links — Page 22

→ June 22, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/21/19.

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

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

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

And now, the links…

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

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

→ June 15, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/16/19.

I had one ESPN+ piece this week, looking at which teams just drafted their new #1 or #2 prospects in last week’s draft.

On July 8th, the day after the MLB Futures Game, I’ll be speaking at the Hudson Library in Hudson, Ohio, about Smart Baseball and signing books.

My free email newsletter is back, at least in the sense that I’ve sent it out twice in the last two weeks, so maybe sign up for that too.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Guardian has an excerpt on a book that argues there are harmful effects of the co-opting of mindfulness by those who push it as a panacea.
The New Yorker solved the mystery of the McCarthy campaign worker Pat Sylvester who impressed Robert F. Kennedy in an impromptu conversation (that included Taylor Branch, later to win a Pulitzer Prize) at the Indianapolis Airport just a month before Kennedy was assassinated.
This piece was free but went premium after I bookmarked it – the Chronicle of Higher Education looks at how the University of Utah failed to protect a student who was stalked and later killed by her former partner.
In the backwater swirling, update: Alabama banned abortion for rape victims but protects the parental rights of rapists. BBC’s The Inquiry podcast asked why is it always Alabama? in this week’s episode.
Former Congressional candidate Paul Nehlen has turned to advocating violence in favor of a whites-only state.
Nancy Bass Wyden, owner of New York’s iconic bookstore The Strand, penned an editorial opposing the city’s designation of the building and store as a landmark. Reason also has an editorial on the topic, pointing out the immense power the 11-person landmarks committee holds over New York City real estate.
Afghanistan veteran and former Missouri Secretary of State Jason Kander spoke to NBC News about his struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder.
A single mutation turned almonds from toxic to a major culinary item, as it removed the amygdalin (found in bitter almonds as well as the nuts at the hearts of peaches) from the nuts.
George Will says that young people have decided the GOP is ‘the dumb party,’ arguing that the Republicans have become the cult of Trump and are devoid of ideas. I tend to agree, but don’t think it’s a fait accompli that Democrats benefit – they need to counter with workable policy ideas of their own and to improve their ground game to capitalize.
Board game news: Renegade Studios announced a September release for Icarus, a collaborative storytelling game about the fall of a civilization.
Deep Water Games opened a Kickstarter for Soveriegn Skies, a midweight Euro that promises to play in 45 minutes.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alabama, board game news, food science, links, longreads, mental health, ptsd, stick to baseball, white nationalism

→ June 8, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/8/19.

Of course, most of my content this week was around this year’s MLB draft, but my biggest piece is actually free for everyone to read – my oral history of the drafting of Mike Trout, as told by the people who were there. For ESPN+ subscribers, you can read my draft recaps for all 15 AL teams and all 15 NL teams. I also held a Klawchat during day two of the draft and a live Periscope chat on Friday.

I really am trying to take time off this weekend, but I still plan to send out a new email newsletter to subscribers (it’s free, you just have to sign up) by Monday.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: That mass-market chocolate product you bought was probably the product of child labor, according to an extensive Washington Post report that documents the chocolate industry’s attempts to avoid accountability for sourcing its raw material. Desperate poverty in Burkina Faso and near-zero enforcement in Côte d’Ivoire have also contributed, and third-party certifications like FairTrade aren’t as reliable as they claim to be. The ultimate solution lies with consumers: Don’t buy cheap chocolate. Buy from companies that can identify their cacao sources.
Just four companies control 60% of global seed sales. This is bad news for our planet and our plates, writes chef Dan Barber, author of The Third Plate and now a seed activist of sorts. We’re reducing biodiversity at a time when we need plants to evolve to cope with our destruction of the environment; we’re reducing the nutrition and flavor of the plants we eat (or the meat we eat, which feeds on those plants).
The New York Times‘ editorial writers Bret Stephens (an Islamophobe and a climate change denier) and Bari Weiss have taken to extreme concern trolling over restrictions on free speech on campus, repeating the same tired (and misleading) talking points the paper has pushed for over a century.
It’s a shame the Times runs such drivel on its editorial page, because its investigative work remains top-notch, as in this piece on former alt-right devotee Caleb Cain and how Youtube helped indoctrinate him into that movement of hate.
We often hear about the mass extinction caused by anthropogenic climate change and other activities of man, but the death of one species can be a boon for another. Bullhead City, Arizona, has been overrun by caddisflies because man has gutted the populations of its predators by damming the Colorado River.
Joe Biden’s first Presidential run in 1988 was sunk in part by the revelation that he’d plagiarized parts of campaign speeches, as well as his habit of embellishing past accomplishments. The New York Times looks back at that disastrous campaign as Biden has begun to repeat his mistakes, such as plagiarizing parts of his climate change policy plan from other outlets.
Arizona cancer quack Colleen Huber, who tells patients she can cure cancer with baking soda and vitamin C, has lost her defamation suit against activist Britt Marie Hermes, a former naturopath who now works to expose the inherent fraud of ‘naturopathic medicine,’ which isn’t actually medicine at all. If you live in Arizona, perhaps consider asking your state attorney general to look into Ms. Huber’s business?
An exclusive Guardian report found that at least 200 quacks in the U.S. are using a sham therapy called ‘Cease’ on children, claiming it can prevent the measles and cure autism.
The Chicago journalist who has investigated R. Kelly’s sexual misconduct for nearly 20 years spoke to the BBC about his work and his new book on the singer, Soulless.
The S&P has performed much worse under Trump than it did under his predecessor. Populism and protectionism are not sound economic policies.
Sudan’s military toppled the country’s dictator this spring, but they’ve since cracked down on pro-democracy groups, arresting three opposition leaders this week and killing dozens of protesters in Khartoum. The coup leaders are relying on the same paramilitary forces that led the genocide in Darfur. Instability here is bad news for the region – and could make the country safe for Islamic terror groups again.
A Delaware man (originally from Queens) and former Army veteran went to York County, Pennsylvania, to try to clear up an outstanding warrant on a DUI charge. He ended up dead in a York jail, and his body was returned to the family missing several organs, including parts of his throat. The County tried to bury its response to the article by releasing a statement late on Friday afternoon.
The University of Alabama returned a $21.5 million gift from a donor who opposes the state’s anti-abortion law, even removing his name from the university’s law school. In the backwater swirling, there are some things that will never change.
The Guardian announced it will stop using inaccurate language to describe anti-abortion bills that supporters label, incorrectly, “heartbeat” bills. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says this term is inaccurate; a fetus of six weeks has no heart or cardiovascular system.
I’ve noticed in a few hotels this year that the little plastic toiletry bottles have been replaced by larger refillable containers affixed to the shower walls. It’s part of a larger movement including legislation in California that banned them in hotels of more than 50 rooms.
California’s Assembly passed a bill that would make some workers for companies like Lyft and Uber employees, rather than independent contractors, giving them greater protection from labor abuses.
The Washington Post‘s Erik Wemple urged media outlets not to fall for Carlson’s bad-faith “praise” of part of Elizabeth Warren’s economic platform. And then Carlson went on air and attacked the “tyranny” of the metric system, the origin of which seems to be foreign to him.
Reading a lot of fiction improves social cognition and makes people more empathetic.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alabama, arizona, chocolate, climate change, cost of food, frauds, links, pennsylvania, vaccines, white nationalism

→ June 1, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/1/19.

My second mock first round for Monday’s MLB draft went up this past Tuesday for ESPN+ subscribers; my Big Board, ranking the top 100 prospects in the class, went up the previous week. I held a Klawchat on Thursday, and will hold another Monday afternoon, plus a Periscope live chat Monday night after the draft starts.

My latest board game review for Paste covers Aerion, a fun little solo game from the designer of Onirim, but that might be a bit too easy to beat. I won every single time I played; it was often close, but I still could find a way to win even with various included expansions.

I finally got back to my email newsletter yesterday, talking about why this was such a weird draft class to cover.

And now, the links…

One of those viral videos that purported to depict racism against African-Americans, this one involving a Chipotle employee (herself a person of color), turned out to get the story backwards; CNN has a long piece breaking down how the ‘internet mob’ got the story wrong and how it affected the woman targeted by the online outrage.
The BBC relates the history of British colonial authorities trying to erase hijras, India’s “third gender.” India recognized transgender people as an official third gender in 2014.
Jonathan Mayo polled 22 MLB scouts and executives asking who they’d take #1 in this draft class.
Waldorf Schools in California form major clusters of unvaccinated children; parents of these kids interviewed in this Guardian article voice the appeal to nature fallacy or the false conflict of interest claims. As much as anti-science is associated today with fundamentalist religion, you can also find wide swaths of anti-vaccine sentiment on the left in communities like these.
A German father wrote about losing his son to SSPE, a rare but invariably fatal side effect of measles infections. Max caught measles at six months, too young to be vaccinated, and SSPE put him into a vegetative state at the age of 12, after he’d suffered seizures and lost most of his memories. He died at 20.
Maine became the fourth state to eliminate non-medical exemptions to mandatory childhood vaccination rules, with the law passing the state’s Senate by a single vote. State Sen. James Dill (D), who voted for the bill, still raised bogus arguments about genetic conditions that might exempt children from the schedule, despite a total lack of evidence to support the existence of any such conditions. He’s listed as a scientist in that article, but his specialty is pest management, not immunology.
Fox News host Laura Ingraham defended white supremacist Paul Nehlen as a “prominent voice” who was “censored” (not what that word means) by social media.
Elizabeth Warren’s explanation of why she won’t do a town hall on Fox News is perfect (although I have no idea what Whoopi Goldberg is talking about at the end).
Why is the Administration referring to fossil fuels as “molecules of freedom?”
A science professor at Williams College writes about how students are rejecting science that challenges their worldviews, such as discussions of genetic differences between males and females, or across different geographic groups.
This New York Post article asserting that some students are avoiding colleges in states that are trying to outlaw abortion seems incredibly anecdotal, even if it’s sort of plausible. I’d like to see actual data on whether this affects applications or enrollment at any such schools before we claim this is a thing.
The Good Men Project tracks Sean Doolittle’s tour of MLB cities’ independent bookstores.
I loved Gabriel Garcia-Marquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, so I enjoyed this mental floss piece with some facts and trivia about the novel.
A University of Alabama-Birmingham study of spectator injuries at sporting events pointed to the need for more netting to protect fans from “ballistic” injuries – something flying from the field of play into the seats.
There’s a new, micro-game on Kickstarter from Wingspan designer Elizabeth Hargrave called Tussie Mussie.
Tweet of the week:
The people who belittle @AOC for being a former waitress are the same faulting @ewarren for billing out at $675/hr. So how much exactly should world-changing women make?

— Katherine M. Gordon (@katgordon) May 28, 2019

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, baseball, india, lgbt rights, links, maine, vaccines, white nationalism

→ May 18, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/17/19.

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

And now, the links…

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

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

→ May 11, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/11/19.

I had two ESPN+ posts this week, my first mock draft of 2019 and a draft scouting post on some prospects at Vanderbilt and Louisville. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

At Paste, I reviewed Noctiluca, a fun, light, dice-drafting game from the designer of Raiders of the North Sea. My daughter and I have really enjoyed this one.

Before I get to the regular links, here’s a GoFundMe that might be of interest to many of you. Luis Vasquez, a former Mets farmhand, developed bone cancer in his leg last year; he has survived it, but surgery to replace his knee and tibia has probably ended his career. Jen Wolf, who worked with Luis while she was with the Mets the last few years, has set up a GoFundMe page to help Vasquez move into a safer house in the Dominican Republic, as his family’s current home is falling apart and lacks electricity or indoor plumbing.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: A prominent case of gang rape in Spain that resulted in the five perpetrators only receiving convictions on lesser charges fueled massive nationwide protests – and into a position of power.
This New Yorker longread from a few weeks ago looks at the drive to automate produce picking, which has implications for the kind of food we eat, when we can buy it, how nutritious it is, and for the demand for unskilled laborers.
VICE explains how AirPods are an environmental tragedy; they’re expensive, don’t last long, and then they’re just trash.
You’ve heard plenty about the Alabama bill that would effectively criminalize abortions in the state; it would also criminalize false rape allegations in a way that if you accuse someone of rape and they’re acquitted, you have then committed a crime. Between this and Georgia’s attempt to ban abortion last week, the American South is no country for women.
Meanwhile, Republicans in Ohio, a state with three big cities and apparently Alabama around them, are pushing a bill to ban private insurance from covering abortions and that might also ban coverage of birth control. Theocracy still has its adherents.
The Daily Beast profiles a Hezbollah sleeper agent busted in the US for selling counterfeit Uggs.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has descended into denialism – and has made it a career. His sister and nephew write about how he’s dangerously wrong on vaccines.
Seth Meyers had Meghan McCain on his show and pushed back on her hypocritical comments against Rep. Ilhan Omar.
Republicans across the country are fighting Democrats’ attempts to tighten vaccination laws across the country, yet another example of the GOP aligning itself with anti-science interests.
The city of San Francisco has subpoenaed a doctor suspected of granting fake medical exemptions to parents seeking to avoid vaccinating their children.
Bioethicist Art Caplan wrote about a framework for legal liability for parents who refuse to vaccinate in a Harvard Law blog post in 2013.
Germany’s health minister proposed fining non-vaccinating parents $2700 to further discourage refusers.
The FDA is moving to increase regulations of supplements, a move that is more than overdue given the size of the market and the potential for harm to consumers by misleading labels and lack of manufacturing standards.
Sexual orientation is fluid into our adult years, supported by yet more research led by Virginia Tech scientist Christine Kaestle.
I’m now very interested in Furious Hours by Casey Cep after reading this review of the book, which covers a possible serial killer and an unwritten book by Harper Lee.
This NPR piece explains how hospitals cope when an unidentifiable patient arrives — someone without ID who isn’t conscious or isn’t able to identify themselves.
Nancy Armour writes about the privilege some Cubs fans have shown when defending Addison Russell or the fan who made a racist gesture on camera, saying those of us with that privilege can’t tell other classes that they shouldn’t be offended.
Why is it news when athletes of color decide not to go to the White House, but it’s not news when white athletes decide to go?

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, cost of food, links, longreads, nutrition, stick to baseball, vaccines, women's rights

→ May 5, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/5/19.

I had two ESPN+ posts last week, my ranking of the top 50 prospects in this year’s draft class and a scouting blog post covering a half-dozen top prep players (five of them on the top 50). My first mock draft of 2019 goes up on Monday. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I sent out the latest edition of my free email newsletter on Friday as well. I’ve been trying to time those to when I’ve got actual content to tell you all about, especially baseball things.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Cut looks at a small cult that operated within the Sarah Lawrence campus, as the father of a student there ended up crashing in her dorm and taking control of many of her roommates’ lives. The university’s reluctance to act is especially disturbing.
BuzzFeed talked to former white nationalist writer/provocateur Katie McHugh, a piece that tries to exonerate her (and fails, in my opinion) but that is instructive into how the alt-right social media machine works.
The Saudi government has regularly helped its citizens living in the U.S. escape prosecution for crimes by spiriting them out of the country, yet we do nothing about this because we continue to believe that the Saudis are our friends despite forty-plus years of evidence that they are not. First it was oil, now it’s help against terrorism, but there’s always an excuse for treating the Saudis as allies even when their actions say otherwise.
My friend Tim Grierson interviewed director/actor Werner Herzog on the eve of the German film giant’s new documentary Meeting Gorbachev.
Kavitha Davidson wrote in the Guardian about sexual assault in sports and society, focusing on Luke Walton’s attorney is trying to use #MeToo to denigrate the coach’s victim.
The New York Times explores eleven major food crops already affected by climate change, which, as the article notes, is widely denied by elected officials (always Republicans) from many of the states that rely on agriculture for employment and income.
The Washington Post profiles D’Arcy Carden, who plays Janet on The Good Place.
The Post also argues that anti-vaxxers should bear the financial costs of their actions when outbreaks occur.
The anti-vaxxer movement is also turning to increasingly violent rhetoric. We ignored this as a society when anti-abortion activists did it, and then when white nationalists did it, and both movements eventually turned to violence and terrorism.
Those same anti-vaxxers are harassing and threatening a Toronto mother whose son died of the flu as she has been advocating for greater use of the flu vaccine.
Measles had been eradicated in this hemisphere in 2000; it just reached its highest level in the U.S. in twenty years, entirely because of anti-vaxxers.
Meanwhile, science-denier Darryl Metcalfe, Pennsylvania’s representative for its 12th district (guess which party!), introduced a bill making it easier for parents to skip vaccinations by requiring doctors to treat unvaccinated children even if it poses risks to other patients.
Germany’s health minister proposed issuing large fines to families who don’t vaccinate their school-aged children. Add that to liability and you might extinguish enough of the deniers to stop these outbreaks.
Indonesia announced a plan to move the capital away from Jakarta because that city is sinking.
The political science valedictorian at Brigham Young University announced during his speech that he’s gay, a huge move given that the Mormon Church just announced a month ago that homosexuality was no longer considered apostasy.
Adam Serwer argues in the Atlantic that Nazis are and have always been trolls.
A National Geographic editorial argues that we must keep half of all land mass in its natural state to stop climate change. That may be true, but, uh, good luck with that.
A federal court ruled that Ohio Republicans violated Ohioans’ constitutional rights with a 2011 gerrymander. I know New Jersey Democrats did this too, but are all of the remaining gerrymanders this decade by Republicans?
Board game news: Plan B Games opened pre-orders for Century: A New World, the third game in Emerson Matsuuchi’s trilogy that also included Spice Road and Eastern Wonders.
Acram Digital announced that they’re developing a digital port of Charterstone, the tremendous legacy game that was my #2 title of 2018.
Asmodee announced the creation of a new fiction imprint to publish works based on or tied to its wide stable of board game and RPG titles.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, climate change, links, metoo, rape culture, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ April 20, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/20/19.

Nothing new for ESPN+ subscribers this week, although I’ll have another draft blog post next week, followed by a draft top 50 the week after (I got bumped by some other draft). My last ESPN+ post covered likely first rounders Alek Manoah and Josh Jung, with Manoah looking like a top ten pick when I saw him.

I reviewed the app version of Castles of Burgundy, one of my favorite high strategy games, for Ars Technica. MENSA also gave its Select tag to five games from 2019 and I’ve reviewed two already, Gizmos and Architects of the West Kingdom.

I rarely appear on podcasts due to time constraints, but when Kyle Bandujo asked if I’d come on his show, Trouble with the Script, to review the worst baseball movie I’ve ever seen, I couldn’t possibly decline. I think we properly eviscerated Trouble with the Curve.

My free email newsletter is becoming dangerously close to a weekly thing now. I must be mellowing in my old age.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This is from February but I hadn’t seen it until a friend sent it along this week – best-selling novelist Dan Mallory is a serial liar who has made false claims of cancer and bipolar disorder to try to further his career. None of the claims has anything to do with his book, The Woman in the Window, however; it’s just that much of what he says about his life to date is untrue.
Mariners pitcher Rob Whalen recently retired due in large part to anxiety disorder, and he says the Mariners handled his case extremely poorly.
WIRED has a long, in-depth look at the chaos inside Facebook in 2018 as the company was called to account for its role in influencing the 2016 election, the way it promulgates hate speech and fake news, and poor data privacy standards.
Audio link: KQED looks at the Coachella concert-goers and those of us at home don’t see, a community far less affluent than the attendees are, and that is dealing with environmental problems from the warming desert.
The Writers’ Guild of America has demanded that its members cut ties with their agents to protest conflicts of interest by agencies that also produce shows via “packaging” deals. This past week, the first writer came out to say he wasn’t going to do so, in a letter that is pompous, self-serving, and in at least one instance untrue.
Fair Harvard, doing me proud: The university’s health services rejected a student proposal to make naxolone, the treatment capable of reversing opioid overdoses, available on campus. The money quote: “They had some skepticism about whether the research actually suggested that naloxone would be effective at Harvard.” If Harvard students have different biology from other humans, I’d love to know about it sooner rather than later.
The FDA may start cracking down on the use of the Non-GMO Project label.
A Bangladeshi student who reported sexual harassment by one of her teachers to the police was burned to death by members of her community, sparking large protests in the Muslim nation in south Asia.
A pair of adults wore Nazi armbands and MAGA shirts in Providence, Rhode Island, and then stood atop the city’s Holocaust memorial where they gave the Nazi salute.
The Washington Post looks at one possible fix to the “nightmare” job market for academics.
Brewers reliever Jeremy Jeffress started a food truck with someone from his hometown to re-create a favorite childhood experience of fried seafood. I need reports from those of you in Milwaukee when it starts up on May 5th.
Apparently there’s a controversy brewing over a Canadian stamp with an inaccurate depiction of something called a Nanaimo Bar, which I’d never heard of it until this happened.
Board game news: Another Terraforming Mars expansion, Turmoil, is over $600,000 on Kickstarter already.
The unrelated game On Mars has also cleared the half-million mark on Kickstarter. The BGG listing for the game says playing time is 90-150 minutes, so I may end up giving this one a miss.
Not a board game, but after reading this review of Falcon Age at Paste, I’m suddenly interested in it despite my general avoidance of video games (because they suck up so much time).

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anxiety, bangladesh, board games, gmo, links, rhode island, social media

→ April 13, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/13/19.

I’ve had four ESPN+ posts this week. On the draft blog, I covered last week’s NHSI tournament + Elon RHP George Kirby, then scouted West Virginia RHP Alek Manoah and Texas Tech 3b Josh Jung. I’ve heard Jung’s name pronounced a few ways, but I think it has to be either Josh Jung or Yosh Yung, for consistency’s sake. On the pro side, I looked at the most prospect-laden minor league rosters this year, and finally saw Luis Robert play against the Royals’ high-A squad. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Architects of the West Kingdom, the newest game from Shem Phillips, who got a Spiel nomination for 2015’s Raiders of the North Sea. Architects is a busy worker-placement game, but has a few fun quirks like capturing your opponents’ meeples and selling them to the prison, or trading reputation to steal tax money or go to the black market.

And now, the links:

Longreads first: Anne Boyer writes in the New Yorker about what cancer takes away from you even if you survive it.
Adjunct professors are the minor-league baseball players of academia: overworked, underpaid, and often living on the edge of poverty. The Atlantic looks at one such adjunct who died because she couldn’t afford basic medical care that might have saved her.
Hampshire College has long had a reputation as a ‘hippie’ school, loose on the academics, maybe heavy on the substances. The college may be on the verge of extinction as it seeks a partner or buyer.
Forbes looks at deadbeat billionaire Jim Justice, the current governor of West Virginia, a man who doesn’t pay his bills and ignores state regulations that don’t suit him.
I’ve written quite a bit here about antibiotic resistance and the need for aggressive, science-based policies to combat it. Well, fungi can also make us sick, and now Candida auris has evolved resistance to antifungal drugs, too – and it’s hard to kill even outside the body. Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (PA-06), an engineer by training, had a tweet thread about this topic after the article ran. Guess her party.
Kyle Korver, who sources tell me is a professional basketball player, wrote in The Player’s Tribune about learning to understand his own privilege.
Isaac Chotiner interviewed writer Bret Easton Ellis for the New Yorker, and Ellis said some things that didn’t play particularly well online, for good reason. I’m not linking this to dunk on Ellis, but to praise Chotiner: Look at how consistently he probes when Ellis dissembles, and how he refuses to let Ellis off the hook for saying something wrong. This is how the media should interview people in power.
ScienceNews has a follow-up piece to a link I posted last week that profiled fossil hunter Robert DePalma and the possible discovery of a fossil record from immediately after the Chicxulub impact.
Chik-Fil-A continues to pour money into nonprofit groups fighting LGBT rights across the country. I haven’t set foot in one of their restaurants in at least a decade, for this precise reason, but J. Kenji Lopez-Alt shows you how to recreate their famous chicken sandwich at home.
WIRED explains why the robocall problem will never truly be fixed.
Elizabeth Warren may not be faring well in early polls or fundraising, but Moira Donegan writes in the Guardian that Warren is the intellectual powerhouse of the Democratic Party, producing practical policy proposals where others purvey platitudes.
This week’s Hidden Brain podcast episode looks at how societal views of gay rights changed so dramatically inside of fifty years.
Stand your white ground: An Alabama woman who shot and killed the man who violently raped her and then assaulted her brother is now facing life in prison. Don’t get mad when people stereotype the south while this shit still happens in your backyard.
In Missouri, two legislators – guess which party! – are pushing anti-vaccine bills and conspiracy theories.
Another WIRED piece argues that our health laws have failed the public good when it comes to vaccines, making it too easy for idiots and the ignorant to opt out.
Amidst the furor over US-Israeli relations, we’re losing track of the various despots Trump is propping up around the world, including the rising dictatorship in Egypt.
Why am I including a link to a press release about a single-malt whiskey’s launch in India? You’ll see if you read it.
The New York Times crossword puzzle Twitter account got into a bizarre beef with another twitterer over what was pretty obviously a joke.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alabama, gay rights, links, missouri, science, vaccines, west virginia

→ April 8, 2019
→ By keith

Longreads, 4/7/19.

My latest draft post for ESPN+ subscribers looks at the top prospects from last week’s NHSI tournament, including C.J. Abrams, Riley Greene, and Jack Leiter; as well as Saturday’s outing by Elon RHP George Kirby.

Here are some of the leftover longreads I hadn’t gotten through in time for yesterday’s post:

The Guardian looks at the evolution of the influencer market, which continues to grow even through scandals and fragmentation. The article also focuses, a bit oddly, on influencers’ drive for “authenticity,” which strikes me as a contradiction in terms.
A reader sent this lengthy Current Affairs overview of Pete Buttigeig as seen through his book Shortest Way Home, arguing that he’s not a progressive candidate and that progressive voters shouldn’t want any part of him as a Presidential candidate. I think the article makes many good points, notably when discussing his policies as South Bend mayor and how he seemed to deprioritize issues like poverty reduction or racial inequality, but also makes some dubious inferences and leans too much on the book itself, which is a campaign document. Buttigeig also wrote about his ten favorite books for Vulture and I find it hard to believe that these ten, which read like the list of books you want other people to believe are your favorite books, are actually his favorites.
The Indy Star profiles John Franzese, whose testimony sent his father, a Colombo crime family boss, to jail, and his life after leaving witness protection, trying to work with recovering addicts like himself.
I’ve read two great books on the Chicxulub impact event, the asteroid collision with the earth that wiped out the dinosaurs and caused the KT mass extinction event, in the last year: The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs and T. rex and the Crater of Doom. The New Yorker has a piece right in line with those, looking at the recent discovery of a site that may have a fossil record of the first few hours after the impact.
Matthew Komatsu documents his experiences as a Japanese-American in the wake of the 2011 tsunami, and what he found in his 2018 return to the country.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: history of science, links, social media

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