longreads — Page 19

→ May 26, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/26/18.

My ranking of the top 100 prospects for this year’s MLB draft is up for Insiders. I held a Klawchat on Friday.

Over at Vulture, my ranking of the 25 best mobile board game apps went up last week.

Smart Baseball is now out in paperback! I’ll be at Politics & Prose in DC on July 14th and am shooting for an event in the Boston suburbs on July 28th. Throw a comment below if you think you could make the latter event.

And now, the links…

Longreads: the New Yorker looks at corrupt Chicago cop Ronald Watts, whose reign of terror in the city’s projects was ended by an FBI investigation and helped by a woman herself wrongfully charged with drug possession. Thirty-two convictions have already been vacated because of Watts’ own crimes, but he was involved in something like 500 in total.
The Guardian goes long on how a small group of dissidents ended the 23-year reign of Gambian dictator Yahya Jammeh last year. The BBC’s Inquiry podcast from last week covered similar ground, asking why some revolutions succeed, starting with the recent peaceful regime change in Armenia.
60 Minutes investigates how the media fell for the story peddled by Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, who talked a good game about her company’s medical products that never worked. She defrauded investors and put patients at risk, but hasn’t even been charged with a crime. You’ll get more jail time for a second arrest for marijuana possession (the federal mandatory minimum is 15 days) than Holmes did for a nearly billion-dollar fraud.
The New York Times‘ Sopan Deb sat down with the cast of Arrested Development for an interview with some very unsatisfying answers on Jeffrey Tambor’s on-set behavior. The men seem to be handwaving away whatever happened, while Jessica Walter (his victim here) and Alia Shawkat, the only women in the room, are outnumbered while standing up for themselves.
This SABR article by Pete Palmer is from 2017, but just crossed my timeline this week: Palmer looks at how big luck/randomness can be in individual year-to-year stats. One big takeaway is that for NOPS (similar to OPS+), “five percent of the players can change 40 or more points from year to year due to luck alone.”
Basketball writer Bo Churney took his own life at age 31 last week. His brother set up a fundraising page to benefit at-risk LGBTQ youth in Atlanta in Churney’s memory, and it has already passed $20,000 in just a few days.
A 30-year-old manchild living with his parents fought them in court over their demand that he move out, claiming he was entitled to six months’ notice of eviction. He lost, but of course he’s now some sort of folk hero, appearing on InfoWars on Friday.
A (now former) doctor spiked his girlfriend’s tea with an abortifacient and was sentenced to three years in prison after she asked the judge for leniency in his case.
Harley-Davidson took its tax cut from the Republican-led tax bill, closed a manufacturing facility in Kansas City, then bought back $700 million in stock.
Arizona’s Secretary of Education, a dingbat creationist, wants to weaken or delete references to evolution in state educational standards.
Who on earth told Jameela Jamil, who plays Tehani on NBC’s The Good Place, that she was “too ethnic” for Hollywood? She also discusses #MeToo in the embedded video interview. I’m halfway through Season 2 of The Good Place, which really hit its stride near the end of season one after a sluggish start.
Deadspin’s Tim Burke points out, yet again, that the claim that ESPN is losing subscribers over ‘politics’ is bogus.
From The Onion: ‘The Onion’ Has Finally Read Michael Cohen’s 2013 Email Regarding His Client Donald Trump And Would Like To Discuss The Matter Further At His Convenience.
The BBC revealed that Cohen received $400K from Ukraine’s government to arrange talks with President Trump.
An Associated Press investigation found that Trump fundraiser Elliott Broidy used his connections to enrich himself by trying to shift U.S. policy in the Middle East against Qatar.
Center-right Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin excoriates Devin Nunes for burning a source to save the President’s skin. Lawfareblog’s Benjamin Wittes writes on the same subject that Trump has ‘all the power’ through his unfettered interference with the FBI and DoJ.
The Kentucky congressional candidate who was told, when she was 13, by her congressperson that she could never be a fighter pilot beat the moderate candidate in the Democratic primary despite national party support for the latter candidate.
You’ve probably seen the story that the feds have lost track of nearly 1500 migrant children forcibly separated from their parents. The collective non-response by our politicians is reminiscent of the pattern in pre-WWI Germany described by Hannah Arendt in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism.
Two Montana residents detained by a Border Patrol agent for speaking Spanish are now talking to the ACLU about legal options.
Sweden distributed a ‘prepare for war’ leaflet to homes in anticipation of a cyber or terror attack.
There’s an Ebola outbreak in sub-Saharan Africa again, and while the new vaccine will help, it won’t stop the epidemic without changes in behavior.
Maine is dealing with increasing vaccination refusals from stupid parents. The answer is simple – change the law to eliminate nonmedical exemptions, especially the “philosophical exemption,” which amounts to “I’m an idiot and don’t like vaccines.” Get on it, Mainers.
There’s a new Kickstarter for a co-op zombie survival board game, Z First Impact, just out from WYSIWYGames.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, baseball, board games, chicago, frauds, links, longreads, metoo, stick to baseball, the swamp, tv, vaccines

→ April 29, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/28/18.

My one Insider post this week looked at four pitchers who could go in the first round of this year’s draft, led by Florida RHP Carter Stewart, who was second on my latest ranking of draft prospects. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the board game Ancestree, a light, filler game from the designer of Blood Rage and Rising Sun, but one that I think borrows too heavily from other titles.

Smart Baseball is now out in paperback, and it’s a bestseller … (checks notes) in Sonoma, California. I’ll be at Washington, DC’s legendary bookstore Politics and Prose at 6 pm on July 14th to discuss & sign the book.

And now, the links…

The Guardian had three superb longreads this week, so I’m including them all. The first calls for universities to ‘bulldoze’ their business schools, as the author, a B-school prof himself, argues they do more harm than good. I have an MBA, and I agree with many of his points, as well as the additional evidence that expensive full-time MBAs do not provide sufficient ROIs to students. But some MBA programs include useful material, including accounting and operations research. There’s a worthwhile course of study in there somewhere, but perhaps under a new name.
The second looks at the challenge in updating the Oxford English Dictionary, producing a third edition in the digital era when language appears to be changing faster than ever. A good read for fellow fans of The Professor and the Madman.
The third is a bit weird, as it documents people who pretend to be wealthy influences on Instagram as a way to make money, somehow, although the main subject is more poseur than profiteer.
The Atlantic has a longread that argues that American democracy no longer accurately represents the will of the people. The anecdote that opens this story, in Oxford, Massachusetts, is absolutely infuriating.
Black students nationally are several times more likely to be suspended or disciplined than white students are for the same infractions. The Obama Administration had begun civil rights investigations into the practice in Texas, but this ProPublica/Mother Jones longread explains how Besty DeVos is ending the effort. If you can’t re-segregate the schools by law, do it by fact.
BuzzFeed investigates Facebook’s role in recent anti-Muslim violence in Sri Lanka, where the government temporarily blocked access to the site because Facebook wouldn’t take down bigoted posts and videos calling for Sinhalese Buddhists (!) to attack Muslims and Muslim-owned businesses.
The British morning show Good Morning Britain, hosted by Susanna Reid (who seems to be sharp) and Piers Morgan (a pile of wilted romaine lettuce in an expensive suit) ran a feature on people who didn’t vaccinate their pets for fear their pets would get autism. No, that isn’t actually possible, and some people are just really fucking stupid.
More and more research on behavior shows that changing attitudes isn’t enough to get people to do the right or smart thing, nor is giving them more information: If you want to change someone’s behavior, you need to convince them that everyone else is already doing what they should be. That’s why vaccine denialism is contagious, and why drowning out these cranks and charlatans with reminders that the vast, vast majority of parents still vaccinate their kids is so important.
Canadian fraudsters (they call themselves “homeopaths,” but homeopathy is just bullshit) are telling parents of autistic children they can ‘cure’ autism with diluted doses of vaccines. This nonsense, called CEASE, is just stealing money from desperate parents, and anyone who offers it should be tried for fraud.
A new study shows evidence that Trump’s election was driven by white racism, not by economic anxiety.
The Alfie Evans tragedy has been co-opted by grifters and vultures, looking to score political points off bogus claims of liberty that ignore the sad fact that there is no hope of recovery for the severely brain-damaged child.
Finland will not continue its Universal Basic Income trial after it reaches its scheduled end in 2019.
A former reporter for a Sinclair-owned station says she was pressured to include climate change denialism In her reporting on climate change itself.
Kansas gubernatorial candidate Kris Kodachrome mocked students protesting for reforming gun laws, and later in the week a law reporter found a huge gaffe in Kobach’s filings in the ACLU’s ongoing suit against his voter suppression law, which has done a great job of eliminating the voter fraud that didn’t exist in the first place.
Some Delaware news: a recent attempt to raise the state’s minimum wage to $9.25/hour failed, but it looks like a “red flag” gun bill will be signed into law soon.
Writer Rebecca Solnit, a contributing editor at Harper’s, asks who gets to control the narrative in a country that claims to want equality but is awfully abstemious about handing it out.
A fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School talked to the university’s alumni magazine about better ways to detect and fight the spread of disinformation online as we head towards another round of elections this fall.
Sacramento DA Anne Marie Schubert, who is up for re-election on June 5th, has a history of declining to prosecute police officers who injure black civilians or suspects in the line of duty. The Intercept reveals that she took $420,000 in donations from police organizations across her three campaigns. She may soon be handed evidence that would support charging the officers who killed Stephon Clark, an unarmed black man, in his own backyard.
Senator Marco Rubio writes for CNN.com that it is time to force Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro from power. I agree, but how? Sanctions, Rubio’s main solution, are unlikely to work in isolation. Maduro is planning to abolish more voting rights soon and has been raising capital by selling the “petro,” a new cryptocurrency that I’m sure is an excellent investment.
My employer ran a fairly favorable profile of Cleveland pitcher and climate change denier Trevor Bauer this week; Deadspin offered a rebuttal.
The EU is set to ban neonics, pesticides suspected of contributing to bee colony collapses worldwide. Meanwhile, here in the U.S., EPA chief Scott Pruitt proposed adding neonics to drinking water.
This essay on Theness.com makes a good point about GMO labeling: The government can’t regulate what it doesn’t understand, and in the case of GMOs, a functional definition of what O’s are GM and require labels may not be feasible.
Texas Monthly looks at the Texas gerrymandering case headed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The 2014 suicide of a student-athlete at the University of Pennsylvania has spurred an ongoing focus on mental health among Ivy League athletes, including the “success culture” that may have contributed to her death.
Protests in Armenia against a power grab by the country’s outgoing President have led to his resignation, although the protests have continued as the ruling Republican Party refuses to relinquish power.
Ali Noorani, the Executive Director of the National Immigration Forum and the son of Pakistani immigrants to the U.S., writes for CNN about the controversy over the Simpsons character Apu.
The alt-right front group Turning Point USA has hired numerous employees with histories of racist and/or bigoted tweets. I wonder why that is.
Could a postal banking system help ‘unbanked’ Americans while also providing much-needed revenue for the US Postal Service? Lack of access to capital is a huge obstacle to the upward economic mobility that is, or at least was, a hallmark of capitalist economies.
The Ringer examines Netflix’ strategy of buying or funding original movies no one can find on its service. Grierson and Leitch have discussed this as well on their podcast – the Netflix algorithm doesn’t even seem to effectively push this content to viewers whose own histories would indicate interest in these indie films.
A study funded by the U.S. military on climate change and sea level rise found that nearly a thousand islands risk becoming uninhabitable this century as a result of man’s effects on the global climate.
Citing low sales and supply chain problems, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson is discontinuing production of a pump used by cancer patients that extends their lives by two years. The headline makes it seem like this is just an evil corporate decision, but the story is more involved than that.
A British activist with cerebral palsy is asking the government to rethink a proposed ban on plastic drinking straws, saying for people with movement disorders, straws are critical to help them drink. (Perhaps reusable, more durable plastic straws, or straws made from paper, would work?)
The CJR interviews Steve Fishman about his podcast, Empire Of Blood, the story of how he helped exonerate a man who served 22 years for a murder he didn’t commit.
The Guardian looks at how the Michael Cohen case has exposed the extent of Sean Hannity’s real estate holdings, which is now in turn leading to stories on substandard living conditions and poor treatment of tenants in his buildings.
Jeet Heer’s Twitter thread on Kevin Williamson and the “troll three-step” move resembles all too well how opinion writers with extremist views try to both appeal to their base and dance around valid criticism from the center or the opposite end of the spectrum.
Alexandra Petri follows this by writing about how she’s been silenced In a column for a small paper in Washington called the Post.
Asmodee Digital announced an upcoming adaptation of the Lovecraftian board game Mansions of Madness, due out on Steam early in 2019.
I loved the Bard’s Tale PC RPGs when I was a teenager, eventually finishing the first two (I never tried the third), so I’m stoked to see inXile is developing a new sequel/update more than 30 years after the series appeared to be finished.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Armenia, board games, climate change, Economics, gmo, guns, history of language, links, longreads, mental health, pseudoscience, racism, rpgs, social media, Sri Lanka, stick to baseball, texas, tv, vaccines, Venezuela, voter suppression

→ March 24, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/24/18.

My column identifying some potential breakout players for 2018 is up for Insiders. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Reiner Knizia’s Sakura, a light, quick-playing game where players all chase the lead ’emperor’ token, but where you can move your opponents as well and try to push them into the emperor, costing them points and sending them to the back of the queue.

Smart Baseball is out in paperback! U.S. Residents can enter a sweepstakes from HarperCollins to win a copy of the book and a phone call with me.

And now, the links…

Former Utah State basketball player Jalen Moore explains in an essay on the Players’ Tribune why he walked away from the NBA to deal with what sounds like crippling panic disorder.
Writing for the New Yorker, Andrew Marantz went inside to see how Reddit is coping with trolls, abuse, and harassment while also considering the need to allow users to express themselves (or else they might not have a business). My personal experiences on Reddit have been largely negative, so while I have an account there, I rarely even open the site.
The Guardian looks at “joint enterprise” laws in the U.K., which led to eleven people earning jail sentences for one murder, even though only one of the eleven actually participated in the killing. The piece argues that the laws’ application particularly targets young black men.
Mari Uyehara writes for GQ about the ‘free speech’ grifters decrying so-called “PC culture” on campuses.
This longread on a snake-oil saleswoman pushing fermented cabbage juice belongs in an April Fool’s joke post.
Here’s an easy tip on how to turn off “platform sharing” on Facebook, now that we all have some evidence that Facebook never bothered to protect users’ data from illicit use.
Brian Wansink, the Cornell food “scientist” who has been repeatedly accused of p-hacking and otherwise manipulating data to produce misleading reports and headlines, appears to have fraudulently accused Joy of Cooking of promoting unhealthy eating.
FEMA ignored requests for fuel from Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands after Hurricanes Irma and Maria, so thousands of tons of food went to waste for lack of refrigeration.
The New York Times sent travel writers to five islands devastated by the pair of hurricanes to see how their tourism industries have rebounded, if at all. Most hotels and restaurants have yet to reopen on St. John, St. Martin, and other islands that were hit by both storms.
The newest nominee to lead the Centers for Disease Control is a virologist with a long track record of research into HIV and AIDS … and accusations of scientific misconduct as well as support for abstinence-only sex education, writes Ed Yong for the Atlantic. Robert Redfield also has virtually no public health experience, unprecedented for a CDC director.
The San Luis Obispo Tribune investigates the death in police custody of a schizophrenic man who was restrained, tortured, and who then died while officers watched. An FBI investigation appears to be ongoing.
Will Leitch looks back at baseball’s “tepid” offseason for New York and asks if we’re leaded for labor strife after 2021.
Former Congressman Joe Walsh, now a conservative talk radio host/provocateur, has become one of Trump’s most vocal critics from the hard right. Walsh has defended the Mueller investigation, argued against selling the 2017 tax bill to voters (saying it won’t have any impact for most people), and criticized Trump’s attacks on the press.
Pennsylvania Republicans are trying to impeach the state’s Supreme Court in retaliation for the latter’s ruling against the GOP’s gerrymandering the state’s Congressional districts. I feel like PA residents should send diapers to these clowns’ offices. Pennsylvania had repeatedly shown up in analyses of the most gerrymandered states, as the Republican Party there split up the heavily Democratic southeastern portion of the state to tilt those seats to themselves.
Michigan State Senator and now Republican gubernatorial candidate Patrick Corbeck is a pseudoscience-spouting loon, a creationist anti-vaxxer who is now touting baseless conspiracy theories about electromagnetic radiation.
Harvard Professor Jorge Dominguez, accused by ten women of sexual harassment who also say the school knew about Dominguez’s transgressions and did little or nothing, is retiring, although the investigation continues. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
An Alabama sheriff *legally* siphoned off $750,000 in public money meant to feed prisoners in his jurisdiction and used it to buy a beach house – and then he retaliated against the source behind a local newspaper’s investigation. Maybe this is just me, but I think any locale where this is legal and supported would qualify as a “shithole.”
I’ve criticized Arizona’s government many times for its general lack of urgency on issues related to the environment, including water usage and climate change, but the state’s utility regulatory commission did something very good, demanding that utility APS stop new natural gas projects and boost renewable energy sources. The commission, which comprises five Republicans, has long been a mere rubber-stamp group for the companies it regulates. The state is now in a drought that has been going on since 1996.
France is experiencing an uptick in measles again, yet more damage wrought by Andrew Wakefield’s debunked, fraudulent paper and the various idiots who still think vaccines cause autism. France made MMR vaccination for infants mandatory as of January 1st, so let’s hope that puts an end to this outbreak.
The House passed “right to try” legislation this week, even though it’s not going to help anyone and may just spread false hope while reducing patient access to these drugs through existing, more realistic programs.
The open-access journal Scientific Reports, published by the same group behind Nature, finally retracted a paper nearly two years after they learned parts of it were plagiarized — and after a dozen of its board members resigned in protest that it wasn’t retracted a year ago.
Biohacking is bullshit and probably dangerous too.
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker lost a lawsuit over his refusal to call special elections to fill vacated legislature seats in his state, a policy that would have left some residents without representation in at least one body for over a year.
Georgia Republicans are pushing a bill to restrict voting hours in heavily Democratic Atlanta. I assume next they’ll introduce literacy tests and a poll tax.
Opponents of abortion rights like to claim that the procedure is dangerous so they can pass laws that require doctors who provide abortions to have admitting privileges at a hospital or even to perform the procedures at hospitals or surgical centers. Five states require doctors to contradict known science and tell women there’s a link between breast cancer and abortions. (There isn’t, in case that wasn’t clear.) A new study finds that abortion in the United States is safe, which underscores that these laws are about religion, not about protecting women.
I just discovered that Elena Ferrante, the pseudonymous Italian author behind the bestselling Neapolitan Quartet, writes a weekly column for the Guardian. Her latest entry argues that everything in women’s lives has been “codified by male needs.”
No, there was not a Ku Klux Klan rally at the 1924 Democratic Convention. That didn’t stop people from spreading the lie on social media – or Breitbart from repeating it.
Gateway Pundit, another far-right blog – with White House press credentials – repeated a different lie, this one libeling the Democratic Sheriff Scott Israel of Broward County after the Parkland massacre.
If you own a VR device like Oculus Rift, you can now play the board game Catan on the platform. I tried a beta version back in November and it was novel, but still the same game.
Please enjoy this delightful Miyazaki-inspired tourism ad for the lovely state of Oregon:

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anxiety, arizona, baseball, guns, harvard, links, longreads, pseudoscience, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ March 10, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/10/18.

I had two posts for Insiders this week, with another one on Shohei Ohtani just posted this morning. One piece looked at potential #1 overall pick Casey Mize, a right-handed pitcher at Auburn who threw a no-hitter last night. I ranked potential impact prospects for the 2018 season, which differs from my top 100 ranking, which looks at prospects’ long-term expected value. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Smile, a new, light card game designed by Michael Schacht, best known for Zooloretto.

The paperback version of Smart Baseball comes out on Tuesday! I’ll be at Twitter HQ that day, and will answer questions from readers via the site’s Q&A app. To submit a question, tweet it with the hashtag #smartbaseball.

And now, the links…

Longreads: The Atlantic on a serial con man who bilked a dozen women out of $1 million by finding them on dating sites, establishing relationships with them, and then doing everything from using their credit cards to pawning their jewelry to stealing one woman’s passport and birth certificate.
Politico examines how the Obama administration’s decision to normalize relations with Myanmar may have led to the ongoing genocide of the country’s Rohingya Muslim minority, many of whom now live in refugee camps in Bangladesh. The country, formerly known as Burma, made superficial moves towards democracy after decades of rule by a military junta, and the U.S. responded in kind by lifting sanctions, but in the process we never pushed for protections for threatened minorities, and still aren’t doing so.
The New York Times‘ news section remains excellent, as in this long profile of a once-promising dancer who ended up homeless in Manhattan, suffering from untreated mental illness. What the writer never seems to question or explore, however, is the link between the subject’s sexual abuse as a child and her mental illness as an adult.
Their opinion section remains a tire-fire, as anti-Arab troll Bari Weiss, who now writes for the NYT full-time, used a fake ‘antifa’ Twitter account as evidence for some point she was making.
Jane Coaston takes a long look for Vox at the current trial of several alt-right leaders for inciting violence in Charlottesville. Are they criminally liable for speech that the prosecution argues led to the death of Heather Heyer?
A new study in Science found that false news stories spread faster than true ones, because it’s more novel or interesting. They also found that bot accounts don’t spread false stories faster than true stories.
David Gorski, at Science-Based Medicine, goes long on the ‘unholy alliance’ in Texas between ultra-religious conservatives and anti-vaxxers to fight vaccine mandates under the bullshit guise of ‘choice.’ You have a choice not to give yourself medicine when you’re sick, because doing so only makes you an idiot. You do not have the choice to deny your children such treatments, nor do you have the choice to endanger vulnerable members of your community who can’t be vaccinated or who could die of vaccine-preventable diseases. If you live in Texas, speak up, assuming you’re not hospitalized with the mumps.
WIRED looks at our extremely vulnerable medical supply chain, as shown by how two hurricanes in Puerto Rico have led to a massive shortage of IV bags in the U.S. Too many drugs and supplies are made outside of the U.S., and, of course, the current Administration’s response to the disaster in Puerto Rico has been unacceptable.
An upcoming trial in Virginia (just postponed to May) will test an anti-abortion tactic of trespassing in abortion clinics to harass and obstruct patients seeking abortions or other related health services. I wonder what would happen if the abortion clinic employees invoked Stand Your Ground laws and shot the trespassers.
Cavaliers power forward Kevin Love wrote a piece for the Players’ Tribune about suffering a panic attack and the good that talk therapy has done for him since then. If you have mental health issues that aren’t trauma-induced, cognitive behavioral therapy can be a wonderful solution, or a major part of the solution.
WNYC’s On the Media podcast did an episode on how various reporters and outlets cover white supremacists. Is giving such racists and cranks publicity only helping them find new members?
An 83-year-old herbalist is now on trial in California for killing a 13-year-old diabetic boy by giving him herbs instead of insulin. The story doesn’t say if the mother is charged, but she should be.
Sinclair Broadcasting is taking over more and more local stations, and they’re forcing news anchors to read promos that bash mainstream media and report on right-wing bugbears like terrorism rather than cover local news.
Vaccines: There’s an epidemic of oral cancer in men, caused by the HPV virus, which men can catch while performing oral sex. The point of the article isn’t to tell me to make like Fat Joe, but to encourage parents to get their sons the HPV vaccine.
StatNews looks back at Albert Sabin, developer of the oral polio vaccine. He died 25 years ago this week and was lauded in his time for refusing to patent the new vaccine, thus making it cheap and affordable for patients around the world. With news that Nigeria appears to have gone a year without any new cases of polio, the disease’s wild form appears to be once again endemic in the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan and nowhere else.
Natural News, a pseudoscience site that trashes valid medicine so Mike Adams can sell you a bunch of useless supplements, was kicked off Youtube after posting videos arguing that the Parkland shooting survivors were just ‘crisis actors.’
GlobalNews looks at the spreading measles outbreak in Europe, which the authors trace back to the fraudulent Andrew Wakefield study that claimed the MMR vaccine caused autism (it doesn’t, no vaccines cause autism, and Wakefield fabricated the data).
Chefs and cooks are notorious for adopting a lifestyle that can be harmful to their long-term health. Kat Kinsman interviewed eleven chefs about their self-care routines.
The short documentary “Heroin(e),” which you can watch on Netflix, looks at three women in Huntington, West Virginia, the ‘overdose capital’ of the United States, who are trying to fight the tide of overdoses and opioid addiction. Vanity Fair looks at the film and story behind it.
High St. on Market is my favorite restaurant in Philadelphia, and now three alumni of the all-day café, built around their amazing house-made breads, are opening a new BYOB dinner-only restaurant called Cadence on the border of Fishtown and Olde Kensington.
LA Times food critic Jonathan Gold reviews the reopened Copenhagen restaurant Noma, often ranked as the best restaurant in the world.
The Irish Times looks at former billionaire Chuck Feeney, who gave his entire fortune to charity, mostly through his own foundation, which has wound itself down by using its endowment.
An ACLU-backed lawsuit accusing Kansas Klown Kris Kobach of voter suppression began this past week; the suit argues that the policy he crafted unfairly disenfranchised thousands of Kansans, and could do the same to a few million American voters if the law spreads. Two things you can do to fight this: Vote against politicians pushing voter suppression under the guise of “stopping voter fraud,” and get a passport.
Boardgame stuff: Designer Grant Rodiek argues that upcoming title Rising Sun is extremely important given the industry’s trend towards more complex games with overlong rulebooks or highly asymmetrical setups that can deter newbies to the hobby – and frankly just don’t have good designs.
Another designer, Bruno Faidutti (Citadels), writes about the flood of new releases every year and how it shrinks the selling windows for most games. I don’t think he has any answers, but his point, that 3000 new games a year probably isn’t sustainable for most publishers, is a real concern.
Restoration Games has updated its Design Diary for the upcoming Fireball Island, a reissue of a Milton Bradley title from 1986.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board games, con men, links, longreads, philadelphia, pseudoscience, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ February 10, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/10/18.

My one new piece for Insiders this week covers the Cubs signing Yu Darvish to a six-year deal. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I reviewed the new, light strategy board game Majesty: For the Realm for Paste this week.

I’ve been sending out my free email newsletter a bit more regularly now that the prospect work is over. Also, Smart Baseball will be out in paperback on March 13th; you can pre-order it on amazon or elsewhere, although at the moment the hardcover version is about $1 cheaper.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This New Orleans Times-Picayune story on a photographer’s friendship with former NFL player Jackie Wallace, who has intermittently gone missing due to his ongoing substance abuse problems, is beautifully written and devastating at the same time.
This 20,000-word piece profiling the Resnicks, the biggest farmers in the United States, manages to touch on water shortages & fights, how companies treat their employees, and the marketing of food in a wide-ranging and brilliant article that doesn’t directly take sides.
A Georgia con artist failed to fulfill a FEMA contract to deliver hot meals to Puerto Rico and is now suing the agency for $70 million. Tiffany Brown had no disaster relief experience, but got the contract anyway, even though you can see on Yelp that she’s been accused of small-scale fraud.
The New Yorker looks at SHIFT, a massive, ongoing research project on sexual behavior on campus located at and funded by Columbia. The goal is to find small, structural changes they can make to student life to reduce the incidence of unwanted sexual contact.
Michael Lewis looks at the Trump Presidency from inside and without, including spending time with a thoroughly unchastened Steve Bannon, in a long piece for Bloomberg News.
Can technology help reduce the sugar in gelato and other desserts? More importantly, why would we want to?
The Asheville Citizen-Times reports on the huge rise in children entering foster care because their parents are hooked on opioids, a problem particularly affecting western North Carolina and other parts of the Appalachian Highlands. The issues range from infants born with up to eight different drugs in their systems to older children dealing with untreated or undertreated post-traumatic stress disorder.
Climate change may release tons of mercury into the atmosphere, well beyond previous projections, because permafrost soil – which may not be so “perma” after all – contains more of the metal than earlier estimates held.
A record number of scientists are running for office this year, spurred by the federal government’s unconscionable, irrational lurch towards denialist policies on everything from climate change to clean water.
Geothermal energy is gaining increased attention as a renewable energy source, which means the current Administration will likely target it with tax hikes and tell us more about “clean, beautiful coal.”
A Pennsylvania Republican is trying to impeach state Supreme Court justices who struck down the state’s gerrymandered map for Congressional seats. Cris Dush, who represents a rural part of western PA, says it’s not about their ruling, but their process. The state’s Democrat governor discussed the gerrymandering ruling with the Washington Post.
Pennsylvania is no isolated case; the Republican Party is benefiting from a long-range, planned effort to gerrymander states across the country to try to hold power in Congress even though they consistently lose the popular vote.
Want to hear a Polish joke? The country passed a law making it illegal to say Polish people collaborated with the Nazis, part of a rising tide of anti-Semitism across Eastern Europe. The country’s president signed the law, drawing a rebuke from Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
An Alabama high school teacher compared Obama to Hitler and assigned an overwhelmingly conservative summer reading list, including Liberalism is a Mental Disorder.
Over 100,000 people protested in Athens … because they don’t like the name of the country Macedonia. I suppose in a country with a 21% unemployment rate, it’s not like these people have anything better to do.
Paul Ryan’s office tweeted about a woman thanking him for a tax cut that gave her an $1.50 a week … and then deleted it in the face of widespread criticism and mockery. The tax cut gave a disproportionate benefit to higher-income earners, even though it’s far from clear that this will do anything to stimulate the economy; there’s a competing school of thought that savings and/or consumption do more to drive growth.
Slate ran a junk-science article claiming backpackers don’t need to filter or treat stream water before drinking it; Discover had one of the best rebuttals of this nonsense, although it still wasn’t enough to convince Slate to correct or take down its post and the dangerous advice therein.
A publicly-funded college in Ontario is launching a diploma program in the pseudoscience homeopathy.
My current home state of Delaware reported its fourth flu death of the season last week, as new flu cases for the last full week of January were double those of the same week last year.
A Colorado man whose rape conviction was overturned after he spent 28 years in prison is suing the state … and the state’s Attorney General is fighting his $1.9 million request.
A new Kickstarter for the board game CO2: Second Chance, an update and reissue of a climate-change themed game from 2012, blew past its funding goal in the first few days last week.
Asmodee’s acquisition binge continued this week with the announcement that they’re acquiring Mayfair Games and Lookout Games. Mayfair, which announced it was shutting its doors after 36 years in business, was the longtime publisher of Catan, while Lookout published Uwe Rosenberg’s biggest titles, including Agricola and Patchwork.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: boardgames, delaware, links, longreads, pseudoscience, science, stick to baseball

→ November 11, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/11/17.

I have a new boardgame review at Paste, covering the card-drafting game Skyward. I also had two Insider posts go up earlier this week, one previewing some potential offseason trade targets, the other ranking the top 50 free agents this winter. And I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Feel free to sign up for my free email newsletter, which I send out … I guess whenever I feel like it. I aim for once a week, although I’ve gone as long as two weeks between issues when I haven’t had much to say. You can see past issues at that link.

Also, don’t forget to buy copies of Smart Baseball for everyone on your Christmas list! Except for infants. They might eat the pages. Get them the audiobook instead.

And now, the links…

Longreads: You probably saw this remarkable New Yorker piece by Ronan Farrow on how Harvey Weinstein used PIs and former spies to track and harass his accusers. If he could do that, think of the other rich, powerful men who stand accused (or have yet to be accused) of sexual harassment and assaults, including a former president and a current one both accused of similar acts. They’ve probably done it too.
This 2015 piece from the Guardian details a failed effort to turn the Comoros into a citizenship-for-sale destination for Bidoon, stateless Arabs living in wealthy countries without actual citizenship or even documentation. The Comoros are a desperately poor island country between Madagascar and mainland Africa, beset by repeated coups since they became independent of colonial France in 1975. Needless to say, the plan didn’t work out well for the the tiny nation.
ProPublica details how right-wing trolls harassed three of its reporters via low-cost methods like filling their inboxes with subscriptions to newsletters.
James Bridle went very long on algorithm-driven kids’ videos on Youtube and more, arguing that such pablum is damaging our kids. (I would also suggest that parents not give their kids unfettered access to any part of the Internet, but that’s just me.)
Scientific American gives us Journey to Gunland, on how more guns do not mean less crime, even though many Americans believe the opposite. The more guns in a state, the more violent crimes, including shootings and rapes. They also ran a rebuttal from a pro-gun social scientist they mentioned, and then (scroll down from there) a rejoinder from the original author.
Are American private colleges and universities making inequality worse as tuition increases and income gaps in the population of potential students grow?
Roy Moore, who believes gays should be jailed or killed and Muslims banned from Congress, sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl in 1979 and behaved inappropriately with several other women in their teens. Several leading Republicans called on Moore to withdraw from the Senate race if the allegations are true.
David French of the National Review cautions conservatives not to dismiss or ignore the allegations. David Leonhardt writes in the New York Times about the cowardice of the “if true” admonitions, which leave the speakers a perfect out.
Utah Representative Rob Bishop is close to his goal of “invalidating” the Endangered Species Act.
Trump’s voter “fraud” commission, which is itself based on a fraudulent premise that pervasive voter fraud exists, has been sued by one of its members, alleging violation of transparency laws and other malfeasance by the Republican members.
A Trump nominee for a lifetime appointment to the federal bench who was unanimously ranked “not qualified” by the American Bar Association was approved in a party-line vote by the Senate Judiciary Committee this week. The judge referred on his blog to “Hillary Rotten Clinton” last year and pledged support for the NRA. If you have a Republican Senator from your state, this would be yet another good reason to call and ask him/her to vote against Talley’s confirmation from the full body.
The swamp is so swampy that minor imbroglios like, say, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross lying about $2 billion in personal wealth just sort of slip under the radar.
They did, however, force one unqualified nominee to withdraw: Michigan state legislator Tim Kelly has his nomination pulled after it was revealed he wanted all Muslims banned from air travel. He’s also said that women aren’t interested in STEM careers, and efforts to encourage girls to pursue such careers are a waste of money. This leaves unanswered the question of what the hell his home district in Michigan is thinking.
One of my Senators, Chris Coons, is demanding an explanation for the ‘resignation’ of U.S. Attorney Dana Boente just days before Robert Mueller announced the first criminal charges in his investigation of the President’s campaign ties to Russia. Attorney General Jeff Sessions asked for Boente’s resignation in late October.
A Kansas City Star investigation led Antonio “Rico” Soave to end his campaign for Congress, as the story uncovered multiple instances of graft while Soave was the state’s Commerce Secretary – and forced Kansas Governor Sam Brownback to admit he’d fired Soave in June.
A fungus called coffee rust threatens the world’s arabica crop, exacerbated by climate change that extends the fungus’ active season.
Climate change is killing farm workers around the world, contributing to the rise of a deadly kidney disease or disorder of unknown cause. I heard about this from a reader who saw in my email newsletter that I like Flor de Caña rum; he mentioned to me that working conditions for their sugar harvesters are abysmal, and they’ve had a rash of deaths due to this disorder.
Also from the Guardian, those supposedly financially disciplined folks in Congress destroyed an expensive Arctic ice probe rather than pay to store it … because the probe would facilitate research on climate change. You read that right: They threw away a major investment because they didn’t want further proof we are warming the planet.
Louis C.K.’s film I Love You, Daddy has been pulled from distribution before its release due to revelations of his past sexual harassment of women. Meanwhile, Mel Gibson’s latest movie is out in theaters, even though he’s a pretty terrible human being too.
Paste calls on all comedians repped by 3 Arts’ Dave Becky to drop him as their manager, as he is accused of facilitating Louis C.K.’s sexual harassment of other comedians.
Tom Colicchio wrote a widely-praised open letter to male chefs urging them to do more to change the culture of restaurant kitchens, which he argues accept harassment as standard operating procedure and thus stymie the efforts of young female (or, I’d imagine, LGBT or nonbinary) chefs to advance in the industry.
Some baseball links: Fangraphs’ Jeff Sullivan asks if the pitch-framing market efficiency is closing.
Baseball America‘s Teddy Cahill looks at increasingly early college commitments from teenaged players, a practice everyone dislikes but no one wants to address.
Lindsey Adler (at Deadspin) had the best piece I saw on the Baseball Prospectus writer who didn’t exist. Ryan Schultz was the online persona of a girl, who started the act at age 13 and is now 21, who catfished numerous readers and writers via social media and later multiple sites.
Mike Tanier writes on Bleacher Report that the NFL has passed the point of no return with Colin Kaepernick as teams give quarterback jobs to vagrants grabbed off the streets rather than call the principled former 49er.
The World Health Organization is now advising farmers to avoid using antibiotics in healthy animals, given the practice’s contribution to the evolution and spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Why hasn’t California cracked down on anti-vaccination doctors? These quacks are exploiting “medical exemptions” rules, but so far, none has been charged with any form of fraud. If you live there, call your state rep or senator to demand real action on this, before there’s another measles outbreak.
There’s a new shingles vaccines that is vastly more effective in older patients than any previous vaccine. It uses a new type of adjuvant that might change how vaccines, especially those for patients over 50, are developed.
Michigan Republicans are pushing forward bills to allow concealed carry in churches and schools.
Cincinnati politicians are trying to gift FC Cincinnati team owners with a publicly-funded stadium in the town’s Oakley neighborhood. Call your local reps and tell them you know what a colossal waste this is.
I agree with President Trump! The federal government needs to revoke the Church of Scientology’s tax-exempt status. It’s a real-estate holding company running a long con on members, and harassed its way into this status in the first place.
Is vermouth making a comeback? Sales are on the rise, largely due to the wine’s use in certain cocktails, like the Negroni and the Manhattan, which are seeing revivals as well.
A Macallan 1878 bottle reported to be worth $300,000 has been exposed as a fake, likely produced between 1970 and 1972.
Astronomers have discovered the first known star to survive a supernova, eventually exploding five separate times over a two-year period.
Mental floss looks at how the death of a chemist in 1996 changed how labs handle dangerous chemicals forever.
Five tips for helping your anxious child (or yourself). They check out for me at least.
Anti-abortion activists are very successful on Twitter, says a pro-choice writer for DAME magazine. Much of what she describes here, like hashtag hijacking, reflects a flaw in the machine, exploited well by one side.
Necessity breeds invention: Food shortages in North Korea have boosted a black market in privation foodstuffs, many of which are made from soybeans.
The 7 Wonders app, in development for at least two full years, will be released for iOS this Tuesday, November 14th, with an Android release coming on December 20th.
An English reporter who happens to be black interviewed white supremacist Richard Spencer on camera, and he let the racist show his true colors. If anything, I wish Younge had let Spencer keep talking; he’s hardly the well-groomed intellectual he pretends to be.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alcohol, anxiety, baseball, chemistry, climate change, coffee, food safety, links, longreads, rum, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ October 28, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/28/17.

No new Insider content this week, as I was writing up the top 50 free agents package. That and a look at the offseason trade market will run the week of November 6th. I did hold a Klawchat on Thursday.

I spoke with Arizona’s KJZZ about my book Smart Baseball and the rise of Big Data in the sport. You can find links to buy the book here.

I also run a free email newsletter with personal essays and links to everything I’ve written since the previous newsletter. If you’re already a subscriber, thank you, and yes, I’m overdue to send another one out.

And now, the links, with boardgame stuff at the end as usual…

I don’t know how anyone could have missed it, but it turns out a tiny Montana firm with ties to the Secretary of the Interior somehow got the biggest contract to restore power in Puerto Rico. Then the Daily Beast‘s Ken Klippenstein got a hold of the contract itself, with some sweetheart clauses to protect this little company from pretty much anything, like, say, getting sued for doing a bad job. And now the White House is slowly backing away from the deal. Drain the swamp, indeed.
The longread of the week was clearly the New Yorker‘s profile of the Sackler family, who’ve made billions by selling opioids, often to addicts rather than people in pain. I wonder if any institutions, including my own undergrad alma mater, will return the money the family donated or take its name off any buildings.
The Atlantic goes long on the potential negative impacts of increased personalization of news – that is, limiting what each of us sees based on what each of us seems to want to see. There are some positives from the algorithms behind these feeds, but newsrooms need the right people and technology to profit from them.
The New York Times looks at how an EPA stacked with former chemical industry officials is rolling back regulations on the use of chemicals where there’s strong evidence of harm to humans. Even more notable is the EPA PR official’s response to a request from the author here, which reads like a Facebook comment.
As more and more women come out against Harvey Weinstein, the women who’ve accused our current President of sexual harassment wonder why these accusations haven’t affected Trump at all.
North Carolina’s state legislature might be the most vile in the nation. The Republicans who control it are trying to rig the courts via gerrymandering after multiple judicial defeats.
Economist Paul Krugman says Trump’s proposed corporate tax cut amounts to $700 billion in foreign aid because of how much of corporate America is foreign-owned – and asks why on earth we would want to do that.
Media Matters argues that the Clinton/uranium investigation is “bullshit” promulgated by Breitbart and Sean Hannity.
The Environmental Defense Fund lists five environmental rules that industries have asked Trump to eliminate. As you might expect, they’re rules that attempt to protect consumers and/or the environment, but raise costs for certain industries.
Millennials are paying for news, contrary to every bit of nonsense you’ve heard about what millennials won’t do or what thing they’re ruining now. I wonder if some of this is a desire to get news from reliable sources given the prevalence of both fake news and highly biased ‘news.’
A Cornell professor who oversees a $22 million federally-funded program to improve school lunches has been accused of misinterpreting, omitting, and otherwise screwing up the data behind several of his studies, leading to at least three retractions by journals of papers he’s published. The New York Times explains one of those retracted studies, on kids and cookies. What I can’t find, shockingly, is any evidence the USDA might pull his funding.
Chef Dan Barber, author of The Third Plate, opened a pop-up in London called wastED, selling foods made from ingredients that would normally be discarded. He’s done it in NYC too.
A new Dark Matter coffee shop in Chicago will give 100% of its proceeds to suicide prevention while also serving as an outreach location that will provide support and training to the community.
Anthony Bourdain spoke candidly to Slate about his role in encouraging ‘bro culture’ in restaurant kitchens as the industry is dealing with the John Besh scandal (and surely more to come).
Amazon has been deleting unfavorable reviews for an anti-glyphosate book that has been accused of relying on weak or junk science, while also allowing reviews by associates of the author (a violation of amazon’s terms) to stay up.
Vulture (for whom I write occasionally) has oral history of the Seinfeld episode “The Contest”, which is particularly interesting for what went on with the network.
Paste (for whom I write more than occasionally) looks at the inherent violence within Castle Wolfenstein II, including the uncomfortable ‘storyline’ in the game.
Hillsborough wants to put the new Rays ballpark in Ybor City. Who’s going to pay for it? Are Florida voters dumb enough to fall for this trick yet again?
A man in Portugal beat his ex-wife with a nail-studded club and avoided jail because the Portuguese judges said his anger was understandable, citing an 1886 ruling and the Bible. A Portuguese politican called it “Sharia law in the Court of Porto,” a fair warning given the rise of hard-right theocrats, including Senate candidate Roy Moore, in the last two years.
Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has an agreement to develop a quayside neighborhood of Toronto, which a lecturer in the ethics of technology warns is a dangerous precedent.
Audio link: Richard Thaler, winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Economics, appeared on NPR’s The Hidden Brain to discuss the predictability of our unpredictability.
Author Patrick Tomlinson presented a thought experiment that he says puts the lie to anti-abortion arguments. Ben Shapiro, himself a pro-lifer, responded on his site, although I think at least two of his four points really miss the mark.
An Indian researcher and former English professor has worked for years to catalog the nearly 800 languages spoken in India, a number that may have dropped by 50% since 1960.
Boardgames! The Kickstarter for ROOT, a new asymmetric game from Leder Games, blew past its modest $24K funding goal in the first five days.
Asmodee announced Fantasy Flight Digital, a new division that will bring FFG titles to tablets and Steam. Fantasy Flight is best known for its Star Wars miniatures and dice games, Netrunner, Game of Thrones, X-COM, and new hit Legend of the Five Rings, but also has some straight Eurogames like Hey That’s My Fish and Ingenious.
Asmodee also released a teaser for the upcoming app version of the complex strategy boardgame Scythe.
The New Yorker looks at the ‘resurrection’ of Dungeons & Dragons, although I know the game never really went anywhere, and of course it inspired hundreds of later games, both RPGs and many tabletop games that integrate role-playing or dungeon crawl elements.
I don’t care for Scrabble or the knockoff Words with Friends, but enjoyed this Vice piece on how WwF essentially hacked the game via its user-generated dictionary.
Rama.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, boardgames, food waste, gmo, Languages, links, longreads, stick to baseball, taxes, the swamp, tv

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