longreads

→ May 16, 2026
→ By keith
→ Leave a Comment

Stick to baseball, 5/16/26.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I posted my Big Board for this year’s draft, ranking the top 100 prospects in the class, and then held a Q&A on Thursday. I also posted a minor league scouting notebook last weekend, covering Liam Doyle, Ike Irish, Dante Nori, and others.

I filed two more pieces this morning, so next up will be a new issue of my free email newsletter, followed by a game review to run here.

And now, the links…

Texas Republicans repeatedly failed to pass flood protection legislation that would have prevented the deadly floods that killed 139 people last summer, according to a ProPublica/Texas Tribune investigation.

Louisiana is one of a handful of reactionary states asking a federal judge to strike a 1973 law protecting disabled Americans from discrimination. Yep – Republicans want to be able to discriminate against Americans who use wheelchairs, or have visual or hearing impairments, and so on. This should be a major campaign issue for Democrats, given how many of us know and care about someone with a disability.

The Wall Street Journal (subscription definitely required here) writes about Sweden’s shift away from its extensive social welfare system, reducing government spending but also raising fears of inequality and increased poverty in the future.

Tennessee continues to show its ass to the world. Keith Ervin, a school board member in Washington County, Tennessee, said to a teenaged girl speaking before the board, “God, you’re hot,” and put his arm around her. The board declined to remove him, and she blasted them in speech before the board last week, saying “you are all cowards.” Which they are.

Also in Tennessee, Rep. Andy Ogles, who raised $25,000 in a fundraiser for a children’s memorial he never built, is now claiming that never happened.

Watertown, Wisconsin’s school board voted to ban an instrumental song from the district’s spring concert merely because it was dedicated LGBT rights pioneer Marsha P. Johnson. And now the cowards won’t answer questions about it. They should get zero peace for this. The next board meeting is Monday, May 18th, so if you live nearby, go let them know how you feel.

Slate’s Maggie Hennessy writes about how the rise of food ‘influencers’ posting pseudo-reviews on TikTok etc. are costing us the real benefits of proper food criticism.

Media Matters’ Angelo Carusone writes about how his organization fought the Trump administration and won.

Jess Valenti writes on her Substack about a case where Child Protective Services kidnapped a 14-year-old girl from her mother’s care because she might have gotten an abortion. There are very few specifics in the story, for the privacy of the mother and teen, but I also want to acknowledge that this story is impossible to verify.

404 Media’s Jason Koebler writes that other so-called writers’ AI use is breaking his brain.

Nearly 50,000 people living near Lake Tahoe are about to lose their power because of fucking data centers. Not temporarily, either, as the electricity generator is redirecting its output to uses that are not people.

Human Rights Watch issued a new report on the massacres, mass rapes, and abductions taking place in the Congolese city of Uvira since the Rwandan-backed rebel group M23 seized the city in December.

Another Kennedy failson is running for Congress, and as The New York Times reports, Jack Schlossberg’s campaign is a mess – but he’s still in line to win.

Restoration Games has a video trailer up for their upcoming Lord of the Rings: The King’s Gambit game, a new implementation of the 2000 game Star Wars: The Queen’s Gambit.

The crowdfunding effort for the game Vanea: Guardians of the Eldertree has been relaunched and is already funded.

Bloomsbury Publishing is shutting down Osprey Games, which has published Cryptid, the Undaunted Series, The King is Dead, and more acclaimed titles. They’ll continue to publish wargames and RPGs under the Osprey name.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, artificial intelligence, board game news, california, disability rights, environment, first amendment, lgbt rights, links, longreads, social media, stick to baseball, tennessee, texas, wisconsin

→ May 10, 2026
→ By keith
→ Leave a Comment

Stick to baseball, 5/10/26.

I posted my first mock draft of 2026 for subscribers to the Athletic this past week. I held a Q&A on Thursday to take your questions on the mock and anything else. I also posted a scouting notebook on Liam Doyle, Ike Irish, Dante Nori, and some other Phillies & Orioles prospects, as well as a draft scouting notebook on some Arkansas and Mississippi prospects, three of whom are probably going in the first round.

I also sent out another epistle of my free email newsletter. Trying to ramp that up to at least every other week.

I’m on Bluesky more than anything else right now. I’ve also been posting longer videos to Instagram and TikTok, talking about players I see or reacting to news, including two clips about the mock. I’ve also been messing around on the restaurant app Beli, if anyone else out there is using it.

A very short links post this week, not sure why. Anyway, and now the links…

Longreads first: Babies are dying because their parents have been scammed by online misinformation into rejecting the vitamin K shot, possibly thinking it’s a vaccine (which is also stupid, as vaccines are safe). Vitamin K is essential for clotting and this ProPublica story reports on babies who have bled to death because they didn’t get the shot.

The Guardian’s Adrienne Mantel describes how Christian nationalists are destroying our public health infrastructure, and potentially exporting their toxic, superstitious worldview around the globe.

Texas Monthly exposes how the Southern Baptist Convention was built by a serial child molester.

The Wall Street Journal investigates betting markets, and, shocker, most bettors there lose money.

Economist Justin Wolfers calculated the cost to each U.S. household of the current, illegal war on Iran will run to thousands and maybe tens of thousands of dollars.

Fayetteville, Georgia, residents, noticed their water pressure was low. It turned out that a data center had stolen 30 million gallons of water via two hookups, paying for neither.

All life on earth emerged from a single common ancestor, about 4 billion years ago. A new study posits that it was about 200 million years before previously thought, while also revealing some new info on what that first prokaryote was like.

The AI craze has led to “RAMageddon,” an impending shortage of random access memory chips for all kinds of devices that will likely lead to price increases in the second half of this year.

Trump’s FDA blocked publication of research showing that the COVID vaccines and the shingles vaccine are both safe. There’s no public health benefit here – they’re just pandering to their anti-science base.

We’ve got anti-vaxxers, anti-seed oil loons, anti-sunscreen charlatans, and now self-styled “sleep experts” are telling parents to ignore the guidelines on preventing SIDS, giving them dangerous advice that is likely to lead to more infants suffocating in their cribs.

Video shows an ICE agent tasing a man multiple times in Bushwick, NYC, after which the Department of Homeland Security lied and said he wasn’t tased.

Fiddler Ashley Macisaac is suing Google after its AI search results wrongly tagged him as a sex offender. It’s only for $1.5 million, which I’m sure Google will settle as a rounding error.

Ravenous is a new worker-owned food journalism outlet founded by five people who had previously worked/published at Eater.

NPR’s Marketplace had a segment on the social media excitement over beans, particularly on “BeanTok.”

Why is Kristi Noem still living in taxpayer-subsidized military housing?

Rock Manor Games – whose owner is a neighbor of mine – has a new Kickstarter up for two games, The Lost Island and Secret Valley.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: artificial intelligence, environment, evolution, food writing, gambling, immigration, links, longreads, nutrition, religion, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ May 2, 2026
→ By keith
→ 21 Comments

Stick to baseball, 5/2/26.

I had a weird lull over at The Athletic, as I didn’t really have games to hit or travel planned, so my scouting notebook from this week on Gerrit Cole, Franklin Arias, Ronny Cruz, and more was my first post in a couple of weeks. I’ll be back with at two pieces next week, including my first mock draft of 2026, tentatively scheduled to run on May 7^th.

Over at AV Club, I reviewed the game Catan on the Road, and then spoke to designer Josh Wood about his upcoming game Let’s Go! To France, the sequel to the delightful Let’s Go! To Japan. The site shuttered its games section on Friday, so my regular reviews and writing there are done. I loved writing about games, so I’m open to freelance board game writing opportunities elsewhere.

I’m on Bluesky more than anything else right now. I’ve also been posting longer videos to Instagram and TikTok, talking about players I see or reacting to news.

I also appeared on 92.3 The Fan in Cleveland to talk about Travis Bazzana, Chase Delauter, and other Guardians prospects/players.

I’ll work on another free email newsletter next.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: North Carolina cop Scott Collins shot and killed Brandon Webster, a Black man, in 2019, and claimed self-defense. The Marshall Project finally got the truth, which includes the state never even bothering to investigate Collins’ rendition of events.

What will it take to get rid of RFK Jr. as Secretary of “Health” and Human Services? Laura Weiss goes long on the topic for The New Republic, with quotes from Colette Delawalla, founder of Stand Up for Science and the subject of this profile. Meanwhile, Gregg Gonsalves writes in The Nation about “Vichy scientists” like Jay Bhattacharya who have chosen to collaborate with the anti-science Administration.

Streetsblog found that Staten Island cop James Giovansanti racked up 547 speeding tickets and hasn’t been disciplined once. The Times picked up the story on Thursday in a longer piece on a bill aimed at stopping these so-called “super-speeders.”

Residents of Roxbury, New Jersey, are fighting ICE’s efforts to build a concentration camp in their town.

Is Jimmy Fallon accelerating the death of culture? I guess the question really is whether he’s a cause or a symptom.

The President of Cornell ran his car over the foot of a protesting student and bumped another, then claimed they had attacked his car and blocked his exit. Student journalists at The Cornell Daily Sun obtained video of the incident and found that he made up that excuse.

The University of Iowa created the Orwellian-titled Center for Intellectual Freedom, which just creates the problem it claims it’s trying to solve.

A mother whose daughter died of SSPE, an incurable, fatal disorder caused by a past measles infection, wrote about the tragedy in The New York Times. The Times’ editorial board ran this editorial a few days later about how RFK Jr. and the Trump Republicans have created a terrifying new reality of preventable infectious diseases.

This Administration is going after all kinds of rights. The FTC is ramping up to go after gender-affirming care in the continuing war on trans people. Trump and RFK Jr. are threatening the availability of contraception.

The London Review of Books notes that the genocide in Gaza continues, and those who still live there face appalling conditions, with over 70,000 cases of rodent and ectoparasitic infestations just this year.

Israel continues to attack journalists in Gaza and now Lebanon, killing Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil and injuring her colleague last week in what appears to have been a deliberate act of murder – when the first airstrike didn’t kill her, they fired again.

I posted this in the last roundup but I’m re-upping here after the sanitizing biopic Michael made so much money last weekend: Tim Grierson writes about the now-unavailable documentary Leaving Neverland and how impossible it is to forget the clear accusations against Michael Jackson that documentary laid out.

Janet Mills’ withdrawal from the Maine Senate race makes Graham Platner the presumptive Democratic nominee. A Maine reporter and former classmate of Platner’s writes about his appeal.

Texas Tech, a public university, has issued a ban on any discussion of LGBTQ+ topics by professors or even by students in their work. The American Historical Association announced their opposition to the policy, which, in a normal world, would be thrown out as a clear violation of the First Amendment. In Inside Higher Ed, Prof. Ben Wright at the University of Texas-Dallas writes that people need to stop criticizing professors who stay at these schools to fight the crackdown.

It’s not a normal world, of course, as six judicial activists on the Supreme Court sounded the death knell for American democracy, writes Moira Donegan in The Guardian.

Louisiana Republicans aren’t just trying to gerrymander Black citizens out of their franchise – they’re also trying to eliminate an elected position so a Black man can’t take office.

In more free-speech-for-me-not-for-thee news, Utah Valley (corrected) caved to a right-wing political campaign that included Senator Mike Lee (R, of course) to disinvite speaker Sharon McMahon … over McMahon quoting Charlie Kirk’s own words after his death.

New gas-powered data centers could dump more climate-warming gases into the air than entire nations.

The Verge looked at how tech bros have lost touch with what people actually want.

The U.S. government is running fake-news sites in Arabic and Farsi to push pro-American views in the Middle East.

I missed this from last fall, but Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC), currently running for Governor of South Carolina, tweeted at a Jewish Congresswoman “I have a good surgeon if you ever want to get your nose done.”

Republicans in Indiana have succeeded again in making it harder for college students to vote.

We love Quince in this house, for their cashmere sweaters (my god they are warm) and many other things. Bloomberg looked at why they’ve been so successful.

A reader passed along this Times story on the hot resale market for La Marzocco espresso machines.

A tiny bit of good news: Over 400 new independent bookstores opened in the U.S. in 2025, an increase of 31% from 2024.

Mixed-use complexes are the hot new(ish) stadium funding scam that built the Battery in not-Atlanta. The Rays’ new owner is trying to run the same playbook, but economist J.C. Bradbury writes that Cobb County hasn’t seen the promised benefits.

I had no idea that English used to have pronouns to refer to exactly two people, whether it was in the sense of us, you, or them.

Allplay has a new Kickstarter up for River Valley Jewelcraft, a ‘spiritual sequel’ to River Valley Glassworks and Things in Rings.

I’ve never played Kohaku, but there’s a Kickstarter up for a reprint and new expansion.
MENSA does some annual board game awards that are probably the only thing MENSA does that’s worth noting; you can see this year’s winners here over on Board Game Wire.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, bookstores, climate change, coffee, Economics, free speech, gaza, immigration, indiana, links, longreads, louisiana, measles, new york city, police, scotus, south carolina, stick to baseball, texas, trans rights, utah, vaccines, women's rights

→ April 21, 2026
→ By keith
→ 6 Comments

Stick to baseball, 4/21/26.

My one post on The Athletic last week was a long scouting notebook covering Vahn Lackey, Joseph Contreras, Liam Peterson, and other players I saw in a week in South Carolina and Georgia.

Over at the AV Club, I reviewed Catan on the Road, a new portable Catan game that loses the map – and thus the competition for space – but keeps the resource-trading mechanic and even tweaks the rules to encourage players to trade more.

I sent out another issue of my free email newsletter late last week. You should subscribe.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New York Times has another exposé on how Harvard professors and administrators were happy to take Jeffrey Epstein’s money, even after his initial conviction. Three more professors found their names included in the latest files that the Times reporters reviewed: Howard Gardner, Anne Harrington, and Andrew Strominger. All are still active faculty members.

The New Yorker investigates how the Trump Administration has made locking up immigrant infants and children a core part of its strategy.

Upward Bound is a bestselling novel written by nonverbal, autistic author Woody Brown using the discredited communication technique called Rapid Prompting. His mother may be the actual author.

A group chat started by the secretary of Miami-Dade’s Republican Party was filled with racist slurs and antisemitic comments by FIU students, but so far the school has yet to take any action against them. One of those students, Ethan Ratchkauskas, is suing the school on First Amendment grounds after saying someone had to “swiss cheese that professor,” later clarifying that he meant shooting them full of holes.

Courtney Williams was one of the whistleblowers who spoke to a journalist about sexual harassment and discrimination at Fort Bragg in the 2010s. The Justice Department just arrested her, claiming she revealed sensitive information.

The BBC goes through all of the insider trading allegations against Trump, his family members, and his Cabinet.

Most of the stories about former Virginia Lt. Gov Justin Fairfax (D)’s murder of his wife and subsequent suicide were about him. CNN profiled Cerina Fairfax, the victim in his case.

Also in the Times, Michael Jackson’s estate is hoping the upcoming hagiography Michael will help restore some of the disgraced singer’s image and thus boost their profits. Of course, if you’ve seen Leaving Neverland, you know exactly why this whole endeavor is disgusting.

Good riddance to Eric Swalwell, whose downfall came about due to the efforts of many women (including some of his victims) who organized themselves online, as detailed by NPR.

Oh, hey, another person President Trump pardoned has gone on to be convicted of sex crimes against children.

The Lancet has an editorial beseeching readers not to forgive people like Jay Bhattacharya and Marty Makary, ostensible scientists who sold their souls to Trump and have peddled misinformation that will set public health efforts back for decades.

It appears that the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which traces its origins to 1786, will continue publishing after all, as the nonprofit institute that owns the Baltimore Banner is buying the paper. Block Communications, owned by the Block family, had decided to shut the paper down rather than abide by federal labor court rulings against their unfair labor practices.

The same white supremacist behind the 2023 Supreme Court ruling that knocked down affirmative action in college admissions is now targeting the Congressional Black Caucus’ scholarship program for Black students. Hell isn’t hot enough for people who want to roll us back to the days after Reconstruction.

A worker died during his shift at an Amazon warehouse in Oregon earlier this month. His co-workers were told to ignore his body and keep working.

Mother Jones details the Trump Administration’s potential ‘nuclear bomb’ to stop all gender-affirming care for trans youths. I’m not sure if Monday’s federal court ruling vacating the Kennedy Declaration changes what’s in this story.

Senegal just passed a law doubling the penalty for same-sex relationships, while also criminalizing “promoting” or “financing” LGBT relationships. The bill passed the West African nation’s legislature with no votes against it.

The Texas A&M professor who was told by that fake university’s Board of Regents that he couldn’t teach a portion of Plato’s Symposium because of the school’s new censorship regime spoke to The Chronicle of Higher Education about his decision to resign.

Traffic to publishers from social media is plummeting, particularly from Facebook and Twitter.

AI-driven accounts promoting Trump and/or conservative politicians are popping up all over TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and Youtube.

A Missouri cop who killed a 2-year-old girl while working as a SWAT team sniper is now a Missouri State Highway Patrol trooper. Keaton Siebenaler has never faced any consequences for firing at a silhouette during a hostage situation, which is how he ended up killing Clesslynn Crawford during a standoff between her father and police.

Quined Games’ reprinting of Rudiger Dorn’s Goa is up on Gamefound right now. I owned it, and played it, but it didn’t quite do it for me – at least not to the level of its reputation.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, artificial intelligence, board game news, frauds, harvard, immigration, lgbt rights, links, longreads, metoo, missouri, pittsburgh, police, social media, stick to baseball, texas, the swamp, trans rights

→ April 12, 2026
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/12/26.

For subscribers to the Athletic this week, I posted my ranking of the top 50 prospects for this year’s draft, although unfortunately one of them, Jacob Dudan, is now undergoing Tommy John surgery. He threw 110+ pitches five times in his last six starts, after throwing just 30 innings last year as a reliever. I’m sure that’s just a coincidence. If I added another name, it would be Virginia Tech’s Brett Renfrow or Arkansas’ Ryder Helfrick.

I swear I’ll get a newsletter out next – I’ve had a mad week of travel, so I’ve had very little time to just sit and write freely.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: By now, you’ve probably seen the New York Times piece that claims that Satoshi, the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin, is actually a British cryptographer named Adam Back. I have some issues with the article, particularly the way it centers the author’s search and feelings rather than Satoshi/Back or why finding him might be important, but in general I think it’s an excellent piece of reporting. (And I have no opinion on whether he’s right.)
Two Congresspersons from Arizona conducted a surprise inspection of an ICE concentration camp there and found the detainees packed “like sardines,” with rooms meant for 24 people holding up to 40, no beds, and no showers. Anyone responsible for this should be put on trial, with life in prison the sentence for anyone found guilty for creating, carrying out, or enabling this inhumane treatment.

The online left is, unfortunately, also prone to believing in conspiracy theories. Brandy Zarozny details one of them, a man named Sascha Riley who has been pushing a fantastical (and probably delusional) tale that, as a child, he was sexually assaulted by several prominent Republicans, including the current President. Riley seems to be unwell, making this all kind of sad beyond just the maddening aspect of people believing so ardently in something untrue.

Four women have come forward to accuse Rep. Eric Swalwell (D), also a candidate for Governor of California, of sexually assaulting them. Several Democrats have called on him to end his campaign, but I have yet to see a single one calling on him to resign from Congress – which he needs to do.

NPR has a wonderful, interactive piece on life on Tristan da Cunha, the world’s most isolated inhabited place.

Washington state has held a man with an intellectual disability in inhumane conditions for 23 years, all for a crime he can’t understand. He’s been assaulted and bullied by other prisoners and residents of the house where he lived on conditional release at one point.

The Times also ran a positive profile of an AI-driven startup that’s peddling GLP-1s and other prescription drugs – but that company is doing so with fake ads and other very sketchy practices that the original story didn’t mention, according to this exposé by Futurism’s Maggie Harrison Dupré. Medvi is just a pill mill that may be violating FDA rules as well, which is noted now in a correction below the original article.

Trump’s Health and Human Services Department is funneling millions of dollars in taxpayer money to so-called “pregnancy crisis centers,” anti-abortion facilities that are nearly always backed by Christian groups.

Former Republican Senator Ben Sasse, who has stage 4 pancreatic cancer, spoke to the Times’ Ross Douthat about the disease and his choice to be so public about his journey. I don’t wish this fate on anyone. I also don’t think it exempts him from answering for, say, opposing efforts to fight climate change or fighting against LGBTQ+ or reproductive rights. Indeed, isn’t that the time to ask questions like that? Would you do anything differently? Are you thinking less about the here and now and more about the world you’re leaving behind?

The right-wing news outlet Dallas Express ran smear stories about the minor child of a Democratic Texas state rep under a fake byline. It’s just another example of how dark money has poisoned the online information ecosystem.

Author Alex Preston used an LLM to write a book review that was published in The New York Times, and he got caught. The Times has dropped him as a freelancer. Also, write your own shit, people.

The Department of Defense sent U.S. soldiers into harm’s way in Kuwait ahead of the Iranian missile attack that killed six service members and injured 30, and they were totally unprepared for the strike, according to survivors – directly contradicting the lie put out by Pete Hegseth.

The Chronicle of Higher Education interviews historian and law professor Dr. Annette Gordon-Reed about her new book and, more salient to us, how the right’s attacks on education and historical research are designed to lead academics and writers to self-censor.

An editorial in the National Catholic Reporter states quite clearly that Catholics who support this Administration are choosing between complicity in the war on Iran, with its attacks on civilian infrastructure and vulgar, hateful language towards the Muslim nation, or the true tenets of their faith. The Administration has couched the war on Christian nationalist rhetoric, but there is no squaring that with the nonviolent Christ of the Bible.

Board game news: Bitewing has a new Kickstarter for two more games in its travel-sized game series, Arribada and Seagrass.

I’ve never played Ostia, which is on the heavier side and has also been hard to find in the U.S., but folks are excited that Crafty Games is going to publish/distribute a fresh edition this fall.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: artificial intelligence, board game news, california, carceral state, conspiracy theories, iran, links, longreads, metoo, religion, stick to baseball, texas

→ April 4, 2026
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/4/26.

I’ve been traveling like mad lately; this is the first weekend I’ve been home both Friday and Saturday nights since the Super Bowl. That’s put a damper on any posting here, and of course makes me a little anxious about getting started again because doing so seems overwhelming. Some of the links below are as much as a month old.

Here are some of my most recent posts at the Athletic: I interviewed Bill White on his career and the announcement that he’s the latest Buck O’Neil Award recipient; I wrote up a draft scouting notebook on a bunch of mostly high school players I saw in mid- to late March, as well as USC lefty Mason Edwards; I did my annual predictions posts, including the full standings and the player awards; and I wrote up what I saw at the Arizona Breakout Games, including Brewers-A’s, White Sox-Dodgers (with 27 walks), Mariners-Brewers, Reds-Giants, and Guardians-Angels (plus some Rockies back fields notes). The record-setting heat in Arizona pushed some game times around, so I ended up seeing one fewer game than expected, missing Padres-Cubs from my original plan. I appeared on The Athletic Show to kick off the MLB season.

At AV Club, I reviewed the worker-placement game Skara Brae (no relation to The Bard’s Tale series); the polyomino tile placement game Wispwood; and the light set-collection game Sanibel, from the designer of Wingspan.

My newsletter is next up on my to-do list, followed by a new music playlist.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: You probably saw McKay Coppins’ piece in The Atlantic (not my employer) on his year as a ‘degenerate’ gambler, where the magazine gave him $10,000 to bet on sports and write a story about it. He’s a Mormon and even sort-of-kind-of got permission from one of their leaders. My one quibble with the piece, which is very good, is that it’s very different when it’s not your money.
A writer for the Times of Israel wrote about how gamblers on Polymarket were sending him death threats if he didn’t change the facts in a story he published on an Iranian missile strike.
Marco Rubio’s college chum and longtime associate David Rivera, a former Congressman himself, is now on trial for lobbying for Nicholas Maduro’s Venezuelan government. Rubio testified last week against his “former” friend.
The Guardian spoke to Iranians after the US bombed oil depots, filling the air there with toxic fumes and blotting out the sun in the middle of the day.
A Project 2025 offshoot laid out plans for Trump to use the U.S. military on our own soil to create a new, shadow law-enforcement regime reporting directly to the lawless president.
WIRED has the story of two crypto bros hatched a scheme to allow people to buy shares of homes, but then left the houses they bought to fall apart, leading to a lawsuit from the city of Detroit.
ProPublica explains how RFK Jr. and his fellow vaccine denialists are ushering in a new era of (preventable) plagues. Many, many children are going to die horrible deaths because of that man, and by extension because of Trump. And our hospitals aren’t ready for even the rising tide of measles cases, let alone, say, a diphtheria epidemic.
The Frontier, in a joint effort with ProPublica, exposes how Oklahoma regulators found hundreds of oil wells that were violating state laws on disposing of the toxic byproducts of drilling – and then they did absolutely nothing about it. Oklahoma might be the worst state to live in right now, given what they’re doing to the environment, their educational system, and the rights of anyone who’s not a white Christian man.
I stay off Twitter except to post links, but when I was still somewhat active there, one of the most prominent and vile anti-vaxxers and misinformation purveyors was William Makis, a former doctor in Canada who has been accused of sexual harassment, animal abuse, threatening co-workers, and … well, you can see for yourself. He’s currently making over a half a million dollars a year via his Substack, selling bogus cancer treatments to desperate people, and is currently under a civil contempt order in Canada for providing medications like ivermectin and fenbendazole, both of which are primarily for animal use and do not treat cancer, without a license.
The Administration blamed AI for the fact that we bombed a school in Iran, but the truth is that this was the outcome of years of human decisions, including the choice to move targeting decisions from a team of experts to a handful of humans using software the working of which they didn’t understand.
A Texas librarian writes about her fight against the book-banning lunatics of Moms for Liberty.
A rare feel-good story around these parts: A woman who was abandoned as an infant in a parking lot in the Cleveland area reunited with the two women who found her.
Guards at the largest ICE concentration camp took bets on which prisoner would be the next to commit suicide.
And a measles outbreak at an ICE concentration camp in Texas has now spilled over into the surrounding community.
An NIH whistleblower wrote in STAT News that scientists need to step up their activism, not reduce it.
Grammarly added a “feature” that used the names and identities of living writers, including several writers at The Verge, to provide AI-generated advice to users – but without those writers’ permission. Grammarly removed the feature pretty quickly, and their CEO ended up talking to The Verge about the whole thing, somewhat combatively.
More in “AI sucks” news: Police in North Dakota used an AI facial recognition app to arrest a woman from Tennessee and put her in jail for five months even though she had never set foot in North Dakota or committed the crimes of which she was accused. She had to prove she’d been elsewhere at the time – the onus was on her, not the garbage AI app, not the police department that used it.
Even more “AI sucks” news: AI-driven lawsuits are clogging up the courts, especially suits where people represent themselves and use LLMs to write their legal arguments.
The final “AI sucks” story of this week is actually a longread: The Guardian talks to several people who ruined their lives – marriages, careers, finances – because they started talking to an AI chatbot and became deluded that it was real.
Several Republican members of Congress have made virulent anti-Muslim comments, including Randy Fine (FL, where else) and Andy Ogles (TN), but Mike Johnson couldn’t even bring himself to condemn the statements. Absolute moral bankruptcy, to say nothing of his vacuous Christianity.
Speaking of fake Christians, Pete Hegseth’s pastor – his fucking pastor – said he wants Texas state Rep. James Talarico to die. I may not be a Christian any more, but I grew up one, and I’ve read that book. This ain’t in it.
Trump pardoned a man now sentenced to prison for an “enormous child pornography collection.” Daniel Tocci was a January 6^th insurrectionist, pardoned by Trump, and now heading back to jail on the CSAM charges.
Covered up by the U.S. war on Iran and other conflicts is the increase in Israeli colonizer violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.
Israel passed a law mandating the death penalty for people convicted of lethal acts of terrorism … oh, no, it only applies to Palestinians. What is the word for a legal system that has different laws for different ethnic groups?
WIRED also has a story from a Gaza hospital, Al-Shifa, where doctors are still begging and smuggling in medical supplies while trying to treat old and new victims of Israel’s war.
Cheaper, easier-to-use solar panels are coming soon, so of course U.S. utility companies are fighting to delay laws making this possible.
A Belgian diplomat may go on trial for his role in the U.S.-backed assassination of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. The Democratic Republic of the Congo has been plagued by instability, dictatorships, and both civil and regional wars since the death of its only truly freely elected leader.
ICE dumped a blind Rohingya refugee on the streets of Buffalo without contacting his family or his lawyer. He later froze to death, and the county has ruled it a homicide.
Both Politico (unsurprising) and the NY Times laundered misinformation from a right-wing fake-news site called the Midwesterner. This type of outlet is often called ‘pink slime,’ and it’s been around at least since 2020, with websites that look and sound like legitimate newspapers but are in fact astroturfed and nearly always far-right ops.
InfoWars, the conspiracy-spouting site owned by Alex Jones, is shutting down, but its legacy won’t die until Trump and his movement are finished.
Buried by (waves hands frantically) everything is the news of a woman from South Carolina who accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in 1984. The Post and Courier looked at public records to verify some aspects of her story, although none relating to the specific claim about the president.
Also forgotten already is that claim that there’s a ranch in New Mexico where Epstein and his allies buried the bodies of two sex-trafficking victims.
A trans man in Idaho wrote about how the state’s new law banning trans people from using the correct bathrooms forces him to choose between the threat of jail or the threat of violence.
Meanwhile, the IOS just caved to the trans panic with a new rule that isn’t based in sound science and will unfairly target intersex people too.
A federal judge in Texas ruled that nine protestors who were demonstrating outside an ICE facility were guilty of “providing material support for terrorism” – even though they did nothing but protest.
Activists with the group Dare to Struggle say that L.A. police broke a teenaged protestor’s shin during the No Kings protests last weekend.
You’ll find a god in every golden oyster … except that these golden oyster mushrooms are crowding out native species in North American forests.
Mathematicians may have partially answered a 2000-year-old question about how many rational points a single curve can contain, as a new preprint puts an upper limit on the number of these points, where both x and y are rational numbers, that any curve can have.
The crowdfunding effort for the two-player game The Glasgow Train Robbery has just a few days left. It’s a cooperative game, and one of the two designers was a co-designer of the amazing Lacrimosa, along with two games currently on my shelf of shame (The Battle of Versailles, Take a Seat).
Awaken Realms is putting out a new special edition of Concordia, a top 50 all-time game for me and on BGG, but after early images showing AI art led to review-bombing on that site, the publisher announced they won’t use AI art in the final product.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: artificial intelligence, board game news, christianity, crypto, environment, frauds, gambling, gaza, immigration, iran, israel, links, longreads, mathematics, scams, social media, stick to baseball, texas, the swamp, vaccines

→ February 21, 2026
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/21/26.

I was on PTO from Wednesday to Wednesday, so I haven’t written anything new on the Athletic in nearly two weeks. I’ll begin draft content this upcoming week.

Over at AV Club, I reviewed two smaller games with surprising depth and complexity for their size in Oddland and Neko Syndicate.

I appeared on Sox Machine to talk about the White Sox’ farm system and a little more about Colson Montgomery.

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

And now, the links…

ProPublica got a hold of letters written by children being held in one of ICE’s concentration camps. The camp’s Schutzstaffel responded by raiding the facility to destroy any further missives. Meanwhile, a group of pediatricians wrote about the harm that ICE detentions are already doing to children. Remember that when anyone tells you they’re concerned about, say, what bathroom a person uses because of “the children.”

The American Prospect’s Ryan Cooper explains why Democrats should defund ICE and CBP permanently. The Nation’s Andrea Ritchie says essentially the same thing.

ICE agents zip-tied a 14-year-old girl in Idaho in October during one of their ‘raids.’ She is a U.S. citizen, but that’s beside the point.

Futurism’s Maggie Harrison Dupré has been all over the harms propagated by the AI sector and the amoral actors pushing the technology. Her latest piece looks at how ChatGPT is fueling and encouraging stalkers, because these LLMs are nothing more than compliment machines – they tell you what you want to hear. Well, that, and plagiarism.

The Guardian exposes just how Substack profits from all the neo-Nazi content it hosts.

A new study published in Nature found that X/Twitter users who had the For You feed turned on saw their political views shift to the right, but turning it off did not move them back towards the left (or center).

The Heritage Foundation published a “roadmap” for the country that is really a playbook for a Christian nationalist future; Jessica Valenti exposes this under the headline “they’re coming for our daughters.” I can’t describe the Heritage Foundation’s worldview as anything other than sick. It is a diseased way of looking at women and humanity as a whole.

Israeli settlers shot and killed an American in the West Bank. No one will do anything about this.

The far-right elites in Texas are backing MAGA candidate Don Huffines for state comptroller as he promises to “DOGE Texas government.”

Meanwhile, the self-immolation of Texas’ public universities continues, as UT-Austin is consolidating four departments relating to Black, Latino, and women’s studies, a move that appears motivated by ideology; and all University of Texas schools now must limit discussion of “controversial topics” in the classroom. I wonder who decides what is “controversial.”

I am shocked, shocked to note that cryptocurrency is now being used to facilitate human trafficking.

A brainwashed mother in South Carolina whose unvaccinated son is hospitalized with complications from the measles told The Independent that she still wouldn’t vaccinate him. There is no risk from vaccines even close to what that poor kid has already suffered, and what he’ll suffer in the future if he survives.

The FDA’s site removed pages that exposed fake autism treatments like MMO (bleach) and raw camel milk.

However, the FDA’s thoroughly unqualified leader Vinay Prasad reversed course and will now review Moderna’s mRNA-based flu vaccine. I wonder what pushback got to him; I suspect it wasn’t the public outcry, but the business one.

Why is Prasad unqualified? Well, for one thing, he’s already facing sexual harassment accusations, and is making us taxpayers pay over $65,000 a year for him to commute from California to DC. And he’s only been on the job for 9 months.

Oklahoma’s radical Gov. J. Kevin Stitt (R) says he will eliminate tenure at most public colleges in his state, a great move for a state widely ranked in the bottom five for education.

Also in Oklahoma, a man speaking out at Claremore City Council meeting against the construction of a new data center was arrested – not stopped, but fucking arrested – for going a few seconds over his allotted time.

There’s some real evidence that Putin murdered dissident Alexei Navalny … and it barely made a dent in the news this week.

The Lemoneads’ Evan Dando is a creep.

Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL) has taken up MTG’s mantle as the most overtly racist member of Congress; he has a challenger this fall in Democrat Jennifer Jenkins, who has a history of calling out Fine’s bigoted language and rhetoric. I knew Fine in college; I thought he was pretentious, but if he held these views back then I didn’t know it.

Harvard took a $350 million gift from Gerald Chan, the second-largest in the university’s history, and then named their school of public health after his father. Chan had a close relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Harvard physics professor Lisa Randall is also all over the Epstein files. I’ve seen some comments that mere association with Epstein, especially for scientists (given his interest in patronizing scientific research), shouldn’t be a capital offense; I might be sympathetic to that perspective if any of these assholes owned up to schmoozing with the convicted sex offender before their names appeared.

At Salon, Andi Zeisler writes that academics who communicated and fraternized with Epstein may not be criminals, but they did so in pursuit of a shared vision of a world where only certain people (men, mostly) were worthy of attaining knowledge and the status that comes with it.

The same folks who were all about “free speech” and talking about opposing cancel culture have been dead silent as the Trump Administration attempts to quell free speech by demanding that social media platforms reveal the identities of users who criticized ICE. Maybe it wasn’t actually about free speech after all.

Defector’s Patrick Redford wrote how Eileen Gu will never be the ‘traitor’ that J.D. Vance and other nationalist nitwits are calling her.

Astronomers might have seen a star in the Andromeda Galaxy become a black hole.

The delightful folks at Flatout Games have a new Kickstarter up for two smaller games, Forage and Honeypot.

Two minor scandals in the gaming world from the last two weeks: Dice Tower contributor Sam Healey resigned from the site – claiming God told him to step away or some other non-apology nonsense – after he said that Alex Pretti and Renée Good were to blame for being murdered; and Alderac (AEG) COO Ryan Dancey, who has left a trail of messes and controversies behind him in his three decades in the industry, was forced out by CEO John Zinser after Dancey posted a pro-AI and very anti-designers rant on LinkedIn. Hey, I guess something good did come out of that site!

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ai, astronomy, board game news, christian nationalism, education, florida, harvard, immigration, israel, links, longreads, measles, oklahoma, russia, social media, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines

→ February 10, 2026
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/10/26.

The top 100 index page is here, with links to all 30 team reports and everything else in the package. If you’re looking for the highlights, you can go right to the top 100 prospects, the prospects who just missed the top 100, and my ranking of all 30 farm systems, as well as the Q&As I did on top 100 day and this past Monday.

Over at AV Club, I reviewed the small-box game Point Galaxy, a sequel game to Point Salad; and Knitting Circle, a lighter game with a similar theme and art to Calico.

My free email newsletter is back as well, and you should sign up for more of me.

I appeared on the Detroit News’ Tigers Today podcast to talk about Detroit’s loaded farm system; on Friar Territory to talk about what’s left in the Padres’ system; on the JD Bunkis Show to discuss the state of the Jays’ system after their World Series run; and on Halo Territory to talk about the Angels’ system and why it’s so bad.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Texas Monthly looks at the meltdown – or self-immolation – at Texas A&M. The Republicans who run the state are going to ruin their public universities to the point where they don’t get the same kind of out-of-state interest that helps add revenue to the system.
Grub Street looks at the decline of the veganism movement in the restaurant world (and our tables). I’m not vegan, or vegetarian, but eating more plants is clearly better for our health and that of the planet.
Deadline doesn’t mince words in its headline about Disney’s new CEO choice: “Dana Walden Expands Oversight To Film in New Role As Media Glass Ceiling Remains Intact.”
That was not Liam Conejo Ramos in Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show; he is in hiding with his family and still traumatized from being kidnapped by ICE.
Writing in Vanity Fair, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about the white nationalist movement that led to the murders of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti.
ProPublica named the two ICE employees who killed Pretti.
Meanwhile, a comedy club in St. Paul cancelled an upcoming series of shows by a comedian who made vile, hateful comments about Renée Nicole Good, and CAA is threatening to sue the bar over it. Maybe CAA should drop Ben Bankas instead.
Why do ICE agents wear masks? So it’s easier for them to violate our Constitutional rights. Duh.
Jonathan Haidt is making bank by running around telling anyone who’ll listen that social media is wrecking the current generation of kids. Two new studies undermine his claims, as the evidence of harm just isn’t strong enough.
The Israel Defense Force accepted the Gaza Health Ministry’s estimate of 71,000 Gazans killed in Israel’s war on the Palestinian territory.
Saudi Arabia is pulling back plans for its new city project Neom, which included the especially bizarre project known as The Line (apparently now dead).
The mass-market paperback is going extinct. What a gigantic shame; I understand the economics of it, in general, but the lower price point can get more people into books or new authors or new-to-them genres, and the smaller form factor is a godsend to people who travel and or just love to stuff a book in a pocket.
Members of our military have reported that their commanding officers are mandating that they go see the fawning ‘documentary’ Melania.
Harvard is, again, all over the Epstein files, including the campus Jewish center Harvard Hillel soliciting donations from Jeffrey Epstein after his 2008 conviction for child sex trafficking.
Yale isn’t faring much better; computer science professor David Gelertner recommended a graduate student to Epstein by praising her looks, and he defended those messages to the dean of the school’s engineering department. Meanwhile, Yale sociologist Nicholas Christakis also seems to have been rather cozy with the convicted sex offender.
I prefer the original headline for this op ed by Molly Jong-Fast, which called Jeffrey Epstein “the devil’s concierge.”
Physicists sort of turned lead into gold at the Large Hadron Collider, smashing lead atoms into each other at such high speeds that a few spit out exactly three protons, which made them gold atoms. Others spit out one proton, making thallium, or two, making mercury, but that’s hardly as fun.
Agrovoltaic canopies – solar panels installed above crops to protect them from excessive sunlight and heat – increased crop yields and reduced water loss in trials in France.
The Burn It All Down podcast has a Kickstarter up to try to fund a return of the show, which features two people I’ve met (Jessica Luther and Lindsay Gibbs) and another I know from the site formerly known as Twitter (Shireen Ahmed). The show is about feminism in sports, and feminism and sports, and women’s sports, and men’s sports through a feminist lens. I don’t understand the podcasting space; it seems like it’s just getting overrun by celebrities with podcasts and nothing interesting to say.
There have been a slew of new boardgame crowdfunding efforts in the last three weeks. Here’s a list:
- Stellar Ventures, a heavy, 150-minute game for 3-5 players about space exploration for fun and profit. I know one of the publishers and have a prototype (yes, I need to play it) and have gotten a demo, and I think it looks pretty fantastic, even though it’s about as heavy a game as I typically play.
- A second edition of Logic & Lore, one of the best games I saw at Gen Con last year, along with a brand new expansion.
- Red Leaf University, a midweight worker-placement game co-designed by Adrian Adamescu, who co-designed Sagrada.
- LODGE, a small spatial-puzzle game from the designer of Tiny Towns and Wormholes. I’ve played this on BGA; the game is very good but I hate the art.
- Gold Country, yet another game from Reiner Knizia, based loosely on his 2012 game Spectaculum.
- Tinctura, a worker-placement game about apothecaries in the 18^th/19^th centuries where players gather ingredients and fulfill contracts.
- Spirited, a hand-management and set collection game co-designed by Shem Phillips (Raiders of the North Sea, Architects of the West Kingdom).
The BBC podcast Witness History has an 11-minute episode on the creation of the game Catan.
And finally, for the August 2024 issue of newsletter-magazine Wyrd Science, Dan Thurot spoke to the designers of three politically-themed board games about incorporating real politics and history into tabletop play, including Tory Brown, designer of the fantastic Votes for Women.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, books, climate change, epstein, gaza, harvard, immigration, links, longreads, physics, podcast, social media, stick to baseball, texas, vegan

→ January 24, 2026
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/24/26.

I wrote two pieces for the Athletic this week, breaking down the MacKenzie Gore trade and the Freddy Peralta trade. My top 100 prospects ranking runs on Monday.

At AV Club, I reviewed the board game Gingham, a family-level game of area control that gets very tense as the game approaches its end.

I sent out an issue of my free email newsletter last weekend, but the next one won’t go out until at least Monday, for obvious reasons.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: My colleague Paul Tenorio wrote about the kidnapping of soccer coach Adrian Heath, as he was lured by the promise of a lucrative job with a Saudi club. The club exists, but the job didn’t, and Heath was lucky to survive the ordeal.

The New Yorker exposes Bari Weiss’s “hostile takeover” at CBS News, which has been a ratings and credibility disaster.

In Harper’s, Jasper Craven writes about the impending sports betting cataclysm, with the added perspective from a habitual sports bettor – himself.

ICE officials claim their agents can enter homes without a warrant, a clear violation of the Fourth Amendment. And this story just sort of drifted by as Trump and his toadies continue to flood the zone with so many outrages that we can’t keep up.

Black pepper and olive oil contain chemicals that may help our bodies absorb nutrients in other foods. I use both of those ingredients constantly, so I will live forever.

Researchers at the Kiel Institute found that American taxpayers paid 96% of the added costs of Trump’s tariffs, calling it an “own goal.”

A new European social network called W is coming, maybe, although I’m not sure what this offers that other alternatives to the deepfake porn site formerly known as Twitter.

The White House used AI to make a civil rights attorney appear to be crying when she was arrested when, in fact, she was quite stoic at the event. She was part of a group protesting at a church whose pastor is the acting director at a local ICE office in St. Paul.

Cochise County (Arizona) Sheriff Mark Dannels, a Trump sycophant, has used his public office to promote a private drone company with a Trump crony on its board. The Phoenix New Times had previously reported on how Dannels may have gotten up to $250,000 in slush money from ICE.

Cows can use tools, if we let them. I for one welcome our new bovine overlords!

Allplay has a Kickstarter up for the Mountain Goats legacy game and the solo game Enchanted Ivy. I like Mountain Goats as a fun, quick-playing filler game.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, artificial intelligence, board game news, gambling, links, longreads, science, soccer, social media, stick to baseball, taxes

→ January 17, 2026
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/17/21.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I had three pieces this week, on the Cubs’ signing of Alex Bregman, the Yankees’ trade for Ryan Weathers, and the three-team trade between the Rays, Reds, and Angels. I am primarily working on the prospect rankings, which are scheduled to start running on January 26^th.

For the AV Club, I reviewed Iliad, a fantastic new two-player game from Reiner Knizia that made my top ten for 2025.

I am about to hit send on the next edition of my free email newsletter. It was almost done, then I set it aside for a moment, which turned into five days.

I have many links this week to pieces in the New York Times, which I often do because I assume many of you have access to those with your Athletic subscriptions (if you have the bundle). I believe the Times in general produces some of the best journalism in the country. I do not endorse all of the views printed in the paper; I just work there.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The outgoing governor of Virginia, Glenn Youngkin (R), and the board that oversees the University of Virginia appear to have rushed through the appointment of a new President, even though that candidate, Scott Beardsley, appears to have fabricated or embellished large parts of his resume, according to the Augusta Free Press. After that ran, over 200 faculty members signed a letter to the board saying that the appointment should not stand.

The so-called “peace” deal between Israel and Gaza is a fiction, as Israel continues to demolish Gaza one building at a time, according to a New York Times investigative report.

The Times also profiled NPR CEO Katherine Maher, who has chosen to fight back against Republicans’ attacks on the public-radio institution and even taken the Trump Administration to court, although some other public-radio figures disagree with her tactics.

America, a magazine published by the Jesuits, published a scathing piece on the attempts by the Administration and its toadies to demonize murder victim Renee Nicole Good, just as the Reagan Administration did with the four nuns raped and killed by the right-wing government of El Salvador in 1980.

The Texas Observer exposed four businesses operating in North Texas with ties to the neo-Nazi Patriot Front.

The Trump Administration demanded that UPenn send them detailed personal information on all Jewish professors, students, and staff members. If this doesn’t make you think of Nazi Germany, I really can’t help you.

The suspect in the arson attack against a Mississippi synagogue told the judge at his arraignment that “Jesus Christ is Lord” and said to investigators that the building was “a synagogue of Satan.” So who radicalized him? Can we deport him to Vatican City?

Those “alt” government accounts on social media that popped up during Trump’s first term always looked like grifters, not actual government employees trying to leak information. The Alt National Park Service one is the worst of the lot, and certainly not authentic in any sense of the word.

A new documentary looks at Jeff Smith, the Frugal Gourmet, a celebrity chef from the days prior to social media who turned out to be a serial sexual predator who likely assaulted dozens of young boys.

The notoriously left-wing Wall Street Journal exposes how RFK Jr. is cozying up to supplement makers, who peddle unproven and sometimes dangerous remedies that aren’t subject to the same safety and efficacy requirements as prescription medicines.

A white nationalist who praised the Nazis’ use of concentration camps has flipped from Republican to Democrat to try to capture a Congressional seat in California. Kyle Langford posted a picture of himself last year at Auschwitz and called it his “0% unemployment plan.”

I came across this March 2025 story from the Times about the Norwegian black metal band Mayhem, as I saw they have a new album, Liturgy of Death, coming out in February. The article is a heck of a read, and treats the band – who have released just seven albums over 35 years due to suicide, murder, controversies (to put it mildly), breakups – as a sort of counterculture icon. It doesn’t mention that at least one of the current members, longtime drummer Hellhammer has voiced indisputably racist and homophobic views, which I find very hard to understand given that it’s hardly a secret.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-semitism, california, gaza, immigration, links, longreads, mississippi, Music, scams, social media, virginia

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