immigration — Page 2

→ August 30, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/30/25.

Over at Endless Mode, I wrote about how educators are using off-the-shelf board games in their classrooms for all sorts of didactic purposes.

I held a Klawchat on Thursday. I also appeared on The Menschwarmers podcast, which (obviously) is about the intersection of Judaism and sports, to talk about the Core Jackson story.

I moved my free email newsletter over to Kit this week, and the transition seems to have gone smoothly. If you were already signed up on Substack before Wednesday, you should have received the new edition. If you haven’t signed up, or signed up on Substack after that, you can sign up on my new site at Kit.

And now, the links…

Long(ish) reads first: A BBC investigation found that images and videos of child sexual abuse are easily found on X/Twitter, including those of a woman who is one of those victims and has directly asked Elon Musk to stop it. Third parties based overseas are using X to advertise the images for sale, then switching to other platforms to exchange them.

Bolts magazine looks at how two neighboring cities in Arizona have taken opposite approaches to tackling homelessness.

Israel struck Nasser Hospital in Gaza four times, killing at least 20 people, including 5 journalists. I’m really sick of western media blindly accepting the IDF’s claims that they’re not targeting civilians.

Taylor Lorenz wrote this investigative piece for WIRED about a dark-money group funding Democratic influencers to spread their messages on social media, although there’s already a correction and at least one of the people she named, Elizabeth Booker Houston, has pointed out what she believes are several errors in the story (example).

The Trump Administration is ending funding of a pediatric brain cancer treatment network dedicated to early trials of new medications.

Harvard has removed support titles for proctors and tutors who were designated as support specifically for LGBTQ+ or first-generation students.

Josephine Riesman ’08 wrote in the Harvard Independent, for which I wrote while I was there, that we should avoid the building that bears her family’s name, the Riesman Center for Harvard Hillel, because that organization has ignored the genocide happening in Gaza and said nothing about the Administration’s attacks against the university.

Anti-vaxx loons are making excuses for the CDC shooter while their idol RFK Jr. pours more gasoline on the fire.

The Philly Inquirer’s Will Bunch writes that a politician is finally doing what they promised: Trump is acting just like an authoritarian, raiding the house of critic John Bolton and using the military on his own people.

Political scientist Don Moynihan writes that the United States is no longer a functioning democracy.
A “voodoo plan” presented to Georgia’s Republican-dominated legislature claims, against pretty much all of economic history, that cutting 40% of the state’s revenues by ending its income tax will somehow make the state’s revenues grow. We’re on about year 45 of this experiment, and it doesn’t work. If you really want to cut taxes and grow an economy, raise the threshold below which people pay zero taxes. Those taxpayers are much more likely to put that money right back into the economy through consumption.

ICE detained a mother in Massachusetts for 10 days over a 2003 cannabis charge for which she’d been pardoned. The woman is here legally, and the offense is no longer even a crime in Massachusetts. She was released on August 20^th.

ICE also arrested two firefighters in Washington while the men were fighting an active wildfire.

The handpicked chairman of the Surry County (North Carolina) Board of Elections was arrested for putting drugs in his granddaughters’ ice cream. James Edwin Yokeley Jr., a Republican, resigned the day after his arrest.

A Republican candidate for Arizona Attorney General claimed that the Yuma sheriff endorsed him … and the sheriff says that’s not true.

Alderac’s Kickstarter for Into the Machine has a novel structure – there are all sorts of expansions for their other titles here as well, and the more items you pledge, the greater the discount you get.

I’m intrigued by the game Le Vent Rouge, with a relaunched Kickstarter up now, as it looks like a dice-rolling and bag-building game, but a heavier one, with a play time listed at 60-120 minutes.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, arizona, Economics, fascism, gaza, georgia, harvard, immigration, links, longreads, north carolina, social media, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ August 23, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/23/25.

I’m on PTO this week, but a piece I helped report ran at The Athletic this week, with Brendan Kuty taking the lead, looking at why the Yankees took a player in the draft last month who, as a college freshman, drew a swastika outside the door of a Jewish classmate. It’s not about his baseball ability, but what the player, Core Jackson, did to try to convince teams that that’s not who he is as a person, and what the Yankees did to decide they were willing to take him in spite of that. I got the initial scoop, and expected that I would end up writing a straightforward story about a kid who’d done an inexcusable thing – and maybe one that no one would want to discuss on the record. It turned out to be something very different.

Over at Endless Mode, I reviewed the two-player game Gatsby, which is an above-average (and very spiteful) game with a well below-average theme that has nothing at all to do with the great novel.

I wanted to get this posted and the next time I get a window to write I’ll work on my free email newsletter, which you should sign up for because it’s awesome but also it’s free so if it’s not awesome have you really lost anything?

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Scientific American explains how a cure – or at least a life-changing treatment – for peanut allergies may be upon us.

Hannah Keyser wrote in the New York Times about the system that encourages very young pitchers to throw harder at younger ages, and what the costs may be. Note this quote from Dr. Brandon Erickson, a surgeon who’s performed many UCL repairs: “The harder you throw, the more likely you are to have a Tommy John.”

WIRED looks at the rising problems for Roblox, as the company faces lawsuits over the lack of moderation and claims that the platform is a haven for child predators.

A new research brief published by the Housing Initiative at Penn found that cash rental subsidies helped reduce the rate of forced moves and of major housing quality concerns among recipients in a controlled pilot program.

ProPublica examines just how badly Trump has gutted our public health agencies. It’s worse than you thought.

A couple of people who look exactly like you’d expect are trying to create a whites-only community in a state where you’d expect it, Arkansas. I saw some negative reaction to this New York Times article, but I don’t think the authors went easy on these neo-Nazis at all – and this is a good example of where sunshine should work as a disinfectant.

An Israeli official was arrested in Nevada in a sting operation aimed at pedophiles after he tried to lure a police decoy into meeting him for a sex act, as was a local evangelical pastor. Tom Alexandrovich, the director of the Israel Cyber Directorate, brought a condom to meet what he thought was a 15-year-old girl. The Trump Administration intervened to get him released and returned to Israel.

A Yale epidemiologist and a former CDC employee write in STAT News that the CDC shooting is public health’s January 6^th, putting the blame squarely on RFK Jr.

Colorado has their 17^th measles case this year, this one of an unvaccinated child under the age of 5. You can put the blame for that on RFK Jr. and his cronies, too, profiting off years of spewing false information about the MMR vaccine.

There’s now a cholera outbreak in refugee camps in Sudan, and climate change is making the spread of the disease.

Trump’s pick to juke the stats at the Bureau of Labor Statistics posted all manner of insane conspiracy theories on his now-deleted Twitter account.

Bradford William Davis spoke to Texas state Rep. Nicole Collier (D), who spent two full days round the clock in the Texas Capitol building in protest against Republicans’ extreme gerrymandering of the state, about her action and how it’s the kind of move that more Democrats need to make to show voters they’re actually fighting.

A Senate probe led by Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) found hundreds of reports of physical and sexual abuse at ICE detention centers.

Eddie Kim, a reporter for the new worker-owned San Francisco publication The Gazetteer, went to report on an ICE kidnapping action and got pepper-sprayed by an ICE officer. They wear masks, they attack the press, all because they know what they’re doing is wrong.

A Seattle restaurant called Stuffy’s II has to pay $936,000 in fines for violating the city’s ban on indoor dining in 2020-21. Good.

Harvard Magazine reveals the hard shift to the right among many students at my alma mater. The opening quote, from a current senior named Leo Koerner, absolutely reeks of privilege: He turned conservative because he had to stay inside during COVID? Grow up, buddy.

I had several links to pieces in WIRED this week, but they also fell for a scammer who sold them AI-authored articles, doing the same to Business Insider and possibly other sites. Both WIRED and BI have taken articles under that byline down.

More great board game Kickstarters: Keymaster has one up for Hanami, the retheming of my all-time favorite game by Reiner Knizia, Samurai; and Weird City has one up for Satchel Quest, a competitive bag-building dungeon crawl game from the designers of Point salad.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, board game news, colorado, coronavirus, harvard, health, immigration, links, longreads, seattle, stick to baseball, texas, the swamp, vaccines

→ August 16, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/16/25.

Over at Endless Mode, I reviewed the light but very fun game Wine Cellar, which scales really well up to 8 players, an unusual player count for anything that’s not a party game. It’s out of stock at Miniature Market but the bad place still has it.

My free email newsletter went out last weekend, and I’ll send another one out whenever my next piece at the Athletic runs (I do like to time them so that they serve the function of catching readers up on things I’ve written).

And now, the links…

Longreads first: My new colleague Nathan Fenno detailed the highly disturbing story of the stalker who has hounded former Rams lineman Aaron Donald for years.

A Facebook/Meta AI chatbot engaged in flirty conversation with a 76-year-old man who was suffering from cognitive decline, eventually giving him an address in New York City so he could come “meet” her. He fell while racing to catch a train and died from his injuries.

The New York Times exposed how the AI bubble is going to drive up energy costs for everyone. Not mentioned is how it’s probably going to drive water shortages as well. If you’re searching for something on Google, by the way, you can disable the automatic AI-generated tosh that appears at the top of the results just by adding “-ai” to the end of your search terms.

Brandy Zarozny exposes the chaos and infighting at HHS under RFK Jr., who didn’t even tell his own staff – or maybe even the President – before announcing that he was killing funding for further research into safe, effective mRNA vaccines.

One woman in Oregon is using an old law aimed at stopping nuclear power plants there to fight green energy projects like wind and solar. Nuclear power was and is much safer and far more efficient than its critics (mostly on the left) claim it is, so while this is just bad for humanity, it is a bit of perverse justice to see the same side that fought nuclear plants hoisted on their own petard.

Scientists have found ‘sex reversal’ in five different species of birds in Australia, including one bird that was genetically male but laid eggs. Taxonomy is a human creation. Nature is too complex to make our artificial categorization schemes as accurate as we pretend they are – which makes the war on trans people even more disgraceful than it is just on humanist grounds.

A professor at Southeastern Louisiana University whose research uncovered high levels of heavy metals, including arsenic and lead, in and around Lake Maurepas was abruptly terminated from the project without explanation, even though she is the only analytical chemist at the entire college.

ICE kidnapped a woman here legally from New Zealand and her six-year-old son when they re-entered the U.S. after dropping her two older children off at the Vancouver airport, holding them for nearly a month now in isolation at an ICE prison. (UPDATE: On Saturday evening, ICE released the pair.)

The staff at an English pub threatened to walk out if the restaurant accepted a reservation from Vice-President JD Vance, so they turned him away. It’s even more humiliating because Kamala Harris ate there a few weeks earlier.

The cases before the Supreme Court on states’ powers to discriminate against trans athletes are about much more than just sports. The seat has been open for years because Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS) blocked a nomination by then-President Joe Biden, just because she could.

The same bigoted judge from Mississippi who denied a trans teen’s right to change his legal name and repeatedly misgendered the teen in his ruling has now been nominated for a US District Court judgeship.

A Texas DA who incorrectly charged a pregnant woman who took abortion pills with murder paid for his own mistress to have an abortion in the 1990s. The charges were dropped a few days later, but the woman is suing authorities over the incident.

There was a global summit on plastics pollution this past week, where talks on a pact to fight the issue broke down (something that plastic doesn’t do!). I didn’t see this in any U.S. press, probably because our current government is cutting every effort to help the environment.

Such as the White House’s decision to stop a wind-power project, claiming it was based on “flawed science,” and then redacting the entire 27-page report that purports to explain their logic.

Two very exciting games I saw at Gen Con went up on crowdfunding sites this week: The Voynich Puzzle, a crunchy worker-placement game based on the unsolved Voynich manuscript; and Camp Grizzly, a co-op title based on 1980s slasher films that is a reprint of a game so hard to find that full copies have gone for $600.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, artificial intelligence, board game news, environment, football, immigration, links, longreads, mississippi, oregon, science, stick to baseball, texas, the swamp, trans rights, vaccines

→ August 9, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/9/25.

At the trade deadline, I broke down the following trades for subscribers to The Athletic:

I also posted a midseason ranking of the top 60 prospects in the minors, held a Q&A about it, and wrote up a scouting notebook on Travis Bazzana, Braylon Doughty, and some other Cleveland and Baltimore prospects.

At Endless Mode, I ranked the ten best new games I saw at Gen Con and also ran through everything else I saw or played at the convention this year. Prior to that, I reviewed the game Big Sur, and wrote a feature story on the effects of the Trump tariffs and economic uncertainty on the board gaming space.

I appeared on NPR’s Morning Edition to discuss the brief callup of Jen Pawol to become the first woman to umpire an MLB game.

Now that this post is done, my next writing assignment is my free email newsletter, followed by a pair of reviews for this site.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: New York’s Intelligencer has the story of the one-man takeover of the Anti-Defamation League, where CEO Jonathan Greenblatt has hijacked the organization to back Donald Trump and attack anyone who criticizes Israel as antisemitic, while abandoning the organization’s storied history of standing up for the rights of all minorities and oppressed people.
Gizmodo wrote about the “end of work as we know it” due to the rising use of AI, even with serious deficiencies in the technology. Whether we’re ready or not, the workforce is about to be hit hard by the fever dreams of a small number of tech bros.
The Huffington Post spoke to Jerce Reyes Barrios about the abuse and torture he suffered in five months in El Salvador’s CECOT, where the U.S. is sending people suspected of entering the U.S. illegally. We are all complicit.
Guards at the ICE detention center in Miami made migrants there kneel like dogs to eat, with their hands shackled. Abu Ghraib taught us nothing.
Phil Williams of WTVF/NewsChannel 5, one of the best investigative reporters in the country, exposes the investors backing the construction of a Christian nationalist community near Gainesboro, Tennessee.
Remember all the stories last summer about Joe Biden’s mental status? Donald Trump “has trouble completing a thought” and has rambled on in nonsensical answers, often entirely off topic, reports Adam Gabbatt for the Guardian, quoting several experts who say the President is showing signs of dementia.
Brown caved to the Trump Administration, and now the university is “functionally inaccessible” to trans students.
NPR ran a series of stories on the problems posed by defunct oil wells across the southern and western United States, starting with one about how we don’t even know where they all are.
Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA) introduced a measure to set cognitive standards for members of Congress, which, of course, was quickly rejected. There are more members of Congress aged 70 or older now than there have ever been.
The Forward explains that the starvation in Gaza is indeed Israel’s fault.
Some Senate Democrats finally took a stand by calling for the U.S. to stop supporting Israel’s ineffective Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which Israel created after kicking the UN out of Gaza, due to the mass starvation happening in the territory.
Israel is taking over Gaza City and has announced plans to occupy the entire Palestinian territory. It’s an invasion and an illegal annexation, no different than Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbia invading Bosnia.
Meanwhile, the New York Times has devoted more articles to attacking mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani than it has to the ongoing humanitarian disaster in Gaza, including the mass starvation and the war’s creation of over 5000 new child amputees in the territory.
An Israeli “settler” in the West Bank shot and killed a Palestinian activist who was involved in the production of last year’s film No Other Land. The Israeli military claims that the shooter was a civilian who responded with gunfire when a group of Palestinians threw rocks.
A far-right Israeli politician said Israel needed to take a cue from Adolf Hitler and wipe out all Gazans.
In June, the publisher of the Harvard Educational Review abruptly cancelled the release of an upcoming issue dedicated entirely to Palestine.
Israel has held an American teenager in prison for five months on charges he threw rocks.
The walkout by Texas Democrats isn’t going to work. It may pay some dividends for the party locally and nationally, but it’s not going to stop the gerrymandering.
Luzerne County, Pennsyltucky, cancelled the scheduled appearance of Philly band Low Cut Connie at a festival because they claimed the band’s music contained “politics and propaganda.” I thought cancel culture was bad?
Jess Grose writes in the New York Times about how social media has further corrupted the already commercialized American childhood, spurred by the Benson Boone Crumbl cookie, which is an actual phrase that unfortunately makes sense to me.
Jacksonville police used deadly force in a routine traffic stop of a Black man, including repeatedly punching him and smashing in his window, despite the fact that he never fought back in any way – and local prosecutors cleared the cops of wrongdoing.
The Spotify catalogs for some dead artists have seen “new” songs that are AI-generated added in recent months; the Futurism story blames Spotify for creating them although it’s unclear who’s actually doing it.
The President of the Utah Senate, Republican J. Stuart Adams, pushed fellow Republicans to lower the state’s age of consent to help out a family acquaintance charged with statutory rape. I don’t see why Democrats would ignore this: The Utah Republican Party is actively helping pedophiles evade punishment.
The wife of Rep. Gabe Evans (R-CO) wrote a racist romance novel. Apparently it’s quite bad, on multiple levels.
RFK Jr. cut a $500 million federal program to continue developing mRNA vaccines, the technology behind two of the main vaccines against COVID-19, offering the potential for vaccines against some cancers and many other diseases. His explanation was full of pseudoscientific bullshit.
Some countries still believe in science: Brazil is about to release swarms of mosquitos infected with a Wolbachia bacterium that prevents the virus that causes dengue fever from multiplying – and that then gets passed down to the mosquito’s offspring.
People who find their minds wander during simple tasks may be better at pattern recognition.
Misgendering and deadnaming are no longer considered hate or harassment on LinkedIn. Why would any site ever make an active choice to permit hateful behavior?
Philadelphia city schools found a way to keep students learning even when federal funding evaporated this summer.
Dan Pelzer kept a log of every book he read for over 60 years, and when he died last month at age 92, his tally was at least 3,599 books read in that span. For comparison’s sake, I’m 52, my list goes back at least to high school, and I’m at 1,988 books read. At my current pace, it’ll still take me at least 20 years to catch up to Pelzer’s total, assuming … a lot of things.
The India Board Game Designers Collective has a Kickstarter up where you can get three print-and-play games for $9, delivering in September. I backed it.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-semitism, artificial intelligence, board game news, colorado, florida, gaza, harvard, immigration, links, longreads, pennsylvania, police, science, social media, stick to baseball, tennessee, utah, vaccines, war crimes

→ July 19, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/19/25.

My recaps of all 30 teams’ draft classes are now up for subscribers to The Athletic, organized by division:

I wrote up a recap of day one that ran overnight Sunday into Monday, and my editor Melissa helped compile all of my comments on first & comp round picks as they happened into a single post.

I also wrote up some observations on the Futures Game.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the new edition of the push-your-luck game Celestia, which really needs the expansions and promo cards that will come in the redo of the big box version, supposedly out later this year.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: ICE arrested a teenager in Milford, Massachusetts, who was on his way to volleyball practice because they were looking for his father. The arrest mobilized the town to help get him freed through the legal process.

The Wall Street Journal has the exclusive story of a “bawdy” letter that Donald Trump sent to pedophile and rapist Jeffrey Epstein on the latter’s 50^th birthday.

Multiple police chiefs and sheriffs in Louisiana have been charged with handing out fraudulent visas to immigrants in exchange for cash.

ICE and Customs and Border Protection have held a family of five U.S. citizens in custody for two weeks with no contact with other family members or legal representation. We live in a police state, but they’re imposing it on us so slowly that no one seems to notice.

The Trump Administration also deported a Guatemalan pastor and father of five who had lived in the U.S. for twenty years. The people posting videos of themselves applauding ICE agents need to hear about these stories.

Israel is destroying civilian buildings in Gaza as part of its genocidal war on the Palestinian people. This is a war crime, by the way.

Israel also killed six Gazan children who were waiting to fill water containers in what they’re calling a “technical error.”

A group of San Francisco-area journalists have joined together to form Coyote Media, a worker-owned publication due to start publishing later this summer.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) is fighting public records requests for his emails with Elon Musk because he claims they are too “intimate and embarrassing” to be made public.

Hugo Award-winning author Paolo Bacigulpi said in an interview with Colorado Public Radio that the future is even stupider than he imagined it would be.

How stupid? The Trump Administration is spending over $160,000 to destroy contraceptives meant for women outside of the U.S.

More stupidity: The Secretary of Transportation keeps lying about the safety of the New York City subways. Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) finally called him out on it in a hearing that devolved into Secretary Duffy shouting that Nadler was the one lying (another lie).

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: gaza, immigration, journalism, links, longreads, louisiana, massachusetts, new york, police, stick to baseball, texas, the swamp

→ July 5, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/5/25.

I posted my final (mostly) Big Board for the 2025 draft this week for subscribers to the Athletic, and then held a Q&A to take questions on it on Wednesday.

Paste Games is now Endless Mode, still under the Paste umbrella, but its own site with more coverage of all things gaming, which will include about twice as many stories from me each year. My first story at the new site is a review of the 2024 reprint of Gold West, a great, family-level strategy game that went out of print with the demise of publisher Tasty Minstrel Games.

I’ll try to get another issue of my free email newsletter out this upcoming week, before the draft drowns me in content.

I appeared on Seattle radio to discuss the Mariners’ farm system and possible draft picks this week, and talked mostly Orioles prospects and the draft with Ryan Ripken on his Youtube show.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Hollywood Reporter explains that Pixar’s Elio, which is on pace to be the studio’s biggest box-office flop ever, was stripped of some key thematic elements in what appears to be an attempt to remove queer-coded parts of the film and make the main character more “masculine.” The only Pixar films to fail to reach $100 million in domestic box office gross were the ones affected in some way by the pandemic (Onward, Luca, Soul, and Turning Red); Elio is at $49 million after two weeks, and saw a 44% decline from week 1 to week 2.

This investigative report from The New York Times looks into how Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, current Vice-President of the United Arab Emirates and owner of the Manchester City football team, consorts with violent rebel leaders and guides his country’s efforts in various foreign wars, all while avoiding serious scrutiny from western press.

Futurism looked at incidents of “ChatGPT psychosis,” where people using the energy-hogging AI tool descend into madness, believing the software is telling them deep secrets about the universe or communicating from beyond the grave or other nonsense. There are no guardrails around these LLMs and clearly no will at the federal level to even consider them.

Also from Futurism, an AI slop story in three parts: They broke down how the artist Velvet Sundown, which had racked up over half a million streams on Spotify, almost certainly did not exist; they ran a follow-up where the ‘band’ claimed they weren’t just an AI fabrication; and they had the last word when the clown behind the scam admitted the music was all made by AI.

The Guardian, of all places, has one of the most thorough takedowns of the Athletics’ abortive attempt to move to Las Vegas, where no one has even broken ground on a new stadium.

The BBC has the story of a man who was stalked and harassed for years by a preacher at his church after he rejected her advances – and where the bishop didn’t believe him, of course.

It was not a great week for the New York Times’ coverage of Zohran Mamdani, but this editorial by M. Gessen nails how Mamdani’s opponents cover their anti-Muslim bigotry in the veneer of claims that he’s antisemitic. Gessen points out that Mamdani is the only mayoral candidate who has spoken about real antisemitism and the costs it imposes on Jews in New York and beyond.

The Times also investigated conditions at the “tropical gulag” in El Salvador where Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia was held – and apparently tortured.

This story from Tiernan Cannon at Paste is the best assessment of the Bob Vylan kerfuffle at Glastonbury and the related, ongoing controversy over Kneecap. I will only add that I saw more stories on the BBC’s site about what Vylan’s vocalist said than about the IDF dropping a 500-pound bomb on a Gaza café, which may be an actual war crime.

A couple of rich homeowners in King County decided that some very old trees were blocking their view, so they had the trees cut down. Except the trees were on public land, and no one is taking responsibility for the actual destruction.

Surprising no one, researchers found that support for anti-trans laws and policies is tied to the rise of authoritarian sentiments and the desire for others to conform to your own views. Religiosity is also correlated with transphobic beliefs, of course.

Oregon state Rep. Greg Smith (R) may have used his position in the legislature to raise his own pay as executive director of the Columbia Development Authority.

King County, Washington, Assessor John Wilson is running for County Executive and said last November that “the foremost challenge facing the county is we’ve got to do something about crime.” He was arrested this week for stalking his ex-fiancée and violating a restraining order.

Trump’s pick to lead the Office of Special Council, Paul Ingrassia, has ties to antisemitic and white nationalist extremists and has shared a 9/11 conspiracy video.

Vox’s Unexplainable podcast talks to Dr. Marlena Fejzo about her work to identify the genetic factors behind morning sickness – and the lack of funding to find a cure.

Seeing this story about a new life form found in tar on a ship that docked in Cleveland just two days after I saw 28 Days Later for the first time does not give me warm feelings.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: artificial intelligence, baseball, immigration, links, longreads, movies, new york city, oregon, religion, science, seattle, stick to baseball, the swamp, trans rights

→ June 21, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/21/25.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I posted my annual ten-year redraft column, looking back at the 2015 class, along with the companion piece on the first-rounders who didn’t pan out. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I have a free email newsletter and more people should sign up for it.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: GroundUp has the first part of a series on the Mozambican children that President Trump has left to die by decimating USAID. No one who claims to be pro-life, or Christian, or even remotely human can support this atrocity. It is a genocide in slow motion.

That Brevard County sheriff who threatened to kill protesters just a day or so because the Minnesota assassinations has a long history of racial profiling and corruption.

This piece is from 2022, but I found it while looking into the band Tulip, whose latest single popped up on a Spotify playlist. Turns out their origin story is fascinating – the two leads were married to other people and members of a conservative evangelical church, then fell in love and were excommunicated. They left the church and formed a symphonic metal band.

North Dakota voters voted to create an ethics commission that could hold officials accountable for violations. Some of the state’s Republican leaders are trying to emasculate it. I wonder why.

Meanwhile, Texas wasted $2 billion in taxpayer money building part of a border wall, which is about as useful as part of a wall tends to be, at least at keeping something out.

ICE is trying to deport a Texas woman who is married to a U.S. citizen, arresting her when she returned to the mainland U.S. from her honeymoon in the Virgin Islands. Ward Sakeik is considered ‘stateless,’ as she was born a refugee and arrived in the U.S. on a refugee visa when she was 8. The federal government wants to deport her to Israel, even though she has never been there or in Palestine. This is not someone who arrived here illegally, or overstayed a visa, or committed a crime.

A flag that’s popular among Christian nationalists flew over the Small Business Administration building this past week, in case you’re still confused about what’s really happening.

Two Michigan parents let their baby girl die of jaundice because they believed God would heal her. They’re going to prison, in part because they’ve said they’d do the same thing all over again. They belong to a Pentecostal church that preaches faith healing, but the church apparently doesn’t proscribe seeing doctors.

Delaware’s Senate, which is currently controlled by a Democratic supermajority, is really getting down to the key issues confronting us today, as they passed a resolution that they should look and see if public schools are at a disadvantage in athletics.

Harvard Magazine explains the university’s conflict with the Administration and what’s at stake in the fight. One of my classmates, Joanna Weiss, is the magazine’s new editor.

This column from the Seattle Times (syndicated from the Washington Post) claims that there’s a simple fitness test that’s highly correlated to your future life expectancy. I can do it but definitely wobble a little on the jump back up. I think that’s still a 9.
Rex Huppke writes that we need to take healthy policy-making away from RFK Jr., as his plans are going to kill people. My Representative, Lisa Blunt Rochester (D), issued a statement decrying his decision to fire all of the smart people on the ACIP vaccine-advisory committee and replace them with a group of Minions.

Congressional Republicans are about to kill the Grad PLUS loan program for graduate studies, further trying to wipe out the U.S.’s substantial advantage in higher education and eventually driving shortages in important fields like engineering.

JK Rowling called the Scottish newspaper The National “anti-woman,” so the editor of the paper, Laura Webster, responded.

Astronomers at CalTech and Harvard may have found the answer to where all the missing matter in the universe is. Turns out it was just behind the couch.

Stonemaier Games announced the summer release of their newest title, Vantage, an open-world, cooperative, exploration game where players have all crash-landed on a planet and can communicate with each other but can’t see anyone else’s locations or views.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: astronomy, board game news, delaware, florida, harvard, immigration, links, longreads, north dakota, physics, police, religion, stick to baseball, texas, the swamp, usaid

→ May 31, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/31/25.

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

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

And now, the links…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

→ May 3, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/3/25.

I had one post for subscribers to The Athletic this past week, a draft scouting notebook on Riley Quick, Kyle Lodise, some UVA bats, and three college hitters who could be top ten picks in 2026.

At Paste, I reviewed the two-player game Floristry, which is important as I think it’s the first two-player title to use an auction mechanic that really works, but unfortunately that doesn’t have enough game beyond that.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New York Times has the bonkers story of how a bunch of college-aged and high school kids stole nearly $250 million in crypto from one guy, and then got caught within a month because they were so sloppy about it. It includes a real-world kidnapping story that demonstrates how this stuff can and will spill over into physical danger, even for people not directly involved in the scams. (Also, the victim of the original theft is a ding-dong, falling for some of the most obvious tricks to get him to divulge his passwords.)

Elon Musk’s xAI is operating 35 gas turbines in Tennessee with no permits for all pollution they’re spewing into the air. AI is an environmental disaster as it is, but Musk using his dubious position in Washington to skip any and all regulations is making the problem worse.

The author/owner of Recipe Tin Eats wrote about how influencer and cookbook author Brooki Bellamy copied several of her recipes, and those of other recipe sites, in Bellamy’s best-selling new book. Nagi refers to it as plagiarism, which is probably inapt, but Bellamy at least appears to have swiped the recipes and very slightly reworded the instructions to avoid copyright claims.

A group of religious zealots called My God Votes are trying to turn Texas into a Christian theocracy (they have lots of help, unfortunately), positively pissing on any notion of the separation of church and state in this country.

And Texas is also threatening to go after bookstores that sell whatever it is that the religious right deems “obscene,” allowing a minor to claim damages from such books.

As Trump and Musk ignore Congress by eliminating federal funding and firing workers, Trump’s golf trips are costing taxpayers tens of millions of dollars. I thought these guys wanted to eliminate government waste. I just found a whole lot of it. Yet food banks across the United States are running desperately short now that Trump/Musk have cut off funding and supplies.

ICE agents raided a house in Oklahoma City … but they had the wrong place. Instead they traumatized a mother and three daughters who had just moved there from Maryland when twenty armed agents broke down the door and seized the family’s computers, phones, and cash. The Philly Inquirer’s Will Bunch writes that people who were called crazy for saying we should abolish ICE were right all along.

AI-generated slop sites are proliferating across the internet; Futurism’s Maggie Harrison Dupré writes about one such site that used an old domain associated with Emerson College’s radio station to appear legitimate while churning out fake ‘news’ stories.

Polygon, the great gaming-news site that was under the Vox umbrella, was decimated after Vox sold it to a content-farming group, with nearly all Polygon staffers laid off. It’s now part of the same company that runs clickbait sites like ScreenRant. I wrote two pieces for Polygon in 2021-22, but if those disappear I’ll repost the reviews here for posterity.

Scientific American reports on the mass-brainwashing effort around measles, spearheaded by the Republican Party and specifically the Trump Administration, pushing the twin lies that the measles vaccine causes autism (again, it does not) and that measles isn’t that harmful (it has already killed two children in the U.S. this year, and can cause the fatal condition SSPE in people who recover from the infection).

The same anti-vaccine lunacy has led to a jump in pertussis cases – over 8400 already in the U.S. this year. Whooping cough kills about 1% of infants under one, children too young to be vaccinated, who contract the bacterial illness.

And bird flu continues to spread, with more people getting infected, raising the specter of another pandemic. If only we had some sort of government agency that could track and respond to this sort of thing.

The NIH has rolled out new rules that prohibit grants to anyone working on programs related to diversity, equity, or inclusion. Like so many other executive orders and federal mandates of the last four months, it’s probably not legal, but it won’t matter. They’ve already caused the chaos they sought.

A mathematician in Australia seems to have solved the problem of finding a generalized solution to polynomial equations of power 5 or greater. I keep seeing the same headline for this one story, but nothing further about the method, or whether other mathematicians agree with what sounds like a controversial approach (among other things, he says he “doesn’t believe in irrational numbers,” which…).

Two board game Kickstarters of note, even as the Trump tariffs threaten the entire industry: Flamecraft Duals, a two-player version of the hit game Flamecraft that promises to be more directly competitive; and Nippon: Zaibatsu, a brand-new edition of a heavy game from 2015 just called Nippon.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, crime, cryptocurrencies, first amendment, immigration, links, longreads, math, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ April 26, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/26/25.

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

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

And now, the links…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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