missouri

→ April 20, 2024
→ By keith
→ 10 Comments

Stick to baseball, 4/20/24.

I updated my ranking of the top prospects for this year’s draft, going to 50 names but not without some difficulty; and posted a scouting notebook covering a half-dozen prospects in the class I saw over the previous ten days. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

As I mentioned in my chat the other day, the Athletic spiked my podcast and cut the daily baseball show to three a week, so I’m no longer doing any regular podcasts for them. I did make a guest appearance on the Windup on Friday, talking draft and prospect stuff.

I am now appearing weekly on the Stadium streaming channel, on the 2 pm show Diamond Dreams, which is entirely about prospects, with occasional appearances on their roundup show The Rally. You can get the app here. Right now, it doesn’t appear that shows are archived, but I’m looking into it.

Once this is done, I’m hoping to get another edition of my free email newsletter out this weekend, before I head back to Chicago for the next show.

Taylor Swift is on Threads now – but I was there first. I’m on Bluesky, too. I ended up re-verified on Twitter, which makes me eligible for a cut of ad revenues around my tweets; I’m going to donate all of it to the Trevor Project. My first and only payout so far was $16.64, which I’ve already donated.

And now, pop an edible (if it’s legal where you are) and enjoy the links…

Before I get to the longreads, this seems like the story of the week: The Supreme Court has declined to hear the appeal in McKesson v. Doe, which held that authorities may hold a protest’s organizer(s) liable if any attendee of the protest commits an illegal act. The decision effectively ends the right to assembly in at least three states. This should have been front-page news across the country.
An editorial in Haaretz argues that Netanyahu’s policies, from his brutal assault on Gaza and assassination of Iranian leaders, are endangering the long-term survival of Israel.
The billionaire co-founder of Cloudflare wanted to build an 11,000 square foot mansion in Park City over the opposition of residents. First he tried to slip a bill through the state legislature to allow the construction, but it failed. When the local paper ran stories critical of him, he bought it and installed his buddy as editor in chief.
Brandy Zarozny of NBC News reported from the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association conference, where speakers urged attendees to seize voting machines and investigate absurd conspiracy theories.
The New York Times reports on how Senate candidate Dave McCormick, a Republican running against Pennsylvania’s Bob Casey (D), appears to have fabricated details of his upbringing to downplay his privileged upbringing.
PressWatchers interviewed Chris Quinn of the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, who has made waves for his willingness to cover former President Trump accurately and for calling out the blatant bothsidesism happening across so-called mainstream media.
Candace Buckner of the Washington Post had a measured take on the outrage over Gregg Doyel’s odd treatment of Caitlin Clark. I’m with her: the story isn’t a non-troversy, but the level of vitriol here is out of proportion to the infraction.
Former federal prosecutor Terra Morehead will be disbarred in the wake of revelations that she helped a Kansas City cop frame an innocent man who then served 23 years in prison. Morehead was also a Wyandotte County prosecutor, and has been implicated in numerous incidents of prosecutorial misconduct.
USC announced that their valedictorian will not be allowed to speak at commencement this year as the university caved to anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian sentiment, including threats against the ceremony and school.
A St. Louis cop who was working undercover among protesters in the city in 2017 was badly beaten by his own colleagues; a judge just awarded him $23.5 million in compensation, which, ultimately, will be covered by taxpayers.
More fallout from Uri Berliner’s unverified column attacking NPR: The network suspended him, after which he resigned, presumably to start a Substack where he’ll rail against DEI and vaccines; while NPR’s Steve Inskeep wrote a detailed takedown of Berliner’s column, pointing out just how little fire there was behind the smoke. I’ll repeat what I’ve said before: Berliner’s argument that NPR didn’t give enough credence to the failed lab-leak hypothesis was a tell. Slate’s Alicia Montgomery, a former NPR staffer herself, has a much stronger critique of the problems at the network.
Louisiana Republicans voted to end mandatory lunch breaks for child workers, cut unemployment benefits, and reduce worker’s compensation.
Ocean acidification and climate change are causing a fourth mass bleaching episode in the world’s coral reefs. Coral reefs are essential to the marine ecosystem – including a lot of the fish we eat.
There are 806 billionaires in the United States. Their wealth exceeds that of the lower half of Americans’ total wealth combined, by a lot.
The great Phil Plait wrote about the declining odds that there is a ninth planet in our solar system, given how much of space we’ve checked without finding it. This is the subject of the fantastic deduction board game The Search for Planet X.
The Sundance Film Festival’s organizers are playing the sports stadium handout game, courting bids from cities to host the influential festival starting in 2027.
Kari Lake (R ), running for Senate in Arizona after voters there rejected her in the race for Governor in 2022, called on sheriffs to enforce the state’s 1864 abortion ban. That same territorial law also banned interracial marriage and set the age of consent for girls at 10.
Tennessee Rep. Scott Cepicky (R) confessed in a leaked conversation that his aim with a school-voucher bill is to “throw the whole freaking (public education) system in the trash.”
Dr. Allison Neitzel has become a target of anti-vaxx trolls for her pro-vaccine and pro-science activism; she responded on her newsletter with the wonderfully titled missive “I Will Continue to Piss Off Men.” If you want to read more about what amounts to harassment campaign against her from the soi-disant “journalist” Paul Thacker, you can go here. Thacker seems to focus on women in the pro-science movement, and I think it’s fair to ask if he’s really just a misogynist.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, arizona, astronomy, climate change, colleges, education, gaza, kansas, links, longreads, louisiana, misinformation, missouri, pennsylvania, police, stick to baseball, tennessee, utah, vaccines

→ April 13, 2024
→ By keith
→ 26 Comments

Stick to baseball, 4/13/24.

I’ve got some new content coming up this week, with a new draft ranking due to run on Thursday and a draft scouting blog probably running Monday or Tuesday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the collectible card game Star Wars: Unlimited – Spark of Rebellion, which I enjoyed even though I’m not generally a fan of deckbuilders.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter, detailing a rather ridiculous dinner I had at the bar at The Publican, an acclaimed Chicago restaurant where, to say the least, one does not belch as loudly as one can.

I’m going to be on a new TV show, Diamond Dreams starting on Monday, April 15^th, on the streaming channel Stadium. The show is a half-hour look at prospects around the minors and for the draft, and will be followed by a show on collectibles where I’ll also offer some comments on the prospects they’re discussing. You can watch via the app on pretty much any platform.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: How Elon Musk convinced MAGA partisans that hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) was a treatment for COVID-19 – which it absolutely is not – and set off four years of online misinformation around the pandemic.

Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote in the New York Times about how “colorblindness” has been hijacked by the white-grievance movement, in direct opposition to the original intent of the term, which meant ending racial discrimination against people of color.

Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote about how the Key Bridge disaster demonstrated the importance of immigrants to our society.

A hardcore conservative group is making it harder for Idaho school districts to renovate or upgrade their facilities.

There’s a big scam going around that has tricked a number of content creators into ceding control of their Facebook pages. It starts with what seems to be an invitation to appear on a big podcast, which of course is very appealing to most people trying to build their online audience.

Over half a million Arizonans signed a petition to put codifying abortion rights on the ballot this November. It’s part of a Democratic strategy to drive voters to the polls in purple states – and also, by the way, a basic human right. This comes on the heels of the GOP-packed Arizona Supreme Court reinstating the state’s 1864 abortion ban – yes, a law that predates Arizona’s statehood by almost 50 years.

The Guardian revealed that Boise State Professor Scott Yenor ran Action Idaho, an extreme right-wing site that attacked LGBTQ+ rights and accused Republicans of being insufficiently conservative. Yenor now also works for the Claremont Institute and just a month ago wrote a piece for the Federalist that said DEI had to die for Western civilization to survive.

ProPublica explains how authorities are trying to crack down on gift-card crime rings, where consumers often end up buying gift cards that appear new but that have already been drained of value by crooks.

Maria Bustillos writes in The Nation about the rise of journalist-owned news outlets amidst the ongoing bloodletting in the industry.

David Chang’s Momofuku company is trying to trademark the generic term “chili crunch” to describe a staple Chinese condiment best known as chili crisp – and they’re suing smaller firms to try to have their way.

Why is Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey (R – and not the former pitcher) doing the bidding of Elon Musk by suing Media Matters for reporting on Twitter’s failure to police hate on their site?

Voters in Enid, Oklahoma, removed Judd Blevins (R) from the city council after his ties to white supremacist groups were exposed.

The BBC has a first-person narrative from a woman who found deepfakes of herself online – and eventually learned it was a close friend of hers who made them.

This Twitter thread has some solid details on the IDF’s attack on the World Central Kitchen convoy in Gaza that killed seven WCK volunteers. I don’t know why those seven deaths should lead to more calls for a cease-fire when the 30,000+ Palestinian deaths before that haven’t … of course I do, let’s not kid ourselves.

Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket reposted a piece from the Kansas Reflector critical of Meta’s ad policy around climate change, and moments later, Meta removed all links to both sites from Facebook and Threads. After an outcry, Meta reversed the decision and blamed a “security error,” but, come on.

Landfills emit far more methane than previously believed, more bad news for the planet as methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

Before voters wisely rejected a stadium tax proposal to replace the two perfectly fine sports facilities outside of Kansas City, the KC Studio had a sensible op ed on what a waste tearing down Kaufmann Stadium would be.

Former SCOTUS justice Steven Breyer wants everyone to get along, like his former colleagues on the high court, even though some of those colleagues are busy destroying Americans’ basic civil rights, writes Elie Mystal of The Nation.

The BBC reports on exploitation of workers in Brazil who harvest the common ingredient carnauba wax, bordering on slavery.

Cleveland Plain-Dealer editor Chris Quinn explains why the paper treats Donald Trump differently from other politicians & candidates. Hint: It’s because he lies.

The Atlantic’s David Graham describes the “Trump two-step:” say something outrageous, claim that’s not really what he said or meant, and then quietly embrace the original statement.

The New Republic’s Greg Sargent details just how entrenched election denial, January 6^th denialism, and other insane conspiracy theories are within the Republican party right now.

Mehdi Hasan wrote in the Guardian that Justice Sonja Sotomayor needs to retire from the Supreme Court so President Biden can appoint a replacement, avoiding the possibility that Trump would get to appoint a fourth justice and give the court a 7-2 majority that would likely last decades. I’m not sure if I agree, but he at least offers a solid argument.

Fox News and several right-wing podcasters, including beanie-wearing Tim Pool, are now facing a lawsuit from a man they all falsely identified as a mass shooter. The man’s lawyer previously represented two Sandy Hook parents in their lawsuit against Alex Jones for his false claims that that mass shooting didn’t happen. Fuck ’em up, Socrates.

The Tampa Bay Times published a rare editorial pointing out that public subsidies for sports stadiums don’t work out for taxpayers, as the Rays try once again to soak Floridians for a new facility.

Here’s a great summary and index of economic research showing how consistently these sports stadium deals fail to live up to economic promises. If you’re writing about the topic, or know a journalist who is, this is invaluable, because the pro-stadium forces will always trot out fabricated numbers from consultants who give them what they want.

The PEN America awards are in a bit of a shambles after a number of high-profile authors withdrew their works from consideration or declined prizes in protest of the organization’s perceived bias towards Israel. The authors include Lorrie Moore, who just won the National Book Critics Circle’s Fiction award for I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home.

A senior editor at NPR wrote a bad-faith, error-filled critique of the public radio outlet on Bari Weiss’s blog. NPR responded, defending its hiring practices and its philosophy. You can find many takedowns of Uri Berliner’s original piece, but one fact that got me was that he accused NPR of downplaying or ignoring the lab-leak theory behind COVID-19’s origins, even when the evidence in favor of a zoonotic spillover kept mounting.

WFLA has the story of a young boy with autism who can no longer receive health services because Florida kicked him off Medicaid. We need more stories like this, showing everyday people getting badly hurt by state policies that cut funding for essential services like health care, education, and even school lunches for underprivileged people.

A former youth minister at a Baptist church in Bixby, Oklahoma, has been charged with sexual exploitation of a minor as well as possession and distribution of child pornography. No drag queens were involved.

Chicago police killed Dexter Reed during a traffic stop where he fired first, injuring one officer, after which the cops fired 96 rounds in less than a minute. The Sun-Times reports that the five officers involved in the incident have been investigated a total of 41 times since 2019, and that the area where they stopped Reed has a disproportionate number of traffic stops. The cops have said they pulled Reed over because he wasn’t wearing a seat belt.

The brightest cosmic explosion scientists have ever seen has now led to new questions about how some of the universe’s heaviest metals are formed. The supernova occurred about 2.4 billion years ago in a galaxy far, far away, producing a huge burst of gamma rays but none of the elements like gold or platinum that scientists expected to find.

Delaware State Senator Sarah McBride is running to be our at-large Representative, vying to become the first trans person elected to Congress. She’s one of at least three Democrats hoping to win the primary, which is tantamount to winning the election in our very blue state. Full disclosure: I’ve met Sen. McBride and we often see each other at our local Brew Haha coffee shop.

Is social media really driving a surge in mental illness among teenagers, as Jonathan Haidt claims in his new book? The evidence is mixed at best, according to this review in Nature.

Eric Hovde, who is running for Senate in Wisconsin as a Republican, is now facing backlash over his comments from a previous campaign where he called for cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits, attacked single mothers, said alcohol should never have been legalized, questioned whether farmers work hard, and lots of other great stuff.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, arizona, chicago, climate change, delaware, Economics, election denial, florida, gaza, idaho, links, longreads, Media, mental illness, misinformation, missouri, physics, police, scotus, social media, stick to baseball, wisconsin

→ March 23, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/23/24.

At the Athletic, I wrote about a bunch of prospects I saw in the Cactus League, including two Breakout games; plus a list of six breakout candidates for 2024; as well as a Q&A with our fantasy expert Nando di Fino.

At Vulture, I wrote about the surge in cooperative tabletop games that started with Pandemic and then picked up during the … pandemic, really, along with a list of 14 of the best.

Now that this post is up I’ll begin the next edition of my free email newsletter.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Scientific American looks at the extensive harm done to LGBTQ+ kids and their parents by the anti-LGBTQ+ bills pushed by religious zealots and right-wingers across the country. One key quote: “Every major medical association in the U.S., including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association and the Endocrine Society, endorses gender-affirming care for trans kids.” The fear and ignorance of a small number of bigots should never outweigh the unanimous view of the medical community.
34^th Street, the arts & culture magazine of the University of Pennsylvania’s Daily Pennsylvanian, offers an incisive look at how big-money donors are trying to stifle free expression on campuses across the country – including at their own school. This goes beyond the attacks on the school’s President, who resigned in December, to demands for mass disciplining of students who participate in certain assemblies or protests, for the right to approve faculty hires, and more. Don Moynihan wrote about a similar topic, including Christopher Rufo’s bad-faith “plagiarism” claims against researchers into race-related topics, in his newsletter.
ProPublica found an “expert” who has testified in Colorado adoption cases for over forty years, typically arguing that foster parents should be allowed to keep the children in their care rather than the biological parents, whose self-described “protocol” is based on no evidence or research at all. It’s a way of conning the system that, according to the authors, is spreading across the country – and taking babies and young children away from their (financially) poor parents.
Abortion bans affect more than just the women who might want or need abortions: Standard pregnancy care in Louisiana has been severely curtailed by the state’s abortion ban.
A scientist and a medical doctor wrote in the Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice that regulatory bodies should take action against medical professionals who spread disinformation about vaccines.
NPR looks at the death of Nex Benedict, a nonbinary, indigenous student in Owasso, Oklahoma, who died after bullies attacked them at their school, and whose death has been ruled a suicide on what appears to be insufficient evidence. The article here at least entertains the possibility that the Owasso School District and local authorities are trying to cover up a case of manslaughter, perhaps because the victim was queer.
A Bronx high school English teacher emailed author Tommy Orange (There There, The Wandering Stars) with an unsolicited request to come speak to his class about his work. Orange rearranged his schedule to make it happen.
Killing Joke founder/singer Jaz Coleman spoke to The Guardian in his first interview since the death this winter of guitarist Geordie Walker.
The Republican Party is making immigration a major issue in this year’s elections, tying it to crime rates. However, immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than people born in the U.S.
North Carolina’s Republican candidate for the state’s Superintendent of Public Instruction post, which offers all public education in the state, has called for the execution of President Biden and former President Obama, along with a host of other Democrats and public figures like Dr. Anthony Fauci. Michelle Morrow also participated in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6^th and has the endorsement of Moms for Liberty. She is opposed by Democrat Mo Green.
Haiti has now fallen into anarchy after the Prime Minister resigned and armed gangs have taken control of large parts of the country. This was the inevitable consequence of two hundred-plus years of exploitation and corruption, according to the Guardian’s Kenan Malik. One enormous factor is the billions of dollars Haiti had to pay France as “reparations” for lost property (primarily slaves) after the Caribbean nation declared its independence in 1804; another is incessant meddling by the U.S. government, including at least one actual invasion, as well as our support of anti-communist dictators who drained the country’s limited coffers without building an actual state apparatus.
Also in Scientific American: There is no evidence supporting the use of the death penalty. It is not a deterrent; it is state-sponsored vengeance. The United States is the only NATO member that still has it.
The Arizona legislature held yet another hearing where they allowed witnesses to expound on various bogus COVID-19 hoaxes and myths.
A Lancaster, PA, library had to cancel a drag-queen story hour after employees found a suspicious package and the library received bomb threats.
Floyd County (VA) Public Schools cancelled a community reading of the YA novel Wishtree after complaints that its protagonist was nonbinary and uses any pronouns. The protagonist is a tree. One of the complaining parents doesn’t even send her kids to the public schools – they go to a fundamentalist Christian school nearby.
Alabama consistently ranks near the bottom of all U.S. states in the quality of its education, so rather than address that issue, the Governor just signed a bill banning all DEI efforts in public education in the state. We’ve already seen some migration from states that have passed anti-LGBTQ+ laws (see above); will we see something similar for non-white families, and for people who work in academia?
A prisoner in Illinois who was teaching a peer-led civics class about voting rights that the state requires inmates to take before they can leave prison was fired for teaching that literacy tests were a racist way to suppress the Black vote. Anthony McNeal, who is Black, has sued the counselor who fired him and the prison warden, claiming his First and Fourteenth Amendment rights were violated. Also, he spoke the truth.
Missouri’s Attorney General beclowned himself by claiming that DEI programs were somehow responsible for a fight between two students that left one, a white girl, critically injured, while her Black 15-year-old assailant is facing assault charges.
I didn’t get to longtime Phoenix restaurant El Portal on my recent trip there, but President Biden went there on Tuesday to kick off a new part of his Presidential campaign aimed at Latino voters. I’m more interested in whether the food’s any good.
Front Office Sports publishes a lot of content, but their editorial standards can be … well, they ran an article claiming that the San Franciso 49ers’ publicly-funded stadium has been a good investment for taxpayers, when the study they cite actually doesn’t show that at all. If you’re a journalist, or trying to be one, and you don’t understand a research paper, find someone who can help you do so.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: academia, alabama, book banning, colorado, death penalty, haiti, illinois, lgbt rights, links, longreads, louisiana, misinformation, missouri, north carolina, oklahoma, pennsylvania, phoenix, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ March 2, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/2/24.

Nothing new this week at the Athletic, but I’ll have two draft-related pieces coming up next week.

At Paste, I reviewed Dragonkeepers, a new family-level game that I found really disappointing, with the wrong mixture of complexity and randomness.

I’ll have a new newsletter out in the next day or two, but you can sign up here – it’s free and always includes links to everything I write.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Color me shocked, but self-help ‘guru’ Jay Shetty has fabricated or embellished much of his background, according to this investigative piece by The Guardian.
Slate’s Chris Molanphy breaks down what the country chart success of Beyoncé’s “Texas Hold ‘Em” does and does not mean in actual impact on radio and with country listeners.
Will Leitch wrote about the culture-war takeover of the murder of Laken Riley, a University of Georgia student who was killed on the same running trail Will and his wife often take in Athens. Because her alleged killer entered the U.S. illegally, the case is now part of the yelling about the so-called “crisis” at the U.S-Mexico border – even though immigrants commit fewer crimes than U.S.-born people.
Florida’s measles outbreak is due to the state’s active campaigning against childhood vaccinations, so, of course, Fox News is blaming it on migrants.
The state of Indiana has blocked funding to the Kinsey Institute, the world’s top sex-research center, as part of that state’s war on LGBTQ+ rights.
Texas executed Ivan Cantu even though the foreman of the jury that convicted him wrote that he believed the sentence was unjust, as the prosecution hid key evidence that may have bolstered Cantu’s claims of innocence. Just another day in the Lone Star State.
What do you expect from a state where the party that controls all branches of government keeps cozying up to a prominent white supremacist?
A Dallas-area high school canceled a student production of The Laramie Project, about the killing of Matthew Shepard by two bigots because he was gay, after the district passed anti-LGBTQ+ rules last year.
Climate change is driving a surge in cholera cases in central Africa.
An unvaccinated nine-year-old boy in Singapore contracted COVID-19, developed myocarditis from it, and suffered a stroke. His mother says she declined the vaccine for her son because she was worried it would cause myocarditis, a good example of the harm that unfettered disinformation is doing to public health.
Some good medical news: An mRNA ‘vaccine’ to fight pancreatic cancer has entered stage 2 trials. I put the word vaccine in quotes because it’s not a preventative vaccine, but is tailored to specific recipients’ cancers to help train the immune system to fight the rogue cells, particularly those that remain after surgery or chemo.
You would think Arizona, the sunniest state in the U.S., would encourage residents to add solar panels, but the state is bowing to one of its major energy utility companies and adding a “punitive” charge to customers with solar panels. The Arizona Corporation Commission approved a request from utility APS despite failing to evaluate the full impact of these price hikes on consumers.
Missouri’s Attorney General is suing Planned Parenthood for “trafficking” minors to get abortions outside of Gilead.
The death of nonbinary teen Nex Benedict in Owasso, Oklahoma, after several girls beat them to the point where they blacked out, has received a lot of unclear and I think contradictory coverage from major outlets so far. Assigned Media has a solid summary of what we do and don’t know so far and a piece criticizing traditional media for accepting the police & school’s narratives without questioning them.
A married couple in Oregon who taught at Damascus Christian School have been charged with sexually abusing a child there. No drag queens or trans people were involved.
The BBC spoke to several Iranian women who are still protesting the theocratic regime’s requirement that they wear hijabs in public.
Mehdi Hasan announced his new media venture, Zeteo News, which sounds promising, although we’ve certainly seen and heard similar pitches before that haven’t panned out. His work with MSNBC was excellent and I expect him to continue to challenge disinformation and bigotry. I hope there’s enough support to allow him to build the news organization he envisions.
A Beverly Hills middle school is grappling with the spread of AI-generated nudes of students. This issue isn’t going anywhere and I doubt passing laws against the practice is going to do much at this level.
I know you’re shocked, but the construction of Elon Musk’s long-promised Hyperloop in Las Vegas is rife with safety violations.
Two twins from the country of Georgia were sold at birth and separated; they found each other as teenagers thanks to a TV talent show and to TikTok. Amy and Ano are two of thousands of babies who were stolen from hospitals in the Caucasus nation, their mothers told their babies had died, and sold to new families who were often unaware the adoptions were illegal.
Board game news: An expansion for the Restoration Games title Thunder Road is now on Kickstarter and has already cleared $1 million.
A roll-and-write game based on the wonderful board game Cascadia is also on Kickstarter and fully funded already.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, arizona, board game news, climate change, country music, death penalty, frauds, las vegas, links, longreads, missouri, oklahoma, social media, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines

→ January 6, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/6/24.

I took a few weeks off from these posts around the holidays, but I did write one piece for subscribers to The Athletic over the break, looking at the Chris Sale trade and Lucas Giolito signing.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the games Daybreak, a cooperative game about fighting climate change; and Wandering Towers, the best new family game of last year. Both games were on my ranking of the ten best new board games of 2023.

My free email newsletter will return today (most likely). Several of you have pledged to support me if the newsletter were to go paid; I have no immediate plans to do so, but if that happens 1) I’ll give everyone a ton of notice and 2) I’ll move it off Substack.

And now, the links…

Writer Tom Scocca’s piece in New York about his sudden, unsolved medical mystery is the best thing you’ll read all week. It’s well-written, of course, and combines the deeply personal with an inherent attack on our broken health-care system.

President Biden won’t just be facing Donald Trump or another GOP opponent in the 2024 election – he’ll be opposed by the News Corp misinformation machine, too. (Related: The Washington Post’s Philip Bump wrote of how journalism needs to defend itself in the face of bad-faith actors. He might start with his own paper’s opinion section.)

The New Yorker looks at board games with serious themes, profiling Amabel Holland, a trans woman who co-owns the publisher Hollandspiele and designed the Iron Rails series of games.

Parenting is hard. It’s been harder thanks to the pandemic. That and other factors have led to the rise of the “accidentally permissive” parent, especially in my age cohort.

Stuart Thompson of the New York Times looks at how anti-vaxx ghouls latched on to the death of a 24-year-old man, who showed no symptoms of myocarditis after his COVID-19 vaccination but whose parents think the vaccine gave him myocarditis anyway. George Watts, Jr., had an enlarged spleen – over six times the normal size for that organ – which is a sign of long-term heart failure, chronic inflammation in his brain, and signs of late-stage pneumonia in his lungs.

mRNA vaccines do not cause cancer, and there is no such thing as “turbo cancer.”

Measles is on the rise around the world thanks to vaccine denialists and misinformation peddlers like RFK, Jr.

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D) has introduced two bills to block military aid to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates due to both nations’ atrocious human rights records. Omar is Muslim, and Islam is the official religion of both nations. Just imagine a similar scenario with Judaism or Christianity instead of Islam.

Meanwhile, Israel has censored its press on eight topics relating to the war on Gaza.

On the coordinated attacks against now former Harvard President Claudine Gay: It was never about plagiarism, but about DEI (from Don Moynihan); American Jews’ moral panic over Gay’s and two other college Presidents’ answers to Congress is misplaced (from The Forward); and Gay’s own editorial in the New York Times on what happened, which I thought was far too reticent.

Why do pundits like Jonathan Chait and Nate Silver say outrageous things? Because it’s effective, at least when you consider that attention is their goal.

The science is clear: Masks work to reduce the spread of COVID-19 and similar viruses, no matter what the misinformation merchants tell you.

The Guardian looks at the unfunny punching-down comedy specials from Dave Chapelle and Ricky Gervais. Chapelle was so groundbreaking at his peak that it’s sad to see him pitching with an 80 mph fastball now.

A list of all 673 books removed from classrooms in Orange County, Florida. I don’t know how anyone with the means to move could still live there. Even if you send your kids to a quality alternative school, your tax dollars are supporting this anti-education.

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) declined federal food aid to provide lunch to schoolchildren over the summer, making a specious argument about obesity. This is free money for the state, and they would rather turn it down than feed poor children in Iowa.

NYC Mayor Eric Adams (D) has drained the city payroll of over $24 million to pay for 293 “special assistants,” many of them major donors to his campaign.

Adams (still D) also tried to kill a bill that requires police to report when they stop anyone on the street to ask for identification, promising to restore budget cuts to other programs if council members voted against it. The bill passed anyway.

Overtime pay for NYPD officers working the city’s subway stations went from $4 million to $155 million between 2022 and 2023, reducing “major crimes” by 2% but primarily leading to more arrests and fines for fare-jumping. That’s a lot of money to fight a handful of skipped $2.90 charges.

New York bookstore Bluestockings is facing eviction for providing Narcan to save people who have overdosed on opioids.

Amanda Todd was 15 when she killed herself in 2012 after three years of cyberstalking by a Dutch man who blackmailed her with threats to send nude images of her to her friends and family. He was sentenced to 13 years by a Canadian court, but a Dutch court cut the sentence in half to match that country’s legal standards.

The Las Vegas Business Journal announced a new editorial policy that it will not publish economic impact estimates for stadium projects and other events unless they can see the methodology and criteria used to reach those estimates (which, in my view, are usually bullshit).

Francis Howell School District in St. Charles, Missouri, has seen white conservatives take over its school board; the board recently backed off a plan to eliminate all Black History and Black Literature courses after massive opposition, including from the NAACP. The same white conservatives are trying to ban trans students from using the appropriate bathrooms. School board elections matter, folks.

Speaking of Missourah, a St. Louis cop crashed his car into an LGBT bar, Bar:PM, and then cuffed one of the owners, who was later charged with a felony. The police didn’t do a toxicology test on their colleague, and now they’re trying to hush up any investigation and refusing to release body cam footage to the public.

Shoegaze had its moment in the early 1990s as a subgenre of alternative music, mostly heard from British acts like My Bloody Valentine, Ride, and Slowdive. It’s had a huge comeback thanks to TikTok.

The data from Insomniac Games released by hackers shows that big-game video game development is not sustainable, per Nathan Grayson of Aftermath, a great new site covering video and tabletop gaming.

I own a fantastic sweater and very warm hat from Quince, specialists in inexpensive cashmere clothing items. It turns out that cheap cashmere has a stark environmental cost.

The seams on a baseball have a higher-than-expected effect on the trajectory of the ball in flight.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, board games, Economics, environment, florida, harvard, iowa, journalism, links, longreads, misinformation, missouri, Music, new york, new york city, parenting, police, science, shoegaze, stick to baseball, vaccines, video games

→ December 16, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/16/23.

We’re getting busy over on the hot stove front, and this week I wrote about the Shohei Ohtani signing, the Lee Jung-hoo signing (plus two Royals signings and the Yanks-Dodgers trade), the impact of the injuries to Ronny Mauricio and Endy Rodríguez, and the Tyler Glasnow trade for subscribers to the Athletic.

At Paste, I ranked the ten best new boardgames of 2023. It was a hard list to make, with probably 20 games I played this year that I liked enough to include, and at least five more I know that I would probably like enough but haven’t played yet. To give you a little more context, a game like Emerge, which I mentioned in my PAX Unplugged writeup, is absolutely fine and I think a lot of casual players would enjoy it. It didn’t stand a chance of getting on this list.

My free email newsletter is alive and well, and more than a hundred new subscribers have joined the list in the last three weeks since I switched platforms, so thank you and welcome. I’m hoping to keep this up as a weekly endeavor again.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New York Times had two outstanding longreads this week. The first is by graphic designer Giorgia Lupi, who has been struggling with long COVID for three years and describes the disorder in prose and graphics that make it one of the most remarkable pieces I’ve read all year. As a companion, you might read Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist/author Ed Yong on how covering long COVID has made him a better writer.
The second is also an interactive story, about a 1973 expedition to the summit of Aconcagua that left two Americans dead on the mountain while six others returned, with the truth about how the two died still mired in uncertainty. The story resurfaced literally this year as climate change led to the withdrawal of a glacier that exposed one of the dead climber’s cameras.
The testimony of three university presidents to Congress a few weeks ago that led to the ouster of Penn’s Liz Magill and calls for Harvard’s Claudine Gay to resign has devolved into claims that Ms. Gay “plagiarized” parts of her dissertation. The Harvard Crimson looks at these claims, line by line, and contacts the authors whose work Ms. Gay allegedly stole. (Spoiler alert: This is a bad-faith argument by right-wing trolls.)
ProPublica looked at one gun store in Indiana that does little to nothing to avoid contributing to the illegal gun trade, and how it impacts communities in Chicago and beyond.
The Intercept obtained a document showing India’s Hindu nationalist government was specifically targeting Sikh separatists in the west, including Hardeep Singh Nijjar, whom the Canadian government says was murdered by Indian intelligence agents in June.
Those stories you saw a year or so ago about the ten-figure toll of organized shoplifting gangs? It was all a lie, cooked up by the retail industry’s lobbyists.
Ben Collins, who spent several years on what he called the “dystopia beat” of online hate and disinformation, writes about how the farce of cable news has reached the end of its lifespan, as younger audiences aren’t falling for the fake debates and dichotomies required by CNN, Fox, and their ilk.
Cameron County, Texas, located at the state’s southernmost tip, is prosecuting an 11-year-old boy who was arrested and put into solitary confinement for reporting his principal for bullying. Principal Marta Garza has a history of retaliating against any parents or children who cross her, including calling CPS after one district grandparent challenged the goals set for her 5-year-old grandchild.
The lie of abortion bans was made very clear with this past week’s ruling in Texas against Kate Cox, a pregnant woman whose fetus was nonviable but was denied an abortion under the state’s bogus “to save the mother’s life” exception.
The Washington Post is laying off experienced journalists – but expanding its increasingly reactionary editorial board, which led to a one-day strike on December 7^th.
Meanwhile, former Post reporter Felicia Sonmez’s lawsuit against the paper reached the DC Appeals Court, where the judges will have to determine whether its editors’ decision to take Sonmez, a sexual assault survivor, off coverage of #MeToo and related stories was discrimination or was a step to maintain objectivity.
First-time author Cait Corrain had her book canceled by its publisher after it came out that she’d review-bombed numerous other authors on Goodreads with various sock-puppet accounts.
A pastor in the United Church of the Kingdom of God was caught on film trying to rid a 16-year-old of “evil spirits,” while another former parishioner said the church tried to convince him to use prayer to become heterosexual when he was 13.
Missouri Rep. Sarah Unsicker (D) has dropped out of the race for the state’s attorney general post after some bizarre behavior, including having a “basil lemonade” with right-wing troll Chuck Johnson and claims that at least one of her opponents is actually an agent of the Israeli government.
Vivek Ramaswamy has now become the new(est) face of the racist, xenophobic Great Replacement Theory.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, coronavirus, harvard, india, links, longreads, Media, missouri, stick to baseball, texas

→ August 19, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/19/23.

I’ve got a piece filed to run on Monday or Tuesday at The Athletic, and another review coming up this week at Paste, but had nothing new up this week. My podcast will be back this week with an episode I recorded on Friday. So … sorry? But I’ll have a lot of content up in the next few days.

A few weeks ago, I appeared on the video podcast Shelf Stories to discuss ethics in board game media and questions of integrity and professionalism among folks who review games or otherwise cover the space, along with former Kotaku writer Luke Plunkett. It’s a long discussion but I greatly enjoyed it.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New York Times has a long adaptation from an upcoming book about how a California high school was torn apart by an Instagram account that posted racist memes about students there.

Nature discusses the impact of scientists leaving or cutting back on Twitter use, allowing anti-science and denialism to fester there – and that ran before Elon threatened, again, to terminate the site’s block function.

The Times also had a piece about three weeks ago looking into the continuing mystery over the origins of COVID-19, arguing that the public’s greater belief in the lab-leak conspiracy theory – any hypothesis of a lab leak remains stubbornly unsupported by evidence – is a function of distrust of authorities and the competition between narratives, not a question of facts.

By now you’ve likely read about Kansas cops raiding the offices of a small, local newspaper, after which the paper’s 98-year-old owner died. It turns out that the cops did so to try to prevent the paper from writing about a local restaurant owner’s DUI, which would have prohibited the woman, Kari Newell, from obtaining a liquor license. The county attorney has said there was insufficient evidence to support the warrant the cops obtained, and there’s now a complaint against the judge, Laura Viar, who signed it. The editorial boards of the Kansas City Star and Wichita Eagle co-published an editorial calling the raid “an intolerable overreach.”

Why did a Missouri judge grant a restraining order preventing the St. Louis Post-Dispatch from publishing details of an accused cop killer’s mental health evaluation? This seems like a First Amendment violation.

Meanwhile, Wisconsin State Senator Cory Tomczyk, a Republican, called a 13-year-old kid a homophobic slur at a county meeting in August of 2021, according to several people who witnessed it, but he’s trying to sue a local newspaper out of existence just for reporting on it.
I don’t know why this story has received so little attention: A 3-year-old girl who was trafficked by Texas state officials died while on a a so-called “migrant bus.” I couldn’t find articles on this in the Times (either one) or Washington Post, for example.

The Los Angeles Times looks at the people who actually lived near the nuclear test sites depicted as remote and unpopulated in Oppenheimer.

NPR summarizes some of the indoctrination awaiting Florida public school students as they return to the classroom this month.

A Montana judge ruled in favor of young climate-change activists who sued the state, arguing that Montana’s policy preventing state agencies from considering greenhouse gas emission potential when evaluating permits for fossil fuel development is unconstitutional. It’s largely symbolic, but could present a path for similar suits elsewhere.

The Baltimore Banner’s Kyle Goon tears apart Orioles failson/owner John Angelos’s bid for more state money along with a land grab around Camden Yards. Meanwhile, Orioles announcer Kevin Brown issued a statement nobody believes that tried to defuse reports that he was suspended for citing facts about the team’s past performance. In the Orioles’ best season in a decade, leave it to John Angelos to muck it up with this clownery.

A new state tax in Massachusetts that levies an extra 4% on incomes over a million dollars will raise $1 billion for FY2024, and the proceeds will pay for free school lunches for all kids in the state, among other things (I assume). Unfortunately, this article’s author confuses wealth with income, referring to “the state’s wealthiest residents.” Income and wealth are not the same thing, and taxing each is a very different process.

From last month, Katherine Miller wrote in the New York Times about the farcical No Labels party, which won’t reveal its funding sources and seems more interested in re-electing Donald Trump than pushing an actual new “centrist” platform (as if Democrats weren’t closer to the center than the progressive left anyway).

The Atlantic points out that asking why people keep moving to the Phoenix area ignores the broader questions of cheap energy and housing that drive it.

Board game news: The Kickstarter for Perch launched this week and is already about 250% funded.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, baseball, board game news, coronavirus, first amendment, florida, kansas, links, longreads, massachusetts, missouri, social media, stick to baseball, taxes, texas, wisconsin

→ April 29, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/29/23.

I’m writing this from the press box at Alex Bos Stadium in Baton Rouge, so I’ll have something up on Dylan Crews and Paul Skenes on either Sunday or Monday, depending on whether I bounce to another game on Saturday with rain scheduled here. I’ve had two posts up in the last two weeks for subscribers to The Athletic, one a Q&A with our own Nick Groke about Brewers prospects, and a draft blog post covering some Virginia and California prep prospects plus general thoughts on the top 15 or so names in the class.

On my podcast this week, I spoke with Elizabeth McCracken, author of 2022’s The Hero of this Book and 2018’s Bowlaway, about the former of those two books, the craft of writing, and being short. The week prior, I spoke with David Grann about his new book The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder, whichI enjoyed so much I bought a copy for my dad for his birthday last month. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links:

Longreads first: This story on The Cut about how a woman coped with her husband getting a dementia diagnosis and then serving her with divorce papers as the disorder took hold is just devastating, especially when the twist in the story hits.

An Iowa middle school history teacher explained how the state’s ban on teaching about racism drove him out of the profession, especially when his boss wouldn’t say he could teach that slavery was wrong. Tennessee just passed a similar bill.

Parents across the political and income spectra are pushing back on school literacy curricula that aren’t doing enough to teach kids to read.

The New York Times magazine interviewed Deep Work author Cal Newport on the paradox of productivity in the digital era, where we have so many tools that are supposed to make us more productive, but we’re not.

The head of a law firm with frequent cases before the Supreme Court bought a property owned by SCOTUS justice Neil Gorusch, who didn’t identify the purchaser on disclosure forms.

Now Missouri and other states are banning or restricting gender-affirming care for trans adults. It was never about protecting kids.

In one of the more blatant First Amendment violations I can recall, Texas’s Senate passed a bill that would require teachers to display the Ten Commandments in their classrooms. It’s a waste of time and taxpayer, and ignores the clear intent and words of the Founding Fathers.

Conservatives are now targeting no-fault divorce in their attempts to force their religion’s values on the rest of us.

Iowa Republicans aren’t done – they held a pre-dawn session, always a great sign that you’re not doing anything sketchy, to pass a bill allowing for expanded child labor.

A non-binary high school student at Nashville Christian School wanted to wear a suit to their prom, rather than a dress, but the school banned them on dress code grounds. A local business stepped in to hold a prom just for them. Support AB Hillsboro Village if you live in that area.

West Texas A&M University faculty scheduled a no-confidence vote in school President Walter Wendler, who banned a student drag show because it conflicted with his personal religious views. The no-confidence vote passed with over 2/3 of the voters supporting it. Wendler is refusing to step down despite the non-binding result. The school faces a lawsuit over the cancellation, and a financial penalty would probably do more to get Wendler out of office than any resolution could.

Roadside drug tests aren’t accurate, yet courts have been using them regularly to convict drivers of drug-related offenses. That’s starting to change, slowly.

I certainly share enough negative news about my alma mater so I’ll share a positive story – Harvard raised the income threshold below which undergraduate students pay no tuition to $85,000.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: education, first amendment, harvard, iowa, links, longreads, missouri, police, stick to baseball, tennessee, texas, trans rights

→ April 2, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/1/23.

Since the last roundup, I’ve written three new posts for subscribers to the Athletic – my annual predictions post, my first dispatch from spring training (mostly Cactus League), my annual breakout player picks, and a draft blog post on three potential first-rounders from Wake Forest and Miami.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the cooperative game Paint the Roses, which has simple rules but poses a difficult deductive challenge for players, working best with three or more.

I appeared on the streaming Scripps News Network to talk about why major-league salaries keep rising while minor leaguers’ haven’t, although this was recorded and aired before the recent CBA announcement.

My podcast will return now that my spring training travel is over, with David Grann lined up as my next guest. I did send out a new edition of my free email newsletter about two weeks ago.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Chronicle of Higher Education looks at Stanford Prof. Jo Boaler, whose arguments and research are driving changes to high school math curricula in California and beyond … but who has a history of playing fast and loose in her own work and with interpretations of others’ research as well. If her name is familiar, it might be for the time she implied she was calling the cops on Dr. Jelani Nelson after he criticized her in a tweet that pointed out that she charges schools up to $5000 per hour in consulting fees.
The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics honored three scientists for their work on quantum entanglement. Scientific American looks at the work of Chien-Shiung Wu, a Chinese-born American scientist whose 1949 experiment on entanglement paved the way for the three men who won the award this year. The Nobel Committee did not mention her contributions.
With Twitter gradually losing steam, the New York Times compiled a ranking of the 25 most important tweets in the site’s history.
TechCrunch took a more sober look at how the microblogging site is dying a slow death. Elon Musk is killing the site’s classic verification feature because he doesn’t understand the value it conferred not on the verified users, but on the site itself.
Simon Hattenstone’s mother sent hundreds of abusive tweets about the McCanns, the British family whose daughter Madeleine disappeared during their Portuguese vacation, taking her own life when she was outed as the troll behind those tweets by Sky News. Hattenstone remembers his mother and how little he really knew about her in a very thoughtful column in the Guardian.
Vanity Fair says Ron DeSantis plans to run for President on an anti-vaccine platform. I imagine that’ll also blend with a lot of railing against “wokeness” (see below), but will this stuff play outside of the states that the Republican candidate will win anyway? Or will it be about pretending the pandemic is over/never happened? Meanwhile, DeSantis’s book tour has been a fiasco so far.
Uvalde police were afraid of the Robb Elementary shooter because he had an AR-15, the very gun the NRA is working so hard to keep legal and accessible across the country.
Raquel Evita Saraswati became a major figure in Philadelphia’s advocacy community, especially for LGBTQ+ rights, as a queer, Muslim woman of color. Her colleagues at the American Friends Service Committee revealed last month that she’s not a person of color at all, assuming various ethnic identities to keep up the fiction.
Anti-gay activist and attorney Jared Woodfill, who was also previously the chair of the Harris County, Texas, Republican Party, maintained ties for over 15 years with a man he knew had sexually abused a child. Woodfill remains a major figure in Texas politics despite his lengthy personal, professional, and financial ties to Paul Pressler, his former law partner who has been accused by several people of sexual abuse and statutory rape over the last forty-five years.
Billy Ball’s six-year-old son died from a horrible accident that caused cerebral swelling that killed him. Vaccine deniers mocked and attacked Ball online, claiming the COVID-19 vaccine was the cause and Ball was culpable. Twitter, Facebook, etc. did little or nothing about the harassment.
Texas’s abortion ban is leading to a shortage of doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel. Why would you work there when there’s plenty of demand in states that let you practice medicine?
—
A girl in California gave her goat to the Shasta County Fair, then wanted it back because she found out they were going to kill and eat it. When her family refused to hand it over, the police came and seized the animal. Fair organizers said they intended to teach kids a lesson. I hope they learn something themselves.
A Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll of trans Americans found the majority were more satisfied in their lives after transitioning.
In Wyoming, Republicans’ attempts to ban abortion in just about every form and case ran afoul of Republicans’ attempts to circumvent the Affordable Care Act. Heh.
Austin police arrested a 71-year-old deaf woman at the airport after she missed her flight, and a jailer twisted her arm enough to break it while handcuffing her. The city charged her with criminal trespass, even though she had a ticket and was trying to change it to a different flight.
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R ) signed multiple anti-LGBTQ+ bills, including one banning gender-affirming care for trans kids, and then said she “didn’t like” doing it.
In neighboring South Dakota, some trans kids are being forced to detransition by that state’s anti-trans law. Who exactly is this helping?
Missouri’s Attorney General is ready to spend a bunch of taxpayer money attacking trans kids, and medical experts are saying his ideas are extremely harmful.
And in Uganda, which is just following the lead of various red states, there’s a new law that makes it a crime to be LGBTQ+ at all. Its proponents invoked the same language as Republicans here – they want to “protect traditional family values” and uphold the Church’s teachings.
When I was a kid, the Republicans used buzzwords like “socialism” to try to scare voters into supporting them, painting Democrats like Mike Dukakis as “card-carrying” liberals. That buzzword has now been replaced by “wokeness,” and the thing the two terms have in common is that people who use them can never define them.
President Biden issued his first veto, striking down a Republican resolution that sought to block retirement fund managers from considering environmental, social, and corporate governance issues, although this was all performative and is part of that whole “wokeness” thing.
A student at Eastern Florida State College said a lecture on civil rights in a U.S. history class made him uncomfortable, so the professor cancelled the class.
Ohio Republicans are trying to pass a law mirroring the Florida law that limits what can be discussed in public education, including banning discussions of so-called “controversial beliefs” like systemic racism and climate change.
Undercover agents (!) went to a drag show in Orlando in December and found nothing “lewd” or indecent, but Florida is going after the venue’s liquor license anyway.
The President of West Texas A&M University cancelled a student-run drag show, claiming it demeaned women and comparing drag to blackface. The students are suing on First Amendment grounds, while they’ve also rescheduled the event off-campus, so they might win twice.
Spotify puffed out its chest a year with the announcement of a $100 million “creator equity fund” that was supposed to boost voices from diverse backgrounds. One year on, they’ve spent less than 10% of it.
Infections with the fungus Candida auris are spreading at an “alarming” rate throughout the United States. It affects people who already have weakened or compromised immune systems, and the current wave of infections is largely resistant to anti-fungals.
With so much evidence of journalistic malfeasance at Fox News – and this was written before the recent summary judgment in the Dominion lawsuit – why won’t journalism schools ostracize the network from campuses? Stop inviting their people to speak. Limit their ability to recruit students through official channels. Anything to acknowledge that this isn’t journalism.
Board game news: Let’s Go to Japan, the new game from the designer of Santa Monica and Cat Lady, is probably going to clear half a million in funding on Kickstarter. The concept is pretty cool – Wood had saved for years for a trip to Japan, where he’d wanted to go since he was a kid, only to have his plans cancelled by COVID-19. So he made this game about it.
The medium-heavy strategy game Wild Gardens is more than 200% funded on Backerkit with 18 days to go.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, education, first amendment, florida, health, iowa, lgbt rights, links, longreads, missouri, ohio, physics, police, social media, south dakota, stick to baseball, texas, trans rights

→ February 11, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/11/23.

My top 100 prospects and team reports have been running for the last 12 days, finishing up today with the AL West team reports/top 20s. You can see the index of everything I’ve written here, which includes direct links to the reports for every team, the top 100, the farm system rankings, my chats on that site, and more.

My latest review for Paste actually went up last week, and even I missed it in all the hubbub. I reviewed the board game It’s a Wonderful Kingdom, the two-person variant of the popular game It’s a Wonderful World, but I have to say I think the original is a better game, even for two people. It’s a bit like 7 Wonders meets Century Spice Road, but with a little more to it than that might imply. You can buy It’s a Wonderful World here on amazon if you’re intrigued.

My free email newsletter has been almost-weekly this year, and I’ll send out the next iteration this weekend. I skipped my podcast this week because I was writing so much. I think it’ll be back next week. Maybe. Life is full of uncertainties.

And now, the links…

The Toronto Star looks at the fall of Jamie Salé into conspiracy theory and denialism. The 2002 Olympic gold medalist, previously best known as one of the two skaters originally cheated out of the gold by corrupt judges, has become a COVID and vaccine denialist – and, of course, now she’s trying to profit off these false views.

The Hollywood Reporter has more details on the implosion of Rick and Morty co-creator Justin Roiland’s animation empire in the wake of his arrest on domestic abuse charges and multiple former co-workers detailing harassment by Roiland.

Intelligencer looks at the increasing “junkification” of Amazon, where legitimate products are getting harder to find as the company tries to muscle its way into more spaces. My outsider’s take: this is what happens when a company needs unbridled growth to prop up a stock price (or a billionaire owner’s wealth).

The right-wing propaganda site Revolver states that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R )’s takeover of that state’s schools, including the previously progressive New College of Florida, is the blueprint Republicans need to use to take down public education across the country. (The article also says that African American studies is “a joke of a subject,” if you doubt my characterization of Revolver’s leanings.)

Elon Musk fired a top Twitter engineer because engagement on the billionaire’s tweets is low. Totally stable genius there.
Twitter glitched for me twice this week – once when we all got the “exceeded the daily limit” warning, and once when the app showed me misplaced white boxes where certain tweets should have appeared in my timeline. Former employees say this is due to a series of code freezes and Musk’s frequent, mercurial demands for changes.

The BBC profiles the French author Colette, calling her “the most beloved French writer of all time,” although in the English-speaking world she’s probably best known for writing the novel Gigi that became a hit musical and film.

Native American groups are protesting the Kansas City NFL team’s nickname, mascot, and their use of the embarrassing “tomahawk chop.” Atlanta baseball fans, pay attention.

A Montana bill would prevent schools from punishing students who intentionally misgender or deadname classmates. Just say bullying is allowed and be done with it.

Is disdain for the less educated the “last acceptable prejudice,” as Michael Sandel writes in the New York Times? He also argues that it’s a problem for the Democrats, and a perception they need to shed.

Voice actors are being asked to sign away rights to their own voices so studios can create AI versions and save a few bucks.

Tony Dungy and James Brown (the NFL announcer) have withdrawn from their speaking slots at an event hosted by an anti-gay Pharisee preacher.

Republicans are not serious about governing, except when it comes to using the government as a weapon against their enemies, which is, you know, what fascist regimes do.

Also in Florida, the state is going to pass legislation to end Disney’s extra-governmental Reedy Creek Improvement District as retaliation for the company’s opposition to the state’s anti-LGBT “don’t say gay” law. See the previous bullet point.

Attempts to erase Black history from curricula, as Florida is doing, end up doing nothing except leaving students less literate in American history, rather than getting them to “love” the U.S. more, writes education Prof. Adam Laats in the Washington Post.

By the way, sometimes pressure works, even on zealots: Florida’s interscholastic sports committee has dropped plans to make questions about athletes’ menstrual cycles mandatory. It was a blatant attempt to out trans kids, of course, although they claimed otherwise.

Missouri’s Republican-led legislature rejected a measure to ban children from carrying guns in public.

Iowa Republicans introduced a bill that would expand child labor in the state, including jobs previously deemed too dangerous for kids like those in mining, logging, and animal slaughterhouses.

A professor at the University of Wyoming tweeted about a former student of hers who was trans and killed themselves. Legislatures passing laws attacking trans people, especially trans kids, are destroying lives just to score political points.

We’re seeing fewer big scientific breakthroughs, with the pace dropping steadily for over three-quarters of a century. Part of it is that breakthroughs are harder to come by as the low-hanging fruit is long picked, and part is that nations don’t invest in basic science research without promise of immediate financial returns the way they used to.

Over 200 people have been quarantined and at least 8 have died in Equatorial Guinea from an as-yet unidentified hemorrhagic fever (a category that includes dengue and the Ebola and Marburg filoviruses).

Board game news: Allplay (formerly known as Board Game Tables) has a Kickstarter up for four new small box games, with pledges starting at $19 for any one of the titles.

Rock Manor Games has a Kickstarter, already over 400% funded, for the new expansion to the game Set a Watch.

This blog post arguing that Dominion killed replayability in board games makes a great point – the need to constantly buy expansions to is a great business model for a very small number of games/publishers but not sustainable for the industry as a whole.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, disney, florida, football, french literature, iowa, links, longreads, metoo, missouri, montana, racism, science, social media, stick to baseball, trans rights

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