronicle of Higher Education looks at Stanford Prof. Jo Boaler, whose arguments and research are driving changes to high school math curricula in California and beyond … but who has a history of playing fast and loose in her own work and with interpretations of others’ research as well. If her name is familiar, it might be for the time she implied she was calling the cops on Dr. Jelani Nelson after he criticized her in a tweet that pointed out that she charges schools up to $5000 per hour in consulting fees.
The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics honored three scientists for their work on quantum entanglement. Scientific American looks at the work of Chien-Shiung Wu, a Chinese-born American scientist whose 1949 experiment on entanglement paved the way for the three men who won the award this year. The Nobel Committee did not mention her contributions.
With Twitter gradually losing steam, the New York Times compiled a ranking of the 25 most important tweets in the site’s history.
TechCrunch took a more sober look at how the microblogging site is dying a slow death. Elon Musk is killing the site’s classic verification feature because he doesn’t understand the value it conferred not on the verified users, but on the site itself.
Simon Hattenstone’s mother sent hundreds of abusive tweets about the McCanns, the British family whose daughter Madeleine disappeared during their Portuguese vacation, taking her own life when she was outed as the troll behind those tweets by Sky News. Hattenstone remembers his mother and how little he really knew about her in a very thoughtful column in the Guardian.
Vanity Fair says Ron DeSantis plans to run for President on an anti-vaccine platform. I imagine that’ll also blend with a lot of railing against “wokeness” (see below), but will this stuff play outside of the states that the Republican candidate will win anyway? Or will it be about pretending the pandemic is over/never happened? Meanwhile, DeSantis’s book tour has been a fiasco so far.
Uvalde police were afraid of the Robb Elementary shooter because he had an AR-15, the very gun the NRA is working so hard to keep legal and accessible across the country.
Raquel Evita Saraswati became a major figure in Philadelphia’s advocacy community, especially for LGBTQ+ rights, as a queer, Muslim woman of color. Her colleagues at the American Friends Service Committee revealed last month that she’s not a person of color at all, assuming various ethnic identities to keep up the fiction.
Anti-gay activist and attorney Jared Woodfill, who was also previously the chair of the Harris County, Texas, Republican Party, maintained ties for over 15 years with a man he knew had sexually abused a child. Woodfill remains a major figure in Texas politics despite his lengthy personal, professional, and financial ties to Paul Pressler, his former law partner who has been accused by several people of sexual abuse and statutory rape over the last forty-five years.
Billy Ball’s six-year-old son died from a horrible accident that caused cerebral swelling that killed him. Vaccine deniers mocked and attacked Ball online, claiming the COVID-19 vaccine was the cause and Ball was culpable. Twitter, Facebook, etc. did little or nothing about the harassment.
Texas’s abortion ban is leading to a shortage of doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel. Why would you work there when there’s plenty of demand in states that let you practice medicine?
—
A girl in California gave her goat to the Shasta County Fair, then wanted it back because she found out they were going to kill and eat it. When her family refused to hand it over, the police came and seized the animal. Fair organizers said they intended to teach kids a lesson. I hope they learn something themselves.
A Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll of trans Americans found the majority were more satisfied in their lives after transitioning.
In Wyoming, Republicans’ attempts to ban abortion in just about every form and case ran afoul of Republicans’ attempts to circumvent the Affordable Care Act. Heh.
Austin police arrested a 71-year-old deaf woman at the airport after she missed her flight, and a jailer twisted her arm enough to break it while handcuffing her. The city charged her with criminal trespass, even though she had a ticket and was trying to change it to a different flight.
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R ) signed multiple anti-LGBTQ+ bills, including one banning gender-affirming care for trans kids, and then said she “didn’t like” doing it.
In neighboring South Dakota, some trans kids are being forced to detransition by that state’s anti-trans law. Who exactly is this helping?
Missouri’s Attorney General is ready to spend a bunch of taxpayer money attacking trans kids, and medical experts are saying his ideas are extremely harmful.
And in Uganda, which is just following the lead of various red states, there’s a new law that makes it a crime to be LGBTQ+ at all. Its proponents invoked the same language as Republicans here – they want to “protect traditional family values” and uphold the Church’s teachings.
When I was a kid, the Republicans used buzzwords like “socialism” to try to scare voters into supporting them, painting Democrats like Mike Dukakis as “card-carrying” liberals. That buzzword has now been replaced by “wokeness,” and the thing the two terms have in common is that people who use them can never define them.
President Biden issued his first veto, striking down a Republican resolution that sought to block retirement fund managers from considering environmental, social, and corporate governance issues, although this was all performative and is part of that whole “wokeness” thing.
A student at Eastern Florida State College said a lecture on civil rights in a U.S. history class made him uncomfortable, so the professor cancelled the class.
Ohio Republicans are trying to pass a law mirroring the Florida law that limits what can be discussed in public education, including banning discussions of so-called “controversial beliefs” like systemic racism and climate change.
Undercover agents (!) went to a drag show in Orlando in December and found nothing “lewd” or indecent, but Florida is going after the venue’s liquor license anyway.
The President of West Texas A&M University cancelled a student-run drag show, claiming it demeaned women and comparing drag to blackface. The students are suing on First Amendment grounds, while they’ve also rescheduled the event off-campus, so they might win twice.
Spotify puffed out its chest a year with the announcement of a $100 million “creator equity fund” that was supposed to boost voices from diverse backgrounds. One year on, they’ve spent less than 10% of it.
Infections with the fungus Candida auris are spreading at an “alarming” rate throughout the United States. It affects people who already have weakened or compromised immune systems, and the current wave of infections is largely resistant to anti-fungals.
With so much evidence of journalistic malfeasance at Fox News – and this was written before the recent summary judgment in the Dominion lawsuit – why won’t journalism schools ostracize the network from campuses? Stop inviting their people to speak. Limit their ability to recruit students through official channels. Anything to acknowledge that this isn’t journalism.
Board game news: Let’s Go to Japan, the new game from the designer of Santa Monica and Cat Lady, is probably going to clear half a million in funding on Kickstarter. The concept is pretty cool – Wood had saved for years for a trip to Japan, where he’d wanted to go since he was a kid, only to have his plans cancelled by COVID-19. So he made this game about it.
The medium-heavy strategy game Wild Gardens is more than 200% funded on Backerkit with 18 days to go.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, education, first amendment, florida, health, iowa, lgbt rights, links, longreads, missouri, ohio, physics, police, social media, south dakota, stick to baseball, texas, trans rights

→ September 29, 2022
→ By keith

Neurotribes.

Steve Silberman’s 2015 book Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity is a history of autism, but one told through anecdotes of people with the neurodevelopmental condition or the scientists who studied it. It’s also an education, and an attempt to set the record straight that we are not, in fact, in the middle of an autism “epidemic,” but that the condition has always existed, even if doctors at those times didn’t realize what they were seeing.

Much of the history of autism is one of tragedy, as people with the condition were often treated as insane, or as imbeciles, and stuck in institutions or otherwise abandoned by their families. The condition was seen as incurable – meaning it was seen as something you’d want to try to cure – and that an autistic child was nothing more than an animal. This view persisted, at least in the west (there’s no discussion here of views of autism outside of the U.S. and Europe), until the early 20^th century.

That’s when two researchers working independently* had their Newton/Leibniz moment, as both Leo Kanner, working in the U.S., and Hans Asperger, working in Vienna, both published key papers identifying autism as a condition with a specific, and in both cases narrow, set of symptoms. Asperger’s name has lived on beyond Kanner’s, but at the time, Vienna was under Nazi control, and Kanner’s work and views took precedence on the larger stage.

*I got a kind note from Steve Silberman via Twitter, saying: “The biggest historical scoop in NeuroTribes is that Kanner and Asperger were NOT working independently, but shared two assistants, Anni Weiss and Georg Frankl.”

If you know of Asperger, it’s through the now-deprecated “Asperger’s syndrome,” which has been subsumed into the larger diagnostic term autism spectrum disorder. One of the most enlightening parts of Neurotribes is Silberman’s explanation of that entire process, although its roots are horrifying: Because the Nazis were murdering any children held in institutions for health or mental reasons, Asperger’s work focused on the socially awkward prodigies he found. This spurred the still-extant stereotype of the autistic savant, which was further cemented in the public mind by the film Rain Man, the history of which Silberman details at great length and with significant empathy for everyone involved in the film.

Kanner viewed Asperger much as Newton viewed Leibniz, and we’re all quite a bit the worse for it, as the rivalry meant Kanner worked to “own” the definition of autism for some time. He claimed the disorder (a term still in use in the technical literature) only affected young children – if they were older, they had schizophrenia or something else – and that the cause was parental indifference. The idea of the “refrigerator mother” who failed to love her child enough, thus giving the kid autism, persisted for decades, at least into the 1980s. When that finally started to crumble, parents began looking for other explanations, landing on environmental toxins and, with the help of a fraudster named Andrew Wakefield, vaccines.

All the while, parents and researchers were looking for a cure, in no small part because Kanner’s definition of autism excluded all but the most serious cases. Some attempts were well-intentioned, while others were (and still are) quackery, and even dangerous. There’s still an institution in Massachusetts that uses shock therapy on autistic residents, despite no evidence that it works (and ample evidence that it’s torture). The FDA has had to issue warnings about so-called “miracle mineral solution,” which is bleach by another name, and which Youtube for one has banned but refuses to remove instructional videos about. (MMS does not cure autism, or anything else, but it can kill you.) Silberman gets into some of this, although I think the bleach stuff largely postdates his book.

It took some substantial efforts by later researchers and especially by activist parents to bring about changes. Those parents demanded changes in how the medical establishment viewed and treated their autistic children, and lobbied for changes in the definition of autism so that school districts would be forced to provide accommodations for autistic students who were previously left behind or even told that they had to attend school elsewhere. The passage of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in 1975 and again in 1990 as well as the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990 allowed autistic children to stay in public schools and required the districts to provide them with individualized education programs (IEP) to determine what accommodations and modifications the child needs to succeed in school. It shouldn’t have been that hard, but Silberman makes it clear that Kanner’s narrow definition and the stranglehold he had on the definition of autism, helped by a small number of others who seemed to profit from their work with autistic kids, made this process far more difficult.

There’s far more to Neurotribes than just a history, however. Silberman discusses a few notable historical figures who almost certainly were autistic, including chemist and physicist Henry Cavendish, the discoverer of hydrogen; and Nikola Tesla, inventor of an overpriced electric car. (Hold on, I’m getting a note here that that isn’t correct.) Temple Grandin makes several appearances on these pages as well. There’s also a deep dive into the correlation between autistic people and sci-fi fandom, including Claude Degler, a key early figure in spreading the gospel of science fiction (until his views on eugenics caught up with him), and perhaps an autistic person himself. Silberman argues that sci-fi fandom was one of the first safe spaces for autistics, as personality “quirks” were less important than one’s passion for the subject – and perhaps because those quirks were more common among the fan base anyway.

There’s a wealth of information within Neurotribes, even though the book is now seven years old and it seems like the medical community knows even more about autism now than it did then. It’s a well-researched and well-argued work, one that encourages empathy for autistic people but not pity, and if anything gives more respect to Wakefield, the NVIC, and other cranks than they deserve, presenting the views of people who seek to find non-genetic causes for autism fairly before explaining that the evidence says they’re wrong. And Silberman makes it very clear that autism isn’t what history tells us it is, or even what many people probably still think it is, thanks to Rain Man or, worse, Music. It’s a deeply humanistic work of non-fiction, and that alone makes it worth a read.

Next up: Dr. Stephanie Cacioppo’s Wired for Love.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: autism, health, highly recommended, history of science, non-fiction

→ May 22, 2022
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/22/22.

For subscribers to The Athletic, I posted my first mock draft for 2022, and took reader questions in a Q&A on the site that afternoon.

On the Keith Law Show, I spoke with Jonathan Higgs of the band Everything Everything about their new album Raw Data Feel, which came out on Friday. You can subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I do send out a free email newsletter about twice a month, and for those of you who said you would attend an in-person event with me in London, it’s in the works now, so thank you all for responding. Speaking of books, Smart Baseball and The Inside Game are both available in paperback, and you can buy them at your local independent book store or at Bookshop.org.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: A new “war on terror” is the wrong approach to fighting domestic terrorism, but would just further curtail our civil liberties withot making us any safer.
A politically connected testing lab earned contract after contract for COVID testing in Nevada, but its tests didn’t work.
In an extra from her memoir, Selma Blair talks about first learning she had multiple sclerosis.
Miami’s mayor is a crypto advocate, and got the city involved with one such scheme – and the coin’s value has since dropped 95%. The article doesn’t even mention the environmental impact of cryptocurrency mining, which would seem especially important to a city like Miami.
Texas’s General Land Officer, led by Commissioner George P. Bush, diverted federal hurricane relief funds away from coastal communities to inland ones that are whiter and more likely to vote Republican.
The New York Times ran a story commemorating the 50^th anniversary of Dr. John Fryer’s speech to the American Psychiatric Association, where he revealed he was gay, doing so while wearing a disguise and without revealing his real name. The speech led to the removal of homosexuality from the APA’s Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). The excellent documentary Cured covers this story at greater length.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ed Yong points out that modest hospitalization numbers don’t tell the whole story about how much stress COVID-19 has put on our health care system.
Why are there gigantic blobs of molten rock and water in the Earth’s lower mantle?
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has the inside story on how the Rams’ ownership worked the NFL to secure the team’s move back to Los Angeles.
Pennsylvania Republicans who helped pass a mail-in voting law are now trying to get it thrown out.
The deaths of two Ohio State students due to fake Adderall that contained fentanyl gave rise, once again, to the myth that there’s fentanyl-laced cannabis in the wild.
Police in Highland Park, Michigan, seized a privately-owned building on dubious grounds, and then demanded that the owners buy the department two new police cars for its return. The department did give the building back to its owners without the ransom, but what are the consequences for the officials involved in this extortion?
Now right-wing politicians and media figures are targeting comedians who mock them, sending a torrent of threats and abuse their way.
A Twitter exec posted some thoughts on how much spam there actually is on the site, and what the company is doing to combat it.
The Society for Academic Emergency Medicine held its annual convention in New Orleans, and they posted (and deleted) a tweet from there showing members unmasked at an indoor concert.
A couple of right-wing nutjobs who also happen to hold office in the Virginia Beach area are suing Barnes and Noble to get specific LGBTQ+ books removed. I’m sure the party of laissez-faire capitalism will put a stop to its own people doing this any minute now!
These ridiculous laws in the American South that prohibit teachers from discussing racism are now making it very difficult for them to discuss the white nationalist who shot up a grocery store in a majority-Black Buffalo neighborhood.
The assaults on voting rights and abortion rights are inextricably linked, writes Brandon Tensley at CNN. It’s clear that the theocratic minority is more than happy to subvert the will of the majority if it suits their superstitious purposes.
The highly polarized public debate over abortion does not accurately reflect the nuanced views of the public, writes Christine Emba at the Washington Post.
Board game news: I didn’t know that a new version of Can’t Stop!, Sid Sackson’s addictive push-your-luck game, had come out from Eagle-Gryphon.
I backed the campaign for a new solitaire game called Resist!, based on the rebels who fought the fascist regime in Spain after the Spanish Civil War.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, board game news, coronavirus, first amendment, football, health, links, longreads, nevada, police, racism, science, social media, stick to baseball, texas

→ April 16, 2022
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/16/22.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I had one new post this week, a roundup of top 2022 draft prospects I’ve seen, including Druw Jones, Termarr Johnson, and the now-injured Dylan Lesko.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Cascadia, one of the best new games of 2021, from the same publisher as Calico. It’s another hex tile-laying game but simpler to learn and play, with variable rules you can fine-tune to allow kids to join.

My own podcast returned with the Productive Outs guys – Ian Miller of Kowloon Walled City and Riley Breckenridge of Thrice – as guests. You can subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I’m due for another issue my free email newsletter this upcoming week. You can find both of my books, Smart Baseball and The Inside Game, in paperback anywhere books are sold, including Bookshop.org.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Child welfare workers in Texas are resigning rather than enforce the state’s hateful law denying medical treatment to trans kids.

Vanity Fair has a long investigative piece on EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit that has been at the center of the discredited lab-leak hypothesis, showing how EHA’s leader, Peter Daszak, made the situation worse both before the pandemic began and after the search for SARS-CoV-2’s origins began.

Firearms have surpassed motor vehicle crashes as the leading cause of deaths for U.S. children and adolescents.

Writing in the New Yorker, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Elizabeth Kolbert writes about how two Florida lakes are suing to stop a development that would destroy nearly 2000 acres of wetlands. The lawsuit includes one actual human, as well as a marsh and a stream, and is the first of its kind in the U.S.

The CEO of Flutterwave, a Nigerian online payments and financial services company with a $3 billion valuation, may have engaged in fraud and insider trading to enrich himself at the expense of shareholders and employees with stock options.

The Texas Observer, a progressive investigative journalism magazine that had a particular focus on Indigenous affairs, lost most of its staff in the last six months due to a series of bungled situations and a divide over the periodical’s mission.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) worked to try to overturn the 2020 Presidential election, according to texts he sent to Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.

Biologist David Sabatini resigned his tenured professorship at MIT after three senior officials at the school recommended revoking it in the wake of sexual harassment allegations against him and concerns over his behavior towards other members of his lab. He is still, however, suing one of the women who has accused him of harassment.

David French writes in The Atlantic that the American right has “lost the plot” on free speech.

The British national who killed MP Sir David Amess was a “textbook example of radicalization” who started reading extremist propaganda online during the Syria conflict.

The cops who shoved a 75-year-old man to the ground for protesting were cleared of all wrongdoing. Because of course they were.

Meanwhile, a panel on the Fifth Circuit of the US Court of Appeals ruled that police who tortured a teenage girl in custody didn’t violate her rights.

Former St. Louis police officer Luther Hall, who was beaten by his fellow officers while working undercover during protests in the city in 2017, spoke out about his desire to leave the city and the lack of justice for his attackers.

There’s very strong evidence that the Epstein-Barr virus causes multiple sclerosis, although why some infected people develop the autoimmune disorder and others don’t isn’t clear.

Why aren’t Democrats doing anything to combat the GOP’s deranged claims that Democrats are all pedophiles and groomers?

South Dakota AG Jason Ravsnborg, who killed a man in a hit-and-run accident, may face consequences after all as the Republican-led legislature has voted to impeach him.

Texas is a shitshow in so many ways. Gov. Greg Abbott’s political stunt at the border has led truckers to demand that he stop inspections of every truck, a move he put in place due to baseless claims about border security. For a party that claims to be pro-business, this is a hell of a way to show it.

Climate change is contributing to the spread of Japanese encephalitis in Australia.

Techdirt decries major newspapers’ continuing failure to grasp social media.

Opinion journalism is beset by structural problems and bad actors. There are ways to fix both of these issues, from better labeling of opinion vs. news pieces to proper editing (in a world where most publications have reduced editorial staff substantiall).

Ukrainian hackers have published a tremendous amount of personal data on Russian troopse fighting in the current war, as have other activists seeking additional ways to fight back against Russia’s pointless invasion of its neighbor.

The Titans’ new state-funded stadium will cost about $2 billion, and the economic impact figures the team has given the legislature appear to have been created out of thin air. Great use of public funds in a state that offers below-average education to its citizens.

A Toronto man amassed a huge cache of guns and killed two men at random before his arrest, which may have prevented a mass shooting given the arsenal he had in his apartment.

Board game news: Birds of a Feather is back on Kickstarter, and while it’s clearly meant to capitalize on Wingspan’s runaway success, it’s also a much lighter game aimed at a different audience.

The newest game from publishers Lucky Duck Games (Chronicles of Crime) to hit Kickstarter is The Dark Quarter, a co-op narrative game set in New Orleans.

Postmark Games has a print-and-play game called Voyages that just requires you to bring your own dice.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, climate change, coronavirus, environment, frauds, health, links, longreads, metoo, police, south dakota, stick to baseball, tennessee, texas

→ December 8, 2020
→ By keith

Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art.

Over the summer, I linked to an interesting longread in The Guardian, an excerpt from a new book by James Nestor called Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art. The excerpt and the title both promised an evidence-based approach to the rather fundamental act of respiration, one that comes up in areas from pulmonary and cardiovascular health to allergies to meditation and mindfulness. It was a huge disappointment: Breath is a lot of woo and anecdote, with a little bit of science hidden in the endnotes. It imparts very little useful information on how to improve your breathing, or address any problems with it.

Nestor starts Breath explaining an experiment he and a fellow “pulmonaut” underwent, where they agreed to block their nasal passages so they’d be forced to breath through their mouths for about three weeks , so they could see how much their health would deteriorate in the meantime. From there, he points out that humans are the only species with our wide range of dental problems, a product of evolution and our changing diet, and speculates that this has led to a constricted airway (which creates the conditions for sleep apnea) and says most of us are just breathing the wrong way.

One major way in which we do it wrong is breathing through our mouths, which bypasses the nose’s air-filtering, humidifying, and warming mechanisms, which came about via evolution and allow us to take less particulate matter into our lungs, while getting warmer, less dry air. Nasal breathing helps filter out some airborne pathogens, while the mouth has no such filtration. There’s even some evidence that breathing through the nose while exercising can improve performance, because “breathing through the nose releases nitric oxide, which is necessary to increase carbon dioxide (CO2) in the blood, which, in turn, is what releases oxygen.”

There’s at least some scientific evidence to back up the claims he presents in those parts of the book, and there’s copious evidence that sleep apnea is associated with serious health problems over the long term. As the book progresses, however, he veers farther and farther into pseudoscientific territory, discussing the Hindu concept of prana (the life force coursing through all living things in Hinduism) as if it were a scientific fact, which it’s not. He mentions how he breathes through his right nostril to improve his digestion, a belief from yoga that appears to have zero scientific evidence to support it. He also appears to advocate some extreme breathing hacks, such as the Buddhist method known as g Tum-mo meditation, that have little to no controlled research showing their efficacy or safety. There are even some internal contradictions here around hypoventilation and its effects, especially since there’s at least some literature showing a connection between hypoventilation and obesity.

I have some very mild breathing issues, mostly connected to sleeping, and thought I might get some useful tips from Breath to help with that, but all I really got out of the book was the advice to breathe more slowly, and remind myself to breathe through my nose when exercising. The former is something you’d get from any resource on mindful meditation, all of which start out with awareness-of-breath exercises. The latter is something I tried on Monday during a run … without success. It turns out that when it’s 40 degrees outside, breathing through your nose is not all that effective in delivering warm, moist air to your lungs, which is counterproductive when you’re trying to run at peak capacity. Apparently this is something you can build up to doing through practice, which I will continue to try to do over the next few weeks, but this isn’t advice for the larger audience.

There’s probably a decent book to write on this topic, but Breath isn’t it. With too much reliance on anecdote and the eventual devolution into woo, it’s not the kind of evidence-based argument I’d want to see for anything related to health or wellness.

Next up: I’ve got a few other books to review, but at the moment I’m reading Jude the Obscure.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: disappointments, health, non-fiction, pseudoscience, self-help books

→ November 16, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/16/19.

I wrote this week, but nothing has been published quite yet. Some of it will be in bookstores on April 21st of next year, though, as I work on the first edit for The Inside Game, my new book combining baseball decisions and cognitive psychology. I also am tentatively scheduled to appear at Washington, DC’s, Politics & Prose on April 24th, with other events likely in that first week. If you’re with a bookstore and interested in arranging an event, feel free to reach out to me in the comments and I’ll connect you with my publicist.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The legal battle over a 7-year-old trans girl in Texas could have substantial implication for trans rights of children in that state and across the United States.
The Guardian looks at the big-data approach to history and projecting the future, a new field of inquiry reminiscent of the psychohistory of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels.
Vanity Fair details the theft of 550 Bitcoin-mining computers in Iceland. The authorities know who stole the machines, but not where the machines are.
A New Jersey high school baseball coach ended up sued after he told a kid to slide, and the kid ended up with a horrible leg injury.
A woman who’s worked in the board game industry came out with her story of how designer/publisher JR Honeycutt manipulated and abused her across a months-long relationship. BoardGameGeek immediately removed him from a panel where he was supposed to speak at BGG.Con this month.
Deval Patrick wants to run for President. He helped a Republican billionaire make millions through foreclosures while he was Governor of Massachusetts.
Restaurant critic Adam Platt – you may have heard of his brother, Oliver – writes about what it’s like to be targeted by a chef whose food you’ve reviewed.
ESPN’s Kevin Arnovitz writes about the silence that follows the NBA’s and Daryl Morey’s China/Hong Kong controversy. I may be showing my age, but can you imagine a similar blowback in the 1970s-1980s if an athlete or GM had voiced support of Solidarity or the Helsinki Watch Groups?
Dignity Health stuck one of its own employees with a $900,000 bill for medical care for her daughter, born three months premature, by trying to use a loophole around a missed deadline. This ProPublica piece points out that “Dignity is also a religious organization that says its mission is to further ‘the healing ministry of Jesus.'”
“I was an astrologer – here’s how it really works, and why I had to stop.”
Anti-vaxxers are now targeting minority groups with their dangerous misinformation.
The Daily Beast got basic anti-vaccine ads approved by Google and Facebook despite those companies’ claims that they wouldn’t run such false or misleading advertisements.
A woman who’s active in promoting vaccine safety and accurate vaccine information on Twitter went to a screening of Vaxxed 2 and tweeted her thoughts.
The head of the Nutrition Department at Harvard’s School of Public Health weighs in on how much meat we should eat and on the new plant-based meat alternatives.
The founder of a site called NoFap, which is – and I’m not making this up – trying to tell men to stop masturbating, is suing a prominent sex researcher because she said masturbation isn’t bad and that porn addiction isn’t real.
Health officials fighting the Ebola outbreak in the north Kivu region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo will now have a second vaccine to try in the city of Goma, which hasn’t yet been hit by the outbreak. Over 2000 people have died already in the year-long Ebola flare-up, which has spread rapidly due to locals’ mistrust of government and NGO personnel.
The current way we use antibiotics to fight routine bacterial infections may be out of date, and contributes to drug resistance.
The lower house of the Ohiobama legislature passed a bill saying that teachers can’t grade students’ incorrect science answers as wrong if the answers reflect the students’ religious beliefs. Imagine paying your tax money so the public schools in your district could fail to teach kids basic science.
Deadspin’s last (interim) editor-in-chief Barry Petchesky wrote for the New York Times about being fired for refusing to stick to sports.
The United States talks about fighting global terrorism, but the country is now seen as a leading exporter of white supremacist terrorism, spreading to violence across the western world.
The Saudis are not our friends. They hacked into the phones of Twitter users critical of their dictatorial regime and extorted them into tweeting state propaganda.
A MediaMatters survey found that just 3% of news reports on the California wildfires pointed out the role of climate change in the conflagration.
Leaked emails show Trump consigliere Stephen Miller empathizes strongly with white nationalists.
Peter Nicholas writes in the Atlantic that Trump’s strategy of attacking his adversaries may not work given how many people are on the opposite side of the impeachment inquiry.
President Trump continued to funnel tax dollars to his friends as his administration hired $380-an-hour outside consultants to handle work ordinarily assigned to government employees, leading to nearly $750,000 in gains for Trump’s allies.
As many as 90% of domestic violence victims report possible traumatic brain injuries, according to two researchers writing for Scientific American.
A new outpost of Pizzeria Bianco, my #1 pizzeria in the United States, will open in Los Angeles in the space formerly occupied by Tartine Bianco.
Board game news: The designer and publisher of the role-playing game Gloomhaven, which costs $120 and comes in a 20-pound box, announced a streamlined version called Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion, which should cost around $50 and hit retail in Q3 in 2020.
Calliope Games is reissuing the 2004 game Station Master (Kickstarter link) with new artwork.
Next Move announced Azul: Crystal Mosaic, an expansion to the 2018 Spiel des Jahres winner that will include overlays to keep your tiles in place and new double-sided player boards.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, anti-science, basketball, climate change, health, lgbt rights, links, longreads, nutrition, pizza, pseudoscience, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ November 9, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/9/19.

My ranking of the top 50 free agents this winter went up on Monday for ESPN+ subscribers, before the actual start of free agency and thus the deadline for some player options, so a few players are on there who ended up staying with their teams (J.D. Martinez, for one). I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Silver, the new deduction/take-that card game from designer Ted Alspach, who set this new game in the same ‘universe’ (loosely speaking) as his One Night Ultimate Werewolf games.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, will be released on April 21, 2020, and you can pre-order it now. We’re working on some bookstore events for late April as well, with Boston, New York, DC, and Harrisburg likely in that first week after release.

I also have this free email newsletter, you may have heard about it, it’s kind of cool.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This Atlantic story on a San Francisco woman who repeatedly stole packages from porches in an affluent neighborhood, despite multiple warnings, arrests, and eventually the loss of of custody of her daughter, is something to behold. It’s a story about technology, including how customers are using video-camera doorbells without considering the loss of civil liberties that may come with it. It’s a story about race, certainly. But the one theme I felt the author understated was that it’s a story about mental illness: The ‘porch pirate’ is ill-served by the prison system, especially since she continues to steal packages even while out on bail, and is not getting the help she probably needs.
A Louisiana parish DA lets defendants pay his foundation to get out of doing community service, according to this investigative report from Radley Balko in the Washington Post. The article appeared on Sunday; since then, I see zero coverage of this in any Louisiana publication.
This episode of the podcast Citations Needed looks at ‘pundit brain’ and the increasingly less data-driven Nate Silver, whose track record of predictions has tapered off since 2008 and who has had to walk back numerous statements on Twitter. Jacob Bacharach covers similar ground in a post on Common Dreams.
Alex Pareene writes about the death of what he calls ‘rude media’, including two entities for whom he used to work, Splinter and Gawker Media.
The New Yorker‘s Louisa Thomas weighed in on the killings of Deadspin and Sports Illustrated by private equity bros.
A new study in Nature (journal access required) found that many ICU patients who received probiotic capsules developed bacteremia as a direct result, using DNA comparisons to show that the bacteria in the patients’ blood came from the same bacteria in those probiotic pills. There’s also zero evidence that probiotic pills are helpful; the acid in your stomach destroys bacteria in those pills, or in fermented foods we consume like yogurt or kombucha.
Aaron Calvin was fired by the Des Moines Register because, in short, the Twitter mob demanded it; he wrote his side of the story for the Columbia Journalism Review.
Clark University dismissed a graduate student who had complained about possible gender discrimination and mishandling of data. This is her side of this story, but Clark issued a general statement, saying that federal law prevents them from commenting on a specific student’s case.
Youngstown State disciplined a student-athlete who sexually assaulted a classmate by (checks notes) letting him serve as a volunteer coach on both the men’s and women’s tennis teams (blinking guy GIF).
Anti-vaxxers use a strategy called ‘firehosing,’ repeating the same lies over and over to drown out the facts and those who try to speak the truth. Fighting these tactics involves more than just debunking falsehoods, but disrupting them by removing their podiums and forewarning people about how these propagandists manipulate them.
A white judge in Virginia sentenced a black woman to ten days in jail because he didn’t like that she slammed the courtroom door.
This is America: A San Diego man brutally assaulted a Syrian teen for speaking Arabic. He has since pleaded guilty and will serve five years in prison.
This is America: A white Milwaukee man threw acid in the face of a Peruvian-born U.S. citizen after asking “why did you come here and invade my country?” Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett blamed President Trump for feeding and encouraging anti-immigrant sentiment.
A new book that fawns over President Trump claimed that the Obama Adminstration held regular “PC (political correctness) meetings.” The author didn’t realize those were NSC Principals Committee meetings, and obviously didn’t bother to confirm it, nor did Fox News before promoting the book and this claim on its site.
If you’ve seen the surprise hit film Parasite, which will pass the $10 million mark for U.S. box office this weekend and is by far the highest-grossing Korean-language film ever in the U.S., you know the use of basements is key to the movie’s story. NPR has snippets from writer/director Bong Joon-hoexplaining a bit more about why basements are so critical in South Korean society.
Martin Scorcese’s explanation of why he doesn’t care for comic-book movies is worth reading, as it’s far more nuanced than the quote that got MCU fanpeople all up in arms. (I tend to agree with him. Comic book movies are entertainment, but I would not say they rise to the level of great cinema.)
I reviewed Gary Smith’s book Standard Deviations this week; he emailed me to point to a post he wrote on October 22nd explaining the role of luck in short series in baseball.
Twitter’s Jack Dorsey announced a plan to ban political ads, but the plan is toothless and misunderstands the nature of free expression.
A tweet asking people to RT if they were spanked as children but didn’t become violent later in life went viral this week, but it misses the point: Corporal punishment is ineffective and harmful, while other methods of discipline, including positive reinforcement and setting clear expectations, do work, without the negative consequences of spanking.
Alison Turkos writes about how her Lyft driver raped her and the company took no action. The driver continued to work for Lyft, and the company even charged her for the trip.
I agree with Cass Marshall: I do not have time for or interest in video games with hundreds of hours of material. Pre-parenthood, I played the Baldur’s Gate trilogy all the way through, hitting almost every side quest, and I’m sure I put over 100 hours into it. I doubt I’ll ever have the time for that again or the attention span.
Board game news: A reader of mine, Kevin Bertram, has designed a game called The Shores of Tripoli now on Kickstarter. This was on my BGG wishlist before I even knew Kevin was a reader.
A digital adaptation of the acclaimed co-op game Spirit Island is also on Kickstarter, and just got funded this week.
PAX Unplugged takes place in Philadelphia on December 6-8 this year. The convention schedule is now up and badges are on sale. I’ll be there as usual.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, health, links, louisiana, media criticism, social media, this is america, vaccines, video games

→ March 30, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/30/19.

For ESPN+ subscribers, I posted my second Cactus League scouting notebook, covering prospects from Cleveland, the Giants, the A’s, the White Sox, the Cubs, and the Padres; my first scouting notebook from Arizona went up the previous week. I also posted a draft scouting post that looked at four of the top college position players in the draft class, including Adley Rutschman and Andrew Vaughn, the top two players on my first draft board. I also wrote up my predictions for this year’s standings, playoff outcomes, and postseason award winners, which has already upset Yankee fans (who cares, my picks don’t affect anything) and had one Mariner fan trying to told-you-so me because they’ve scored a lot of runs through (checks notes) four games.

At Paste, I gave the first perfect score (10/10) I’ve given to any board game in the 100+ reviews I’ve written for them in the last five years, awarding the honor to Wingspan, an incredible, smart, beautiful, and scientifically accurate new game from Elizabeth Hargrave that, coincidentally, is one of the only games I know that was designed and illustrated entirely by women. It’s so well-designed, yet easy to learn and doesn’t take that long to play once you understand a few basic mechanics. The game has sold out its first two print runs but the next one is expected in early May.

I didn’t chat this week for a few reasons, and am behind on my email newsletter for the same, but hope to pick all of that back up in the next few days. I appreciate your patience. That sounds ominous but they’re mostly good things that have simply demanded more of my time.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This is from February, but this New York/The Cut longread on the rise and fall of Tulum, Mexico as a vacation destination is fascinating, and a lesson in how some of the ills of western prosperity are causing environmental destruction and economic harm in the developing world.
The surgeon who writes and tweets as Doc Bastard has compiled a list of rebuttals to 73 common anti-vaxxer claims, including some I’d never seen before.
Mother Jones looks at how crowdfunding has made catastrophic medical care into an online popularity contest.
Alex Jones is being sued – I hope into oblivion – by parents of victims of the Sandy Hook massacre, and in his deposition he claimed he had a “psychosis” that led him to say Sandy Hook was a staged, false-flag operation, and frequently denied saying or doing things he actually did.
Nevada Lt. Governor Lucy Flores details getting an unwanted kiss from then-VP Joe Biden in 2014. I have zero interest in a Biden candidacy for President anyway, but I hope this finally ends it.
The New Yorker‘s Helen Rosner describes Julia Child’s commitment to progressive politics, which became more public as her profile grew.
Ginny Searle, writing for Deadspin, takes a critical look at the increasingly fan-unfriendly policies implemented across MLB, often with the outright complicity of media shills like Darren Rovell.
The Economist tweeted and then deleted a teaser that asked, rhetorically, if trans people should be sterilized. The Daily Dot examines the transphobic history of editor Helen Joyce, arguing that this was far from an isolated or accidental incident.
The NRA had quite a week: They fought against renewal of the Violence Against Women Act, arguing that domestic abusers shouldn’t lose their rights to own guns, and then a Huffington Post investigation revealed that NRA executive Mark Richardson solicited a Sandy Hook hoaxer, asking him to do the same for the Parkland mass shooting.
The Atlantic describes the chytrid fungus Bd, responsible for the decline or extinction of over 500 amphibian species, making it the deadliest pathogen in recorded history.
My friend Adnan Virk is starting a great new gig at DAZN, co-anchoring their nightly whip-around baseball show. He spoke to the Washington Post‘s Ben Strauss about his new job and how ESPN treated him, up to his firing in February.
NPR profiles Bob’s Red Mill, especially how it became a force in gluten-free products. I counted three Bob’s bags in my pantry just now, and need to pick up two more items – their GF flour mix and their almond flour – today. Their products are great for any bakers, since they’re often the only source of things like tapioca or potato starch, both superior to corn starch for hot fruit pies, Mike.
The CDC helped fund the development of a drug that can prevent HIV transmission even during unprotected sex, so why is a private company reaping all the profits and pricing it as a monopolist?
A California GOP delegate appointed a white nationalist to an ‘associate’ delegate position, and seems rather pleased with himself.
An African-American attorney in Maryland says he was detained in a Harford County courthouse because the deputy thought he was pretending to be a lawyer.
Here’s this week’s roundup of vaccine news and anti-vaxxer madness. Maryn McKenna, writing for WIRED, looks at the real costs to society of the anti-vaxxer movement. We all pay more for health insurance because of these idiots.
VICE‘s Joseph Cox says Instagram’s algorithm pushed him into an anti-vaccine ‘rabbit hole’ within ten seconds of him following one prominent denialist account.
Maine’s rate of pertussis infections is eight times the national average because of Mainers’ higher than normal rate of refusing vaccines.
I’ve included a few links recently on California doctors selling questionable or outright fraudulent ‘medical exemptions’ to the state’s tight vaccination laws; now Dr. Richard Pan, a state Senator there, has introduced new legislation targeting such doctors, who put personal profits over the good of the community.
New York’s Rockland County has declared a state of emergency due to a massive measles outbreak caused by anti-vaxxers, with over 150 reported cases of the highly contagious, dangerous disease. Prof. Peter Hotez, writing for the BMJ‘s opinion blog, calls the outbreak nightmarish, especially how anti-vaxxers targeted orthodox Jews with their messaging. This is an increasing problem – anti-vaxxers find vulnerable groups and bombard them with bullshit, but face no consequences when outbreaks occur.
Someone ran around Cook County (Chicago) with the measles, sparking a warning to the public of possible exposure at fifteen different locations over the past week. I hope this person is held accountable for the costs of their actions, but I doubt it.
There’s a mumps outbreak near me in Philly, spurring officials at Temple University, where the outbreak is centered, to give students booster shots to try to counter the waning immunity teenagers seem to experience from that specific vaccine.
Deadspin’s Albert Burnenko asks Which Online Edgelord Mishaps Will Derail Trevor Bauer’s Season?.
Oceans, a new standalone game with similar mechanics to its parent game, Evolution, is now on Kickstarter; I demoed this at PAX Unplugged in December and found there were some aspects I preferred, especially the mechanics around feeding.
Dire Wolf’s upcoming Game of Thrones: Oathbreaker social deduction game is now available for pre-order.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: climate change, Cooking, environment, gluten-free, guns, health, hoaxes, metoo, mexico, stick to baseball, vaccines

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