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Stick to baseball, 10/17/20.

Just one piece this week for subscribers to the Athletic as I work on the top 40 free agents ranking, which will run a few days after the World Series ends: Nick Groke, our Rockies beat writer, asked me a bunch of questions about Colorado’s farm system, and I dutifully answered them. Klawchat, board game reviews, and dish posts should return next week.

My guest on this week’s episode of The Keith Law Show was my old partner-in-crime Eric Karabell, although Bias Cat did not make an appearance. My podcast is now available on Amazon podcasts as well as iTunes and Spotify.

I’m due to send out a fresh edition of my free email newsletter this weekend as well. We’ll see how that works out for me.

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…

The New England Journal of Medicine has just weighed in on the election, urging Americans to vote Trump out of office, the first time it’s done so in its 208-year history. This comes on the heels of Scientific American and Nature doing the same. The Lancet published an editorial calling on governments to act now in accordance with the science, attacking the so-called herd immunity approach and supporting continued attempts to control the virus’s spread.

Now some longreads: ProPublica details the fall of the CDC, undermined from above by the anti-science Trump Administration and from within by craven, spineless leadership.

David Wallace-Wells writes for New York that there’s still no plan to stop the pandemic, a third crest is approaching, and we’re basically waiting until January – and hoping that brings a functional government – to do anything about it. Imagine how quickly this Administration would have committed a few billion dollars to responding if 200,000 Americans died from terror attacks rather than a virus.

The President and his children have turned the government into a sort of personal ATM, as exposed by this New York Times investigative piece, which you’d think would be the sort of thing to turn off the very voters who said they wanted him to drain the swamp.

Sara Benincasa’s essay “Fred and Me” is just wonderful and I won’t spoil it in the least.

Scientists confirmed that a Nevada man caught COVID-19 twice, requiring assistance breathing the second time around, which has some unpleasant connotations for the future of the pandemic and should end any discussion of a strategy based solely around herd immunity.

Why has Germany handled COVID-19 better than its neighbors? By following the science, including implementing widescale, frequent testing.

Earlier in October, a group of people who’ve lost loved ones to the pandemic set up 200,000 chairs on a lawn facing the White House to protest the government’s inaction.

One of those who’ve died from COVID-19 was a 44-year-old husband and father of two young children in northern New Jersey. He leaves behind a two-year-old daughter and a six-month-old son.

QAnon, the batshit-crazy hoax embraced by multiple alt-right figures and now our sitting President, is tearing families apart as people become sucked into this utterly false conspiracy theory and alienate family members with their nonsense.

A new complaint alleges that ICE is torturing Cameroonian immigrants to try to coerce them into signing deportation documents.

A six-year period of horrendous weather may have exacerbated the 1918-19 Spanish flu pandemic.

Lauren Witzke, the Delaware GOP candidate for the Senate seat currently held by Democrat Chris Coons, appeared on white-nationalist, anti-immigrant hate site VDare last month, not long before saying the Proud Boys provide security at her events. She has no chance to win, but still, Delaware Republicans should revoke their endorsement of her.

Neal Karlen was a close friend of Prince and interviewed him many times over a period of about a dozen years earlier in the musician’s career. He’s written a biography of Prince called This Thing Called Life (natch) and this excerpt tells how Prince was the loneliest person he’d ever met.

Draining the swamp update: A former patent litigator became a federal judge and is openly advising patent trolls to come to his court. This lets those trolls abuse the patent system (which has its own problems, but still) for their own profit, and ultimately American consumers will end up paying the cost.

Project Veritas, the grift run by so-called journalist James O’Keefe, bribed the brother of a Minneapolis councilman to say he was harvesting ballots for Rep. Ilhan Omar, a popular target of Islamophobes.

There may be a new, more efficient method of answering the traveling salesperson problem, which makes use of the geometry of polynomials to improve the results. A truly efficient solution probably can’t be found in polynomial time, which refers to the P vs. NP problem described in the book The Golden Ticket.

HBO Max has a new series called Patria, based on the bestselling novel by Fernando Aramburu. The Guardian explains how a novel about Basque separatists’ decades-long terror campaign became a global success.

Paul Heaton, former lead singer for the Housemartins and the Beautiful South, made a large donation to help the staff of the shuttered music magazine Q.

Several people sent me this story from the New York Times on how local bookstores are struggling to survive in the pandemic and lockdowns.

Irina Slavina, a Russian journalist who reported on excesses of the government’s security apparatus, killed herself via self-immolation in front of the Interior Ministry headquarters earlier this month.

This 2018 piece from Smithsonian magazine details some of the science behind the flavors of chocolate.

Board game news: The Princess Bride Adventure Book Game is out and exclusively on sale at Target.

The Kickstarter for Flora, a “semi-cooperative” game based on the Voynich manuscript, launched this week.

Greenbrier Games’ cooperative story-based game Lost Ones funded its Kickstarter in the first day.

Cascadia, from the publisher and artist behind the game Calico (which I haven’t played but hear is quite good), has already blown past its tiny funding goal.

The role-playing game designer outfit Roll20 is holding a 3-day virtual gaming con with proceeds to benefit a charity focused on racial justice.

Stick to baseball, 9/29/18.

My awards ballots for the six major postseason player honors went up this week for ESPN+ subscribers, and I held a Klawchat Thursday to discuss them.

My latest board game review for Paste covers Reiner Knizia’s Blue Lagoon, a light/midweight game that plays very quickly but adds some strategy with complex scoring, and has a cover that might remind you of a certain Disney movie.

And now, the links…

Long reads first: This Politico piece on on the rise, fall, and change of heart of former hard-right Iowa state rep Kent Sorensen is the best thing I read this week. It speaks once again to the power of exposing bigots to the very people they profess to hate.
A Boston University doctor and researcher has made a career of testifying that cases of suspected child abuse are actually rare genetic disorders or vitamin deficiencies; in over ten years he’s never examined an abuse case and determined it was the result of actual abuse. This ProPublica piece highlights inaccuracies and inconsistencies in his statements, and details a case where Holick’s testimony resulted in a baby going back to an abusive parent who subsequently put her back in the hospital with a broken leg and bleeding in the brain. Why BU employs a child abuse enabler, or courts and juries find him credible, is not explained.
A UPenn professor and director of that school’s Annenberg Public Policy Center argues that Russian interference online gave Donald Trump the 2016 election – but she bases her assertion on data, not conjecture, laying out the case in greater length in her upcoming book Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President.
The Daily Beast looked at Barstool Sports’ history of bullying opponents and encouraging sexual harassment. Founder Dave Portnoy often doxxes critics, such as posting this piece’s author’s phone number on Twitter, a clear violation of their ToS, but was never suspended for doing so.
Methane trapped in Arctic ice is starting to leak out as the climate warms. A similar event at the end of the Triassic era warmed the planet so much it led to a mass extinction event that wiped out 76% of all species on earth.
I’ve written before here about how trauma affects the brain, including my review of the seminal book The Body Keeps the Score. In the wake of multiple women stating that Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted them, NPR talked to scientists about how trauma affects memory, something that everyone should be taught in schools. We tend to think of memories the way we think of data storage – that we record the information, accurately, and have it there to be recalled when we run the appropriate mental script – but memories are fallible and malleable, with trauma a major reason why our memories of significant events are often wrong or incomplete.
Arizona Senator Jeff Flake asked for a vote delay after previously signaling his support for the nominee, and the link there implies it was the result of assault victims confronting him in an elevator just hours before his announcement. I’d like to think this is true, and that Flake, who says lots of good things and then does nothing to back them up, has decided to take a stand, but I’ll believe it when I see it.
This Twitter thread from a researcher who studies sexual violence includes information, with links to published research, on why we should believe women, including Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who allege they’ve been assaulted.
Padma Lakshmi explained why she didn’t report her rape at age 16 in the NY Times.
ThinkProgress’ Lindsay Gibbs writes about Dr. Ford’s bravery, and watching the hearings as a sexual assault survivor herself.
We excuse young men who assault women because they’re young and their brains are still developing and we don’t want to ruin their lives. We excuse older men who’ve done it because that’s all in the past and they’ve changed since then, of course. Where in this framework do women matter?
America’s crumbling social infrastructure of libraries, schools, playgrounds, and fields is is hurting our democracy, writes sociologist Eric Klinenberg for The Atlantic.
In Texas, a state where most politicians think The Handmaid’s Tale is a utopian novel, the state’s attorney general is supporting a school district that expelled a student for refusing to stand for the pledge of allegiance, a clear violation of the student’s First Amendment rights, in a case of blatant pandering for votes before November.
Professor of English and Cultural History Joe Moran writes in the Guardian about the difficult of writing a ‘perfect’ sentence, or even deciding what a perfect sentence is.
A new book called Between Hope and Fear: A History of Vaccines and Human Immunity argues that there have always been anti-vaxxers, according to this NPR interview with author Michael Kinch.
ProPublica also looks at the so-called “Jobs Alliance” in West Virginia where a coal baron is trying to block natural gas expansion that would actually help a growing industry with a viable future.
A Trump Administration analysis concluded that the planet will warm by 7 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100 so climate change regulations are pointless, bringing a whole new level of cynicism to public discourse.
Trump’s EPA immediately rolled back rules on coal plant pollution into waterways, raising the risk of heavy metal pollution during flooding like that caused by Hurricane Florence.
This long-ish excerpt from Michael Lewis’ upcoming book The Fifth Risk covers the tragicomic inside of Trump’s transition team and shows him as a man who didn’t believe he had any chance to be President.
One new board game Kickstarter of note – Fabio Lopiano’s Ragusa, co-published by Capstone Games, a company that focuses on heavy Euro titles it can translate and import to the U.S.

Stick to baseball, 10/17/20.

Stick to baseball, 9/29/18.

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