longreads — Page 16

→ August 8, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/8/20.

I wrote another scouting notebook column for subscribers to The Athletic this week, looking at Jo Adell, Jesus Luzardo, Touki Toussaint, Nate Pearson, Nick Madrigal, and more. On The Keith Law Show this week, I got together with my old friend Joe Sheehan to talk about this teetering disaster of a season so far.

For Paste, I reviewed Marvel Villainous: Infinite Power, the newest entry in the Villainous game series, this one with five new villains from the MCU, adding some new rules that mean these villains aren’t playable with any of the previous 15. I also ranked all twenty of the villains in the Villainous games so far.

I participated in a panel at Gen Con Online on using social media in tumultuous times, and whether there’s an obligation to use your social media accounts to support causes like BLM or other social justice endeavors.

My partner and I are among the co-hosts for a virtual event and fundraiser for Kyle Evans Gay, a Democratic candidate for the Delaware Senate, who is trying to flip our district blue. If you’d like to help us out and perhaps join the event on August 15th, you can buy tickets to the virtual event or just make a donation here. If you happen to live nearby, the full tickets also include dinner from V&M, an Italian restaurant in the district that has also been a takeout machine since the state first locked down in March.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Ed Yong continues his peerless coverage of the pandemic for the Atlantic with this massive look at the United States’ epic failure this year, from a federal government “denuded” of experts to a social safety net sewn out of dental floss to one of the least efficient health-care systems in the developed world. This article is a list of failures, a maddening series of decisions not to fund basic initiatives that might have slowed the spread of COVID-19. Instead, we have 4% of the world’s population but a quarter of its cases and deaths.
Reason looks at the emerging political philosophy of Peter Thiel, who claimed to be a libertarian but now supports nationalistic policies more commonly associated with fascism. Note that Thiel and his proxies supported travel bans to fight COVID-19; the link above this from Ed Yong explains why travel bans can actually exacerbate the spread of a new pathogen.
The Guardian Long Read has a mournful look at the last of the Zoroastrians, as one of the world’s extant religions is slowly dying out.
Politico explores how xenophobic activist David Horowitz helped mentor and create Stephen Miller, architect of this Administration’s worst anti-immigrant policies.
Iowa’s state epidemiologist medical director got a 45% raise plus $55,000 in overtime pay this year despite leading one of the nation’s most ineffective responses to the pandemic, which including blocking school districts from closing unless they met state standards for virus spread and refusing to implement a complete shutdown. I’m all for paying scientists what they’re worth, but Iowa is still seeing 14+ new cases a day per 100,000 residents.
You should not “do your own research” when it comes to science. People who say that are inevitably going to be wrong, because they lack the experience or knowledge to evaluate what they find in that “research,” and the results are dangerous to us all.
A Utah woman is facing life in prison for buying red paint that was used at a protest. Really – not Zimbabwe, or Saudi Arabia, or China, but Utah.
My friend Will Leitch wrote for New York about how watching sports simultaneously now feels meaningless and yet extremely powerful.
Jeff Gregorich, superintendent of schools for a district in the hinterlands of southeastern Arizona, told Eli Saslow of the Washington Post that there is no good plan to reopen schools, and that “it’s a fantasy” to think it can be done without people in the community getting sick and dying from COVID-19.
Colleges are reopening faster and more fully than primary schools, but that’s the reverse of how things should be, given how much better college-aged students can handle online learning.
NPR published this helpful pocket guide to COVID-19 etiquette, with tips like talking to people about ground rules when you’re going to see them later at a physically distanced gathering.
The Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan wrote that this was the week American lost the war on misinformation, thanks to the President’s promotion of raging quack Stella Immanuel, although I’m pretty sure we lost this war a long time ago and it’s going to take state and national vaccine mandates to stop it.
Board game news: Starling Games will release Flourish, a lightweight game from the creators of the amazing Everdell, some time before the end of 2020.
An update to Ultimate Werewolf Extreme is now on Kickstarter, funding in just 18 hours.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, coronavirus, links, longreads, science, stick to baseball

→ August 2, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/2/20.

I wrote two scouting notebook columns for subscribers to The Athletic this week, one on Dustin May, Luis Robert, Brady Singer, and others; the second on Nate Pearson, David Peterson, Zach Plesac, and more. I also held a Klawchat on Friday afternoon.

You can buy my latest book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, anywhere you buy books, and I recommend bookshop.org. I sent out another edition of my free email newsletter this week as well.

I participated in one panel for the Gen Con Online Writers Symposium this year, on using social media in tumultuous times. It looks like it’s free for everyone to watch.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Vanity Fair has an exclusive report on how a White House group led by Jared Kushner – who is both unelected and unappointed to any official role in the government – came up with a comprehensive national plan for testing and tracing back in the spring, only to have Kushner scrap it because the pandemic was hitting blue states much harder.
The Daily Beast looks at the alt-right sports site Outkick, which has been pushing COVID-19 hoaxes and misinformation since late February.
ProPublica has a useful guide to interpreting public COVID-19 data. One conclusion to bear in mind: deaths lag cases by a few weeks, so people celebrating lower death rates are often just misreading the data to support a desired conclusion.
OneZero looks at Pinterest’s difficulty in keeping offensive content off their platform, although I think the takeaway here is that they’re doing a much better job than Twitter, Facebook, or Youtube. Moderating content is always going to suck as a job, and moderators should be better compensated and cared for, but the problems described here pale next to what those other sites have.
The Guardian has an excerpt from James Nestor’s new book Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art.
“Hygiene theater” is a waste of time, writes Derek Thompson at the Atlantic. The novel coronavirus spreads primarily via the air, from people in proximity to one another and/or in enclosed spaces.
Twenty percent of Americans say they wouldn’t get a COVID-19 vaccine if one is available. We need better education and outreach to overcome that.
Since Jeva Lange’s piece on how baseball’s COVID-19 struggles are a microcosm of the U.S. as a whole ran, both situations have deteriorated further, with a rolling outbreak now in the St. Louis clubhouse.
This twitter thread from an OR doc shows how he talked a reluctant patient, who fell for fake information on the coronavirus he saw on Facebook, into getting a COVID-19 test.
Another Twitter thread, this one authored by a (self-described) lawyer, explains why the “Covington kid” probably got little or nothing in his settlement with the Washington Post.
Just days after her newest novel This Mournable Body was longlisted for the Booker Prize, Zimbabwean author Tsitsi Dangarembga (whose Nervous Conditions was #98 on my last top 100 novels list) was arrested during anti-government protests in Harare.
A Singaporean ‘consultant’ used LinkedIn to troll for contacts in his work as an agent for Chinese intelligence. Jun Wei “Dickson” Yeo pleaded guilty to an espionage charge in a U.S. court last month.
The British-Japanese musician Rina Sawayama found out she’s ineligible for the prestigious Mercury Prize and the BRIT Awards because she holds a Japanese passport. Those awards’ rules have “nationality clauses” that exclude her, even though she’s lived in the UK for 25 years, in part because she’s a solo artist; musical groups don’t have to comprise only British citizens.
A profoundly anti-gay state Senator in Arkansas called mask mandates “draconian,” and then was hospitalized with COVID-19. Guess his party affiliation!
U.S. Senator Tom Cotton (also of Arkansas) called slavery a “necessary evil” in building the United States, and is fighting attempts to introduce new historical perspectives on slavery into U.S. school curricula, such as considerations of the long-term impact of slavery on Black Americans.
Movie theaters have been mostly closed since March, so we are now relying on opaque claims from streaming services to determine when a movie is “a hit.”
Several ex-Deadspin staffers have banded together to create Defector Media, a new site that promises, at least, to fill the void left by Deadspin’s implosion last year.
Much “nutrition research” today amounts to p-hacking, writes Tamar Haspel, who helped expose … , in the Washington Post. She suggests more research on the effects of portion sizes, food delivery to people to keep them out of supermarkets, food and nutrition education, and more.
Society , a research journal published by Springer Nature, published a commentary by Prof. Lawrence Mead of NYU that argues that Black and Latinx people lack the ambition and temperament of European immigrants to rise out of poverty, leading to a massive backlash and quick retraction. NYU issued a statement decrying the paper’s sentiments while defending Mead’s academic freedom.
Board game news: The cooperative game Spirit Island is now available on Steam.
Renegade announced an upcoming game called Embarcadero, from one of the designers of Scoville, featuring hand management and tile-laying mechanics.
A number of publishers put together game bundles for sale during Gen Con Online, which took place from Thursday through Sunday, which would have been the dates for the regular convention had COVID-19 not led to its cancellation.
Serious Catan players might like these new game-specific accessories coming soon from a partnership between Gamegenic and Asmodee.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, arkansas, baseball, board game news, coronavirus, links, longreads, mercury prize, nutrition, social media, stick to baseball, the swamp

→ July 25, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/25/20.

I wrote two pieces for subscribers to The Athletic this week – a season preview, with breakout candidates and team predictions; and a look at the top 100 prospects who made Opening Day rosters. I held a live Zoom Q&A via The Athletic’s Twitter account on Thursday.

For Paste, I reviewed the new flick-and-write game Sonora, where players flick discs on to the same board, possibly knocking each others’ discs out of the way, and score on their personal scoresheets based on where the discs end up.

My book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, is out now. You can order it anywhere you buy books, and I recommend bookshop.org. I’ll also resume my email newsletter this weekend.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: GEN looks at evangelical women who’ve left their churches and the Republican Party because they couldn’t reconcile Christian support for Trump with the ostensible tenets of the religion.
The New Yorker‘s Isaac Chotiner interviewed Thomas Chatterson Williams, one of the authors of the Harper’s letter decrying ‘cancel culture’ on the left; it’s an informative conversation, made better because Chotiner is unafraid to challenge Williams’ inaccuracies and to correct others in the final text.
The Jackson Free Press spoke to doctors and nurses at the University of Mississippi Medical Center’s dedicated COVID-19 ICU about how overloaded they are and how sick the victims become. The executive vice chair of emergency medicine, begging people to wear masks and keep distancing, says, “Please don’t make this worse.”
A SPLC Hatewatch investigation found that OANN employee Jack Posobiec went to Poland to meet with a Polish neo-Nazi party, promoting their messages through his popular Twitter account.
Customs and Border Protection is involved in far more cities than just Portland, and they’re not being transparent about their activities.
Florida’s former top coronavirus data scientist claims she was fired for refusing to manipulate data to make the pandemic there appear less serious than it actually was.
WIRED looks at the difficulty of calculating herd immunity requirements for COVID-19; the quick summary is that we need a vaccine to get there.
A group of over 100 scientists called for a rapid review system for research preprints so papers like the Stanford one that used highly questionable methods to claim that the rate of COVID-19 infection was 50 times higher in California than widely accepted don’t get widely reported before they’re further vetted.
To be a parent right now is to be a liar, writes Dan Sinker for Esquire.
Dave Grohl – yep, that one – wrote an op ed in the Atlantic in defense of teachers, saying we need better plans before we reopen schools.
Why have rates of premature births gone way down in some areas during the pandemic?
Here’s a list of all of the known QAnon supporters running for Congress this year, or who tried to run; fourteen have already secured spots on November ballots. Sixty-two of the 67 are Republicans. Meanwhile, Twitter has at least begun to ban or limit accounts promoting the QAnon conspiracy theory, on the grounds that the ‘movement’ is associated with increasing violence. Facebook needs to do the same.
Over 280 Wall Street Journal employees signed a letter to the paper’s new publisher asking for a clearer distinction between the news and opinion sections, something the paper reported on itself (subscription required).
A Philadelphia attorney who makes her living evicting people on behalf of city courts is married to a city eviction judge who doesn’t recuse himself from cases involving her.
Quanta has a pretty good, concise explanation of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems.
Board game news: Renegade Game Studios announced the release of a new RPG, Kids on Brooms, that is itself a spinoff of the game Kids on Bikes.
Capstone announced the late 2020 release of Renature, from designers Michael Kiesling and Wolfgang Kramer, which I assume is a sequel to their 2017 game Reworld. The two are probably best known for their collaborations on Tikal and Torres.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, conspiracy theories, coronavirus, links, longreads, math, philadelphia, stick to baseball

→ July 18, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/18/20.

I didn’t write anything this week other than the review here of Patrick Radden Keefe’s book Say Nothing and my review of the lovely little light strategy game Walking in Burano. I will do a season preview with some picks for breakout candidates this week for subscribers to The Athletic, as well as a new game review for Paste, and a Zoom Q&A session on The Athletic’s site on Thursday at 3 pm ET. I answered reader questions on a mailbag episode of my podcast last week.

My book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, is out now, just in time for Opening Day (okay, three months before, but who’s counting). You can order it anywhere you buy books, and I recommend bookshop.org. I’ll also resume my email newsletter this week once I have some new content.

I’ll be speaking at the U.S. Army Mad Scientist Weaponized Information Virtual Conference on Tuesday at 9:30 am ET, talking about topics from The Inside Game. You can register to watch the event here.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Data scientist David Shor, fired for tweeting that nonviolent protests tend to push public opinion leftward (a conclusion based on data), spoke at length to New York about what the data say about the Democrats’ chances in 2020 and beyond. It’s sobering, but comes with evidence-based recommendations that start with not taking any swing states for granted in October.
The Guardian looks at the rise and fall of Nespresso, which faces low-price competition, criticism of environmental impact, and growing consumer awareness.
Politico has a long profile on Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D), a first-term representative from Michigan running for re-election in her purple district, and what lessons she may have to offer Democrats nationwide.
The inspiration for the original text-based adventure game Colossal Cave Adventure (often just abbreviated as Adventure) was Patricia Crowther, ex-wife of the game’s co-creator, who didn’t credit her with the cave mapping that he used to design the game.
Orac looks at the controversy over airborne transmission of COVID-19. His conclusions: the virus can be spread via respiratory aerosols, but we already guessed that, and mandating masks and physical distancing is part of the solution.
Cases have been rising, but deaths weren’t, which isn’t the good news it might appear to be, writes Alexis Madrigal for the Atlantic. The death rate has begun to rise since Madrigal’s piece went up, though.
The CDC’s longtime status as an agency beyond the reach of partisan politics has left it defenseless against attacks from the science-deniers in the White House.
Vox looks at why Arizona has the nation’s worst outbreak of COVID-19, and may be undercounting cases since they have so little testing. They closed too late, reopened too soon, people didn’t take the masks and distancing guidelines seriously.
The New Yorker looks at how Texas Republicans politicized the coronavirus pandemic, leading to an ongoing outbreak, and over 600 deaths in just the last four days.
An Alabama jail refused to give masks to prisoners because, jail officials claimed, the prisoners would eat them.
There’s a threat to American democracy beyond that posed by the President and his sycophants – the ongoing disappearance of local news outlets. When nobody watches local officials, they can get away with a whole lot more.
Why are federal law enforcement agents arresting protestors in Oregon, using unmarked vehicles? When did the feds start looking at the Sicherheitsdienst as a model?
Multiple employees of color at ESPN spoke to the New York Times about racism behind the camera at the company, from limited career opportunities to a lack of diversity in leadership. I can’t say I ever witnessed any of this, or heard about it from people affected, but given the ways you get into leadership positions at ESPN, a lack of diversity is a feature rather than a bug.
Authorities in Selah, Washington, including the city leaders, are trying to criminalize speech in the form of chalk writing of “Black Lives Matter.”
Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler (guess!) is running against Black Lives Matter, opposing the WNBA’s use of the term (she owns part of the WNBA’s Atlanta Dream) and claiming that BLM harbors anti-Semitic and anti-Christian views (they don’t, as BLM is not a single, coherent organization). Here’s a list of some major companies that donated to her while proclaiming support for Black Lives Matter and efforts to fight structural racism.
Three articles on the additional challenges working mothers are facing during the pandemic: “They Go to Mommy First,” from Jess Grose in the New York Times; Parents Can’t Wait Around Forever, by author/economist Emily Oster in the Atlantic; and how a lack of childcare options is keeping women unemployed, in Politico.
A woman who had been tested for COVID-19 but didn’t self-isolate while she waited to get her results dropped off her child at a day care facility in upstate New York. She tested positive and gave it to 16 other adults and children.
A meeting in Utah to discuss requiring students to wear masks in schools was postponed because dingbats without masks filled the room, some carrying signs opposing the mask requirement. Their ‘arguments’ mirror those of anti-vaxxers’, which should be reason enough to overrule them.
An activist couple who support Palestinian causes found themselves attacked online in columns appearing in the Jerusalem Post and The Algemeiner by a student at the University of Birmingham named Oliver Taylor … except that Oliver Taylor doesn’t exist, and seemingly accurate photos of him are just well-made deepfakes.
A Toronto health official has the right to intervene in the case of two children whose dipshit mother doesn’t want to get them vaccinated. Vaccines work. They are safe and effective, and it turns out that the MMR vaccine may even protect you against some of the worst symptoms of COVID-19.
Walt Disneyworld is permanently closing three attractions, two rides and a show, none of which will be particularly missed.
Board game news: Renegade Game Studios announced a new line of puzzles based on art from four popular board games, including Raiders of the North Sea and Arboretum, with pre-orders now open.
Grail Games has a Kickstarter up for Whale Riders, a new game from Reiner Knizia, which is always of interest to me. I’m not sure about this theme, though; those look like Inuit people, and there’s no reason to use them in the artwork.
Marvel Villainous, the new standalone game in the Villainous line from Ravensburger, is available for pre-order exclusively through Target. I have a review copy and have played it once; it’s quite good, with five new villains from the MCU, but can’t be played with any of the 15 villains from the previous four boxes in the series.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alabama, arizona, board game news, coffee, coronavirus, disneyworld, frauds, links, longreads, michigan, stick to baseball, utah, vaccines, video games

→ July 11, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/11/20.

I had one solo post for The Athletic subscribers this week, something out of the ordinary: To participate in the site’s Book Blitz, I gave 25 recommendations for non-sports books, five apiece in literary novels, sci-fi/fantasy, detective/mystery, non-fiction, and short story collections. I also joined the site’s Authors Roundtable, answering some questions on the book-writing process.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Floor Plan, a new roll-and-write from Deep Water (publishers of Welcome To…) that is quite easy to learn, but where the theme and the strategy don’t work together.

My second book, The Inside Game, is out now, and you can buy it on bookshop.org through that link, or find it at your local independent bookstore.

And now, the links…

Vulture‘s interview with Thandie Newton is a must-read for her unbelievable candor, speaking about racism and sexism on set as well as some lousy experiences with Tom Cruise.
Patients who are hospitalized with COVID-19 and recover can face weeks or months of delirium, anxiety, depression, fatigue, and physical and cognitive deficits.
The Washington Post looks at how the pandemic has made the struggle working moms face impossible for employers to ignore, as we’ve seen with the recent backlash to bizarre decisions by Florida State and Georgia Tech.
The new invite-only audio app Clubhouse is paying a price for omitting any protections for users against harassment. Given what this Verge article says about the app I’d have zero interest in participating in it.
The Paris Review explains how Neapolitan cuisine became synonymous with Italian food.
Human rights lawyer Derecka Purnell explains why she became a police abolitionist, the first of three links this week from the Atlantic. The crux of her argument is the lack of accountability for officers who commit violence against civilians.
Ed Yong continues his tremendous work for the Atlantic on the pandemic, writing about how the experts trying to help hospitals and policymakers are getting burned out, while the pandemic is exacerbating issues of gender equity in the field, and charlatans from outside of epidemiology are trying to make names for themselves with shoddy research.
Also in the Atlantic, why death rates haven’t risen even as cases and hospitalizations continue to rise. Hint: it’s not necessarily good news.
A new study published in The Lancet found that antibody levels were extremely low in populations in COVID-19 hotspots, meaning that herd immunity isn’t coming any time soon.
Axios explains how public health efforts have to step up their efforts to combat COVID-19 misinformation.
This tweet showing average new cases per day of COVID-19 along with Trump’s comments on the pandemic is rather damning.
NPR looks at how crowdfunding has changed the board game industry in the wake of the RPG Frosthaven, the sequel to Gloomhaven, taking in $12.9 million in its Kickstarter run.
A Minnesota State Senator, who is also a physician, is now under investigation after spouting nonsense conspiracy theories about COVID-19 on social media. He has a history of voicing anti-vaccine sentiment too.
This isn’t exactly news, but a new study showed that anti-vaxxer parents are fraudulently using state religious exemptions to avoid vaccinating their kids. With no penalty for doing so – and minimal enforcement – they’re not going to stop until this loophole is closed.
Mental Floss has nine possible uses for sourdough starter discard.
I included this last week as well: There’s a petition online to demand the removal of the Conferederate flag and monument to Confederate soldiers at the Nutter Marvel Carriage Museum in Georgetown, Delaware. It’s a private institution, so unlike the statues and flags coming down in public spaces, the state and local governments can’t just remove the offensive objects.
Meanwhile, everything is fine in Poland, where the state TV station is warning that the opposition candidate for President will “fulfil Jewish demands” if he wins.
Board game news: Marvel Villainous, a new standalone game in the Disney Villainous series that introduces some new rules and five new villains to play, is available for pre-order at Target.
Bézier Games has announced an upcoming Kickstarter for Ultimate Werewolf Extreme, an expanded and upgraded version of their popular Ultimate Werewolf game.

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

→ June 20, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/20/20.

My one piece for subscribers to the Athletic this week looked at which MLB teams just drafted their new #1 or #2 prospects. No chat this week as I was busy with work calls or family commitments every afternoon.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the Kennerspiel des Jahres-nominated game The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine, a cooperative trick-taking game that plays out over a series of 50 missions, like a legacy game but without asking you to change or destroy any components.

The Boston Globe just named my second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, one of its recommended sports reads for the summer. The book has garnered similar plaudits from major publications as a Father’s Day gift or for summer reading, including from Forbes, The New York Times, and Raise. My thanks to all of you who’ve already bought it; if you’re looking to pick up a copy, you can get it at bookshop.org or perhaps at a local bookstore if they’re reopening near you.

I’m sending out my free email newsletter a bit more regularly lately, which is a good sign for my mental health, I think. You can sign up for free here.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: USA Today has the story of the late scout Rudy Santin’s attempts to expose MLB’s broken system for signing international amateur free agents, which can include verbal (and thus unenforceable) agreements between teams and 12-year-old players. The system doesn’t really work for either side – players can, and do, walk away from these agreements as late as the day before the signing period opens – but the likely alternative, a draft, will just result in less money flowing to players from teams.
Vanity Fair‘s Jeff Sharlet goes deep inside the cult of Trump, talking to his diehard supporters and their beliefs in some of the most bizarre, antifactual conspiracy theories you could ever imagine. These are people who think Q is real, that leading Democrats are literal demons who eat children, and that Trump was sent by God to save us all.
One way to craft a response to a pandemic is to look at successful responses to past pandemics. STAT News explains how the pornography industry dealt with the HIV epidemic, successfully, and what lessons countries might take away from their strategy.
The New York Times looks at two major failures in the peer-review process this year, asking why this happened and if the process itself is flawed (or, as some of the quoted sources say, simply overtaxed).
Also in the Times, what exactly is a Twitter bot, and are they as numerous as many recent headlines have claimed? I shared a story a few weeks ago about research at Carnegie Mellon that claimed as many as half of the tweets about COVID-19 in the study sample were from bots, but multiple sources here say that conclusion was not supported by the data.
My friend Alex Speier looked at unconscious racial bias in baseball scouting, including the language used in scouting reports. I’m quoted in the article.
Arizona’s COVID-19 pandemic might be even worse than the official data indicate. The state’s Rt remains well above 1, there’s barely any contact tracing, and the current trend has the state on its way to running out of ICU beds. This is what happens when you elect anti-science people to run your state.
Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts has told counties that if they require citizens to wear masks in county buildings, they will not receive any of the state’s COVID-19 relief funds. This is what happens when you elect anti-science people to run your state.
Stefan Fatsis, author of the entertaining Word Freak, writes about the debate within the competitive Scrabble world over whether to prohibit racial and other hateful slurs.
Expecting college students to behave prudently if they return to campus this fall is a fantasy, because people in that age range tend to engage in more risky and impulsive behaviors.
Troy Amen, who is entering his fifth year of a joint MD-MBA program at Harvard Medical School (and, I assume, Harvard Business School), writes about systemic racism at HMS and the school’s apparent refusal to hire a more diverse faculty.
Prosecutors allege that 18-year-old Chicago man murdered a trans woman after going home with her and learning she was transgender. According to the prosecution, he left, got a gun, returned to shoot her, left, and then went back to shoot her again.
Facebook Groups are fountains of disinformation and crackpot conspiracy theories, according to this editorial in WIRED by two authors who research disinformation and fake news. This isn’t shocking to anyone who follows anti-vaccine activity online, as Facebook is ground zero for so much of their bullshit.
Civil rights groups are asking big advertisers to pause spending on Facebook ads for the month of July, citing the platform’s failure to police hate groups on the site, as part of the #StopHateforProfit campaign.
Two Virginia lawyers pleaded guilty to attempting to extort $200 million from Monsanto by threatening to file false legal claims around Roundup (glyphosate). This is notable because the two lawyers work with scaremonger Carey Gilliam and her anti-GMO organization U.S. Right to Know.
Plenty of bad actors are spreading bogus stories of service workers tampering with the food ordered by police officers, but now the police unions are doing the same, disparaging Shake Shack with a false claim that workers there had “poisoned” several cops’ milkshakes. The NYC Detectives’ Endowment Association didn’t admit their error or apologize for spreading the lie.
Writer and book critic Carolyn Kellogg revealed on Twitter why she quit the National Book Critics Circle’s board – the group’s refusal to issue a statement on Black Lives Matter and the verbal abuse directed at another board member who led the working group trying to craft a statement.
Zimbabwe may be on the verge of collapse yet again, and they’ve resumed arresting and torturing opposition activists.
Board game news: roll20 announced the upcoming release and pre-order availability for Burn Bryte, a new tabletop RPG that’s been three years in the making.
Asmodee Digital announced an upcoming port of the Game of Thrones board game, a big, complex, long game that might really benefit from a digital adaptation.
Bézier Games announced pre-orders for Maglev Metro, the newest game from the designer of Suburbia and the Castles of Mad King Ludwig.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, anti-science, arizona, board game news, coronavirus, links, longreads, nebraska, social media, stick to baseball, the swamp

→ May 30, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/30/20.

My second mock draft went up this week for subscribers to the Athletic; I think it was a lot better than my first one, which went up two weeks ago, based on the feedback I got from sources after it was posted. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday to take your questions about it. I’ll do another mock plus a draft ranking this upcoming week, then a final mock on June 10^th, the morning of the draft.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Azul: Summer Pavilions, the third game in the Azul series (Azul and Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra). If you liked either of the first two Azul games, you’ll probably like this one as well, which offers the same tile-selection mechanic but new ways to place and score. Here on the dish, I reviewed La Isla, a midweight game from the designer of Castles of Burgundy and Carpe Diem.

My podcast this week featured Dr. Claude Steele, a psychology professor at Stanford and the author of Whistling Vivaldi, who spoke to me about stereotype threat and how players and evaluators might cope with it in sports. You can also listen on Apple, Stitcher, or Spotify. I also appeared on the Romantic About Baseball podcast to discuss my new book The Inside Game, the draft, and other issues in baseball.

The Inside Game has garnered several recommendations from major publications as a Father’s Day gift or for summer reading, including from Forbes, The New York Times, and Raise. My thanks to all of you who’ve already bought it; if you’re looking to pick up a copy, you can get it at bookshop.org or perhaps at a local bookstore if they’re reopening near you.

And now, the links … many of which are from the Washington Post this week, which wasn’t deliberate.

Longreads first: The Daily Beast looks at the questionable fundraising efforts of Shaun King, sometimes known to his detractors as “Talcum X,” who has a history of not really accounting for funds he’s raised.
The Salt Lake Tribune has a very useful, practical guide to how the coronavirus spreads in various public spaces, so you can assess the risk of various activities.
We haven’t heard much about “draining the swamp” recently, have we? Trump is now appointing watchdogs beset by ‘preposterous’ conflicts of interest, like the one who is now responsible for investigating his own actions.
Why do people often support or vote for narcissists in times of trouble? Professor Charles O’Reilly at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business explains that and how narcissistic leaders destroy from within.
Meanwhile, Twitter finally took a very modest step to rein in Trump’s lies on their site, and Trump had a tantrum over it.
Many African nations have had more progressive – and, to date, more successful – approaches to slowing the spread of coronavirus than the U.S. has, including aggressive lockdowns and bans on international travel.
My colleague at the Athletic Marcus Thompson wrote about the murder of George Floyd and what it means to be in a rage all the time.
NPR reviewed federal records showing that the Trump administration killed a federal rule that would have protected health workers in case of a pandemic.
I found the maps on the COVID Policy Responses tracker site to be both useful and mesmerizing.
COVID-19 may become endemic, even with a vaccine, and we need to prepare for that possibility (but we aren’t).
North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum (R) pleaded with anti-mask twits to act reasonably and stop this stupid culture war.
A trio of Penn professors suggest three things we can do to persuade more people to wear masks.
The Washington Post‘s Max Boot writes about the three reasons why conspiracy theories are especially dangerous right now: social media, higher stakes, and a President who spreads them like they’re butter.
Also from the Post, a new study tries to explain why some kids are experiencing massive, Kawasaki disease-like reactions to COVID-19 – a cytokine storm.
Here are five things those of us not in underrepresented groups can do to help those who are in our workplaces.
Board games: Asmodee has issued a bunch of print-and-play expansions and modules for existing games you own, such as the one that lets you play 7 Wonders Duel as a solo game.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, board game news, boardgames, coronavirus, links, longreads, stick to baseball, the swamp

→ May 16, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/16/20.

I posted my first mock draft of 2020 on Wednesday for subscribers to The Athletic, since we are now just 26 days away from the first night of the draft, which will only be five rounds. I wrote last week about the impact of the shorter draft on players and the sport as a whole, and also did a “what-if” lookback at the Padres’ decision to take Matt Bush over Justin Verlander in 2004. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday, my first in ages.

My new book, The Inside Game, is now out and you can buy it everywhere fine books are sold, including here on bookshop.org; I’m donating my affiliate commissions from sales of my book through the site to my local food bank. The Eugene Register-Guard has a nice review of both The Inside Game and Brad Balukjian’s The Wax Pack.

My guest on this week’s episode of The Keith Law Show was San Francisco Chronicle baseball writer John Shea, whose book 24: Life Stories and Lessons from the Say Hey Kid, co-authored with Willie Mays, was released on Tuesday. I’m scheduled to have Cubs infielder/outfielder Ian Happ on the show this upcoming week to talk about his charitable endeavors with artisanal coffee. You can also subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and Spotify.

At Paste, I reviewed The Sherlock Files: Elementary Edition, a new card-based deduction game that played better than I expected, although the Sherlock character isn’t remotely involved in the game’s story or mechanics. My review of the excellent digital adaptation of Sagrada is up over at Ars Technica.

I sent out another edition of my email newsletter on Friday night to subscribers; it’s free and you can sign up here.

And now, the links…

Longreads … well, medium-reads first: The New Yorker has a look at the secret world of fungi, the botanical kingdom that goes way beyond the mushrooms you likely pictured when you read that.
ProPublica has a piece explaining how climate change is pushing up infectious disease rates, and making pandemics more likely in the future.
The Guardian looks at former US army sergeant’s abortive plot to overthrow Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro.
“For conservative zealots and media figures, the pandemic is quickly becoming just another culture war battleground — an axis of postmodern symbolic conflict, another vent for bottomless grievance, and fuel for a screeching victimhood complex.” This from The Week’s Ryan Cooper, who also points out that the United States’ response to COVID-19 has been the worst of any developed nation and argues that the problem of conservative victimhood has made governing the U.S. impossible.
Some countries are easing restrictions on movement and gatherings, but other nations are restoring such isolation measures because of increases in new cases.
Get ready for a massive disinformation effort against a COVID-19 vaccine; it has started online even though such a vaccine doesn’t actually exist.
A commentary in CalMatters, authored by two professors in the University of California system, gives helpful tips for journalists asked to cover anti-vaccine or anti-lockdown “protests,” most of which are very small and may be astroturfed events.
For example, Creative Loafing Tampa revealed that a “reopen Florida” rally was, in fact, organized by an anti-vaccine group – which multiple mainstream Tampa media outlets failed to mention in their coverage of the protest.
Various states’ lockdown efforts have led anti-vaccine groups to team up with pro-Trump agitators in some of these protests, the strangest of bedfellows other than their shared denial of science.
Many red states are now seeing cases surge even as Trump claims (falsely) the pandemic is subsiding.
GOP-controlled legislatures are up to some shit while we’re distracted by the pandemic, such as Missouri Republicans attempting to gut gerrymandering reform.
An interesting topic for debate: Do works by authors accused of sexual harassment belong in the classroom? I think the answer at the university level would mostly be “yes,” but what about high school? Junior high school? Can you have a serious discussion about separating artist from art, or about the specifics of any accusations, with 16-year-olds or 12-year-olds or younger kids?
Tribune Publishing is furloughing workers and cutting pay to save about $550,000 just months after distributing $9 million in cash to shareholders.
Nik Sharma, author of the wonderful cookbook Season, writes in the Washington Post on how to make a flavorful vegetable stock that contains just five ingredients other than water.
The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent warns that, as in 2016, too many media members lend credence to bullshit conspiracies and outright lies from the Trump camp through weasel wording.
From a few weeks ago: McSweeney’s hits rather close to home with “Emails from My Children’s School Before 8:00 AM During the COVID-19 Crisis.”
Jess Grose’s latest parenting column for the New York Times, on dealing with home-schooling burnout, has a note at the end from a name familiar to board game fans.
Renegade Game Studios are holding a virtual game convention on June 5-7 where they’ll announce a bunch of upcoming new games as well.
Cranio Creations has a Kickstarter up for their planned reissue of the 2004 Wolfgang Kramer/Michael Kiesling game Maharaja, reimagined by Simone Luciani (Tzolk’in, Grand Austria Hotel).

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, climate change, Cooking, coronavirus, links, longreads, metoo, missouri, mushrooms, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ May 2, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/2/20.

I was busy this week promoting The Inside Game, my new book, now available from bookshop.org and other fine retail outlets. As of Thursday, Midtown Scholar in Harrisburg had signed copies for sale. I’m especially thrilled to see how positive the reviews have been, from a starred review in Publishers Weekly to this glowing writeup in the Maine Edge. Library Journal also “highly recommended” the book, although the review is only for subscribers.

WIRED has an excerpt from The Inside Game on its site, a portion of the chapter on anchoring bias that discusses a major reason why the automated strike zone would be an improvement over human umps.

I appeared on several great podcasts this week, including:

Jeremy Schaap’s The Sporting Life: ESPN Podcenter, Apple, Spotify, Stitcher
Inquiring Minds: Apple; Stitcher
Wharton Moneyball: Apple, Spotify, Stitcher
Sox Machine: Apple, Spotify, Stitcher
KPCC Airtalk: Apple, Spotify, Stitcher (around the 93:00 mark)

On my own podcast this week, I had board game designer & Blue Jays fan Daryl Andrews (Sagrada, Bosk), talking about his latest games, designing & playing during self-isolation, and his Toronto fandom. You can subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or Stitcher.

I was interviewed by my friend Tim Grierson for MEL Magazine, talking about my new book and life in self-isolation.

Also, my first book, Smart Baseball, is now available in Korean. If you’re in South Korea, you can pick it up here on Kyobo.

I reviewed the game Half Truth, a fun party/trivia game designed by Ken Jennings and Richard Garfield, for Paste this week, and reviewed the digital adaptation of the great dice-drafting game Sagrada for Ars Technica.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Can we just give Ed Yong a Pulitzer Prize for his essay in the Atlantic called “Why the Coronavirus is So Confusing?” It is clear, coherent, comprehensive, and serious without being alarmist. It makes clear the role disinformation is playing in the pandemic, lays appropriate blame for the U.S.’s poor and late response, and discusses the structural problems that made a pandemic of some sort inevitable. It’s the best piece I’ve read this year.
CNN has the story of the man who spent 46 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, the longest such wrongful sentence in U.S. history.
Gabrielle Hamilton, chef-owner of Prune and author of Blood, Bones, and Butter, wrote a poignant, self-searching editorial in the New York Times asking if her restaurant really is “essential” and whether she’ll have the energy or the funds to reopen.
Writing for SB Nation, Shakeia Taylor looks at the curious life of Effa Manley, Negro Leagues owner and Baseball Hall of Famer, and, according to multiple sources, a white woman who passed herself off as black when it was convenient to do so.
Why does Belgium have such a high COVID-19 fatality rate? One major reason is that they’re being more honest in reporting such deaths.
It’s “doubtful” that COVID-19 was accidentally released from a Wuhan lab, but that won’t stop conspiracy-mongers and xenophobes from spreading a probable lie.
Those two Bakersfield ER docs you might have seen on Youtube calling for states to reopen their economies? They’re quacks, pushing a bogus epidemiology, which I presume is for attention.
Progressive women politicians are being offered “a poisoned chalice” when it comes to Joe Biden, who faces a serious allegation from Tara Reade that he sexually assaulted her in the 1990s. Meanwhile, Biden, obviously taking this very seriously, appointed notorious partier Chris Dodd, himself involved in sexual assault allegations (with Ted Kennedy) in the 1980s, to serve on his VP selection committee.
Tennessee restaurants re-opened as the state saw its biggest one-day jump in COVID-19 cases. The states that were the slowest to shut down or refused to do so will compete with the states that rushed to re-open for the worst spikes in COVID-19 cases, and I expect they’ll ask the federal government to bail out their incompetence, too.
Iowa is one of those states that never closed, but governor Kim Reynolds (R) is already loosening restrictions, even though COVID-19 cases there are surging.
Cosplayers stormed the Michigan Capitol this week, armed with small-penis symbols, and some called for the Governor’s murder, to which state Republicans have said … nothing.
The shutdown is changing how people buy books, and has given a huge boost to the startup bookshop.org, which I have begun using for all affiliate links to books on this site.
Tim Grierson also interviewed the director of A Secret Love, a wonderful new Netflix documentary about two women, one a former AAGPL star, who were a couple for nearly 70 years but hid their relationship even from close family until the very end.
Why did billionaire Monty Bennett get $96 million in Payroll Protection Program loans that his company, Ashford Inc., does not appear to plan to pay employees? It’s a bit of a shell game, as Ashford merely “advises” two hotel companies Bennett owns.
Why did my undergraduate alma mater maintain such close ties with Jeffrey Epstein even after his conviction for sex crimes against a minor?
Betsy Levy Paluck writes in the Washington Post about how she gave birth by herself during this pandemic, but she never felt alone.
No board game news this week, but I know of two interesting Kickstarters coming on Tuesday and will tweet about them when they launch.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, bookstores, coronavirus, harvard, iowa, links, longreads, metoo, michigan, restaurants, stick to baseball, tennessee

→ April 18, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/18/20.

My book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, will be out in three days! You can buy it wherever you can buy books right now, but allow me to recommend bookshop.org, which sources books from independent bookstores or just gives some of their proceeds from direct sales to indie stores.

For The Athletic subscribers this week, Eno Sarris and I examined the five tools for position players from both scouting and analytical perspectives. There will be another piece for pitchers, which I hope to get done this week (I think Eno’s well ahead of me for his part). On my own podcast, I spoke with former Angels scouting director Eddie Bane about Mike Trout, all-time draft busts Bill Bene and Kiki Jones, and more. You can subscribe here on Apple and Spotify.

On the board game front, I reviewed Oceans, the new standalone sequel to the game Evolution, over at Paste this week. For Vulture, I looked at pandemic-themed games, including the one by that name, with thoughts on why diseases are such a popular theme.

I did a virtual bookstore event with Harrisburg’s Midtown Scholar on Thursday, which you can watch here if you missed it. I’ll do another such event on Friday, April 24th, with Sean Doolittle via DC’s Politics & Prose; you can sign up by buying a copy of The Inside Game here.

I spoke to Ryan Phillips of The Big Lead about The Inside Game and my move to the Athletic, among other topics, appeared on the Sports Information Solutions podcast with my former ESPN colleague Mark Simon to talk about the book, and talked about boardgames during quarantine on the Just Not Sports podcast.

And now the links…

Longreads first: This WIRED piece on the neurological decline of a brilliant young coder is devastating and kind of hopeless, yet so well-written.
John Horton Conway died this week of complications from COVID-19; this Guardian profile of the master mathematician from 2015 gives you a sense of his works and his persona. Conway invented the zero-player game The Game of Life, which proceeds according to fixed rules from whatever starting position you create. It’s famous in mathematical and computer science circles, at least.
The economic pain from the pandemic will be unfairly distributed. This piece from the New Yorker makes some strong points, although there’s a bit of a survivorship bias angle to the conversations with an investor who claims he saw the pandemic coming and profited heavily from investments around it.
Republicans are trying to use the pandemic as cover to remove thousands of voters from the registration rolls, with Wisconsin a prominent example of how they’re targeting voters of color too.
Anti-vaxxers are already spreading disinformation about COVID-19 and preparing to fight vaccinations if and when a vaccine is developed for it – but there are also signs that some vaccine hesitant people are reconsidering their views.
Dr. Grace Farris, the chief of medicine at Mount Sinai West in New York and author of some very clever cartoons on her Instagram account @coupdegracefarris, wrote a bittersweet piece in the New York Times about how she hasn’t seen her kids in four weeks to try to keep them away from the coronavirus while she’s working at the hospital.
No matter what Fox News tells you, there is no evidence that COVID-19 came out of a laboratory in China or anywhere else.
South Dakota’s Republican governor is one of five who’ve resisted issuing stay-at-home orders, and now the state has one of the nation’s worst hotspots for COVID-19.
Ohio Republicans are trying to get the state’s governor, Mike DeWine (R), to reopen the state’s economy. This is becoming a trend across the Midwest and south, despite public health experts’ recommendations that the states remain closed.
And we may not be able to reopen at all until we start testing a lot more people – especially those who aren’t visibly sick.
An email chain involving experts inside and outside the government shows just how far behind the curve Trump and even the CDC were in preparing for the pandemic here.
Why did a company with no employees and no history of producing medical equipment get a $55 million contract to make N95 masks for the federal government?
Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker (D) has had to arrange covert shipments of protective masks from China to avoid the federal government seizing them, since the feds haven’t provided enough masks to the state in the first place.
Molly Roberts, writing in the Washington Post, looks at the problems the Tara Reade allegations pose for Democrats looking to support Joe Biden (or who simply want to defeat Trump in November).
Bill Simmons bought a $16 million home outside L.A., and Variety reported on it but took the story down within hours.
There’s a GoFundMe open to support Oakland’s Marcus Books, the nation’s oldest black-owned independent bookstore.
CMON’s Kickstarter for Ankh: Gods of Egypt, the newest game from designer Eric Lang (Blood Rage, Rising Sun), has already crossed $1.25 million.
Jupiter Disco, a Brooklyn cocktail bar owned by a friend of my partner, has a Kickstarter out (already funded) for a new cocktail zine called PRESERVATION! to help keep the bar afloat during the shutdown.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, bookstores, coronavirus, links, longreads, south dakota, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines, voter suppression

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