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→ March 22, 2025
→ By keith
→ 2 Comments

Stick to baseball, 3/22/25.

I’m back from Arizona, and wrote five scouting notebooks while I was out there: on the Mariners-Guardians Breakouts Game (plus some Brewers notes), on the Giants-Rangers Breakouts Game (plus some Rockies/Angels notes), on the White Sox-Rockies and Reds-Brewers Breakouts Game (plus some Dodgers notes), on some Dodgers & Guardians prospects, and on some Royals & Rangers prospects. I wanted to do a Klawchat on the flight home but we were delayed an hour-plus and then I fell asleep a few minutes after takeoff.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Teen Vogue’s cover story is a profile of Vivian Jenna Wilson, who happens to be the estranged daughter of Elon Musk, and who has some interesting things to say about her father and on the fight for basic rights for trans people.

The Guardian’s long read explains how an extremist, bigoted rabbi who died over 30 years ago holds sway over leaders at the top of the Israeli government.

M. Gessen, a trans immigrant to the United States, wrote in the New York Times about the “hidden” motive behind Trump’s war on trans rights – which isn’t that hidden, as it’s one of the first steps in the totalitarian playbook: Find a vulnerable minority and demonize them, casting them out of the polity, and then move on to the next one. One time it was the Jews (okay, more than one time). One time it was the Tutsis. One time it was the intellectuals. This time it’s trans people.

One more – The Bulwark’s Jonathan Last rants about how it was never about trans women in sports, and how we should just leave trans people alone.

A 6-year-old girl died of the measles in Texas, because her parents are part of a religious cult that has largely rejected vaccines. The anti-vaccine movement has pounced and is using the death to further press their own dangerous bullshit.

Columbia University bent the knee to President Trump over $400 million in funding. Their endowment, by the way, is about $15 billion. This is an active choice, not a financial necessity.

Prof. Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist and professor of bioethics at Columbia, coincidentally, wrote an editorial for Nature calling on scientists to stand up against the war on DEI.

Three prominent conservatives were arrested just this past week for child sex crimes. The issue is not trans people. It was never trans people. Here’s more on the Minnesota Republican, who spoke out against teaching kids about sexual orientation and gender identity back in 2016. (It’s not limited to right-wingers, though; a Democratic party official in Florida was arrested a few weeks back for the same.)

The Mississippi Free Press reports on deaths and injuries resulting from no-knock raids in that state.

Dark energy might be weakening, challenging cosmologists’ understanding of the way it works and threatening the standard model of the universe.

SpaceX’s Starship ships keep blowing up – and it will never work because of Elon Musk, according to journalist Will Lockett.

I watched Flow at home a couple of weeks ago, and my dog, who almost never looks at any screen at all, seemed to be watching it. Turns out I might not have been imagining it after all – dogs like that movie.

From my colleague Carson Kessler: MLB may be ending its Diversity Pipeline Program to try to comply in advance with the new Administration’s anti-DEI crusade.

A math problem known as the Kakeya Conjecture has been solved after 117 years.

Two board game Kickstarters to highlight this week – Pirates of the High Teas, a light strategy game from a small publisher that tries to bring diverse designers into the space; and Misfit Heroes, a card-crafting game from Phil Walker-Harding.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, israel, links, longreads, mississippi, physics, stick to baseball, trans rights, vaccines

→ March 16, 2025
→ By keith
→ 7 Comments

Stick to baseball, 3/15/25.

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

And now, the links…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

→ March 9, 2025
→ By keith
→ 20 Comments

Stick to baseball, 3/8/25.

I had two columns this week for subscribers to The Athletic – a ranking of the top 30 prospects for this year’s draft, and a scouting notebook on Oregon State, Auburn, and high school shortstop Kayson Cunningham.

I’m on the run, so let’s get to the links…

The New York Times looks at the rising tide of the working homeless – people who work critical but low-wage jobs in wealthy areas where they can’t afford housing.

Elon Musk is pouring money into an Wisconsin Supreme Court election, and the Republican candidate he’s backing said just this week that women are too emotional to rule on abortion cases.

Musk’s goons disbanded the technology office known as 18F, which existed to develop projects designed to improve government efficiency. Some of the former employees have set up a site to explain and defend their work.

The Texas A&M Board of Regents voted to ban all drag shows at the entire campus network, a pretty clear First Amendment violation. FIRE has sued to block the ban.

Our genius President referred to Lesotho as a country “nobody has ever heard of,” so the BBC published a story with nine facts about the tiny African country, which is entirely surrounded by South Africa.

Phoenix Children’s Hospital – where my daughter received care multiple times in the two-plus years we lived out there – has put a halt to gender-affirming care in obeisance to Trump’s (probably unconstitutional) executive orders. Absolute cowardice.

More obedience in advance – the University of Virginia voted to dissolve its office of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Lindsey Boylan, the first woman to come forward to report on Andrew Cuomo’s history of sexual harassment, wrote a piece in Vanity Fair decrying the disgraced ex-Governor’s intended candidacy for mayor of New York City. Cuomo and his legal team have spent years hounding Boylan and his other accusers to try to discredit them.

Louisiana’s Department of Health is ending its mass vaccination programs and banning promotion of seasonal vaccines like the one against the flu. That measles outbreak in Texas and New Mexico has already killed at least three people with over 200 confirmed cases, by the way.

I don’t do a lot of feel-good stories here, but this one is exceptional: The owner of the last video-rental store in Pocatello, Idaho, closed down his shop, but preserved a little bit of it in the corner of his convenience store especially for one customer, a woman with Down syndrome who’s been renting from him for 15 years.

The Seattle Times explains why coffee has gotten much more expensive lately, and is likely to continue to get even more so.

Fox News anchors are suddenly panicking about the “weakening” economy under Trump, as if this is any sort of surprise.

People who voted for Trump are now losing their government jobs. I really find it hard to muster any sympathy for these folks; if they claim they didn’t know what they were voting for, they weren’t paying enough attention before they went to the booth.

A Mississippi State alumna writes about the Trump Administration’s attempts to threaten universities into historical denialism, including her own alma mater’s shameful history of racial discrimination.

A cop in Vermont who struck and killed a cyclist was watching a right-wing Youtube video while driving.

Some ongoing board game Kickstarters: Point City & Propolis is still going for three more weeks, and there’s another for a 10^th anniversary edition of Champions of Midgard with about the same time left.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, board game news, coffee, Economics, first amendment, idaho, links, louisiana, mississippi, new york, phoenix, police, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines, wisconsin

→ March 1, 2025
→ By keith
→ Leave a Comment

Stick to baseball, 3/1/25.

Two new posts this week at the Athletic, one looking at the top 25 prospects just for potential 2025 impact, and another draft scouting notebook from my trip to San Diego, looking at Tyler Bremner, Gavin Fien, and Nick Dumesnil.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the game Harvest, a big update to a smaller-box game of the same name from the defunct publisher Tasty Minstrel Games. I’m a huge fan of the new version.

I keep pushing back another issue of my free email newsletter because I’ve been writing so much other stuff, but it’ll come … soon. No promises, though.

And now, the links…

The Administration appears to be on the verge of firing anyone who’s LGBTQ+ (and out) in the federal government.

And they’ve already begun the process of banning trans people from obtaining visas to enter the United States. The absolute war on this tiny, highly vulnerable population should make everyone nauseous. It is just evil.

I’m embarrassed to say I did not know that many counties charge prison inmates “lodging fees” or “room and board” or some other bullshit – even if the convictions were later overturned. Pennsylvania’s Dauphin County has not only ended this practice, but forgiven over $65 million in such debts “owed” by past prisoners.

COVID-19 began with zoonotic spillover, but from what species? An increasing body of evidence points to raccoon dogs, which, come on, they just sound like trouble.

An unvaccinated child died from measles in Texas, the first death in the ongoing measles outbreak there that resulted from high vaccine-denialism rates there. The measles vaccine, part of the MMR shot, is extremely effective in preventing illness, and even if you survive a measles infection you can die years later from an incurable, degenerative neurological condition called SSPE.

So of course West Virginia is trying to weaken its vaccination requirements for schoolchildren, spurring this editorial in MetroNews arguing against this dangerous bill.

Meanwhile, RFK Jr. is already implementing his vaccine-denialist views, pausing an effort to develop a new COVID-19 vaccine and cancelling a critical meeting to help develop next season’s flu vaccines.

Three western Attorneys General are going to hold a series of town halls to highlight how these mass firings and funding freezes are affecting Americans. This should be happening everywhere, in every blue state, at least.

That Mississippi town (Clarksdale) that sued a local paper to force them to remove an editorial they didn’t like backed down under public pressure, withdrawing their lawsuit.

The current Supreme Court is very friendly to states that want to kill prisoners, but they issued a surprising ruling in one recent case of an Oklahoma man who wasn’t even accused of killing anyone and where the prosecutors withheld critical evidence.

Indiana Republicans are trying to ban the use of student IDs for voting, because the youths won’t vote for fascism! Remember, voter fraud isn’t a thing.

Captives freed from Myanmar scam centers – where pig-butchering and other phishing text & call scams originate – are now living in dire conditions in makeshift camps along the Myanmar-Thai border.

Pinterest is the latest site to be overrun by AI slop, according to this report from Futurism. AI-generated recipes, decorating tips, etc. are all over the site, drawing readers back to sites full of junk ads.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: death penalty, first amendment, indiana, links, measles, our dying democracy, prison culture, scams, stick to baseball, texas, trans rights, vaccines, voting rights, west virginia

→ February 22, 2025
→ By keith

For subscribers to the Athletic, I posted my first draft scouting notebook of 2025, covering the players I saw at the Shriners College Classic, which probably includes anywhere from three to six first-rounders and maybe ten guys who’ll go on day one. I also held a Klawchat here on Thursday.

Coming up, I’ll have my ranking of the top prospects for impact in 2025 on Monday, plus a draft scouting notebook from this weekend probably Tuesday, and then I believe my first ranking of draft prospects will go up around March 5^th.

You can also sign up for my free email newsletter, which didn’t go out this week because I was recovering from some sort of respiratory infection that wasn’t flu or COVID but still sucked.

And now, the links…

The so-called SAVE Act is a backdoor way to make it impossible for millions of women to vote, because they took their husbands’ surnames or have otherwise changed their names so that they no longer match those on their birth certificates. Democrats should be lying in front of the steamrollers to stop this one.

Epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves wrote an editorial in The New York Times about how RFK Jr.’s bullshit “just asking questions” line led to over 300,000 preventable deaths in South Africa, when that country’s leader was a rabid HIV denialist.

The President of the American Association of University Professors wrote an open letter stating that the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights has declared war on civil rights in our education system.

A prosecutor for ICE has been running a Twitter account that’s made highly racist, xenophobic, and white nationalist comments for a decade. He’s still employed by ICE as an attorney as of this writing; I’m surprised he hasn’t been promoted or transferred to DOGE.

SFGate reports on the chaos at Yosemite National Park after DOGE did its thing.

Many Americans are leaving the country for good, or at least for the foreseeable future, as the new Administration is slashing and burning through science and other federal budgets while threatening a level of authoritarianism never seen in this country. I don’t blame them one bit.

Meanwhile, the Administration is flouting federal rulings ordering them to release promised funding for NIH grants by refusing to submit notes to the Federal Register, which is required to release the funds.
Such federal grants help fund studies like this one at the University of Southern Mississippi into the causes of the tick-borne ‘red meat allergy’ that has been spreading across the United States, mostly in the south.

The great Elie Mystal asks how New Yorkers should solve the problem of Eric Adams; the only acceptable answer has him removed from office, obviously.

Quite a coincidence – just as I was reading W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz (spoiler: I hated it), this damning review in the Guardian of a posthumous collection of Sebald’s literary criticism appeared.

A dam in Czechia was held up by red tape, so beavers went and finished it themselves. I for one welcome our new beaver overlords.

The daughters of the late cofounder of Target spoke out against the company’s decision to end DEI initiatives, which have also led to a big drop in the company’s share price.

The mayor and city council in Clarksdale, Mississippi, sued a local newspaper for publishing an accurate story on a secret vote that the council was required to announce to the public before holding. The paper took the editorial down, but other sites are publishing it to get the word out.

Some board game Kickstarters of interest: Flatout Games has one for Point Galaxy, the third game in the Point Salad/City series, along with a new small-box citybuilder called Propolis.

Rock Manor Games has one up for StarDriven: Gateway, the second go-round after they pulled a campaign in the fall to tweak the game somewhat. I’ve demoed this game, as the publisher is a friend (our kids go to school together), and I recommend it.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, denialism, links, longreads, mississippi, new york city, our dying democracy, science, stick to baseball, vaccines, voting rights

→ February 16, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/16/25.

My entire offseason prospect rankings package is now up for subscribers to the Athletic, and you can find links to all 33 lists/articles on this index page. If you just want the highlights, here’s the top 100, the farm system rankings, and the two Q&As I did around the package on February 12^th and January 28^th.

I reviewed the family board game Fairy Ring over at Paste about two weeks ago; it’s really great, easy to learn for kids 8 and up, but with enough mental calculations on each turn that it has enough to keep adults engaged. My review of Harvest will go up this week.

I got back to my free email newsletter in the last few weeks, and hope to get back to posting more regularly on the dish as well now that the mad rush of the prospect rankings is over.

There were way too many articles to link to since my last roundup to include them all, so here’s a quick list of high (or low) lights…

Longreads first: Doesn’t matter much now, but RFK Jr. still espouses the same bullshit anti-vaccine and conspiracy theory views he did before his nomination, no matter how much he tried to dissemble and deny in his confirmation hearings.

This may also be a bit out of date already but the American Association for the Advancement of Science published an inside look at the devastation going on inside the NIH, NSF, and other federal science agencies.

The BBC exposed how MI5 lied to a court to protect one of its agents who had a history of abusing women.

The New Republic profiled Rep. Sarah McBride (D), my representative in Congress and the first openly trans Congressperson in either chamber.

The Society for the Study of Evolution issued an open letter to the President and Congress on the current scientific understanding of sex and gender, a small but important gesture against the Republican Party’s relentless war on trans people – which included a threat to pull all federal funding to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children if the group didn’t remove all mention of trans kids from their site. And the cowards complied.

There’s a big measles outbreak in a county in Texas with a very low vaccination rate, a direct result of the right’s attack on the extremely safe and effective MMR vaccine. Measles can kill and maim children, and some people who recover will die years later from an incurable neurological condition called SSPE.

A baby died and over 50 people fell ill from a pertussis outbreak in Greece. Pertussis is also vaccine-preventable, although its efficacy depends even more on herd immunity than measles does.

Shutting down USAID is already threatening to help an Ebola outbreak continue spreading in Uganda. The idea that contagious diseases will respect borders is yet another fiction of the anti-science crowd (some of whom don’t believe viruses exist at all).

A 29-year-old woman died from a chiropractic “adjustment” that tore an artery. That thing where chiropractors crack your neck? It’s dangerous and totally useless. Chiropractic is woo. It’s based on a ghost story, not any actual science or evidence.

Paul Krugman spoke to the Columbia Journalism Review about why he left the New York Times.

WAMU has a story on the new American board game craze, although I dispute the “new” part.

A writer for the Federalist and The Daily Wire who claimed queer people were “grooming” children has been arrested for molesting a child under the age of 12. Remember that if you buy anything from U-Line, you are funding the Federalist.

A judge in upstate New York was forced to resign after he tried to get out of jury duty by claiming anyone accused of a crime must be guilty.

The title of this New York Times op ed keeps changing – I have it saved on my phone as “Why Would We Undermine the Marvel of American Science,” now it’s showing up on my laptop as “I Used to Run the N.I.H. Here’s What Worries Me,” and Chrome shows it as “American Science is Under Attack” in my history. Whatever the title, it’s worth a minute. The wholescale assault on American science research will destroy American health and wreck our economy, which depends on innovation since we have long lost our competitive advantages in manufacturing.

Yes, everyone should boycott Tesla. At this point, if you’re buying a Tesla, you are openly choosing to side with the guy.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, great britain, journalism, links, longreads, new york, pseudoscience, stick to baseball, texas, trans rights, vaccines

→ January 25, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/25/25.

I had two posts for subscribers to the Athletic this week, on the signings of Anthony Santander and Jurickson Profar. My ranking of the top 100 prospects in baseball will go live on Monday morning; the content is all written but I am still tweaking the final order.

At Paste, I reviewed the game Gnome Hollow, a medium-weight family game of tile placement, set collection, and some market selling, along with gnomes. I liked it but I would say I didn’t love it.

I did send a short newsletter out to subscribers earlier last week; you can subscribe here for free and get the next one, which I hope will go out Monday/Tuesday to go along with the unveiling of the top 100.

As the social media landscape has lurched to the right, I’m posting links on several sites but only posting other content or answering people on Bluesky, so if you want to interact with me that’s the spot.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Molly White writes in her newsletter, [citation needed], about Elon Musk’s and the right’s war on Wikipedia, a source of information they can’t easily control.
An independent journalist is going to trial over her coverage of the police response to a pro-Palestine protest at Portland State University. Alissa Azar has already been convicted once for her work, as the police claim she’s not a journalist, but “antifa.” How convenient for them.
Joe Kahn, the executive editor of the New York Times, said that defending democracy would amount to “abandoning its central role as a source of impartial information.” His comments, made to a former colleague of his now at Semafor, didn’t go over well.
Just days after a (so-called?) cease-fire in Gaza, Israel launched a major offensive against Palestinians in the West Bank city of Jenin. La plus ça change.
I hate to link to the dumpster fire that is Politico, but they have a good piece on how RFK Jr. might try to remove vaccines from the market entirely if he’s confirmed as HHS Secretary. And his buddy Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) might vote for him. If you live in Rhode Island, you need to call Sen. Whitehouse’s office on Monday morning.
Florida has benefited from net positive migration for years because of its weather, cheap real estate, and general economic growth. That may be changing, as more people left Florida in 2023 than any other state but California. Climate change and the state’s hard-right shift are likely causes.
My former colleague at the Athletic Lindsey Adler has a newsletter of her own now after she left the Wall Street Journal, and her latest issue, “Ten Years in a Crumbling Industry,” is an excellent look at her decade in (mostly) digital media and what it’s been like to work in a field that’s imploding around you like the Hamptons sequence in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Character.AI has been in the media more for problems with its software, including one user’s suicide after he became obsessed with a chatbot modeled after Daenerys Targaryen, than for anything good about the product. So why would any media brand want to partner with them?
Jeb Lund writes at Truthdig that AOC ’28 needs to start now – not necessarily because she’ll win, but because she is the right person to stand front and center as the leader of the opposition to the President. And I agree. I don’t think concerns about “electability” are even relevant any more; Trump should have been the most unelectable candidate ever, and he just won his biggest victory yet.
At Slate, Dan Kois writes about The Straight Story, David Lynch’s most conventional film, and an absolute fucking masterpiece.
Outgoing President Joe Biden commuted the sentence Leonard Peltier, who spent nearly 50 years in prison for a murder he says he didn’t commit. The federal government withheld a ballistics report that showed the fatal shots did not come from Peltier’s gun, and no witnesses identified him as the shooter.
Support our troops! But don’t give them houses! Oklahoma scrapped a plan by the Veterans Community Project to build tiny homes for homeless veterans in Oklahoma City after neighbors objected. I bet they stand for the anthem, though!
Elon Musk made a Nazi salute at the inauguration, twice. We know that’s what it was because neo-Nazis online said so – and they loved it.
Greg Sargent of the New Republic says that Trump allies are conceding they don’t have a huge “mandate” after all. I’m not sure this means much if no one is willing to stand up to him.
The New England Patriots set up a Bluesky account and the NFL told them to shut it down. Then the league announced a new partnership with Twitter.
The Columbia Journalism Review has a story on how the White House press corps is looking forward to a second Trump term. It’s the most effective way I can think of to make someone hate the media. The people they spoke to do not care who’s hurt or what the long-term effects on the country might be, as long as their individual jobs are easier.
One of Trump’s barrage of executive orders tried to erase the existence of trans people. It is cruelty for cruelty’s sake. No one benefits from this – certainly not the very women who such orders are supposed to protect, not as their rights to basic medical care are also under assault.
Another order froze pretty much all business at the NIH, which is going to seriously impact critical scientific research on things like cancer treatments and disease prevention. NIH, NSF, and other federal agencies fund all kinds of research into medicine, mental health, and other areas of science that have helped keep the American economy among the world’s strongest and driven continued improvements in global health. That’s all at risk now.
The American Association of University Professors put out a statement called “Against Anticipatory Obedience.” Do not comply in advance. It’s not hard to remember.
We have a new Fabio Lopiano (Merv, 3 Ring Circus) game up on Kickstarter, called Baghdad: The City of Peace. I love Lopiano’s games – they’re medium-heavy but manageable – and this one looks like it’ll have great art similar to that of Merv, which I own and have played just once but kept because it’s so gorgeous.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: artificial intelligence, board game news, fascism, football, links, longreads, movies, oklahoma, police, portland, rhode island, science, social media, stick to baseball, trans rights, vaccines

→ January 18, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/18/25.

One new piece this week for subscribers to the Athletic, my reaction to Roki Sasaki’s announcement that he’s going to sign with the Dodgers. I also contributed to the Athletic’s Hall of Fame ballot roundup, listing my selections with a brief explanation.

I do have another board game review going up at Paste next week, but most other writing has been on hold as I work on the top 100 prospects ranking, which is due to go live on January 27^th. I actually still haven’t settled on who’s #1 – I see six or seven worthwhile candidates, but nobody is a clear leader. I do hope to get a newsletter out in the next few days as I feel more comfortable about my progress on the top 100.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Vulture ran an extensive exposé detailing the sexual assault allegations against Neil Gaiman, with specifics from several women who came forward last year to accuse him.
Miss Hall’s School, an all-girls boarding school in Massachusetts, protected a teacher who was grooming and raping students for over 25 years, according to multiple victims who spoke to Vanity Fair. The school ignored complaints from students, even (allegedly) expelling two who pointed out what was happening, until one of the victims went public last spring.
This New York Times story about a woman who is “in love” with a ChatGPT character she created is disturbing and also extremely well-crafted.
RFK Jr. admitted that he lied about how much money he’s made from his anti-vaccine grift. Spreading health misinformation is extremely profitable, as long as you don’t care about who your words harm.
One of the best headlines of the month comes from Jezebel, in a piece about Mark Zuckerberg: “It Must Suck to Be Such a Whiny Little Bitch.” That scene from last year’s Thelma where she keeps mispronouncing his name comes to mind every day now.
The Washington Post spiked its editorial page’s endorsement of Kamala Harris by claiming they weren’t in the endorsement business or some such nonsense. Now they’ve endorsed 19 Trump nominees.
Neko Case spoke to the Times about her upcoming memoir.
AI is also screwing up the world of academic publishing, as people are using it to push garbage commentaries at journals to try to juice their personal impact factors.
Can the TikTok ban end up helping the seriously fucked-up social media landscape?
There are a couple of would-be Instagram competitors out now, Flashes (based on BlueSky’s protocols) and PixelFed, at least in part as a response to Facebook’s decision to stop most content moderation and allow users to say pretty much anything they want about LGBTQ folks.
Garrett Martin, my editor at Paste, wrote about playing Baldur’s Gate 3 in explorer or easy mode. I still haven’t tried it because I spent so much time playing the original series all the way through, several times, including all sorts of mods. I’m sure I’d love it, though.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: academia, links, longreads, metoo, social media, stick to baseball, vaccines, video games

→ January 12, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/12/25.

I took a month or so off from these Saturday posts, mostly because I was busy just about every weekend in December – PAX Unplugged, hosting two holiday parties, getting ready for Christmas, then traveling. I do plan to return these to their normal format, but for now I’m doing a briefer one just to get one posted after I was out of town for the weekend (we went to NYC to see friends and to watch SIX).

I did have one story up this week for subscribers to The Athletic, covering the Gavin Lux trade and associated signing by the Dodgers of Hyeseong Kim.

Over at Paste, my review of the excellent board game Tower Up went up this past week; that game appeared on my list of the top ten games of 2024.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Defector’s exhaustive history of the barely-a-company Color Star, which first appeared on anyone’s radar when they signed a partnership deal with the 76ers in 2021 that the team quickly rescinded, is completely bizarre and an amazing piece of investigative work. The short version is that the company looks like it’s been running some kind of stock scam for at least five years, and has never produced any actual product or service.

The New Yorker has the story of one author’s copyright infringement lawsuit alleging another author, an editor, and a publisher stole the plot and many key details from of one of her unpublished novels, which delves into the question of how far you can copy an idea before it might cross into infringement, but also explains the anti-literary world of “romantasy” and other fast-fashion books that are written to chase trends on TikTok and other social media.

ProPublica published an exposé from and about a man who, on his own, infilitrated multiple right-wing militias, collecting data on members and recording conversations with leaders. He believes they’ll take the country down if they’re not stopped soon.

Dogs who press buttons to ‘talk’ to their owners are all the rage on Instagram and TikTok. Is there any science behind this? I’m a strong skeptic here, and I think the experts quoted in this New York Times Magazine piece lean that way as well, although there are experiments underway to try to understand better what dogs really can understand and express.

Some idiot flew a drone into forbidden airspace over the Palisades wildfire last week, and it crashed into a Super Scooper firefighting plane, disabling it.

Greg Sargent & Kyle Cheney discuss Rep. Jamie Raskin’s (D) pointed and very accurate criticism of the phone call between SCOTUS Justice Samuel Alito and President-Elect Donald Trump.

Editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes quit the Washington Post after the paper refused to run a cartoon she drew that depicted billionaires bending the knee to the incoming President. She explained why on her Substack.

Coffee futures prices hit record highs in December and haven’t come down much thanks to below-average rainfall in Brazil and bad weather in Vietnam, the two largest coffee producers in the world. Between weather, climate change, and rising demand, coffee futures prices are up over 75% in the last year.

Are we ready for the next pandemic? Of course not!

This story is a bit out of date, but I’m going to share it anyway because it touches on two topics of particular interest to me, board games and the enshittification of social media: Facebook banned ads for the Kickstarter for an upcoming board game called First Monday in October, which is about the Supreme Court, claiming the ads’ content could somehow influence how people voted in elections.

The now-fired fact checker group that worked with Facebook for the past nine years published an open letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg about the likely consequences of his decision to end fact-checking on the site. Do not comply in advance.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, coffee, frauds, links, longreads, science, social media, stick to baseball

→ November 30, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/30/24.

I had two columns go up at the Athletic in the last week, one on the Dodgers signing Blake Snell and one on the trade of Jonathan India and Joey Wiemer for Brady Singer.

At Paste, my review of the heavy worker-placement game Nova Roma went up just before the holiday. It’s almost certainly going to make my top ten for the year.

If you’re looking for me on social media, you’re most likely to find me on Bluesky and Threads. I’m only posting links on Twitter at this point, but not answering questions or engaging with other content. You can also subscribe to my free email newsletter.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This piece from The Verge on one Amazon influencer suing another for stealing her vibe – I’m not even being sarcastic – is both bonkers and extremely thorough in its coverage of the real legal issues at play.

Character.AI is a cesspool – now Futurism reports that the site hosts chatbots that encourage young people to engage in disordered eating.

An infant died of whooping cough in Australia in the Queensland state’s worst epidemic of the disease, which is preventable via vaccines, except infants are too young to get the vaccine and enough idiots out there have listened to anti-vaccine misinformation that the disease is spreading all over the west.

The worldwide trend of voters tossing out incumbents has had a few bright spots: an outsider to the political establishment in Botswana has ended the 58-year rule of the Botswana Democratic Party – the longest current reign of any party in a democracy in the world. The rival Umbrella for Democratic Change won an outright majority in the country’s Parliament, marking the first time in the nation’s history a party other than the BDP will rule.

Dorothy Bishop resigned from the Royal Society over the group’s continued affiliation with Elon Musk, who was named a Fellow of the Society in 2018. Her resignation letter is pointed, measured, and I’m sure will be summarily ignored by the group.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) signed a bill that bans transgender students from using the correct bathrooms in schools, because the cruelty is the point. There is no evidence to support these laws, and they are not solving any actual problem.

The sister of a woman killed by her ex-boyfriend last November in Italy continues to speak out and lead protests at the country’s culture of violence against women.

Joel Grey wrote an op ed in the New York Times saying that we need to heed the warnings of Cabaret, the film for which he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1972.

The idea that “woke” killed the Democrats in the 2024 election is wrong, but people are embracing it because it allows us to avoid making real, structural changes.

Pentagon officials told The Intercept that Trump’s plan to use the military to conduct mass deportations is “absolutely insane.”

Trump’s pick to head the NIH is “as bad as it gets.” Dr. Jay Bhattacharya was a vocal opponent of measures that helped slow the COVID-19 pandemic, including lockdowns and vaccine mandates, and argued that we should let the virus spread to achieve herd immunity, which would have led to hundreds of thousands or millions of more deaths.

I hadn’t heard the term “leguminati” before, but I’ve come across those folks, often vegans or environmentalists who preach the power of legumes, pulses, and nuts to feed the world without destroying the planet.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, artificial intelligence, coronavirus, italy, links, longreads, ohio, pertussis, social media, stick to baseball, trans rights, vaccines

Stick to baseball, 3/22/25.

Stick to baseball, 3/15/25.

Stick to baseball, 3/8/25.

Stick to baseball, 3/1/25.

Stick to baseball, 2/22/25.

Stick to baseball, 2/16/25.

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