links — Page 25

→ September 9, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/8/18.

My one piece for ESPN+/Insider this week looked at the top prospects at last weekend’s Future Stars Series, including Daniel Espino, the top RHP for the 2019 draft, and Glenallen Hill, Jr. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

My annual minor league player of the year column is supposed to run this upcoming week, which means I need to write it (it’s not like the winner is a tough choice, but I like to highlight a few other dudes who had great years too), and I am hoping to get a new edition of my email newsletter out as well.

And now, the links…

Slate looks at the sustainability of The Athletic’s business model while raising critical questions about whether their content is actually as unique as they claim it is. (I’m an Athletic subscriber and happy to pay for good content, but I would say I read a very small number of writers on that site.)
Two longreads from the great investigative journalism site ProPublica this week. First, how Oregon keeps releasing violent criminals who were judged criminally insane, with several such convicts eventually reoffending for violent crimes.
Also, José Bacelga, a cancer researcher and the Chief Medical Officer at Sloan Kettering, failed on several occasions to disclose financial conflicts of interest when publishing cancer research in major journals. He was even editor-in-chief of one such journal that published his research yet broke its rules on disclosure.
I loved Will Leitch’s take on Nike choosing to ally itself with Colin Kaepernick despite the entirely expected outcry from the right. I also think they got more publicity value out of the announcement than they could possibly have bought. (Will is a friend of mine.)
Ars Technica, for whom I have written one freelance piece, has a short column asking BBQ pit masters for basic tips on pork butts and briskets. I’ve used the foil trick to get around the stall problem with pork shoulders, but prefer not to use it because it softens the bark that forms on the meat’s exterior.
The President’s increasingly overt racism shouldn’t be a surprise – he’s been attacking Elizabeth Warren for years by using ‘Pocahontas’ as a sort of racial slur to question her integrity. The Washington Post debunks Trump’s claims that she used her heritage to obtain promotions or admission to schools.
A trans woman of color was murdered in Philadelphia this week, and 2018 is shaping up to be an especially deadly year for trans people in the US, although it seems like hard data on the subject is hard to come by. I think it’s fair to say the trend isn’t good – such killings should be going down and they’re probably not.
Passengers on four Southwest Airlines flights may have been exposed to measles thanks to a sick passenger who traveled on those planes. The measles virus is extremely contagious and can be fatal at the time of infection or later in life. I would entirely favor a law criminalizing the woman’s actions: flying with a contagious, vaccine-preventable disease, thus putting hundreds of people at risk.
Ride-sharing services like Uber may be exacerbating traffic problems because riders choose them over public transportation, not over driving themselves. I do use these services from time to time, but not when public transit is available (and safe).
Twitter banned Alex Jones and InfoWars this week after months of pressure to rid the site of the hoax-peddling arch-right conspiracy theory factory and its corpulent founder. Jane Coaston covered these bans last month for Vox, looking at why YouTube, Apple, and Facebook took the same action.
Board games! Z-Man Games, an imprint of Asmodee, announced the latest extension to the Pandemic brand with Pandemic: Fall of Rome, which sounds a lot like last winter’s Pandemic: Rising Tide, another game that took the framework of the original Pandemic, added some clever twists to the rules, and shifted the theme away from fighting global epidemics.
Floodgate Games announced the Kickstarter for Bad Maps, a light family-level strategy game they demoed at Gen Con. It’s about 2/3 to its goal with 18 days to go. Floodgate also released the 5-6 player Sagrada expansion, which includes a private dice board to tweak the original’s dice-drafting mechanic, to retail this past week. It’s $25 on amazon via that link.
Starling Games announced a Kickstarter, opening to backers on September 10th, for Pearlbrook, the first expansion for Everdell, itself in the running for my #1 new game of 2018.
It seems like each week brings one great new(ish) comic on vaccine denialism, so here’s the latest.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: bbq, board games, links, media criticism, social media, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ September 1, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/1/18.

My one Insider/ESPN+ piece this week ranked the best tools among MLB players, which is probably my least favorite piece to write each year. And I held a Klawchat this week.

I reviewed the incredible new board game Everdell for Paste this week. It’s got a Stone Age vibe, but adds so much more to that worker placement framework, and the artwork is some of the best I have ever seen.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: There’s a new health scam out there, targeting desperate people like cancer patients, that claims that food-grade hydrogen peroxide can cure many ailments. There is no such thing as food grade hydrogen peroxide, which has never been proven to treat any disease and is very, very dangerous to consume at even moderate doses.
Esquire looks at the imminent global water crisis, caused by overuse, pollution, climate change, and unwise or even deleterious government policies. This, not Islamist terrorism, is the greatest threat to global stability for this century.
Alan Rusbridger, former editor-in-chief of the Guardian, has a new book coming out titled Breaking News, on how the business of news has broken the concept of news; his old paper has a lengthy excerpt that focuses on a major phone-hacking scandal within Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.
Recode’s Kara Swisher interviewed OB/GYN and GOOP debunker Dr. Jen Gunter, which you listen to as a podcast or read in a transcript. It’s funny and also very telling about how patients use “Dr. Google,” and how people like Gwyneth Paltrow take advantage of the gullible and the desperate to line their own pockets.
Mother Jones investigates the broken federal student loan forgiveness program, which has had problems for years but has taken a bigger dive off a cliff under Betsy DeVos.
A few weeks ago I posted a story about a female NYU professor accused of harassing a male graduate student, after which many women stood up for her, the predator, not the victim. A graduate student who studied with that professor writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education that she believes the accuser, saying that Professor Avital Ronell is a bully while questioning her academic and feminist bona fides.
Conservative writer, evangelical Christian, and Iraq War veteran David French and his wife adopted a two-year old girl from Ethiopia in 2010. He writes for the Atlantic how he has seen attitudes of Americans shift towards hate against his daughter, his wife, and himself for daring to cross racial lines in the name of love. He also covers some policy changes from the current and previous Administrations that have discouraged such adoptions from outside of the United States.
BlacKkKlansman includes a line from David Duke where he mentions being a friend of technology pioneer and Nobel laureate William Shockley, one of the inventors of the transistor and founder of Shockley Semiconductor (from which the Traitorous Eight left to found Fairchild Semiconductor). I had no idea that Shockley became an inveterate racist shitstain and eugenics proponent.
The “age of privacy nihilism” is upon us, although I’d argue nothing has really changed – we’ve given away our data for decades, in exchange for the occasional coupon for 50 cents off Nutter Butters.
Mollie Tibbetts was murdered by a man because she dared to say no; that man was Latino, possibly in the U.S. illegally, so within hours of her murder, the white supremacists in power chose to politicize her death (which, I was told, we’re not supposed to do when a white man shoots up a school or a church). Her family is having none of it, and her father came out to show his gratitude for and support of the Iowan Latino community.
The Nordic countries’ economies are often held up, with good reason, as exemplars of Western democracies that use broad social safety nets and other progressive policies to produce high employment rates with low rates of poverty, homelessness, and crime. They also tend to score very high on economic “happiness indices,” but the BBC points out that such rankings obscure increasing mental health issues in those countries, especially among younger citizens.
The collapse of the Venezuelan state and economy has led to a growing refugee crisis in neighboring countries, with this Washington Post article focusing on the Brazilian town of Boa Vista.
The ongoing European measles epidemic has killed 37 people and sickened 41,000 – and remember, children can survive measles only to die of the virus a decade later due to an incurable condition called subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE).
Roland’s Market, the new Phoenix restaurant and collaboration of Chris Bianco and the Holguins (Tacos Chiwas), earned a very positive review from the Arizona Republic.
The Arizona Republican Party packed its Supreme Court, and just got a big win from their efforts, as the Court blocked a ballot measure that could have funded state schools with an extra $690 million. The proposed question had over a quarter of a million signatures. The governor who stuffed the Supreme Court is facing a challenge this November from David Garcia, a Democrat, a veteran, and an education professor at Arizona State. If he wins, he’ll be the first Latinx governor of Arizona in 44 years.
A neuroscientist discusses how skimming rather than deep reading can alter our brains for the worse.
This is simply perfect.

Give Him a Shot pic.twitter.com/RVtd7tVY3L

— Light Roast Comics (@lr_comics) August 27, 2018

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, history of science, links, metoo, phoenix, privacy, pseudoscience, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines, Venezuela, water crisis

→ August 25, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/25/18.

I had one Insider/ESPN+ piece this week, scouting notes on Tampa wunderkind Wander Franco and some Yankees & Rangers prospects, and held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I reviewed the gladiator-themed deckbuilding game Carthage for Paste this week. That’s the last of my pre-Gen Con reviews; I believe everything I review the rest of the year will either be from games I got/saw at Gen Con or that were released afterwards.

I’m about due for a fresh edition of my free email newsletter, to which you may wish to subscribe if you enjoy my ramblings.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: ESPN’s Jackie McMullen has an excellent piece on the NBA’s progressive efforts to help players battle mental health issues, interspersed with insights from Kevin Love, Paul Pierce, and other players who’ve dealt with anxiety, depression, and panic disorder.
The Guardian looks at TripAdvisor at a crossroads, beset by fake reviews and dealing with many of the same questions of responsibility for content that affect larger tech outfits.
Ten billion dollars a year goes to ‘charities’ who aim to shape public policy, which can both alter public discussion and political votes on topics while also depriving the U.S. Treasury of tax revenue from the associated income. That’s just one revelation in Pulitzer winner Elizabeth Kolbert’s New Yorker piece on the new era of philanthropy, where the wealthy have more power than ever and often wield it through their foundations.
Radiolab looked at Facebook’s own problems with regulating hate speech in a recent podcast episode that I found very thorough – it doesn’t let Facebook off the hook, but does a solid job of explaining some of the difficulties they face in making decisions on what content to allow and what to delete.
The BBC’s The Inquiry podcast asks if we might see another AIDS pandemic as global health initiatives slow and major aid donors (notably the U.S.) reduce their funding. If our government continues its lurch towards theocracy, you can bet AIDS research and international aid for AIDS treatment will drop.
Russian trolls/bots may have been spreading vaccine denialist views on social media, although Dr. David “Orac” Gorski argues that the media coverage has overstated its prevalence.
Orac was busy this week, with another post on how the Australian edition of 60 Minutes ran a puff piece on a quack stem cell clinic. So-called stem cell therapy has become the next big thing in separating gullible or desperate patients from their money, but the science itself is unproven and very much in its infancy.
Harvard Law Professor Jack Goldsmith writes in the conservative Weekly Standard that there is sufficient grounds for impeachment, and that may lead Trump to try to fire Mueller and any other investigators working on the collusion case.
How do microscopic plastic particles end up in our food chain? Researchers have found so-called microplastics in water supplies, in beer, and even in aquatic creatures we consume, with unknown consequences for the ecosystem and our bodies.
The multi-level marketing scheme known as Herbalife has been around, and been accused of being a scam, for decades now, but somehow they always skate by. (They’re a major sponsor of the LA Galaxy soccer team, and as good an argument as you’ll see for not putting corporate sponsor names on jerseys.) A new lawsuit alleges that Herbalife’s system of paid seminars misleads attendees by promising wealth while siphoning off their money.
Uganda, one of the few African countries where baseball has a presence, may be about to descend into chaos as a popular singer turned rising opposition politician has been jailed and beaten by agents of dictator Yoweri Museveni. Protests against the detention and Museveni’s oppressive rule continue to grow.
Corruption in Louisiana: The state’s Senate President, John Alario, has twice spiked a bill legalizing ride-sharing services to help his friend, who sells insurance to cab companies. This story appeared on ProPublica two days ago; it hasn’t been picked up by any local Louisiana news outlet since.
New EPA rules, relaxing regulations on clean, beautiful coal, will lead to 1400 more deaths per year and up to 15,000 additional cases of respiratory problems, including asthma, due to the fine particulate matter emitted by coal mining and production.
Brooklyn-based pizzaiolo Paulie Gee has been talking about opening a New York-style slice shop for years now, but it appears it will finally open at Franklin & Noble this month.
N.K. Jemisin won her third straight Hugo Award for Best Novel for The Stone Sky, and her five-minute acceptance speech is well worth your time, as it’s by turns funny and inspiring.
My Twitter friend Parker Molloy wrote for the Guardian how she can’t root for the Cubs after their decision to acquire Daniel Murphy, who has expressed anti-gay views without ever retracting or revising them.
Asia Argento, a prominent victim of Harvey Weinstein’s predations, now stands accused herself of statutory rape of a 17-year-old boy; we can believe her claims on Weinstein but still hold her accountable for her own transgressions.
Kelli Ward is running for Jeff Flake’s Senate seat in Arizona on a platform of pro-Trump, white nationalist talking points; she’s even been campaigning with Weird Mike Cernovich, the conspiracy theorist who gained an audience by pushing the bullshit Pizzagate story.
Blake Fahrenthold resigned from Congress over a sexual harassment scandal that U.S. taxpayers helped clear up for him, but blames everyone except himself for his career’s demise.
Georgia’s GOP is trying to suppress the black vote in November by closing polling stations, using the Americans with Disabilities Act as its justification. Majority-black Randolph County did reverse its plans to close seven of nine polling stations after the public outcry. If you live in Georgia, make sure your elected officials know you support voting rights and oppose any attempts to suppress the vote. And voters in other areas should know this is part of a broader, national vote-suppression effort using the same flanking maneuver.
The Washington Post‘s Elizabeth Bruenig argues that it’s time to stop thinking of ‘socialism’ as a dirty word in a piece that argues largely for ‘democratic socialism,’ which is a poorly-named platform of social welfare policies that by and large doesn’t actually require socialism. Socialism has a specific historical meaning: government ownership of major means of production and distribution. It’s been tried all over the world, and it has failed, as it wipes out many of the incentives that drive human decisions in the marketplace. If you want to argue for a stronger social safety net and for policies that strive to reduce structural discrimination and inequality, that’s a debate worth having, but it’s not ‘socialism.’
The New Republic‘s Sarah Jones writes (in a piece from April) that the real campus free speech problem is on the right, not on the left, highlighting cases of punishment for views handed down by evangelical Christian colleges.
A Kansas City TV station suspended a reporter for sharing an article on white privilege on her Facebook page. The incident may also have led to her termination; a KC Star editorial argues that the station was in the wrong. The reporter’s lawsuit against KSHB is still pending.
Amazon appears to have set up a slew of astroturfing Twitter accounts to fight news coverage of poor working conditions at its warehouses.
Researchers at MIT and Harvard have developed a genome test that may help identify patients at greater risk for diabetes, heart disease, breast cancer, and a few other common, often deadly diseases.
The longstanding hypothesis on the cause of age-related cognitive decline has been neuron death and insufficient replacement of those cells to make up for the loss. New research may counter that, showing that the cause might be lost neuron plasticity, which was reversed in mice using the drug fluoxetine, better known as Prozac.
Hua Hsu writes in the New Yorker about the ‘end point’ of representation and the hit film Crazy Rich Asians, the success of which has brought the term representation (back) into the mainstream conversation. Representation matters to the people who haven’t been represented, and if that inconveniences you as someone who has never had to think twice about seeing people who look and sound like you on the big or small screens, well, tough.
Red Raven Games has a Kickstarter running for the second edition of their game The Ancient World.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, arizona, charity, environment, hugo award, links, medicine, pizza, pseudoscience, representation, science fiction, social media, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines, voter suppression

→ August 18, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/18/18.

My biggest piece this week was my annual Gen Con wrap-up for Paste, covering the 20 best games I got to play, demo, or just watch at the convention, and discussing pretty much everything else I saw too.

For Insiders, I wrote up what Shane Baz’s inclusion means for the Chris Archer trade, with scouting notes on Adam Haseley, Nolan Jones, and some pitching prospects. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I sent out the latest edition of my free email newsletter on Friday. Feel free to sign up for more of my ramblings, plus links to all of my content.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New York Times profiles the privacy activists who fought Google, Facebook, & other tech giants over how they used customers’ data.
This research paper from May finds that hospitals’ leverage results in large price swings (PDF) even across “undifferentiated” services between different facilities, one possible contributor to the rising cost of health care that any reform proposal will need to address. Directing patients to lower-cost providers for such basic services could save patients and insurers a significant amount of money.
Food writer Michael Twitty visits his ancestral homeland of Ghana for the first time, in the company of four African-American chefs, to eat traditional Ghanaian food and reconnect with his roots.
Dan Gillmoor, director of the Knight Center at Arizona State’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, calls on all journalists to work together to defend the freedom of the press and expose the degradation of key cultural norms that underpin our society, including voting rights, free speech, and opposition to corruption.
Dr. David Glosser, the uncle of White House policy adviser and xenophobic reactionary Stephen Miller, argues that Miller’s anti-immigration stance is ‘hypocritical’ because Miller wouldn’t be in the U.S. were it not for the same immigration laws Miller is trying to roll back. That’s not a perfect argument – I don’t think it makes Miller a hypocrite for arguing for tighter borders, but it makes his beliefs about the borders inconsistent with his own history.
The Philadelphia Citizen and its partners launched a series of related pieces on the high cost of being ‘broke’ in Philadelphia. For example, WHYY looks at how the cost and limitations of public transit reduce job options for poor Philadelphians.
At the Athletic, Melissa Lockard wrote about her husband’s passing this month at age 41 of a rare cancer. The piece is free for all readers, and is every bit as gutting as you’d expect.
This Royals Review post’s title makes it sound like a mere hit job on the team, but “It is possible that the Royals do not understand how numbers work” makes a smart, broader point that the team’s fealty towards Alcides Escobar is irrational based strictly on the math, without involving emotions at all.
Our jury system is not well built to adjudicate questions of science, a fact demonstrated yet again when a jury decided in favor of a man who claimed Monsanto’s Roundup gave him cancer. The main problem here is that you can pretty much never say what caused someone’s cancer; we can make educated guesses, of course, but cancer is aberrant cell division, and can happen without any apparent external cause.
Then the Environmental Working Group (EWG) opportunistically put out a press release claiming that they found excessive quantities of glyphosate (Roundup) in breakfast cereals, without putting their claims through peer review or explaining why they used a standard of 1/10,000th that of the EPA tolerance for glyphosate. Slate explained why the EWG piece and credulous media reports on it are all bunkum.
An ongoing measles epidemic has sickened over 100 people in 21 states already. And if people try to tell you measles isn’t that bad, ask them if they know about the fatal brain-wasting complication that shows up ten years later.
An 11-month-old boy had a stroke from catching the chicken pox from unvaccinated older siblings. (He was too young for the vaccination.) I don’t understand how this isn’t child neglect. The boy will likely have permanent neurological damage and is at increased risk of another cerebrovascular incident.
I linked to the #MeToo stories on Four Barrel Coffee over the winter, when the scandal first broke. Eight months later, the business is recovering but the owners haven’t divested to employees as they promised. Their reasons aren’t invalid, but when you state to the public and to your workers that you’re going to do something, failing to do so is a serious abdication of responsibility.
This New York Times story asks what happens to #MeToo when the harasser is a feminist professor? The answer, entirely predictably, is that other academics closed ranks around her, rather than believing her accuser.
Neo-Confederates – Christ, how is this even a thing – are now openly courting Russian assistance, which has to be a joke, not that I think these people are smart enough to punk the mainstream media, but white supremacists making friends with our main geopolitical adversary, today and from the last 70 years, is too ridiculous to be real. Of course, these neo-Nazi types ain’t the brightest bulbs.
First We Feast’s Hot Ones videos can be kind of amusing for the guests’ reactions to the spiciest hot sauces they consume as the interview nears its end, but most of the time, that’s been the only appeal for me. Their latest episode with Michael Cera is the best pure interview I’ve seen from the show – and he takes the million-Scoville hot sauce like a damn veteran.
KUOW looks at how Ohio used technology to help clear its rape kit backlog and asks why other states, like Washington, aren’t doing the same.
West Virginia’s Republican Party just pulled an end run around voters to pack its Supreme Court before this fall’s elections.
Joe Scarborough asks why the GOP has abnegated its responsibilities on Russia despite clear evidence that the country interfered in our elections and continues to do so, even trying to stop ongoing investigations into Russia’s efforts.
Georgia leaders are trying to close polling places in heavily Democractic precincts, citing ADA requirements to justify their attempts at voter suppression. The ACLU is fighting it, but the real problem is the 2013 Supreme Court ruling Shelby County v. Holder, which invalidated key parts of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
BuzzFeed profiled Parkland shooting survivor Jaclyn Corin, who is less famous than some of her classmates but is more instrumental in organizing the students’ movement for greater gun control.
Entertainment Weekly interviewed Steven Universe creator Rebecca Sugar on LGBTQ representation in animation and children’s series.
I’m not sure if this Vox piece on why adults find it hard to make and maintain friendships is all that accurate, but its points, especially about being a reliable friend, are worth considering.
Board games: If you’re familiar with the very fun One Night Ultimate Werewolf – which, I recently discovered, my six-year-old niece is shockingly good at playing – there’s a spinoff title, One Night Ultimate Super Villains, on Kickstarter now. It’s a little more kid-oriented in theme and language.
Starling Games has a Kickstarter going for a new expansion to its Alien Frontiers game.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, baseball, board games, environment, first amendment, health, links, privacy, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ August 11, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/11/18.

Just one Insider post this week, with scouting notes on some Yankees, Pirates, and Orioles prospects. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

My Gen Con wrap-up is filed to Paste and I’ll update this post with the link when I get it.

You can sign up for my free email newsletter, which I’ve been sending out every ten days or so. And my book, Smart Baseball, is now just $9 on Kindle.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Eater exposes the toxic workplace culture at Estela and other restaurants operated by chef Thomas Carter.
ProPublica exposes the unelected officials who are running the VA from the shadows of Mar-a-Lago.
Dale Murphy, former Atlanta Braves superstar and near-Hall of Famer, wrote the best piece I have seen to date on players’ social media gaffes, such as the extremely bigoted tweets from Josh Hader and Trea Turner. Murphy gets it, and speaks with the gravitas folks like me simply can’t muster. Over at Medium, Justin Megahan asked about the baseball culture that produces young men who think this shit is funny, although I think it’s not specific to baseball, but a function of societal views of masculinity.
A major investigation by liberal rag … um Forbes found that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross may have stolen over $120 million from investors, and lied about his assets and business activities on ethics disclosure forms when he was nominated. He’s still employed as of Saturday afternoon. Drain the swamp, indeed.
Twitter’s attempt to remain apolitical by refusing to ban conspiracy theorist and snake oil salesman Alex Jones is in itself a political choice. Parker Malloy writes here that Twitter still can’t figure out what kind of platform it wants to be; I don’t like the platform it has become.
WIRED‘s Issie Lapowsky writes that tech companies can’t win their war against Jones. That may be true, but doesn’t excuse inaction.
Also writing for WIRED, Clive Thompson offers thoughts on how to slow the spread of online hate. Doing nothing or disengaging are not good options.
Slate examines four hypotheses on why Twitter hasn’t moved against Jones yet, none of which is terribly satisfying.
Laura Ingraham went full white nationalist on Fox News this week; the Atlantic called her out on it, both in that her love of “country” seems to ignore this country’s founding principles, and that the population as a whole doesn’t agree with her.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the darling of the progressive left, but her increased media presence has just led to her producing a lot of bullshit answers, including the same kind of myth-repeating that characterizes the alt-right. Her policy proposals are at least interesting enough to discuss, but her sound bytes don’t reveal any depth to her ideas.
The Italian Senate is trying to delay the country’s new mandatory vaccination rules that arose in response to an ongoing measles epidemic in the supposedly developed country.
I’ve never had any use for PETA, and they reminded me why when they attacked Impossible Foods for testing its burgers on rats to satisfy federal safety requirements. If PETA’s interest is in improving the lives and welfare of animals … well, it’s not, as evidenced here. Their interest is in generating headlines. I guess they got their wish.
A couple in New Mexico appear to have stolen a $100 million painting just to keep it in their apartment, and perhaps stolen and sold other art works to finance a lifestyle beyond their apparent means. None of this was discovered until after their deaths, and family members still can’t believe it’s true.
The FDA has approved the first new malarial preventive drug in over 18 years.
One of my Senators, Tom Carper, wrote an editorial assailing the Trump administration’s plans to end emissions standards for cars. It’s going to take years to undo the environmental damage wrought by this regime.
Attorney General Jeff helped block an EPA action against Drummond Coal, one of his biggest donors, while he was still in the Senate, according to testimony in a recent bribery trial of a Drummond executive and a prominent Alabama law firm, both of whom had close ties to .
The sugar industry in Florida is under attack now for its role in pollution that is feeding toxic algae blooms; they’ve also got a long history of labor rights abuses and using tariffs to restrict sugar imports and raise consumer prices. The Florida GOP has historical ties to Big Sugar, and one leading gubernatorial candidate, Adam Putnam, has taken over $8 million in contributions from Big Sugar and its PACS.
Mike Salk, program director for ESPN Seattle 710 and longtime host of the Brock & Salk show, as well as a friend of mine, wrote about how Jim Abbott helped inspire him after an accident damaged his hand at age 12.
The online editorial comics site The Nib has a Kickstarter for them to start a print version of the publication. Some of the best editorial cartoonists online have appeared in the Nib or will appear in the magazine, including Matt “We Should Improve Society Somewhat” Bors.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alabama, baseball, environment, florida, health, links, science, social media, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ August 5, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/4/18.

For Insiders this week, I had a slew of trade writeups:

I also held a Klawchat on Wednesday before I headed off to Gen Con 2018. You can see some of the photos I took there, the country’s biggest board gaming convention, on my Instagram. The writeup will come later this week.

I’ve been better about sending out my free email newsletter lately after slacking a bit during the spring (in large part because I can’t use the site’s editing function on an iPad), so, you know, do that signup.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The hard-to-believe true story of how an ex-cop led a conspiracy to rig the McDonald’s Monopoly game.

The Guardian rank a lengthy excerpt from a new book on denial and denialism, Keith Kahn-Harris’ Denial: The Unspeakable Truth. The excerpt covers a lot of ground, describing why denialism is more than just the denial of truth, why facts tend not to stop or change denialists’ minds, and the dangerous new phase of denialism before us.

The Verge has a longread on the gaming of Amazon’s listings and sales system by self-published romance authors. It’s just a bizarre subculture, and has led to a lawsuit over two authors’ use of the word “cocky” in their books titles. The journalist who wrote this piece, Sarah Jeong, just joined the New York Times editorial board; Vox, which owns the Verge, has a great piece on the non-troversy that alt-right trolls used to try to get her fired.

The Rumpus’ editor Lyz Lenz writes that writing still matters in the age of despair. Write like a motherfucker, as Cheryl Strayed (Wild) once wrote.

Why would the University of Michigan allow the presentation of “research” on homeopathy? Homeopathy is woo. After you dilute the substance in question that many times, all that remains is bullshit.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune editorial board called on the state to crack down on doctors who spread anti-vaccine lies, as California is trying to do.

There’s a huge Dunning-Kruger epidemic in the anti-vaccine community, which has also managed to diverted time and funds away from more important vaccine research towards needless studies debunking claims like the nonexistent vaccine/autism link.

Spike Lee accused the President of giving the green light to the KKK and other hate groups during a wide-ranging interview with the Guardian about his upcoming film Black Klansman.

Gizmodo details how two strangers tried to wreck an Alabama realtor’s life by spreading a false story about the realtor sleeping with someone else’s husband.

The Washington Post looks at the board game Twilight Struggle’s new relevance in this political environment. I happen to find the game wildly overrated; it’s long, hard to set up, and requires intimate knowledge of the two player decks to play it well.

This Psychology Today essay assailing the ‘lack of resiliency’ of today’s college students seems to me to paint with an excessively broad brush, and contradicts the message we give our kids today to reach out when they need help. I’m also a little skeptical of the veracity of some of the stories – they sound like they were crafted for viral tweets – but even if they’re true, I’d rather too many kids ask for help than too few.

The anti-LGBT group Alliance Defending Freedom has been working to undermine basic protections for LGBT citizens, especially trans youth, using disingenuous and even dangerous language.

Former big leaguer Adam Greenberg, whose MLB career consisted of two PA, one in 2005 and one in 2012, is now running for Congress in Connecticut as a Republican. The fact that he’s turning to politics is interesting in itself, but the NY Times author here, John Altavilla, spends almost no time on Greenberg’s policy positions.

Would-be populist – and clear Islamophobe and race troll – Ben Shapiro is backed by a wide network of billionaire conservatives, many of whom also support more reviled figures like Ann Coulter and the Breitbart site.

Turning Point USA, the hard-right conservative group founding by diaper-clad college students, has been courting and praising anti-Semitic troll Bryan Sharpe, who has denied the Holocaust occurred and uses the triple-parentheses notation favored by white supremacists to identify or out Jewish people.

These QAnon people are batshit insane.

The Pennsylvania gun rights lobby watered down a bill aimed at keeping domestic abusers from obtaining guns.

The Washington Post profiled New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, although the piece doesn’t question him enough about their opinion pages.

An Astros fan wrote an open letter to the team’s GM, criticizing the decision to acquire Roberto Osuna.

There’s a new shape in town – really, totally new to mathematicians and physicists, but something that appears in nature: the scutoid.

An “Instagram star” – seriously, how the fuck is this a thing – is in hot water after her cookbook included ‘recipes’ likely to sicken or kill people who try to eat those dishes. One example that would be obvious to anyone who knows food is the advice to forage for and eat raw morels. A good editor is important; a bad one can lead to a PR disaster. Also, maybe don’t give someone who just takes nice pictures a cookbook deal.

Jack White (ex-White Stripes) is now the co-owner of a baseball bat manufacturer.

And finally, a video, as comedian Aamer Rahman explains why there isn’t any such thing as “reverse racism:”

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, boardgames, denialism, links, longreads, racism, stick to baseball, vaccines, writing

→ July 28, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/28/18.

Trade writeups for Insiders:

• Jeurys Familia to Oakland
• Zach Britton to the Yankees
• J.A. Happ to the Yankees
• The Eovaldi, Andriese, and Oh trades
• Cole Hamels to the Cubs

I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

On the board game front, I reviewed Istanbul: The Dice Game for Paste this week; it’s fun, and quick to learn and play, but not as good as the original Istanbul.

At 1 pm today (Saturday) I’ll be at the Silver Unicorn Bookstore in Acton, Massachusetts, talking Smart Baseball and signing books. I hope to see many of you there – and some more of you at Gen Con in Indianapolis next week as well, where I have a signing scheduled on Friday at noon and am happy to sign books any other time during the con.

I’ve been sending out my free email newsletter a bit more often lately; you can sign up through that link and see archives of past editions.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Texas Monthly investigates how a waterpark owner from Texas built a waterslide that decapitated a Kansas boy in 2016 at the park’s Kansas City location. The boy’s death opened a window on the virtually unregulated industry of amusement parks.
Arizona is headed for chronic water shortages, according to this New York Times piece. I was hardly alone in seeing this coming; I wrote in 2013 that the state government’s climate change denialism, including total denial that water was a scarce resource, was a reason I didn’t want to own a house there and thus have a substantial portion of my material wealth tied up in an asset that might lose value very quickly when the water ran out.
Alt-right troll “Weird Mike” Cernovich, once arrested for rape and a frequent rape apologist, has moved from pushing Pizzagate to targeting liberals he doesn’t like by digging up old tweets and trying to get them fired from their jobs or entertainment projects. He took down James Gunn – whose tweets in question were, in my opinion, beyond inappropriate – and has targeted journalists who’ve dared write about his antics. Cernovich, who appears to enjoy the protection of Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, and fellow Pizzagate-bullshit promoter Jack Posobiec don’t like when people dare question or criticize them, doxing, harassing, and threatening their antagonists with the help of anonymous followers.
Will Leitch writes that baseball’s “steroid panic” appears to be finally be over, although I’ll believe that in full when Barry Bonds gets into Cooperstown.
My Paste editor Garrett Martin points out how giving in to these trolls encourages them to do it more, as now they’re targeting various comedians whose tweets are often offensive by design (in the service of humor) and fare poorly when taken out of context.
Digital devices are threatening to impact the climate more than the aviation industry, as more things are connected to the Internet and thus require more power, while public utilities continue to push back on renewable energy sources (and presumably some consumers won’t or can’t pay more for it).
A few veterans spoke to WBUR about the sports world’s fetishization of the military; Nick Francona, recently fired by the Mets, is quoted at length.
Conservatives who decry ‘outrage culture’ are outraged by a (rather boring) piece of art. I mean, there are some seriously full diapers over this one. It’s not even particularly good art, or that meaningful, but it is clearly protected speech.
Pulitzer Prize-winning LA Times restaurant critic Jonathan Gold died this week at age 57 of pancreatic cancer. A reader pointed me to two seminal pieces from Gold: his 1998 story “The Year I Ate Pico Boulevard” and his 1989 profile of rising gangsta rap act N.W.A..
Food writer Camas Davis learned how to butcher meat and wrote a book about it; she discussed what she learned and how it affects what she cooks and eats with NPR’s Terry Gross.
Bloomberg reports that workers’ wages have fallen since the Trump ‘tax cut’, which didn’t exactly cut taxes for everyone so maybe don’t call it that.
There’s a lot of talk about “socialized medicine” and “socialism” right now, often from people who don’t know what the terms mean but instead care about what they stand for. Socialized medicine is a buzzword; the goal is – or at least should be – to provide health care for all citizens, because it’s a human right, and because a healthier populace is more productive and puts less strain on public resources, thus growing the economy and making the country better off as a whole. Israel got this and reformed its health care system starting in 1995. Their results put them well ahead of the United States on many measures, including the percentage of GDP spent on health care.
Georgia Representative Jason Spencer – guess which party – went on Sasha Baron Cohen’s new gotcha show, and bared his ass while shouting the n-word on camera. He announced his plans to resign on Thursday.
Deadspin’s Albert Burnenko weighs in on Tronc’s evisceration of the Daily News to further profit its shareholders.
A candidate for Missouri’s state legislature – guess which party – is raffling off a 3-D printer that can make ‘untraceable’ guns. Of course, whether he ever gives away such a machine is immaterial: he’s already gotten a ton of free publicity for this stunt.
A climate-change denying Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate – guess which party – was asked about climate change by a voter, and his response was to belittle her for her youth. Scott Wagner has previously said that he thinks climate change is caused by … body heat.
Meanwhile, a Harvard climate scientist who has a geoengineering idea to try to spray particles into the stratosphere to reflect some of the sun’s heat discussed fighting misinformation and ‘chemtrail’ conspiracy theorists online and in the real world.
The federal government is halting reviews of pesticides that may threaten endangered species as a sop to the pesticides’ manufacturers; wild salmon are particularly at risk from the pesticides known as organophosphates.
Pursuant to my comment above about “socialism” and “socialized medicine:”

a separate point – worth exploring – but most of what is now branded 'democratic socialism' in the USA in 2018 is more or less the Truman presidential platform in 1948. so there are some definitional issues we probably need to work through.

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) July 26, 2018

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, climate change, Economics, ethics, food writing, links, stick to baseball

→ July 21, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/21/21.

For Insiders this week, I updated my ranking of the top 50 prospects in the minors and posted analyses of the Manny Machado trade and the Brad Hand/Francisco Mejia trade. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

My next game review for Paste will go up next week; this week I reviewed the app version of Istanbul, a great strategic game of pathfinding and set collection, here on the dish.

I’ll be at the Silver Unicorn Bookstore in Acton, Massachusetts, on July 28th at 1 pm to talk Smart Baseball and sign copies.

And now, the links…

Before I hit the longreads, I want to highlight this editorial from The Daily Barometer, a student-run newspaper at Oregon State, which states what probably should have been obvious all along: “OSU supporters who cheered Luke Heimlich have embarrassed the entire community.” It placed winning baseball games over believing the words of a sexual assault victim and over the impact of the trauma that Heimlich caused. I wish this had run a few months ago, but I am proud to see OSU students put this message out there themselves, knowing the backlash they’ll likely receive for doing so.
OK, longreads: Popula’s Maria Bustillos has the last great interview with Anthony Bourdain, a wide-ranging piece that runs over 10,000 words. Their argument over Obama’s tenure and legacy is outstanding. There are so many wonderful quotes in here, but I’ll pick just one: “We live in a world where we cannot, if you’re running for political office, you cannot admit to speaking a second language, extensive travel, or a familiarity with arugula.” Maybe that’s why our dear leader nicknamed the North Korean dictator “Rocket Man?”
There will be no Nobel Prize in Literature this year in the wake of a scandal involving a serial sexual abuser married to an Academy member, where the two of them also misused Academy funds. Eighteen women spoke about against him, two accusing him of rape. Resignations of other members in protest left the Academy without a quorum for its vote on the candidates for this year’s honor. The story is one of men protecting men, but also symptomatic of the rot of small institutions that operate without oversight.
You’ve probably seen this already, but just in case: Mina Kimes spoke at length to Aly Raisman about the gymnast’s vault to prominence as a forceful advocate for sexual assault victims and for change in the corrupt hierarchy of U.S.A. gymnastics.
Anti-wolf activists ruined the career of a tenured professor who researched the canines’ habits and pushed for conservation efforts, including extorting his employer, Washington State, by threatening to withhold state funding for a new medical school on campus.
George Will’s op ed’s title sums up its message: “This sad, embarrassing wreck of a man” who is now our President.
The Guardian also ran an excerpt from Michiko Kakutani’s forthcoming book The Death of Truth, in which she argues that ‘truth decay’ and alternative facts gave us Trump and are eroding our democracy.
I enjoyed the Atlantic‘s piece calling this the “moment of truth” for Republicans as if there was a damned chance in hell of any of them stepping out of line to criticize their dear leader.
And why would they, when the Supreme Court nominee they’re about to confirm promises to roll back voting rights sixty years.
Actually, one Republican found a backbone here: Will Hurd, a Republican House member from Texas, wrote a searing op ed for the New York Times that Russia is manipulating the President, calling for Congress to act to protect our interests.
Another Republican Congressman broke with Administration on the issue of net neutrality, as Colorado’s Mike Coffman signed a petition to force a vote on legislation to reverse the FCC’s giant gift to the telecom industry.
Meanwhile, current Minnesota Congressman Jason Lewis said African-Americans have a “cultural” problem and an “entitlement mentality” on a previous radio show where he pushed the idea of a race war.
The Treasury will no longer collect information on large donations to 501(c) nonprofits, meaning ‘dark’ money can flow unimpeded to political groups. “The news was well-received among conservative groups and congressional Republicans,” whom I’m sure have nothing at all they’d like to hide now that they can do so without fear of disclosure.
There’s scant good news on the rationalist front, but some scientists running for office have fared well in elections this year. Hiral Tipirneni nearly won a special election in a crimson-red district in Arizona this spring, and she is running for the same seat again in November.
A new investigative paper published in JAMA found that the poor quality of sleep received by hospital patients slows their healing, so stop waking them up for routine tests that might not be necessary for all patients.
Should lab-grown meat be labelled as meat? It’s biochemically identical to meat that came from an animal’s carcass, but is cultured and grown in a lab, obviating some ethical and environmental concerns. Of course, the meat manufacturing and processing industries are trying an end run around the technology, hoping to ban those products from calling themselves ‘meat,’ rather than, you know, telling consumers what the product is and letting the market decide.
Wild optimism over CRISPR-based therapy has been slapped with several large charges on its latest reality bill, including potential long-term DNA damage to patients, some of which could lead to cancer.
CNN got played by a pseudoscience-pushing conspiracy theorist who claimed on air that cell phones cause cancer – but didn’t disclose his conflict of interest, working for a company that sells equipment to “protect” people from such radiation.
An arcane type of numbers called octonions (beyond real and complex numbers) may provide the unifying math behind the Standard Model of Physics.
No one can quite explain those $2000-plus used book prices on amazon, charged by third-party sellers with murky identities.
Eritrea and Ethiopia have signed a peace deal promising to end their pointless, twenty-year border war, giving hope that democracy may finally come to Eritrea, Africa’s last true one-party state.
Every time I bring up offensive team nicknames like those of the baseball teams in Cleveland or Atlanta or the football team in Washington, some chud shows up with a “What about Notre Dame?” Here’s a well-written editorial from Irish news site The Journal that explains why the analogy isn’t just wrong, but ignorant of history.
r/Dodgers has solved the mystery of Kiké Hernandez’s (tight) pants.
Alan Sepinwall reviewed Sacha Baron Cohen’s new show and says it’s about 15 years out of date with its conceit of trying to shock the audience by what victims of his pranks will say or do.
Your brain is always looking for problems to solve, so when problems become a bit scarce, it can try to find problems where there are none.
Eagle-Gryphon published a Kickstarter for Escape Plan, a new game from Vital Lacerda, known for overlong, complex games like Lisboa.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board games, links, math, metoo, nobel prize, racism, science, stick to baseball

→ July 14, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/14/18.

No new Insider pieces this week; I’ll have a Futures Game wrapup Sunday night and an updated top 50 prospects ranking out on Thursday. I did hold a Klawchat this past week.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the popular and very highly-rated new board game Rising Sun, from designer Eric Lang (Blood Rage, Ancestree), a $100 game with meticulously-crafted miniature figures but a fairly straightforward set of mechanics around area control and negotiation.

In just a few hours, I’ll be DC’s famed bookstore Politics & Prose with Jay Jaffe to talk about our books and sign copies. The event starts at 6 pm.

Two weeks from today, I’ll be at the Silver Unicorn Bookstore in Acton, MA at 1 pm to speak and sign copies of my book as well.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Guardian goes deep on how the Caribbean island of Nevis, half of the country of St. Kitts and Nevis, has become one of the world’s most secretive offshore havens for money laundering and tax evasion.
Was rum invented in India, not the Caribbean as generally believed? It sounds like it – but to what extent was rum invented rather than discovered? It’s the distilled byproduct of the fermentation of molasses, which itself was the waste left over from sugar production; millers left the molasses out in the sun, using it to feed slaves, and the stuff would ferment into the precursor of rum.
There are anti-vaxxers even in the world of horses, and the result is a fight against a vaccine for an equine virus called Hendra, a very deadly paramyxovirus that can also infect humans, and is among the candidates for the next global pandemic.
No sooner do I praise Italy for the quality of life over there than the new right-wing government says parents no longer have to provide proof of vaccinations for schoolchildren. Some useful phrases for Italian learners: il morbillo, la parotite, la rosolia = measles, mumps, rubella.
Increased use of nonmedical (i.e., bogus) exemptions has driven down vaccination rates in Arizona, spurring fears of loss of herd immunity for highly contagious, deadly diseases already present in the state like measles and pertussis.
The “white nose fungus” killing bats is spreading to more states and more bat species. Bats serve a crucial role in human agriculture, feeding on many pests that would otherwise destroy crops or encourage further use of pesticides.
There’s a lot more talk about plastic pollution lately, even in our destroy-the-EPA life as it is right now. Recycling alone won’t solve this problem; we need to make less, use less, and think more holistically about the life cycle of plastics. And as of this year, China won’t recycle the world’s plastic waste any more.
Deadspin ran this crushing letter from a parent whose preschool-aged daughter was molested by a relative. One key line, from the therapist the parent consulted: “Kids that age don’t make this kind of statement up, you have to take it seriously.” Bear that in mind when you read excuses made for a certain Oregon State left-hander who pled guilty to molesting a child around this age, and now has tried to deny it.
The U.S. economy is approaching the mythical threshold known as “full employment,” although such figures generally ignore unemployed workers who have chosen not to continue seeking work, or who are unable to for whatever reason. But full employment isn’t NAIRU, the non-accelerating rate of unemployment, so high inflation is eating most workers’ wage gains.
People often ask how I ended up choosing Delaware when I relocated from Arizona back to the east coast. One reason was its low taxes, and it turns out that Delaware’s tax burden is the lowest of all 50 states after you adjust for cost of living. I actually think our property taxes could be higher, especially if the funds could help improve the dismal schools in the city of Wilmington and boost its police force.
The San Francisco branch of the Federal Reserve posted a note saying the 2017 GOP Tax Bill will boost the economy far less than promised, in part because the economy was already growing over the previous few years.
Mainers keep voting for Medicaid expansion and their racist governor Paul LePage, a Republican, refuses to implement it. He’s offered to go to jail rather than expand the program, to which I say, why not both?
I reviewed the new documentary about Fred Rogers the other day; the Observer has a piece on the ‘haunting doubts’ of Rogers and Paddington Bear, building off a line Rogers uttered to his wife shortly before he died, wondering if he’d been a good enough Christian in his life.
Stop ‘snitch tagging’ on social media. I block anyone who does this. If someone asks me about a player, don’t tag the player on my response. People doing that have largely driven me away from tweeting opinions on players, and leaving those opinions in chats or on ESPN.
A Republican state senator in Kansas who is running in a primary for a Congressional seat said “outside of western civilization is only barbarism”, and later clarified that he meant Judeo-Christian civilization … you know, the same civilization that enslaved over 10 million Africans not very long ago.
Neutrinos are one of the great mysteries of particle physics – long believed to be massless, now known to have unfathomably minuscule mass, interacting via the weak force and gravity, able to pass through entire planets without hitting anything – and for the first time, scientists detected neutrinos and identified their source galaxy.
The Daily Beast has a fun slideshow of the strange mix of stunning architectural styles in Baku, Azerbaijan.
Tweet of the week:

It’s so fucking weird that we scrape the seed pod of an orchid into ice cream and that flavor is considered plain.

— Michael Hoffman (@Hoffm) July 6, 2018

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: astronomy, caribbean, Economics, environment, italy, kansas, links, maine, physics, pollution, rum, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ July 7, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/7/18.

I had two new posts for Insiders this week, one on the Futures Game rosters, which were announced on Friday; and a post of scouting notes on Orioles, Phillies, Rangers, White Sox, and Royals prospects I’ve seen in the last few weeks. That Futures Game column included Houston’s Forrest Whitley, but he was removed from his last start with “left oblique discomfort,” so I’m expecting him to be replaced on the roster before game day.

I have two book signings for Smart Baseball coming up this month. Next Saturday, July 14th, I’ll be at Politics & Prose in Washington, DC, signing books and talking baseball with Jay Jaffe; and I’ll be at the Silver Unicorn Bookstore in Acton, Massachusetts, on July 28th, hosted by store owner and former Fangraphs/Hardball Times writer Paul Swydan.

And now, the links…

The best thing I read this week was this massive essay from author/comedian Sara Benincasa called Reading Joan Didion in California Restaurants, although it’s really a meandering set of observations on her life that is by turns funny and poignant. Her line about one of the joys of sharing one’s art with the world is spot on. I do wonder if her family’s name was Dahomeycasa before they changed it, though.
From April 2017, the Atlantic predicted that plant proteins called lectins would be the next health boogeyman for idiots. I found this because a friend suggested a book that blames lectins, without real evidence, for a panoply of health problems.
Henderson Island, an uninhabited island in the south Pacific with a raised coral atoll and a unique, diverse native ecosystem, is also covered with around 18 metric tons of trash, mostly plastic.
Several locations on the planet set all-time heat records last week, more proof that the Chinese will stop at nothing to perpetrate this elaborate ‘climate change’ hoax.
Progessives in the U.S. often point to Scandinavian economies as exemplars of their proposed policies, but Denmark is heading in the opposite direction, with strict laws aimed at forcing immigrants to assimilate into Danish society more quickly, including mandatory instruction for children in “Danish values.” The quotes from Danish natives sound an awful lot like those of white American voters who support Trump.
Timothy Geithner served as Treasury Secretary under Obama, where he condemned predatory lenders who charged usurious interest rates on loans to the poor. Now he runs one via the private equity firm of which he’s President.
Neshaminy High School in Langhorne, PA, a town between Philadelphia and Trenton, has a history of corruption and other controversies under Principal Rob McGee. The latest and most damning instance appeared in the student newspaper, which uncovered evidence that the school was deliberately hiding sexual harassment complaints against teachers and discouraging victims from reporting. The newspaper’s outgoing editor in chief also accused the administration of outing LGBTQ students who wrote critical articles in the paper. For all of this, McGee was recently promoted to an executive position that will pay him over $150,000 a year.
Trump considered invading Venezuela. This seems like a terrible idea on so many levels, not least of which is that we’d end up with a lot of dead American soldiers in the process.
Residents of an apartment complex in Riviera Beach, Florida, are organizing against their landlords over black mold and sewage leaks in their complex. The residents also accuse the city of failing to enforce fines for code violations.
Conservative something-or-other Dinesh D’Souza tried the whole “Republicans are the party of civil rights!” argument on Twitter and got absolutely dunked on, repeatedly, by historians & writers.
In North Carolina, an open white supremacist is running for the state legislature, and was running as a Republican until the party belatedly withdrew its support last week. (I don’t know how his name will appear on the ballot.)
Daniel Radcliffe revealed in an interview recently that he has some very racist friends. So why wouldn’t he do something about it?
The Phoenix New Times named its seven best new restaurants so far for 2018, of which I can vouch for three: Roland’s Market (a collaboration between Chris Bianco and the couple behind Tacos Chiwas), Starlite BBQ, and Taco Chelo. I’ll try to hit Osteria before an AFL game in Mesa this fall too.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, climate change, links, longreads, phoenix, pollution, stick to baseball

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