pseudoscience

→ September 21, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/21/24.

One new post at the Athletic this week, naming Boston’s Kristian Campbell as the Minor League Player of the Year for 2024, along with a bunch of honorable mentions and other honorees as usual. And, as usual, people got very mad that I didn’t mention some prospect from their favorite team. I’ve got a piece coming up Monday on the future of the White Sox given what’s in their farm system and what they’ve shown they can and can’t develop.

You can and should sign up for my free email newsletter, because think of all the worthless crap that’s in your inbox. I promise you my emails are better than the latest email blast from Lands’ End, and they’re much less frequent.

If you missed me on Codenames Live! this week, you can watch the replay here on Twitch. My teammate was the great Daryl Andrews, designer of Sagrada and the brand-new game Mistwind.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New York Times’ Jodi Kantor reported on how Chief Justice Roberts engineered several major court decisions to favor disgraced ex-President Donald Trump.

ProPublica reported on the deaths of two women in Georgia due to the state’s draconian ban on abortion, in that story and this one as well.

A new study in Nature found that a combination of willful ignorance and cognitive distortions drives vaccine refusal and hesitancy. It doesn’t help when private companies allow misinformation to run rampant on their platforms, though. Or when the anti-science forces running Florida lead to a surge in vaccine refusals from parents, leaving pediatricians concerned and exhausted as they try to combat the nonsense.

Northwestern has suspended Professor of Journalism Steven Thrasher due to his participation in the anti-Gaza War encampments in the spring and pro-Palestine statements he has made elsewhere. Over 1900 journalists, academics, and health professionals signed a letter to the school, saying he has been targeted for his views and what should be protected speech. I’m presenting the story here but acknowledge it may be more complicated than it first seems, as this only presents Thrasher’s side and that of his supporters.

The Q-Collar claims it can protect athletes’ brains from concussions and that research “proves” its efficacy. The data may not be real. I don’t see any way this thing could possibly work as claimed.

Some evangelical voters are standing up for their values by voting for Kamala Harris, turning their back on the vitriol of Trump’s rhetoric and his veiled calls for violence.

A group of election officials and 2020 election deniers in Georgia are already strategizing on how to rig the state for Trump and to sow doubt about the result if Harris wins.

Why are major newspapers sanewashing the incoherent word salads served up by Trump? Michael Tomasky gives some specific examples of this in the New Republic.

Former Trump White House staffer and now Project 2025 co-author John McEntee posts inane rhetorical questions on his TikTok account, but when he posted one claiming no women had been denied critical medical care due to abortion bans, he got hundreds of responses from women who had indeed faced such circumstances. NBC News even had one of those women on air to discuss her traumatic experience. McEntee lost his job in the Trump Administration because of his gambling habit.

Try to hide your surprise, but Justice Samuel Alito has been hanging out with right-wing billionaire and anti-abortion Leonard Leo, who’s spending a fortune to try to tip the election to Trump and the Republicans.

A sheriff in Portage County, Ohio, ran his mouth on social media, asking residents to write down the addresses of people with Harris-Walz signs in their yards so someone could send migrants to live with them. Now his officers won’t be providing security at any election sites in November.

Also in the New Republic, Greg Sargent excoriates Jay Divans – excuse me, I’m being told it is actually spelled J.D. Vance – for his unrepentant lies and xenophobia about Haitians living and working in Springield, Ohio.

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear (D) issued an executive order banning conversion therapy for minors, a harmful pseudoscientific practice that pretends it can turn gay people straight.

Sorry, more Ohio stuff, and more from ProPublica: The Buckeye State is now using public taxpayer dollars to build religious schools. I hope they get sued into oblivion. Or into Michigan. Whatever they would hate more.

Climate change is impacting coffee farmers’ yields, and after a drought hit Vietnam – a major producer of lower-quality Robusta beans – some coffee farmers there switched to the malodorous fruit durian, and the loss of product has driven Robusta and Arabica prices to near-highs on the global market.

Climate change is acting as a “chaos multiplier” in the fragile African nation of Somalia, which has been wrecked by 30 years of civil war, has one or two breakaway republics in its north (depending on how you define it), and has to deal with terrorist attacks from al-Shabab.

Former U.S. Representative Bob Inglis (R-SC) wrote in Forbes about the utility of a “tipping fee” on emissions that contribute to climate change – not that different than the so-called carbon tax in effect, just a little bit in implementation and nomenclature. You pay for what you use, so to speak. Inglis was also in the news this week for announcing he’s voting for Harris for President.

Prof. Deborah Kelly at Penn State has had two papers retracted and a third may be on the way, but she’s lawyered up and is fighting it even though other researchers have found fabricated data or images in 21 of her publications.

Two Alameda, California, residents are suing to stop the relocation of a local Food Bank to … an empty parking lot. One litigant claims the parking lot is “historic;” the other appears to be motivated by NIMBY.

Paste’s Jim Vorel wrote a defense of the Aviation, a drink that had a brief renaissance about 15 years ago but seems to have lost some of its luster. I’m a fan – it is the only drink I’ve ever seen that uses crème de violette, but those floral notes are a great complement to the juniper flavors of a quality gin. And it’s a good drink to order out in the world because you’re never going to buy crème de violette to make it at home.

Wirecutter’s Hannah Rimm wrote an ode to the wide and enduring popularity of Ticket to Ride.

Studio Ghibli released a print-and-play board game to help advertise its quirky theme park in Japan.

A Kickstarter for Railroad Tiles, a new game inspired by the roll & write series Railroad Ink, is already over $250,000 in funding. I actually don’t like Railroad Ink, but this looks more up my alley.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, academia, africa, anti-science, board game news, california, climate change, cocktails, coffee, florida, gay rights, gaza, georgia, kentucky, links, longreads, ohio, pseudoscience, scotus, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ September 14, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/14/14.

Light week here for writing and links, although it looks like I’ll have two columns at the Athletic this upcoming week.

Over at Paste, I reviewed The Vale of Eternity, a card-drafting game that’s a lot harder than it looks, especially because of its quirky mechanism of handling coins when you buy and sell cards.

I also sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter on Saturday. You can sign up here.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Ted Chiang, author of the short story that became the film Arrival, wrote about the false promise of AI for creating art in the New Yorker.
Magnetic “therapy” is not backed by any evidence, but parents of autistic children are turning to it anyway out of desperation and denial.
States are using flawed drug test results as the justification for taking children away from their parents, according to this investigative report from the Marshall Project.
Cloud storage and AI are driving massive increases in energy usage, but the tech firms behind them are fighting efforts to make them pay their fair share. Large language model algorithms are very energy intensive; they shouldn’t be so freely available when they have such high hidden costs.
Idaho’s abortion ban is putting the lives of women at risk and forcing doctors to ignore their training, similar to what we’ve already seen in other states that couldn’t wait to put a giant foot down on women’s necks after Dobbs.
Texas AG Ken Paxton is suing to ensure the state can access medical records of Texans who go out of state for abortions, gender-affirming care, or other medical treatment that is none of the state’s business.
Two Florida voters who signed a petition to get abortion access on the ballot found themselves visited by Gov. DeSantis’s voter intimidation unit.
A town council member in Jefferson County, Colorado, shot a 17-year-old teen in the face, through the windshield of the victim’s car, as the boy and his friend were looking for a place to take homecoming pictures. The victim is hospitalized in serious condition and Brent Metz is facing multiple charges.
I enjoyed Will Bunch’s evisceration of Donald Trump’s performance at the debate on Tuesday against VP Kamala Harris.
A fishing village in Kenya that has also become a popular tourist destination is disappearing as sea levels rise due to climate change.
The Times reports on the efforts to rebuild the Libyan city of Derna a year after two dams failed and the city flooded, killing over 4000 people. Libya has two rival governments in place, and the one funding the $2 billion effort has given power to run the program to the son of a powerful warlord, raising fears of corruption and more shoddy work.
“Debate in nuclear-armed former colony fails to reassure global community.” Hat tip to Craig Calcaterra and his essential Cup of Coffee newsletter for alerting me to this satirical gem.
The most recent edition of the Times’ Modern Love column is a gut-punch.
The Kickstarter for Pantheum: Demigods of Olympia, an intriguing game from a new publisher, is about to clear $100K as I write this on Friday night.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, africa, board game news, florida, guns, idaho, kenya, links, longreads, pseudoscience, stick to baseball, texas, voter suppression

→ October 28, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/28/23.

Nothing new from me at the Athletic this week as I’ve been working on my top 50 free agents rankings, which will run on Wednesday. My only new content outside of this site was a review of the game Forest Shuffle over at Paste Magazine; it’s got some lovely art but it’s a heavy thinker for a game that’s entirely made up of a large deck of cards. I do like it, though.

My guest on the Keith Law Show this week was Dr. Lee McIntyre, a philosopher at Boston University who discussed his new book On Disinformation: How to Fight for Truth and Protect Democracy. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Robert Kolker, author of Lost Girls and Hidden Valley Road, revisits the topic of the former book, the recently-solved Long Island serial killer case, in a long story on how Suffolk County police botched the investigation for over a decade thanks to infighting, corruption, and incompetence. The story mentions the murder of John Pius, which happened in my hometown when I was about five. Kolker is going to appear on my podcast in November to discuss Hidden Valley Road, about a family with ten sons, six of whom developed schizophrenia.
The CBC has a long investigative piece on singer Buffy Sainte-Marie’s claims to indigenous heritage, which appear to be false based on her birth certificate showing two white European-descended parents. Sainte-Marie’s public and commercial image were very closely tied to her claimed native identity, including a much-loved appearance on Sesame Street in1975.
Vermont’s Woodside Juvenile Rehabilition Center was closed in 2020 after years of allegations of abuse and neglect of the young people in the center’s care. Seven Days has the harrowing story of one young woman whose life was destroyed by her time at the facility.
Another police misconduct story, this one from Dallas, where a Black man who had the same name as a suspect at large found himself assaulted by cops and then arrested on a bogus charge, triggering a cascade of events that cost him his job and his house. He’s suing the police department and the city, neither of which has compensated him in any way for the actions of their officers.
I’d never heard of the pop artist Devon Rodriguez, but I have now, after an art critic who reviewed his work found himself the target of an online mob stirred up by Rodriguez himself, who appears to have skin thinner than tengujo paper.
A site aimed at helping people commit suicide, even connecting them with people who’d sell them the drugs to do it, was ignored for years by UK authorities, leading to 50 or more preventable deaths.
CVS revealed it won’t sell cold medicines with phenylephrine, since the so-called decongestant doesn’t actually work. So why are they still selling so-called “homeopathic” remedies that also don’t work?
My editor at Paste, Garrett Martin, visited Dubrovnik, Croatia, recently, and writes that it’s lovely and is being strangled by tourism.
Clarence Thomas took a loan from a friend for $267,230, and then the friend just flat-out forgave it before Thomas paid down any principal. Thomas, of course, never reported this on financial disclosure reports.
Dr. Hala Alyan, a Palestinian writer and clinical psychologist, writes in the New York Times on how Palestinians are, in her words, expected to “audition” for empathy and compassion.
Also in the Times, Jamelle Bouie writes that the rightward shift as voters get older is happening less with each succeeding generation. One effect of making it harder for people to buy houses (and thus get mortgages) is that they don’t experience the drift towards fiscal conservatism/desire to pull up the ladder behind them. Oh well!
The skin disease leishmaniasis is now endemic in the United States. It’s spread by sandflies, and their habitats are expanding thanks to climate change.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson wants to ban no-fault divorce. This is disastrous for people in abusive marriages, but also, my marriage is none of your fucking business.
Historian Kevin Kruse is leaving Twitter, which matters because he was one of the more prominent voices countering political disinformation on the site, which, as he says, is undergoing enshittification and becoming a white nationalist utopia like Truth Social and Gab. NBC has a story on how LGBTQ+ people are leaving Twitter as well, citing the site’s increasingly toxic atmosphere and Musk’s decisions to allow deadnaming, misinformation, and hate speech to run rampant on the platform. I’ll be there as long as many of you are, but I’m on Bluesky (@keithlaw.bsky.social), Threads (@mrkeithlaw, same as Instagram), and Spoutible (@keithlaw) as well.
The Times had a good story on how sports Twitter is still hanging in there, relatively speaking.
Dr. Peter Hotez, author of the new book The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science, received the inaugural Anthony Fauci Courage in Leadership Award from the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
Board game news: The Kickstarter for Nocturne, the latest game from the publishers of Cascadia and Fit to Print, is live now and already at $64K with 41 days to go.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, board game news, frauds, health, links, longreads, mental health, police, pseudoscience, scotus, social media, stick to baseball, texas, true crime, vermont

→ March 18, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/18/23.

I’m running around Florida this week and will have a draft blog post up Sunday or Monday, but for now you’ll have to just make do with my ramblings here. It’s been a fairly unproductive week on the minor-league scouting side, but better for draft scouting, which I’ll write up before Monday.

In the meantime, the links:

Longreads first: Creative Loafing Tampa uncovers a long history of the city of New Port Richey harassing residents and business owners it deems undesirable, using dubious code violations and illegal searches.

Copi is an invasive species in American rivers and lakes. One solution is to convince Americans to eat it more.

Writing in Democracy, former NARAL president Ilyse Hogue argues that when we defend reproductive rights, we are also defending democracy itself.

The Columbia Journalism Review looks at the implosion at the BBC over Gary Lineker’s criticism of a bill that even UNHCR said aimed to “extinguish” a refugee’s right to seek protection in the UK.

UPenn law professor Amy Wax has a long history of derogatory statements about non-white people, some as public commentary, some to students directly. Should she be fired despite the protections of tenure?

An online influencer who pushed ivermectin to his followers FAFO’d – he took a daily dose of the antiparasitic, which causes severe heart damage if taken for too long or in large doses, and died of a massively enlarged heart. Now his followers are worried about their own health. Maybe they should have listened to doctors and scientists instead of one fucking moron with an internet connection?

Meanwhile, some parents of autistic kids are torturing their children by giving them ivermectin despite its horrible side effects. Where are all the people who claim their main goal is protecting kids when they campaign against drag shows and LGBT+ themed books?

We now have even stronger evidence of a zoonotic origin for COVID-19, based on genetic sequences that tie it to raccoon dogs sold illegally at a Wuhan market.

Masks are effective against COVID-19; we know this because valid scientific research tells us so.

Comedian Russell Brand’s turn towards conspiracy theories and anti-science views is a harbinger of a grim future where those with huge digital platforms misinform their large, often younger audiences.

A Syracuse radio station fired a sports talk show host for being insufficiently positive in his comments about the Orange’s sportsball programs.

An activist protesting the razing of forests and green space to build a vast new training facility for Atlanta cops may have been shot by police while his hands were raised. Manuel Teran was shot and killed by cops in January and his family is now suing the city of Atlanta.

Trump has once again called on his supporters to riot if he’s indicted, which I think is probably an attempt to deter state prosecutors from doing so. Let’s hope the relevant authorities are prepared this time around.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R ) has moved to revoke the liquor license of a Miami Hyatt that hosted a drag show at Christmas, claiming there were minors who “appeared less than 16 years of age” at the event. At some point, aren’t the corporations he’s targeting going to push back?

He’s also targeting Wall Street firms that use ESG (environmental & social goals) as part of their investment or other strategies, and while everyone agrees this is performative on his part, there’s a stunning lack of rejoinders from his targets.

A Saudi trans woman appears to have killed herself after her family tricked her into returning to Saudi Arabia and forced her to de-transition. The suicide rate for trans people is extremely high, and laws that ban gender-affirming care will only exacerbate this.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: autism, coronavirus, environment, florida, food science, journalism, links, longreads, pseudoscience, stick to baseball

→ March 4, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/4/23.

I posted an early draft ranking of just 30 names, enough for a typical round, for subscribers to The Athletic. I’ll expand that list a few times and eventually get to 100 by May or so, but I’d like to at least see all the high school players get started.

No podcast this week as the guest I had lined up had to reschedule. Feel free to sign up for my free email newsletter, as I’ll be sending another one out this week.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Financial Times has a deep dive into how Putin blundered into Ukraine and has continued isolating himself from would-be advisers who might have helped him out of this mess. The writer posits that Putin may try to hold on until January of 2025, hoping we elect a Republican as President and thus pull our military support of Ukraine.
Anything Elizabeth Kolbert writes is a must-read for me; her latest piece in the New Yorker covers how our mining of too much phosphorus and subsequent waste of much of it is choking our oceans while leading towards a bottleneck that threatens our food supply. The article also describes the world’s longest conveyor belt, a 61-mile track in the illegally annexed territory of the Western Sahara.
A former employee came out with claims about malfeasance at a St. Louis medical center that treats transgender youth, telling her story to a newsletter author who doesn’t engage in any sort of fact-checking of stories. The Missouri Independent and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch both investigated and found no corroboration, finding instead that parents had nothing but praise for the center and the treatment their children received. Newsletters are fine for some types of content, but not for actual news.
The New Republic profiled Dr. David Gorski, who has also blogged as Orac, and his battle against pseudoscience, quackery, and so-called “alternative” medicine online. (There is no such thing as “alternative” medicine. If it works, it’s medicine.)
I enjoyed this Slate story on the 25^th anniversary of Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea and the bizarre, cultlike fandom that album has generated. The title track from that record remains one of my favorite songs to play & sing.
The cesspool of Twitter had a debunked conspiracy theory trending earlier this week about Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs. It’s just one of several that Republican legislators there continue to push as they’ve seen the state turn increasingly blue.
There is no “lab leak theory.” There are a bunch of conspiracy theories, but no single, testable theory of how COVID-19 was supposedly engineered in and escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China. And the available evidence points to a zoonotic (natural) origin.
If you saw anything about Washington, D.C., attempting to update its criminal code this week, with hysterical tweets about reducing penalties for certain crimes like carjacking, there’s a lot more to the story. Most of this would be solved by just making the district a state with the same autonomy as the other fifty have.
Arkansas’ new education plan, which includes an extremely broad voucher program, is full of sops to banks and charter-school operators, and it’s also likely to gut public education in the state while favoring higher-income families. Sounds great!
Tennessee jumps on the bandwagon by banning drag shows. There is no evidence any drag show has ever harmed anyone. There is, however, copious evidence that guns have. The choice to ban harmless entertainment should tell you everything about this legislature.
Board game news: Restoration Games announced that they’re retiring the first two Unmatched sets, Cobble & Fog and Robin Hood vs. Big Foot, later this year, with no plans to reprint them.
The Gamefound campaign for Huang, a new game from prolific designer Reiner Knizia, is fully funded with five days to go.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, arizona, arkansas, board game news, conspiracy theories, coronavirus, links, longreads, pseudoscience, russia, science, stick to baseball, tennessee, trans rights, ukraine, washington

→ March 15, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/15/21.

I have one new post up for subscribers to the Athletic, looking at prospects I can’t wait to see when minor league games resume. I also held a Klawchat last week.

On the Keith Law Show last week, I spoke with Cleveland right-hander Triston McKenzie about his development as a pitcher and his experiences as a Black ballplayer. On this week’s episode, I spoke with film critic Tim Grierson about his new book This is How You Make a Movie, the Oscar nominations, and his Cardinal fandom. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the new game Holi: Festival of Colors, played on a 3-D board that’s immediately striking and that lends itself to some novel strategies, with almost no random elements at all.

For more of my writing, you can subscribe to my free email newsletter. Also, you can still buy The Inside Game and Smart Baseball anywhere you buy books; the paperback edition of The Inside Game will be out in April.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: ProPublica’s look at some of the mental health costs borne by teenagers during the pandemic is a long, grueling read, and while it might go a little too far in blaming the lockdown for teen suicides, it’s as balanced a look at this as I’ve seen. The piece pairs well with the New York Times’ stunning gallery of artwork from teenagers using multiple media to show how the pandemic and lockdown have affected them.
Ann Patchett has a lovely essay in the New Yorker about letting go of one’s stuff, which she refers to by the euphemism of ‘practice.’
The Atlantic profiles Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman (D), now the front-runner for the Senate seat coming open in 2022, including a look at an incident that took place while he was mayor of Braddock that will probably become a major issue in the campaign.
Bloomberg takes aim at racial inequity in the property tax system, where Black-owned properties are overvalued in tax assessments in cities like Detroit, Chicago, New York, Baltimore, and St. Louis.
Jelani Cobb asks if the Republican Party is destroying itself by focusing so heavily on white men, a declining portion of the electorate, to the point that “voter suppression becomes the only viable strategic option.” I wouldn’t underestimate the role that dark money can play in keeping them in power, whether through voter suppression or by targeting Latinx populations as they did in 2020.
“In Georgia, Republicans Take Aim at Role of Black Churches in Elections.” Why do Republicans hate Christians?
Related: At least 250 new laws have been proposed in 43 states to make it harder for people to vote. It’s about gaining and clinging to power at all costs. Stacey Abrams detailed some of those bills in a Twitter thread.
Facebook is finally, belatedly cracking down on anti-vaccine content, but it’s having a very hard time because it started so late and makes it too easy for users to share false information. One thing they could do, however, is focus on the small group of users having the greatest impact on others’ vaccine doubts. Meanwhile, those anti-vaxxers are pushing the lie that the vaccines cause cancer.
Also in “what took you so long,” the FDA warned quack Joseph Mercola to stop hawking fake COVID-19 treatments. He’s been pushing pseudoscience and outright anti-science for at least 25 years, all in the service of selling his supplements.
A new research study, published in Nature, found evidence of higher mortality rates from the SARS-CoV-2 B.1.1.7 variant, which is now the predominant strain in Texas, Florida, and Georgia.
James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds, explains why he thinks the NFT bubble is destined to pop.
The Cleveland Plain-Dealer‘s editor wrote a column defending the paper’s decision not to cover a fringe Republican candidate’s outlandish statements, calling him a “nobody begging for people to notice his tweets.”
In a victory for people who remember the First Amendment, Des Moines Register journalist Andrea Sahouri was acquitted of bogus charges stemming from her coverage of police activity during a BLM protest.
Oklahoma’s lower house passed a bill protecting drivers who hit protestors from prosecution, as long as they say it was an accident.
Pakistan is turning a blind eye to the problem of child marriages involving kidnapped Christian, Sikh, and Hindu girls, forced to convert to Islam and marry under threats of violence to them or family members.
A writer with autism watched Sia’s execrable movie Music and wrote about its awfulness for Slate.
This Irish Times editorial on the Meghan-and-Harry interview is a marvel of excoriating humor.
Norton Juster, the author of The Phantom Tollbooth, died last week at age 91.
Board game news: Asmodee acquired Plan B games, yet another notch in the former company’s acquisition spree, but also notable because Plan B was founded by Sophie Gravel, who sold her last company, F2Z (which included Z-Man Games and Plaid Hat), to Asmodee in 2016, then left and starter Plan B, which also includes the imprints Next Move and eggertspiele.
Some Kickstarters of note include the dice-game version of Baseball Highlights 2045; the new roll-and-write game Three Sisters, from the designers of Fleet: The Dice Game; and two new expansions for Everdell.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, coronavirus, first amendment, georgia, links, longreads, oklahoma, pennsylvania, pseudoscience, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ December 8, 2020
→ By keith

Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art.

Over the summer, I linked to an interesting longread in The Guardian, an excerpt from a new book by James Nestor called Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art. The excerpt and the title both promised an evidence-based approach to the rather fundamental act of respiration, one that comes up in areas from pulmonary and cardiovascular health to allergies to meditation and mindfulness. It was a huge disappointment: Breath is a lot of woo and anecdote, with a little bit of science hidden in the endnotes. It imparts very little useful information on how to improve your breathing, or address any problems with it.

Nestor starts Breath explaining an experiment he and a fellow “pulmonaut” underwent, where they agreed to block their nasal passages so they’d be forced to breath through their mouths for about three weeks , so they could see how much their health would deteriorate in the meantime. From there, he points out that humans are the only species with our wide range of dental problems, a product of evolution and our changing diet, and speculates that this has led to a constricted airway (which creates the conditions for sleep apnea) and says most of us are just breathing the wrong way.

One major way in which we do it wrong is breathing through our mouths, which bypasses the nose’s air-filtering, humidifying, and warming mechanisms, which came about via evolution and allow us to take less particulate matter into our lungs, while getting warmer, less dry air. Nasal breathing helps filter out some airborne pathogens, while the mouth has no such filtration. There’s even some evidence that breathing through the nose while exercising can improve performance, because “breathing through the nose releases nitric oxide, which is necessary to increase carbon dioxide (CO2) in the blood, which, in turn, is what releases oxygen.”

There’s at least some scientific evidence to back up the claims he presents in those parts of the book, and there’s copious evidence that sleep apnea is associated with serious health problems over the long term. As the book progresses, however, he veers farther and farther into pseudoscientific territory, discussing the Hindu concept of prana (the life force coursing through all living things in Hinduism) as if it were a scientific fact, which it’s not. He mentions how he breathes through his right nostril to improve his digestion, a belief from yoga that appears to have zero scientific evidence to support it. He also appears to advocate some extreme breathing hacks, such as the Buddhist method known as g Tum-mo meditation, that have little to no controlled research showing their efficacy or safety. There are even some internal contradictions here around hypoventilation and its effects, especially since there’s at least some literature showing a connection between hypoventilation and obesity.

I have some very mild breathing issues, mostly connected to sleeping, and thought I might get some useful tips from Breath to help with that, but all I really got out of the book was the advice to breathe more slowly, and remind myself to breathe through my nose when exercising. The former is something you’d get from any resource on mindful meditation, all of which start out with awareness-of-breath exercises. The latter is something I tried on Monday during a run … without success. It turns out that when it’s 40 degrees outside, breathing through your nose is not all that effective in delivering warm, moist air to your lungs, which is counterproductive when you’re trying to run at peak capacity. Apparently this is something you can build up to doing through practice, which I will continue to try to do over the next few weeks, but this isn’t advice for the larger audience.

There’s probably a decent book to write on this topic, but Breath isn’t it. With too much reliance on anecdote and the eventual devolution into woo, it’s not the kind of evidence-based argument I’d want to see for anything related to health or wellness.

Next up: I’ve got a few other books to review, but at the moment I’m reading Jude the Obscure.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: disappointments, health, non-fiction, pseudoscience, self-help books

→ October 24, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/24/20.

My top 40 free agents ranking is filed, and will run two days after the end of the World Series, so that could be as soon as Tuesday and no later than Friday. I did hold a Klawc https://klaw.me/3ogZKgt hat on Thursday.

My latest review for Paste covers the legacy game My City, from the prolific designer Reiner Knizia (Samurai, Lost Cities, Tigris & Euphrates), a fun tile-laying game that ramps up the legacy rules slowly enough to keep the game accessible.

My guest on this week’s episode of The Keith Law Show was longtime A’s beat writer Susan Slusser, talking about Billy Beane’s future, the free agency of Liam Hendriks and Marcus Semien, and the playoffs to that point. My podcast is now available on Amazon podcasts as well as iTunes and Spotify.

I sent out another edition of my free email newsletter earlier this week to subscribers. Thank you all for the kind feedback, as always.

As the holiday season approaches, I’ll remind you every week that my books The Inside Game and Smart Baseball make excellent gifts for the baseball fan or avid reader in your life.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Verge has the story of how a deal with Taiwanese company Foxconn, touted by Trump and former Gov. Scott Walker, to generate jobs for Wisconsin workers went completely south and will probably not lead to any new jobs or economic development.
Remember that story a year or two ago about how U.S. agents abroad might have been attacked with some sort of sonic weapon? Julia Ioffe’s piece in GQ looks at the increasing number of cases, evidence that Russia is behind it, and the CIA’s reluctance to investigate.
The New Yorker tells how Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia, son of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin, has spent his year in the Cabinet working to undermine labor protections. The President of the AFL-CIO even sent Scalia a letter in April accusing the Secretary of forsaking the very mission of the department, which was created in 1913 to defend the rights of workers, job seekers, and retirees, not the employers Scalia seeks to protect.
Prevagen is a nutritional supplement – that should set off alarm bells right there – that claims it can improve your memory. The FDA has been receiving consumer complaints and notices of adverse events for over a decade, but lax regulations over the supplement market have helped the manufacturer avoid serious consequences.
Two devastating stories on the decline of local newspapers and how it may harm the towns those papers served: As local news dies out, Republican PR firms are cooking up pay-to-play faux-newspapers that look like the real thing. Meanwhile, a Floyd, Virginia, newspaper fired its only employee, leaving the paper reliant on freelance content and articles from sister publications.
Will Leitch wrote about the lessons from how baseball held its season during the pandemic, navigating early interruptions to the point where we’re about to finish the World Series.
James Wagner wrote about the WhatsApp group for women in baseball that has served as an informal support network, spearheaded by Cleveland’s life skills coordinator Jen Wolf. I’ve known Jen a long time and I am not the least bit surprised that she would be behind something like this.
Stop wiping down your groceries and focus on things that actually reduce the chances of transmission, like washing your hands.
Sinclair Broadcasting aired an interview with a white nationalist last weekend, conducted by anti-vaxxer Sharyl Atkisson.
The editorial board of the Washington Post wrote that the Trump administration kidnapped children, and we shouldn’t mince words about it.
The Atlantic‘s editorial board unequivocally endorsed Joe Biden, imploring readers to vote out Donald Trump.
Amy Coney Barrett overturned a civil court ruling in favor of a woman raped by a prison guard in Wisconsin “because the sexual assaults fell outside of the guard’s official duties,” and the watchdog group Accountable.US said such “unconscionable cruelty” has no place on the high court.
A professor who worked at Notre Dame says her experience as a working mother there was very different from Barrett’s. The Catholic university’s “pro-life” policies don’t extend to reasonable resources or time off for pregnant women or working mothers.
Dr. Craig Spencer was vilified by Trump in 2014 when the director of global health in emergency medicine at Columbia-Presbyterian came home from working with Ebola patients in Guinea with the virus. He hit back at Trump this month over the President’s irresponsible behavior while infected with COVID-19, and called Trump’s lack of empathy “the single greatest threat to the American people.”
Scientific American debunks the myth that COVID-19 death counts are inflated.
The BBC has a useful primer on Bolivia’s presidential election.
BuzzFeed tracked down the “Dunkies” woman who went viral for her emphatic appearance on a local TV station in Boston.
Tony Lewis, lead singer and bassist for The Outfield, died suddenly this week at 62. The band’s guitarist, John Spinks, died in 2014 of cancer.
Harvardmagazine profiles Louisa Thomas of the New Yorker, who wrote that magazine’s essay on the return of baseball in a pandemic this summer.
The diabolical ironclad beetle (Nosoderma diabolicum) can withstand forces of 39,000 times its body weight, which would liquefy almost any other creature.
From late September: MediaMatters’ Matt Gertz explains how Trump rallies overwhelm media members assigned to cover them with so much bullshit that it’s impossible to discuss it all.
From 2017: The New York Review of Books has a longish piece on the mystery of the Voynich Manuscript. Is it an undecipherable code, or just medieval nonsense?

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, coronavirus, journalism, longreads, pseudoscience, russia, stick to baseball, the swamp, white nationalism

→ February 8, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/8/20.

The Mookie Betts trade might be falling apart as I write this, but I did break down the reported three-team deal on Wednesday morning. I’ll update that as needed when the trade becomes final. Schedule conflicts prevented me from chatting but I did do a Periscope on Friday. My prospect rankings will run on The Athletic the week of February 24^th.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, is due out on April 21^st from Harper Collins, and you can pre-order it now via their site or wherever fine books are sold. Also, check out my free email newsletter, which I say I’ll write more often than I actually write it.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: I reviewed Colson Whitehead’s novel The Nickel Boys earlier this week. Read the Tampa Bay Times investigative report into the Dozier School for Boys, which inspired Whitehead’s book.

“Pro-Trump forces are poised to wage what could be the most extensive disinformation campaign in U.S. history,” according to this article by the Atlantic‘s McKay Coppins, who details the methods operatives use to fool people, especially via social media, into believing fabrications are the truth and the truth is merely fake news.

Rolling Stone‘s Ash Sanders spoke to adults who escaped the cult of Scientology and how they struggled to readapt to society.

People keep dying in Mississippi prisons, but Governor Tate Reeves just wants to “turn the page” on the state’s responsibility to its inmates.

Evenflo, one of the major manufacturers of child car safety seats, lied when marketing its “Big Kid” booster seats despite data showing kids in those seats could be injured or killed in side-impact crashes, according to this investigative report from ProPublica.

Mass shootings get the headlines and the calls for needed gun control, but far more Americans who die from guns are suicides.

The Economist‘s Nicholas Pelham tells his story of being detained in Iran in July 2019, despite his presence there on a journalist’s visa.

Why the fuck is the New York Times running editorials defending Gwyneth Paltrow’s pseudoscience show GOOPagainst the evidence-based criticisms of its content?

Developing countries with valuable internet top-level domains, such as .tv (Tuvalu), .ly (Libya), or .nu (Niue), have often missed out on the profits from those names, which instead flowed to programmers or entrepreneurs in the U.S. or western Europe.

Southern Methodist women’s basketball coach Travis Mays stands accused of telling players they should kill themselves if they didn’t want to work and of otherwise verbally abusing his players. So far, SMU has backed him, and not its players (who are unpaid, mind you). Here’s a crazy idea, though: why not hire a woman to coach a women’s sports team?

The Trump Administration is charging the Secret Service exorbitant rates as high as $650/night to stay at Trump’s hotels, yet another example of how Republican members of the executive branch are looting the American taxpayer.

An abortion cannot be “reversed,” but six states require that women seeking abortions receive counseling that this is possible. There are also three times as many “pregnancy crisis centers,” which somehow receive federal funding,” in the U.S. than abortion clinics. STAT News argues in this piece that abortion advice needs to be safe and evidence-based. The United States is not a theocracy.

US Bank came under (well-deserved) attack last week after news spread that they had fired an employee for giving a stranded customer $20 on Christmas Eve so he could get home, and fired her supervisor as well. They’ve said they offered to re-hire both women, although the first of the two says she still hasn’t received a formal offer or any apology for the way the company defamed her publicly.

“Attention residue” reduces our productivity and happiness. One proposed solution is to carve out GLYIO (Get Your Life In Order) times during which you handle administrative tasks, or work out, or do other things that are bothering you because they’re always on your mind or your to-do list.

The Facebook group Stop Mandatory Vaccinations, which has 178,000 members, urged a mother who reported that her unvaccinated four-year-old son had the flu not to give him TamiFlu. He died four days later. Facebook is a dumpster fire of anti-vaccine bullshit and other conspiracy theories, and they simply do not care about the real-world consequences of their choice to shield this content.

Facebook also doesn’t do anything to stop anti-vaxxers from flooding pro-vaccine advocates, such as pediatrician Nicole Baldwin (whose pro-vax TikTok video went viral in mid-January), with threats and hate comments. That’s why Shots Heard Round the World was formed to help pro-vaccine advocates fight back against these armies of ignorance.

C|Net has some advice on how to manage the information Google tracks about you.

The FCC did something good, for a change: They have proposed a $13 million fine against a robocaller who used the death of Mollie Tibbetts to spread white-supremacist messaging.

Miami, Florida, is the most vulnerable coastal city in the world as sea levels rise, yet Miami voters chose a Republican mayor, and the state has two Republican Senators and a Republican Governor – even though the GOP’s official stances on climate change range from opposing regulations on fossil fuels to outright climate denial.

I reviewed Matthew Walker’s book Why We Sleep a few years ago and praised it; I listened to the audio version and it seemed to be well-sourced and backed by evidence. Now there are claims that Walker manipulated the data in the book, and his responses so far have not come close to addressing the criticisms.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, climate change, cults, links, longreads, mississippi, pseudoscience, reproductive rights, social media, the swamp, vaccines

→ January 4, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/4/20.

Happy New Year! I skipped last week since it was the holidays and I was offline quite a bit, but in the last couple of weeks I had a bunch of year-end board game posts, including my top 10 games of 2019 for Paste, my best games of the year by category for Vulture, and the top 8 board game apps of 2019 for Ars Technica.

My free email newsletter will return on Monday, time and health (I’m sick yet again) permitting. My second book, The Inside Game, will be out on April 21st and is available for pre-order.

And now, the links…

One longread this week, from the Guardian‘s best longreads of the year: Time management is making us miserable.
Figure skater Gracie Gold is working her way back to competition after a long fight with depression and an eating disorder.
One of the biggest funders of anti-vaccine groups has made millions selling “natural” health products. Joseph Mercola has also been fined by the FDA for making false health claims, and has promoted all kinds of pseudoscience on his site for over 20 years.
Joan Walsh writes about “this fucking decade” for The Nation: “The last decade showed that the United States can be dramatically changed by a minority of people seized by grievance, convinced that they’re the real victims, and determined to get revenge.”
The rivers and beaches of Guatemala are filling with trash, especially plastic, emblematic of a global problem with plastic waste.
An Alabama woman murdered by her former partner is another example why the NRA’s choice to kill the Violence Against Women Act will have deadly real-world consequences.
A study found that 39% of respondents in eight European countries would like to live in a world where chemical substances don’t exist. Good luck with that.
The search for new antibiotic drugs is hitting another roadblock: startups trying to develop these compounds are going bankrupt.
Congress appears on the verge of letting a program designed to help stop the next pandemic expire, likely because the GOP doesn’t want to spend money on anything but war.
I was obsessed with the periodic table when I was a kid, so of course I enjoyed this New Yorker piece on the search for larger and larger (and yet incredibly unstable) elements.
GQ interviewed Michael Caine about The Muppet Christmas Carol.
Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy signed letters authored by the Pebble Mining Company favorable to the company’s mining efforts in his state.
The U.S. held off on punitive tariffs against Argentina while the country reviewed two trademarks for Trump’s personal business.
Sacha Baron Cohen gave an incredible speech to the Anti-Defamation League on the failure of social media giants to regulate hate speech and fake news on their sites.
Capstone Games has really carved out a niche for itself for high-end games, many of them imported from Europe, including the popular train game Irish Gauge, which they imported and released in the U.S. in 2019. They just announced the follow-up game, Ride the Rails, will be released on July 1st, when Irish Gauge will also return to stores.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alaska, board game news, chemistry, environment, links, longreads, pseudoscience, social media, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

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