longreads

→ November 30, 2024
→ By keith
→ 38 Comments

Stick to baseball, 11/30/24.

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

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

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

And now, the links…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

→ November 23, 2024
→ By keith
→ 2 Comments

Stick to baseball, 11/23/24.

Nothing new from me beyond the dish this week. I’ll write up big transactions when they happen, and I should have a board game review up next week, although the game I’m targeting I have yet to play, so we’ll see. EDIT: Hey, we got a trade last night, after I’d scheduled this post, so here’s my writeup of the Jonathan India-Brady Singer trade.

If you’re looking for me on social media, you’re most likely to find me on Bluesky and Threads. I’m winding things down on Twitter, just posting links there, and I locked the account due to the change in the blocking policy. You can also subscribe to my free email newsletter.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This Esquire first-person longread on what it is like to be homeless in America in 2024 is beautifully told and especially important given what is to come. It should end up on the shortlist for a Pulitzer.

And in a related story, Harvard magazine looks at the causes of our housing crisis, led by the lack of affordable housing (and of any will to build it) along with draconian zoning laws that pull the ladder up behind existing homeowners.

Florida State Rep. Rick Roth (R) is a farmer turned politician who long fought attempts to crack down on immigration, but turned into an anti-immigrant hawk in 2023 – hurting his constituents but not him. Funny how that works!

An Israeli student who shared four photos of the country’s attack on Gaza right after the Hamas attacks of October of 2023 found herself in prison for violating the country’s laws on “incitement” and her prospects for a career all but ruined.

Trump’s new candidate for Attorney General is Pam Bondi, to whom his foundation donated $25,000 while she was investigating the foundation as Florida AG. She then closed the investigation. Is that a bribe? Do we want an Attorney General who may have taken a bribe, and changed her actions as a result of it?

A police chief in West Virginia raped a teenager and then paid her $100 to cover it up, according to this investigative piece from the Washington Post.

At least seven Oklahoma school districts refused to show the state’s school superintendent Ryan Walters’ video promoting his Christian nationalist, pro-Trump agent to students, as he attempted to mandate. Walters spent millions of dollars on “Trump Bibles,” paying twenty times the cost for a regular Bible just to curry favor.

Our political system is horribly broken – and, more importantly, voters believe it is. Democrats have to change their entire strategy to reflect this.

Carole Cadwalladr of the Guardian offers 20 tips for surviving the coming “post-truth” world and potential autocracy.

The eXodus: The Guardian will no longer post on X. This month, the site has lost users at the highest clip since Elon Musk took the site over. Truthdig makes the case for abandoning the site. Writer John Paul Brammer did the same. Meanwhile, Bluesky is exploding; my follower count has more than tripled in two weeks, and as a result I’m much more active there than anywhere else. Brian Kirby, a longtime marketing professional with a focus on children’s literature, argues that X is already dead, as a huge number of its accounts are inactive, so publishers should leave it.

Startup Character.AI is hosting chatbots that groom users who indicate that they’re underage. I’m about as far from a Luddite as you can get, but the public applications of AI so far all suck. And they use too much energy.

Roxane Gay writes, “Enough.”

Some mainstream media outlets, including the usually reliable NPR, have already begun sanewashing the anti-vaccine loon RFK Jr, writes Benjamin Mazer in the Atlantic, who also says we should call him what he is – a crank.

The New Republic’s Melody Schreiber writes that we can expect fewer vaccines and more E. Coli outbreaks under a Trump/RFK Jr administration – and that was before COVID denier Jay Bhattacharya’s name came up as a possible head of the NIH.

Meanwhile, influenza H5N1, commonly known as bird flu, may have mutated to become more transmissible to humans. Great timing.

Children who are not vaccinated against COVID-19 are much more likely to develop the life-threatening reaction MIS-C after infection, according to a new study.

ProPublica reported on two maternal deaths that resulted from Georgia’s draconian abortion ban, using documents obtained from a state committee on maternal mortality. The state then fired the entire committee.

Oliver Darcy interviewed The Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel about the Big Tech oligarchs who support and enable Trump.

North Carolina state Sen. Danny Britt (R) responded to a constituent who raised concerns about the state’s abortion ban by telling her to “move to China” or Russia or Venezuela. As of Wednesday, I haven’t seen any apology or restorative action from Britt or his office.

GQ interviewed Richard Gadd on what life has been like since Reindeer Baby burst on the scene and swept the Emmys.

The Seattle Times reports on the effort by the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe to restore the Elwha River by building logjams to help undo over a century of damage wrought by humans.

Ken White, aka Popehat, wrote about one of his own cases, defeating what he called “the most purely evil and abusive SLAPP suit” he has ever seen. A 21-year-old Stanford student named King Vanga was charged with gross vehicular manslaughter for a car accident that killed two people. He then sued the family members of the deceased for defamation because they contacted the school with the details of the criminal case. Really.

Board game news: Fort Circle Games, publishers of Votes for Women and The Shores of Tripoli, has a new Kickstarter up for the SCOTUS-themed game First Monday in October.

Board game designer Kory Heath, whose games include Zendo, Blockers, and this year’s hit game The Gang, took his own life this week at age 54. Boardgamegeek has a memoriam to Heath and links to other tributes.

I’ve mentioned the death of board game evangelist Amber Cook a few times now. She left behind a 6-year-old son, and there are several fundraising efforts to try to help provide for his future, including a huge bundle of RPGs available for just $25, over 90% of their aggregate list prices.

From McSweeney’s: Sure, I Voted for Someone Whose Policies Might Kill You, but Now’s the Time to Put Aside Our Differences.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, board game news, coronavirus, florida, gaza, georgia, housing, links, longreads, oklahoma, police, religion, social media, stick to baseball, the swamp, tv, vaccines, west virginia

→ November 11, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/11/24.

We updated my ranking of the top 50 free agents in baseball this offseason on Monday after all options were declined or exercised to reflect the actual free agent pool. My next article there will probably come when we have a big transaction.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter, covering my feelings on the election, on Saturday.

I locked my Twitter account earlier in the week due to the site’s change to allow blocked users to see your posts. At this point, I will only post links to my work there, and I’ll be more active on Bluesky and Threads. Of course, I’ll still be here, and in the comments under my articles on The Athletic.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Does the NIL era mean the end of Ivy League athletics? I think it does, at least as we have known it. And maybe that’s fine.

Fine, here are some of the better post-election pieces I’ve seen, bearing in mind I’ve skipped a lot of the blame game going around. The New Republic has had the best content in the wake of the election disaster, including Kat Abughazaleh’s story saying the Democrats need to clean out their party leadership after losing to Trump twice in three elections, a Greg Sargent column on how Trump voters don’t realize how he actually hurt the economy and reproductive rights, and a podcast with Sargent and the Philly Inquirer’s Will Bunch on Jeff Bezos sucking up to Trump after the election. In The Nation, Elie Mystal wrote what I also believe, that Trump is not a fluke, but that this is what the United States is. In The Atlantic, Lora Kelley wrote about how the economy ended up more important than the issues on which the Democrats focused, including abortion rights and democracy itself. The Texas Tribune wrote about the rightward shift of the southern part of that state. Just before the election, Tom Nichols wrote in The Atlantic that Trump needs help, as we had even more evidence that the former and now incoming President might be losing his grip.

Scientific American covered how catastrophic a Trump Presidency will be for climate action.

There were some tiny, isolated bits of good news from Election Day, including Arizonans defeating three GOP-led ballot measures to restrict voting rights; my state of Delaware electing Sarah McBride to be the first openly trans member of Congress (I’ve met her and I’m a big fan); and abortion rights passing everywhere except in a rigged vote in Florida, where the ballot measure got 57% of the vote, but the Republicans moved the goalposts to 60%.

Iowa tried to purge alleged noncitizens from voter rolls after early voting had already begun. Sounds fair. It’s not like they had any warning that an election was coming.

A court in Maricopa County, Arizona, cancelled the registrations of some voters based on errant information that they had been convicted of felonies.

The Guardian’s Arwa Madhawi writes that we are witnessing the final stage of genocide in Gaza, citing historian Omar Bartov. The Associated Press covered Israel’s renewed attacks on hospitals in Gaza, buildings that Israel has already previously bombed.

A dismaying story from the Times on older folks giving all their money to scammers while their kids have no way to stop them from doing so. This isn’t people with (diagnosed) cognitive decline or impairment, but people who are perhaps a little more credulous because of their age and unfamiliarity with the digital world.

NPR has a story on attorney Victoria Burke, who helps victims of sexual assault fight defamation suits filed against them by the accused. Such lawsuits can become a way to silence victims and make it harder for them to come forward or pursue their cases, and Burke has helped expand anti-SLAPP statutes in California to cover these cases.

Not all tech companies are bad: Apple quietly added a feature to iOS 18 to protect users’ data on phones seized by police from potentially unlawful searches. Phones that have remained in the lock state for four days will automatically reboot to their Before First Use state, making it harder for forensic analysts to break into them.

Multiple women have accused University of Florida men’s basketball coach Todd Golden of stalking and sexually harassing them, according to a report in the independent site The Alligator. The University received a Title IX complaint against Golden on September 27^th.

Jason Yates, an evangelical Christian who supports Trump and previously was CEO of the activist group My Faith Votes, was arrested on charges of possession of over 100 images of child pornography. No trans people were involved in the case.

Jamie Oliver wrote a children’s fantasy novel, and it turns out it has some really dated stereotypes of indigenous Australians. Worse, neither he nor his publishers even consulted with anyone on cultural sensitivity to maybe avoid this fiasco.

Swifties are fleeing Twitter for BlueSky, too.

A 13-year-old girl in Florida went to the police after she was raped by her adoptive father; the police didn’t believe her and charged her with lying. When he raped her again, she recorded it on her phone. Taylor Cadle, now 21, came forward this week in a PBS story on the police’s complete mishandling of the case.

Prof. Donald Fanger taught my favorite class at Harvard, Comedy and the Novel, where we read several novels I still love, including my all-time favorite, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. Prof. Fanger died this July at age 94.

I mentioned the letter urging a literary boycott of Israeli cultural institutions in an earlier roundup; there is now a countering letter opposing that boycott, with hundreds of signatories of its own.

I had a couple of short links about the shocking and untimely death of Amber Cook, who worked in marketing for several board game companies and was an avid gamer herself, last weekend. Her partner wrote a slightly longer note about her passing and some upcoming events to raise funds for Amber’s young son.

An 11-year-old girl in Alabama killed herself as a result of bullying, possibly after just one incident at school.

Two updates on elections in Eastern Europe: Molvoda’s pro-western President Maia Sandu won re-election despite a massive disinformation campaign by Russia, while outside observers say that the election results in Georgia (the country) make no statistical sense. The incumbent Georgian Dream party claimed victory, while opposition parties have alleged fraud and blame Russian involvement.

A new study in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia found a correlation between higher caffeine consumption and lower risk of memory impairment. This is just one study, and it showed correlation, not causation, but that’s none of my business (sips tea).

Rich countries, led by the EU, blocked a proposal to help poorer countries restore their environments at the COP16 global biodiversity summit in late October.

France is prosecuting seven people involved in spreading the lies that led to the beheading of a French teacher who had shown an example of the cartoons from Charlie Hebdo that Islamist terrorists cited as their reason for murdering 12 people at the magazine’s offices in 2015. The actual killer was shot dead by police shortly after he murdered the teacher, Samuel Paty; this trial is about the online “hate campaign” that took place before the attack.

Trump’s Truth Social platform outsourced coding jobs to Mexico even as he threatened companies with retaliation for sending jobs outside of the U.S. American Second to Profits.

The progressive voter mobilization group AllVote sent misleading and/or inaccurate text messages to voters in swing states claiming they had already voted or sending links to the wrong sites for voting information, according to state officials in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Arizona.

Elon Musk’s false or misleading claims about the election, including those about the major candidates, were viewed over 2 billion times, according to an analysis by CNN. I’m sure that had no effect on anyone’s voting choices, though.

Nearly 400 people have joined lawsuits alleging sexual abuse at state-run youth detention centers in Washington, with the allegations dating as far back as 1956.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alabama, arizona, board game news, climate change, coffee, delaware, europe, florida, france, gaza, harvard, iowa, links, longreads, metoo, police, social media, stick to baseball, suicide, technology, trump, voter suppression, washington

→ November 2, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/2/24.

My ranking of the top 50 free agents available this offseason is now up for subscribers to the Athletic; we’ve updated it now to reflect two players on the list coming off the board as their clubs picked up their options, adding two new players to keep it at 50. I also held a Q&A on the Athletic site on Friday to talk about the list.

For Paste, I reviewed Stamp Swap, a light new game from Stonemaier Games, whose products always have excellent components and art. The game play was meh for me – it was mostly stuff I’ve seen before, and in one case I think a mechanic just makes the game worse/slower.

I need to get another issue of my free email newsletter out soon, but got held up by the FA rankings and the relative lack of sleep I had thanks to the World Series.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: ProPublica has two stories about pregnant women who died because of Texas’s draconian abortion ban, which led hospitals to refuse to treat the women for life-threatening issues. Josseli Barnica died of a bacterial infection, leaving behind a one-year-old daughter. Neveah Crain died of sepsis; she was 18.
A baseball coach in Nyack, New York, abused multiple boys playing on his teams, and the school district that employed him never reported any of the allegations to authorities. Peter Recla has never been arrested or charged with any crime, thanks in large part to the complicity of his bosses. One victim did sue the district and reached a settlement that included a non-disclosure agreement. Some of the survivors have established a scholarship fund to honor one baseball player and one softball player from Nyack High School each year.
The Guardian profiled Gazan journalist Wael al-Dahdouh, whose wife, two children, and grandson were killed by an Israeli strike in October of 2023.
More from ProPublica – Project 2025 co-architect Russell Vought, who ran the OMB under Trump, plans to put civil servants “in trauma” and use the military to quash dissent.
Vogue has a short but powerful story on Gisèle Pelicot, the Frenchwoman whose husband is now on trial for orchestrating serial sexual assaults against her, and how she has become a symbol of hope and strength for victims across France.
A Republican party leader and former Congressional candidate in Indiana has been arrested and charged with stealing ballots during a public test of voting machines. Larry Savage Jr. was caught on camera taking two ballots and slipping them in his pocket. Maybe he saw Election.
The Washington Post’s decision – made by owner Jeff Bezos, CEO & Publisher Will Lewis, or a magic 8-ball – to endorse no candidate for President led over 200,000 people to cancel their subscriptions to the paper. I’m torn on this; yes, it hurts the many people there trying to produce good journalism, whether it’s reporting or opinion, but on the other hand, voting with your wallet is the clearest way to tell any company you don’t agree with something they’re doing. I cancelled my subscription a few years ago because they ran too many anti-science editorials.
The family-owned Seattle Times, however, enthusiastically endorsed VP Kamala Harris for President. I subscribed.
A “tradwife” influencer who has a rare type of ectopic pregnancy intends to carry it to term despite the very high risk that it will kill her, because she opposes abortion. She has seven other kids and has been told that the pregnancy is not viable because the embryo has implanted in scar tissue.
The Israeli Knesset passed a bill that bans the UNRWA from operating in Gaza starting in 90 days. This will cripple aid efforts, as nearly all 2.2 million Gazans have been displaced and many face starvation as a result of Israel’s year-plus war on the territory, with the UNRWA the main conduit for aid.
More on terrible Texas: The city of Odessa passed an ordinance that not only bans trans people from using the bathroom that matches their gender identity, but provides a $10,000 bounty for anyone who reports a trans person using the correct bathroom.
Meanwhile, a youth leader at a church in Abilene, Texas, was charged with possessing child pornography, after he solicited nude pictures from girls through social media. There is no bounty in Texas for turning in a pedophile.
South Carolina executed Richard Moore over the objections of the sentencing judge, three trial jurors, and the former director of the state’s corrections department. Moore is Black and was convicted by an all-white jury, because it’s apparently still 1923 there.
The New York Times profiled Robert Smith of The Cure, as the band released its 14^th album, Songs of a Lost World, on Friday.
Board game news: Druid City Games has a Kickstarter up for Madcala, a new game in the same ‘universe’ as their very highly-rated (and hard to find) game Wonderland’s War.
I met Amber Cook at Gen Con a few years before the pandemic hit, while she was freelancing for Asmodee; she was a marketer and publicist and very passionate about games and gaming. She introduced me to Silver & Gold, still one of my favorite games and one of the first games that my wife really loved. Amber died last week, leaving behind her partner and a young son. Game designer and publisher Mike Selinker wrote a short piece in her memory.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 2024 in music, abortion, board game news, death penalty, france, gaza, indiana, links, longreads, south carolina, stick to baseball, texas, trans rights

→ October 26, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/26/24.

I spent last week in the Arizona Fall League and filed three scouting notebooks, one with some initial observations, a second was all about pitching, and a last one that wrapped up a bunch of additional position players.

I sent out another issue of my free email newsletter this week; with Twitter increasingly overrun with misinformation and white nationalists, I’m there less and less, and the newsletter or one of the Twitter alternatives (Threads, Bluesky) are better ways to keep up with my work.

I appeared on All Things Considered’s Weekend Edition on NPR to preview the World Series (before the LCS actually ended!) and then did the same on NBC Morning News yesterday. One of my tweets made this SI roundup of people mocking former Reds infielder Zack Cozart’s incredible ignorance.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Archconservative billionaire Leonard Leo’s ongoing effort to take over the American judiciary might bankrupt Planned Parenthood and gut women’s health care in the U.S. This Guardian report looks at the long tentacles of Leo’s judicial network, and how he’s managed to tilt the scales of justice in his favor.

A far-right Texas judge has shown other reactionaries a playbook for how to consolidate power and use local government to push their agendas, even in a purple county like Tarrant.

Two stories from ProPublica: Arizona’s school voucher program is supposed to help low-income families, but they’re not the ones using the vouchers – it’s wealthy parents doing so. A claimed lack of prosecutors in Anchorage is leading to dozens of cases, some involving serious crimes like domestic violence or child abuse, being dismissed without trial. Other dismissed cases include 270 people arrested for suspected DUI.

The Washington Post explains how the Russian-backed head of the International Boxing Association roiled the Olympics with the bogus “scandal” over the identities of two female boxers. Meanwhile, a Russian propaganda unit spread a false story smearing Tim Walz, and the conservative ecosystem ate it up without bothering to fact-check it (again, it’s false). WIRED has more on Russia’s disinfo machine, including how it is threatening democracy in tiny Moldova, where Putin has supported a separatist movement for decades.

Thanks to Arizona’s 15-week abortion ban, a pregnant woman who learned at 18 weeks that her fetus had a very high likelihood of spina bifida had to travel to Las Vegas for an abortion and ended up recovering in a casino hotel room. Abortion is health care.

This week in Bad Decisions: a doctor leading a large study on transgender youth said she didn’t publish her research findings because the results might be weaponized by anti-trans forces – which, of course, got out, and was promptly weaponized by anti-trans forces, even though the key quote here is this: “Puberty blockers did not lead to mental health improvements, (the doctor) said, most likely because the children were already doing well when the study began.” It’s also news that the children on puberty blockers didn’t get worse. Regardless of the results, her decision to withhold the results hasn’t helped anyone at all.

A Florida judge ruled that that state’s letters threatening TV stations that aired ads supporting a November abortion rights ballot question were unconstitutional – and he called Florida officials “stupid” for trying it.

A Black man alleges that Michigan police racially profiled him and tried to plant drugs on him during a traffic stop.

Phoenix police tased and punched a deaf Black man who has cerebral palsy – and now he’s the one charged with aggravated assault. They targeted the man based on a false tip.

Israel threatened a Palestinian teen reporter, telling him to stop filming in Gaza, and when he didn’t, they killed him.

A Palestinian man whose wife and children burned to death in a tent hit by an Israeli missile asks why the West sees their suffering and yet stays silent. Related: Israel’s assault on Gaza is happening with weapons made in the United States.

Elon Musk’s gambit of a lottery to try to drum up support for Trump may run afoul of U.S. election law. Of course, it doesn’t matter because he’s rich and the government doesn’t seem to have any desire to hold the rich accountable for their crimes. The Philly Inquirer has more on Musk’s campaigning in the state.

Three red states are suing again to try to limit access to mifepristone, a drug used in medical abortions, despite the recent Supreme Court ruling – and they’re going to the same rogue judge in Texas who sided with them the first time. If you live in Missouri, Kansas, or Idaho, is this where you want your tax dollars going?

The editorials page editor of the Los Angeles Times resigned after the paper’s owner blocked the editorial board from endorsing Kamala Harris for President; two more members of the board followed her lead. The Washington Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, blocked his paper from doing the same. Are these outlets doing so out of fear of retaliation from Trump? It sure looks like “anticipatory obedience” – kowtowing to the whims of a would-be autocrat before he’s even in power.

On the other end of the spectrum, the Boston Globe wrote about the clear signs of Trump’s cognitive decline and asked why the press isn’t holding him to the same standard they used for President Biden?

Trump praises Hitler and his sycophants rush to excuse it.

Tens of thousands of Christian nationalists went to DC for an anti-trans rally hosted by a self-styled “apostle” and former multi-level marketing hawker – and they held it on Yom Kippur, no less.

Another day, another church leader charged with sexually abusing children. No trans people or drag queens here.

A SuperPAC affiliated with Trump sent out mailers that looked like Medicare cancellation notices to try to scare older voters from voting for VP Kamala Harris.

The Central Park 5 are suing Trump again after he defamed them during the Presidential debate.

The country of Georgia is also heading for a pivotal election, and the pro-Russian incumbent may still win a plurality, with fears rising of actual election fraud.

The Times has an interview with author Susanna Clarke, who just released a new short story called The Wood at Midwinter, set in the world of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.

Defector’s Neil deMause writes about what a bad deal the proposed downtown arena for the 76ers will be for Philadelphia, on top of destroying what’s left of historic Chinatown.

Stanford held a conference on the pandemic that was full of grifters and purveyors of misinformation.

The hypothesis that Barnard’s Star, the second-closest star to our own, might have a planet orbiting it dates back at least to when I was a little kid. Now there might actually be some proof.

Japandroids just released their fourth and final album, Fate & Alcohol, eight days ago. Drummer David Prowse talked to Kerrang! about the ten songs that changed his life.

A new Kickstarter from Bitewing Games has raised over $200K for three new games from the master designer Reiner Knizia.

The Onion’s Point/Counterpoint this week: We Need To Take Trump’s Rhetoric Seriously, But Not Literally vs. Have That Guy Killed.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, alaska, arizona, astronomy, board game news, disinformation, education, first amendment, florida, gaza, links, longreads, michigan, Music, olympics, police, russia, science, stadium scams, stick to baseball, trans rights, voting rights

→ October 12, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/11/24.

Nothing from me this week at the Athletic, although I should have at least two pieces going up in the next seven days.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the board game Little Alchemists, a streamlined version of the heavy game Alchemists that also works as a light legacy game, building you up over seven modules to a full midweight deduction game that you could play with the family.

I’ve been much more regular with my free email newsletter since taking some PTO in August, which I don’t think is a coincidence as it gave me some mental downtime after the crush of the draft and the trade deadline.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Guardian has the unbelievable story of how a UK’s Serious Fraud Office investigation into a global mining company called ENRC might lead to British taxpayers paying millions to Russian oligarchs.
The New York Times has finally turned the same scrutiny it gave President Biden on current candidate Trump: Trump’s rambling, incoherent, forgetful speeches may be a sign of age-related cognitive decline.
Why are so many evangelical Christians obsessed with beating their kids? You can call it “corporal punishment,” but that is child abuse.
America Last? In 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, then-President Trump sent scarce COVID tests to Vladimir Putin – and the two still appear to talk regularly even with Trump nearly four years out of office. How any so-called “patriot” can support this man is beyond me.
Meanwhile, the head of MI5 says that Russia’s intelligence agency is trying to create sustained mayhem on Britain’s streets through arson, sabotage, and more.
At least some of the Sri Lankan migrants who have been held in deplorable conditions for years on Diego Garcia will be allowed to resettle in Romania and potentially then in the UK.
I’ve bought and read many sci-fi and fantasy novels under the Del Rey imprint, but until this week I didn’t know it was founded by Judy-Lynn Del Rey, a woman with dwarfism who became one of the most influential publishers or editors in the genre’s history.
The online misinformation machine is just getting worse and worse, with threats now against FEMA workers and meteorologists from people who fall for fake info and images online.
A Minneapolis elementary school student has measles. Vaccine mandates are under attack everywhere, but the outcome is going to be dead and disabled children.
Israel attacked a shelter for displaced families in Gaza, killing at least 28. They claimed, as usual, that there were Hamas fighters there.
UN investigators have accused Israel of deliberately targeting medical personnel and facilities in Gaza.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has threatened to prosecute stations for running ads supporting a pro-reproductive rights ballot question, earning a rebuke from the FCC. I thought this was the party of “free speech.”
Another self-proclaimed “free speech” absolutist, Elon Musk has censored any mention on Twitter of the RNC’s dossier on JD Vance, and even banned independent journalist Ken Klippenstein for publishing it. Musk has gone full white nationalist in his own tweets and the linked story says he may be pumping up to half a billion dollars into the Trump campaign.
Delaware is about to elect Sarah McBride as its at-large Representative, making her the first openly trans member of Congress. She’ll have to serve alongside people who question her right to live as a trans person, or to have basic human rights others take for granted. I’ve met State Senator McBride twice and have read her book, Tomorrow Will Be Different, which also has the story of how she became a widow at 2014 when her husband, Andrew Cray, died of cancer.
One of my tweets appeared in this BuzzFeed roundup of jokes and criticism of Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA)’s comments on tampons and hurricane relief. The UN has ruled that access to sanitary products is a fundamental human right.
A conservative think tank has said that Trump’s economic proposals would crash the U.S. economy – and Michael Hiltzik says they’re being kind.
Trump invoked Nazi beliefs on eugenics when he talked about immigrants having bad genes in an especially unhinged talk on conservative radio this week. That Times article doesn’t get at the madness; this LA Times op ed calls him out more forcefully.
Board game news: The Gamefound campaign for StarDriven: Gateway is fully funded and live for another two weeks; I know the publisher very well, but I also backed this game myself.
The Kickstarter for Snow Planner appears to be a second printing along with an expansion of a midweight game that came out earlier this year from Japanese publisher 14games.
I know nothing of this publisher, but the theme of Cerro Gordo Silver Mine, now up on Kickstarter, looks interesting and novel.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, coronavirus, delaware, first amendment, florida, gaza, links, longreads, minnesota, russia, social media, stick to baseball, trans rights, vaccines

→ October 5, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/5/24.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I ranked the top rookies on postseason rosters, based on their likely impact; my top pick looks pretty good so far. I also held a Q&A on the Athletic’s site on Friday, which was almost entirely baseball questions (unlike the typical Klawchat over here).

We’ve got two family birthdays this weekend, so it’s birthdaypalooza around here, but I’m hoping to do another issue of my free email newsletter once we get through Sunday.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The BBC managed to get a journalist to Diego Garcia, one of the hardest to access inhabited places in the world, and she wrote about what she saw. There are currently a number of Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka who are seeking asylum but have been held on the island for several years. Later this week, the United Kingdom announced it would return control of Diego Garcia and the other Chagos islands to Mauritius, but the United States would maintain its naval base there.

ProPublica has the inside story on how the Biden Administration went above and beyond to send weapons to Israel that the state has used in its yearlong assault on Gaza, which has led to over 40,000 deaths of Gazans and a massive humanitarian crisis. Meanwhile, Americans in Lebanon say they feel abandoned by the U.S. government, which took swift steps to evacuate Americans in Israel last October.

Writing for Slate, Katie McBride explains how Silent Spring kicked off the American environmental movement but also demonized chemicals in a way that continues to hurt us today.

Dr. Eliezer Masliah was the director of neuroscience at the National Institute of Aging until researchers discovered evidence of data manipulation and fabrication in “scores” of his published papers. He was fired on Monday.

A global lead-poisoning mystery that affected people in Bangladesh and New York City came down to a surprising culprit: A dye used to make turmeric more appealing to buyers.

High Country News looks at how the 2014 Bundy standoff paved the way for January 6^th and helped boost the idea of “white oppression” on the right.

The New Yorker looks at the small coalition of evangelicals backing Kamala Harris, a group that could prove pivotal in several swing states.

The Washington Post covered a rambling, incoherent Trump speech accurately, without “sanewashing” it. There have been a lot of clips this week of Trump appearing to forget where he was or what he was talking about. Too many media outlets continue to dance around this.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R-) called out Trump & Vance’s lies on Springfield and the Haitian community there. This shouldn’t be newsworthy, but so few Republicans in office are willing to push back against the convicted felon/Presidential candidate that it is remarkable when one does so.

A new study of Scottish women found that those who received the HPV vaccine before age 14 had zero cases of cervical cancer. Yes, there is a vaccine your kids can get that may completely prevent several types of cancer, including cervical and anal cancers. There is so much misinformation about this vaccine online, and the cost of this will be human lives.

The data from Texas show how abortion bans are killing women, writes Michael Hiltzik for the LA Times, with the maternal death rate in Texas rising in 2022 to 26% above the national average.

A tenured, Jewish professor at Muhlenberg College says she was fired for her pro-Palestinian comments. She is appealing the decision and for now continues to be paid.

New York magazine reports on the clandestine alliance between the right-wing rag the New York Post and Mayor Eric Adams, currently under indictment on corruption charges. The Post ran point for Adams’s mayoral campaign, backing him, trashing his rivals, and doing what appeared to be PR work for him, according to Noah Schachtman, and now the paper is trying to prop him up amidst the scandal.

ProPublica ran an expose on the EPA’s approval of plastic-based fuels despite evidence that they contained one chemical with a cancer risk one million times the usual ‘acceptable’ limit. This week the EPA announced they’re withdrawing that approval.

Oklahoma is already violating the First Amendment by mandating the teaching of the Bible in public schools, but the state’s strict rules around what Bible they can use point exclusively to the Trump-branded version of the book. I don’t think there’s been a lawsuit yet, but the ACLU and Americans United for Separation of Church and State appear to be preparing for one.

Board game news: To commemorate the 50^th anniversary of the release of the first Dungeons & Dragons set, NPR asked readers to contribute their memories of playing the game. Here are five of their stories.

Rock Manor Games has a Gamefound campaign up for StarDriven: Gateway, a pickup-and-delivery game on a modular board. I’m friends with the publisher and got to try a prototype last week; we played the shortest version, and I think it needs the extra rounds, but I like the fact that there’s no conflict and that the economic aspects are easy to keep straight in your head.

Shem Phillips’s Garphill Games has a Kickstarter up for two new titles, Skara Brae and The Anarchy. Phillips is best known for his series of worker-placement games that started with Raiders of the North Sea. I don’t think Skara Brae has anything to do with The Bard’s Tale, though.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, academia, board game news, environmentalism, gaza, links, longreads, new york city, ohio, separation of church and state, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines

→ September 28, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/28/24.

I had three new posts this week for subscribers to the Athletic – my hypothetical ballots for the six major postseason awards, my annual look at some players I was wrong about, and a look at the future of the White Sox based on what’s in their system and their recent development successes and failures.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the board game Let’s Go to Japan, a fantastic game that is about … exactly what it sounds like: planning a trip to Japan, based on the designer’s own yearslong plans to visit the country only to have it postponed for several years by the pandemic.

I sent another issue of my free email newsletter out on Monday. That’s two weeks in a row, so clearly I have the hot hand.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The seas are rising and encroaching on the barrier islands off the coast of Galveston, Texas, but developers there are building new condos right on the shore, according to this interactive piece from the Washington Post.

The French cement company Lafarge paid millions to ISIS to keep its plant operating in Syrian territory held by the terror group. The Guardian has the full story, including the $778 million judgment against Lafarge in the U.S., lawsuits from people victimized by ISIS, and now a criminal trial in French accusing Lafarge executives of abetting crimes against humanity.

Both USAID and the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration independently concluded that Israel blocked humanitarian aid to Gazans. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken ignored them and told Congress the opposite was true. Had he told the truth, existing U.S. law would have forced us to stop sending weapons to Israel. Related: The pager attack didn’t just affect Hezbollah members, as pagers belonging to ordinary people went off in hospitals and schools.

Luke Winkie’s story in Slate on the absolutely bonkers email exchanges he had with Jeopardy! champion Yogesh Raut offers a window into what seems to be the very disturbed mind of a very, very smart person.

Josh Kraushaar is the editor-in-chief of Jewish Insider, and this past week, he started a false rumor that Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D) accused Michigan AG Dana Nessel of filing charges against pro-Palestinian campus protestors because Nessel is Jewish. Steve Neavling, the Metro Times writer whose interview with Rep. Tlaib was the supposed source of the quote, says the claim is false and she never referred to Nessel’s religion. Kraushaar’s tweet and story are still up, and it’s been picked up by Nessel, by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, and others. The New Republic weighed in as well.

Republicans are trying to use the practice of some women changing their names upon marriage as a way to strike them from voting rolls.

Seeing a lot of AI spam on Facebook? It’s the “zombie internet,” says 404 Media’s Jason Koebler, with bots interacting with bots in a facsimile of the old web.

Judge Aileen Cannon, under fire from other judges and legal experts for her rulings favoring the guy who appointed her, has failed to disclose junkets paid for by right-wing groups, violating judicial ethics rules.

Thomas Chatterton Williams writes in the Atlantic that Elon Musk is debasing American society by endorsing and amplifying the views of trolls and extremists.

Several women accuse a “homeopathic” midwife of giving them misoprostol without their knowledge, leading to the death of at least one baby. Just a reminder that homeopathy is woo, and it’s unregulated, making it a great place for scammers and grifters to operate.

Parker Molloy has about the only thing you really need to read on the Olivia Nuzzi/RFK Jr. scandal, as she points out how way too many media members are rushing to defend Nuzzi in the face of a dead-clear ethics violation.

Neo-Nazis are panicking now that European authorities are cracking down on Telegram and the site’s founder, recently arrested in France, is promising to comply with demands for user information. Of course they’ll just move somewhere else.

The Delaware Drug Overdose Fatality Review Commission released a new report with suggested policies to try to reduce drug overdoses in the state, especially among those recently released from prison.

New FBI data show that violent crime in the United States is decreasing, no matter what your racist uncle claims on Facebook, and yes, major cities are contributing their data once again.

Republican Senate candidate Bernie Moreno, running in Ohio against incumbent Sherrod Brown, said in a town hall that suburban women are “a little crazy” for being “single-issue” voters around abortion. Really beating the “weird” tag here, Bernie.

Rep. Anthony D’Esposito (R-NY) had an affair and then put his lover and his fiancée’s daughter on his Congressional payroll. He’s from Nassau County, because of course he is.

One of the folks behind Project 2025 has been accused of creeping on teenagers online. Another, Kevin Roberts, apparently told people he killed a neighbor’s dog with a shovel because it was barking too loudly.

The Guardian has a story on how Codenames became what they call “the board game of the decade.” I don’t know if I agree with the hyperbole in the piece, but it is a good story on one of the best party games out there in the wake of the release of a Codenames app.

Kurt Vonnegut designed a board game in the 1950s, before his literary career took off. It’s about to get its first commercial release, and the board game blog Space-Biff got to play a pre-release copy.

We’re in crowdfunding season for board games, so expect to see a bunch of links for them here the next few weeks. Floodgate Games has one up for Hedge Maze, from the designer of 2021’s Umbra Via.

Eagle-Gryphon has a Kickstarter up for Speakeasy, the newest game from Vital Lacerda, designer of such heavy, complex games as Lisboa, Kanban, and On Mars.

North Star Games, publishers of Evolution, has a Kickstarter live for Nature, a new, standalone, modular game in the Evolution series that streamlines a lot of the rules of the original.

Inside Up has a Kickstarter up for Ice and Idols, from the designer of a game I’ve never heard of called Reality Shift.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, climate change, corruption, crime, delaware, gaza, islamophobia, links, longreads, new york, social media, stick to baseball, texas, voter suppression

→ September 21, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/21/24.

One new post at the Athletic this week, naming Boston’s Kristian Campbell as the Minor League Player of the Year for 2024, along with a bunch of honorable mentions and other honorees as usual. And, as usual, people got very mad that I didn’t mention some prospect from their favorite team. I’ve got a piece coming up Monday on the future of the White Sox given what’s in their farm system and what they’ve shown they can and can’t develop.

You can and should sign up for my free email newsletter, because think of all the worthless crap that’s in your inbox. I promise you my emails are better than the latest email blast from Lands’ End, and they’re much less frequent.

If you missed me on Codenames Live! this week, you can watch the replay here on Twitch. My teammate was the great Daryl Andrews, designer of Sagrada and the brand-new game Mistwind.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New York Times’ Jodi Kantor reported on how Chief Justice Roberts engineered several major court decisions to favor disgraced ex-President Donald Trump.

ProPublica reported on the deaths of two women in Georgia due to the state’s draconian ban on abortion, in that story and this one as well.

A new study in Nature found that a combination of willful ignorance and cognitive distortions drives vaccine refusal and hesitancy. It doesn’t help when private companies allow misinformation to run rampant on their platforms, though. Or when the anti-science forces running Florida lead to a surge in vaccine refusals from parents, leaving pediatricians concerned and exhausted as they try to combat the nonsense.

Northwestern has suspended Professor of Journalism Steven Thrasher due to his participation in the anti-Gaza War encampments in the spring and pro-Palestine statements he has made elsewhere. Over 1900 journalists, academics, and health professionals signed a letter to the school, saying he has been targeted for his views and what should be protected speech. I’m presenting the story here but acknowledge it may be more complicated than it first seems, as this only presents Thrasher’s side and that of his supporters.

The Q-Collar claims it can protect athletes’ brains from concussions and that research “proves” its efficacy. The data may not be real. I don’t see any way this thing could possibly work as claimed.

Some evangelical voters are standing up for their values by voting for Kamala Harris, turning their back on the vitriol of Trump’s rhetoric and his veiled calls for violence.

A group of election officials and 2020 election deniers in Georgia are already strategizing on how to rig the state for Trump and to sow doubt about the result if Harris wins.

Why are major newspapers sanewashing the incoherent word salads served up by Trump? Michael Tomasky gives some specific examples of this in the New Republic.

Former Trump White House staffer and now Project 2025 co-author John McEntee posts inane rhetorical questions on his TikTok account, but when he posted one claiming no women had been denied critical medical care due to abortion bans, he got hundreds of responses from women who had indeed faced such circumstances. NBC News even had one of those women on air to discuss her traumatic experience. McEntee lost his job in the Trump Administration because of his gambling habit.

Try to hide your surprise, but Justice Samuel Alito has been hanging out with right-wing billionaire and anti-abortion Leonard Leo, who’s spending a fortune to try to tip the election to Trump and the Republicans.

A sheriff in Portage County, Ohio, ran his mouth on social media, asking residents to write down the addresses of people with Harris-Walz signs in their yards so someone could send migrants to live with them. Now his officers won’t be providing security at any election sites in November.

Also in the New Republic, Greg Sargent excoriates Jay Divans – excuse me, I’m being told it is actually spelled J.D. Vance – for his unrepentant lies and xenophobia about Haitians living and working in Springield, Ohio.

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear (D) issued an executive order banning conversion therapy for minors, a harmful pseudoscientific practice that pretends it can turn gay people straight.

Sorry, more Ohio stuff, and more from ProPublica: The Buckeye State is now using public taxpayer dollars to build religious schools. I hope they get sued into oblivion. Or into Michigan. Whatever they would hate more.

Climate change is impacting coffee farmers’ yields, and after a drought hit Vietnam – a major producer of lower-quality Robusta beans – some coffee farmers there switched to the malodorous fruit durian, and the loss of product has driven Robusta and Arabica prices to near-highs on the global market.

Climate change is acting as a “chaos multiplier” in the fragile African nation of Somalia, which has been wrecked by 30 years of civil war, has one or two breakaway republics in its north (depending on how you define it), and has to deal with terrorist attacks from al-Shabab.

Former U.S. Representative Bob Inglis (R-SC) wrote in Forbes about the utility of a “tipping fee” on emissions that contribute to climate change – not that different than the so-called carbon tax in effect, just a little bit in implementation and nomenclature. You pay for what you use, so to speak. Inglis was also in the news this week for announcing he’s voting for Harris for President.

Prof. Deborah Kelly at Penn State has had two papers retracted and a third may be on the way, but she’s lawyered up and is fighting it even though other researchers have found fabricated data or images in 21 of her publications.

Two Alameda, California, residents are suing to stop the relocation of a local Food Bank to … an empty parking lot. One litigant claims the parking lot is “historic;” the other appears to be motivated by NIMBY.

Paste’s Jim Vorel wrote a defense of the Aviation, a drink that had a brief renaissance about 15 years ago but seems to have lost some of its luster. I’m a fan – it is the only drink I’ve ever seen that uses crème de violette, but those floral notes are a great complement to the juniper flavors of a quality gin. And it’s a good drink to order out in the world because you’re never going to buy crème de violette to make it at home.

Wirecutter’s Hannah Rimm wrote an ode to the wide and enduring popularity of Ticket to Ride.

Studio Ghibli released a print-and-play board game to help advertise its quirky theme park in Japan.

A Kickstarter for Railroad Tiles, a new game inspired by the roll & write series Railroad Ink, is already over $250,000 in funding. I actually don’t like Railroad Ink, but this looks more up my alley.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, academia, africa, anti-science, board game news, california, climate change, cocktails, coffee, florida, gay rights, gaza, georgia, kentucky, links, longreads, ohio, pseudoscience, scotus, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ September 14, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/14/14.

Light week here for writing and links, although it looks like I’ll have two columns at the Athletic this upcoming week.

Over at Paste, I reviewed The Vale of Eternity, a card-drafting game that’s a lot harder than it looks, especially because of its quirky mechanism of handling coins when you buy and sell cards.

I also sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter on Saturday. You can sign up here.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Ted Chiang, author of the short story that became the film Arrival, wrote about the false promise of AI for creating art in the New Yorker.
Magnetic “therapy” is not backed by any evidence, but parents of autistic children are turning to it anyway out of desperation and denial.
States are using flawed drug test results as the justification for taking children away from their parents, according to this investigative report from the Marshall Project.
Cloud storage and AI are driving massive increases in energy usage, but the tech firms behind them are fighting efforts to make them pay their fair share. Large language model algorithms are very energy intensive; they shouldn’t be so freely available when they have such high hidden costs.
Idaho’s abortion ban is putting the lives of women at risk and forcing doctors to ignore their training, similar to what we’ve already seen in other states that couldn’t wait to put a giant foot down on women’s necks after Dobbs.
Texas AG Ken Paxton is suing to ensure the state can access medical records of Texans who go out of state for abortions, gender-affirming care, or other medical treatment that is none of the state’s business.
Two Florida voters who signed a petition to get abortion access on the ballot found themselves visited by Gov. DeSantis’s voter intimidation unit.
A town council member in Jefferson County, Colorado, shot a 17-year-old teen in the face, through the windshield of the victim’s car, as the boy and his friend were looking for a place to take homecoming pictures. The victim is hospitalized in serious condition and Brent Metz is facing multiple charges.
I enjoyed Will Bunch’s evisceration of Donald Trump’s performance at the debate on Tuesday against VP Kamala Harris.
A fishing village in Kenya that has also become a popular tourist destination is disappearing as sea levels rise due to climate change.
The Times reports on the efforts to rebuild the Libyan city of Derna a year after two dams failed and the city flooded, killing over 4000 people. Libya has two rival governments in place, and the one funding the $2 billion effort has given power to run the program to the son of a powerful warlord, raising fears of corruption and more shoddy work.
“Debate in nuclear-armed former colony fails to reassure global community.” Hat tip to Craig Calcaterra and his essential Cup of Coffee newsletter for alerting me to this satirical gem.
The most recent edition of the Times’ Modern Love column is a gut-punch.
The Kickstarter for Pantheum: Demigods of Olympia, an intriguing game from a new publisher, is about to clear $100K as I write this on Friday night.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, africa, board game news, florida, guns, idaho, kenya, links, longreads, pseudoscience, stick to baseball, texas, voter suppression

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