missouri — Page 3

→ October 16, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/16/21.

My first dispatch from the Arizona Fall League is up now for subscribers to the Athletic. I’ll have probably one more post, a longer one that covers everything else I saw.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Riftforce, a great new two-player game that sort of combines Battle Line and Magic: the Gathering, if you can imagine that. It has a very high replay value as well, which is key in a two-player game.

With some more content out, I’ll get on my email newsletter as soon as I’m back from Arizona. And, as the holidays approach, I’ll remind you all every week that I have two books out, The Inside Game and Smart Baseball, that would make great gifts for the readers (especially baseball fans) on your lists.

And now, the links, with a shorter list this week as I’ve been reading less while on the road…

Poynter senior media writer Tom Jones explains why Adam Schefter was completely in the wrong to allow the subject of an article to see and approve that article before publication. Of course Darren Rovell defended it.
One of you sent this along: Writing in Reason, Matt Welch explained how the government helped MLB wreck the minors, and how they can also help undo some of the damage. I tweeted this earlier in the week: If you care about minor league players, call your Representative and Senators and ask them to repeal the Save America’s Pastime Act. It’ll take you 5-10 minutes.
Netflix has really fumbled its response to criticism from its own employees of the transphobic material in Dave Chappelle’s new comedy special.
A prominent Australian anti-vaccine influencer put yellow stars of David on herself and her family last week, later deleting several of her social media accounts after people pointed out what an incredibly shitty, anti-Semitic move that was.
Hold your surprise, but anti-vaxxers are misrepresenting a study on breakthrough cases in Vietnam.
Police officers in Dayton, Ohio, dragged a paraplegic Black man from his car by his hair. The victim, Clifford Owensby, was charged with – wait for it – having tinted windows, and failing to have his son in a car seat. The officers in question have not been identified and you know damn well that means they haven’t been sanctioned, suspended, or fired.
Via Craig Calcaterra: The Ohio Board of Education voted to rescind a resolution condemning racism. That’s right, kids: In Midwest Florida, racism isn’t bad any more!
The University of Delaware tried to hush up a horrible sexual assault committed by one student against another, but had to acknowledge it when activists made the story go viral on TikTok. The school claimed it was a “domestic violence” incident that didn’t require that they notify the campus community.
Also from a reader: The St. Louis Post-Dispatch discovered that a state health department database revealed social security numbers and other private information of some Missourians, so they notified the government, gave them time to fix the error, and then published a story. The Governor’s response: threaten to sue the paper for ‘hacking.’
Podcaster and writer Michael Hobbes followed up on last week’s “bad art friend” longread by pointing out that it’s easy to see who the bad art friend is: Both of them.
Nik Sharma, author of Seasons and The Flavor Equation, offered some tips to avoid ‘crying’ when dicing onions.
A sort-of-reporter for an Ole Miss fan site published quotes from a player despite never talking to that player to get those quotes. The reporter has been fired and the site itself was rebranded without two of its former leaders.
Board game news, starting with some Kickstarters of note: the train-and-stock game Union Station, the beautiful seed-planting game Gartenbau (Horticulture), and the set collection game Birdwatcher, which has a theme that seems a bit familiar to me.
Upper Deck is running a contest with the top prize a free trip to Gen Con 2022. You have to submit a short video or a brief statement explaining why you are the ultimate ‘legendary gamer’ (meaning you love games a lot).

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, board game news, Cooking, journalism, links, missouri, ohio, police, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ October 10, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/10/21.

My only content for subscribers to The Athletic this week was my contribution to our playoff predictions, where I pointed out that the evidence says playoff predictions by humans are probably no better those by than a dart-throwing monkey. I only got one of the wild-card winners right, and at the moment one of my four LDS picks is down 0 games to 2. Anyway, I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the semi-cooperative horror-themed board game Deranged, which I found too derivative of games like Arkham Horror without offering enough new ideas or mechanics.

On my podcast, I spoke with Jeremy Booth, founder of Program 15 and the Future Stars Series, talking about the 2022 draft’s deep high school class, player development in the majors, and more. You can subscribe to my podcast on Spotify or iTunes. I will not have a new episode this week due to travel, but will return on the 18^th.

I’ve been better about sending out my email newsletter this past month, although I held off sending one this week with nothing immediate to promote. And, as the holidays approach, I’ll remind you all every week that I have two books out, The Inside Game and Smart Baseball, that would make great gifts for the readers (especially baseball fans) on your lists.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The best thing I read this week was this Guardian longread on how the Booker Prize works – how judges are chosen, and how in turn they choose the shortlist and the ultimate winner. The UK’s rough equivalent to our Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Booker confers financial success on nearly all of its winners, often changing the courses of their careers.
Ed Yong writes that we are unprepared for the next pandemic as we refuse to learn lessons from our mishandling of this one.
A “dead” oil tanker that has been moored at a Yemeni port for 45 years is in danger of falling apart, sinking, or blowing up, all of which would lead to a massive humanitarian and environmental disaster, with minimal plans to prevent this catastrophe and no help from the Houthi forces that control western Yemen and its Red Sea ports.
Students who were victims of sexual assault at Moody Bible Institute, an evangelical Christian college, found themselves blamed and punished while their abusers often escaped consequences. The same school fired a professor who helped students file a Title IX complaint a few years ago. Just like Jesus told his followers to do!
You read about the bad art friend, right? You should read about the bad art friend.
Kellogg workers are on strike, after months of being forced to work 7 days a week, 16 hours a day, and now threats to outsource their jobs. You may choose to join me in avoiding buying their products while their workers are fighting for basic rights.
Case reports continue to show the risk of death and severe illness in children who contract COVID-19, such as the 8-year-old girl and 7-year-old boy who died of cerebral edemas due to COVID infections.
Yet another ivermectin/COVID-19 study that claimed to show a benefit has serious problems with its data.
Writing in The Cancer Letter, the newsletter of the National Cancer Institute, Dr. Arthur Caplan, who has written several books on the policies of Nazi Germany called out the non-virologist Dr. Vinay Prasad’s recent comparison of COVID-19 mitigation measures to fascism, calling them “fundamentally racist.”
Moderna is prioritizing profits over public health, keeping prices for its COVID-19 vaccines out of reach of many poorer countries. Is the global benefit of curtailing the pandemic enough that wealthy nations should subsidize vaccinations in poorer ones?
“Pro-life” Missouri Governor Mike Parson (R) declined to stay the execution of a man with the mental capacity of a small child, because nothing says you believe in the sanctity of life like signing off on a state-sponsored murder.
The vice-chair at the Fed shifted his portfolio towards stock ahead of a big announcement last year, as did two other Fed officials, which should make you ask why people in those positions are allowed to trade in equities at all.
The “Evolved Apes” NFTs turned out to be a scam. Color me shocked that a new, unregulated market is rife with fraud and con artists.
The Biden Administration says they want science advisers, but they haven’t been listening to them when it comes to policy choices.
I know very, very little about this topic, but thought this piece from Matt Yglesias on the “mobilization delusion” of progressives was well argued.
Literary Hub has a piece on how Rush’s lyricist/drummer Neil Peart helped lure young listeners over to the “dark side” of Ayn Rand, the terrible novelist.
Board game news: Asmodee imprint Space Cowboys announced a new edition of the out-of-print game Jamaica, a popular family game
The Kickstarter for Mythwind, a cooperative, asymmetrical game, is over $666,000 as I type this, and keeps going up, with 21 days to go.
Board & Dice announced Tabannusi: Builders of Ur, a heavy worker placement game co-designed by Daniele Tascini (Tzolk’in, Teotihuacan).
The Kickstarter for North Star Games’ new Alice in Wonderland-themed game Paint the Roses will open up on October 12^th.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: coronavirus, environment, links, longreads, man booker prize, missouri, stick to baseball, the swamp

→ July 31, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/31/21.

I had a lot of content this week around the trade deadline for subscribers to The Athletic, including:

The Cubs’ four main deals on Friday (Báez, Bryant, Kimbrel, Marisnick)
The Phillies/Rangers trade
The Toronto trade for José Bérrios
The Max Scherzer/Trea Turner trade
The Yankees’ trade for Anthony Rizzo
The Yankees’ trade for Joey Gallo
The Starling Marte/Jesús Luzardo trade (also includes three Pirates trades and the Andrew Chafin deal)

I also wrote up my notes from a game between the Yankees’ and Pirates’ AA affiliates. I was planning to do a chat but the pace of trades made that impossible.

My guest on the Keith Law Show this week was Slate‘s Josh Levin, talking about his One Year: 1977 podcast episode about baseball broadcaster Mary Shane and his book The Queen. You can subscribe on iTunes and Spotify.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Whistle Mountain, a medium-heavy worker placement game from the designer of the train game Whistle Stop.

I returned to my email newsletter, with a note on why I’ve been absent from there and largely from here over the last six weeks. Also, my second book The Inside Game is out in paperback and available from bookshop.org or wherever you buy books.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Olympian Emily Infeld’s three-year nightmare with a stalker highlights just how poorly our society handles this kind of threat.
An anti-trans Instagram account posted a fabricated story about a spa in Los Angeles, leading to weeks of death threats and real violence.
Ed Yong detailed the incredible results of an experiment to make mosquitoes immune to the dengue virus by using the Wolbachia bacterium.
The critical race theory non-troversy has caused a huge schism in a Michigan town where high school students conducted a “slave auction” of their Black classmates.
The preprint that COVID deniers like to tout that claims that ivermectin is effective against the virus? It’s been withdrawn due to a major data integrity issue.
The home of a fraudster who has been pushing a bleach “cure” for autism has been raided by German authorities.
A marketing agency tried to pay YouTubers to spread anti-vaccine propaganda, but the influencers wouldn’t play ball. No one knows who was actually behind the plot.
I know you’re shocked, but the Trump Administration handed out big federal contracts to its political allies during the pandemic, often breaching the rules to do so.
The man who owned the @tennessee Twitter handle refused to sell it, so a 20-year-old who wanted the handle ‘swatted’ the man, who then had a fatal heart attack during the incident.
A survivor of the Parkland high school shooting wrote about how his own father thinks the massacre was a hoax, thanks to the QAnon community.
A state inquiry ruled that the Maltese government was responsible for the death of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, who exposed corruption in the island nation that went all the way up to the Prime Minister. Galizia was murdered in 2017 when someone set off a bomb in her car.
Why is the Biden Administration allowing a pilot program where federal prisoners would only receive scans of personal mail, rather than the originals? Several states use this program and also charge prisoners a fee for each scan.
Missouri has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the country right now, and the effects of the right-wing disinformation campaign are evident in area hospitals.
A Houston Chronicle editorial said aspects of a new Texas anti-abortion law “are what we might expect from the lowest intellects in the Taliban.”
Virginia’s pro-Trump Republican party has gone after a University of Virginia professor for his tweets criticizing Trump.
The BBC explains how Hall & Oates’ 1980 pop song “You Make My Dreams” became a streaming hit.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: conspiracy theories, links, longreads, missouri, racism, science, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines, virginia

→ May 23, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/23/21.

I had one post this past week for subscribers to the Athletic, breaking down the four-player trade between Milwaukee and Tampa Bay along with the implications for Wander Franco, Taylor Walls, and Luis Urías. I also held a Klawchat on Friday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Cryo, a really engaging new worker-placement game from the designers of Manhattan Project: Energy Empire, where resources are always limited and you have to build your board to maximize your resource collection.

If you’d like to buy The Inside Game and support my board game habit, Midtown Scholar has a few signed copies still available. You can also buy it from any of the indie stores in this twitter thread, all of whom at least had the book in stock earlier this month. If none of those works, you can find it on Bookshop.org and at Amazon.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul, & Mary received a Presidential pardon from Jimmy Carter for a charge of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl. It turns out that she was far from his only victim.
There’s a tradition in Alabama where sheriffs who lose elections waste a whole shitload of taxpayer money to make things harder for their successors, because Alabama is apparently some sort of developing-world dictatorship.
The BBC looks at “infinite plastic,” efforts to use chemistry to break down plastics back into a form of oil, which would make any plastic materials recyclable – even things like sandwich bags that contain multiple different types of plastic and can’t be recycled directly into new plastics.
Nik Sharma looks at the science behind vegan meringues, made from the liquid in canned chickpeas, for Serious Eats.
If staying at home with the kids (rather than working) is so wonderful, why don’t more men do it? Jessica Valenti explores the manipulation going on in the wake of a pandemic that has disproportionately hurt women in the workforce.
Saturday Night Live‘s sketch parodying the Muppets was embarassingly bad. A bunch of people thought the actual Muppets were part of the sketch.
COVID denialists have pounced on a CDC data set that they claim shows an increased incidence of suicides under age 18 during lockdowns. They are being disingenuous, at best, or are outright lying.
Justice Elena Kagan has had about enough of Brett Kavanaugh’s judicial activism. I still want to know who paid off his credit card debts.
A Missouri lawyer, who represented the gun-toting bigots who got famous for standing courageously on their front porch, drew fire this week for derogatory comments about people with autism and people with disabilities.
In Texas, where The Cruelty Is the Point, it is about to become almost impossible for a woman to exercise her right to abort a pregnancy. This Twitter thread elucidates just how cruel that law will be in practice.
Ethiopia expelled a New York Times reporter who’d written about the regime’s extensive human rights abuses in Tigray.
The BBC World Service looks at Africans who were forced to speak English growing up and now face an identity crisis of sorts when they find themselves unable to speak their native languages.
Two great pieces on the Yankees’ Corey Kluber in the wake of his no-hitter this week: my colleague Lindsey Adler on the development of his arsenal, and the New York Post‘s Dan Martin on what Yankees’ scouts saw in Kluber to convince the team to sign him.
The Onion, always on point.
Board game news: Brew is now available for pre-order from Pandasaurus Games.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, alabama, board game news, Cooking, links, longreads, metoo, missouri, stick to baseball

→ May 8, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball , 5/8/21.

I got back out to a minor league game last week and wrote about the prospects I saw for subscribers to the Athletic, focusing on Jackson Rutledge (Nationals) and Grayson Rodriguez (Orioles). I’ll have a post up Sunday or Monday on Kumar Rocker and Jack Leiter, followed by a ranking of draft prospects later in the week.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the new card game Flourish, co-designed by the person behind the outstanding 2018 game Everdell.

On the Keith Law Show this week, my guest was Louisville catcher Henry Davis, one of the top prospects in this year’s MLB Draft; I also answered a number of your questions, mostly about the draft but also one about my three-legged cat. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify. I also appeared on the Athletic Baseball Show on Friday, which will be my regular slot for most of the year.

For more of me, you can subscribe to my free email newsletter

And now, the links…

Longreads first: And I do mean long, as this piece from WIRED‘s June 2020 issue – which I don’t remember seeing last year – on the rise, fall, and rise again of white-hat hacker Marcus Hutchins, who played the biggest role in stopping the WannaCry ransomware worm, is exceptionally well-written and well-reported, and it runs nearly 15,000 words.
Almost as good is this New Yorker profile of legendary yet reclusive Simpsons writer turned self-published detective novelist John Swartzwelder, who is responsible for “Homer At the Bat” and one of my favorite SNL sketches, “Those Unlucky Andersons.”
A small number of wealthy donors to Trump now wield outsized influence within the GOP – and potentially over our government, too – just by virtue of their seven- and eight-figure donations.
Four L.A. cops coerced a 13-year-old boy into confessing to a crime he didn’t commit. A court ruled they get qualified immunity on some of the potential charges against them, because they didn’t coerce him for a long enough period of time. What if – stay with me here – we just ended qualified immunity for cops?
The controversy over the University of Texas’ racist fight song continues, as a perfectly normal person brought a gun to a Zoom discussion on the topic. I assume he shot his computer to own the libs.
Anti-diversity activists won big in a school board election outside Dallas, because, you know, Texas has no history of racism you might want to teach to schoolchildren.
Teachers in Rockwood, Missouri, are now facing threats and harassment over that school district’s diversity curriculum. In a state where you stand on your porch with semi-automatic weapons to face peaceful protesters, this fits.
An Idaho legislative intern alleges her boss, Aaron von Ehlinger (who has since resigned in disgrace), raped her, and in return, several other members of the Idaho legislature – all Republicans – doxxed her, harassed her, and tried to get her charged with filing a false report. Two of those other legislators are women.
It’s time to start shunning the vaccine hesitant, says USA Today editorial writer and former federal prosecutor Michael Stern.
Centner Academy, a private primary school in Miami, has become a “beacon” for anti-vaxxers, as the school is turning away vaccinated students and staff because of the bogus idea that they can “shed” the virus. (The vaccine does not contain the live SARS-CoV-2 virus, and thus vaccinated people have nothing to “shed.” This is sheer ignorance.) Linda Centner, who founded and runs the school, has espoused all sorts of anti-science conspiracy theories, including anti-mask views and baseless fears of 5G cell towers.
Meanwhile, one former anti-vaccine influencer in Texas got her COVID-19 shot and is talking about it publicly.
Is some anti-vaccine loon in your life claiming there are hundreds of reports of adverse reactions to the COVID-19 jab? Well, here’s a thread explaining why those reports, from VAERS, don’t actually mean any of these reactions were to the vaccines – if they happened at all.
Is there some hope on the horizon for a vaccine against HIV? It’s still a ways off, but a new breakthrough at least means there’s the possibility of such an inoculation, although retroviruses are extremely difficult to treat with antivirals or prevent via vaccines.
Regardless of your opinion of the filibuster, it’s not the thing preventing Democrats from enacting major legislation right now.
Speaking of which, President Biden wants to create a family leave plan that would put the U.S. in line with other developed nations. We are far worse off than our peers in Europe and parts of eastern Asia when it comes to quality-of-life laws.
Hold your surprise, but white authorities in Arkansas executed a Black man who may very well have been innocent. The death penalty is barbaric and should be abolished everywhere.
A Black homeowner in Indianapolis found the appraisal of her house went up for $100,000 when she removed items that might have hinted at her race, and had a white friend pose as the homeowner.
An Israeli man visiting relatives in Baltimore was shot and killed, possibly because he was Jewish.
Eleven Madison Park, one of the most acclaimed (and expensive) restaurants in the world, will reopen with a completely plant-based menu, at $335 a person.
Signal tried to place ads on Instagram showing just how much the social-media site (owned by Facebook) knows about you, but Instagram banned the ads instead.
This BBC story of a stranded sailor who couldn’t leave his ship for four years is fascinating and a little horrifying.
Stars, they’re just like us! Kate Winslet loves Wawa. As a non-native who has been converted to the cult of Wawa, I say to Kate, welcome.
Google Doodle celebrated Teacher Appreciation Week by animating some StoryCorps stories of teachers who made a difference in specific students’ lives, such as this wonderful one from Dr. William Lynn Weaver.
The Guardian explains why the Carters looked so tiny in that photo with the Bidens. (I mean Pres. Jimmy and Rosalynn, not Jay-Z and Beyoncé.)
Board game news: The Kickstarter for Floodgate Games’ upcoming title Vivid Memories has 13 days to go.
Michael Luu, designer of the upcoming cooperative game Mission ISS, wrote a designer diary about his experience.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, baltimore, board game news, dark money, links, missouri, social media, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines, vegan

→ May 16, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/16/20.

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

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

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

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

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

And now, the links…

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

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

→ April 13, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/13/19.

I’ve had four ESPN+ posts this week. On the draft blog, I covered last week’s NHSI tournament + Elon RHP George Kirby, then scouted West Virginia RHP Alek Manoah and Texas Tech 3b Josh Jung. I’ve heard Jung’s name pronounced a few ways, but I think it has to be either Josh Jung or Yosh Yung, for consistency’s sake. On the pro side, I looked at the most prospect-laden minor league rosters this year, and finally saw Luis Robert play against the Royals’ high-A squad. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Architects of the West Kingdom, the newest game from Shem Phillips, who got a Spiel nomination for 2015’s Raiders of the North Sea. Architects is a busy worker-placement game, but has a few fun quirks like capturing your opponents’ meeples and selling them to the prison, or trading reputation to steal tax money or go to the black market.

And now, the links:

Longreads first: Anne Boyer writes in the New Yorker about what cancer takes away from you even if you survive it.
Adjunct professors are the minor-league baseball players of academia: overworked, underpaid, and often living on the edge of poverty. The Atlantic looks at one such adjunct who died because she couldn’t afford basic medical care that might have saved her.
Hampshire College has long had a reputation as a ‘hippie’ school, loose on the academics, maybe heavy on the substances. The college may be on the verge of extinction as it seeks a partner or buyer.
Forbes looks at deadbeat billionaire Jim Justice, the current governor of West Virginia, a man who doesn’t pay his bills and ignores state regulations that don’t suit him.
I’ve written quite a bit here about antibiotic resistance and the need for aggressive, science-based policies to combat it. Well, fungi can also make us sick, and now Candida auris has evolved resistance to antifungal drugs, too – and it’s hard to kill even outside the body. Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (PA-06), an engineer by training, had a tweet thread about this topic after the article ran. Guess her party.
Kyle Korver, who sources tell me is a professional basketball player, wrote in The Player’s Tribune about learning to understand his own privilege.
Isaac Chotiner interviewed writer Bret Easton Ellis for the New Yorker, and Ellis said some things that didn’t play particularly well online, for good reason. I’m not linking this to dunk on Ellis, but to praise Chotiner: Look at how consistently he probes when Ellis dissembles, and how he refuses to let Ellis off the hook for saying something wrong. This is how the media should interview people in power.
ScienceNews has a follow-up piece to a link I posted last week that profiled fossil hunter Robert DePalma and the possible discovery of a fossil record from immediately after the Chicxulub impact.
Chik-Fil-A continues to pour money into nonprofit groups fighting LGBT rights across the country. I haven’t set foot in one of their restaurants in at least a decade, for this precise reason, but J. Kenji Lopez-Alt shows you how to recreate their famous chicken sandwich at home.
WIRED explains why the robocall problem will never truly be fixed.
Elizabeth Warren may not be faring well in early polls or fundraising, but Moira Donegan writes in the Guardian that Warren is the intellectual powerhouse of the Democratic Party, producing practical policy proposals where others purvey platitudes.
This week’s Hidden Brain podcast episode looks at how societal views of gay rights changed so dramatically inside of fifty years.
Stand your white ground: An Alabama woman who shot and killed the man who violently raped her and then assaulted her brother is now facing life in prison. Don’t get mad when people stereotype the south while this shit still happens in your backyard.
In Missouri, two legislators – guess which party! – are pushing anti-vaccine bills and conspiracy theories.
Another WIRED piece argues that our health laws have failed the public good when it comes to vaccines, making it too easy for idiots and the ignorant to opt out.
Amidst the furor over US-Israeli relations, we’re losing track of the various despots Trump is propping up around the world, including the rising dictatorship in Egypt.
Why am I including a link to a press release about a single-malt whiskey’s launch in India? You’ll see if you read it.
The New York Times crossword puzzle Twitter account got into a bizarre beef with another twitterer over what was pretty obviously a joke.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alabama, gay rights, links, missouri, science, vaccines, west virginia

Stick to baseball, 10/16/21.

Stick to baseball, 10/10/21.

Stick to baseball, 7/31/21.

Stick to baseball, 5/23/21.

Stick to baseball , 5/8/21.

Stick to baseball, 5/16/20.

Stick to baseball, 4/13/19.

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