longreads — Page 17

→ April 4, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/4/20.

I had two new pieces for subscribers to the Athletic this week, one on the great 1980s video game Earl Weaver Baseball (for which I spoke to one of its lead developers), and one with the latest on MLB’s plans for minor league realignment and contraction.

On the gaming front, I had nothing new this week but have a few more pieces filed. Last week, I reviewed ClipCut Parks, a new “flip-and-cut” game that is great for younger kids who love using scissors but not much of a game for older players, for Paste. For Vulture, I updated my ranking of the top 25 board game apps available on mobile platforms. For Ars Technica, I reviewed the new app version of the legacy game Charterstone.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, is due out on April 21^st from Harper Collins, and you can pre-order it now via their site or wherever fine books are sold. Also, check out my free email newsletter, which I say I’ll write more often than I actually write it. To be perfectly honest, I just haven’t felt up to writing that lately.

And now, the links…

The most distressing this I read this week was the Washington Post‘s story on how attempts to re-open Wuhan after two weeks of no new (reported) cases of coronavirus failed miserably as new infections came back immediately. The Chinese government was able to enforce much more draconian measures than we’ll ever see here, and yet they couldn’t corral the virus; what does that imply about what June and July will be like here in the U.S.?
A Guardian longread asks how our world will change permanently in the wake of the pandemic, highlighting decreasing civil liberties and the potential of a new response to climate change as two possible outcomes.
A column in Foreign Policy calls the COVID-19 pandemic the worst intelligence failure in U.S. history. Ken Klippenstein wrote in the Nation that the U.S. military knew years ago that a pandemic caused by a “novel respiratory disease” was likely on the horizon, so was the failure of intelligence or of the President’s response to it?
This New York Times longread investigates how a failure to test early in the U.S. – again, due to the Administration’s choice to ignore information it received – led to the pandemic and probably thousands of needless deaths.
The right-wing dark money group Americans for Prosperity, founded by neoconservative billionaire Charles Koch, pushed a $1 billion cut to the Centers Disease Control’s funding and is now attacking shelter-in-place orders for harming businesses.
Social distancing can’t last forever, and we need a comprehensive testing-and-tracing plan in place when the restrictions are inevitably eased.
Arizona Governor Doug Ducey finally issued a stay-at-home order on Monday, after weeks of dithering and dismissing the concerns about COVID-19’s risks. Senior citizens make up 17.5% of the state’s population.
On the other side of the coin, Washington Governor Jay Inslee (D) and Ohio Governor Mike DeWine (R) have both earned praise for their fast, definitive moves to try to slow the virus’s spread in their states.
Kentucky, South Dakota, and West Virginia have used the cover of COVID-19 restrictions to criminalize mass protests, including those against fossil-fuel projects like Dakota Access.
Senator Kelly Loeffler (GA-guess) sold millions of dollars in shares after receiving a confidential briefing on COVID-19 in early February, and bought shares in a company that makes protective equipment.
Kara Swisher at the New York Times delineates how Fox News spread disinformation and downplayed the threat of COVID-19 to its viewers, even though they were taking significant precautions behind the scenes.
We have it bad here in the U.S., but the impact of the pandemic and attempts to stop it will lead to massive suffering in the developing world, such as a lack of shelter or food for millions in India.
A charity run by Franklin Graham, who has a long history of anti-gay commentary, has refused to allow LGBT people to volunteer in its tent hospital in New York’s Central Park.
Meanwhile, the President is going to go golfing again.
And he’s allowing a reporter from OANN – an extreme right-wing ‘news’ outlet that openly supports the Administration – to flaunt the White House Correspondents’ Association’s rules on social distancing. OANN didn’t belong in the press room in the first place.
LitHub ranked 75 different covers of The Master & Margarita from around the world, and commented on them. I’ve had #25, #8, and #3 over the years.
Hackers or pranksters have been breaking into random Zoom meetings and defacing peoples’ screens. The FBI has warned that the platform isn’t secure.
Powell’s, one of the best independent bookstores in the United States, had laid off 100+ workers when the shutdown first hit Oregon, but has rehired them to meet a surge in online orders – one of which was from me, buying The Mirror and the Light as a birthday gift for my girlfriend’s mother. You can pre-order The Inside Game from them as well.
Progressive/instrumental metal band Town Portal and post-metal act Kowloon Walled City worked together on a live mashup of Solange’s “Rise” and Kaki King’s “Jessica” when the bands met up last summer, and just released it on YouTube to support Town Portal’s record label Small Pond.
Rock Manor Games’ two-player game Lawyer Up is in its last few days on Kickstarter. I’ve actually played this game with co-designer Mike Gnade, who lives near me, and would definitely recommend it based on that one play of a finished prototype.
And finally, some tweets of note from the week:

Fauci just admitted that if the Trump Administration had not fumbled the ball so badly on testing many fewer Americans would die from coronavirus.
— Dan Pfeiffer (@danpfeiffer) March 31, 2020

Friends, I learned last night over Zoom drinks that ya'll're baking so much that there's a shortage of yeast?! I, your local frumpy yeast geneticist have come here to tell you this: THERE IS NEVER A SHORTAGE OF YEAST. Here's where I'm a viking. Instructions below.
— Sudeep Agarwala (@shoelaces3) March 29, 2020

powerful https://t.co/QuwBc7G42J
— Daniel Uhlfelder (@DWUhlfelderLaw) March 31, 2020

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

→ March 28, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/28/20.

One new article this week for subscribers to The Athletic, looking at what the agreement between MLB and the players’ union might mean for this year’s draft. It’s not very good for the draft prospects themselves, unfortunately. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday and a Periscope (where my voice gave out!) on Tuesday.

On the gaming front, I had four new pieces this week. For Paste, I reviewed ClipCut Parks, a new “flip-and-cut” game that is great for younger kids who love using scissors but not much of a game for older players. For Vulture, I updated my ranking of the top 25 board game apps available on mobile platforms. For Ars Technica, I reviewed the new app version of the legacy game Charterstone.

And now, the links…

Matt Leacock, the game designer behind Pandemic, wrote an op ed for the New York Times about how no one can win this real-life pandemic ‘game’ by themselves.
Who funds the Federalist? It would be nice to know that, after the extremist site ran a column from an unlicensed dermatologist calling for people to hold ‘coronavirus parties,’ as VICE’s Laura Wagner writes. Twitter briefly locked the site’s account for posting the link.
The preacher who leads Bible study for members of Trump’s Cabinet claims that coronavirus is God’s wrath on people for allowing homosexuality and environmentalism to exist. His fans in government include Vice-President Mike Pence and Senator Joni Ernst. I wonder how much of our tax dollars go to enabling this hatemongering.
Delusional politicians and right-wing media members are making scientists developing statistical models of coronavirus’s spread harder by implying or outright claiming such models are hoaxes.
The Trump Administration has been citing a retracted paper to defend its early opposition to expanding COVID-19 testing, a policy that will likely lead to tens of thousands of needless deaths. Meanwhile, their plan involves blaming China for a ‘cover-up’ that never happened rather than coming up with a viable plan for slowing the pandemic.
Surgeons are increasingly reluctant to perform operations in this environment, due to equipment shortages, fear of infection from asymptomatic patients, and the possibility that doctors might be at higher risk for the most serious form of the disease.
“Mothers are held responsible for every detail — large and small — of their children’s well-being.” Jess Grose explains how coronavirus has exposed the ‘great lie’ of modern motherhood.
The owner of a Philadelphia hospital – who shuttered the facility last year – demanded $6 million in rent for the city to use it for six months to house COVID-19 patients.
Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey (guess) voiced opposition to the $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus bill because sending the unemployed or underemployed money “creates incentives not to work.” Toomey is repeating a popular conservative myth, probably because it sells.
Longreads: The Ford Motor Company purchased the Michigan Central train station in downtown Detroit, part of that city’s ongoing revitalization, the story of which is the subject of this BBC longread.
A ProPublica investigation found that the Chinese government is using tens of thousands of hacked or fake Twitter accounts to spread pro-Beijing propaganda on issues ranging from the Hong Kong protests to the government’s COVID-19 response.
Texas Monthly looks at how the H-E-B supermarket chain prepared for the pandemic several weeks ahead of just about any other company or government authority.
Writing for Billboard, Natalie Weiner looks at how two hits from 2000 that told of women getting revenge on their abusers elicited entirely different public reactions. My real issue with “Goodbye Earl” is that there is no “midnight redeye flight” from Atlanta that would put you anywhere in the United States.
Ann Forsyth, director of Harvard’s Healthy Places Design Lab, writes about how COVID-19 may alter the future of urban and home life.
Harvard finally reversed course and will pay its furloughed dining-hall workers. The University has a miserable history of failing to reasonably compensate the people who keep the place running.
Americans are stocking up on various dry goods, but also on jigsaw puzzles. I have quite a few in the house but never seem to choose them over a board game or a movie.
I didn’t realize that gay marriage is still illegal in South Korea, where there’s still a terrible social stigma around homosexuality in some parts of the country.
This ad, lambasting Trump for his late and inadequate response to this crisis, is superb.

what an ad. pic.twitter.com/yZV9KJCOEn
— Florida Chris (@chrislongview) March 25, 2020

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: coronavirus, detroit, harvard, links, longreads, south korea, stick to baseball

→ March 21, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/21/20.

My one new piece at The Athletic this week looked at the top 30 prospects for this year’s MLB draft, which is itself up in the air, although I am inclined to doubt that the draft would be completely cancelled because I think there’d be a flurry of lawsuits from players (and their advisors).

In response to many reader requests, I posted a ranking of my favorite board games for two players – some are just two-player games, some play more but work quite well for two. I have more board game content in the works for Paste, Vulture, and Ars Technica in the next few weeks as well.

And now, the links…

Coronavirus stories first … Here’s the most aggravating thing you’ll read this week: Texas Monthly looks at anti-vaxxers so deranged they’re already trying to avoid a COVID-19 vaccine, even with mortality rates thousands of times higher for the virus than for any vaccine we have.
Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) voted against the coronavirus relief bill because it provided sick leave to same-sex domestic partners.
The Washington Post details how the federal government fouled up the coronavirus testing situation so badly, allowing the virus to spread much faster than it might have otherwise. The Post‘s Jennifer Rubin calls Trump’s response to the pandemic the biggest blunder in Presidential history.
Trump said this week he didn’t know about the White House Pandemic Response Team but there’s video of him bragging about dismantling it.
The BBC’s The Inquiry podcast looked at how the USA failed in our initial response to the virus. The short answer: Incompetence.
STAT looks at how some other countries have been successful at beating back the pandemic.
At least five Senators appear to have dumped stocks after a confidential hearing about how unprepared the U.S. was for the COVID-19 pandemic. Intelligence Committee Chair Richard Burr (R-NC) sold up to $1.7 million in stock even as he reassured the public we were prepared. Senator Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) sold hundreds of thousands of dollars of shares as well, and bought shares in Citrix, which makes software used by employees working from home.
Italian author Igiaba Scebo writes from Rome “Dear Americans, Please Stay Inside.”
As the Administration discusses bailing out airlines and cruise ship operators, the restaurant industry has received no response to its own pleas for financial assistance, despite employing more people and lacking the airlines’ history of massive stock buybacks and seven-figure CEO salaries.
J. Kenji López-Alt posted a lengthy guide to food safety and coronavirus.
Longreads: This New York Times story about fabricated sexual harassment claims against a professor at Arizona State is both fascinating and infuriating. The worst part is that the author, one of the targets of the scheme, can’t name the perpetrator, who is now free to do this again to someone else.
The BBC has the story of a reporter who worked with an English man to try to reunite an Afghan mother with the daughter taken from her by the father when he fled to the UK as a migrant.
An editorial in Scientific American discusses the growing problem of harassment of scientists and others who promote knowledge on social media, on topics as diverse as vaccines, climate change, evolution, and mental health treatment.
The Trump Administration overruled the EPA and other scientists who used evidence to show that the widely-used chemical trichloroethylene is linked to fetal heart defects.
ChefsFeed offers six tips on how you can help local restaurants try to survive the shutdown. Many are opening fundraising pages to help employees who need emergency assistance, like the wonderful 5&10 in Athens, Georgia, has.
A member of the far-right hate group the Proud Boys ended up appointed to the city commission in Latinx-majority Fennville, Michigan, because he didn’t disclose his affiliation and the commissioners didn’t do their due diligence on his social media accounts.
Board game news: Two Kickstarters of note this week. The first is for Holi, an area control game coming soon from Floodgate games.
The second is for Ark: Awakening, an engine-builder with a modular board where each player has a unique faction (which sounds a bit like Root).

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

→ March 14, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/14/20.

I have one new post for The Athletic subscribers this week, looking at what might happen to the draft when there are no games to scout. I will have a ranking of the top 30 prospects for the draft on Monday; I’m not sure what my draft coverage might look like from here on out, as it depends on whether anyone’s playing and if the draft date moves.

Over at Paste, I reviewed PARKS, one of the most popular new games of 2019, featuring artwork from the Fifty-Nine Parks series.

And now, the links…

Coronavirus first, unfortunately: The White House has repeatedly sought to minimize the facts about the virus’ spread, and even ordered federal health officials to make their deliberations classified, which just further slowed the response … The Singapore government’s strategy in response to the virus has won praise from the WHO while the United States’ strategy has been insufficient … The former head of the White House pandemic office explains what the department did before Trump closed it for no apparent reason at all. He won’t answer questions about the decision, of course.
Two longer reads on the virus: How the Chinese scientist known to colleagues as the “bat woman” has identified dozens of virii in that family (similar to the ones that cause COVID-19 and SARS) by searching in bat caves … James Hamblin, whose work for the Atlantic has been some of the best writing on the pandemic, points out that staying home if you start coughing is not a sufficient plan.
Longreads: The BBC had three great longreads this week. The first is on the twenty-year quest to solve a murder in Idaho Falls, one for which an innocent man spent nearly all that time in prison because he was railroaded by police interrogators.
The second is by a woman who tried to get investigators to track down a child abused in a pedophilia video.
And the third is about efforts by victims of sexual assault to get videos of their attacks removed from porn sites.
ProPublica found that the Republican National Committee has handed out big contracts to companies linked to Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel’s husband and her political bankers.
The media needs to stop treating Trump’s inaccurate and often incoherent statements as normal political copy.
While we’re all distracted by the growing pandemic, Congress is considering a bill that would give law enforcement a back door into encrypted communications, giving the government far greater surveillance powers.
The National Labor Relations Board is trying to remove non-discrimination language from its contract with professional attorneys, eliminating protections against discrimination based on race, sex, religion, and sexual orientation.
NPR’s Short Wave has a 12-minute audio clip on anti-matter and attempts to create it.
Worsening relations between Estonia and Russia have split the Seto ethnic minority with an increasingly impassable border.
Board game news: Capstone Games announced a new game, New York Zoo, from designer Uwe Rosenberg (Agricola, Patchwork, Cottage Garden).
Viscounts of the West Kingdom, the third game in the second trilogy from designer Shem Phillips (Architects of the West Kingdom, Raiders of the North Sea), is at nearly $600,000 as it ends its Kickstarter run.
Dire Wolf Digital’s port of Sagrada is now in Early Access on Steam; I’ve played it a few times and it’s very strong, as all of DWD’s adaptations have been.
Finally, this is just … special.

Seeing some incredible takes about Public Enemy today pic.twitter.com/ag2zk7DhHg
— Wild Geerters (@steinkobbe) March 2, 2020

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

→ February 29, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/29/20.

My top 100 prospects package began to run this week on The Athletic, with the global top 100 running Monday, the column of guys who just missed on Tuesday, and then the American League org reports running the rest of the week. (Here’s the Rangers’ report, and the Royals’, for example.) You can access everything via this index page. I also held a Klawchat this Thursday.

My brand-new podcast, The Keith Law Show (also on iTunes), debuted this past week as well, with a guest appearance from Fangraphs’ lead prospect writer Eric Longenhagen. My thanks to all of you who’ve subscribed and/or left five-star ratings.

I’ve also got at least five signings scheduled at independent bookstores already, with two announced on the stores’ pages: April 24^th at Politics & Prose in DC and April 25^th at Midtown Scholar in Harrisburg.

And now, the links…

This week’s must-read piece is from James Hamblin in the Atlantic, on how we are all likely to get coronavirus. A vaccine won’t arrive in time to stop the outbreak, with U.S. policy failures a big reason why, and the virus’s long incubation period and 2% fatality rate ensure it will continue to spread despite containment efforts. We should try to get all our red city cards to the Scientist.
Of course, our Dear Leader referred to concerns about coronavirus and the media coverage of it as a hoax, and then offered some false statements on the virus’s spread.
Longreads: This history of the failure of the startup Homepolish is fascinating if entirely familiar. A fast-talking, highly educated con man convinced a lot of seemingly smart people to fund his company-without-a-business.
GQ has the story of “the Great Buenos Aires bank heist,” meticulously planned and executed, only to collapse because of one gang member’s infidelity to his wife.
The Guardian looks at the lasting influence of Copenhagen restaurant Noma, which continues to alter the global food scene with its ethos of local, sustainable cuisine.
Writing for VICE, the great ex-Deadspin writer Laura Wagner details testimony in a lawsuit over the NYPD’s racist policing practices.
Pippa Norris, Harvard political scientist and director of the Electoral Integrity Project, discusses the rise of authoritarian populism as a response to social change and why populism lends itself to authoritarian impulses.
How Gmail filters emails from various candidates may affect how those candidates fare in the primaries.
The mass murderer who killed nine Turkish immigrants outside Frankfurt was a Trump-loving, QAnon believer.
Bloomberg profiled Restoration Games and founder Rob Daviau fresh off the company’s blockbuster Kickstarter effort for the Return to Dark Tower, a reboot of a cult classic game from the early 1980s, which raised over $4 million. Daviau is also the inventor of the “legacy game” concept, which turned Pandemic Legacy into one of the most acclaimed and highest-rated board games ever released.
Celtics rookie Grant Williams loves him some Settlers of Catan.
Jon Melli goes inside the campers where two Orioles pitching prospects make their homes.
Learning another language can alter your perception of time.
You can only be a writer if you can afford it.
Plaid Hat Games, acquired several years ago by Asmodee, has been sold back to founder Colby Dauch, although much of its catalog of games will stay with Asmodee.

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

→ February 15, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/15/20.

My only new content this week at the Athletic was a breakdown of the final Mookie Betts trade, as I continue to work on the prospect rankings, which will run the week of February 24^th. I’ll be working through the weekend to stay on schedule for that release date.

I do have a new game review up at Paste, covering Genius Games’ new title Ecosystem, a card-drafting, tableau-building game that moves very quickly but has intricate interactions among the cards you place. The deck has cards for two habitats and nine different species of animals, birds, fish, and insects, and where and how you place those cards in your 4×5 grid affects your ultimate scoring.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New Yorker has a giant profile of N.K. Jemisin on the eve of the release of her first novel since her Broken Earth trilogy won three straight Hugo awards.
The Guardian has an excerpt from Andrew Marantz’s forthcoming book Antisocial that looks at how far-right trolls took over social media, with a lot of help from Silicon Valley execs who view news as merely another commodity to be sold.
Melissa Clark has a buyer’s guide to chocolate, including explanations of some key terms and a discussion of the ethics of buying chocolate, in the New York Times.
A new federal lawsuit alleges that children held at Chicago Lakeshore Hospital were drugged and/or sexually abused while Cook County officials covered it up, according to ProPublica.
Shipt, the home-delivery company now owned by Target, has taken on some strongly anti-worker practices and encouraged its delivery folks to spend their own money to try to butter up customers.
From last March, Quinnipiac women’s rugby coach Becky Carlson looks at how colleges get rid of female coaches who dare to speak out against systemic sexism and other abuses of power.
A pediatrician in Illinois left a suicide note that implied that he’d been faking vaccination records, either to help anti-vaccine parents, or because he himself was anti-vaccine and simply lied to parents about vaccinating their kids.
If you live in Connecticut, call your state rep and your state Senator to tell them you support the bill eliminating all non-medical exemptions to childhood vaccination requirements. The claim that such a bill violates “religious liberties” is bullshit; no major religion opposes vaccinations, and anti-vaxxers use this as a cover story for their own ignorance.
MIT Technology Review looks at how the ‘manosphere’ of angry men, including so-called ‘incels,’ is become more radicalized on sites like Reddit and Gab. The Texas Department of Public Safety called incels “an emerging domestic terrorism threat.” Maybe we should ban men from immigrating out of Texas?
Also in Texas, a 16-year-old boy who came to the aid of another student who was being bullied was himself shot to death by the bully, who was no older than 15 but still somehow had a handgun.
In 2018, Rep. Jim Jordan (guess) begged a former Ohio State wrestler to deny reports of sexual abuse while Jordan was an assistant coach on the team.
Islamophobe Laura Loomer is probably going to be the Republican nominee for Florida’s 21^st district.
An abnormality in cells that produce myelin may be connected to how and why autism spectrum disorder affects so many parts of the brain’s functioning.
A Utah legislator has introduced a bill to stop usurious lenders from jailing borrowers and seizing their bail money. Does Utah send these people to Newgate?

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: connecticut, hugo award, links, longreads, social media, stick to baseball, texas, utah, vaccines

→ February 8, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/8/20.

The Mookie Betts trade might be falling apart as I write this, but I did break down the reported three-team deal on Wednesday morning. I’ll update that as needed when the trade becomes final. Schedule conflicts prevented me from chatting but I did do a Periscope on Friday. My prospect rankings will run on The Athletic the week of February 24^th.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: I reviewed Colson Whitehead’s novel The Nickel Boys earlier this week. Read the Tampa Bay Times investigative report into the Dozier School for Boys, which inspired Whitehead’s book.

“Pro-Trump forces are poised to wage what could be the most extensive disinformation campaign in U.S. history,” according to this article by the Atlantic‘s McKay Coppins, who details the methods operatives use to fool people, especially via social media, into believing fabrications are the truth and the truth is merely fake news.

Rolling Stone‘s Ash Sanders spoke to adults who escaped the cult of Scientology and how they struggled to readapt to society.

People keep dying in Mississippi prisons, but Governor Tate Reeves just wants to “turn the page” on the state’s responsibility to its inmates.

Evenflo, one of the major manufacturers of child car safety seats, lied when marketing its “Big Kid” booster seats despite data showing kids in those seats could be injured or killed in side-impact crashes, according to this investigative report from ProPublica.

Mass shootings get the headlines and the calls for needed gun control, but far more Americans who die from guns are suicides.

The Economist‘s Nicholas Pelham tells his story of being detained in Iran in July 2019, despite his presence there on a journalist’s visa.

Why the fuck is the New York Times running editorials defending Gwyneth Paltrow’s pseudoscience show GOOPagainst the evidence-based criticisms of its content?

Developing countries with valuable internet top-level domains, such as .tv (Tuvalu), .ly (Libya), or .nu (Niue), have often missed out on the profits from those names, which instead flowed to programmers or entrepreneurs in the U.S. or western Europe.

Southern Methodist women’s basketball coach Travis Mays stands accused of telling players they should kill themselves if they didn’t want to work and of otherwise verbally abusing his players. So far, SMU has backed him, and not its players (who are unpaid, mind you). Here’s a crazy idea, though: why not hire a woman to coach a women’s sports team?

The Trump Administration is charging the Secret Service exorbitant rates as high as $650/night to stay at Trump’s hotels, yet another example of how Republican members of the executive branch are looting the American taxpayer.

An abortion cannot be “reversed,” but six states require that women seeking abortions receive counseling that this is possible. There are also three times as many “pregnancy crisis centers,” which somehow receive federal funding,” in the U.S. than abortion clinics. STAT News argues in this piece that abortion advice needs to be safe and evidence-based. The United States is not a theocracy.

US Bank came under (well-deserved) attack last week after news spread that they had fired an employee for giving a stranded customer $20 on Christmas Eve so he could get home, and fired her supervisor as well. They’ve said they offered to re-hire both women, although the first of the two says she still hasn’t received a formal offer or any apology for the way the company defamed her publicly.

“Attention residue” reduces our productivity and happiness. One proposed solution is to carve out GLYIO (Get Your Life In Order) times during which you handle administrative tasks, or work out, or do other things that are bothering you because they’re always on your mind or your to-do list.

The Facebook group Stop Mandatory Vaccinations, which has 178,000 members, urged a mother who reported that her unvaccinated four-year-old son had the flu not to give him TamiFlu. He died four days later. Facebook is a dumpster fire of anti-vaccine bullshit and other conspiracy theories, and they simply do not care about the real-world consequences of their choice to shield this content.

Facebook also doesn’t do anything to stop anti-vaxxers from flooding pro-vaccine advocates, such as pediatrician Nicole Baldwin (whose pro-vax TikTok video went viral in mid-January), with threats and hate comments. That’s why Shots Heard Round the World was formed to help pro-vaccine advocates fight back against these armies of ignorance.

C|Net has some advice on how to manage the information Google tracks about you.

The FCC did something good, for a change: They have proposed a $13 million fine against a robocaller who used the death of Mollie Tibbetts to spread white-supremacist messaging.

Miami, Florida, is the most vulnerable coastal city in the world as sea levels rise, yet Miami voters chose a Republican mayor, and the state has two Republican Senators and a Republican Governor – even though the GOP’s official stances on climate change range from opposing regulations on fossil fuels to outright climate denial.

I reviewed Matthew Walker’s book Why We Sleep a few years ago and praised it; I listened to the audio version and it seemed to be well-sourced and backed by evidence. Now there are claims that Walker manipulated the data in the book, and his responses so far have not come close to addressing the criticisms.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, climate change, cults, links, longreads, mississippi, pseudoscience, reproductive rights, social media, the swamp, vaccines

→ February 1, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/1/20.

I had two posts for Athletic subscribers this week, one on whether the Reds have done enough to contend in the NL Central, and one on the Starling Marte trade. I held a Klawchat on Thursday, and a Periscope chat, my first since I started getting sick at Thanksgiving (after taking prednisone for just four days!) and had a cough for most of the next six weeks. My prospect rankings will run on The Athletic the week of February 24^th.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Hadara, a civ-building, card-drafting game that made my top ten games of 2019. I keep comparing it to 7 Wonders because of the similarities in themes and card selection, but it’s more in the “try this if you like 7 Wonders” vein than a “this is too similar” one.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, is due out on April 21^st from Harper Collins, and you can pre-order it now via their site or wherever fine books are sold. Also, check out my free email newsletter, which I’ll get back to again this upcoming week in between writing words about prospects.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This Atlantic piece asking whether domestic violence treatment programs work was both interesting and frustrating, as the author barely mentions whether any of these programs are evidence-based (DAIP isn’t) and focuses only on group treatment rather than individual.
A Wisconsin doctor and his wife have lost custody of their adopted daughter due to a child-abuse claim disputed by fifteen medical experts. The state’s system for detecting child abuse may encourage its own experts to find abuse even where evidence is weak or absent.
The Guardian caught up with Kelis and learned how badly the music industry mistreated her. She accuses the Neptunes, which include Pharrell Williams, of cheating her out of her share of royalties from her first two albums.
The Congressional Budget Office reported this week that the U.S. national debt will rise to 98% of GDP by 2030, with deficits of over $1 trillion a year for over a decade. The Wall Street Journal‘s piece ($) blames the 2017 Republican tax cuts.
Greenpeace is fighting the Philippines’ approval of Golden Rice, a far more nutritious rice strain, because it’s genetically modified – not, mind you, because of any evidence of harm.
The Columbia Journalism Review weighed in on the Washington Post‘s since-rescinded suspension of Felicia Sonmez over her tweets in the wake of the death of Kobe Bryant, a move the Post‘s own Erik Wemple excoriated in a column in that paper.
With 85% of the world’s languages reportedly endangered, the BBC looks further at alphabets and writing systems similarly threatened with extinction.
The BBC also profiled Duolingo founder Luis von Ahn, who explains why he created the free app, which includes lessons in 28 languages. I’ve used it a few times but find it less useful than hand-written flash cards (albeit a fraction of the time required), and I don’t think it teaches much grammer or syntax.
A Sandy Hook hoaxer was arrested after tormenting the families of the victims. He’s a former contributor to Alex Jones’s Infowars site.
Practice Fusion provided free health-records software to doctors’ offices, but they struck a secret deal with Purdue Pharma for the software to ‘recommend’ opioids as treatment in an effort to boost prescriptions.
Climate change is threatening many high-end food items like coffee and wine; a rise of 2 C would cause the loss of 56% of current vineyard land.
The WHO has warned that the well of new antibiotics is running dry. While it’s hardly the main concern about rising antibiotic resistance, think of how much professional sports will change if ‘routine’ surgeries are no longer possible because of the risk of infection?
Tennessee state legislator Mitch Van Huss (guess) submitted a resolution declaring CNN and the Washington Post ‘fake news.’
That same Washington Post has some good tips on how to impede Facebook from stalking your activity off the Facebook site.
Our country’s anti-Muslim travel ban was just extended to add six countries, not that you heard about it much in the news.
Chemical and Engineering News looks at how chemical changes to the baseball’s core have contributed to longer batted ball distances.
I enjoyed the Netflix documentary The Killer Inside, about the late NFL player and convicted murderer Aaron Hernandez, but Will Leitch has a very different, critical take on it.
Facebook has hired a former Fox News exec who oversaw the spread of multiple bogus conspiracy theories, like one that Barack Obama was educated in a Muslim madrassa, to help ‘curate’ content to be shown on Facebook’s News tab.
Darren Rovell re-used an image without permission and threw a fit when asked to delete it.
Board game news: Genius Games’ Genotype, a game of Mendelian genetics, hit Kickstarter this week and is already at 6x its funding goal. I have seen the prototype of this game and I’m very excited for it.
I missed this around the holidays, but Board & Dice announced Tekhenu: Obelisk of the Sun, the new game from the designers of Tzolkin, will be released right ahead of Gen Con 2020.
And finally, in a video for Eurosport, John McEnroe has some truth to share about the bigoted tennis legend Margaret Court.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, climate change, Languages, links, longreads, science, social media, stick to baseball

→ January 25, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/25/20.

I had one piece for the Athletic this week, on Atlanta’s signing of Marcell Ozuna. I held a Klawchat on Friday.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, is due out on April 21^st from Harper Collins, and you can pre-order it now via their site or wherever fine books are sold. I also sent out a fresh edition of my free email newsletter this week, revealing my Hall of Fame ballot.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Vox looks at how the Netherlands makes universal, private health insurance work, resulting in some of the world’s best health outcomes.
“We live in a world where supply-side economics, which was always a fraud, became a religion.” The New Yorker looks at the Patriotic Millionaires, a group of ultra-wealthy Americans who fight for higher taxes, higher minimum wages, and other policies that would help the other 99%.
ProPublica and the New York Times reveal what we know about the longstanding FBI attempt to downplay Saudi Arabia’s involvement in the 9/11 attacks.
I read Kassia St. Clair’s enjoyable The Secret Lives of Color recently, and she mentioned the Bahia emerald, a giant rock that contains the largest emerald shard ever found and that has been valued, allegedly, at nearly a billion dollars. That led me to this 2017 WIRED story on the neverending legal battles over its ownership, which still seems to be unresolved.
David Schmidt, writing for the Huffington Post, crystallizes the problem with American Dirt – that it erases authentic Latinx voices by borrowing passages and language, then passing them off as authentic.
The Trump administration repealed a set of major clean-water regulations, continuing its push to make our environment dirtier and more dangerous so that businesses (like Koch Industries) can make more money.
Amanda Marcotte writes for Slate that Democrats need to stop buying the myth of the ‘reasonable’ Republican. Nothing Trump does or did matters, as long as he and the GOP cling to power.
A Republican activist in Georgia smeared a black Democratic Congresswoman by saying her son, who was shot and killed by a white man who didn’t like the music her son was playing in his car, was killed in “a drug deal gone bad.” Nothing matters to these people except power.
An Ohio pediatrician went viral after posting a pro-vaccine clip on TikTok, so, of course, anti-vaccine lunatics have threatened her person and her practice while also flooding her business’s Google and Yelp pages with fake negative reviews.
Politicans from the far right to the center-left love to frame family policies as promoting ‘choices’ for working mothers, but many of those aren’t choices at all, and they’re always ‘choices’ for women who must balance work and family, rarely if ever for men. When I discuss balancing my work schedule with my desire to spend time with my daughter, I’m praised, because the world doesn’t expect men to consider this.
Isabel dos Santos became Africa’s richest woman while her father was President of Angola. This BBC report examines over 700,000 leaked documents to show how she exploited her position to rob the oil-rich country, where 30% of the population lives on under $1.90 a day, of around $2 billion.
George Will writes about the right-wing Spanish Party Vox and its leader Santiago Abascal, who is peddling messages similar to Trump’s in a country that has, so far, not lurched so far to the right.
The title of this piece is a bit misleading, but a recent study compared ‘rational’ behavior against ‘reasonable’ behavior, showing evidence that doing what is in your best economic interest may not be in your best overall interest if it violates social norms.
Thanks in part to a ProPublica investigation, Illinois is restoring driver’s licenses to residents whose licenses were suspended for unpaid parking tickets.
A new study out of Cardiff University found a type of T-cell that may be useful in targeting multiple cancers, although the study is extremely preliminary and hasn’t been tested in humans at all.
I’ve recommended the iOS port of Carcassonne as the best digital adaptation of any board game for close to a decade now, but that’s about to change. Coding Monkeys’ license for the game is expiring, so if you want their version – which is now on sale for $4.99 – go buy it before March 1^st.
One last chance to back AlderQuest on Kickstarter, as the campaign ends on Thursday. Also, if you wanted Irish Gauge (like me!) but missed the first printing, Capstone Games is taking pre-orders for a bundle of that game and Ride the Rails.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, anti-science, board game news, environment, links, longreads, medicine

→ January 4, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/4/20.

Happy New Year! I skipped last week since it was the holidays and I was offline quite a bit, but in the last couple of weeks I had a bunch of year-end board game posts, including my top 10 games of 2019 for Paste, my best games of the year by category for Vulture, and the top 8 board game apps of 2019 for Ars Technica.

My free email newsletter will return on Monday, time and health (I’m sick yet again) permitting. My second book, The Inside Game, will be out on April 21st and is available for pre-order.

And now, the links…

One longread this week, from the Guardian‘s best longreads of the year: Time management is making us miserable.
Figure skater Gracie Gold is working her way back to competition after a long fight with depression and an eating disorder.
One of the biggest funders of anti-vaccine groups has made millions selling “natural” health products. Joseph Mercola has also been fined by the FDA for making false health claims, and has promoted all kinds of pseudoscience on his site for over 20 years.
Joan Walsh writes about “this fucking decade” for The Nation: “The last decade showed that the United States can be dramatically changed by a minority of people seized by grievance, convinced that they’re the real victims, and determined to get revenge.”
The rivers and beaches of Guatemala are filling with trash, especially plastic, emblematic of a global problem with plastic waste.
An Alabama woman murdered by her former partner is another example why the NRA’s choice to kill the Violence Against Women Act will have deadly real-world consequences.
A study found that 39% of respondents in eight European countries would like to live in a world where chemical substances don’t exist. Good luck with that.
The search for new antibiotic drugs is hitting another roadblock: startups trying to develop these compounds are going bankrupt.
Congress appears on the verge of letting a program designed to help stop the next pandemic expire, likely because the GOP doesn’t want to spend money on anything but war.
I was obsessed with the periodic table when I was a kid, so of course I enjoyed this New Yorker piece on the search for larger and larger (and yet incredibly unstable) elements.
GQ interviewed Michael Caine about The Muppet Christmas Carol.
Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy signed letters authored by the Pebble Mining Company favorable to the company’s mining efforts in his state.
The U.S. held off on punitive tariffs against Argentina while the country reviewed two trademarks for Trump’s personal business.
Sacha Baron Cohen gave an incredible speech to the Anti-Defamation League on the failure of social media giants to regulate hate speech and fake news on their sites.
Capstone Games has really carved out a niche for itself for high-end games, many of them imported from Europe, including the popular train game Irish Gauge, which they imported and released in the U.S. in 2019. They just announced the follow-up game, Ride the Rails, will be released on July 1st, when Irish Gauge will also return to stores.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alaska, board game news, chemistry, environment, links, longreads, pseudoscience, social media, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

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