longreads — Page 13

→ May 23, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/23/21.

I had one post this past week for subscribers to the Athletic, breaking down the four-player trade between Milwaukee and Tampa Bay along with the implications for Wander Franco, Taylor Walls, and Luis Urías. I also held a Klawchat on Friday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Cryo, a really engaging new worker-placement game from the designers of Manhattan Project: Energy Empire, where resources are always limited and you have to build your board to maximize your resource collection.

If you’d like to buy The Inside Game and support my board game habit, Midtown Scholar has a few signed copies still available. You can also buy it from any of the indie stores in this twitter thread, all of whom at least had the book in stock earlier this month. If none of those works, you can find it on Bookshop.org and at Amazon.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul, & Mary received a Presidential pardon from Jimmy Carter for a charge of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl. It turns out that she was far from his only victim.
There’s a tradition in Alabama where sheriffs who lose elections waste a whole shitload of taxpayer money to make things harder for their successors, because Alabama is apparently some sort of developing-world dictatorship.
The BBC looks at “infinite plastic,” efforts to use chemistry to break down plastics back into a form of oil, which would make any plastic materials recyclable – even things like sandwich bags that contain multiple different types of plastic and can’t be recycled directly into new plastics.
Nik Sharma looks at the science behind vegan meringues, made from the liquid in canned chickpeas, for Serious Eats.
If staying at home with the kids (rather than working) is so wonderful, why don’t more men do it? Jessica Valenti explores the manipulation going on in the wake of a pandemic that has disproportionately hurt women in the workforce.
Saturday Night Live‘s sketch parodying the Muppets was embarassingly bad. A bunch of people thought the actual Muppets were part of the sketch.
COVID denialists have pounced on a CDC data set that they claim shows an increased incidence of suicides under age 18 during lockdowns. They are being disingenuous, at best, or are outright lying.
Justice Elena Kagan has had about enough of Brett Kavanaugh’s judicial activism. I still want to know who paid off his credit card debts.
A Missouri lawyer, who represented the gun-toting bigots who got famous for standing courageously on their front porch, drew fire this week for derogatory comments about people with autism and people with disabilities.
In Texas, where The Cruelty Is the Point, it is about to become almost impossible for a woman to exercise her right to abort a pregnancy. This Twitter thread elucidates just how cruel that law will be in practice.
Ethiopia expelled a New York Times reporter who’d written about the regime’s extensive human rights abuses in Tigray.
The BBC World Service looks at Africans who were forced to speak English growing up and now face an identity crisis of sorts when they find themselves unable to speak their native languages.
Two great pieces on the Yankees’ Corey Kluber in the wake of his no-hitter this week: my colleague Lindsey Adler on the development of his arsenal, and the New York Post‘s Dan Martin on what Yankees’ scouts saw in Kluber to convince the team to sign him.
The Onion, always on point.
Board game news: Brew is now available for pre-order from Pandasaurus Games.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, alabama, board game news, Cooking, links, longreads, metoo, missouri, stick to baseball

→ May 16, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/16/21.

I’ve had three posts up in the last week for subscribers to the Athletic: my ranking of the top 100 prospects for this year’s MLB Draft; a special Q&A about that ranking; and a post on my trip to see Vanderbilt and Alabama, when Jack Leiter was a very late scratch for his start. He did pitch yesterday and his velocity was completely normal.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Flourish, a new, quick-playing card game from the designers of Everdell.

For more of me, you can subscribe to my free email newsletter, which will return this week (tomorrow, I hope).

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Dyatlov Pass mystery may have a very mundane, anti-climactic solution.
The headline here doesn’t really summarize the article, but musicians are organizing to try to fight the vice grip Spotify has on the industry.
Policymakers ignored the United States’ near-total lack of child care infrastructure until the pandemic exposed this massive economic weakness. If you want to grow the economy, you need affordable child care.
The CDC’s statistic that “less than 10 percent” of COVID-19 transmission occurred outdoors is probably wildly misleading. The actual rate might be 1/100^th of that.
Adolescents can finally get their COVID-19 vaccines! My daughter got her first dose less than 24 hours after the approval came through. Her only complaint afterwards was two days of a sore shoulder. Go get your kids the shot.
Facebook deplatformed an Ohio-based anti-vaccine group, and then did the same to Erin Elizabeth, a major anti-vaccine wacko who is partners with longtime quack Joseph Mercola.
Activists opposed to syringe exchanges are just bizarre, but their work may lead a major success story in Indiana, which helped end an HIV outbreak, to close.
If the West Antarctic Ice Shelf collapses, the rise in sea levels will be 30% higher than originally thought.
The Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth may be misusing data from students’ electronic devices to accuse those students of cheating.
Frank Abagnale authored a best-selling memoir that became the movie Catch Me If You Can. It turns out that his story is probably a big hoax.
The cicadas are coming, so of course some folks suggest eating them.
Former UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s defence against a charge of improper lobbying is that he was undone by autocorrect. The lede here is spectacular.
Bari Weiss really took off her mask in a substack post that justified the killing of Palestinian children.
Two good op eds from the Washington Post this week on our current quaqmire: how two men named Joe (Biden & Manchin) hold the future of our democracy in their hands, and why democracy and cults of personality don’t mix.
I know Jonathan Chait’s reputation is … not great, perhaps, but I agree with him on the subject of Rep. Liz Cheney. She can be wrong on many issues, but she is right on Trumpism and the direction of the GOP, and we can acknowledge or even praise the latter without somehow tacitly supporting the former.
The bloated U.S. military budget isn’t just wasteful – its consequences disproportionately harm people of color.
Board game news: Board & Dice, publisher of some of really heavy Euro titles like Teotihuacan and Tekhenu, explained how and under what terms they’re continuing their relationship with designer Daniele Tascini, who made some insensitive comments on race last year. I think it’s a good blueprint for working with someone who might be too quickly ‘cancelled.’

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, climate change, coronavirus, hoaxes, longreads, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ May 1, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/1/21.

I had two posts for subscribers to The Athletic this week, one on how the Rockies’ next GM might start to turn the franchise around, and a draft scouting notebook looking at several day-one candidates, led by Fordham lefty Matt Mikulski.

On the Keith Law Show this week, my guest was MLB Pipeline’s Jim Callis, talking about this year’s MLB draft class. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify. I also appeared on the Athletic Baseball Show on Friday, which will be my regular slot for most of the year.

For more of me, you can subscribe to my free email newsletter.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: One of the many victims of disgraced writer/teacher Blake Bailey came forward to tell how Bailey manipulated and raped her.
Alameda police killed Mario Gonzalez, who was unarmed, by pinning him to the ground for five minutes during an arrest on April 19^th. This is a systemic issue.
CloseCallSports has the best explanation of the obstruction call in Milwaukee that I tried to explain on Twitter, only to have my replies explode with people who didn’t like the call. An umpire can make a call that is technically correct – and Marty Foster’s was, indeed, justified by the rules – but so rarely made that we assume it’s wrong.
Tony LaRussa’s animal welfare nonprofit is plagued by claims of racism and a toxic workplace environment. Between this and his multiple DUIs, LaRussa’s hiring by the White Sox this offseason looks even more suspect. Over at Sox Machine, Jim Margalus talks about some of what LaRussa is doing wrong on the field, too.
West Virginia Governor Jim Justice (R) announced that residents aged 16-35 who get the COVID-19 vaccine will get a $100 savings bond, an ingenious use of the stimulus funding the state has received.
After years of misguided opposition, Florida officials will finally release genetically modified Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, the kind responsible for spreading the Zika virus, dengue fever, chikungunya, and more, to stop the insects’ offspring from surviving into adulthood.
Anti-vaxxers are adopting yellow stars and other symbols of the Holocaust, in case you were wondering how low they would sink in their war against science and rationality.
The official Twitter account for the Auschwitz Museum is pushing revisionist history that absolves Poles of their role in the Holocaust (Haaretz, $ required).
PBS has a new series coming up on May 11^th called Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer, about the extraordinary success of vaccines and other major medical advances that helped double our life expectancy in a century.
Facebook claimed they removed the “Disinformation Dozen,” twelve people responsible for the vast majority of anti-vaccine lies on the internet, but ten of them are still active on the site.
Joe Rogan told his millions of young listeners not to get a COVID-19 vaccine. That is dangerously irresponsible, and he shouldn’t be issuing medical advice.
Julie DiCaro reminds us not to listen to people with obvious conflicts of interest – agents, lawyers, fans – when they try to downplay charges of sexual assault against popular athletes.
Fox News is struggling to “pick a side” when their culture-war takes conflict with the facts, as with two recent manufactured outrage stories that turned out to be false – that Biden would ban or limit meat consumption, and that migrant children were being given Kamala Harris’ book.
The BBC asks why the west neglects a potential superfood source that’s efficient, sustainable, and climate-friendly: insects.
Epicurious revealed that they won’t publish any new beef recipes, part of an effort to encourage more sustainable eating. They stopped publishing those a year ago and they say nobody has noticed.
Conservative writer Gary Abernathy argues that all conservatives should support reparations to Black Americans.
From the National Review, the “Fairness Doctrine” is not the answer to Tucker Carlson’s misinformation.
University researchers appear to have moved and possibly lost the remains of two children killed in Philadelphia’s bombing of its own citizens in 1985, part of a government assault on the MOVE cult.
Deforestation in the amazon has soared under the reactionary Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, devastating native homelands and reducing one of the world’s most important carbon dioxide sinks.
A teacher in Washington State’s Issaquah School District is on administrative leave after parents objected to a poem she used in her anti-racism curriculum
Ashley Feinberg may have found JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon’s secret Instagram and Twitter accounts. Dimon has been accused of misleading investors in the “London Whale” investment disaster and of overseeing a culture of discrimination at his banks.
Board game news: Capstone Games is reissuing the Uwe Rosenberg worker-placement classic Glass Road, and pre-orders are open now at $10 off.
Renegade has a Kickstarter going for the ‘epic mad scientist’ game My Father’s Work, which they say will only be sold through their website once it’s released.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, baseball, board game news, coronavirus, links, longreads, police, racism, stick to baseball, sustainability, vaccines

→ April 24, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/24/21.

I had two posts this week for subscribers to the Athletic. I wrote a draft scouting notebook that focused on Louisville catcher Henry Davis, who might be the best prospect in this class. I also collaborated with Britt Ghiroli to look at the MLB Draft League, which sent out its initial rosters this week and earned negative reviews from scouts and executives. I also held a Klawchat this week.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the Princess Bride Adventure Book Game, a slight but fun co-operative game you can play with your kids or just because you love the movie, to which the game is very faithful.

On the Keith Law Show this week, my guest was our White Sox writer James Fegan, talking about Carlos Rodón, the Yerminator, and more. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify. I also appeared on the Athletic Baseball Show on Friday, which will be my regular slot for most of the year; and on the Sports-Casters podcast, talking about the draft and my second book.

If you’d like to buy The Inside Game and support my board game habit, Midtown Scholar has about a dozen signed copies still available. You can also buy it from any of the indie stores in this twitter thread, all of whom at least had the book in stock earlier this month. If none of those works, you can find it on Bookshop.org and at Amazon.

For more of me, you can subscribe to my free email newsletter.

And now, the links…

Longreads: Vietnam has beaten COVID-19, with just 35 deaths in a country of over 96 million people. They did it with strict travel restrictions even as health experts said those were the wrong policy response.
There’s a movie coming out about Tim Ballard, former CEO of the anti-trafficking group Operation Underground Railroad, but he and his group have a history of exaggerating their feats as well as their (limited) links with law enforcement.
Cops who break the law in New Jersey often avoid prison, even when the crimes they commit should result in time.
Harvard profiled Professor Sandra Susan Smith and her work on the relationship between urban poverty and the prison-industrial complex.
NPR tells the story of the SolarWinds hack, one of the most extensive corporate hacks in history, which went undiscovered for nearly a year even as the company’s compromised software went out to customers.
With vaccination cards come frauds selling (and buying) fake vaccination cards, a crime made easier by sites like eBay refusing to crack down on their sale.
That “Stanford” study saying masks don’t work? Yeah, it’s not a real study, and the author has nothing to do with Stanford. Anti-mask loons lapped it up, though.
An editorial in Nature argues that social media sites should remove accounts that spread anti-vaccine misinformation or face stricter regulation.
A threatened advertiser boycott over Tucker Carlson’s embrace of white supremacist rhetoric hasn’t cooled Fox’s commitment to him.
Republicans who don’t believe in the First Amendment are introducing and passing bills that limit protestors’ rights and remove sanctions for people who hit protestors with their cars. We had a right to peaceable assembly, once.
Minor Figures, a London-based producer of coffee-related products, plastered ads for its new oat milk product all over existing street art in Philadelphia, spurring a backlash from artists and people in those communities.
Shock G, the main MC of Digital Underground who also played the character of Humpty Hump, died this week at age 57. He might be best known for “The Humpty Dance,” but Digital Underground was responsible for many better songs, including their first single, “Doowutchyalike,” and the track “Same Song,” which introduced the world to a 19-year-old rapper named 2Pac.
Jonathan Capeheart wrote in the wake of the Derek Chauvin verdict that being Black in America is exhausting.
President Biden appears to be on the verge of calling the Turkish massacre of Armenians in 1915 a genocide. Here’s what that means in practical terms.
A former producer of deceptively edited right-wing videos explains how he gamed the YouTube algorithm to rack up views and followers.
Board game news: Z-Man Games is putting out a new Carcassonne Big Box to celebrate the game’s 20^th anniversary.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, coronavirus, first amendment, hip hop, links, longreads, philadelphia, social media, stick to baseball, vietnam

→ April 17, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/17/21.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I ranked the top 50 prospects in this year’s MLB draft class, a list I’ll expand to 100 in early May. I had to skip the chat this week due to travel and the two-hour round trip on Thursday to get my first vaccine dose (Pfizer). I’ll do one this week.

On The Keith Law Show this week, I had our Padres beat writer Dennis Lin on to talk about Musgrove’s no-hitter, Tatis Jr.’s injury, and more Padres/NL West news. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify. I also co-host our daily baseball show every Friday, and on this week’s episode we talked about Rodon and a number of pitchers who appear to be on the rise.

I appeared on the Huddle Up with Gus Frerotte podcast to talk about my book The Inside Game, now out in paperback. I also spoke to Chris Phillips, Associate Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon CMU, about The Inside Game in a half-hour conversation for the CMU Alumni Association.

If you’d like to buy The Inside Game and support my board game habit, Midtown Scholar has several signed copies available. You can also buy it from any of the indie stores in this twitter thread, all of whom at least had the book in stock earlier this month. If none of those works, you can find it on Bookshop.org and at Amazon.

For more of me, you can subscribe to my free email newsletter.

Longreads first: This New Yorker post on a suicide cluster at a small Midwestern college, and whether one person who knew all the victims was somehow responsible, is extremely well-reported and written.

The Burmese genocide of the Rohingya is a massive humanitarian tragedy, but there are other consequences to ethnic cleansing, such as the loss of native foodways.

Does urban planning produce ‘bad cities?’ Is there a third way to balance the need for affordable housing and the desire for certain aesthetics in design?

Earlier this month, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins tried to claim that acceptance of transgender people means we should accept so-called “trans-racial” people (like Rachel Dolezal). Here’s a rational response to that sort of argument.

Polygon has a column that tries to explain why the Muppets have had a hard time catching on in recent years.

Why did a Queens judge dismiss a DWI charge and seal the case against a Bronx ADA who crashed her car into a line of parked vehicles? Does everyone charged with a DWI get that treatment in NYC?

Jorge Cham, aka Phd Comics, has a great comic strip on the recent discovery of an anomaly in the behavior of muons that might break the Standard Model of physics once and for all (but might not).

Could the pandemic lead to a massive drain of women working in the sciences? There’s a growing body of evidence that the pandemic and associated lockdowns have had a disproportionate impact on working women.

This is from a couple of weeks ago, but Islamist insurgents took over a town right near a Total natural gas installation in Mozambique – the largest foreign investment project in Africa to date.

I’m so sad that last week’s White Lives Matter rallies were a giant flop. (I’m not actually sad about it.)

A virologist who got the Johnson & Johnson shot explains why she’s not losing any sleep over the federal investigation into a very rare blood clot disorder that might (but might not) be caused by the vaccine.

The Atlantic’s tremendous coverage of the pandemic continues with Derek Thompson’s article calling for an end to hygiene theater now that the CDC has acknowledged that SARS-CoV-2 spreads through the air, not surfaces. My daughter’s school closes one day a week for “deep cleaning” that, it turns out, is unnecessary.

An immunological process called imprinting could make second- and third-generation COVID-19 vaccines less effective, although there are reasons why that may not be true for this particular virus.

Media Matters’ Bobby Lewis spent a month watching and documenting the racism and lunacy aired daily on One America News Network. If you have cable, you’re probably paying something for OANN whether you know it or not.

The Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law has released a brief on the spate of anti-trans bills, especially those banning gender-affirming medical care, appearing in state legislatures across the country. These bills, if passed and upheld, are going to result in unspeakable harm to trans kids, including a more suicides, but they’re sold to gullible (or bigoted) voters under the guise of preventing “child abuse.”

Mississippi passed an anti-trans law and the NCAA might pull sports championships from the state as a result. Hard for me to believe the NCAA is on the right side of a progressive issue, but they are.

One of the officers who shot Breonna Taylor got a book deal from a small right-wing press; Simon & Schuster bowed to public pressure and declined to distribute it. I see a thorny issue here – we may all believe he committed multiple crimes, but without a conviction (he’s still on the police force in Louisville), I’m not sure what legal recourse there would be to stop him from writing about what happened, as vile as it seems.
Florida plans an “audit” of a state regulation that prohibited parents of children who suffered brain damage in childbirth from suing.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, blm, coronavirus, longreads, new york city, racism, stick to baseball, trans rights, vaccines

→ April 10, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/10/21.

The Inside Game is now out in paperback! Midtown Scholar has several signed copies available, and you can also buy it from any of the indie stores in this twitter thread, all of whom at least had the book in stock as of Wednesday. If none of those works, you can find it on Bookshop.org and at Amazon.

I had two posts this week for subscribers to the Athletic, a draft notebook with some notes on the top of the draft, and a look at prospects from my top 100 who are currently on MLB rosters. I also held a Klawchat on Friday.

My latest review for Paste covers the pickup-and-delivery train game Maglev Metro, from the designer of Suburbia and One Night Ultimate Werewolf. I have some quibbles with the art choices but the underlying game is pretty great.

On this week’s episode of the Keith Law Show, I spoke to White Sox right-hander Lucas Giolito about his transformation as a pitcher, from reworking his delivery to developing one of the game’s best changeups. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify.

I spoke to Chris Phillips, Associate Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon CMU, about my second book, The Inside Game, in a half-hour conversation for the CMU Alumni Association. For more of me, you can subscribe to my free email newsletter.

Longreads first: The best thing I’ve read in the last two weeks was Prof. Simukai Chigudu’s essay on growing up in the shadow of Cecil Rhodes, the repressive, murderous, racist colonizer for whom Chigudu’s native Zimbabwe was once named, and who is still honored with a statue at Oxford.
Derek Thompson writes at the Atlantic about Alex Berenson, the “pandemic’s wrongest man,” who wrote a very wrong book about cannabis and has now spent the last year being wrong about COVID-19 and, more recently, the vaccines against it. Berenson also bullies and harasses people on Twitter, name-searching himself and encouraging his followers to pile on.
“VC Lives Matter?” That quote from a venture capitalist trying to oust San Francisco’s reformer District Attorney is the most tone-deaf thing I’ve heard in some time. The story is really about a moneyed few trying to buy the government they want – the United States in miniature.
I’m not a huge fan of Brandi Carlile’s music, but this New York Times profile of her and partial review of her new memoir Broken Horses is excellent.
Delaware’s Representative Lisa Blunt Rochester (D) features prominently in this article on how websites use deceptive techniques called “dark patterns” to fool users, as she has introduced legislation to crack down on the practice.
The Journal of the American Medical Association is embroiled in a scandal of its own making, as one of their podcast hosts dismissed the possibility that there might be racist doctors or racism within medicine, and they responded poorly to the backlash, too.
There’s a genocide going on in northern Ethiopia, led by the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Ethiopian President Abiy Ahmed.
The NYPD has a “goon squad” manual that explains how police officers can violate citizens’ rights to freedom of assembly, according to an investigative report from the Intercept.
Physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory announced a new finding around the wobbliness of muons that appeared to be the death knell of the Standard Model – but another new paper might explain it within the Standard Model. Physics is fun!
The Anti-Defamation League has called for Fox to fire Tucker Carlson after he espoused the white supremacist dogma called the Great Replacement during his show on Thursday.
Dr. Peter Hotez writes that the anti-science movement is going global and thousands of people will die needlessly as a result.
And, shocker, white evangelical Americans are saying they won’t get vaccinated.
A gun in the house increases that someone living there will commit suicide – like 11-year-old Tyler Paxton did with his dad’s gun.
The economic impact of sporting events, like the MLB All-Star Game, is usually wildly overstated.
Prof. John Ioannidis had a significant, positive impact on the world of science in 2005 when he argued that most published research was wrong, as researchers only had to find statistical significance to be published, resulting in many false positives and conclusions that couldn’t be replicated. He has since become a COVID-19 denialist, and wrote an unhinged personal attack against two experts who dared question him, publishing it in the journal of which he was previously the editor in chief.
A bunch of right-wing grifters and pundits were tweeting at length about a Pakistani Muslim immigrant killed in a robbery by two Black teenagers, but Wajahat Ali explains why this was all done in bad faith.
A new neurological disease that resembles Creutzfeldt-Jakob Syndrome (the prion disease that you could get from eating beef from ‘mad’ cows) has emerged in the Canadian province of New Brunswick, killing 6 and sickening up to 38 others.
A longtime bartender at St. Elmo’s Steakhouse in Indianapolis died of COVID-19 after an outbreak at the restaurant. St. Elmo’s has been an annual stop for me during Gen Con, and I know it’s a favorite of many during the NFL combine.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, anti-science, coronavirus, guns, longreads, religion, stick to baseball, technology

→ March 27, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/26/21.

I had one filler post for subscribers to the Athletic this past week to tide us over until we get to my predictions this upcoming week, looking at some possible trends in player development to watch for as games begin next week. I also held a Klawchat on Friday.

At Paste, I reviewed Renature, the latest collaborative design from Wolfgang Kramer and Michael Kiesling, who’ve worked together before on Torres and Tikal. This game has a good bit more oomph to it – it’s less abstract and definitely more fun.

On the Keith Law Show this week I spoke to Julie DiCaro about her new book Sidelined: Sports, Culture, and Being a Woman in America and how sports leagues can do better on matters of gender, race, harassment, and domestic violence. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify.

For more of me, you can subscribe to my free email newsletter. Also, you can still buy The Inside Gameand Smart Baseball anywhere you buy books; the paperback edition of The Inside Game will be out on April 6^th, just 10 days from now.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: A professor in the United Kingdom who has spent about a decade trying to defend the Assad regime in the western media thought he was corresponding with a Russian spy, but was actually talking to someone at the very group he was trying to discredit. Prof. Paul McKeigue is also a COVID-19 hoaxer, signatory to the Great Barrington anti-lockdown manifesto, and close pal of a 9/11 hoaxer.
ProPublica looks at the disastrous state of Maine’s public defense system; the state has no public defenders and farms the work out to private attorneys, many of whom are ineligible to try the cases they’re assigned.
Just twelve people are responsible for two-thirds of the anti-vaccine content found on social media. The Center for Countering Digital Hate has issued a report on the dirty dozen and is urging social media platforms to crack down before it’s too late. Just days before they released, a dozen state attorney generals told Facebook and Twitter to do a better job against this misinformation. I’m pleased to see our Attorney General here in Delaware, Kathy Jennings, was one of the signatories.
It’s been lost in the news for understandable reasons, but Aurora, Colorado, police forced an innocent Black family, including a six-year-old girl, to lie on the pavement while the cops had guns drawn – and they’re upset at the angry response to their actions.
Eric Garcia writes in the Washington Post of the rightward shift of some Latino men, including his father, an avid Trump supporter. It’s the most vulnerable demographic in the Democratic coalition right now.
Also in the Post, a principal in Indio, California, has had to go looking for students missing since the city’s high school closed to in-person instruction last March.
USA Today, the same newspaper that rushed to have Bob Nightengale provide a fresh coat of whitewash to Thom Brennaman after the latter uttered a vile homophobic slur on air, fired For the Win’s Hemal Jhaveri for tweeting about mass shooters mostly being white men.
The story of cascatelli, a new pasta shape designed by podcast host Dan Pashman, is an amazing only-in-2021 kind of tale where a guy who thinks (correctly) that spaghetti (the shape) is boring and nonfunctional can end up engineering a brand new shape and partnering with a manufacturer to produce it.
The great Dr. Peter Hotez debunks five myths about coronavirus vaccines in a piece he co-wrote with Dr. Maria Elena Bottazzi in the Washington Post.
Zoom earned $660 million in pre-tax profits in 2020 and paid $0 in taxes on it. It might be cheaper to eliminate the corporate income tax entirely – saving the costs to collect it and freeing up productive capacity dedicated to it – than to perpetuate a system where this happens over and over.
North Carolina sends six-year-olds to court, as in the case of a boy who faced a hearing for picking a tulip from a neighbor’s yard.
Arkansas passed a law that would allow doctors to deny medical care to LGBTQ+ patients. The absolute obsession many Republicans have with gay and trans Americans is pathological.
West Virginia is trying to ban needle exchanges in the midst of the country’s worst HIV outbreak.
Here in Delaware, a former police officer who shot an unarmed teen and escaped criminal charges has been indicted for lying about the incident and tampering with evidence.
Illinois State Rep. LaShawn Ford resigned from the board of Loretto Hospital to protest the board’s decision not to suspend or fire the CEO and COO who distributed vaccines to ineligible recipients at Trump Tower and other wealthy enclaves.
A Missouri Republican state senator has been charged with fraudulently billing the government for over $900,000 in COVID-19 claims, including some services that were never provided.
Dr. Emily Oster caused a stir recently with a column that had a headline saying your unvaccinated kids were comparable to their vaccinated grandparents. Dr. Tara C. Smith explained why this is misleading and possibly dangerous, one of the critiques that led Dr. Oster to correct herself a day or two later.
Naia Cucukov, the Executive Producer of the acclaimed 2020 Netflix adaptation of The Babysitter’s Club, wrote a powerful thread in the wake of the shootings of Asians by a deranged white man in Atlanta last week. (Naia is also a personal friend.)
Matt Leacock, designer of Pandemic and its various offshoots (as well as Era: Medieval Age), is working on a new game about combating climate change.
A 25-year-old mystery about the sudden deaths of bald eagles in some parts of the south has now been solved. Humans were responsible, of course, but perhaps not in a way you’d expect.
GQ interviews the priceless Sir Ian McKellen on his remarkable career, including an upcoming film shot entirely on iPhones in London’s mostly empty streets.
The New York Times’ Bret Stephens, known for so many things but especially (to me) for his climate change denialism, is the editor of a new journal focusing on “Jews and social justice.”
The BBC profiles Jang Yeong-Jin, the only openly gay North Korean defector. Jang crawled across the DMZ to reach South Korea in 1997, and now, at 62, is about to get married.
The New Republic argues that the media are manufacturing a crisis at the border to try to prove that they’re balanced in their coverage of President Biden.
Cymru am byth.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, arkansas, coronavirus, links, longreads, maine, north carolina, racism, science, social media, vaccines, west virginia

→ March 20, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/20/21.

I had one new post for subscribers to the Athletic this week, looking at some breakout candidates for 2021. A reader suggested Gavin Lux in the comments as well, and I agree with them – he’s also a very good bet to break out, especially since it seems like he’s going to get the playing time to do so.

On the Keith Law Show this week, I spoke to my friend Tim Grierson about his new book This is How You Make a Movie, the Oscar nominations, and his Cardinal fandom. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify.

For more of me, you can subscribe to my free email newsletter. Also, you can still buy The Inside Game and Smart Baseball anywhere you buy books; the paperback edition of The Inside Game will be out on April 6th.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Atlantic’s Helen Lewis looks at people who fake being members of underrepresented by minority groups, calling it “social Munchausen syndrome.”
The American Psychological Association issued a resolution opposing gender identity change efforts (GICE), as the evidence overwhelmingly shows that GICE – which, in lay terms, is trying to convince a trans person via bogus ‘therapy’ that they aren’t transgender but are suffering from some mental disorder – is harmful to patients.
Bloomberg BusinessWeek looks at the bizarre family feud between the owners of the only medical swab manufacturer in the U.S. – a company that has been handed a de facto monopoly by the pandemic.
The Biden Administration is terminating some hires with histories of marijuana use, even after telling them such details wouldn’t affect the. There’s no evidence-based argument to support this, and cannabis use is legal in so many places now that the policy seems even more out of step.
Here in Delaware, New Castle County – where I live, with Black residents making up 26% of the population – released body cam footage of the death of an unarmed black man at the hands of two cops, and the video contradicts the officers’ claims that the man drove his car at them before they fired. The police department didn’t want the video released, but County Executive Matt Meyer did so over their objections. Also of note: “A police officer in Delaware has never been found criminally liable for a shooting.”
Texas Republicans have introduced a slew of bills designed to keep people of color, or just Democrats in general, from voting, even as the state appears to be turning some shade of purple.
A Florida man is facing felony charges for putting up a sham candidate in a 2020 Congressional election, and while he and the candidate might end up doing time, the ploy worked. Frank Artiles is alleged to have paid Alex Rodriguez (not that one) to stand for the election against the incumbent José Javier Rodríguez (D) to confuse voters. Alex Rodriguez took over 6000 votes, and José Javier lost by only 32 votes.
A former anti-vaxxer wrote about his decision to get vaccinated against COVID-19, and why he’s encouraging others to do so. He doesn’t explain why he was opposed to all sorts of medicine before, although he may have been a Christian Scientist or in another similar cult.
A pair of internal medicine physicians wrote about the need for a unified response to vaccine disinformation.
The National Review decided to offer up a defense of the British monarchy. You know, the one we fought a revolution to escape.
In the ongoing trial of three St. Louis cops who beat a Black protestor who was, in fact, an undercover cop, the defense argument is essentially that the Black cop had it coming.
Board game news: Cheap manufacturing costs have led to a rise in counterfeit copies of popular board games, including Catan, Pandemic, and Clank!
Z-Man Games, now part of the Asmodee empire, announced in a lengthy post why they’re ending reprints of their Euro Classics line, which included updated versions of Samurai and Tigris & Euphrates, while also cancelling a scheduled update of Princes of Florence. It’s disappointing, as these are good games that I think are still finding new audiences, but in the flood of new games every year it’s also easy for games like these to get lost.
There’s a Kickstarter coming next week for a brand-new version of the 2005 game Fjords, with a redesign from one of my favorites, Phil Walker-Harding (Cacao, Gizmos, Silver & Gold, Imhotep).
And there’s an active Kickstarter for a cheeky-looking take-that game called CULTivate.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: coronavirus, delaware, florida, lgbt rights, longreads, police, stick to baseball, texas

→ March 15, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/15/21.

I have one new post up for subscribers to the Athletic, looking at prospects I can’t wait to see when minor league games resume. I also held a Klawchat last week.

On the Keith Law Show last week, I spoke with Cleveland right-hander Triston McKenzie about his development as a pitcher and his experiences as a Black ballplayer. On this week’s episode, I spoke with film critic Tim Grierson about his new book This is How You Make a Movie, the Oscar nominations, and his Cardinal fandom. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the new game Holi: Festival of Colors, played on a 3-D board that’s immediately striking and that lends itself to some novel strategies, with almost no random elements at all.

For more of my writing, you can subscribe to my free email newsletter. Also, you can still buy The Inside Game and Smart Baseball anywhere you buy books; the paperback edition of The Inside Game will be out in April.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: ProPublica’s look at some of the mental health costs borne by teenagers during the pandemic is a long, grueling read, and while it might go a little too far in blaming the lockdown for teen suicides, it’s as balanced a look at this as I’ve seen. The piece pairs well with the New York Times’ stunning gallery of artwork from teenagers using multiple media to show how the pandemic and lockdown have affected them.
Ann Patchett has a lovely essay in the New Yorker about letting go of one’s stuff, which she refers to by the euphemism of ‘practice.’
The Atlantic profiles Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman (D), now the front-runner for the Senate seat coming open in 2022, including a look at an incident that took place while he was mayor of Braddock that will probably become a major issue in the campaign.
Bloomberg takes aim at racial inequity in the property tax system, where Black-owned properties are overvalued in tax assessments in cities like Detroit, Chicago, New York, Baltimore, and St. Louis.
Jelani Cobb asks if the Republican Party is destroying itself by focusing so heavily on white men, a declining portion of the electorate, to the point that “voter suppression becomes the only viable strategic option.” I wouldn’t underestimate the role that dark money can play in keeping them in power, whether through voter suppression or by targeting Latinx populations as they did in 2020.
“In Georgia, Republicans Take Aim at Role of Black Churches in Elections.” Why do Republicans hate Christians?
Related: At least 250 new laws have been proposed in 43 states to make it harder for people to vote. It’s about gaining and clinging to power at all costs. Stacey Abrams detailed some of those bills in a Twitter thread.
Facebook is finally, belatedly cracking down on anti-vaccine content, but it’s having a very hard time because it started so late and makes it too easy for users to share false information. One thing they could do, however, is focus on the small group of users having the greatest impact on others’ vaccine doubts. Meanwhile, those anti-vaxxers are pushing the lie that the vaccines cause cancer.
Also in “what took you so long,” the FDA warned quack Joseph Mercola to stop hawking fake COVID-19 treatments. He’s been pushing pseudoscience and outright anti-science for at least 25 years, all in the service of selling his supplements.
A new research study, published in Nature, found evidence of higher mortality rates from the SARS-CoV-2 B.1.1.7 variant, which is now the predominant strain in Texas, Florida, and Georgia.
James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds, explains why he thinks the NFT bubble is destined to pop.
The Cleveland Plain-Dealer‘s editor wrote a column defending the paper’s decision not to cover a fringe Republican candidate’s outlandish statements, calling him a “nobody begging for people to notice his tweets.”
In a victory for people who remember the First Amendment, Des Moines Register journalist Andrea Sahouri was acquitted of bogus charges stemming from her coverage of police activity during a BLM protest.
Oklahoma’s lower house passed a bill protecting drivers who hit protestors from prosecution, as long as they say it was an accident.
Pakistan is turning a blind eye to the problem of child marriages involving kidnapped Christian, Sikh, and Hindu girls, forced to convert to Islam and marry under threats of violence to them or family members.
A writer with autism watched Sia’s execrable movie Music and wrote about its awfulness for Slate.
This Irish Times editorial on the Meghan-and-Harry interview is a marvel of excoriating humor.
Norton Juster, the author of The Phantom Tollbooth, died last week at age 91.
Board game news: Asmodee acquired Plan B games, yet another notch in the former company’s acquisition spree, but also notable because Plan B was founded by Sophie Gravel, who sold her last company, F2Z (which included Z-Man Games and Plaid Hat), to Asmodee in 2016, then left and starter Plan B, which also includes the imprints Next Move and eggertspiele.
Some Kickstarters of note include the dice-game version of Baseball Highlights 2045; the new roll-and-write game Three Sisters, from the designers of Fleet: The Dice Game; and two new expansions for Everdell.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, coronavirus, first amendment, georgia, links, longreads, oklahoma, pennsylvania, pseudoscience, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ March 6, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/6/21.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I ranked the top 30 prospects in this year’s draft class, with the caveat of course that we’ll likely see a lot of movement this spring because most college players didn’t play at all last summer or fall. I also answered some questions on the Padres’ farm system for our beat writer Dennis Lin. And I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

My guest on the Keith Law Show this week is Aaron Fitt of D1baseball.com, talking about this year’s draft class, Kumar Rocker vs. Jack Leiter, and other topics around college baseball. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify.

The latest edition of my free email newsletter was about how it feels when the face in the mirror finally starts to catch up with your biological age. Also, you can still buy The Inside Gameand Smart Baseball anywhere you buy books; the paperback edition of The Inside Game will be out on April 6^th.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: WIRED looks at the strange economy of scandals in Hollywood and the man who often inserts himself into the deals made around them.
In 1963, Alderman Ben Lewis, a rising political figure in Chicago and one of the most powerful Black men in the city government, was killed in his office, execution-style, but the city made sure not to investigate it thoroughly. ProPublica examines why not, and whether the police may have been involved in the murder.
Anti-vaxxers are now misusing federal data to lie about COVID-19 vaccines, claiming they pose dangers that aren’t supported by evidence. Alex Berenson, once a promising New York Times reporter, has now gone from cannabis alarmist to COVID-19 denialist to full-blown anti-vaxxer, using his sizable Twitter following to encourage fellow deniers and discourage people from getting the vaccine.
The Washington Post examines the history of lies and fraud that propelled Madison Cawthorn to the House of Representatives.
From last August, Current Affairs explains that police aren’t the answer if crime isn’t actually the question.
The Guardian has the story of the battle over the Wentworth golf club in Surrey, England, which they describe as a battle between the rich and the very, very rich.
Georgia Public Broadcasting has an update on the voter suppression bills currently in the works in the state.
Kayla Parker, a 25-year-old Black activist, is trying to mobilize Tennessee voters the way Stacey Abrams did in Georgia.
Dr. Richard Pan, a state Senator in California, writes that anti-vaccine extremism is a form of domestic terrorism.
David Leonhardt, writing the daily briefing for the New York Times, explains why the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is just as effective as the other two vaccines on the market already, even though misleading headlines show lower efficacy rates.
The University of Texas is embroiled in a completely avoidable controversy over a racist song sung by some fans of their football team. Some angry white donors sent some rather telling emails to the school, threatening to pull their donations if the racist song was banned, because you can’t have college football if you don’t get to do a racism.
The Atlantic reports on the success of a small Universal Basic Income experiment in Stockton, California. The United States is the stingiest developed country when it comes to helping people in our lowest income strata. That needs to change if we don’t want to lose the economic and social gains of the last century.
New York Times opinion page writer David Brooks, who hates millennials but married one anyway, has been taking a second salary from the Weave Project, funded by Facebook and by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ father, without disclosing the potential conflict of interest to his editors or his readers.
A U.S. diplomat has been railing against Jews and promoting the idea of a Christian nation-state online for years and is somehow still employed by the Foreign Service.
Wealthy residents of one town in the Florida Keys received COVID-19 vaccines before most of the state … and, oh, hey, a bunch of donors to Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) live there.
Dan Dakich, an announcer for ESPN and a former assistant coach who has denied being there when Bobby Knight choked Neil Reed, doxxed a UNC teacher and threatened to sexually assault an Ursinus professor. Somehow, four days later, ESPN hasn’t suspended him or taken any other action. Sure seems like they move a lot faster when the tweets are about evolution, doesn’t it?
Former WNBA owner and former Senator Kelly Loeffler lost control of her basketball team to a player whom she refused to meet to discuss their differences of opinion.
The former head of the agency that oversees the Voice of America racked up over $1 million in taxpayer-funded expenditures to investigate his own employees to find reasons to fire them. I thought the Republicans were the party of smaller government and less waste?
These transgender athlete bills pushed by Republican lawmakers – who don’t care about athletes of any identities, only about staying in power – are a solution in search of a problem, according to critics of one such bill in Missouri.
Hundreds of scientists and researchers have signed an open letter to President Biden saying that evidence-based policy should mean decriminalizing sex work. Doing so would be the best way to protect the interests and health of the workers themselves.
Board Game News: Red Rising, the latest release from publisher Stonemaier Games (Scythe, Charterstone, Pendulum), is now available for pre-order.
Alderac has a Kickstarter up for Meeples & Monsters that funded fully in just 15 minutes.
And there’s also a Kickstarter for High Noon, a card-based strategy game for 2+ players, where the first 4000 people to fund the game will get their copies as soon as the Kickstarter closes – the first I’ve seen of this in a board game crowdfunding effort.
The British Museum offers a look at ten board games from ancient history.
And finally, watch a doctor dismantle Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene’s ignorant claims on sex and gender in about 30 seconds.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: florida, lgbt rights, links, longreads, social media, texas, the swamp, vaccines

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