links — Page 3

→ September 6, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/6/25.

Over at The Athletic, I wrote some brief updates & outlooks for five prospects called up on August 31^st/September 1^st, and an in-person scouting notebook on Guardians pitcher Joey Oakie plus some other Guards, Orioles, Nats, and Phillies prospects.

At Endless Mode, I reviewed the one vs. many game 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the player who takes on the HAL role does indeed get to close the pod bay doors. It’s a good game, Dave.

I’ve moved my free email newsletter over to Kit, away from the place that proudly hosts white nationalist newsletters.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This WIRED story on a venture capitalist, Cindy Bi, who hired a surrogate to carry her baby, and is now trying to destroy the woman’s life after she miscarried, is absolutely batshit. I’m not a lawyer, so I don’t know if Bi actually hurt her legal case, but she certainly tanked her own reputation by talking to writer Emi Nietfeld, who did a great job telling the story.
Maclean’s has a story from a former anti-vaxxer who now tries to convince the deluded and the ignorant that vaccines are, in fact, safe and effective.
Former Dodgers & Expos GM Kevin Malone, who called himself “Dodger Boy” and said “there’s a new sheriff in town” before spending several years as one of the worst GMs in Dodger history, is now an adviser to President Trump on human trafficking, because he became a religious nut and joined one of those activist groups that claims it’s fighting human trafficking (and actually isn’t helping at all).
The Trump Administration is trying to tag several politicians with mortgage fraud for allegedly claiming more than one primary residence on loan applicants. At least three Cabinet members have done the same thing, ProPublica found in an investigation. It’s almost like this isn’t actually about mortgage fraud!
ProPublica also wrote about how xenophobes and white nationalists are co-opting climate change as a justification for their proposed policies.
Yale epidemiology professor Gregg Gonsalves writes in The Nation that RFK Jr. needs to resign or be forced out immediately as head of Health & Human Services.
Benny Johnson was fired for multiple acts of plagiarism. He became a right-wing podcaster and charlatan, posting lie after lie on social media, and took money from the Russian government to do so. He’s now a darling of the Trump White House.
A reserve captain in the Israel Defense Forces who served in Gaza wrote in the New York Times that fellow reservists should refuse to fight in this unjust war. His words: “With over 60,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, dead, according to Gazan health authorities, and growing starvation in the territory, with Israeli hostages languishing for nearly two years, this war has crossed every boundary. There is no longer any goal worth achieving by prolonging the war.”
Reps. James Comer (R-KY) and Nancy Mace (R-SC) are demanding that Wikipedia dox its own editors because of some bullshit claim about editorial bias. Where are the free speech absolutists now?
The matcha drink craze has led to a shortage of the green tea product, which has cultural significance in Japan, as influencers need their grass-flavored iced milk beverages.
Harvard won the latest round in its legal battles against the Trump Administration, as a judge ordered the White House to restore funding it had cut, but my alma mater continues to comply in small but meaningful ways with the fascists, this time removing designated spaces for the women’s center and the office for LGBTQ+ students.
Yahoo! sportswriter Matt Ufford writes that Bluesky has plenty of users, and the complaints to the contrary seem to miss the point or stem from individuals’ bad experiences with, well, getting called out for their bullshit.
The great Elie Mystal writes about the power of small acts of noncompliance, and the overemphasis on “big” acts of resistance.
Allplay has a Kickstarter for a new edition of the grail game Container, which runs $100+ for a used copy. It’s an economic simulation game about shipping containers, which sounds dry as hell, but people love this game. It’s been out of print since the 2018 tenth anniversary edition.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, gaza, harvard, links, longreads, social media, stick to baseball, tea, the swamp, vaccines, white nationalism

→ August 30, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/30/25.

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

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

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

And now, the links…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

→ August 23, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/23/25.

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

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

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

And now, the links…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

→ August 16, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/16/25.

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

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

And now, the links…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

→ August 9, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/9/25.

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

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

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

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

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

And now, the links…

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

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

→ July 19, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/19/25.

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

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

I also wrote up some observations on the Futures Game.

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

And now, the links…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

→ July 13, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/13/25.

I had a fourth mock draft go up Saturday morning for subscribers to The Athletic and then updated it on Sunday (same URL), following one I published just this past Tuesday. I also wrote up short capsules on fifty more players who might be drafted this week, beyond those on my top 100. I recapped Saturday’s Futures Game with notes on the standouts and a couple of disappointments. And I wrote up a scouting notebook on some guys I saw in triple A and high A games the previous week, including Cam Schlittler and Konnor Griffin.

At Endless Mode (formerly Paste Games), I reviewed the light tile-laying game Flower Fields, which reminded me a bit of Patchwork, but less tense and for up to four players rather than just two.

I really meant to get a newsletter out last week but never had time enough to write up the first half (the part that matters). Anyway, sign up here for free and I’ll try to do one after the draft dust settles.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Hollywood Reporter describes the celebrity-impersonation scams that proliferate on social media, and how those celebrities may be the best hope for fighting back against this scourge.

Anas Baba, NPR’s producer in the Gaza Strip, described the horrendous conditions there in a story on how difficult it is for Gazans to secure food from one of the few distribution centers. Meanwhile, the IDF bombed a queue of mothers and children lining up to receive nutritional supplements in Gaza, and it appears that Israeli ‘settlers’ in the West Bank beat an American citizen visiting family there to death. I’ve seen no comment or demand from our federal government about his murder yet.

The New York Times has an in-depth story on a woman who kidnapped her daughter after her divorce, because in the 1970s courts would not award custody to mothers if they were gay. The piece focuses on the child, who has very mixed feelings about what her mother did and how it altered the course of her life forever.

The family of a Northwestern University Professor who killed herself during a (dubious) federal investigation into whether she was some kind of spy for China is suing the school for contributing to her declining mental state.

The author Gary Shteyngart visited the country of Georgia and wrote about its food and sights for Condé Nast Traveler.

A few months ago, Texas Republicans voted down a bill to improve local disaster warning systems, such as tornado and flood sirens.

The Guardian’s Margaret Sullivan asks why The New York Times appears to be trying to take down Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign, focusing on the paper’s recent story about what she calls a “made-up scandal.”

I included a link on John Wilson, who was running for executive of King County (WA), getting arrested for stalking and violating a restraining order, in the links a week or two ago; this week, charges were dropped, but he also ended his campaign.

Rare good news on the vaccine front, as NBC News reports on some states, mostly blue ones, trying to end the fake ‘religious exemptions’ to school vaccination requirements.

That’s important because, as this BMJ piece notes, the vaccine-denial movement is threatening global health.

Texas AG Ken Paxton (R) loves to talk about what a strong Christian he is, and has attempted to bring religion into government since he took office a decade ago. His wife announced this week she’s filed for divorce because he keeps cheating on her. Thou shalt not, or something like that.

Paste explores how AI-generated content is drowning the publishing industry in slop.

The Intelligencer explains how a combination of changes at Google, Twitter’s self-destruction, and AI have led to a traffic apocalypse for media companies.

The Guardian has a story on just how dangerous choking during sex is, even as the practice seems to be becoming more prevalent – and it’s almost always women being choked, of course. The whole story made me feel very old and creeped out.

Libraries in Kent, England, have been instructed by the Reform-led council there to remove any trans books from their shelves if they might be seen by children. There are many problems here, but the most fundamental one is the idea that books about trans people – or other LBGTQ+ people, or Black people, or Jewish people – are inherently inappropriate for children. They’re not.

Some board game Kickstarters of note: Allplay has one for Sail Legacy, a legacy version of the cooperative two-player trick-taking game; and Restoration Games has one for a storage solution for players of their Unmatched card-game series.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: artificial intelligence, board game news, book banning, gaza, georgian cuisine, links, longreads, new york city, scams, sex, social media, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines

→ July 5, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/5/25.

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

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

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

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

And now, the links…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

→ June 28, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/28/25.

For subscribers to the Athletic this week, I had a scouting notebook on Jesus Made, Luis Peña, Trey Yesavage, and some Orioles and Brewers low-A prospects, and a post on the 2025 draft prospects who might be the first to reach the majors.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Conservas, a solitaire push-your-luck game that brings environmental sustainability into its victory conditions.

I also sent out another edition of my free email newsletter on Monday.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The fast-fashion craze is a huge drain on the planet’s resources, although this Scientific American feature also examines some entrepreneurs fighting to make clothing more sustainable.

In the New Yorker, Rivka Galchen examines the enormous cost we’re about to face from rising vaccine denialism (or “skepticism”).

The New York Times tells the stories of people caught up in measles outbreaks from Texas to North Dakota, all preventable, all the result of scam artists and lunatics spreading lies about vaccines.

Kate Shemirani was a nurse in Britain who lost her license for spreading false information about COVID-19. Her anti-medicine insanity ran so deep that her 23-year-old daughter just died of a treatable cancer because her mother opposed her getting chemotherapy. Shemirani’s two sons blame their mother and are urging social media sites to crack down on misinformation.

Gregg Gonsalves writes in The Nation about the cowardice of Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), a physician who voted to confirm RFK, Jr., knowing full well what the noted anti-vaccine crank would do as head of the HHS.

A presentation for this week’s meeting of CDC vaccine “advisers” cited a study on thimerosal in vaccines and autism that does not exist. (There is no link between thimerosal and autism.)

Vanity Fair profiles Iowa state Rep. J.D. Scholten (D), who is running to unseat Sen. Joni “We all die some day!” Ernst (R) while also pitching for the independent Sioux Falls Explorers.

Haaretz spoke to IDF soldiers who say they were ordered to shoot at unarmed Palestinians trying to get food and other aid.

The University of Florida’s law school gave an award to a paper written white-nationalist student in which he argued that Constitutional rights only apply to white Americans.

Harvard hired a researcher to examine the school’s historical ties to slavery … but when he found too many, they fired him.

Everything is bad – it’s just as terrible as you imagined and probably worse – but a three-judge panel struck down a Louisiana law requiring public schools to display the Ten Commandments. Your religion is yours; don’t force it on me or my kids or anyone but your own.

Your energy bill may be going up because of the AI bubble as energy companies rush to build more infrastructure to support these greedy tech companies.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R, of course) refused $450 million in federal funds that would have provided food to school-aged children over the summer. Just like Jesus intended.

Roll20-owned site DriveThruRPG, a major store to download new and classic role-playing games, removed a game called Rebel Scum from its catalog because the anti-fascist game is “too political.”

I really hesitate to share anything made by AI, but this satirical newscast is one of the funniest things I’ve seen in months.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, environment, gaza, harvard, iowa, links, longreads, louisiana, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines

→ June 21, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/21/25.

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

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

And now, the links…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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