nutrition

→ May 10, 2026
→ By keith
→ Leave a Comment

Stick to baseball, 5/10/26.

I posted my first mock draft of 2026 for subscribers to the Athletic this past week. I held a Q&A on Thursday to take your questions on the mock and anything else. I also posted a scouting notebook on Liam Doyle, Ike Irish, Dante Nori, and some other Phillies & Orioles prospects, as well as a draft scouting notebook on some Arkansas and Mississippi prospects, three of whom are probably going in the first round.

I also sent out another epistle of my free email newsletter. Trying to ramp that up to at least every other week.

I’m on Bluesky more than anything else right now. I’ve also been posting longer videos to Instagram and TikTok, talking about players I see or reacting to news, including two clips about the mock. I’ve also been messing around on the restaurant app Beli, if anyone else out there is using it.

A very short links post this week, not sure why. Anyway, and now the links…

Longreads first: Babies are dying because their parents have been scammed by online misinformation into rejecting the vitamin K shot, possibly thinking it’s a vaccine (which is also stupid, as vaccines are safe). Vitamin K is essential for clotting and this ProPublica story reports on babies who have bled to death because they didn’t get the shot.

The Guardian’s Adrienne Mantel describes how Christian nationalists are destroying our public health infrastructure, and potentially exporting their toxic, superstitious worldview around the globe.

Texas Monthly exposes how the Southern Baptist Convention was built by a serial child molester.

The Wall Street Journal investigates betting markets, and, shocker, most bettors there lose money.

Economist Justin Wolfers calculated the cost to each U.S. household of the current, illegal war on Iran will run to thousands and maybe tens of thousands of dollars.

Fayetteville, Georgia, residents, noticed their water pressure was low. It turned out that a data center had stolen 30 million gallons of water via two hookups, paying for neither.

All life on earth emerged from a single common ancestor, about 4 billion years ago. A new study posits that it was about 200 million years before previously thought, while also revealing some new info on what that first prokaryote was like.

The AI craze has led to “RAMageddon,” an impending shortage of random access memory chips for all kinds of devices that will likely lead to price increases in the second half of this year.

Trump’s FDA blocked publication of research showing that the COVID vaccines and the shingles vaccine are both safe. There’s no public health benefit here – they’re just pandering to their anti-science base.

We’ve got anti-vaxxers, anti-seed oil loons, anti-sunscreen charlatans, and now self-styled “sleep experts” are telling parents to ignore the guidelines on preventing SIDS, giving them dangerous advice that is likely to lead to more infants suffocating in their cribs.

Video shows an ICE agent tasing a man multiple times in Bushwick, NYC, after which the Department of Homeland Security lied and said he wasn’t tased.

Fiddler Ashley Macisaac is suing Google after its AI search results wrongly tagged him as a sex offender. It’s only for $1.5 million, which I’m sure Google will settle as a rounding error.

Ravenous is a new worker-owned food journalism outlet founded by five people who had previously worked/published at Eater.

NPR’s Marketplace had a segment on the social media excitement over beans, particularly on “BeanTok.”

Why is Kristi Noem still living in taxpayer-subsidized military housing?

Rock Manor Games – whose owner is a neighbor of mine – has a new Kickstarter up for two games, The Lost Island and Secret Valley.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: artificial intelligence, environment, evolution, food writing, gambling, immigration, links, longreads, nutrition, religion, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ June 7, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/7/25.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I wrote about three prospects who’ve really seen their stock rise this year and three who’ve seen theirs fall as a follow-up to last week’s top 50 ranking. I also wrote a news story (which I think is free to read) on Wake Forest baseball coach Tom Walter using a homophobic slur during a game, and his weak apology after he got caught on camera. And I held a Klawchat here on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Zenith, an outstanding new two-player game where you fight your opponent for control of five planets, playing cards from your hand to three different areas to try to pull planets your way. You win by getting the same planet to your end of the table three times, or four different planets to your side, or five planets in any combination at all.

I sent out another issue of my free email newsletter on Friday, my third in four weeks, which for me constitutes some sort of hot streak.

I appeared on Marty Caswell’s Youtube channel to talk about the Padres’ farm system, potential trades if they stay in the race, and what to do with Xander Bogaerts; and on 92.3 the Fan in Cleveland to talk about Travis Bazzana and Cleveland’s struggling offense.

And now, the links:

Longreads first: This undated story on the main suspect in the Tylenol poisonings and how he slipped through multiple murder investigations is the best thing I read all week. At least part of the basis of a new Netflix documentary series, this story is at least two years old, as James Lewis, the suspect in that case and at least one other murder, died in July 2023.

Federal and Texas state law enforcement officers arrested 47 people at a house party, claiming they were members of a gang called Tren de Aragua. Months later, they’ve found and offered no evidence of any gang connections, according to a Texas Tribune investigation.

The AP reports on how Trump’s slashing of public health budgets is destroying our national infrastructure of preventative health services, which will cost us billions more in lost lives and years while further eroding trust in those same authorities.

Oklahoma Republicans passed a law allowing parents to opt their children out of any class subjects they believe to be “harmful.” Rational-minded parents there are now using the law to withdraw their kids from classes pushing election conspiracy theories and Christian theology. If you live in Oklahoma, the form you can use is here.

WIRED has the story of a study on the keto diet and arterial plaque that keto proponents claim validates their position – but one of the study’s authors left the project and has called for its retraction, due to conflicts of interest and shoddy work. There’s an underlying theme here on how peer review can break down and how bad actors are increasingly trying to exploit the academic-research system.

“Israeli gunfire” targeted Gazan civilians outside an aid distribution center, according to the Red Cross. The Guardian had a later update that raised the death toll to over 30. Israel first denied anything happened, then denied firing at civilians, then later admitted to firing “warning shots.”

The Trump Administration has ended an NIH program that was working towards a vaccine against HIV, the virus that causes AIDS – a program that also had potential in many other areas, including possible therapies for autoimmune disorders.

NBC News interviewed several families who are leaving the U.S. because of the increasingly anti-transgender climate. I’ve assumed we’ll see, or even already are seeing, migration out of red states for LGBTQ+ families because of hate laws passed there, but adding this to the brain drain from the Administration’s war on academia is going to further erode our economic position for decades to come.

Indeed, even in red states where voters have passed progressive ballot initiatives on subjects like abortion and cannabis, Republican lawmakers are trying to subvert the will of the voters, usually in the name of religion.

MIT banned one of its scheduled student speakers from graduation because she gave a pro-Palestinian speech the day before.

The GENIUS Act looks like it will prioritize crypto holders over depositors if a bank becomes insolvent.

The New York Times reports on WelcomeFest, a gathering of so-called “centrist” Democrats who are mad that we’re all yelling at them online. The story notes on politicians taking shots at Indivisible, an important voter mobilization group with hard-left ideas like “don’t cut aid to the poor.” These people are only centrist if you ignore how much the Overton window has lurched to the right in the last decade.

Talking Heads enlisted director Mike Mills (the C’mon C’mon guy, not the REM bassist) to film a music video for “Psycho Killer,” starring Saoirse Ronan. It’s excellent, and Ronan is both hilarious and unsettlingly weird in it.

The Spanish publisher Salt & Pepper Games has a new crowdfunding campaign up for Battle of the Divas, a two-player game that casts the players as Maria Callas and Renata Tibaldi, fighting to be the greatest singer of their era.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, gaza, links, longreads, nutrition, oklahoma, science, stick to baseball, the swamp, true crime, vaccines

→ August 2, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/2/20.

I wrote two scouting notebook columns for subscribers to The Athletic this week, one on Dustin May, Luis Robert, Brady Singer, and others; the second on Nate Pearson, David Peterson, Zach Plesac, and more. I also held a Klawchat on Friday afternoon.

You can buy my latest book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, anywhere you buy books, and I recommend bookshop.org. I sent out another edition of my free email newsletter this week as well.

I participated in one panel for the Gen Con Online Writers Symposium this year, on using social media in tumultuous times. It looks like it’s free for everyone to watch.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Vanity Fair has an exclusive report on how a White House group led by Jared Kushner – who is both unelected and unappointed to any official role in the government – came up with a comprehensive national plan for testing and tracing back in the spring, only to have Kushner scrap it because the pandemic was hitting blue states much harder.
The Daily Beast looks at the alt-right sports site Outkick, which has been pushing COVID-19 hoaxes and misinformation since late February.
ProPublica has a useful guide to interpreting public COVID-19 data. One conclusion to bear in mind: deaths lag cases by a few weeks, so people celebrating lower death rates are often just misreading the data to support a desired conclusion.
OneZero looks at Pinterest’s difficulty in keeping offensive content off their platform, although I think the takeaway here is that they’re doing a much better job than Twitter, Facebook, or Youtube. Moderating content is always going to suck as a job, and moderators should be better compensated and cared for, but the problems described here pale next to what those other sites have.
The Guardian has an excerpt from James Nestor’s new book Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art.
“Hygiene theater” is a waste of time, writes Derek Thompson at the Atlantic. The novel coronavirus spreads primarily via the air, from people in proximity to one another and/or in enclosed spaces.
Twenty percent of Americans say they wouldn’t get a COVID-19 vaccine if one is available. We need better education and outreach to overcome that.
Since Jeva Lange’s piece on how baseball’s COVID-19 struggles are a microcosm of the U.S. as a whole ran, both situations have deteriorated further, with a rolling outbreak now in the St. Louis clubhouse.
This twitter thread from an OR doc shows how he talked a reluctant patient, who fell for fake information on the coronavirus he saw on Facebook, into getting a COVID-19 test.
Another Twitter thread, this one authored by a (self-described) lawyer, explains why the “Covington kid” probably got little or nothing in his settlement with the Washington Post.
Just days after her newest novel This Mournable Body was longlisted for the Booker Prize, Zimbabwean author Tsitsi Dangarembga (whose Nervous Conditions was #98 on my last top 100 novels list) was arrested during anti-government protests in Harare.
A Singaporean ‘consultant’ used LinkedIn to troll for contacts in his work as an agent for Chinese intelligence. Jun Wei “Dickson” Yeo pleaded guilty to an espionage charge in a U.S. court last month.
The British-Japanese musician Rina Sawayama found out she’s ineligible for the prestigious Mercury Prize and the BRIT Awards because she holds a Japanese passport. Those awards’ rules have “nationality clauses” that exclude her, even though she’s lived in the UK for 25 years, in part because she’s a solo artist; musical groups don’t have to comprise only British citizens.
A profoundly anti-gay state Senator in Arkansas called mask mandates “draconian,” and then was hospitalized with COVID-19. Guess his party affiliation!
U.S. Senator Tom Cotton (also of Arkansas) called slavery a “necessary evil” in building the United States, and is fighting attempts to introduce new historical perspectives on slavery into U.S. school curricula, such as considerations of the long-term impact of slavery on Black Americans.
Movie theaters have been mostly closed since March, so we are now relying on opaque claims from streaming services to determine when a movie is “a hit.”
Several ex-Deadspin staffers have banded together to create Defector Media, a new site that promises, at least, to fill the void left by Deadspin’s implosion last year.
Much “nutrition research” today amounts to p-hacking, writes Tamar Haspel, who helped expose … , in the Washington Post. She suggests more research on the effects of portion sizes, food delivery to people to keep them out of supermarkets, food and nutrition education, and more.
Society , a research journal published by Springer Nature, published a commentary by Prof. Lawrence Mead of NYU that argues that Black and Latinx people lack the ambition and temperament of European immigrants to rise out of poverty, leading to a massive backlash and quick retraction. NYU issued a statement decrying the paper’s sentiments while defending Mead’s academic freedom.
Board game news: The cooperative game Spirit Island is now available on Steam.
Renegade announced an upcoming game called Embarcadero, from one of the designers of Scoville, featuring hand management and tile-laying mechanics.
A number of publishers put together game bundles for sale during Gen Con Online, which took place from Thursday through Sunday, which would have been the dates for the regular convention had COVID-19 not led to its cancellation.
Serious Catan players might like these new game-specific accessories coming soon from a partnership between Gamegenic and Asmodee.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, arkansas, baseball, board game news, coronavirus, links, longreads, mercury prize, nutrition, social media, stick to baseball, the swamp

→ November 16, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/16/19.

I wrote this week, but nothing has been published quite yet. Some of it will be in bookstores on April 21st of next year, though, as I work on the first edit for The Inside Game, my new book combining baseball decisions and cognitive psychology. I also am tentatively scheduled to appear at Washington, DC’s, Politics & Prose on April 24th, with other events likely in that first week. If you’re with a bookstore and interested in arranging an event, feel free to reach out to me in the comments and I’ll connect you with my publicist.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The legal battle over a 7-year-old trans girl in Texas could have substantial implication for trans rights of children in that state and across the United States.
The Guardian looks at the big-data approach to history and projecting the future, a new field of inquiry reminiscent of the psychohistory of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels.
Vanity Fair details the theft of 550 Bitcoin-mining computers in Iceland. The authorities know who stole the machines, but not where the machines are.
A New Jersey high school baseball coach ended up sued after he told a kid to slide, and the kid ended up with a horrible leg injury.
A woman who’s worked in the board game industry came out with her story of how designer/publisher JR Honeycutt manipulated and abused her across a months-long relationship. BoardGameGeek immediately removed him from a panel where he was supposed to speak at BGG.Con this month.
Deval Patrick wants to run for President. He helped a Republican billionaire make millions through foreclosures while he was Governor of Massachusetts.
Restaurant critic Adam Platt – you may have heard of his brother, Oliver – writes about what it’s like to be targeted by a chef whose food you’ve reviewed.
ESPN’s Kevin Arnovitz writes about the silence that follows the NBA’s and Daryl Morey’s China/Hong Kong controversy. I may be showing my age, but can you imagine a similar blowback in the 1970s-1980s if an athlete or GM had voiced support of Solidarity or the Helsinki Watch Groups?
Dignity Health stuck one of its own employees with a $900,000 bill for medical care for her daughter, born three months premature, by trying to use a loophole around a missed deadline. This ProPublica piece points out that “Dignity is also a religious organization that says its mission is to further ‘the healing ministry of Jesus.'”
“I was an astrologer – here’s how it really works, and why I had to stop.”
Anti-vaxxers are now targeting minority groups with their dangerous misinformation.
The Daily Beast got basic anti-vaccine ads approved by Google and Facebook despite those companies’ claims that they wouldn’t run such false or misleading advertisements.
A woman who’s active in promoting vaccine safety and accurate vaccine information on Twitter went to a screening of Vaxxed 2 and tweeted her thoughts.
The head of the Nutrition Department at Harvard’s School of Public Health weighs in on how much meat we should eat and on the new plant-based meat alternatives.
The founder of a site called NoFap, which is – and I’m not making this up – trying to tell men to stop masturbating, is suing a prominent sex researcher because she said masturbation isn’t bad and that porn addiction isn’t real.
Health officials fighting the Ebola outbreak in the north Kivu region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo will now have a second vaccine to try in the city of Goma, which hasn’t yet been hit by the outbreak. Over 2000 people have died already in the year-long Ebola flare-up, which has spread rapidly due to locals’ mistrust of government and NGO personnel.
The current way we use antibiotics to fight routine bacterial infections may be out of date, and contributes to drug resistance.
The lower house of the Ohiobama legislature passed a bill saying that teachers can’t grade students’ incorrect science answers as wrong if the answers reflect the students’ religious beliefs. Imagine paying your tax money so the public schools in your district could fail to teach kids basic science.
Deadspin’s last (interim) editor-in-chief Barry Petchesky wrote for the New York Times about being fired for refusing to stick to sports.
The United States talks about fighting global terrorism, but the country is now seen as a leading exporter of white supremacist terrorism, spreading to violence across the western world.
The Saudis are not our friends. They hacked into the phones of Twitter users critical of their dictatorial regime and extorted them into tweeting state propaganda.
A MediaMatters survey found that just 3% of news reports on the California wildfires pointed out the role of climate change in the conflagration.
Leaked emails show Trump consigliere Stephen Miller empathizes strongly with white nationalists.
Peter Nicholas writes in the Atlantic that Trump’s strategy of attacking his adversaries may not work given how many people are on the opposite side of the impeachment inquiry.
President Trump continued to funnel tax dollars to his friends as his administration hired $380-an-hour outside consultants to handle work ordinarily assigned to government employees, leading to nearly $750,000 in gains for Trump’s allies.
As many as 90% of domestic violence victims report possible traumatic brain injuries, according to two researchers writing for Scientific American.
A new outpost of Pizzeria Bianco, my #1 pizzeria in the United States, will open in Los Angeles in the space formerly occupied by Tartine Bianco.
Board game news: The designer and publisher of the role-playing game Gloomhaven, which costs $120 and comes in a 20-pound box, announced a streamlined version called Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion, which should cost around $50 and hit retail in Q3 in 2020.
Calliope Games is reissuing the 2004 game Station Master (Kickstarter link) with new artwork.
Next Move announced Azul: Crystal Mosaic, an expansion to the 2018 Spiel des Jahres winner that will include overlays to keep your tiles in place and new double-sided player boards.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, anti-science, basketball, climate change, health, lgbt rights, links, longreads, nutrition, pizza, pseudoscience, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ July 27, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/27/19.

My two ESPN+ posts this week covered a slew of low-A and short-season prospects for the Yankees, Phillies, Red Sox, and Orioles, including Roansy Contreras and a third look at Grayson Rodriguez; and my wrapup of this year’s Under Armour game, full of high school prospects for the 2020 draft. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

At the moment, it looks like I’ll be in Bristol on Wednesday for ESPN’s Trade Deadline special, driving home that night and flying out to Gen Con the following morning. That probably spikes a chat for this week, but I’ll return for one on the 7th or 8th.

You can still subscribe to my free email newsletter to get additional writing, typically of a more personal nature than what you find elsewhere. My deepest thanks to all of you who sent such kind replies to my most recent newsletter, and a seriously-fuck-off to the one guy who decided it was a good time to be an ass to me.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Atlantic looks at why so many rape cases go unprosecuted or even uninvestigated: Because men still don’t believe women.
“The Most Gullible Man in Cambridge,” from New York‘s The Cut, lives up to its title and then some – it’s a con story, but also a head-scratcher that an intelligent man could be such an easy mark.
Say it ain’t so, Mo: Mariano Rivera is a Trump supporter and has aligned himself with an anti-Semitic pastor who says Jews deserve blame for their own genocide at the hands of Nazi Germany. Rivera spoke to the New York Daily News after the first story appeared but reaffirmed his views.
Women face a substantial obstacle in their careers, regardless of type: gender roles in our society give them little time to themselves. Women are still expected to handle the lion’s share of the family responsibilities, even at the expense of their vocations or creative potential.
Dutch parents have long engaged in “dropping” their teenaged children, sending them into the woods in small groups at night and telling the kids to find their own way back to base camp.
Wyoming Valley West school district, northwest of Philadelphia, made news by threatening to send kids to foster care over unpaid school lunch debts, and then turned down a $22,000 offer from the founder of La Colombe Coffee to clear those debts. Maybe it’s not about the money after all.
Ed Kilgore’s piece in New York on the argument against impeaching Trump even if you believe he’s guilty of obstruction is worth reading, even though I still come down on the side of impeachment.
Three Ole Miss students posed with guns in front of a shot-up Emmett Till memorial, which somehow doesn’t violate the school’s code of conduct.
Singer Nick Cave had a rather wonderful response after someone referred to his fans as “pretentious fat lesbians.”
Rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, a major driver of anthropogenic climate change, also lead to reduced nutrition levels in rice.
Your bagged salads or lettuces may, on rare occasions, also include reptiles or amphibians, alive, dead, or perhaps in pieces.
I was relieved to see my friend Will Leitch had a very positive review of Tarantino’s latest film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
The Hidden Brain podcast had an episode on vaccine refusal and other kinds of denialism called Facts Aren’t Enough.
Renegade Games announced an upcoming title based on Katie O’Neill’s graphic novel The Aquicorn Cove. It’s a cooperative title listed for ages 10+, although the book is aimed at readers aged 7 and up.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, climate change, harvard, links, mississippi, nutrition, racism

→ May 11, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/11/19.

I had two ESPN+ posts this week, my first mock draft of 2019 and a draft scouting post on some prospects at Vanderbilt and Louisville. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

At Paste, I reviewed Noctiluca, a fun, light, dice-drafting game from the designer of Raiders of the North Sea. My daughter and I have really enjoyed this one.

Before I get to the regular links, here’s a GoFundMe that might be of interest to many of you. Luis Vasquez, a former Mets farmhand, developed bone cancer in his leg last year; he has survived it, but surgery to replace his knee and tibia has probably ended his career. Jen Wolf, who worked with Luis while she was with the Mets the last few years, has set up a GoFundMe page to help Vasquez move into a safer house in the Dominican Republic, as his family’s current home is falling apart and lacks electricity or indoor plumbing.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: A prominent case of gang rape in Spain that resulted in the five perpetrators only receiving convictions on lesser charges fueled massive nationwide protests – and into a position of power.
This New Yorker longread from a few weeks ago looks at the drive to automate produce picking, which has implications for the kind of food we eat, when we can buy it, how nutritious it is, and for the demand for unskilled laborers.
VICE explains how AirPods are an environmental tragedy; they’re expensive, don’t last long, and then they’re just trash.
You’ve heard plenty about the Alabama bill that would effectively criminalize abortions in the state; it would also criminalize false rape allegations in a way that if you accuse someone of rape and they’re acquitted, you have then committed a crime. Between this and Georgia’s attempt to ban abortion last week, the American South is no country for women.
Meanwhile, Republicans in Ohio, a state with three big cities and apparently Alabama around them, are pushing a bill to ban private insurance from covering abortions and that might also ban coverage of birth control. Theocracy still has its adherents.
The Daily Beast profiles a Hezbollah sleeper agent busted in the US for selling counterfeit Uggs.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has descended into denialism – and has made it a career. His sister and nephew write about how he’s dangerously wrong on vaccines.
Seth Meyers had Meghan McCain on his show and pushed back on her hypocritical comments against Rep. Ilhan Omar.
Republicans across the country are fighting Democrats’ attempts to tighten vaccination laws across the country, yet another example of the GOP aligning itself with anti-science interests.
The city of San Francisco has subpoenaed a doctor suspected of granting fake medical exemptions to parents seeking to avoid vaccinating their children.
Bioethicist Art Caplan wrote about a framework for legal liability for parents who refuse to vaccinate in a Harvard Law blog post in 2013.
Germany’s health minister proposed fining non-vaccinating parents $2700 to further discourage refusers.
The FDA is moving to increase regulations of supplements, a move that is more than overdue given the size of the market and the potential for harm to consumers by misleading labels and lack of manufacturing standards.
Sexual orientation is fluid into our adult years, supported by yet more research led by Virginia Tech scientist Christine Kaestle.
I’m now very interested in Furious Hours by Casey Cep after reading this review of the book, which covers a possible serial killer and an unwritten book by Harper Lee.
This NPR piece explains how hospitals cope when an unidentifiable patient arrives — someone without ID who isn’t conscious or isn’t able to identify themselves.
Nancy Armour writes about the privilege some Cubs fans have shown when defending Addison Russell or the fan who made a racist gesture on camera, saying those of us with that privilege can’t tell other classes that they shouldn’t be offended.
Why is it news when athletes of color decide not to go to the White House, but it’s not news when white athletes decide to go?

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, cost of food, links, longreads, nutrition, stick to baseball, vaccines, women's rights

→ March 23, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/23/19.

I had two ESPN+ pieces this week – my annual breakouts column and my first scouting notebook from Arizona, covering prospects from the Padres, Dbacks, A’s, and Royals. I’ll have a draft blog post up this weekend looking at four potential first-rounders, including presumptive #1 overall pick (today, at least) Adley Rutschman. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

There will be a fresh email newsletter in the next 2-3 days as well. You can sign up free and never miss a word.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New Republic looks at the nihilist governing philosophy of Mitch McConnell and how it has broken our federal government for decades to come.
Our diet has declined in quality as it has increased in quantity, and the results are killing us, literally, according to the Guardian’s The Way We Eat Now column.
The California Sun has a great profile of Olympic ski jumper Elizabeth Swaney, who was excoriated last year for her performance at Sochi and the unusual way she qualified.
We should be eating a lot more fiber, and a lot of different kinds of it. I exceed the daily recommendation when I’m home, eating homemade granola (with oats, almonds, coconut, and pepitas) with yogurt every day for lunch and usually getting plants into my dinner every night.
An Oregon pediatrician with over 15,000 patients claims vaccines cause autism and has said he would rather his grandchildren not be vaccinated. This has to become cause for loss of your medical license in every state. With Oregon in the grip of a measles outbreak, state Republicans are rallying around the bullshit argument of “vaccine choice,” because the GOP hasn’t met an anti-science position it won’t adopt.
Marie Claire has a piece on the perils of sharing your name with an infamous person … by a writer named Elizabeth Holmes.
The great Jasper Fforde writes about how living in Wales influenced his latest book, the novel Early Riser.
Pete Buttigeig’s interview in the Washington Post is too short but shows why he’s sort of come out of nowhere to capture some early support; his answers are thoughtful and on the issues he discusses he mostly lines up with my personal positions, at least.
Expiration dates are a myth, and public reliance on them is a major cause of food waste. My test: use your eyes and your nose. You’ll know if food is spoiled.
One San Diego pediatrician is responsible for a third of all “medical exemptions” in the city, because, it appears, she’s realized she can gain patients by doing so – even though she’s granting them for bogus reasons.
A Kentucky student who refuses to get vaccinated against chicken pox (because of a bogus belief about the vaccine) is suing to be allowed to play basketball, since he obviously thinks his “right’ to play supersedes other students’ rights to not get chicken pox. Kentucky’s governor didn’t help matters this week, of course.
GoFundMe will no longer allow anti-vaxxers to raise funds on its site. Although this is just one outlet and the direct impact may be small, the more major sites do this the better chance we have that others – including Twitter, still a holdout in clamping down on denialists – will follow suit.
Anti-vaxxer groups on Facebook have been mobilizing to spam doctors’ pages with fraudulent information and even threats against the physicians, so some physicians find themselves unwilling to speak out about vaccines or even reach out to patients to let them know when flu shots are available.
After one such coordinated attack on the public pages of a Pittsburgh pediatrician’s office, researchers examined the comments to find common factors among the trolls – and found that the attacks were coordinated from inside those closed anti-vaccine groups on Facebook.
Dr. Paul Offit, inventor of the rotavirus vaccine, explains the mumps outbreak at Tufts and why herd immunity matters in a 13-minute audio interview with WHYY.
The Globe & Mail’s editorial page is just the latest to argue that the media needs to stop providing false balance by listening to anti-vaxxers, who rely on debunked ‘studies’ and refuse to debate in good faith.
These so-called “fetal heartbeat” bills are medically illiterate, and the press needs to catch on and call them fetal pole cardiac activity bills, because that’s what tests are actually detecting, not a heartbeat.
For The Athletic subscribers, this piece on wearable technology is a good introduction to the topic, although I think it leaves a few key questions unaddressed, and I have an issue with the use of “genetic” here to describe physical characteristics (nobody is checking players’ genes, at least not that I know of).
There’s a new Kickstarter up for an expansion to Valeria: Card Kingdoms, a dice-rolling tableau builder, which also includes a new standalone title within the Valeria family of games.
There’s also a Kickstarter up for a new campaign for the RPG Symbaroum.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: kickstarters, longreads, nutrition, vaccines

→ August 17, 2017
→ By keith

The Gluten Lie.

Alan Levinovitz is, by day, a professor of philosophy and religion at James Madison University, focusing “primarily on the relationship between religion and literature, with particular attention to classical Chinese thought and comparative ethics,” according to his official bio. Yet he stepped way out of his lane in the best possible way with his 2015 book The Gluten Lie: And Other Myths About What We Eat, which dissects the history of fad diets and the misunderstandings or blatant falsehoods behind claims that foods like flour, sugar, and salt are “toxins” or otherwise harmful.

The gluten lie of the title is the first major food myth Levinovitz tackles, in part because it is so pervasive right now. While some people suffer from a real autoimmune disease triggered by ingesting gluten, known as celiac or celiac sprue, thousands of others have given up gluten for dubious reasons, including the belief in “gluten sensitivity,” a medical condition for the existence of which there is scant evidence. Gluten is not inherently harmful, but it’s blamed for all sorts of current health evils, from obesity to autism to heart disease to cancer to the quack favorite, “leaky gut syndrome,” which isn’t even real. Numerous books excoriating gluten, including Wheat Belly and Grain Brain, have become bestsellers based on questionable or nonexistent science, taking advantage of a gullible public eager for quick fixes and explanations for their health woes. (Here’s the answer no one wants to hear: obesity, autism, heart disease, and perhaps even cancer are at least partially explained by genetics, and there isn’t much you can do to alter that part of your system.)

Levinovitz starts out by giving the history of glutenphobia and the very real celiac disease, explaining along the way how some doctors refused to accept proof that gluten was the cause of celiacs’ illness, generally because it interfered with their profits. He details the criminal behavior of Walter Kempner, whose name is still easily found on Duke’s campus because his “rice diet” was popular even among celebrities, but who operated a de facto cult, convincing women to be his sex slaves and whipping other patients who didn’t adhere to the diet’s strict limits (around 1200 calories/day). He also covers Dr. Sidney Haas, who believed bananas had some magical cure for celiac disease, so that his patients would get better – until they later ate wheat again. Today’s charlatans may not be so violent or obstinate, but they are profiting off the science ignorance of the public by convincing people that one ingredient is making them sick, offering a quick-fix rather than the more difficult treatment of a healthful, balanced, calorie-limited diet and regular exercise. It’s much easier to just blame the bread.

Gluten isn’t the only enemy Levinovitz exonerates; the new food nemesis is sugar, and he describes the war on sucrose and fructose, along with the past wars on fat and salt, none of which was really based in sound science. (The research on sugar is nascent compared to that on the other fields, for political reasons as much as scientific ones, so I’m not quite ready to give sugar a complete acquittal yet – but he’s right that evidence against it is overstated.) The idea that salt is dangerous still persists across a broad swath of the population, especially those my age and older, because it was everywhere in the 1980s and 1990s, from warnings about salt intake to the prevalence of “salternative” products like NoSalt (which contains potassium chloride, safe in low doses but lethal in moderate ones) or Mrs. Dash (salt-free spice blends). The truth is that sodium is necessary for most people – salt is the only rock we eat, and we eat it because we need it – and only dangerous for a narrow subset of the population, like folks with high blood pressure, Meniere’s disease, or other rare disorders around the body’s homeostasis of sodium. It’s unlikely that you’re eating too much salt, and if you cook most of your food rather than eating out or buying it already prepared, it’s unthinkable.

The low-fat craze, which is also still with us albeit at a lower level of intensity, is based on some outdated science and a history of corporate interference and corruption that led to government condemnation of fat in its dietary recommendations. (Don’t eat what the USDA tells you to eat.) Again, your body needs fat; in fact, you may crave it. Fat contains 9 calories per gram, compared to 4 for proteins or carbohydrates. Humans evolved in environments of scarcity, and fat, typically animal fat, was the most calorie-dense food source available. Such cravings may be ‘hardwired’ in our genes – that is, humans carrying genes that rewarded them for eating fats and sugars fared better in natural selection, and thus craving those foods may now be innate.

The word “natural” in there draws special ire from Levinovitz, as most modern diet fads revolve around some misunderstanding of what a “natural” diet means. Some people simply assume anything artificial is bad, as if your body knows whether a molecule you consume was created in a forest or in a lab. The same applies to the fear of GMO foods. Paleo diets are based on a poor understanding of how early man lived and ate, demonizing foods that can be healthful (whole grains) just because Thag the Caveman no eat them. Others claim you should avoid dairy because it’s not “natural” to consume the milks produced by other species. Levinovitz goes after hucksters like the Food Babe and Joseph Mercola, who demonize harmless ingredients with scary names (and, in Mercola’s case, vaccines and real medicines) to convince you to buy their books and supplements.

Science-ignorance is rampant in our society; I find copious examples every week for my links roundup, and it particularly bothers me when it comes to our governments setting policies that put people’s health and lives at risk. The Gluten Lie aims a little lower; if anything, Levinovitz’s main goal seems to be protecting your wallet, and perhaps your taste buds, from falling prey to groupthink and con artists who’ll peddle what you want to hear in exchange for some of your money. If you want to lose weight, reduce your caloric intake. If you have other health problems, talk to your doctor. But don’t deny yourself the glory of Neapolitan pizza or fresh pasta just because someone on your internet told you that gluten was evil.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, Food, food science, food writing, nutrition

→ January 28, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/28/17.

My ranking of the top 100 prospects went up this week, and my org rankings went up last week, so ESPN set up a landing page that links to all my prospect content. When the individual team top tens and reports go up next week, you’ll be able to reach them from this page as well.

ESPN split my top 100 ranking into five posts this year, twenty prospects per page, so here they are from the top to the bottom:

I held a Klawchat Friday after the whole list was up.

And I even got another boardgame review up, this one of the new edition of the 2000 game Citadels, which is actually designed for 4 to 8 players, with rules variants included for 2 or 3. It’s definitely best with four or more, though.

You can preorder my upcoming book, Smart Baseball, on amazon, or from other sites via the Harper-Collins page for the book. Also, please sign up for my more-or-less weekly email newsletter.

And now, the links…

Aziz Ansari takes Trump to task for his anti-Muslim rhetoric in this NY Times editorial.
The House of Representatives quietly changed a rule that will make it easier for the federal government to sell off national park lands, or to transfer them to the states and let the states sell them.
The Environmental Protection Agency froze its grant programs and slapped a gag order on employees. This is happening all over the executive branch, apparently, such as the adminstration’s “control-alt-delete” strategy on climate change policy. These orders led to a series of “rogue” Twitter accounts that ostensibly will allow employees of those agencies to still leak information to the public – if those accounts are what they say they are. TIME‘s Jeffrey Kluger says Trump will lose his war on science, but doesn’t quite point out that we may all be losers before science eventually wins.
Do you live in Iowa? If so, your state’s GOP is pushing a bill to expand non-medical exemptions to vaccinations for schoolchildren. This is dangerous and utterly baseless. Call your state representatives and senators Monday and tell them to stop this madness.
Do you live in Kansas? That state’s GOP has introduced a bill defining a person’s “sex” by their chromosomes, and of course, they’re pitching it as a “student privacy and protection act,” despite zero instances of any actual violation of the privacy or safety of cis students. It’s flagrantly anti-trans, but, as with all these bills, ignores people who are not born male or female, collectively called intersex. It’s a hate bill, and even worse, it’s government-sponsored religion. Call your state representatives and senators Monday and tell them to stop this madness.
Do you live in South Dakota? Well your state GOP is actively subverting your right to vote on laws, reversing a voter-passed ethics reform package and now trying to double the number of signatures required to place something on the ballot in the first place. Do they run the state for themselves, or do they run it for the people? Call your state representatives and senators Monday and tell them to stop this madness.
Do you live in Pennsylvania? Well your state GOP gerrymandered the hell out of your state, with one district around Philly ranked among the ten “most rigged” districts in the country. This is a tougher change, because fixing it would require an amendment to the state constitution, but still, call your state reps and senators Monday and ask how to fix this so that neither party gets to do this in 2020.
Net neutrality, a fundamental principle of the open internet, is about to die after Ajit Pai became head of the FCC. It’s probably too late to stop this one – Trump’s election made this a fait accompli – I still say call your Representative and Senators on Monday to say you support net neutrality and want the Open Internet Order to remain in effect.
Sean Spicer, Trump’s Press Secretary, has killed the traditional way the media reports on a President.
Two great pieces from Esquire‘s Charles Pierce: on last week’s Women’s March and on Trump’s rabid bullshitting in his interview with ABC News. The latter piece also points out the major, major problem that Trump’s brand of absurdity covers up: A fringe, conservative, and often evangelical wing of the Republican Party is now dismantling social and environmental programs that have been in place for decades. Do most Trump voters know what rights and benefits they’re about to lose?
Dan Savage has revived his 2006 site and fundraising campaign ITMFA, which stands for something you can figure out by clicking. I never believed W was worthy of impeachment, for the record. He turned out to be an unsuccessful President, but that’s wholly different from what we’re facing now.
A neo-Nazi who’d been walking around the University of Florida campus wearing a swastika armband drew protests and was later “jumped” by two men who ripped the armband off him. You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t feel too sorry for the guy.
The Guardian looks at the incredible shrinking printed circuit board, which they call the vanishing computer. Intel, AMD, and their ilk are now printing transistors so small and so close together that they’re reaching the physical limits of what’s possible. We can’t make transistors any smaller because we’re at the atomic level here, and that means our devices, which have been increasing in speed and power for four decades, are hitting a wall.
One of the very, very few positives that might come out of a Republican Administration and Congress is a renewed emphasis on nuclear power, which environmentalists have opposed even though it doesn’t contribute to climate change. NuScale Power has applied to build the country’s first small, “modular” reactor, and within that article there’s a mention of a company trying to bring back the molten salt reactor design, which runs on ‘spent’ nuclear fuel from light-water reactors.
A law professor in Alabama fought a traffic ticket and turned it into a constitutional rights question. It’s funny, but also disturbing, given how much the city’s mayor clings to the cameras even after orders to stop using them, in part because a private company is profiting from their usage.
The woman who accused, under oath, Emmett Till of grabbing her fabricated her testimony. She’s now 82, and maybe feels some guilt, but will get away with ensuring that the murderers of a 14-year-old black boy got off scot-free.
Are we entering a post-statistics democracy, where populist distrust of traditional statistics is undermining our society, and traditional methods of gathering statistics may tell us less about our populations than they did in the past?
This piece is from 2013 but was relevant to some Twitter idiocy I encountered this week: we don’t need vitamin supplements, although the supplements industry would like us to think otherwise.
In December, a woman of Indian descent was stopped and questioned by police for “walking while brown,” in her words. One officer questioned if she was here illegally.
In Finland, people drink a milder, possibly more healthful coffee that’s mixed with dried mushrooms. I like coffee too much to try this, and also the article put this song in my head.
Hey girl, Ryan Gosling doesn’t understand how he became a meme.
This Onion article hit a little to close to home: Explanation Of Board Game Rules Peppered With Reassurances That It Will Be Fun. But why pick on Ticket to Ride in the photo, when that game’s rules are easy? Have the authors ever seen the rules for Caverna or Android: Netrunner?

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: boardgames, coffee, environment, hate bills, links, nutrition, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ September 24, 2016
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/24/16.

I named Houston’s Alex Bregman as our 2016 Prospect of the Year, and listed a bunch of other worthy candidates and the 2016 draftees who had the top debuts as well, all for Insiders. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

My latest boardgame review for Paste covers the cute, fast-playing game New Bedford, where players build the town and send ships out on whaling expeditions to rack up points. I really loved everything about that game – it looks great, the play is simple, Within that review is a paragraph on its two-player spinoff, Nantucket.

You can pre-order my book, Smart Baseball, on amazon already; it’s due out in April. Also, sign up for my email newsletter to stay up to date on all the stuff I write in various places.

And now, the links…

Terry Jones, one of the original members of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, has been diagnosed with dementia at age 74. He’s losing or has lost his ability to speak (aphasia), a shame for a great comic talent and the author of this delightful letter to then-President George W. Bush.
Turmeric is being touted by all the woo-wielding nature-people for alleged health benefits … and that might be true, as long as you eat it as opposed to taking supplements. My guess is that it requires the presence of fats to work. Its main benefits appear to be anti-inflammatory, although too much turmeric can also give you heartburn so don’t go too nuts. I add a teaspoon of it when making homemade granola; it alters the color but not the flavor.
“I’m a non-binary ten-year-old,” writes a child for the BBC’s magazine site. What bathroom would you suggest this child (who prefers ze or they) use? How about those with ambiguous genitalia, known as intersex? Why is this a fucking government issue at all?
Speaking of which, North Carolina’s Hate Bill 2 has cost the state nearly $400 million already in lost business, according to an estimate from WIRED, all in the name of discriminating against LGBTQ people. If you live there, you get to vote in November and let your representatives know how you feel about this…
Truthout looks at Penn State truthers who try to whitewash the tattered legacy of Joe Paterno. Not mentioned is the sick role Paterno’s adult children play in this, using semantics to argue that their father somehow wasn’t culpable in covering up for a sexual predator.
Two interesting posts on attempts to save dying languages, one on a Native American woman trying to create the first Wukchumni dictionary, as she’s its last fluent speaker, and the effort to save the Chickasaw language with an app, part of a broader piece on language loss.
Following up on the Derrick Rose story I posted last week, Julie DiCaro wrote about the importance of anonymity in rape cases after the judge in that civil suit ruled that Rose’s attorneys can name the victim (and smear her).
A rare Hawai’ian crow showed the ability and knowledge to use “tools” to retrieve food placed out of their reach in a test run by the Hawaii Endangered Bird Conservation Program.
Vox breaks down how rap lyrics and meter work with or against their underlying beats.
A reader sent over this fantastic cognitive bias cheat sheet, that takes the 175 biases listed on Wikipedia’s page on the topic and organizes them into a much more manageable tree of major archetypes.
The great J. Kenji Lopez-Alt made a lighter take on fettucine alfredo, although I think his version couldn’t properly be called “alfredo” given the modifications he makes. True pasta alfredo contains just pasta water, Parmiggiano-Reggiano, and butter, but of course the result is a rather stomach-unfriendly pile of carbs and fat, and many American restaurants compound the problem by adding cream. Lopez-Alt’s version uses science (of course) to lighten things up and give the dish more flavor.
Another piece on Rob Daviau and how his idea of Legacy games has changed boardgaming. These games involve storylines and permanent alterations to the board and components as you follow the story across multiple plays. Daviau’s latest title, Seafall, is the first standalone Legacy title after Risk and Pandemic got the treatment.
This week the United Nations held a summit to discuss antibiotic resistance, only its fourth summit ever to discuss a health-related topic.
Growing vegetables instead of grass can help reduce greenhouse gases in the air. Also, you can’t eat grass, so there’s another benefit to switching to produce.
Yet another massive price hike for an obscure pharmaceutical, although in this case, it’s not even clear how effective the skin gel is.
The shift to the far right isn’t just happening here – it’s as bad or worse in Europe, with Austria set to elect a far-right President, and Islamophobia and xenophobia becoming major tenets in party platforms.
Courage House, an organization that houses victims of sex trafficking, is being accused of violating the girls’ privacy rights and forcing them to attend Christian masses. I don’t agree with the article’s use of “exploiting” here – in this context, it sounds like they’re allowing the girls to be sexually violated again – but the allegations themselves are disturbing.
The Guardian‘s superb writer Jessica Valenti argues that distrust of Hillary Clinton is a function of our distrust of women in general.
Gary Johnson said in 2011 that fighting climate change is futile because the sun will eventually expand and swallow the earth. This is true, although there’s probably a 3 billion year gap that he might wish to consider. This goes along with an article I tweeted earlier this week, Slate‘s piece arguing that Johnson is not in any sense a “liberal” candidate, and liberals shouldn’t vote for him as a protest vote. I thought the article failed to fully make its case about young voters, but it is correct about Johnson, whose fiscal and regulatory policies would favor higher-income earners and large corporations at the expense of the lower-income strata, especially those with chronic illnesses, as well as the environment.
Charles M. Blow writes in a NY Times op ed that Clinton and Trump are not equal and protest votes are folly. He articulates my own opinion on the subject better than I could.
Joss Whedon’s celebrity-filled anti-Trump, get-out-the-vote ad was probably more funny than effective, but since I agree with the stance on Trump, I laughed quite a bit.
Trump used $258,000 from his charity to settle his own legal problems. The Washington Post‘s David Fahrentold has been all over Trump’s phony charity, calling hundreds of alleged beneficiaries to verify donations (with many saying they’d never received a dime). The New Yorker claims Trump’s charity duplicity has become a campaign issue.
Trump may be looking at oil exec and anti-environmentalist Forrest Lucas for Secretary of the Interior. The article has quotes from leaders of the Sierra Club, the Oil Change USA, and the Humane Society. Trump’s ties to oil and gas industry people may mean he fills Cabinet posts typically aimed at balancing corporate needs with the public good of environmental stewardship.
Speaking of which, Trump is a climate-change denier, which doesn’t jibe with rising sea levels on the east coast. The damning quote: “Donald Trump lives in a parallel universe where the facts established by the scientific community to him don’t exist.”
Meanwhile, U.S. intelligence officials continue to investigate ties between Trump’s camp and the Kremlin. I can’t believe this hasn’t become a bigger issue. Russia is a dictatorship where dissent is quashed and journalists are killed for their work, and as their economy continues to shrink they’ll become more of a threat to global stability. Cozying up to Putin should be an automatic disqualifier.
The Philadelphia Fraternal Order of Police endorsed Trump, but black cops in Philly say the endorsement ignores their views. I have no idea if such endorsements matter at all, but it would seem that any group with a mixed membership will have a minority that feels marginalized by a single endorsement like this.
Talking Points Memo describes the “fever inside” Donald Trump, his arbitrary, impulsive nature and outsized reactions to perceived slights.
Drew Magary wants to say fuck you to Trump voters. Who am I to argue?
I Just Wish NFL Players Could Find A Way To Protest Without Starting A National Dialogue. Yes, it’s from The Onion. Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: climate change, Languages, links, nutrition, pasta, rap, recipes, stick to baseball

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