longreads — Page 19

→ October 12, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/12/19.

I’ll have an Arizona Fall League scouting post up Monday or possibly Sunday night, covering everything I’ve seen out here in the desert. No chat this week as I was traveling.

I did review Tapestry, the newest game from the mind of designer Jamey Stegmaier (Scythe, Charterstone), for Paste this week; it’s a quick-to-learn strategy game with a ton of potential decisions and paths for players, pitched as a civ-builder but playing more abstract than that.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves,
is now available for pre-order on the Harper Collins site and through major retailers. It’s due out in April 2020.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: From The Atlantic, technology is creating a massive noise pollution problem that nobody’s trying to stop, despite decades of research into the harms of excessive or incessant noise, as well as newer research that quiet or the sounds of nature are particularly good for our brains.
The Guardian asks why American pedestrian fatalities are going back up, and says it’s not just because the victims were distracted by their phones or because of driverless cars.
For The Athletic ($), Pablo Maurer looks at the broken promises of the soccer stadium in Chester, Pennsylvania, a very disadvantaged exurb of Philly that has seen no benefit from the facility’s existence.
The same dumb British newspaper ran two columns this week touting diametrically opposed claims on the safety of consuming processed meat. David Speigelhalter explains the three questions readers should ask when confronted with this kind of journalistic malfeasance.
This is from 2007 but I only saw it this week when Langdon Cook referred to it in The Mushroom Hunters: Those “truffled” dishes at restaurants probably contain no truffles or anything made from truffles, but use truffle oil that gets its flavor from the synthetic flavoring agent 2,4-dithiapentane.
The Atlantic‘s James Hamblin writes about identity fusion and why it might explain Trump supporters’ irrational devotion to him even as he’s accused of committing further crimes and continues to stoke fear and prejudice.
John Holdren, professor of environmental science and policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School and at the university’s Department of Planetary and Earth Sciences, says that that recent IPCC report on climate change understates how much danger we’re in, particularly if we ignore this problem long enough to let the permafrost in earth’s polar regions melt, releasing tons of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere.
The Washington Post‘s Samantha Schmidt examines both sides of the question about dress codes and norms for teenaged girls. Is ‘revealing’ clothing empowering, or playing to harmful societal standards of beauty?
From the same paper, AirPods aren’t just short-lived, but they can’t be repaired or have their batteries replaced; they’re just trash and Apple needs to do better.
The Hutchins Center at Harvard hosts The Hip Hop Archive, including a list called 24 albums with annotated lyrics, including entries from Eric B. & Rakim and A Tribe Called Quest, as well as a broader collection of 200 albums deemed seminal to the genre’s history.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution‘s Bill Torpy calls for the Braves to get rid of the Tomahawk Chop, a racist, ignorant gesture that has outlived its welcome.
I love third-wave coffee but didn’t realize the term had a known originator. Trish Rothgeb coined the phrase while working in Oslo in 2002, and is now leading the push to make coffee more inclusive without compromising the new genre’s emphasis on quality.
Floodgate Games’ Cosmic Colonies is now on Kickstarter.
James Mickens’ tenure announcement is probably the funniest such piece you’ll ever see.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, board game news, climate change, coffee, environment, food science, harvard, hip-hop, journalism, links, longreads, pollution, psychology

→ October 5, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/5/19.

Nothing new from me this week other than a Klawchat and a Periscope video as I try to finish off the first draft of my upcoming book The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, now available for pre-order. My next ESPN+ column will be a dispatch from the Arizona Fall League.

And now, the links – fewer than usual, for the same reasons, but these should get back to normal by the end of the month:

Longreads first: This New York Review of Books review of Tim Alberta’s book American Carnage doubles as a look at how the Republican Party was heading for this Trumpian moment for a half-century.
Haruki Murakami writes about memories of his father and their declining relationship for the New Yorker.
Deadspin has the inside scoop on how TheMaven plans to gut Sports Illustrated by turning it into a lousier version of SBNation or SI‘s own FanSided.
GQ takes readers inside the brutal dictatorship ruling Burundi, a tiny country in the heart of Africa, the southern neighbor of Rwanda. Burundi’s sectarian violence hasn’t become a global story like the Rwandan civil war and genocide did, but that doesn’t make its current regime’s crimes any less heinous.
The American Prospect looks at the novel campaign of West Virginia gubernatorial candidate Stephen Smith, which focuses more on philosophy than the candidate himself.
The BBC has a not-quite longread on the international heist of Saudi jewels, including the “blue diamond,” that has caused a rift between Saudi Arabia and Thailand, and that ultimately involved multiple murders.
Nestlé, whose products you should already think about avoiding given their exploitation of water resources, is now complaining that they don’t want to comply with Australian requirements to report on whether they rely on slavery in their chocolate supply chain, claiming it would cost consumers more money in the end. I mean, I’m good paying another dime for chocolate if it means the cacao wasn’t harvested by an eight-year-old slave in Côte d’Ivoire.
Susanna Clarke, author of one of my all-time favorite novels in Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, will release her second novel in September of 2020, sixteen years after her bestselling, critically-acclaimed, Hugo-winning debut.
Plastic tea bags release billions of plastic microparticles into your tea. I’ll stick with loose leaf teas at home, thanks.
Two women in New Zealand lost their pregnancies because they contracted measles. Remember that when someone tells you that measles is a benign childhood illness.
From 2017, the chief of the Guardian‘s Melbourne bureau, Melissa Davey, wrote that we need to teach science and health literacy in schools so those kids don’t grow up into gullible adults who fall for pseudoscience and anti-science myths they read online.
An “Actually Disabled” person penned an open letter to Andy Richter about the dangers of assuming someone who looks able-bodied is feigning a disability.
Why are Customs and Border Protection agents harassing journalists as they re-enter the United States? Probably for the same reason the U.S. has fallen to “problematic” on the World Press Freedom index.
Board game news: Reiner Knizia’s Yellow & Yangtze, which he calls his “spiritual successor” to Tigris & Euphrates, is coming to digital platforms and just hit Early Access on Steam. It’s from Dire Wolf, who did such great work on digital ports of Raiders of the North Sea and Lanterns.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, board game news, british literature, chocolate, food safety, longreads, murakami, science, stick to baseball, west virginia

→ September 28, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/28/19.

My one piece for ESPN+ subscribers this week had my six postseason player award ballots, all hypothetical as I didn’t have any vote this year. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday and another Periscope video chat on Tuesday.

At Paste, I reviewed Silver and Gold, a tremendous new flip-and-write game from the designer of Gizmos and Bärenpark, where players fill in polyomino shapes on their own cards, trying to complete as many cards as possible while racking up various bonuses. It’s due out in late October.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, is now available for pre-order on all the usual sites. The release date is April 21, 2020.

You can also get more updates from my free email newsletter; the next edition will go out some time this week, before I head to Arizona for an abbreviated trip to the Fall League.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Royals pitcher Danny Duffy opened up to the Kansas City Star about his anxiety, depression, and panic disorder, with a little about what he has done to combat it.
Texas Monthly has the story of the hunt for a serial killer in Laredo last year; the culprit was actually a member of the Border Patrol.
The backlash against so-called “cancel culture” among comedians is nothing but a big con. Most figures in entertainment who’ve supposedly been “cancelled” continue to perform or publish, and to make money, while other comedians have found an audience by railing against minority groups and “cancel culture” itself.
Writer Prachi Gupta remembers her brilliant, late brother, who had become red-pilled and died under hard to fathom circumstances in Italy two years ago.
Amid an apparent rise in suicides and cases of mental illness at British universities, the Guardian‘s Samira Shackle asks why it’s happening, what can be done, and if it’s the schools’ jobs to fix it at all.
Author Matt Goulding examines the culture of Neapolitan pizzas in Tokyo, where multiple pizzaioli pursue pizza perfection, even if they’ve never been to Italy themselves.
Anti-vaxxer groups are targeting moms who lost children and convincing them vaccines killed their kids, then turning the moms into “crusaders” and the kids into talking points. Dorit Reiss takes a closer look at the newest such case, a baby who suffocated while sleeping in her parents’ bed.
The Atlantic looks at a proposal to make 988 the suicide prevention hotline number, and some of what we know about how and why such lifelines work.
Rakim has a new book out on creativity and NPR excerpted a portion of it.
A new study found that gluten doesn’t make you sick if you don’t have celiac or a wheat allergy. “Gluten sensitivity,” “leaky gut,” and other pseudoscience diagnoses are just that – pseudoscience.
The New York Times has really had a bad week. They published key details on the Ukraine whistleblower. Opinion columnist Bari Weiss’s new book on anti-Semitism got a damning review in Jewish Currents. And the New Republic exposed the haughty history of Bret “Bedbug” Stephens, who likes to write as if he knows what “ordinary” (his word, and his quotes) Americans are thinking.
The World Health Organization is holding back doses of the one existing Ebola vaccine during the ongoing epidemic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, spurring criticism from Doctors Without Borders.
Ravensburger just announced an upcoming Minecraft board game called Minecraft: Builders and Biomes, due out worldwide on November 15th.
(chef’s kiss)

pic.twitter.com/lURLRFJhR9

— ed (@macaulaybalkan) September 26, 2019

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, board game news, links, longreads, mental health, mental illness, pizza, vaccines

→ September 14, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/14/19.

For ESPN+ subscribers, my annual Prospect of the Year column went up this week, with Wander Franco, Luis Robert, and Gavin Lux the three finalists. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday and a Periscope video chat on Tuesday.

My latest game review for Paste covers Realm of Sand from Deep Water, a mashup of Patchwork and Splendor with incredible artwork by the same artist behind Hanamikoji and Shadows of Kyoto.

My latest email newsletter went out on Wednesday. You can sign up for free to get whatever topic is on my mind when I feel like I’ve gone too long without sending one.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This Washingtonian story about a hoarder, a would be tech bro, and a murder is really out there.
Lead poisoning may be the real explanation for the rise and fall of violent crime from the 1960s to the 1990s, and the problem isn’t gone because so much of lead belched out by cars burning leaded gasoline is still in our environment. (Small world department: I worked with Prof. Reyes for about a year at a consulting firm before I went into baseball and she returned to academia.) Of course, the Trump administration is rolling back regulations to keep lead and other pollutants out of our water supply.
In the New Yorker, Michael Schulman looks at the rise of the “superfan” and what it means for content creators, especially when those fans don’t agree with creative choices in books, films, or TV shows.
Garrett Graff, author of the new book The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11, ponders how much sheer luck or randomness determined who survived the 9/11 attacks in an essay for the Atlantic.
Vox looks at what “a Hurricane Katrina of heat,” caused by climate change, would look like for Phoenix, the second-fastest growing metropolitan area in the country, which already had 128 days over 100 degrees in 2018. Beyond the obvious strains on the power and water supplies, such extended heat waves would lead to substantial emergency room visits and deaths from heat stroke.
Panama disease is a fungus that attacks banana plantations and destroys entire crops; since the Cavendish bananas we see in every store are all genetically identical, the plants have no way to develop immunity through natural selection. Two gene-editing efforts are racing to create a new banana plant that can resist the fungus before the Cavendish goes the way of its predecessor, the Gros Michel, which disappeared in the 1950s for a similar reason. If you like that link, check out the book Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World, which I reviewed in 2013.
If you thought anti-abortion advocates were about anything other than subjugating women, look at this utterly absurd, anti-science ‘debate’ over surgery to treat ectopic pregnancies, operations that save the lives of the women while removing pregnancies that are nonviable by definition. Several anti-abortion zealots are claiming this surgery is abortion, and that ectopic pregnancies can magically relocate to the uterus (wrong), and that doctors should employ “watchful waiting” to see if the pregnancies miscarry on their own (risking the woman’s life in the process).
Florida’s race to codify woo into the state’s regular operations has gone from schools to medicine now, as a new law forces doctors to endorse nonmedical, ineffective pseudoscience as ‘alternatives’ to opioids. Remember, there is no such thing as “alternative medicine.” If something works, it’s medicine.
New Zealand is creating a firearm registry and increasing penalties for illegal gun sales, while we have a sitting Texas state representative threatening to use an assault rifle against a Presidential candidate. It took one mass shooting to galvanize their public and their government to take action on guns.
A woman frustrated by receiving unsolicited dick pics created her own filter to block them … which, I don’t know, Twitter and Facebook and most dating apps could buy and use?
A judge in Florida ruled that a four-year-old leukemia patient will remain with his grandparents because his own parents refuse to get him chemotherapy, instead claiming they’ll use “natural” treatments (i.e., they’ll let him die). This has important implications in the vaccine mandate debates: Your right to parent your children does not extend to denying them medical care.
Lee Salem was an influential comic strip editor who helped find or develop strips as diverse as “Doonesbury,” “Calvin and Hobbes,” and “For Better or Worse.” He died earlier this month at age 73.
Preorders for the latest game in the Azul series, Azul Summer Pavilion, are now available.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, climate change, environment, guns, links, longreads, pseudoscience, stick to baseball

→ September 7, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/7/19.

I had one ESPN+ piece this week, looking at the best or most interesting September prospect callups. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

For Paste, I reviewed Planet, a simple tile-laying game where you place those tiles on your own polyhedron planet, so you get to hold the whole world in your hands.

Now that this piece is done and I’ve already filed my ESPN column for next week (Prospect of the Year), I’ll work on my next email newsletter. You can sign up for free any time.

I’m selling off some of my board games, and once again I’m donating all proceeds to the Food Bank of Delaware. You can see the games I’m selling here. Thanks to those of you who’ve already bought some of my games, I’ve donated over $330 to the Food Bank.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Dan Piepenbring, writing in the New Yorker, describes the time he spent with Prince just before the singer’s death as the two collaborated on what would have been Prince’s autobiography.
Amazon’s private delivery network has led to accidents and fatalities, but the retailer hides behind its use of third parties to avoid any liability.
The Guardian‘s Nesrine Malik argues that there is no free speech crisis – there’s a hate speech crisis, and she puts particular blame on social media sites that do little to nothing to stop it.
Scientific American looks at how misinformation spreads and why we fall for it, using a model from economics called the network epistemology framework and discussing the human tendency towards conformism. The piece also puts some blame on social media.
Also from the New Yorker, emails from longtime GOP operative Thomas Hofeller show just how racially-motivated the Republican Party’s gerrymandering was across the country.
The New York Times examines the role Youtube’s algorithms played in helping radicalize Brazil, aiding the rise of their Trump-like, far-right leader Jair Bolsonaro.
STAT News describes the new effort to create and market a vaccine against Lyme disease and asks if the public will be more open to it than it was 20 years ago.
Saveur profiles the families that make L’Etivaz cheese in Switzerland, a sort of spinoff from Gruyère cheese that preserves older methods and is now protected by a national law.
Last month, the FDA approved a new, novel antiobiotic that can defeat extensively- and multi-drug resistant tuberculosis caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis.
School dress codes are a nightmare for parents and for educators, and they often directly or indirectly disfavor girls, especially girls of color. Now some young girls of color in Washington, D.C., are fighting back against rules that discriminate against them.
Adele Lim, co-writer of the script for Crazy Rich Asians, has left the project for the sequel after discovering that her white male counterpart was offered eight to ten times her pay. Warner Brothers explained to Lim’s representatives that making an exception to the standard industry pay scales “would set a troubling precedent in the business,” which ignores how those pay scales were first set (and by whom) or the disadvantages women writers or writers of color have from the start in an industry that has tended not to utilize them.
NPR looks at the ongoing fallout from the “shitty media men” list, including author Stephen Elliott, who wants everyone to know that he’s not a shitty media man who has assaulted women and is suing the list’s creator to ensure that nobody finds out that he was on it.
James Smyth has a great Twitter thread explaining how Mike Minor is leading AL pitchers in Baseball-Reference’s WAR.
A St. Louis police officer pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and a grand jury about an assault by cops on an undercover officer in the wake of the 2017 protests after the acquittal of officer Jason Stockley on a murder charge.
David Karpf responds to Bret “Bedbug” Stephens’ screed, published on the editorial pages of the New York Fucking Times, to say that Stephens has merely proved Karpf’s own point by comparing him to Nazi propagandists. Karpf’s best question is why the Times’ editorial page editor James Bennet allowed Stephens’ garbage column to see the light of day.
The third Azul game, called Azul: Summer Pavilion, is now available to pre-order. It’s a must for me given how much I loved the original Azul and the second game in the series, Stained Glass of Sintra.
Tapestry, the new civilization-building game from Scythe and Charterstone designer Jamey Stegmaier, sold out its first printing pre-orders in just a few days, but you can still reserve a copy from your Friendly Local Game Store.
And finally, happy 51st anniversary to my parents. I wouldn’t be the person I am without you two.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, baseball, board game news, brazil, free speech, links, longreads, medicine, metoo, prince, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ August 31, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/31/19.

I had two ESPN+ posts this week, both scouting blogs: one on Clarke Schmidt, Matt Manning, Julio Rodriguez, and other Tigers/Nationals/Mariners/Royals/Blue Jays prospects; and one on Spencer Howard and other Phillies & Orioles prospects. I held a Klawchat on Wednesday.

I’m selling off some of my board games, and once again I’m donating all proceeds to the Food Bank of Delaware. You can see the games I’m selling here; I’m going to continue to add titles over the weekend and next week as I go through my collection. In case you missed it, I also went through all the games I saw and tried at Gen Con 2019 over at Paste.

Also, this was kind of fun – I got a mention in roast magazine’s Daily Coffee News, which used my review of Coffee Roaster to cover the game’s upcoming second edition.

I sent out my free email newsletter again on Friday night, but you can still sign up for free and get more personal writing from me.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: “I see this as part of a larger war against science-based reality.” The New Yorker goes very long on how the return of the measles is a sign of a war against science, and how authorities must combat the dangerous ideas that threaten our species.
The Washington Post spoke to Caitlan Coleman, who was held by the Taleban for five years with her husband, giving birth to three kids while there. She’s since revealed that her husband brought her into Afghanistan, against her wishes, only to see them kidnapped and held hostage, where he became physically and psychologically abusive.
Sesame Street is about to begin its 50th season; the New York Times looks at how the show uses music – and celebrity musicians – to teach viewers and create iconic moments. Recently, I introduced my girlfriend’s children to “Me Lost Me Cookie At the Disco;” they introduced me to “Me Want It (But Me Wait).”
The Guardian looks at how air conditioning is heating the planet as it cools our homes, which in turn requires more energy in a vicious cycle. Oddly absent is a mention of powering it via energy sources that do not contribute to climate change.
The Guardian‘s Lizzie Cernik looks at why some people cut off all ties to their parents, usually the result of toxic relationships that date back decades.
Garrett Martin, my editor at Paste, called out Dave Chappelle for his sensitivity and entitlement, as well as his transphobia and derision of the men Michael Jackson molested.
A deranged man, radicalized by anti-vaxxers preaching hate and violence online, assaulted California Sen. Richard Pan, the doctor who pushed through the state’s essential, life-saving law that ended nonmedical exemptions to childhood vaccinations.
Two Washington Post editorials worth reading: Why a primary challenger to Trump is a good thing, and why white evangelical leaders should be panicking over the demographic demise of their movement. I can’t think of a worse way to market religion than the way the evangelical movement has acted in the last two decades.
Indonesia is moving its capital to Borneo as Jakarta is sinking into the ground at a faster rate than any other city in the world.
My friend Eric Longenhagen looked at the most interesting position player-to-pitcher conversion projects in the minors right now, starting with San Diego’s Javier Guerra.
This story of a few fifth grade boys in Minnesota who took a bullied kid with special needs under their wing is the sweetest thing I saw in this week of terrible news.
Another story of kindness, although the route there goes right through hate and ignorance, comes from Ferial Pearson, who was targeted for being Muslim and for being queer while speaking to schools in Mullen, Nebraska.
One Night Ultimate Werewolf fans may be interested in pre-ordering the new expansion containing all bonus roles and tokens from smaller expansion packs released in the last few years.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, climate change, links, longreads, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ August 24, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/24/19.

I’ve got notes stored up for an ESPN+ piece but it probably won’t run until Monday. My daughter returns to school this week too, which will mean the return of Klawchat on Thursday.

My massive article on all the games I saw at Gen Con 2019, including my ten favorites, went up at Paste this week.

My free email newsletter will also return this week once I’ve written a few more things around the interwebs.

I’m selling off a number of my superfluous board games again this year, so if you’re interested, check out my inventory page on Boardgamegeek. Thanks to Sean Lopolito of Lops Brewing in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, who just bought eight games from me last week. I’ll be donating the $150 proceeds to the Food Bank of Delaware.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Guardian long read looks at how an online community devoted to the Columbine murderers fed a murder plot in Halifax, Nova Scotia. A tip to police stopped a potential massacre.
The New Yorker‘s Isaac Chotiner interviewed Penn Law professor Amy Wax, who espouses what certainly sound like white nationalist talking points, dressed up in finer clothing.
This piece in Palladium by a recent Yale grad saying that free speech isn’t the problem at that school, that the behaviors of elites are the real issue, is all over the place, and kind of hard to stay with to the end, but along the way Natalia Dashan raises a lot of good points, many of which ring true even based on my own experience at a similar college over 25 years ago.
Afghanistan veteran and sometime political candidate Jason Kander, writing with his wife, Diana, addresses five lies people tell themselves about trauma and PTSD.
Activists on the Greek island of Paros are fighting to make the island plastics-free, citing the massive damage plastics, which break down into microplastic particles that end up in the bodies of marine life and eventually us, are doing to their environment. This article claims that 95% of waste in the Mediterranean Sea is plastic.
Evgeny Morozov writes in the New Republic how his literary agent, John Brockman, helped connect Jeffrey Epstein with scientists and other intellectuals, many of whom are now, belatedly, being called to account for their relationships with the deceased pedophile.
Speaking of Epstein, it’s time to kill the phrase “underage woman.” Epstein didn’t prey on underage women; he raped children.
Loretta Ross, a black feminist, writes in the New York Times that call-out and cancel culture are themselves toxic, arguing that there are better ways to address most public displays of prejudice or ignorance.
India’s Constitution has protections aimed at ending the country’s longstanding caste system, with a 1989 law aiming to prevent atrocities against those born into ‘lower’ castes, but it hasn’t prevented the perpetuation of some parts of the caste system; the parents of a bride who married a man from the so-called “untouchables” caste hired an assassin and had her husband killed.
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson ordered steps to try to stop the spread of measles in that country, which lost its measles-free status three years after eradicating the virus. Researchers there have discovered a new link between children getting measles and their parents being ‘morons.’
The President’s Chief Economic Adviser, Larry Kudlow, says he doesn’t see a recession coming, but he has a long history of making predictions that turn out completely wrong, including numerous public statements and articles leading up to the 2008-09 downturn where he dismissed any possibility of an economic slowdown.
Trump nominated a lawyer who has argued for ethnic homogeneity and written screeds against LGBT rights groups for a seat on a federal appeals court.
In response to our bloviating leader’s claims that he wants to buy Greenland from Denmark, Denmark has inquired about buying the United States from Russia.
Board game news: Wavelength, now on Kickstarter, is an upcoming game co-designed by Wolfgang Warsch, the brains behind The Mind, That’s So Clever, and The Quacks of Quedlinburg.
Jamey Stegmaier, designer of Scythe and Charterstone, has a new civilization-building game coming out this fall called Tapestry. His designer blog has a ton of information on the game, including that the rulebook is just four pages, and that there’s very little luck or randomness involved.
Stronghold Games opened pre-orders for fall titles, including Amul and the re-issue of Coffee Roaster, a solitaire game I just reviewed this week.
This Twitter thread about a D&D player who taught his grandmother the game when she was 75, only to have her get incredibly into it, was very sweet.
Brilliant, highly nerdy board game tweet:
Someone placed their first tile in Terraforming Mars. @StrongholdGames https://t.co/b680qwgiRn

— Jess (The Valkyrie of Gameosity) (@miniktty) August 22, 2019

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, Economics, environment, india, links, longreads, metoo, ptsd, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ August 3, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/3/19.

Busy week on the baseball front; I had five pieces reacting to deadline trades, on the Stroman trade, the Bauer/Puig/Trammell trade, the Greinke deal, the Jesus Sanchez/Trevor Richards trade, and some smaller moves that didn’t merit full writeups. No chat this week as I’m at Gen Con.

I’ll resume my free email newsletter on Monday; I had one mostly written but never had time to finish and send it before the deadline, and while I love TinyLetter it doesn’t work correctly on my iPad.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This academic paper, co-written by reader Dr. Mike Sonne, finds in a review of existing literature that pitchers’ mechanics and performance break down with fatigue, with the effects apparently interdependent (fatigue leads to mechanical breakdown, which can lead to declining performance and increased stress on joints, leading to more fatigue and performance declines, etc.).
An ESPN Outside the Lines investigation uncovered track coach Conrad Mainwaring’s forty-year history of molesting athletes, often children, under his command.
A podcast helped get parole for a black man in Texas whom prosecutors railroaded into a murder conviction.
The Guardian looks at modern slavery in the United Kingdom and the government’s mistreatment of these victims of human trafficking, focusing on a Vietnamese boy who was abducted and forced to work on a cannabis farm.
Novelist and writing teacher CJ Hauser wrote a harrowing essay on how she called off her wedding ten days before the date after realizing her fiancé had been extensively gaslighting her and denying her the most basic level of emotional attention.
Cultural appropriation is endemic in board game design, but the industry got some needed pushback this spring over a game called Scramble for Africa, which treated the colonization and pillaging of the continent as fodder for game play, gamifying the enslavement and massacres of entire peoples. Maybe it’s not okay to take massive tragedies and turn them into fun?
The fraudulent “documentary” Vaxxed has been disappearing from streaming platforms, with Vimeo the latest to pull it, because it’s full of falsehoods that may scare parents into denying their children vaccines. Skeptical Raptor explains why the film is so bad and lauds Vimeo’s decision.
Films like that exist because spreading anti-vaccine propaganda is very profitable. It’s late-stage capitalism at its worst, and the solution is to attack it on both ends: constricting supply by closing channels, reducing demand through education.
Washington Post advice columnist Carolyn Hax answers a reader who overheard a man she hoped to date grossly objectifying her body.
Because Florida: The state Board of Education’s new chair is a dimwitted creationist who thinks evolution is “only a theory” (you keep using that word…) and shouldn’t be taught in schools.
Right near me in Delaware, vandals removed a new memorial to the lone confirmed victim of lynching in Delaware history. George Lynch was accused of murdering a white person, and a local pastor encouraged residents to break him out of jail and kill him, which they did by burning him alive, taking pieces of his charred body as souvenirs.
Diabetes sufferers are going without insulin because of rising prices; one 22-year-old woman died because she aged out of a state assistance program and couldn’t afford insulin on her own.
The Colorado Rapids cancelled a postgame fireworks display because there’s a plague outbreak on a nearby nature reserve.
The New York Times ran an essay from Timothy Winegard’s upcoming book on how mosquitoes are our apex predator.
A tiny town in Texas, near the Louisiana border, has stirred controversy by declaring itself a “sanctuary town” for fetuses.
There’s new hope for a peaceful settlement to the conflict in Sudan.
Phoenix restaurateur Sam Fox, whose portfolio includes Culinary Dropout and the original Zinburger, sold his company to the Cheesecake Factory, although for now he’ll stay on as head of the group.
I am shocked, shocked I tell you to read that affluent parents are gaming the system of accommodations for students with ADHD or learning disabilities.
The Onion had a good baseball post on Instagram.
If you love the Deep Water Games flip-and-write title Welcome To, which I did, check out their expansion pads showing different themed neighborhoods, like this Halloween edition.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, anti-science, baseball, board game news, colorado, delaware, evolution, florida, links, longreads, phoenix, vaccines

→ July 13, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/13/19.

I had two ESPN+ pieces this week: my midseason ranking of the top 50 prospects in baseball and my Futures Game wrapup. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I’d planned to send a newsletter out yesterday but I’m so backed up on life things from being sick for ten days (I’m recovered now, just dealing with a mild cough). I’m going to try to do that in the next few days, though, and you can still sign up here.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Author David Epstein argues for generalization, not specialization, against the current trope that experts in any endeavor need 10,000 hours of experience or practice to reach that level of competence. This is good for me as I do not have the discipline or attention span to do anything for 10,000 hours other than sleep.
The BBC looks at how NBA star Giannis Antetokounmpo went from a stateless migrant to a Greek icon, including the racism he faced growing up and even after he was drafted by the Bucks, and how he’s helped ease the path for migrant children born and educated in Greece.
The Washington Post dives into how Sandy Hook parents are fighting back against hoaxers who claim the massacre was faked.
The Seth Rich murder conspiracy theory, widely pushed by Fox News personalities, was in fact a hoax planted by Russian intelligence, according to an investigative report from Yahoo News.
The Huffington Post reports that “progressive” baby boomers are fighting affordable housing projects in cities, a rather blatant “not in my backyard” mentality that masks both self-interest (preserving artificially high real estate values) and racism: Just look at the photo of Orange County, California residents fighting the placement a sober living facility.
Justin Gest, an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at George Mason, proposes an evidence-based overhaul of immigration policy, one that considers factors both economic and humanitarian.
Biotech executive Michael Becker is dying of neck cancer at age 49, and is using his remaining time to urge parents to get their teenagers vaccinated against HPV. While HPV causes nearly all cervical cancers, it’s also responsible for many other cancers, including more than 70% of oropharyngeal cancers in the United States.
ICE has just opened three new migrant detention centers, flouting limits placed by Congress in February. They’re run by private prison companies, who, of course, profit the more we lock people up in their facilities.
“Healing crystals” are pseudoscientific bullshit. They’re also the new “blood diamonds,” often mined in war-torn areas or mined by children as young as seven.
Harvard just suspended economist Roland Fryer for two years and closed his lab in response to sexual harassment claims.
The Miami-Herald‘s Julie K. Brown, whose investigative reporting helped lead to the re-arrest of alleged child rapist & human trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and resignation of Alex Acosta from the Cabinet, writes that more than a dozen additional victims of Epstein have come forward since his latest arrest.
Mashable tries to explain the cult of Wawa. I don’t think they really get at just how much people in the mid-Atlantic love the chain of convenience stores, including their coffee and sandwiches.
Yet another new tick-borne disease, the Bourbon virus, has shown up in the United States, thanks to climate change and global travel.
Virginia state Senator Amanda Chase (guess) said in a comment on her office’s Facebook page that rape victims were naïve and unprepared. She’s only barely backed off of the comments since then, using them instead to justify carrying a firearm in public.
Veterans’ rights activist Paul Rieckhoff, himself a veteran of the Iraq War, posted an excellent tweet thread about the invective and outright racism hurled at Kamala Harris, which came his way after he said he agreed with Harris’s statements on Trump’s ridiculous July 4th display. He singles out Laura Ingraham for her role in fomenting the racist and misogynist commentary.
An extreme right-wing gubernatorial candidate in Mississippi denied a woman reporter access to his campaign because of her gender, and then played white nationalist bingo on Twitter to defend himself, citing the “liberal left,” “socialism,” and “putting men in women’s bathrooms.” I think the answer is simple: don’t cover him. He just played the media and got exactly what he wanted: free coverage of his theocratic worldview.
The Kingston Whig-Standard posted the first of a three-part series on the impending global water crisis. The BBC’s The Inquiry podcast looked at the same topic through the lens of the water shortage happening now in Chennai, a city that relies on monsoon rains for its water supply.
A Nebraska midwife faces homicide charges after delivering a baby who died two days later. The midwife actually did not have a certification to practice as one, and even if she had, state law prevents midwives from delivering babies at home. The newborn in this case was born breech and died from oxygen deprivation during the delivery. Hospitals seem like good places for births, but that’s just me.
Remember how the GOP tax bill was supposed to boost our economy? The deficit just jumped 23% in the last year even as GDP growth is slowing.
This tweet is from October but rather nicely sums up conservatives’ claims of “censorship” on social media.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: climate change, harvard, hoaxes, links, longreads, migrant crisis, pseudoscience, the swamp, vaccines, water

→ July 6, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/6/19.

My one ESPN+ post this week looked at a few of the top names in the July 2nd market, including Jasson Dominguez (Yankees) and Robert Puason (A’s). I also co-hosted the Baseball Tonight podcast twice this week, on Monday with guests Eric Karabell and Eric Longenhagen, and on Tuesday with guests Dr. Meredith Wills and Sarah Langs.

My latest board game review for Paste covers Bosk, a beautiful game that unfortunately is very slow to play, with needlessly complicated scoring.

You can get more of my rants and raves – mostly rants – if you sign up for my free email newsletter, which appears two to four times a month, or whenever my spirit guide tells me what to say.

I’ll be appearing in Hudson, Ohio, at the Hudson Library and Historical Society this Monday evening, July 8th, at 7 pm, talking about baseball and other topics, then signing copies of Smart Baseball. I’ll also be at the Futures Game at Jacobs Field (yes, I know, I’m still calling it the Jake) on Sunday evening, and will tweet about a meetup with fans before first pitch.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: WIRED tells the harrowing story of a cyberstalker in New Hampshire who was extorting teenaged girls for nude photos, and the effort to find and arrest him. (They did.)
The Washington Post looks at how easily cancer patients can find bogus and even dangerous “treatments” online, including bullshit cures like baking soda and an alkaline diet.
News coverage of a spate of “suspicious” deaths of U.S. tourists in the Dominican Republic is a textbook case of base-rate neglect, with journalists and members of Congress alike reacting to a story that isn’t there.
Microsoft shut down its electronic book store – store of electronic books? – which serves as a reminder that we don’t own the digital content for which we’ve paid. It would be more accurate to say you’re leasing it, under the terms of the agreements you’ve made (when you clicked Agree) with the iTunes store or amazon or other purveyors.
My alma mater’s Kennedy School of Government keeps putting its foot in it with some of the invitations they’ve offered to former government officials, but former Michigan Governor Rick Snyder bailed them out by withdrawing from a one-year fellowship after criticism of the appointment. Snyder was governor during the period when the city of Flint experienced the still-ongoing crisis in its water supply. I suppose the folks at the Kennedy School don’t have Google.
Arizona Governor Doug Ducey filled his diaper over Nike’s decision, threatening to pull some state funding for a new Nike facility in Goodyear, but his tweets were probably a meaningless attempt to score political points, playing to his base and trying to raise his national profile.
White Sox pitcher and first-time All-Star Lucas Giolito spoke to the Chicago Sun-Times about his progressive views on immigration.
Prof. Noam Chomsky spoke to Truthout about Trump’s efforts to create an alliance of far-right leaders around the world, although I wonder if this is the efforts of the people below Trump.
Former U.S. Deputy Attorney General Donald Ayer, who served under George H.W. Bush, writes in The Atlantic about the dangerous plan of current AG Bill Barr to give the President unchecked power.
Also in The Atlantic, a pediatrician who examined children at a Border Control camp found evidence of malnutrition, infections, and psychological trauma. We should be far more outraged as a society than we actually are.
Two New Jersey judges ruled for leniency for privileged teenaged boys accused of rape, although both rulings were overturned or revised by higher courts.
The Tennessee Smokies, the double-A affiliate of the Chicago Cubs, tweeted and then deleted a series of pictures mocking Colin Kaepernick over his counsel to Nike to recall shoes with the Betsy Ross United States flag on them. It was a particularly tone deaf tweet, given the presence of multiple players of color on their roster.
I rather enjoyed WNBA star Sue Bird’s rant on the Players’ Tribune, titled So the President F*cking Hates My Girlfriend. (Her girlfriend is USWNT star Megan Rapinoe.)
I’ve been adopted into Phish phandom, and just learned about the clever, elaborate hoax the band pulled around its Halloween 2018 concert.
Board game news: Plan B Games announced pre-orders for Century Eastern Mountains, a special edition of Century Eastern Wonders with a new theme and artwork to dovetail with their Century Spice Road Golem Edition.
A reprint of Die Macher, the first game ever entered into the BoardGameGeek database, is about to wrap up a run on Kickstarter.
Tweet of the week: I feel like everyone should watch this clip from Love Has No Labels, in which John Cena shares some thoughts on what it means to be American.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, harvard, links, longreads, new jersey, pseudoscience

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