religion

→ January 10, 2026
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/10/26.

I had one story this week for subscribers to the Athletic, breaking down the Cubs’ trade for Edward Cabrera. I’m spending most of my time right now working on the annual prospect rankings, which are tentatively slated to run starting January 26^th with the top 100.

At AV Club, I reviewed the flip-and-write game Ra and Write, which borrows the theme from the auction game Ra but doesn’t have many similarities beyond that; and Propolis, a bee-themed engine-builder in a small box.

I’m trying to squeeze in another edition of my free email newsletter this weekend before the heavy phone work resumes on Monday. We’ll see how that works out for me.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: WIRED has the story of how a down-on-his-luck private detective named Brad Dennis helped find “Torswats,” a teenager who made well over 300 swatting calls to schools, universities, and other targets, when the FBI appeared not to take the case very seriously at all. The culprit, Alan Filion, is awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty to four charges, while it appears that the case has sent Dennis in the wrong direction. (Unrelated, but the swatter Dennis knew in the early 2000s who ended up targeting him eventually was charged and convicted, then died quite young in 2023.)

The New York Times investigates how a teenager died while working at the Nebraska pork production factory Pillen Family Farms, founded by now Gov. Jim Pillen (R), while two years have produced no charges or even explanations for the minor’s family. Maybe Morrissey was right: meat is murder.

In the National Catholic Reporter, John Grosso calls out JD Vance’s gross misuse of both his platform and his soi-disant Catholic faith to blame murder victim Renee Good for her own killing, referring to Vance’s actions as a “a moral stain on the collective witness of our Catholic faith.” I’m secular now, but grew up Catholic and certainly understand the tenets of that religion enough to say ‘hell yeah.’

Ben Lorber at Religion Dispatches points out that Elon Musk openly endorsed a white nationalist position and nobody has said a thing about it.

The notoriously left-wing Wall Street Journal reveals how lobbyists are charging $1 million to secure a pardon from President Trump.

WIRED explains what the “quantum apocalypse,” where existing cryptographic methods would become obsolete almost overnight, might mean for our society and the global economy.

The #3 official at the Interior Department didn’t disclose that her husband held a multi-million dollar water rights contract with a lithium mine that her department approved. That story ran a week ago, and there’s been absolutely nothing since then – I don’t see a single member of Congress so much as calling for an investigation.

An Ohio teenager died from the flu despite being otherwise healthy, because the flu can kill a healthy person. Get vaccinated.

An unvaccinated person with the measles visited the Ark Encounter fiction park in Kentucky, which, well, a person who doesn’t believe in science visited an entire theme park built around ignorance of science.

An NBC News investigation into 31 states that provide county-or other below state-level data found that 70% of jurisdictions have fallen below the herd immunity vaccination rate for pertussis, which is why whooping cough cases are now soaring in this stupid country.

Utah theocrats are pushing to end all gender-affirming care for minors despite a report from the state’s Health and Human Services Department finding positive outcomes from such treatment. Keep your nonsense religion out of my house, please.

Montana revoked the medical license of a quack doctor who diagnosed healthy patients with cancer and treated them with chemotherapy and opioids, killing at least one of them in the process. This came about due to investigative reports from ProPublica, which found that the state renewed Thomas Weiner’s medical license twice despite complaints about his conduct.

The Intercept calls on Democrats to fight back against the MAGA machine’s attempts to destroy trans people, which is straight out of the totalitarian playbook.

Kansas’ Governor Laura Kelly (D) has claimed the deal for a new NFL stadium that provides $4 billion in subsidies to the Chiefs will not cost anything in new taxes. Field of Schemes explains why that’s a lie.

The Guardian’s Andrew Lawrence wrote about how Sinners became the most culturally important film of 2025.

Here are 19 artists who pulled their music from Spotify in 2025.

The notoriously left-wing Financial Times walks us through the executives at “the deepfake porn site formerly known as Twitter.”

A former Times editor spoke about what she perceived as anti-trans bias coming from the top levels at the newspaper. The Times responded, although the paper’s response does not provide evidence to counter the former employee’s claims.

The city of Wilmington announced a plan to have a local nonprofit manage an encampment for homeless people within the city. Mayor John Carney, formerly the Governor of Delaware, had campaigned on making housing and combating homelessness a priority, but this is the first move forward on that front after his decision in October to ban other encampments and step up enforcement against people with nowhere else to go.

Denny Carter writes at his Bad Faith Times how popularism has failed miserably in the UK and Democrats need to give up that strategy entirely.

A new study found that playing tabletop and/or role-playing games provides social, educational, and therapeutic benefits, especially for neurodivergent players.

Rock Manor Games has a Kickstarter up for the latest expansion to the Set a Watch series.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 2025 in music, anti-science, board game news, delaware, kansas, labor rights, links, longreads, religion, social media, stadium scams, stick to baseball, the swamp, trans rights, utah, vaccines

→ December 6, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/6/25.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I wrote my analyses of the Sonny Gray trade; the Dylan Cease signing (featuring a massive temper tantrum by Jays fans in the comments); the Cody Ponce & Devin Williams signings; and the Jhostynxon Garcia-Johan Oviedo trade.

At AV Club, I reviewed the game White Castle Duel and wrote up my weekend at the PAX Unplugged board game convention here in Philly.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter last weekend, right after the holiday.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: ProPublica has the story of another woman killed by Texas Republicans and their anti-abortion crusade. Just worth noting that the unholy marriage between Christians and the anti-abortion movement is an entirely modern creation, not supported by the Bible or the previous 1700 or so years of Christian thought.

Bill McKibben, an environmental activist and lifelong Methodist, writes in the Guardian of how Trump and his allies are doing to America what they did to Christianity – subverting their meanings and destroying them from the inside.

Dr. Atul Gawande, author of The Checklist Manifesto and a professor at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, says that the ending of USAID funding has already killed hundreds of thousands worldwide.

Princeton Prof. Robert P. George, a highly influential conservative philosopher and legal scholar who was in the news recently for his resignation from the board of the Heritage Foundation, spoke to The Chronicle of Higher Education about the state of academic thought and the growing ‘illiberalism’ on the far right.

Also in ProPublica, a Minnesota pediatrician who challenged the methods of the director of the child abuse team at the state’s primary children’s hospital says he was sacked for speaking out. The director in question, Dr. Nancy Harper, appears to still use debunked ideas like “shaken-baby syndrome” and thus overdiagnoses child abuse, separating children from families without sufficient cause.

Twitter turned on location identification for its accounts, and shocker of shockers, a huge number of self-proclaimed MAGA accounts are based in Pakistan or Morocco or elsewhere outside the U.S.

Prof. Jack Goldsmith, a conservative scholar at Harvard Law School who authored the memos authorizing the Bush Administration’s use of warrantless wiretaps in 2004, writes that the U.S. strikes on boats in the Atlantic are murder even if you assume all of the government’s claims are true.

I won’t link to too much about the Olivia Nuzzi scandal, given how much attention it’s received and the fact that Vanity Fair finally undid its mistake in hiring her (although whoever approved that hiring needs to be held accountable for the decision), other than this New Republic piece on the public-health cost of Nuzzi’s utter lack of ethics.

Speaking of which, Kentucky has reported its third infant death in the last year from pertussis, a vaccine-preventable disease; all three infants were unvaccinated, as were their mothers.

Michael Scherer writes about the delusions of RFK Jr., who is dismantling public health in the face of all available evidence and massive pushback from the scientific community.

Dr. Rachael Bedard writes in the Times about her experiences attending an anti-vaccine conference and why these grifters and liars are so easily able to capture people’s minds.

Scientific American has a somewhat related story about how AI chatbots could sway voters’ opinions even when the bots were fabricating ‘facts.’

Drew Magary writes that it is time to declare war on AI, and I couldn’t agree more.

Government bans on the use of puberty blockers for trans teens set a dangerous precedent for further intrusion into individual health-care decisions.

Concerned Republican Senator Susan Collins (ME) is backing a referendum to overturn Maine’s protections for trans students. National media members need to stop calling her a “centrist.” She is as extremist as the rest of the party.

Drain the swamp! Trump commuted the sentence of David Gentile, who had served just two weeks to date for his role in defrauding investors of $1.6 billion through his private equity funds. The corruption is coming from inside the White House.

Tennessee libraries have begun shutting down to purge books that Republican theocrats wish to ban because they contain LGBTQ+ characters or themes.

I’m absolutely stunned that a Turning Point staffer and Arizona city councilwoman has been accused of sexually harassing another TP employee – and kidnapping his daughter when he rebuffed her. People that obsessed with others’ sex and sexuality are telling you something about themselves.

The government of the Caucasus nation of Georgia sprayed anti-government protestors with bromobenzyl cyanide, a toxic form of tear gas introduced by the Allied Powers during World War I, according to a report from the BBC.

Disgraced New York City Mayor Eric Adams signed an order that would ban any city agency heads or staff from doing pretty much anything in line with the BDS movement against the government of Israel, just a month before the door hits him on his way out of Gracie Manson in four weeks. Incoming Mayor Zohran Mamdani could undo this with a similar order, but of course there will be an outcry calling this antisemitism if he does.

Europe’s water reserves, especially those in southern Europe, are drying up due to climate change, while Tehran is approaching day-zero for water.

There’s a new Kickstarter from Spanish publisher Salt & Pepper Games, publishers of the solo game Resist!, for Queen of Spies, another solitaire game, set this time set during World War I.

Mike Drucker’s parody of Isaac Chotiner interviewing Santa Claus is note-perfect.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, academia, arizona, artificial intelligence, board game news, book banning, climate change, journalism, kentucky, links, longreads, maine, minnesota, new york city, religion, science, social media, stick to baseball, texas, the swamp, vaccines

→ October 25, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/25/25.

I ended up unable to do a links post last weekend because I was out scouting the Arizona Fall League (which also prevented me from doing something else on Saturday morning), so we’re back now and at least I can post my AFL wrap-ups. I broke them up into one post on the notable pitchers and another on the notable hitters I saw in the eleven games I attended, but of course I couldn’t see everyone.

Over at Endless Mode, I reviewed the games Twinkle Twinkle, a solid family-level tile-laying game; and Duel for Cardia, an excellent two-player capture-the-flag game that gets a lot of mileage out of its two 16-card decks.

I sent out another issue of my free email newsletter about two weeks ago, so I’m due for another one now that I’ve written some more stuff.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: You’ve probably seen the Politico story on the incredibly racist, anti-Semitic, and generally hateful group chat featuring a bunch of adult Republicans, including a state Senator from Vermont who’s since resigned.

Charlie Warzel writes in The Atlantic (not my employer) about how AI slop is taking over the internet, stifling or threatening to stifle real creativity. He’s casting about a little for an analogy; it’s just Cory Doctorow’s enshittification write large. (Link is free to read.)

Mother Jones exposes the hacking software company First Wap, whose products use SS7 to track phone users anywhere in the world, without requiring that they click on a malicious link or otherwise put some sort of tracking app on their phones.

ProPublica found that ICE has held at least 170 U.S. citizens against their will so far, in many cases physically abusing them, and I’m sure that’s an undercount. The site also reported that Kristi Noem took campaign donations from a dark-money group for her personal use.

The Athletic (my employer) has a story by Carson Kessler and Gabby Herzig about catfishing scams that convince men they’re talking to top women golfers, eventually conning them out of thousands of dollars and posing new safety risks to the athletes from men who think they have romantic relationships with them.

An Arizona wannabe influencer tried to extort a local bakery, JL Patisserie, for a collaboration fee, or at least a bunch of free food, in exchange for a favorable video. The bakery declined; the woman showed up anyway, and then posted a negative review that had some false claims in it, so the bakery posted a point-by-point response … and then all hell broke loose. I went there and got a chocolate-pistachio croissant for $8.50; it was probably the best croissant I’ve ever had, and I’ve been to France three times.

Starving children screaming in agony: the inevitable result of the Trump Administration’s devastation of the USAID program.

Sen. “Cancun” Ted Cruz is targeting Wikipedia, claiming the site – which has extensive rules on reliable & verifiable sourcing – has a “left-wing bias.” Well, if you’re saying facts have a left-wing bias…

Christian Pastors Gone Wild: A Utah youth pastor says young black men should be executed and cites the Bible in his arguments … a former South Carolina pastor was sentenced to 20 years in prison after authorities found over 5000 CSAM images on his phone … an Ohio pastor who said that being gay was a “health risk” and that gay literature made him “sick” has been arrested and charged with raping a 14-year-old girl. No trans people or drag queens were involved in any of these stories.

Indiana University fired its student newspaper’s advisor, then shut down the newspaper entirely because the students were publishing … news. Purdue students stepped up and distributed 3000 copies of their own paper, with the front-page headline “We Student Journalists Must Stand Together,” on IU’s campus.

The Guardian reported on the justified backlash against comics who took the Saudi dictators’ money to play the Riyadh comedy festival.

Former anti-vaxxers told Raw Story that they’re “horrified” by RFK Jr’s gutting of the American health system, including eroding Americans’ trust in vaccines (which are, again, highly safe and effective). Meanwhile, measles cases continue to rise across the U.S.

And hundreds of anti-science bills have hit state legislatures as evangelicals and ‘do-your-research’ loons try to make America die of preventable diseases again.

A viral story about an Olive Garden waitress who threw breadsticks at customers is fake … but uses the identity of a real person, with her picture, and it’s made her life needlessly difficult.

Texas police who said they used a network of license-plate cameras to try to track the safety of a woman who’d self-administered an abortion. Turns out, of course, they were actually trying to track her so they could charge her with murder.

Professor Lisa Moore, who heads the Department of Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at the University of Texas, writes that she doesn’t recognize the place where she’s worked and taught for 35 years.

Two Harvard professors wrote that the school must reject the Trump Administration’s so-called “compact” and take a public stand against it.

This is how you report on the President: “Clueless Donald Trump, 79, Humiliated After Dodging Legal Question.”

Did President Trump push Israel to accept a ceasefire to protect his own financial relationships with the Qatari emirate?

As Trump spends $130 million or more on the vanity-project ballroom at the White House – which he is not allowed to do without Congressional approval, not that they’ll stop him from doing anything – a typhoon destroyed villages and killed at least one person in Alaska.

Data centers make bad neighbors. If they’re trying to build one near you, speak out against it.

An El Paso family claims a Border Patrol agent shot and killed their dog during a search; the incident took place in September and ended up in the national news earlier this month, but I can’t find any more recent update.

Kevin Howley, a writer and media critic, writes about the harm of the “fact-free anarchy” that has taken over public discourse in the U.S. with the full complicity of the mainstream media.

Defector has a good laugh at the Free Press writer – I’m not calling them journalists, sorry – Olivia Reingold, who is complaining that most of her friends are shunning her after she wrote a story claiming that the Gazan babies who died of starvation were actually sick with other things, so it wasn’t that big of a tragedy. I need a quantum violin to play for her, because anything else would be too large.

The hosts of a left-wing podcast called out Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) for his votes for Trump appointees and generally clubby attitude towards the rise of authoritarianism.

Your brain adjusts to doing things you think are morally wrong, so that doing the same sort of thing again becomes easier and easier. The good news is you can go in the other direction by doing the right thing, and make it easier to be honest or brave or otherwise virtuous.

Raas: A Dance of Love is an upcoming board game from two Indian designers, now up on Gamefound; it’s the first game I’ve seen that uses an aspect of Indian culture and is also designed by people from the subcontinent.

Boardgamegeek has an entertaining designer diary from two of my favorites, the folks behind the new game The White Castle Duel, as well as the original The White Castle and The Red Cathedral.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, board game news, environment, frauds, indiana, links, longreads, neuroscience, religion, stick to baseball, texas, the swamp, vaccines

→ July 5, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/5/25.

I posted my final (mostly) Big Board for the 2025 draft this week for subscribers to the Athletic, and then held a Q&A to take questions on it on Wednesday.

Paste Games is now Endless Mode, still under the Paste umbrella, but its own site with more coverage of all things gaming, which will include about twice as many stories from me each year. My first story at the new site is a review of the 2024 reprint of Gold West, a great, family-level strategy game that went out of print with the demise of publisher Tasty Minstrel Games.

I’ll try to get another issue of my free email newsletter out this upcoming week, before the draft drowns me in content.

I appeared on Seattle radio to discuss the Mariners’ farm system and possible draft picks this week, and talked mostly Orioles prospects and the draft with Ryan Ripken on his Youtube show.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Hollywood Reporter explains that Pixar’s Elio, which is on pace to be the studio’s biggest box-office flop ever, was stripped of some key thematic elements in what appears to be an attempt to remove queer-coded parts of the film and make the main character more “masculine.” The only Pixar films to fail to reach $100 million in domestic box office gross were the ones affected in some way by the pandemic (Onward, Luca, Soul, and Turning Red); Elio is at $49 million after two weeks, and saw a 44% decline from week 1 to week 2.

This investigative report from The New York Times looks into how Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, current Vice-President of the United Arab Emirates and owner of the Manchester City football team, consorts with violent rebel leaders and guides his country’s efforts in various foreign wars, all while avoiding serious scrutiny from western press.

Futurism looked at incidents of “ChatGPT psychosis,” where people using the energy-hogging AI tool descend into madness, believing the software is telling them deep secrets about the universe or communicating from beyond the grave or other nonsense. There are no guardrails around these LLMs and clearly no will at the federal level to even consider them.

Also from Futurism, an AI slop story in three parts: They broke down how the artist Velvet Sundown, which had racked up over half a million streams on Spotify, almost certainly did not exist; they ran a follow-up where the ‘band’ claimed they weren’t just an AI fabrication; and they had the last word when the clown behind the scam admitted the music was all made by AI.

The Guardian, of all places, has one of the most thorough takedowns of the Athletics’ abortive attempt to move to Las Vegas, where no one has even broken ground on a new stadium.

The BBC has the story of a man who was stalked and harassed for years by a preacher at his church after he rejected her advances – and where the bishop didn’t believe him, of course.

It was not a great week for the New York Times’ coverage of Zohran Mamdani, but this editorial by M. Gessen nails how Mamdani’s opponents cover their anti-Muslim bigotry in the veneer of claims that he’s antisemitic. Gessen points out that Mamdani is the only mayoral candidate who has spoken about real antisemitism and the costs it imposes on Jews in New York and beyond.

The Times also investigated conditions at the “tropical gulag” in El Salvador where Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia was held – and apparently tortured.

This story from Tiernan Cannon at Paste is the best assessment of the Bob Vylan kerfuffle at Glastonbury and the related, ongoing controversy over Kneecap. I will only add that I saw more stories on the BBC’s site about what Vylan’s vocalist said than about the IDF dropping a 500-pound bomb on a Gaza café, which may be an actual war crime.

A couple of rich homeowners in King County decided that some very old trees were blocking their view, so they had the trees cut down. Except the trees were on public land, and no one is taking responsibility for the actual destruction.

Surprising no one, researchers found that support for anti-trans laws and policies is tied to the rise of authoritarian sentiments and the desire for others to conform to your own views. Religiosity is also correlated with transphobic beliefs, of course.

Oregon state Rep. Greg Smith (R) may have used his position in the legislature to raise his own pay as executive director of the Columbia Development Authority.

King County, Washington, Assessor John Wilson is running for County Executive and said last November that “the foremost challenge facing the county is we’ve got to do something about crime.” He was arrested this week for stalking his ex-fiancée and violating a restraining order.

Trump’s pick to lead the Office of Special Council, Paul Ingrassia, has ties to antisemitic and white nationalist extremists and has shared a 9/11 conspiracy video.

Vox’s Unexplainable podcast talks to Dr. Marlena Fejzo about her work to identify the genetic factors behind morning sickness – and the lack of funding to find a cure.

Seeing this story about a new life form found in tar on a ship that docked in Cleveland just two days after I saw 28 Days Later for the first time does not give me warm feelings.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: artificial intelligence, baseball, immigration, links, longreads, movies, new york city, oregon, religion, science, seattle, stick to baseball, the swamp, trans rights

→ June 21, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/21/25.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I posted my annual ten-year redraft column, looking back at the 2015 class, along with the companion piece on the first-rounders who didn’t pan out. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I have a free email newsletter and more people should sign up for it.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: GroundUp has the first part of a series on the Mozambican children that President Trump has left to die by decimating USAID. No one who claims to be pro-life, or Christian, or even remotely human can support this atrocity. It is a genocide in slow motion.

That Brevard County sheriff who threatened to kill protesters just a day or so because the Minnesota assassinations has a long history of racial profiling and corruption.

This piece is from 2022, but I found it while looking into the band Tulip, whose latest single popped up on a Spotify playlist. Turns out their origin story is fascinating – the two leads were married to other people and members of a conservative evangelical church, then fell in love and were excommunicated. They left the church and formed a symphonic metal band.

North Dakota voters voted to create an ethics commission that could hold officials accountable for violations. Some of the state’s Republican leaders are trying to emasculate it. I wonder why.

Meanwhile, Texas wasted $2 billion in taxpayer money building part of a border wall, which is about as useful as part of a wall tends to be, at least at keeping something out.

ICE is trying to deport a Texas woman who is married to a U.S. citizen, arresting her when she returned to the mainland U.S. from her honeymoon in the Virgin Islands. Ward Sakeik is considered ‘stateless,’ as she was born a refugee and arrived in the U.S. on a refugee visa when she was 8. The federal government wants to deport her to Israel, even though she has never been there or in Palestine. This is not someone who arrived here illegally, or overstayed a visa, or committed a crime.

A flag that’s popular among Christian nationalists flew over the Small Business Administration building this past week, in case you’re still confused about what’s really happening.

Two Michigan parents let their baby girl die of jaundice because they believed God would heal her. They’re going to prison, in part because they’ve said they’d do the same thing all over again. They belong to a Pentecostal church that preaches faith healing, but the church apparently doesn’t proscribe seeing doctors.

Delaware’s Senate, which is currently controlled by a Democratic supermajority, is really getting down to the key issues confronting us today, as they passed a resolution that they should look and see if public schools are at a disadvantage in athletics.

Harvard Magazine explains the university’s conflict with the Administration and what’s at stake in the fight. One of my classmates, Joanna Weiss, is the magazine’s new editor.

This column from the Seattle Times (syndicated from the Washington Post) claims that there’s a simple fitness test that’s highly correlated to your future life expectancy. I can do it but definitely wobble a little on the jump back up. I think that’s still a 9.
Rex Huppke writes that we need to take healthy policy-making away from RFK Jr., as his plans are going to kill people. My Representative, Lisa Blunt Rochester (D), issued a statement decrying his decision to fire all of the smart people on the ACIP vaccine-advisory committee and replace them with a group of Minions.

Congressional Republicans are about to kill the Grad PLUS loan program for graduate studies, further trying to wipe out the U.S.’s substantial advantage in higher education and eventually driving shortages in important fields like engineering.

JK Rowling called the Scottish newspaper The National “anti-woman,” so the editor of the paper, Laura Webster, responded.

Astronomers at CalTech and Harvard may have found the answer to where all the missing matter in the universe is. Turns out it was just behind the couch.

Stonemaier Games announced the summer release of their newest title, Vantage, an open-world, cooperative, exploration game where players have all crash-landed on a planet and can communicate with each other but can’t see anyone else’s locations or views.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: astronomy, board game news, delaware, florida, harvard, immigration, links, longreads, north dakota, physics, police, religion, stick to baseball, texas, the swamp, usaid

→ November 23, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/23/24.

Nothing new from me beyond the dish this week. I’ll write up big transactions when they happen, and I should have a board game review up next week, although the game I’m targeting I have yet to play, so we’ll see. EDIT: Hey, we got a trade last night, after I’d scheduled this post, so here’s my writeup of the Jonathan India-Brady Singer trade.

If you’re looking for me on social media, you’re most likely to find me on Bluesky and Threads. I’m winding things down on Twitter, just posting links there, and I locked the account due to the change in the blocking policy. You can also subscribe to my free email newsletter.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This Esquire first-person longread on what it is like to be homeless in America in 2024 is beautifully told and especially important given what is to come. It should end up on the shortlist for a Pulitzer.

And in a related story, Harvard magazine looks at the causes of our housing crisis, led by the lack of affordable housing (and of any will to build it) along with draconian zoning laws that pull the ladder up behind existing homeowners.

Florida State Rep. Rick Roth (R) is a farmer turned politician who long fought attempts to crack down on immigration, but turned into an anti-immigrant hawk in 2023 – hurting his constituents but not him. Funny how that works!

An Israeli student who shared four photos of the country’s attack on Gaza right after the Hamas attacks of October of 2023 found herself in prison for violating the country’s laws on “incitement” and her prospects for a career all but ruined.

Trump’s new candidate for Attorney General is Pam Bondi, to whom his foundation donated $25,000 while she was investigating the foundation as Florida AG. She then closed the investigation. Is that a bribe? Do we want an Attorney General who may have taken a bribe, and changed her actions as a result of it?

A police chief in West Virginia raped a teenager and then paid her $100 to cover it up, according to this investigative piece from the Washington Post.

At least seven Oklahoma school districts refused to show the state’s school superintendent Ryan Walters’ video promoting his Christian nationalist, pro-Trump agent to students, as he attempted to mandate. Walters spent millions of dollars on “Trump Bibles,” paying twenty times the cost for a regular Bible just to curry favor.

Our political system is horribly broken – and, more importantly, voters believe it is. Democrats have to change their entire strategy to reflect this.

Carole Cadwalladr of the Guardian offers 20 tips for surviving the coming “post-truth” world and potential autocracy.

The eXodus: The Guardian will no longer post on X. This month, the site has lost users at the highest clip since Elon Musk took the site over. Truthdig makes the case for abandoning the site. Writer John Paul Brammer did the same. Meanwhile, Bluesky is exploding; my follower count has more than tripled in two weeks, and as a result I’m much more active there than anywhere else. Brian Kirby, a longtime marketing professional with a focus on children’s literature, argues that X is already dead, as a huge number of its accounts are inactive, so publishers should leave it.

Startup Character.AI is hosting chatbots that groom users who indicate that they’re underage. I’m about as far from a Luddite as you can get, but the public applications of AI so far all suck. And they use too much energy.

Roxane Gay writes, “Enough.”

Some mainstream media outlets, including the usually reliable NPR, have already begun sanewashing the anti-vaccine loon RFK Jr, writes Benjamin Mazer in the Atlantic, who also says we should call him what he is – a crank.

The New Republic’s Melody Schreiber writes that we can expect fewer vaccines and more E. Coli outbreaks under a Trump/RFK Jr administration – and that was before COVID denier Jay Bhattacharya’s name came up as a possible head of the NIH.

Meanwhile, influenza H5N1, commonly known as bird flu, may have mutated to become more transmissible to humans. Great timing.

Children who are not vaccinated against COVID-19 are much more likely to develop the life-threatening reaction MIS-C after infection, according to a new study.

ProPublica reported on two maternal deaths that resulted from Georgia’s draconian abortion ban, using documents obtained from a state committee on maternal mortality. The state then fired the entire committee.

Oliver Darcy interviewed The Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel about the Big Tech oligarchs who support and enable Trump.

North Carolina state Sen. Danny Britt (R) responded to a constituent who raised concerns about the state’s abortion ban by telling her to “move to China” or Russia or Venezuela. As of Wednesday, I haven’t seen any apology or restorative action from Britt or his office.

GQ interviewed Richard Gadd on what life has been like since Reindeer Baby burst on the scene and swept the Emmys.

The Seattle Times reports on the effort by the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe to restore the Elwha River by building logjams to help undo over a century of damage wrought by humans.

Ken White, aka Popehat, wrote about one of his own cases, defeating what he called “the most purely evil and abusive SLAPP suit” he has ever seen. A 21-year-old Stanford student named King Vanga was charged with gross vehicular manslaughter for a car accident that killed two people. He then sued the family members of the deceased for defamation because they contacted the school with the details of the criminal case. Really.

Board game news: Fort Circle Games, publishers of Votes for Women and The Shores of Tripoli, has a new Kickstarter up for the SCOTUS-themed game First Monday in October.

Board game designer Kory Heath, whose games include Zendo, Blockers, and this year’s hit game The Gang, took his own life this week at age 54. Boardgamegeek has a memoriam to Heath and links to other tributes.

I’ve mentioned the death of board game evangelist Amber Cook a few times now. She left behind a 6-year-old son, and there are several fundraising efforts to try to help provide for his future, including a huge bundle of RPGs available for just $25, over 90% of their aggregate list prices.

From McSweeney’s: Sure, I Voted for Someone Whose Policies Might Kill You, but Now’s the Time to Put Aside Our Differences.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, board game news, coronavirus, florida, gaza, georgia, housing, links, longreads, oklahoma, police, religion, social media, stick to baseball, the swamp, tv, vaccines, west virginia

→ July 13, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/13/24.

I posted a third projection for Sunday’s first round of the MLB draft, and updated my Big Board of the top 100 prospects in the draft class, both for subscribers to the Athletic. I also took your questions here in a Klawchat on Thursday. On Saturday, I’ll have a new post with smaller scouting reports on about 20-25 more players in the draft class, guys whose names you might hear Sunday or Monday but who didn’t make the cut for the top 100.

At Paste, I reviewed Neotopia, a perfectly cromulent filler game for family play that didn’t bring anything new to the tabletop. I do like the way the scoring forces players to think about balance throughout the game, though.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Gateway Church founder Robert Morris blamed his 12-year-old victim for the sexual abuse he inflicted on her. And so did Morris’s wife, according to the victim, Cindy Clemishere, who courageously came forward a month ago with the story, leading to Morris’s abdication and the resignations of four other Church leaders. No drag queens, no trans people, just a pastor and the leaders of a giant, tax-exempt religious organization.

Texas Monthly exposed how the Texas Senate has buried sexual harassment claims against its members and senior staffers even after it revised its policies to supposedly address the issue.

Also in Texas – what a great government they have down there! – the state has spent years siphoning public funds to so-called “pregnancy crisis centers,” usually religious groups that try to convince pregnant women not to have abortions, but there’s no evidence it has had any effect at all, aside from violating the principle of separation of church and state.

Vaccine denialist and antisemite Robert F. Kennedy Jr. helped spawn a measles outbreak in Samoa that killed several children. He’s denying that, too.

Vaccines save lives. We need new strategies to increase vaccine uptake and counter bullshit from bad actors like RFK Jr.

Donald Trump is Unfit to Lead: He Is Dangerous in Word, Deed, and Action. The NY Times editorial page belatedly gets the point. Biden may not be fit to be President. Trump is a threat to our democracy.

Trump is also lying to the press and public by saying he doesn’t know about Project 2025. We’ll see if Inquirer columnist Will Bunch’s belief that Project 2025 is poison for Trump’s candidacy is valid.

A Russian Kh-101 cruise missile struck a children’s hospital in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, killing at least two children. Trump has said he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want.”

It doesn’t matter what Trump says or does, though. His supporters don’t waver. If they think an action is bad, and Trump does it, they change their opinion of the action. If that’s not cultlike behavior, well, I don’t have a better word for it – and the media needs to cover his campaign accordingly.

A former student of the Kyrene School District in southeast Phoenix is suing the district for failing to address a long string of antisemitic bullying incidents that already resulted in a citation from the U.S. Department of Education.

Meanwhile, Arizona’s public schools chief is trying to push the right-wing PragerU materials into classrooms, promoting the misinformation group’s content on the department website, by claiming that teachers have only been presenting the “extreme left side” in classrooms. I’m very glad I didn’t raise my daughter there.

Our brains are wired to see patterns – even when they aren’t there. Which, coincidentally, is the theme of a single released last month by Mercury Rev.

Voters in Jackson County, Missouri, resoundingly rejected a sales tax hike to use taxpayer funds for stadium projects for the privately-owned Chiefs and Royals just three months ago, so, of course, the owners are just going to try to put it up for another vote and threaten to move the teams out of state.

Many species of tropical frogs are endangered because of a fungus that causes the disease chytridiomycosis; it turns out the fungus is heat-sensitive and a sort of ‘sauna’ can help kill the fungus and save the frogs.

Plaid Hat Games introduced a Kickstarter for Wandering Galaxy, a board game set in the Crossroads universe.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, board game news, environment, links, longreads, metoo, neuroscience, religion, science, stadium scams, stick to baseball, texas, trump, ukraine, vaccines

→ June 1, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/1/24.

Nothing new this week at the Athletic, but I have a top 50 pro prospect rankings update slated for Monday the 3^rd.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the roll-and-write game French Quarter, from the designers of Three Sisters and Fleet: the Dice Game. I think it’s fantastic, although it’s harder than any of their previous games to play well.

I’ll be back on Stadium on Monday at 2 pm ET for Diamond Dreams and somewhere in the 2:30 pm show Unpacked for one more segment. We’ll discuss some of my new rankings on the first show and have an interview with Colt Emerson lined up.

A million bonus points if you know what today is, by the way. I’ll accept two answers, although one is more obvious than the other.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: You’ve probably seen this Guardian longread on the so-called “pro-natalist” family who, among other things, think nothing of physically abusing their children in the name of “discipline.” My issue with the piece is this: The parents claim that their parenting is “evidence-based,” yet they then do many things, including smacking their children, that are unequivocally contrary to all available evidence – and the piece’s author does not push back in any way. That is your job as a journalist.

This New York Times retrospective on Cass Elliot and the vicious hoax about how she died is an empathetic and thoughtful look at a major figure in pop music history who was, unfortunately, best remembered for that false rumor.

WIRED has the story of Jane Willenbring, the victim of sexual harassment by disgraced Professor David Marchant while they worked in Antarctica, whose willingness to come forward led to Marchant’s firing and the renaming of the glacier that once bore his name.

Two stories on the 19^th century state of Mississippi: In DeSoto County, a hospital transfers some patients to jail while they await mental health treatment, with the results you would expect. Meanwhile, Mississippi Today also obtained transcripts of WhatsApp messages from the soi-disant “Goon Squad” of racist, abusive cops who terrorized a central Mississippi County – including torturing two Black men and shooting one in the face – for a generation.

A new working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found a strong positive correlation between public school expenditures and Black student achievement during school and later in life. They used data from that same backwards country of Mississippi, which has been busy trying to find ways to spend less on education.

A new paper in Nature shows how researchers used machine learning to help explain how insect wing hinges work. We know of four separate times when a species has developed the ability to fly, but insects are the only case where flight evolved without muscles or nerves in the wings.

Quanta has the story of two groups of physicists using machine-learning to try to understand the nature of the ‘missing’ dimensions required by superstring theory.

Splinter’s Jim Vorel looks at the slow death of QAnon and the even more virulent strains that have replaced it. There’s a strong sense of “When Prophecy Fails” here – when people realized they believed in a con, they don’t just come to their senses; they look for another con to believe.

Greenpeace sided with the anti-science crowd and blocked the introduction of the nutritious Golden Rice variety into the Philippines, claiming, among other things, a “human health risk” that has never been demonstrated with any genetically-modified foodstuff.

A nurse at NYU’s Langone Health hospital mentioned the genocide in Gaza during her speech accepting an award for her compassion in caring for mothers who’d lost their babies. The hospital fired her. They’ve said she was warned before “not to bring her views on this divisive and charged issue into the workplace.” The hospital took its name from Republican billionaire donor Kenneth Langone, who has previously compared critics of rising income inequality to Nazis.

UC-Irvine law professor David Kaye writes in the New York Times that we should allow the International Criminal Court to do its job after the Court announced charges against the leaders of Hamas and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. The U.S. has remained outside of the ICC for twenty years, even though we could do the most good by accepting its tenets and supporting its efforts to pursue war-crimes charges – as we have asked the ICC to do against Vladimir Putin.

Many students walked out of Harvard’s commencement last week, spurred by the University’s corporate board’s decision to overrule a faculty vote that would have allowed 13 students to graduate after they’d been suspended for their actions in the campus protests over the Israeli war on Gaza.

Even before Friday’s verdict, Greg Sargent noted that Trump’s anti-media rhetoric had turned more dangerous with the convicted felon’s apparent endorsement of a rant about how he’ll “get rid of all you fucking liberals.”

The Washington Post sat on the story of Samuel Alito hanging pro-insurrection and pro-nationalist flags at his house for several years. The New York Times has been reporting on the story now, including this very measured piece on what seems to have happened, including disputes over the order of some of the events in the neighborhood dispute.

The Republican candidate for Governor in North Carolina is a QAnon-touting, Holocaust-denying, antisemitic, anti-LGBT conspiracy theorist. Will he cost Trump a swing state he won in 2020?

A passenger on a United flight into Fresno this week has tested positive for measles. This should be a criminal offense – they put many, many other people at risk through their actions, like driving drunk.

Michael Hiltzik writes in the LA Times that now Democrats are just as bad at Republicans in putting political concerns over science, as Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-CA) continues his sham hearings promoting the debunked lab-leak hypothesis.

RFK Jr.’s turn into vaccine disinformation came after he spoke to and then totally ignored Dr. Paul Offit, co-inventor of the rotavirus vaccine.

Pope Francis apologized for using the Italian equivalent of the f-slur and saying there was too much of that in the priesthood when arguing against allowing celibate gay men to take orders. I think there’s too much emphasis here on the word choice and nowhere near enough on pretty much everything that lies behind it.

Two board game Kickstarters of note this week: 25^th Century Games (who published French Quarter) just put up a new crowdfunding effort for a four-pack of smaller games that you can back as a bundle or individually.

Luthier is the latest complex game from Paverson Games, publisher of last year’s excellent heavy game Distilled. There’s a full site up for the game but the crowdfunding link isn’t open yet. I saw Luthier at PAX Unplugged; it’s gorgeous and huge, but my guess is it’s too long a game for my personal tastes and attention span.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, board game news, environment, gaza, harvard, links, longreads, measles, metoo, mississippi, physics, police, religion, scotus, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ February 24, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/24/24.

My entire prospect rankings for 2024 are now up for subscribers to The Athletic, including:

I held a Klawchat earlier this week to take questions on the lists and more.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Apiary, the latest game from publisher Stonemaier Games (Wingspan, Scythe, Tapestry); The Search for Lost Species, a deduction game and sequel to my #1 game of 2020, The Search for Planet X; and The White Castle, my #1 game of 2023, designed by the folks behind The Red Cathedral.

I also sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter last week, about how we had to put our cat, Hexie, down when a blood clot traveled to his descending aorta and paralyzed his hind quarters. It’s been tough.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Religious zealot and billionaire Tim Dunn is behind the Texas GOP’s hard shift to the right as he tries to remake the state into a Christian theocracy. Imagine if a Muslim billionaire used his money in a similar way. It’s certainly not about following the teachings of Jesus – as does this Catholic charity in El Paso, which is now facing closure at the hands of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
I’ll also just mention here that religious ‘nones’ are now the largest single group in the U.S. The term refers to anyone who does not identify themselves as affiliated with a church or religion, including atheists, agnostics, ‘spiritual but not religious’ people, deists, and others.
The New York Times had an excellent story on the athletes recruited to The New School in Florida, as the state pours money into the once-liberal institution to try to turn it into a southern version of Hillsdale College. The kids are going to be all right, despite the adults’ best efforts.
Gary, Indiana, has an ongoing lawsuit against gun manufacturers over their tacit allowance of illegal gun sales. The Indiana Republican Party is trying to pass a bill that would invalidate the suit and protect gun manufacturers from liability.
A former minister in the Christian cult The Truth admitted to molesting a young boy through his role in the ‘church,’ part of a decades-long pattern of abuse and cover-ups in the home-based movement, also known as Two by Twos.
A doctor who went to Gaza to help victims of Israel’s ongoing assault wrote in the LA Times that what he saw “wasn’t war – it was annihilation.”
In the face of growing hate towards Palestinians, some chefs and restaurant owners who come from or trace their ancestry to Palestine are choosing to emphasize their identity
The 76ers’ proposed downtown arena is likely to cost the city millions in lost tax revenue while also risking Philly’s vibrant Chinatown neighborhood. Let the owners pay for it themselves.
There’s a huge measles outbreak in Florida thanks to parents rejecting universal medical advice and skipping the MMR vaccine. Florida’s Surgeon General is telling parents they can still send their unvaccinated kids to school. Measles is the most contagious virus that infects humans, and it can kill children and adults, either during the infection itself or up to a decade later due to an incurable neurological condition called SSPE. This is abject insanity. The MMR vaccine is safe, effective, and led to the (temporary) eradication of measles from the Americas, until Andrew Wakefield and the fucking idiots who follow him brought it back.
KFF Health News looks at how these fringe anti-science views became so dominant in American politics, and what it might mean this November.
Meanwhile, vaccine denialists are everywhere, downplaying the severity of measles. I see it every day on the disinformation hellhole of Twitter. Measles kills, maims, deafens, and more. It can lead to weeks of hospitalizations. I would love to see health insurers insist on vaccinations for coverage, because why should my premiums go up just because someone else was too dumb or misinformed to make the right choice?
West Virginia Republicans saw this outbreak and decided to exempt private schools from the state’s strict vaccination requirements, because I guess having the nation’s highest death rate from opioids wasn’t good enough!
Timor-Leste (formerly known as East Timor) is battling simultaneous outbreaks of three mosquito-borne diseases: Zike, dengue, and chikungunya. We need more releases of genetically modified mosquitoes and mosquitoes infected with Wolbachia bacteria to reduce their numbers before these diseases spread further.
Tim Burke, formerly of Deadspin, was indicted in Florida for allegedly hacking Fox News video streams of Kanye West and Tucker Carlson … that Burke says were unprotected by passwords or other encryption. This is a freedom of the press issue. You could contact your Representative or Senator, especially if any serve on their respective Judiciary Committees, as I’ve done. An attack on any journalist is an attack on all of us.
A Texas attorney poisoned his pregnant then-wife with abortion pills, which didn’t cause the pregnancy to terminate but caused enough damage to the fetus that their daughter has developmental delays. He was sentenced to merely 180 days in jail, because abortion bans are not about saving babies (or fetuses), but about subjugating and controlling women.
Abortion rights are a consistent, winning issue for Democrats, writes Ilyse Hogue in the New Republic, and the party needs to lean into that more.
We got an answer, belatedly, on the Hugo Awards’ exclusion of certain works, notably those by Chinese or Chinese-American authors, and it was craven submission to Chinese government involvement. Dave McCarty, a sci-fi fan who was head of the Hugo Committee for 2023, and others resigned and/or were censured. One of the winners, Adrian Tchaikovsky, has already said he will no longer cite or list the award among his honors.
This satirical column from The Crimson mocks national reporters’ obsession with campus life at Harvard.
Posts from the transphobic ‘activist’ LibsOfTikTok led to at least 21 bomb threats against schools, libraries, small businesses, and more. Twitter has done nothing to shut Chaya Raichik down, despite the real-world consequences to her actions.
Pamela Paul wrote an anti-trans editorial in The New York Times. It was riddled with inaccuracies.
The co-founder of the anti-LGBTQ, book-banning advocacy group Moms for Liberty engaged in threesomes with her husband and another woman. Bridget Ziegler is on the school board in Sarasota County, Florida, and her husband Christian (heh) was the former head of the Florida Republican Party. MfL’s influence appears to be waning as more people catch on to their radical agenda.
Seattle cops raided several LGBTQ+ bars in the city, taking photos of patrons, citing regulations banning “lewd conduct.” Owners and patrons fought back, and the state’s liquor board, which oversees such businesses, agreed to knock it off and end this collaboration with the police.
New York’s Nassau County issued an order banning teams with trans athletes from using public fields or arenas, yet another pointless, cruel rule pandering to bigots, a solution in search of a problem.
Republicans smeared Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) over comments she made – but they used a bogus translation to do so.
An old indie blog called The Hairpin that closed in 2018 has come back to life as a zombie clickbait farm.
A mother of four was shot and killed while driving to work in Philadelphia in November, and her family says the police aren’t doing enough to try to solve the case.
There’s a Kickstarter open for Conservas, a new solo bag-building game from designer Scott Almes (Tiny Epic Galaxes, Beer & Bread).

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, board game news, florida, guns, harvard, hugo awards, indiana, lgbt rights, links, longreads, new york, philadelphia, religion, seattle, social media, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines, west virginia

→ January 13, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/13/24.

I had two posts this week for subscribers to The Athletic – a breakdown of the Michael Busch trade for prospects and another of the Cubs signing Shota Imanaga. Somehow, this brought the Matt Mervis stans back out off hiding.

At Paste, I published a full review of the game The White Castle, my top new game of 2023. Fries are extra.

I also sent out a fresh edition of my free email newsletter earlier in the week. You should sign up, as I’m posting less to Twitter these days, although you can also find me on Threads, Bluesky, and Spoutible.

A light week for links, probably because I was on the phone so much working on prospect stuff that I was offline more than usual (at least twice because my eyes hurt from so much screen time)…

This fantastic episode of The Hidden Brain talks about persistence and uses R.A. Dickey as one of its core examples – and gets his story right.

In Nyack, New York, sex abuse claims against a former high school baseball coach have resurfaced in an attempt to get the name of the head coach (who is not the accused abuser) removed from the school’s field. Several former players have accused assistant coach Peter Recla, who coached at Nyack High School in the late 1990s and early 2000s, of grooming and sexual abuse. The district settled a lawsuit with some of the victims in November.

Nigerian megachurch leader TB Joshua, who was not a drag queen, tortured, raped, and abused many of his worshippers until his death in 2021. A BBC investigation found cases of all of the above as well as forced abortions and cult-like control spanning twenty years.

Now Florida schools are pulling dictionaries and encyclopedias from shelves because they may have “objectionable” content like … facts.

Following the lead of Iowa, Mississippi has withdrawn from a free federal program providing funds to states to feed underprivileged schoolchildren over the summer, part of a new Republican drive against the “welfare state.” I don’t understand why this is minor news, but a rat-shaped hole in Chicago gets coverage in national papers.

Meanwhile, a third of the current Representatives and Senators are election deniers. This just isn’t compatible with democracy as a going concern. It’s one or the other.

Are fast-food prices really going up, and if so, is it because of rising wages? It’s not that simple, according to this story on Vox. Input prices have gone up substantially in the last few years as well. Also, the $18 Big Mac story that went viral was about a McDonald’s at a rest stop with a captive audience.

This NY Times story explains a new type of streaming fraud, where copycats steal obscure artists’ songs and repackage them under fake artist names. What’s interesting here is that Warner ended up distributing some of the bogus tracks.
Birmingham Children’s Hospital in England is inundated with measles cases because anti-vaxxers convinced enough parents not to vaccinate their children against the incredibly contagious and dangerous virus.

Paste profiled SPRINTS as the Irish punk band released their first full-length album Letter to Self.

If you live in Ohio and are concerned about the recent anti-trans law passed by the state’s heavily gerrymandered legislature over Gov. Mike DeWine (R)’s veto, here are some things you can do to help the cause.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: book banning, election denial, florida, links, mississippi, Music, ohio, psychology, religion, stick to baseball, trans rights

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