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→ April 21, 2026
→ By keith
→ 4 Comments

Stick to baseball, 4/21/26.

My one post on The Athletic last week was a long scouting notebook covering Vahn Lackey, Joseph Contreras, Liam Peterson, and other players I saw in a week in South Carolina and Georgia.

Over at the AV Club, I reviewed Catan on the Road, a new portable Catan game that loses the map – and thus the competition for space – but keeps the resource-trading mechanic and even tweaks the rules to encourage players to trade more.

I sent out another issue of my free email newsletter late last week. You should subscribe.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New York Times has another exposé on how Harvard professors and administrators were happy to take Jeffrey Epstein’s money, even after his initial conviction. Three more professors found their names included in the latest files that the Times reporters reviewed: Howard Gardner, Anne Harrington, and Andrew Strominger. All are still active faculty members.

The New Yorker investigates how the Trump Administration has made locking up immigrant infants and children a core part of its strategy.

Upward Bound is a bestselling novel written by nonverbal, autistic author Woody Brown using the discredited communication technique called Rapid Prompting. His mother may be the actual author.

A group chat started by the secretary of Miami-Dade’s Republican Party was filled with racist slurs and antisemitic comments by FIU students, but so far the school has yet to take any action against them. One of those students, Ethan Ratchkauskas, is suing the school on First Amendment grounds after saying someone had to “swiss cheese that professor,” later clarifying that he meant shooting them full of holes.

Courtney Williams was one of the whistleblowers who spoke to a journalist about sexual harassment and discrimination at Fort Bragg in the 2010s. The Justice Department just arrested her, claiming she revealed sensitive information.

The BBC goes through all of the insider trading allegations against Trump, his family members, and his Cabinet.

Most of the stories about former Virginia Lt. Gov Justin Fairfax (D)’s murder of his wife and subsequent suicide were about him. CNN profiled Cerina Fairfax, the victim in his case.

Also in the Times, Michael Jackson’s estate is hoping the upcoming hagiography Michael will help restore some of the disgraced singer’s image and thus boost their profits. Of course, if you’ve seen Leaving Neverland, you know exactly why this whole endeavor is disgusting.

Good riddance to Eric Swalwell, whose downfall came about due to the efforts of many women (including some of his victims) who organized themselves online, as detailed by NPR.

Oh, hey, another person President Trump pardoned has gone on to be convicted of sex crimes against children.

The Lancet has an editorial beseeching readers not to forgive people like Jay Bhattacharya and Marty Makary, ostensible scientists who sold their souls to Trump and have peddled misinformation that will set public health efforts back for decades.

It appears that the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which traces its origins to 1786, will continue publishing after all, as the nonprofit institute that owns the Baltimore Banner is buying the paper. Block Communications, owned by the Block family, had decided to shut the paper down rather than abide by federal labor court rulings against their unfair labor practices.

The same white supremacist behind the 2023 Supreme Court ruling that knocked down affirmative action in college admissions is now targeting the Congressional Black Caucus’ scholarship program for Black students. Hell isn’t hot enough for people who want to roll us back to the days after Reconstruction.

A worker died during his shift at an Amazon warehouse in Oregon earlier this month. His co-workers were told to ignore his body and keep working.

Mother Jones details the Trump Administration’s potential ‘nuclear bomb’ to stop all gender-affirming care for trans youths. I’m not sure if Monday’s federal court ruling vacating the Kennedy Declaration changes what’s in this story.

Senegal just passed a law doubling the penalty for same-sex relationships, while also criminalizing “promoting” or “financing” LGBT relationships. The bill passed the West African nation’s legislature with no votes against it.

The Texas A&M professor who was told by that fake university’s Board of Regents that he couldn’t teach a portion of Plato’s Symposium because of the school’s new censorship regime spoke to The Chronicle of Higher Education about his decision to resign.

Traffic to publishers from social media is plummeting, particularly from Facebook and Twitter.

AI-driven accounts promoting Trump and/or conservative politicians are popping up all over TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and Youtube.

A Missouri cop who killed a 2-year-old girl while working as a SWAT team sniper is now a Missouri State Highway Patrol trooper. Keaton Siebenaler has never faced any consequences for firing at a silhouette during a hostage situation, which is how he ended up killing Clesslynn Crawford during a standoff between her father and police.

Quined Games’ reprinting of Rudiger Dorn’s Goa is up on Gamefound right now. I owned it, and played it, but it didn’t quite do it for me – at least not to the level of its reputation.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, artificial intelligence, board game news, frauds, harvard, immigration, lgbt rights, links, longreads, metoo, missouri, pittsburgh, police, social media, stick to baseball, texas, the swamp, trans rights

→ April 4, 2026
→ By keith
→ 8 Comments

Stick to baseball, 4/4/26.

I’ve been traveling like mad lately; this is the first weekend I’ve been home both Friday and Saturday nights since the Super Bowl. That’s put a damper on any posting here, and of course makes me a little anxious about getting started again because doing so seems overwhelming. Some of the links below are as much as a month old.

Here are some of my most recent posts at the Athletic: I interviewed Bill White on his career and the announcement that he’s the latest Buck O’Neil Award recipient; I wrote up a draft scouting notebook on a bunch of mostly high school players I saw in mid- to late March, as well as USC lefty Mason Edwards; I did my annual predictions posts, including the full standings and the player awards; and I wrote up what I saw at the Arizona Breakout Games, including Brewers-A’s, White Sox-Dodgers (with 27 walks), Mariners-Brewers, Reds-Giants, and Guardians-Angels (plus some Rockies back fields notes). The record-setting heat in Arizona pushed some game times around, so I ended up seeing one fewer game than expected, missing Padres-Cubs from my original plan. I appeared on The Athletic Show to kick off the MLB season.

At AV Club, I reviewed the worker-placement game Skara Brae (no relation to The Bard’s Tale series); the polyomino tile placement game Wispwood; and the light set-collection game Sanibel, from the designer of Wingspan.

My newsletter is next up on my to-do list, followed by a new music playlist.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: You probably saw McKay Coppins’ piece in The Atlantic (not my employer) on his year as a ‘degenerate’ gambler, where the magazine gave him $10,000 to bet on sports and write a story about it. He’s a Mormon and even sort-of-kind-of got permission from one of their leaders. My one quibble with the piece, which is very good, is that it’s very different when it’s not your money.
A writer for the Times of Israel wrote about how gamblers on Polymarket were sending him death threats if he didn’t change the facts in a story he published on an Iranian missile strike.
Marco Rubio’s college chum and longtime associate David Rivera, a former Congressman himself, is now on trial for lobbying for Nicholas Maduro’s Venezuelan government. Rubio testified last week against his “former” friend.
The Guardian spoke to Iranians after the US bombed oil depots, filling the air there with toxic fumes and blotting out the sun in the middle of the day.
A Project 2025 offshoot laid out plans for Trump to use the U.S. military on our own soil to create a new, shadow law-enforcement regime reporting directly to the lawless president.
WIRED has the story of two crypto bros hatched a scheme to allow people to buy shares of homes, but then left the houses they bought to fall apart, leading to a lawsuit from the city of Detroit.
ProPublica explains how RFK Jr. and his fellow vaccine denialists are ushering in a new era of (preventable) plagues. Many, many children are going to die horrible deaths because of that man, and by extension because of Trump. And our hospitals aren’t ready for even the rising tide of measles cases, let alone, say, a diphtheria epidemic.
The Frontier, in a joint effort with ProPublica, exposes how Oklahoma regulators found hundreds of oil wells that were violating state laws on disposing of the toxic byproducts of drilling – and then they did absolutely nothing about it. Oklahoma might be the worst state to live in right now, given what they’re doing to the environment, their educational system, and the rights of anyone who’s not a white Christian man.
I stay off Twitter except to post links, but when I was still somewhat active there, one of the most prominent and vile anti-vaxxers and misinformation purveyors was William Makis, a former doctor in Canada who has been accused of sexual harassment, animal abuse, threatening co-workers, and … well, you can see for yourself. He’s currently making over a half a million dollars a year via his Substack, selling bogus cancer treatments to desperate people, and is currently under a civil contempt order in Canada for providing medications like ivermectin and fenbendazole, both of which are primarily for animal use and do not treat cancer, without a license.
The Administration blamed AI for the fact that we bombed a school in Iran, but the truth is that this was the outcome of years of human decisions, including the choice to move targeting decisions from a team of experts to a handful of humans using software the working of which they didn’t understand.
A Texas librarian writes about her fight against the book-banning lunatics of Moms for Liberty.
A rare feel-good story around these parts: A woman who was abandoned as an infant in a parking lot in the Cleveland area reunited with the two women who found her.
Guards at the largest ICE concentration camp took bets on which prisoner would be the next to commit suicide.
And a measles outbreak at an ICE concentration camp in Texas has now spilled over into the surrounding community.
An NIH whistleblower wrote in STAT News that scientists need to step up their activism, not reduce it.
Grammarly added a “feature” that used the names and identities of living writers, including several writers at The Verge, to provide AI-generated advice to users – but without those writers’ permission. Grammarly removed the feature pretty quickly, and their CEO ended up talking to The Verge about the whole thing, somewhat combatively.
More in “AI sucks” news: Police in North Dakota used an AI facial recognition app to arrest a woman from Tennessee and put her in jail for five months even though she had never set foot in North Dakota or committed the crimes of which she was accused. She had to prove she’d been elsewhere at the time – the onus was on her, not the garbage AI app, not the police department that used it.
Even more “AI sucks” news: AI-driven lawsuits are clogging up the courts, especially suits where people represent themselves and use LLMs to write their legal arguments.
The final “AI sucks” story of this week is actually a longread: The Guardian talks to several people who ruined their lives – marriages, careers, finances – because they started talking to an AI chatbot and became deluded that it was real.
Several Republican members of Congress have made virulent anti-Muslim comments, including Randy Fine (FL, where else) and Andy Ogles (TN), but Mike Johnson couldn’t even bring himself to condemn the statements. Absolute moral bankruptcy, to say nothing of his vacuous Christianity.
Speaking of fake Christians, Pete Hegseth’s pastor – his fucking pastor – said he wants Texas state Rep. James Talarico to die. I may not be a Christian any more, but I grew up one, and I’ve read that book. This ain’t in it.
Trump pardoned a man now sentenced to prison for an “enormous child pornography collection.” Daniel Tocci was a January 6^th insurrectionist, pardoned by Trump, and now heading back to jail on the CSAM charges.
Covered up by the U.S. war on Iran and other conflicts is the increase in Israeli colonizer violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.
Israel passed a law mandating the death penalty for people convicted of lethal acts of terrorism … oh, no, it only applies to Palestinians. What is the word for a legal system that has different laws for different ethnic groups?
WIRED also has a story from a Gaza hospital, Al-Shifa, where doctors are still begging and smuggling in medical supplies while trying to treat old and new victims of Israel’s war.
Cheaper, easier-to-use solar panels are coming soon, so of course U.S. utility companies are fighting to delay laws making this possible.
A Belgian diplomat may go on trial for his role in the U.S.-backed assassination of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. The Democratic Republic of the Congo has been plagued by instability, dictatorships, and both civil and regional wars since the death of its only truly freely elected leader.
ICE dumped a blind Rohingya refugee on the streets of Buffalo without contacting his family or his lawyer. He later froze to death, and the county has ruled it a homicide.
Both Politico (unsurprising) and the NY Times laundered misinformation from a right-wing fake-news site called the Midwesterner. This type of outlet is often called ‘pink slime,’ and it’s been around at least since 2020, with websites that look and sound like legitimate newspapers but are in fact astroturfed and nearly always far-right ops.
InfoWars, the conspiracy-spouting site owned by Alex Jones, is shutting down, but its legacy won’t die until Trump and his movement are finished.
Buried by (waves hands frantically) everything is the news of a woman from South Carolina who accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in 1984. The Post and Courier looked at public records to verify some aspects of her story, although none relating to the specific claim about the president.
Also forgotten already is that claim that there’s a ranch in New Mexico where Epstein and his allies buried the bodies of two sex-trafficking victims.
A trans man in Idaho wrote about how the state’s new law banning trans people from using the correct bathrooms forces him to choose between the threat of jail or the threat of violence.
Meanwhile, the IOS just caved to the trans panic with a new rule that isn’t based in sound science and will unfairly target intersex people too.
A federal judge in Texas ruled that nine protestors who were demonstrating outside an ICE facility were guilty of “providing material support for terrorism” – even though they did nothing but protest.
Activists with the group Dare to Struggle say that L.A. police broke a teenaged protestor’s shin during the No Kings protests last weekend.
You’ll find a god in every golden oyster … except that these golden oyster mushrooms are crowding out native species in North American forests.
Mathematicians may have partially answered a 2000-year-old question about how many rational points a single curve can contain, as a new preprint puts an upper limit on the number of these points, where both x and y are rational numbers, that any curve can have.
The crowdfunding effort for the two-player game The Glasgow Train Robbery has just a few days left. It’s a cooperative game, and one of the two designers was a co-designer of the amazing Lacrimosa, along with two games currently on my shelf of shame (The Battle of Versailles, Take a Seat).
Awaken Realms is putting out a new special edition of Concordia, a top 50 all-time game for me and on BGG, but after early images showing AI art led to review-bombing on that site, the publisher announced they won’t use AI art in the final product.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: artificial intelligence, board game news, christianity, crypto, environment, frauds, gambling, gaza, immigration, iran, israel, links, longreads, mathematics, scams, social media, stick to baseball, texas, the swamp, vaccines

→ February 21, 2026
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/21/26.

I was on PTO from Wednesday to Wednesday, so I haven’t written anything new on the Athletic in nearly two weeks. I’ll begin draft content this upcoming week.

Over at AV Club, I reviewed two smaller games with surprising depth and complexity for their size in Oddland and Neko Syndicate.

I appeared on Sox Machine to talk about the White Sox’ farm system and a little more about Colson Montgomery.

I sent out another edition of my free email newsletter on Friday.

And now, the links…

ProPublica got a hold of letters written by children being held in one of ICE’s concentration camps. The camp’s Schutzstaffel responded by raiding the facility to destroy any further missives. Meanwhile, a group of pediatricians wrote about the harm that ICE detentions are already doing to children. Remember that when anyone tells you they’re concerned about, say, what bathroom a person uses because of “the children.”

The American Prospect’s Ryan Cooper explains why Democrats should defund ICE and CBP permanently. The Nation’s Andrea Ritchie says essentially the same thing.

ICE agents zip-tied a 14-year-old girl in Idaho in October during one of their ‘raids.’ She is a U.S. citizen, but that’s beside the point.

Futurism’s Maggie Harrison Dupré has been all over the harms propagated by the AI sector and the amoral actors pushing the technology. Her latest piece looks at how ChatGPT is fueling and encouraging stalkers, because these LLMs are nothing more than compliment machines – they tell you what you want to hear. Well, that, and plagiarism.

The Guardian exposes just how Substack profits from all the neo-Nazi content it hosts.

A new study published in Nature found that X/Twitter users who had the For You feed turned on saw their political views shift to the right, but turning it off did not move them back towards the left (or center).

The Heritage Foundation published a “roadmap” for the country that is really a playbook for a Christian nationalist future; Jessica Valenti exposes this under the headline “they’re coming for our daughters.” I can’t describe the Heritage Foundation’s worldview as anything other than sick. It is a diseased way of looking at women and humanity as a whole.

Israeli settlers shot and killed an American in the West Bank. No one will do anything about this.

The far-right elites in Texas are backing MAGA candidate Don Huffines for state comptroller as he promises to “DOGE Texas government.”

Meanwhile, the self-immolation of Texas’ public universities continues, as UT-Austin is consolidating four departments relating to Black, Latino, and women’s studies, a move that appears motivated by ideology; and all University of Texas schools now must limit discussion of “controversial topics” in the classroom. I wonder who decides what is “controversial.”

I am shocked, shocked to note that cryptocurrency is now being used to facilitate human trafficking.

A brainwashed mother in South Carolina whose unvaccinated son is hospitalized with complications from the measles told The Independent that she still wouldn’t vaccinate him. There is no risk from vaccines even close to what that poor kid has already suffered, and what he’ll suffer in the future if he survives.

The FDA’s site removed pages that exposed fake autism treatments like MMO (bleach) and raw camel milk.

However, the FDA’s thoroughly unqualified leader Vinay Prasad reversed course and will now review Moderna’s mRNA-based flu vaccine. I wonder what pushback got to him; I suspect it wasn’t the public outcry, but the business one.

Why is Prasad unqualified? Well, for one thing, he’s already facing sexual harassment accusations, and is making us taxpayers pay over $65,000 a year for him to commute from California to DC. And he’s only been on the job for 9 months.

Oklahoma’s radical Gov. J. Kevin Stitt (R) says he will eliminate tenure at most public colleges in his state, a great move for a state widely ranked in the bottom five for education.

Also in Oklahoma, a man speaking out at Claremore City Council meeting against the construction of a new data center was arrested – not stopped, but fucking arrested – for going a few seconds over his allotted time.

There’s some real evidence that Putin murdered dissident Alexei Navalny … and it barely made a dent in the news this week.

The Lemoneads’ Evan Dando is a creep.

Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL) has taken up MTG’s mantle as the most overtly racist member of Congress; he has a challenger this fall in Democrat Jennifer Jenkins, who has a history of calling out Fine’s bigoted language and rhetoric. I knew Fine in college; I thought he was pretentious, but if he held these views back then I didn’t know it.

Harvard took a $350 million gift from Gerald Chan, the second-largest in the university’s history, and then named their school of public health after his father. Chan had a close relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Harvard physics professor Lisa Randall is also all over the Epstein files. I’ve seen some comments that mere association with Epstein, especially for scientists (given his interest in patronizing scientific research), shouldn’t be a capital offense; I might be sympathetic to that perspective if any of these assholes owned up to schmoozing with the convicted sex offender before their names appeared.

At Salon, Andi Zeisler writes that academics who communicated and fraternized with Epstein may not be criminals, but they did so in pursuit of a shared vision of a world where only certain people (men, mostly) were worthy of attaining knowledge and the status that comes with it.

The same folks who were all about “free speech” and talking about opposing cancel culture have been dead silent as the Trump Administration attempts to quell free speech by demanding that social media platforms reveal the identities of users who criticized ICE. Maybe it wasn’t actually about free speech after all.

Defector’s Patrick Redford wrote how Eileen Gu will never be the ‘traitor’ that J.D. Vance and other nationalist nitwits are calling her.

Astronomers might have seen a star in the Andromeda Galaxy become a black hole.

The delightful folks at Flatout Games have a new Kickstarter up for two smaller games, Forage and Honeypot.

Two minor scandals in the gaming world from the last two weeks: Dice Tower contributor Sam Healey resigned from the site – claiming God told him to step away or some other non-apology nonsense – after he said that Alex Pretti and Renée Good were to blame for being murdered; and Alderac (AEG) COO Ryan Dancey, who has left a trail of messes and controversies behind him in his three decades in the industry, was forced out by CEO John Zinser after Dancey posted a pro-AI and very anti-designers rant on LinkedIn. Hey, I guess something good did come out of that site!

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ai, astronomy, board game news, christian nationalism, education, florida, harvard, immigration, israel, links, longreads, measles, oklahoma, russia, social media, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines

→ February 10, 2026
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/10/26.

The top 100 index page is here, with links to all 30 team reports and everything else in the package. If you’re looking for the highlights, you can go right to the top 100 prospects, the prospects who just missed the top 100, and my ranking of all 30 farm systems, as well as the Q&As I did on top 100 day and this past Monday.

Over at AV Club, I reviewed the small-box game Point Galaxy, a sequel game to Point Salad; and Knitting Circle, a lighter game with a similar theme and art to Calico.

My free email newsletter is back as well, and you should sign up for more of me.

I appeared on the Detroit News’ Tigers Today podcast to talk about Detroit’s loaded farm system; on Friar Territory to talk about what’s left in the Padres’ system; on the JD Bunkis Show to discuss the state of the Jays’ system after their World Series run; and on Halo Territory to talk about the Angels’ system and why it’s so bad.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Texas Monthly looks at the meltdown – or self-immolation – at Texas A&M. The Republicans who run the state are going to ruin their public universities to the point where they don’t get the same kind of out-of-state interest that helps add revenue to the system.
Grub Street looks at the decline of the veganism movement in the restaurant world (and our tables). I’m not vegan, or vegetarian, but eating more plants is clearly better for our health and that of the planet.
Deadline doesn’t mince words in its headline about Disney’s new CEO choice: “Dana Walden Expands Oversight To Film in New Role As Media Glass Ceiling Remains Intact.”
That was not Liam Conejo Ramos in Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show; he is in hiding with his family and still traumatized from being kidnapped by ICE.
Writing in Vanity Fair, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about the white nationalist movement that led to the murders of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti.
ProPublica named the two ICE employees who killed Pretti.
Meanwhile, a comedy club in St. Paul cancelled an upcoming series of shows by a comedian who made vile, hateful comments about Renée Nicole Good, and CAA is threatening to sue the bar over it. Maybe CAA should drop Ben Bankas instead.
Why do ICE agents wear masks? So it’s easier for them to violate our Constitutional rights. Duh.
Jonathan Haidt is making bank by running around telling anyone who’ll listen that social media is wrecking the current generation of kids. Two new studies undermine his claims, as the evidence of harm just isn’t strong enough.
The Israel Defense Force accepted the Gaza Health Ministry’s estimate of 71,000 Gazans killed in Israel’s war on the Palestinian territory.
Saudi Arabia is pulling back plans for its new city project Neom, which included the especially bizarre project known as The Line (apparently now dead).
The mass-market paperback is going extinct. What a gigantic shame; I understand the economics of it, in general, but the lower price point can get more people into books or new authors or new-to-them genres, and the smaller form factor is a godsend to people who travel and or just love to stuff a book in a pocket.
Members of our military have reported that their commanding officers are mandating that they go see the fawning ‘documentary’ Melania.
Harvard is, again, all over the Epstein files, including the campus Jewish center Harvard Hillel soliciting donations from Jeffrey Epstein after his 2008 conviction for child sex trafficking.
Yale isn’t faring much better; computer science professor David Gelertner recommended a graduate student to Epstein by praising her looks, and he defended those messages to the dean of the school’s engineering department. Meanwhile, Yale sociologist Nicholas Christakis also seems to have been rather cozy with the convicted sex offender.
I prefer the original headline for this op ed by Molly Jong-Fast, which called Jeffrey Epstein “the devil’s concierge.”
Physicists sort of turned lead into gold at the Large Hadron Collider, smashing lead atoms into each other at such high speeds that a few spit out exactly three protons, which made them gold atoms. Others spit out one proton, making thallium, or two, making mercury, but that’s hardly as fun.
Agrovoltaic canopies – solar panels installed above crops to protect them from excessive sunlight and heat – increased crop yields and reduced water loss in trials in France.
The Burn It All Down podcast has a Kickstarter up to try to fund a return of the show, which features two people I’ve met (Jessica Luther and Lindsay Gibbs) and another I know from the site formerly known as Twitter (Shireen Ahmed). The show is about feminism in sports, and feminism and sports, and women’s sports, and men’s sports through a feminist lens. I don’t understand the podcasting space; it seems like it’s just getting overrun by celebrities with podcasts and nothing interesting to say.
There have been a slew of new boardgame crowdfunding efforts in the last three weeks. Here’s a list:
- Stellar Ventures, a heavy, 150-minute game for 3-5 players about space exploration for fun and profit. I know one of the publishers and have a prototype (yes, I need to play it) and have gotten a demo, and I think it looks pretty fantastic, even though it’s about as heavy a game as I typically play.
- A second edition of Logic & Lore, one of the best games I saw at Gen Con last year, along with a brand new expansion.
- Red Leaf University, a midweight worker-placement game co-designed by Adrian Adamescu, who co-designed Sagrada.
- LODGE, a small spatial-puzzle game from the designer of Tiny Towns and Wormholes. I’ve played this on BGA; the game is very good but I hate the art.
- Gold Country, yet another game from Reiner Knizia, based loosely on his 2012 game Spectaculum.
- Tinctura, a worker-placement game about apothecaries in the 18^th/19^th centuries where players gather ingredients and fulfill contracts.
- Spirited, a hand-management and set collection game co-designed by Shem Phillips (Raiders of the North Sea, Architects of the West Kingdom).
The BBC podcast Witness History has an 11-minute episode on the creation of the game Catan.
And finally, for the August 2024 issue of newsletter-magazine Wyrd Science, Dan Thurot spoke to the designers of three politically-themed board games about incorporating real politics and history into tabletop play, including Tory Brown, designer of the fantastic Votes for Women.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, books, climate change, epstein, gaza, harvard, immigration, links, longreads, physics, podcast, social media, stick to baseball, texas, vegan

→ January 24, 2026
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/24/26.

I wrote two pieces for the Athletic this week, breaking down the MacKenzie Gore trade and the Freddy Peralta trade. My top 100 prospects ranking runs on Monday.

At AV Club, I reviewed the board game Gingham, a family-level game of area control that gets very tense as the game approaches its end.

I sent out an issue of my free email newsletter last weekend, but the next one won’t go out until at least Monday, for obvious reasons.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: My colleague Paul Tenorio wrote about the kidnapping of soccer coach Adrian Heath, as he was lured by the promise of a lucrative job with a Saudi club. The club exists, but the job didn’t, and Heath was lucky to survive the ordeal.

The New Yorker exposes Bari Weiss’s “hostile takeover” at CBS News, which has been a ratings and credibility disaster.

In Harper’s, Jasper Craven writes about the impending sports betting cataclysm, with the added perspective from a habitual sports bettor – himself.

ICE officials claim their agents can enter homes without a warrant, a clear violation of the Fourth Amendment. And this story just sort of drifted by as Trump and his toadies continue to flood the zone with so many outrages that we can’t keep up.

Black pepper and olive oil contain chemicals that may help our bodies absorb nutrients in other foods. I use both of those ingredients constantly, so I will live forever.

Researchers at the Kiel Institute found that American taxpayers paid 96% of the added costs of Trump’s tariffs, calling it an “own goal.”

A new European social network called W is coming, maybe, although I’m not sure what this offers that other alternatives to the deepfake porn site formerly known as Twitter.

The White House used AI to make a civil rights attorney appear to be crying when she was arrested when, in fact, she was quite stoic at the event. She was part of a group protesting at a church whose pastor is the acting director at a local ICE office in St. Paul.

Cochise County (Arizona) Sheriff Mark Dannels, a Trump sycophant, has used his public office to promote a private drone company with a Trump crony on its board. The Phoenix New Times had previously reported on how Dannels may have gotten up to $250,000 in slush money from ICE.

Cows can use tools, if we let them. I for one welcome our new bovine overlords!

Allplay has a Kickstarter up for the Mountain Goats legacy game and the solo game Enchanted Ivy. I like Mountain Goats as a fun, quick-playing filler game.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, artificial intelligence, board game news, gambling, links, longreads, science, soccer, social media, stick to baseball, taxes

→ January 17, 2026
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/17/21.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I had three pieces this week, on the Cubs’ signing of Alex Bregman, the Yankees’ trade for Ryan Weathers, and the three-team trade between the Rays, Reds, and Angels. I am primarily working on the prospect rankings, which are scheduled to start running on January 26^th.

For the AV Club, I reviewed Iliad, a fantastic new two-player game from Reiner Knizia that made my top ten for 2025.

I am about to hit send on the next edition of my free email newsletter. It was almost done, then I set it aside for a moment, which turned into five days.

I have many links this week to pieces in the New York Times, which I often do because I assume many of you have access to those with your Athletic subscriptions (if you have the bundle). I believe the Times in general produces some of the best journalism in the country. I do not endorse all of the views printed in the paper; I just work there.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The outgoing governor of Virginia, Glenn Youngkin (R), and the board that oversees the University of Virginia appear to have rushed through the appointment of a new President, even though that candidate, Scott Beardsley, appears to have fabricated or embellished large parts of his resume, according to the Augusta Free Press. After that ran, over 200 faculty members signed a letter to the board saying that the appointment should not stand.

The so-called “peace” deal between Israel and Gaza is a fiction, as Israel continues to demolish Gaza one building at a time, according to a New York Times investigative report.

The Times also profiled NPR CEO Katherine Maher, who has chosen to fight back against Republicans’ attacks on the public-radio institution and even taken the Trump Administration to court, although some other public-radio figures disagree with her tactics.

America, a magazine published by the Jesuits, published a scathing piece on the attempts by the Administration and its toadies to demonize murder victim Renee Nicole Good, just as the Reagan Administration did with the four nuns raped and killed by the right-wing government of El Salvador in 1980.

The Texas Observer exposed four businesses operating in North Texas with ties to the neo-Nazi Patriot Front.

The Trump Administration demanded that UPenn send them detailed personal information on all Jewish professors, students, and staff members. If this doesn’t make you think of Nazi Germany, I really can’t help you.

The suspect in the arson attack against a Mississippi synagogue told the judge at his arraignment that “Jesus Christ is Lord” and said to investigators that the building was “a synagogue of Satan.” So who radicalized him? Can we deport him to Vatican City?

Those “alt” government accounts on social media that popped up during Trump’s first term always looked like grifters, not actual government employees trying to leak information. The Alt National Park Service one is the worst of the lot, and certainly not authentic in any sense of the word.

A new documentary looks at Jeff Smith, the Frugal Gourmet, a celebrity chef from the days prior to social media who turned out to be a serial sexual predator who likely assaulted dozens of young boys.

The notoriously left-wing Wall Street Journal exposes how RFK Jr. is cozying up to supplement makers, who peddle unproven and sometimes dangerous remedies that aren’t subject to the same safety and efficacy requirements as prescription medicines.

A white nationalist who praised the Nazis’ use of concentration camps has flipped from Republican to Democrat to try to capture a Congressional seat in California. Kyle Langford posted a picture of himself last year at Auschwitz and called it his “0% unemployment plan.”

I came across this March 2025 story from the Times about the Norwegian black metal band Mayhem, as I saw they have a new album, Liturgy of Death, coming out in February. The article is a heck of a read, and treats the band – who have released just seven albums over 35 years due to suicide, murder, controversies (to put it mildly), breakups – as a sort of counterculture icon. It doesn’t mention that at least one of the current members, longtime drummer Hellhammer has voiced indisputably racist and homophobic views, which I find very hard to understand given that it’s hardly a secret.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-semitism, california, gaza, immigration, links, longreads, mississippi, Music, scams, social media, virginia

→ 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

→ November 8, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/8/25.

I had two new pieces this week for subscribers to the Athletic, my annual ranking of the top 50 free agents (which I’ve updated to reflect option decisions and the probable return of Cody Ponce from the KBO) and a column on why the Contemporary Era Committee should put Dale Murphy in the Hall of Fame. I also held a Q&A on Monday after the rankings went live.

At Endless Mode, I looked at the massive board game Luthier, which has its own soundtrack to reflect the composers depicted within the game.

I’ll do another newsletter any day now, I swear.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: ProPublica investigates what was really happening in Portland before Trump illegally sent the National Guard to the Oregon city. The short answer: not much, just peaceful protests and a whopping three people charged with crimes.

The Atlantic has the unbelievable story of a Wisconsin man who appeared to have drowned while fishing, but when police couldn’t find his body, the story started to get very weird.

The Guardian examines Tucson residents’ fight against a data center that is going to put a huge strain on the region’s water and energy supplies. It doesn’t help that the center’s developers have been sketchy about who’s going to use the facility – but it’s probably Amazon.

One major lesson from Tuesday night’s decisive victories by Democrats is that supporting trans rights is a winning issue – or, I suppose, at least not a losing one. California Gov. Gavin Newsom has been rushing to throw trans rights out the window as he lines up to run for President in 2028, and it’s both cruel and unnecessary.

In The Nation, Gillian Branstetter goes further, pointing out that so-called centrist Democrats need to stop blaming trans people for the party’s failures in 2024.

Democrats can be sketchy too! Rep. Chuy Garcia (D-IL) is withdrawing his reelection papers to try to gift the seat to his chief of staff, which critics are calling a “coronation.”

The stochastic terrorists of the online right, especially on Twitter, directed death threats to Arizona teachers who wore the same Halloween costumes they wear every year, because the right-wing loons assumed without evidence that the costumes were mocking the death of Charlie Kirk.

Speaking of Kirk, his death left a void in the white-nationalist wing of the Republican Party that Nick Fuentes is happily trying to fill.

An 18-year-old man in Oklahoma was convicted of raping two girls, including strangling one until she fell unconscious, but the judge approved a plea deal that charged him as a minor and turned a minimum of 10 years in prison to counseling with no prison time. Jesse Mack Butler was 16 at the time of at least one of the assaults. The linked story implies that he received favorable treatment because his father was the football director at Oklahoma State, where the ADA went to school; I think he got favorable treatment because he’s a white man.

Australia is generating so much electricity from renewables that they’re offering consumers three free hours of solar energy in the middle of the day, when demand is lower and generation is highest. This could be us, but you playin’ (taking fossil fuel money to prop up a dying, suicidal industry).

The north African country Mali may be about to fall to a rebel group affiliated with al-Qaeda. America’s influence in the Sahel was already waning before January, and it appears to be diminishing even further.

A couple of Philadelphia restaurants found their Google pages spammed with fake 1-star reviews … plus a “review” offering to remove those for a fee.

Astronomers detected the longest-lasting gamma-ray burst on record, so now they’re trying to figure out what caused it.

Bluesky’s official blog noted the huge traffic surge during the World Series, with a 30% bump for Saturday’s game 7, and in doing so they used a post from yours truly.

Board game news: The Gamefound campaign for The Mix, a midweight game about making cocktails, funded in just an hour and is approaching C$60,000 as I write this.

And the campaign for Movers & Shakers, a railway game of building routes and completing contracts, also funded inside of a day. It’s looks a bit lighter than the typical title from Quined, who specialize in heavier Euros and have a great reputation.

Damion Schubert looked at 365 board game rankings, condensed the games by game families (e.g., putting all Ticket to Ride games into one bucket), and then compiled the top 100 families based on those individual rankings. The list skews towards medium-heavy games, but not the heaviest, which I appreciate, and there are three families in this top ten that appeared in my own top ten last November. (Damion confirmed my list was one of the 365.)

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, arizona, astronomy, board game news, climate change, frauds, links, longreads, oklahoma, oregon, scams, social media, stick to baseball, trans rights, white nationalism

→ September 6, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/6/25.

Over at The Athletic, I wrote some brief updates & outlooks for five prospects called up on August 31^st/September 1^st, and an in-person scouting notebook on Guardians pitcher Joey Oakie plus some other Guards, Orioles, Nats, and Phillies prospects.

At Endless Mode, I reviewed the one vs. many game 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the player who takes on the HAL role does indeed get to close the pod bay doors. It’s a good game, Dave.

I’ve moved my free email newsletter over to Kit, away from the place that proudly hosts white nationalist newsletters.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This WIRED story on a venture capitalist, Cindy Bi, who hired a surrogate to carry her baby, and is now trying to destroy the woman’s life after she miscarried, is absolutely batshit. I’m not a lawyer, so I don’t know if Bi actually hurt her legal case, but she certainly tanked her own reputation by talking to writer Emi Nietfeld, who did a great job telling the story.
Maclean’s has a story from a former anti-vaxxer who now tries to convince the deluded and the ignorant that vaccines are, in fact, safe and effective.
Former Dodgers & Expos GM Kevin Malone, who called himself “Dodger Boy” and said “there’s a new sheriff in town” before spending several years as one of the worst GMs in Dodger history, is now an adviser to President Trump on human trafficking, because he became a religious nut and joined one of those activist groups that claims it’s fighting human trafficking (and actually isn’t helping at all).
The Trump Administration is trying to tag several politicians with mortgage fraud for allegedly claiming more than one primary residence on loan applicants. At least three Cabinet members have done the same thing, ProPublica found in an investigation. It’s almost like this isn’t actually about mortgage fraud!
ProPublica also wrote about how xenophobes and white nationalists are co-opting climate change as a justification for their proposed policies.
Yale epidemiology professor Gregg Gonsalves writes in The Nation that RFK Jr. needs to resign or be forced out immediately as head of Health & Human Services.
Benny Johnson was fired for multiple acts of plagiarism. He became a right-wing podcaster and charlatan, posting lie after lie on social media, and took money from the Russian government to do so. He’s now a darling of the Trump White House.
A reserve captain in the Israel Defense Forces who served in Gaza wrote in the New York Times that fellow reservists should refuse to fight in this unjust war. His words: “With over 60,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, dead, according to Gazan health authorities, and growing starvation in the territory, with Israeli hostages languishing for nearly two years, this war has crossed every boundary. There is no longer any goal worth achieving by prolonging the war.”
Reps. James Comer (R-KY) and Nancy Mace (R-SC) are demanding that Wikipedia dox its own editors because of some bullshit claim about editorial bias. Where are the free speech absolutists now?
The matcha drink craze has led to a shortage of the green tea product, which has cultural significance in Japan, as influencers need their grass-flavored iced milk beverages.
Harvard won the latest round in its legal battles against the Trump Administration, as a judge ordered the White House to restore funding it had cut, but my alma mater continues to comply in small but meaningful ways with the fascists, this time removing designated spaces for the women’s center and the office for LGBTQ+ students.
Yahoo! sportswriter Matt Ufford writes that Bluesky has plenty of users, and the complaints to the contrary seem to miss the point or stem from individuals’ bad experiences with, well, getting called out for their bullshit.
The great Elie Mystal writes about the power of small acts of noncompliance, and the overemphasis on “big” acts of resistance.
Allplay has a Kickstarter for a new edition of the grail game Container, which runs $100+ for a used copy. It’s an economic simulation game about shipping containers, which sounds dry as hell, but people love this game. It’s been out of print since the 2018 tenth anniversary edition.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, gaza, harvard, links, longreads, social media, stick to baseball, tea, the swamp, vaccines, white nationalism

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