links — Page 17

→ January 18, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/18/20.

I’ve written five pieces for the Athletic so far over the two weeks since I joined. In reverse chronological order, they are a ranking of the ten best prospects to change organizations this winter; a breakdown of the Josh Donaldson signing; a breakdown of last week’s Rays-Cardinals trade; notes on what I look for when evaluating players; and my introductory post. I also held a Klawchat this week.

Over at Paste, I reviewed The Taverns of Tiefenthal, the newest game from Kennerspiel des Jahres winner Wolfgang Warsch, who also designed The Mind, That’s Pretty Clever!, and The Quacks of Quedlinburg, all of which are quite good.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, is due out on April 21^st from Harper Collins, and you can pre-order it now via their site or wherever fine books are sold. You can also sign up for my free email newsletter for even more non-baseball content.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Slate has the story of a credible allegation of rape against three Mets from the spring of 1991, with Doc Gooden, Daryl Boston, and Vince Coleman all accused. None was ever charged.
The Root and the Young Turks detail outright racism in the South Bend police force under Pete Buttigieg. The details herein, and Mayor Pete’s unwillingness to answer basic questions about them, are quite damning.
Did an Oxford classics professor steal and sell ancient pieces of papyrus, including one that would be the oldest known piece of the gospels, to the billionaire owners of Hobby Lobby? (Also, how can you be a billionaire and a devout Christian? I’m reasonably sure Jesus said those two things could not be true at the same time.)
The New Yorker looks at a woman who can’t feel physical or emotional pain due to a genetic mutation, and whether the extent to which we feel pain is really an essential part of being human.
The New York Times describes how a recently-deceased real estate ‘star’ lied about her entire biography.
Peter Hotez, author of Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism, writes about how sick you’re going to get if you catch various vaccine-preventable diseases. It’s not pretty, and it’s all the more argument for tightening vaccination laws for schoolchildren.
Here’s a shocker: Gwyneth Paltrow’s new GOOP show on Netflix is a mixture of pseudoscience, bullshit, and tedium, including an episode with a so-called “energy healer” (which is not real) and another with a self-proclaimed psychic (also not real).
Michigan state senator Peter Lucido, who has delusions of governorship, told a woman journalist trying to interview him that a group of high school boys “could have a lot of fun” with her. As of Friday, he’s issued a half-assed apology, but remains in office.
The New Yorker talks to the two people behind the great @NJGov twitter account.
Writing for VICE, Laura Wagner (ex-Deadspin) writes about the Facebook ‘sponsored post’ fiasco at Teen Vogue.
A British Columbia court ruled that two young children must be vaccinated over their mother’s objections. The mother tried to cite one of the most vocal anti-vaccine cranks on Twitter, Toni Bark, who claimed the measles wasn’t a highly contagious disease (it’s considered the most or second-most contagious virus humans can catch).
Perhaps “cocktails” of multiple antibiotics aren’t as good of an idea for the long term as we thought, as one new study shows that they may accelerate antibiotic resistance.
Tabatha Southey writes for McLean’s about Watergate, my #3 game of 2019, and what a future board game of the Donald Trump presidency and impeachment might look like.
I’ve got four new board game Kickstarters to share this week. First is the one I tweeted about on Tuesday, Restoration Games’ Return to Dark Tower, which is already clear of $2.25 million pledged as of Friday afternoon. It’s an update to the 1981 cult classic, and I was hooked when I saw the demo at PAX Unplugged.
Next is AlderQuest, an area-control game from Rock Manor Games and Mike Gnade (Set a Watch, Brass Empire). Rock Manor pulled the original Kickstarter from before the holidays and restarted it; it’s about 2/3 of the way to its funding goal as I write this. Full disclosure: I met Mike this week to play an upcoming Rock Manor title, Lawyer Up, as he lives a stone’s throw from me.
Leder Games has the newest game from designer Cole Wehrle (Root, Pax Pamir), Oath: Chronicles of Empire and Exile, already more than 13 times past its initial goal.
Vesuvius Media has a Kickstarter up for Pacific Rails, a route-building/worker-placement game based on the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869.
Finally, here’s an intriguing game of dirty popes: Habeamus, which the publishers describe as “a game for ending 2-4 friendships. This is the farthest from its goal of these five Kickstarters right now.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, frauds, links, medicine, metoo, social media, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ January 4, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/4/20.

Happy New Year! I skipped last week since it was the holidays and I was offline quite a bit, but in the last couple of weeks I had a bunch of year-end board game posts, including my top 10 games of 2019 for Paste, my best games of the year by category for Vulture, and the top 8 board game apps of 2019 for Ars Technica.

My free email newsletter will return on Monday, time and health (I’m sick yet again) permitting. My second book, The Inside Game, will be out on April 21st and is available for pre-order.

And now, the links…

One longread this week, from the Guardian‘s best longreads of the year: Time management is making us miserable.
Figure skater Gracie Gold is working her way back to competition after a long fight with depression and an eating disorder.
One of the biggest funders of anti-vaccine groups has made millions selling “natural” health products. Joseph Mercola has also been fined by the FDA for making false health claims, and has promoted all kinds of pseudoscience on his site for over 20 years.
Joan Walsh writes about “this fucking decade” for The Nation: “The last decade showed that the United States can be dramatically changed by a minority of people seized by grievance, convinced that they’re the real victims, and determined to get revenge.”
The rivers and beaches of Guatemala are filling with trash, especially plastic, emblematic of a global problem with plastic waste.
An Alabama woman murdered by her former partner is another example why the NRA’s choice to kill the Violence Against Women Act will have deadly real-world consequences.
A study found that 39% of respondents in eight European countries would like to live in a world where chemical substances don’t exist. Good luck with that.
The search for new antibiotic drugs is hitting another roadblock: startups trying to develop these compounds are going bankrupt.
Congress appears on the verge of letting a program designed to help stop the next pandemic expire, likely because the GOP doesn’t want to spend money on anything but war.
I was obsessed with the periodic table when I was a kid, so of course I enjoyed this New Yorker piece on the search for larger and larger (and yet incredibly unstable) elements.
GQ interviewed Michael Caine about The Muppet Christmas Carol.
Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy signed letters authored by the Pebble Mining Company favorable to the company’s mining efforts in his state.
The U.S. held off on punitive tariffs against Argentina while the country reviewed two trademarks for Trump’s personal business.
Sacha Baron Cohen gave an incredible speech to the Anti-Defamation League on the failure of social media giants to regulate hate speech and fake news on their sites.
Capstone Games has really carved out a niche for itself for high-end games, many of them imported from Europe, including the popular train game Irish Gauge, which they imported and released in the U.S. in 2019. They just announced the follow-up game, Ride the Rails, will be released on July 1st, when Irish Gauge will also return to stores.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alaska, board game news, chemistry, environment, links, longreads, pseudoscience, social media, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ December 21, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/21/19.

I wrote two ESPN+ pieces this week, on the Madison Bumgarner contract and the Corey Kluber trade. I didn’t chat this week as I’m preparing for the holidays and had a lot of personal business that required my time.

On the board gaming front, I ranked the top ten games of 2019 for Paste and the best board games of 2019 by category for Vulture. I’ll have a piece up this weekend on Ars Technica ranking the best board game apps of the year. Also for Paste, I ran down the best games I saw at PAX Unplugged earlier this month.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, comes out on April 21^st from William Morrow (Harper Collins). You can pre-order it now through that link or wherever delicious books are sold.

And now, the links…

The Mormon Church has built up a $100 billion fund they claimed was for “charitable” purposes, but has hoarded much of the money and only made distributions to two for-profit businesses owned by the church, which if true is a massive case of tax fraud.
Professor Julie Sedivy writes about rediscovering her parents’ native tongue, Czech, after her father died, and how the process reconnected her with her roots.
I’ve been listening to the audiobook version of Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! and have been struck by just how much of a creep Richard Feynman appears to be in his own telling. It turns out I’m far from the only one who noticed, and, worse, his second wife accused him of physical and verbal abuse. To make it worse, the audio version has its own problems, such as the narrator trying to imitate non-American accents, with an especially cringey version of a Japanese accent that might make Krusty the Clown blush.
Over at the Atlantic, Amanda Mull says enough with the year-end rankings, and while I agree there are a lot of those posts, I think she misses a large part of the point: They become both conversation starters, which is one of the main reasons I post rankings here, and ways to find new music or books or movies you might not have heard about previously.
Clint Eastwood is clearly a chauvinist asshole, with his new film, Richard Jewell, fabricating a story about a real journalist offering sex in exchange for information – a story that never happened, about a journalist who has since passed away and can’t defend herself. Ankita Rao writes in the Guardian how harmful this pervasive stereotype is.
I guess one good thing about the ongoing measles epidemic in the U.S. is that it is waking up more media outlets to the existential threat anti-vaxxers pose. Men’s Health has a column from Jacqueline Detwiler on how scientific BS has brought measles back, and how we can fight for science against denialists.
A bill in the New Jersey legislature to end non-medical exemptions to mandatory schoolchild vaccinations – which is only rational, since there are no religious prohibitions on vaccinations, and if you have a “philosophical” objection to vaccination then you can just home-school your kid – stalled in the Senate after vocal protests from anti-vaxxers. The Newark Star-Ledger’s editorial board commented by saying that the anti-vaxxer movement has gone off the rails, comparing vaccinations to “hate crimes.” Do you live in New Jersey? Find your legislators and call them Monday to let them know you support this bill.
The Washington Post‘s Dave Sheinen profiles fringe relief prospect Gabe Klobosits to talk about how the proposed cuts to minor league baseball might impact players at the margins of organized baseball. It’s a good piece, but I think it’s an anecdotal argument that doesn’t consider how many other players like Klobosits never pan out (and he hasn’t yet) and what the overall cost is to employ and develop those players, and additional coaches and staffers, in the hopes you’ll find one or two hidden big leaguers.
A disabled artist designed a hotel room that is deliberately difficult to stay in, trying to mimic the experience disabled people have in rooms designed solely for the non-disabled, for the Art B&B in Blackpool, England.
I do like my elite status when I get it, so this New Yorker piece on the madness of airline elite status hit rather close to home.
The Department of Agriculture listed Wakanda as a trade partner, trading ducks, donkeys, and dairy cows with the U.S., even though Wakanda is a fictional country. We have handed the keys to our government to the dumbest possible people.
China responded too slowly to a pig virus called African swine fever, leading to an epidemic and fears it will spread beyond China’s borders.
I’d never heard of Bolze, a French-German hybrid language spoken in a small town in the canton of Fribourg, before finding this BBC Travel post about the language and its associated culture.
The Anti-Defamation League now lists the ‘ok’ hand gesture as a symbol of hate, depending on context, of course.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, china, food safety, Languages, links, movies, vaccines

→ December 14, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/14/19.

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

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

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

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

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

And now, the links…

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

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

→ November 30, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/30/19.

I had one ESPN+ post this week, covering the Luis Urias/Trent Grisham trade with a note on the Kyle Gibson signing. No Klawchat due to the holiday, but I did do my annual Periscope live chat where I spatchcocked the turkey.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, comes out on April 21st, and you can pre-order it now through that link or anywhere fine books are sold. Also, I’m trying to be more diligent about my free email newsletter now that we’re in the offseason.

I’ll be at PAX Unplugged here in Philadelphia next weekend, and if you’ll be there and are up for a game, just drop me a line. I have some publisher meetings, but my goal is to check out as many games in the First Look section as I can, and I may bring a game or two from my review queue as well.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Guardian explores how how our obsession with home delivery is reshaping the world. I think the traffic angle was the most eye-opening – how much delivery trucks contribute to urban traffic, especially because of their frequent stops at the curb to drop off.
Graig Graziosi writes about the death of the Youngstown Vindicator, the 150-year-old Ohio newspaper where he’d worked as a reporter.
Baby bumpers have been tied to dozens of infant deaths. So why don’t regulators do something about it?
Andrew Yang is talking up a universal basic income but gets its tenets wrong while pandering to the investor class, failing to acknowledge the growing wealth and income gap in the United States that is the real problem his plan doesn’t address.
Is virtue signaling hypocritical? Is it even real? What about virtue signaling about others’ virtue signaling? The term gets thrown around a lot on social media, often as a way to shut down discussion about real societal problems, but this is a bit more thorough treatment of what the phrase implies.
Yet another anti-vax grifter has emerged, calling herself The Skeptical Doctor’s Wife; Orac has the details on her all-too-familiar shtick, and how she cloaks herself in some false appeal to authority to seem more reliable.
A woman who developed Guillain-Barré syndrome from a vaccination – an extremely rare side effect that affects about 1 in every 1 million recipients of the flu shot – did a Reddit AMA to explain why she remains staunchly pro-vaccine.
Anti-vaxxers targeted Samoan families with their disinformation, helping stoke a measles epidemic that has already killed 38+ kids aged 4 and under. Now a group of anti-vaxxers are claiming the disease is the result of “malnutrition” and are sending a bunch of worthless vitamins to the island. If you want to actually help, donate to this GoFundMe that is tailored to hospitals’ stated needs as they try to stem the spread of this highly contagious, dangerous virus.
Memorial Sloan-Kettering, a major cancer treatment and research institution, announced proudly that they’re going to waste $3.7 million studying acupuncture, a pseudoscientific ‘treatment’ that does not work.
Ohio continues its fight to be the most backwards state in the union as Republicans in the state’s lower house passed a bill that would require doctors to implant ectopic pregnancies, a procedure that does not exist, rather than abort them, which they do routinely to save the mother’s health and life.
Meanwhile, Kentucky Republicans, mad their guy lost the gubernatorial race, are trying a Wisconsin move to strip powers from the governor’s office before the incoming Democrat can take his seat. They say it’s a coincidence; sure, Jan.
West Virginia joined several other states in making prisoners pay by the minute to read e-books that are available free from Project Gutenberg. Other states have gone further and banned outside donations of print books to force prisoners to pay for e-books or simply not read, although Pennsylvania and three New York prisons relented after public outcry.
Author Tom Nichols showed his ass on Twitter last week by saying “Indian food is bad,” then tweeting through the reaction and defending his statement in a McPaper editorial. Madeleine Davies’ perfect response on Eater explains that you can always shut up.
If you’ve seen the great documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, Jiro’s restaurant in Tokyo lost its Michelin stars because you can’t get a seat there. It’s so exclusive that you have to have a connection or be staying at a luxury hotel nearby to eat there.
Zimbabwe is on the brink of man-made starvation, with 60% of the sub-Saharan African country, which is still just emerging from the nearly 40-year grip of dictator Robert Mugabe, considered “food insecure.”
Teen Vogue had a group of teenaged girls from groups indigenous to North America explain the real origins of Thanksgiving, which involved white settlers killing native peoples and then celebrating with food.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, Economics, links, longreads, social media, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ November 23, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/23/19.

For ESPN+ subscribers, I discussed the baseball case for trading Mookie Betts, and looked at the Yasmani Grandal and Will Smith signings. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Watergate, a great and well-timed new two-player game where you play either as Nixon or as the journalists trying to uncover the scandal. For Ars Technica, I reviewed the social deduction game Game of Thrones Oathbreaker, a game with team & individual components that I think is too unbalanced.

My new book, The Inside Game, will be out on April 21, 2020, and you can pre-order it now. Stand by for news on store events, including Politics & Prose in DC and Midtown Scholar in Harrisburg.

I’ll send out the latest edition of my free email newsletter later today, talking a little about the philosophical debates I’m having with myself over this year’s Hall of Fame ballot.

My friend Jessica Scarane is mounting a primary challenge to Delaware Senator Chris Coons; Coons is a centrist Democrat who, among other things, thought Nats fans were wrong to boo President Trump, and who regularly works with the GOP. You can donate to Jess’s campaign on her website.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: My colleague Kevin Arnovitz describes how a Sacramento Kings exec pilfered $13 million from the team before he was caught.
A Newsday investigation found evidence of steering and de facto redlining in the Long Island real estate market.
This New Yorker profile of the 47-year-old Park Slope Food Co-Op is fascinating, by turns a paean to a community effort to make people and the planet healthier, and a portrait of how insufferable other people can be.
The Atlantic‘s Sarah Zhang detailed how a few Internet sleuths helped identify a Jane Doe murdered 13 years ago.
NPR reports on how the federal government is depriving U.S. territories of Medicaid funding, which may result in half or more of Guam and U.S. Virgin Islands residents losing their coverage, and Puerto Rican residents losing dental and prescription drug coverage. I should also point out that citizens of these territories do not vote for President and lack any representation in Congress.
MLB.com’s Joe Trezza has a thorough overview of how Mike Elias has reshaped the O’s baseball ops department.
Lindsay Gibbs of the Athletic wrote in her newsletter this week about Malcolm Gladwell’s betrayal of sexual abuse victims with his Penn State trutherism and misquoting of Michigan State victims. In addition to his own podcast, Gladwell was a guest on ESPN’s 30 for 30 podcast about the L.A. Clippers just three weeks ago, well after he’d started this weird campaign.
Philadelphia Eagles safety Malcolm Jenkins wrote an editorial urging mayor Jim Kenney to consider transparency and accountability when choosing the city’s next police commissioner. The city’s police union issued a juvenile response, calling him a “nonresident washed up [sic] football player,” which Jenkins simply called a “distraction.”
Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers and Wharton/Penn Law professor Natasha Sarin point out that improving the IRS’s auditing capabilities and resources should be the first step in any tax reform proposal because (according to their research) every $1 spent on auditing would yield $11 in increased revenue. That obviously can’t continue indefinitely – the ratio will decline with increased auditing, as the easiest targets are made to pay up and other tax scofflaws improve their compliance to avoid getting caught – but they refer to this as “low-hanging fruit” that also should be politically popular.
A former writer for The Simpsons explains how the “attempted crime isn’t a crime” defense of Trump comes from that show, where Sideshow Bob asked how attempted murder could be a crime.
Also in the Washington Post, two editorial writers described this week how Gordon Sundland’s testimony made the Trump/Ukraine scandal much bigger.
Should the Parthenon (“Elgin”) Marbles be returned to Greece? I mean, of course they should, but Mary Norris argues in favor as well. Also, they’re marble statues, not, like, actual marbles.
A mother explains why she chose not to use car seats.
Why has Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent, retracted paper on vaccines and autism been cited over a thousand times? The reasons are complex but one key takeaway is that the system of citing breaks down when the cited papers are partially or fully retracted.
Board game news: Alder Quest, a new area control game for 1-4 players, just hit Kickstarter this week.
A new game from the publishers of Ragusa (which I demoed but haven’t actually played), Venice is now on Kickstarter as well, with a very cool-looking board of streets and canals in the soon-to-be-underwater city.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, board game news, links, longreads, philadelphia, taxes, the swamp

→ 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

→ November 2, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/2/19.

This isn’t quite new, but I put out a formal announcement this week that my second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, will be out on April 21, 2020. You can pre-order it now on HarperCollins’ site.

On the board gaming front, I ranked the top 25 board games of the 2010s for Paste this week, and also wrote about some recent programming games, where players issue instructions as if they were writing code, over at Ars Technica. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

You can get more of me by signing up for my free email newsletter, which I send out irregularly but definitely not often enough to bother you.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: A ProPublica investigation found billionaire Dan Gilbert got a huge tax break with the help of the Trump Administration after making large donations to Trump’s campaign. The tax break in question involved “opportunity zones,” incentives aimed at spurring new development in disadvantaged urban areas – not, as in Gilbert’s case, for investments already made.
One dollar of every $10 spent on AmazonBasics products is spent on batteries. One writer tried to track where those batteries come from and what their impact is on the environment. She found a few answers, but not enough, and a lot of opacity from a company that is already under fire for labor concerns, climate impact, and its logistics operation’s effect on road safety.
Allie Conti, writing for VICE, describes discovering a vast, nationwide hosting scam on AirBnB that costs unsuspecting guests hundreds of dollars and leaves them without a place to stay.
The well-titled article “The Fight Over a Shitty Rock” has a very serious point: There’s a dispute roiling over Rockall, a tiny and uninhabitable islet in the North Atlantic claimed by the United Kingdom, and whether the islet extends the UK’s fishing rights against the wishes and claims of Ireland.
The chocolate industry has already been criticized for its use of child labor and even slaves; now the Washington Post points out that cacao farmers in West Africa are decimating forests, accelerating climate change, while western chocolate producers talk about sustainability without addressing this issue at all.
Spotify’s dominance in the streaming industry is still tenuous and hasn’t led to consistent profits, which explains in part the company’s acquisition of podcast producers Gimlet Media.
Anti-vaxxer nuts send racist, violent threats to people who post pro-vaccine messages, and Facebook does absolutely nothing about it. The people running these sites – Twitter is no better – talk a big accountability game when it comes to abuse and harassment, but they don’t back it up with actions.
Facebook also lets right-wing propaganda site The Daily Wire violate its rules by using sock puppet accounts to promote its content. Again, Facebook does … nothing. And they blocked pro-vaccine ads while letting anti-vaxxer ads run. It’s okay if we’re still getting paid.
Anti-vaxxers love to claim that measles is ‘benign,’ but there’s growing research on just how harmful a bout of the viral disease can be in the long term. New evidence shows that causes ‘immune amnesia’ in survivors, whose immune systems must relearn how to fight infections because measles wiped out 11% to 73% of antibodies already present in that person’s blood.
The anti-vaxxer faux-documentary Vaxxed has a sequel, but the producers aren’t saying where it’s playing for fear rational people will try to stop it, so keep your eyes open, rational people, and demand any theater near you that tries to show Vaxxed 2 pull their screenings.
An evidence-based technique called motivational interviewing is proving useful in addressing vaccine-hesitant parents. It involves one-on-one conversations between parents and trained counselors who don’t tell the parents what to do, but “simply talk through parents’ fears and goals, and let them decide what to do.”
Louisa Thomas wrote of the ‘stories’ the Houston Astros have told, which don’t always align with reality, in the New Yorker. I know of at least three more departures from their baseball operations department in the last few months, only one of which, longtime Jeff Luhnow lieutenant Oz Ocampo, is public.
Michael Stipe and Mike Mills spoke to the BBC about their album Monster on the 25th anniversary of its release.
Writing for Paste, Annie Merkley writes about what it’s been like as an American in the midst of the protests in Chile, a piece that also explained to me what the protests have been about.
It’s from June of 2018, but John Pavlovitz’s “Now You Want Civility?” post seems apropos after all the pearl-clutching over Nationals fans booing President Trump last Sunday. And, by the way, one of the clutchers was Delaware Senator Chris Coons, a Democrat I’m hoping gets primaried the next time he’s up.
VICE asks if sex addiction is real, or a misidentification of people who have sexual habits or preferences that might vary from the median.
A Spanish court acquitted five men of rape because the victim was drunk, so they didn’t have to use force. This is separate from the “Wolf Pack” rape case that led to protests earlier this year.
A legislator from Cobb County, home of your Atlanta Braves, is trying to make it a felony for trans kids to get gender reassignment via surgery or drugs. In two thousand and fucking nineteen, we are still doing this. This isn’t ‘protecting kids,’ as she claims; it’s going to do nothing but increase suicides.
Deep sleep may help protect the brain against Alzeimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases by triggering electrical pulses, according to one new study.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: chocolate, climate change, frauds, georgia, lgbt rights, links, longreads, sleep, social media, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ October 26, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/25/19.

My one ESPN+ piece this week covered the possibility of realigning the minor leagues, possibly contracting several dozen teams or demoting them to nonaffiliated leagues. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Era: The Medieval Age, the new game from Pandemic designer Matt Leacock. It’s a roll-and-build game that reimplements his own Roll Through the Ages: The Bronze Age, but gives it better components and a spatial aspect absent from the first game.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, will be out on April 21st, 2020, from HarperCollins. You can pre-order it now through that link (and please do so!).

You should also subscribe to my my free email newsletter, because I said so.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Shane Mitchell writes for Bitter Southerner about the long transatlantic history of okra, a global plant that came to the west a few hundred years ago from Africa and that is now essential to the cuisines of the American south. I love it dipped in cornmeal and fried, or in a deep brown gumbo.
Why do people hate vegans? They’re a convenient punchline, says George Reynolds of the Guardian, but their dietary choices force us to confront harsh environmental and medical realities about the meat-centric diet of the west while also running up against a longstanding association of meat with prosperity.
Psychologist Hans Eysenck’s work has been highly influential but also criticized on multiple grounds, including his dubious support of work that claimed there was a link between race and IQ. Cosmos details a bigger scandal, that Eysenck and a longtime collaborator may have faked data and conclusions, including studies that claimed your personality could influence your chances of getting cancer or heart disease. If all 61 papers co-authored by Eysenck are eventually retracted, he would become, per Retraction Watch, the most retracted psychology researcher of all time.
Jerome Groopman writes in the New Yorker about brain science and successful ways to break bad habits. I don’t think these are panaceas, but they’re more likely to work than negative reinforcement, self-shaming, or just trying to beat bad habits with willpower. Excuse me, I feel like I need some Oreos after typing that…
Since Prince’s death in 2016, his estate has been releasing some of the trove of unreleased material the singer and multi-instrumentalist left behind – even though he was very protective of the same music while he was alive. Paste‘s Richard Aaron looks at the ethics and implications of listening to this music, some of which has been quite good, while some was clearly never intended to see the light of day.
In my chat this week, a reader sent a link arguing that wealth taxes failed in Europe. This is at least misleading, if not outright false, according to this editorial from the Washington Post, which highlights how much easier it is in Europe to evade taxes, how loophole-ridden their wealth taxes were, and how competition across the borderless EU made it easier to just pick up and move.
Philly magazine looks at the rise of food co-ops in the city, asking how well they actually serve the communities in which they’re located.
Amazon has spent nearly $1.5 million to defeat a socialist incumbent on Seattle’s city council. Kshama Sawant led the push for Seattle’s higher minimum wage, but lost (in the end) a battle to tax large corporations on a per-employee basis and use the funds to serve the city’s large population of homeless people.
Gun sellers at a show on the Iowa State fairgrounds used Nazi symbols and racist/anti-Semitic imagery to sell guns and explosives. The state fair’s CEO passed the buck, saying that they don’t control what independent companies that rent the space do once they use it.
Author Alex Berenson name-searched himself and showed up in my replies to harass one of my longtime readers on Twitter this week. I wasn’t familiar with him or his work before, but it appears that the scientific consensus on his book about cannabis is that it’s alarmist and highly misleading.
A new California law designed to curb abuses in the so-called ‘gig economy’ appears to hurt freelance writers more than anyone else because it would set such a low bar for the number of pieces someone could write before they’d have to be considered a full-time employee.
“Prime editing” could correct up to 89% of disease-causing errors in our genes, although the research and techniques are in their infancy. As someone with an inborn error of metabolism, I’m intrigued, but can we ‘fix’ one gene (two, in my case, since it’s autosomal recessive) without causing any other unforeseen consequences?
California’s state medical board has now targeted a second doctor accused of writing bogus vaccine exemptions for schoolchildren, asking that her license be suspended or revoked entirely.
Residents of Newtok, Alaska, are moving – yes, all of them – to a new village as climate change has eroded much of the land in Newtok and threatens to make the entire town unlivable.
Antibiotic resistance – and evolution – in real time: It took just three weeks for a ‘superbug’ to evolve resistance to the drug of last resort.
Board game news: Cities Skylines, the tabletop version of the popular citybuilder video game from Paradox Interactive, is now out from Thames & Kosmos. It’s a cooperative game, whereas I believe the video game version is competitive. I saw an early prototype last year, but at that point the game wasn’t co-op yet.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: climate change, drugs, evolution, frauds, links, longreads, prince, southern cooking, stick to baseball, vaccines, vegan

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