social media — Page 2

→ October 14, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/14/23.

My one piece this week for subscribers to the Athletic this week was my first dispatch from the Arizona Fall League, covering prospects from the Tigers, Cardinals, and Rockies. I’ll have a longer wrap-up once my trip concludes on Saturday evening.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: ProPublica continues to lead the way in exposing the role of Leonard Leo in creating the conservative super-majority on the Supreme Court and packing federal courts with right-wing jurists, often of dubious credentials, and how he plans to push the country further towards a Christian theocracy.
New York’s Olivia Nuzzi followed the clown car of Republican candidates trying to run against the disgraced former President – and, so far, failing.
The richest man in Pennsylvania is spending millions of dollars to support Republican candidates for judicial races, most of it to support Carolyn Carluccio, a right-wing justice running for a seat on the state’s Supreme Court.
Sports Illustrated’s Steve Rushin wrote a lovely memoriam to sportswriter Jim Caple, who died last week at age 61 of frontotemporal dementia. I did not know Jim well, and even argued with him at times about matters such as the value of the runs scored statistic for individual hitters, but I believe the outpouring of sadness from people in our industry who did know him well is a testament to his legacy.
Several new instant-loan apps in India have targeted borrowers with threats of leaked nudes, harassment, and other forms of coercion that have led to multiple suicides.
I have taken a psyllium husk supplement every day for nearly 25 years now to help manage my stomach, as I was diagnosed with the meaningless term “irritable bowel syndrome,” which means that I don’t actually have a GI disease or disorder but the doctors didn’t want me to walk away empty-handed. Psyllium husk works wonders, and it’s probably pretty good for my overall health anyway. Now it’s a fad food and if you fucking hippies and influencers create a shortage I will come for you all.
Target closed several Seattle stores, blaming crime for the decisions – but is that really the reason for the failures of these Target mini-stores?
Arkansas, befitting its status as a backwater state, gave prisoners with COVID-19 ivermectin without their knowledge or consent, so now the ACLU has filed suit on their behalf. Just a reminder that ivermectin is completely ineffective against COVID-19 and comes with rather unpleasant side effects, no matter what the grifters on the interwebs told you.
Mississippi was one of the only two states that disallowed religious exemptions to childhood vaccination requirements until a Republican judge struck down the state’s rule, and this fall over 1800 such exemptions have been issued – even though no major religion bans or forbids vaccines. This is all a con from parents who are ignorant, denialist, or just sheep going along with the Republican party’s anti-science platform. We’re likely to see some sort of outbreak there in the next few months, perhaps measles, as it’s the most contagious of the vaccine-preventable diseases that affect humans.
Eric Trump hosted an overt anti-Semite who denies the Holocaust and once killed someone while driving drunk at the Trump Doral Miami resort for a “Reawaken America” event this week.
And some prominent Texas Republicans hosted Holocaust denier and white supremacist Nick Fuentes at the headquarters of right-wing consulting firm Pale Horse Strategies.
Elon Musk is actively promoting false information about the Israel-Hamas war, even sharing a video that falsely claimed a reporter there was actually an actor. (By the way, I’m avoiding any commentary on that conflict. I know I don’t know anywhere near enough to say anything worthwhile beyond condemning any and all attacks on civilians.)
Alex Norris is the creator of the web comic known simply as Webcomic Name, but after he signed a deal with Golden Bell Games to publish a board game using his creations, the publisher is trying to claim ownership of his intellectual property. There’s a GoFundMe to support his legal case, but I’m also linking this so people know what Golden Bell – publishers of Unbroken, Dungeon Dice, and other titles – are all about.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: coronavirus, health, india, links, longreads, mississippi, pennsylvania, scotus, social media, stick to baseball, texas, white nationalism

→ October 7, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/7/23.

I’ve had one post up for subscribers to the Athletic since the last roundup, with my hypothetical postseason awards ballots for 2023. I do have another story filed for Sunday, so keep an eye skinned for that.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Votes for Women, a (mostly) two-player, asymmetrical game about the fight for women’s suffrage. It’s fantastic, and I also love that this review went up the week that Glynis Johns turned 100.

On the Keith Law Show this week, my guest was MLB’s Sarah Langs, talking about the season that was, who she would vote for in the various awards, and what excited her about this year’s playoff teams. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Rolling Stone’s Sean Williams writes about being conned by a con artist who tried to get the journalist to write a long profile/feature on him to further a movie deal, only for Williams to discover that the fraudster had as many as 200 victims of various romance and other scams over the last forty years.
The Washington Post looks at how climate change increases the demand and need for air conditioning, which in turn contributes more to climate change. Cooling a world that’s getting hotter requires increasing levels of energy, and we still rely far too much on energy-production methods that pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
An effective vaccine against tuberculosis would save millions of lives; it’s the deadliest infectious disease in the world, killing 1.6 million people a year. When pharmaceutical company GSK developed a vaccine for it, they chose instead to use the technology for a shingles vaccine, keeping the TB vaccine off the market for years.
Workers in California who cut stone countertops are coming down with silicosis, an incurable and terminal disease.
Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull gave a very candid interview to the San Diego Union-Tribune ahead of the band’s concert last month in that city.
Dr. Peter Hotez warns that antiscience conspiracy theorists are growing in power and organization, threatening public health and the scientists working on projects like new vaccines – such as the brand-new vaccine against malaria, potentially one of the biggest global health breakthroughs in decades.
SARS-CoV-2 infects coronary arteries and arterial plaque, which increases the risk of heart attack and stroke in people who have or had COVID-19.
NBC News’s Ben Collins may have found a clue to why Elon Musk bought Twitter only to destroy it. Musk also wiped out the company’s election integrity team and cut the group targeting disinformation on the site.
Rumble host Stew Peters called for the execution of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. Media Matters found ads for the NFL appearing on Peters’ Twitter account, including one near a link to the video of his death threat.
Fact-checking had a big moment between the 2020 election and the pandemic, with news organizations hiring more fact-checkers and more independent groups combating misinformation online, but nothing has really changed and now the effort has stalled.
Italy’s right-wing government has moved to erase LGBTQ+ people, especially parents, from their society.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has spent millions of taxpayer dollars defending his “anti-woke” laws targeting LGBTQ+ rights, public education, Disney, and more, only to lose repeatedly in the courts.
Harris County, Texas, taxpayers are in a similar boat, having paid over $1 million to people roped into County DA Kim Ogg’s (D) prosecutions of public officials with whom she’s feuded.
Republicans in North Carolina passed a bill to grab power from the Governor so they can control elections in the state, which already has a gerrymandered legislative map. Gov. Roy Cooper (D) vetoed Senate Bill 749, but the body is set to override his veto on Tuesday.
Delaware became the 17^th state to ban the “gay panic” defense, where a defendant accused of a violent act claims the act is justified because their victim was LGBTQ+.
A city commissioner in Anchorage, Alaska, who had a previous history of fraud, has been indicted for fraudulently taking $1.6 million in COVID-19 relief funds. She and her husband are accused of using the money to buy cryptocurrency, pay taxes, and for other personal matters.
The mayoral race in Franklin, Tennessee, got even more bizarre last week when a bunch of self-proclaimed white nationalists showed up to support candidate Gabrielle Hanson at a campaign event.
People of Praise, the extreme Catholic group that counts SCOTUS Justice Amy Coney Barrett as a member, is facing an FBI investigation into a cover-up of sexual abuse in the sect.
A rare bit of good news on the environment – Antigua & Barbuda has transformed the nation’s uninhabited third island, Redonda, from a lifeless rock into a thriving fountain of biodiversity.
An activist group is suing the EPA on behalf of a largely Black community in West Virginia’s “Chemical Valley,” arguing that the agency hasn’t done enough to protect residents from ethylene oxide pollution from a Union Carbide plant there.
The capitalists will let you drown. There’s money for cops and sports stadiums, but not for housing, or for infrastructure that might have prevented the flooding that plagued New York City eight days ago.
Speaking of which, just ten New York City cops were responsible for $68 million in payouts to victims of their misconduct, yet all ten are still on the public payroll.
A cop in Pennsylvania tried to strangle his ex-girlfriend and then used his authority to have her involuntarily committed.
The conservative newsletter/site The Dispatch argues that Trump and his supporters in office are devoid of moral leadership, and as Trump’s rhetoric worsens, too few people in his party seem to notice or care. Indeed, Trump called for the execution of General Mark Milley, and it barely made a ripple.
Did Hasan Minhaj go too far in fabricating autobiographical details in his standup routine? Brian Logan, comedy critic for the Guardian, says he did. The controversy seems likely to cost Minhaj a shot at the hosting job for the Daily Show.
Your brain sees winning streaks everywhere, even in random sequences. Scientific American looks at why.
Did the James Webb Telescope discover galaxies older than the projected age of the universe? Maybe, explains astrophysicist Katie Mack.
Some board game Kickstarters of note: Diatom is a tile-laying, pattern-making game based on an old Victorian art form.
And there’s a Kickstarter for the roll-and-write Merchants of Magick game, which is in the same universe as Set a Watch, along with two new expansions.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alaska, antiscience, board game news, climate change, cognitive psychology, delaware, environment, florida, frauds, health, italy, lgbt rights, links, longreads, Music, north carolina, physics, police, social media, stick to baseball, tennessee, texas, vaccines

→ September 2, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/2/23.

Nothing new this week at the Athletic beyond contributing notes on the callups of Jasson Dominguez and Ceddanne Rafaela.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the board game Bamboo, a cute medium-box game that’s a pretty meaty game at heart.

I appeared on two podcasts this week, talking to Jim Margalus of Sox Machine about the White Sox’ front office turmoil and to Chris Crawford about eight prospects who’ve had surprising years, four positive and four negative.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The writer Naomi Klein writes in the Guardian about being confused with the crackpot Naomi Wolf and how people fall for conspiracy theories online, part of her upcoming book Doppelganger.
Albanian youths bought into the hype of influencers who claimed they’d found riches elsewhere, leading to a shortage of young people staying in the town of Kukes.
The Atlantic profiles the latest Presidential candidate/grifter, Vivek Ramaswamy, who seems to think January 6^th was something other than an insurrection of idiots and might be a 9/11 truther. He also claims he’s not “bought and paid for” but is a major investor in companies fighting climate change policies.
Florida state officials sought opposing viewpoints on slavery while reviewing the AP African-American Studies curriculum. The Tampa Bay Times has more details on how Gov. Ron DeSantis’s “anti-woke” policies have led to this embarrassing situation.
In the late 1950s, Spain built a dam that should have flooded the thousand-year-old town of Granadilla, leading authorities to evacuate it. Sixty-odd years later, the town remains above water, but residents and their descendants still can’t return.
ProPublica exposes a Chicago cop who’s lied under oath at least 44 times, putting dozens more cases at risk.
Do you follow a doctor or scientist on social media who’s always promoting their subscription newsletter? The BMJ ran an opinion piece on how those pose a conflict of interest.
The San Francisco Chronicle looks at how the New York Times has covered (badly) the national assault on trans rights.
Try to contain your surprise, but Republicans blocked a bill that would have required dark money groups to reveal their donors’ identities.
The Katy ISD in Texas has halted all new book purchases for its schools because of objections to any books with LGBTQ+ themes.
Disgraced Spanish soccer official Luis Rubiales is facing a national inquiry over his forced kiss of a Spanish women’s national team player; meanwhile, his mother is going on a hunger strike over what she claims is unfair treatment of her creep son.
Atlanta magazine has lost much of its editorial staff after its publisher and editor-in-chief told writers to cut back on “woke” coverage of one of the south’s most diverse cities.
Azerbaijani forces have blocked food shipments to the Armenian exclave of Nagorno-Karabach, leading to a massive humanitarian disaster.
The Gabonese military overthrew the country’s latest leader, the third in the line of the Bongo family that had ruled the country for 55 rules. Is it a real change in power or more of the same?
Big Gay Ice Cream was one of the hottest brands in the company before the pandemic hit, but mismanagement and a fight for control have reduced the brand to just one NYC outpost and left the future of the company in doubt.
Billy Bragg tore apart country singer Oliver Anthony’s faux working class song “Rich Men North of Richmond” for the Guardian and recorded his own response track calling on people to join and support labor unions if they actually care about the plight of blue collar workers.
Saudi Arabia has sentenced a critic of the regime to death for his tweets. Very nice for an ally of the United States and a primary owner of the site formerly known as Twitter.
When VICE declared bankruptcy, its executives still got paid even when its employees didn’t.
I missed this in June but a unique Magic: the Gathering card representing the One Ring from the Lord of the Rings trilogy was valued at over $2 million by companies offering a bounty for whoever pulled the card.
If you’re having trouble falling asleep, cognitive behavioral therapy may help.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: florida, frauds, links, longreads, police, social media, stick to baseball, texas, trans rights

→ August 19, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/19/23.

I’ve got a piece filed to run on Monday or Tuesday at The Athletic, and another review coming up this week at Paste, but had nothing new up this week. My podcast will be back this week with an episode I recorded on Friday. So … sorry? But I’ll have a lot of content up in the next few days.

A few weeks ago, I appeared on the video podcast Shelf Stories to discuss ethics in board game media and questions of integrity and professionalism among folks who review games or otherwise cover the space, along with former Kotaku writer Luke Plunkett. It’s a long discussion but I greatly enjoyed it.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New York Times has a long adaptation from an upcoming book about how a California high school was torn apart by an Instagram account that posted racist memes about students there.

Nature discusses the impact of scientists leaving or cutting back on Twitter use, allowing anti-science and denialism to fester there – and that ran before Elon threatened, again, to terminate the site’s block function.

The Times also had a piece about three weeks ago looking into the continuing mystery over the origins of COVID-19, arguing that the public’s greater belief in the lab-leak conspiracy theory – any hypothesis of a lab leak remains stubbornly unsupported by evidence – is a function of distrust of authorities and the competition between narratives, not a question of facts.

By now you’ve likely read about Kansas cops raiding the offices of a small, local newspaper, after which the paper’s 98-year-old owner died. It turns out that the cops did so to try to prevent the paper from writing about a local restaurant owner’s DUI, which would have prohibited the woman, Kari Newell, from obtaining a liquor license. The county attorney has said there was insufficient evidence to support the warrant the cops obtained, and there’s now a complaint against the judge, Laura Viar, who signed it. The editorial boards of the Kansas City Star and Wichita Eagle co-published an editorial calling the raid “an intolerable overreach.”

Why did a Missouri judge grant a restraining order preventing the St. Louis Post-Dispatch from publishing details of an accused cop killer’s mental health evaluation? This seems like a First Amendment violation.

Meanwhile, Wisconsin State Senator Cory Tomczyk, a Republican, called a 13-year-old kid a homophobic slur at a county meeting in August of 2021, according to several people who witnessed it, but he’s trying to sue a local newspaper out of existence just for reporting on it.
I don’t know why this story has received so little attention: A 3-year-old girl who was trafficked by Texas state officials died while on a a so-called “migrant bus.” I couldn’t find articles on this in the Times (either one) or Washington Post, for example.

The Los Angeles Times looks at the people who actually lived near the nuclear test sites depicted as remote and unpopulated in Oppenheimer.

NPR summarizes some of the indoctrination awaiting Florida public school students as they return to the classroom this month.

A Montana judge ruled in favor of young climate-change activists who sued the state, arguing that Montana’s policy preventing state agencies from considering greenhouse gas emission potential when evaluating permits for fossil fuel development is unconstitutional. It’s largely symbolic, but could present a path for similar suits elsewhere.

The Baltimore Banner’s Kyle Goon tears apart Orioles failson/owner John Angelos’s bid for more state money along with a land grab around Camden Yards. Meanwhile, Orioles announcer Kevin Brown issued a statement nobody believes that tried to defuse reports that he was suspended for citing facts about the team’s past performance. In the Orioles’ best season in a decade, leave it to John Angelos to muck it up with this clownery.

A new state tax in Massachusetts that levies an extra 4% on incomes over a million dollars will raise $1 billion for FY2024, and the proceeds will pay for free school lunches for all kids in the state, among other things (I assume). Unfortunately, this article’s author confuses wealth with income, referring to “the state’s wealthiest residents.” Income and wealth are not the same thing, and taxing each is a very different process.

From last month, Katherine Miller wrote in the New York Times about the farcical No Labels party, which won’t reveal its funding sources and seems more interested in re-electing Donald Trump than pushing an actual new “centrist” platform (as if Democrats weren’t closer to the center than the progressive left anyway).

The Atlantic points out that asking why people keep moving to the Phoenix area ignores the broader questions of cheap energy and housing that drive it.

Board game news: The Kickstarter for Perch launched this week and is already about 250% funded.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, baseball, board game news, coronavirus, first amendment, florida, kansas, links, longreads, massachusetts, missouri, social media, stick to baseball, taxes, texas, wisconsin

→ June 24, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/24/23.

I released my second mock draft for 2023 this week for subscribers to the Athletic. I also did a Q&A to answer your draft questions.

My guest on the Keith Law Show this week was Michael Ruhlman, author of Ruhlman’s Twenty and the brand-new The Book of Cocktail Ratios: The Surprising Simplicity of Classic Cocktails, which is an essential guide for any home bartender. You can listen & subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New Yorker’s Louisa Thomas has a tremendous story on the vicissitudes of Daniel Bard’s career, as he’s had at least two distinct comebacks already in his baseball life. (There’s also a mention of Keith Law Show guest Sian Beilock, author of Choke.)

Defector has the story of con artist John Rogers, who scammed people out of millions through his business of buying and digitizing photo archives from major newspapers and professional photographers.

NPR affiliate KNKX looks at how Christopher Rufo, who made “critical race theory” an electoral rallying cry and is now going after trans people, went from a little-known City Council candidate to a right-wing influencer with links to two Presidential candidates.

The new chief of the 1100-person Grand Caillou/Dulac Band of Native Americans in Louisiana is a 25-year-old coastal scientist who wants to help his tribe fight climate change and preserve their way of life.

Water recycling is the next big thing in building and urban planning, from commercial to residential properties.

Meanwhile, the state of Arizona is making it way too hard for native populations to access their guaranteed water rights.

The Guardian spent three days interviewing the Kenyan Nobel Laureate Ng?g? wa Thiong’o, author of Wizard of the Crow and A Grain of Wheat.

The BBC has a rare look at the famine and increased repression taking place right now in North Korea.

NBC News’s Brandy Zadrozny interviewed putative Presidential candidate and science denier Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who shows just how divorced from reality he is, claiming that the powers-that-be prolonged the pandemic, that the vaccines killed more people than they saved (they did not), and that the CIA killed his father. He also still doesn’t understand that the mercury found in fish and the mercury that used to be found in vaccines were in completely different forms that the human body handles differently.

RFK Jr. is not a doctor or scientist; he’s a lawyer, with no medical or scientific background whatsoever. This TIME editorial explaining how and why RFK Jr. is “dead wrong” about vaccines was co-authored by a doctor and professor of global health.

Still not convinced? RFK Jr.’s anti-vaccine group, the misleadingly-named Children’s Defense Fund, has been reaching out to neo-Nazi and white nationalist users to drum up support for him. Very fine people.

The Washington Post has more on how a fringe, Christian doctors’ group has spurred Republicans’ renewed war on abortion, transgender rights, and more.

The same billionaire who lavished gifts on SCOTUS Justice Clarence Thomas has also donated over $450,000 to Republican Senators who might vote on judicial ethics reform.

The British government is holding over 60 migrants, mostly Tamils, in a makeshift detention camp on Diego Garcia, with conditions deteriorating and what seems like an end-run around refugee rights because the Brits are claiming the island, which houses a military base, isn’t actually part of the UK.

Two old morons accused a nine-year-old girl of being trans at a track meet, stopping the event and demanding proof that the girl was cis. This is what comes of right-wingers spreading fear and hate of trans people just to gain political currency.

Writing in the Observer, Kathryn Bromwich argues for a more inclusive feminism and less focus on the distraction of transphobia, as there are far more pressing and practical issues confronting women today.

Starbucks caved to pressure from bigots and removed Pride décor from many of its stores. Workers from over 150 locations are going on strike to protest the move.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who uses a wheelchair, vetoed a bill to make it easier for people with disabilities to vote by mail. He also approved a law that bans cities and counties in Texas from mandating water breaks for construction workers in the heat.

The BBC has the story of a Texas woman who was denied an abortion for a nonviable pregnancy and nearly died as a result of the state’s draconian, misogynistic abortion ban.

The Speaker of the North Carolina House, Tim Moore (R), stands accused of using his position to gain sexual favors, including “engaging in group sex” with people looking to benefit politically.

The British newspaper The Times ran a story claiming that COVID-19 came from a lab leak, although they didn’t provide any evidence. It’s right in line with the paper’s AIDS denialist stance from the 1980s.

Elon Musk joining in and encouraging an attack against vaccine developer Dr. Peter Hotez has many scientists looking for the exit from Twitter.

Can you wash and reuse plastic zip-top bags? Yes, several times.

Barbara Kingsolver became the first author to win the Women’s Prize for Fiction twice.

PEN America referred to the removal of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s memoir Between the World and Me from a South Carolina school’s AP course list as “an outrageous act of government censorship.”

NBC News reporter Ben Collins received a Walter Cronkite Award for TV Political Reporting, earning special recognition for his “incisive reporting from the trenches of the information war,” and gave a great speech about fighting misinformation and the need to stand up for the truth.

Truthout has some details on billionaire Leonard Leo’s operation to try to buy up the American judiciary and impose a hard-right agenda on the country.

Looks like CNN and MSNBC learned one tiny lesson, refusing to broadcast Trump’s post-arraignment speech live, since they couldn’t fact-check it in real time.

A whole bunch of Trump supporters claimed they’d respond to his arraignment with violence. They did not. You can’t cave to these people.

Meanwhile, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R) sent out a fundraising email for a “Trump Defense Fund” that would actually funnel most of the money to her.

On the bright side, Delaware’s at-large Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D) announced that she’s running for the Senate seat soon to be vacated by Tom Carper’s retirement. Delaware has never had a female Senator or a Senator of color.

Writer/activist Michael Harriot exposes some of the hypocrisy of Nikki Haley’s views and statements on race.

Verge explains the Reddit shutdown last week where multiple subreddits went dark for days to protest the company’s new policies.

The astroturfing group Moms for Liberty, which is pushing book bans and other anti-LGBTQ+ policies, quoted Hitler … again.

Board game news: A new version of the 1980s classic game Crossbows & Catapults is now up on Kickstarter.

Tangerine Games launched a Kickstarter for yet another bird-themed game, the very pretty Nestlings.

Thiefdom, a new game from the designers of Clans of Caledonia, is now also up on Kickstarter. I don’t like Clans of Caledonia anywhere near as much as the consensus – I find it a rather soulless economic Euro – but this appears to be a totally different sort of game.

Waypoints, a print-and-play game for $5, is also up on Kickstarter for one more week.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: african literature, anti-science, baseball, board game news, book banning, con men, delaware, links, longreads, misinformation, north carolina, north korea, refugees, scotus, social media, stick to baseball, texas, trans rights, vaccines, water

→ June 10, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/9/23.

I posted my first Big Board of 2023, ranking the top 100 prospects in this year’s MLB Draft class, over at The Athletic this week. I wanted to do a chat of some sort but my afternoons weren’t clear, unfortunately. Next up will be the ten-year redraft posts I do every year, this time looking back at the very mediocre 2013 class, followed by a fresh mock draft on June 21st. I also had a minor-league scouting post looking at some Yankees and Nationals prospects, including Spencer Jones and James Wood.

On the board game front, I reviewed Heat: Pedal to the Metal, a 2022 racing game that earned just the second perfect grade of 10 I’ve given to any game since I started reviewing for Paste in 2014. Heat’s a blast to play, and if you ever played the bike-racing game La Flamme Rouge from about five years ago, you will know a little bit of the mechanics, as one of Heat’s designers also did that game. Vulture asked me to list the best new games of 2023 so far.

I had Jonathan Mayo on my podcast last week to talk mock drafts, then took this week off to finish the Big Board and take care of some personal stuff. I hope to be back next week. In the meantime, you can listen & subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I sent a fresh version of my free email newsletter out to subscribers on Friday. Why not sign up?

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Columbia Journalism Review has a story on Defector, a writer-owned website founded by Deadspin refugees that’s making its model work in a difficult landscape that is seeing many other sites flounder.
This is appalling on so many levels – parents are paying to have their high school students’ papers published in junk journals to burnish the kids’ college applications.
The Washington Post looks at the “revolt of the Christian home-schoolers,” as some evangelicals who’d been brainwashed into avoiding public education are sending their kids back to regular schools.
A former gun industry executive turned gun safety advocate talked to ProPublica about how the NRA and gun manufacturers radicalized American gun owners.
The New York Times has a great story on a couple of crypto con artists whose last firm, Three Arrow Capital, went bust, so they’v e l e f t t h e U S f o r Bali and Spain … and have already started another crypto outfit.
Dr. Peter Hotez wrote in the Houston Chronicle that not only is the current pandemic not over, there will be more coronavirus pandemics to come.
The mother of an 18-year-old who killed himself is suing the publisher of a newspaper that used the teen’s image to claim he died from the COVID-19 vaccine.
Fidelity has marked down its investment in Twitter by two-thirds since Elon Musk’s purchase of the site.
Maybe it’s because Twitter no longer bothers to remove most hate speech on the site.
Or because Musk himself has gone over the right rail, quoting a neo-Nazi and spreading an antisemitic conspiracy theory.
Charlie Warzel writes in the Atlantic that all of this and more prove that Twitter is just another far-right social network. Parler, Truth Social, Gab – none of these could get a critical mass of users, so instead a right-wing nut job bought a site that already had it, then shifted it hard to the right, betting that the audience and advertisers would stick around.
Bans on drag shows are unconstitutional, writes Elie Mystal in the Nation. Of course they are. My guess is many of the laws Republicans have passed in this culture war will fail in the courts, but it won’t make an iota of difference.
A woman in Tennessee had to undergo an emergency hysterectomy after doctors in that state refused to give her a medically necessary abortion because of the state’s neanderthal abortion ban.
Two groups cancelled conventions they planned to hold in Orlando in response to the state’s anti-LGBT, anti-free speech, and anti-everything policies.
A woman in Washington state has been arrested after refusing treatment for tuberculosis, which a judge ordered her to receive over a year ago.
Rex Huppke takes aim at entitled right-wing protesters screaming at employees and damaging merchandise in Target over the chain’s line of Pride Month merchandise.
Charlotte Clymer had a thoughtful take on this topic, pointing out that giving in to the right-wing outrage machine doesn’t work: they’ll never be satisfied, and they’ll forever be in a shrinking minority.
The President of the Temecula Valley School Board referred to Harvey Milk as “a pedophile” before voting to ban a book that discussed Milk’s life and legacy. He doubled down on the comments after Gov. Gavin Newsom called him out.
Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville (guess) has been so blatant in his support of white nationalists that his own brother is disavowing him.
We’re finally getting a film adaptation of the first Flavia de Luce novel, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, with Martin Freeman attached, I presume as Flavia’s father.
Board game news: The designers of Three Sisters, Motor City, and Fleet: The Dice Game opened a Kickstarter for their next roll-and-write game, French Quarter.
Days of Wonder announced an upcoming Ticket to Ride legacy game, with original designer Alan Moon joined by Rob Daviau (Pandemic Legacy, Return to Dark Tower) and Matt Leacock (Pandemic).

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, board game news, book banning, first amendment, florida, links, longreads, Media, social media, stick to baseball, tennessee, vaccines

→ May 20, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/20/23.

I had two new posts this week for subscribers to the Athletic – a minor league scouting notebook on prospects with the Brewers, Pirates, and Phillies; and a draft scouting notebook looking at Max Clark, Dillon Head, Mac Horvath, and more.

My guests on the Keith Law Show the last two weeks have been Max Bazerman, discussing his new book Complicit: How We Enable the Unethical and How to Stop; and Russell Carleton, talking about his upcoming second book The New Ballgame: The Not-So-Hidden Forces Shaping Modern Baseball. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Just a reminder you can also find me on Spoutible and Bluesky as @keithlaw.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This (extremely long) piece from the New York Times Magazine on a woman whose dementia led to a long battle between her daughters and her second husband, whom the daughters accused of abusing and manipulating her, is sad and sobering for all of us with parents getting into that age range.

Three pieces from ProPublica: How South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn (D) conspired with Republicans to gerrymander his way into a safer seat, and how a former NFL player has sold “child ID kits” to eleven states despite no evidence they work and free alternatives already available, and how NYPD investigators never even asked for footage showing that one officer tried to stop his partner from killing an unarmed Black man. The investigators cleared both officers of any wrongdoing.

A new research paper found, once again, that sports stadiums/facilities do not generate enough ancillary economic activity to justify their costs to taxpayers when subsidized by the government. This Boston Business Journal piece covers the paper’s examination of Polar Park in Worcester.

NBC News has a longread on how conservatives took over the school board in Woodland Park, Colorado, ushering in a right-wing curriculum, forcing out employees who spoke out, and engaging in apparent self-dealing.

The Guardian spoke to a number of Florida teachers about their experiences under the state’s draconian new laws restricting their speech and lesson content, with several saying they’re considering leaving the state and/or the profession. Florida already has a severe teacher shortage, by the way.

The science behind reverse osmosis filtering was unclear, until a paper published in April upended the previous model and opened up the possibility of new membranes that make filtration, including desalination, more energy-efficient.

A conservative “foundation” recruited fifteen men at a Poughkeepsie homeless shelter to pretend they were veterans kicked out of a hotel to make room for migrants coming up from New York City. The plan fooled state Assemblyman Brian Maher (R), who fed the outrage machine until he had to admit he’d been had.

The Philly Inquirer has a story on a victim of the romance scam known as ‘pig butchering’ who ended up out $450,000 to a con artist she met on Hinge.

An invasive weed known as stinknet has taken over Arizona’s Sonoran desert, fueling wildfires, crowding out native species, and causing lung problems for nearby residents. And it’s spreading.

The executive director of the Kinsey Institute at the University of Indiana wrote in the Washington Post about the Republican-controlled state government’s attack on the institute, which prohibits the university from using any state funds to support the institute. It’s culture-war bullshit that impedes important research.

Bryan Slaton has resigned his post in the Texas legislature after it emerged that he’d behaved inappropriately with an intern. The Republican once introduced legislation to ban children from attending drag shows, claiming it was some form of grooming.

Meanwhile, doctors at Austin’s Dell Clinic who were treating trans kids there are leaving after the state’s under-indictment AG Ken Paxton announced an investigation into the facility after the duplicitous far-right Project Veritas claimed it was conducting surgery on kids as young as eight. The Texas Observer found documents from the also right-wing American College of Pediatricians setting out a playbook for how to defund trans care in Texas.

The current moral panic over trans kids is part of a larger effort to control the lives of American youths, argues researcher Dr. Chris Pepin-Neff in Scientific American.

Richard Uilhein, the right-wing billionaire owner of U-Line, is one of the chief backers of the proposed Ohio amendment that will make it harder for future amendments to pass by raising the threshold from 50% to 60%. Don’t buy from U-Line!

Ohio Republicans are trying to follow Florida’s lead in banning DEI programs at state universities and mandating their sort of indoctrination in the classroom, along with the definitely not problematic proposal to base tenure on whether a professor taught with “bias.”

I know you’re shocked, but Iowa’s new law allowing residents to use school vouchers for private and even religious schools has led many of those schools to raise tuition in response. You’d think they might have learned from the national student loan fiasco.

Nebraska legislator Megan Hunt is the hero we need. Just don’t call her a Democrat.

I agree with everything in this Mary Sue post about the disappointing S3 of Ted Lasso, which has none of the things that made the show good in its first two seasons. But at least the episodes are longer!

A woman in Utah who wrote a children’s book about how to deal with grief after her husband died has now been charged with his murder.

Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) has no problem with white nationalists serving in the U.S. military.

The Arab League has quietly reinstated Syria, more than a decade after the nation and its murderous dictator President Bashad al-Assad were expelled for violent reprisals against protestors leading up to the country’s 12-year civil war.

Two mass shootings in Serbia have led to public demonstrations and a wave of people turning in their guns. Must be nice.

Jasper Fforde ffans like me have waited thirteen years for a sequel to his novel Shades of Grey. It’s finally coming, as Red Side Story will be released in the UK in February of 2024. No word yet on a U.S. release; the fourth Dragonslayer novel didn’t get one, which is not a great sign.

Ben Collins wrote at NBC News about how Twitter has disabled some key content-moderation controls, allowing things like animal torture videos to spread across the site. Meanwhile, Elon Musk has been busy spreading misinformation about the Texas mall shooter.

The best piece I read on CNN’s Trump Town Hall faceplant was, in fact, this one on Teen Vogue.

This post from WBUR’s Here and Now recommending some modern board games for families is actually very good.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alabama, arizona, baseball, board game news, Economics, florida, frauds, iowa, links, longreads, nebraska, ohio, police, science, social media, stick to baseball, syria, texas, the swamp, trans rights, tv, voter suppression

→ April 2, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/1/23.

Since the last roundup, I’ve written three new posts for subscribers to the Athletic – my annual predictions post, my first dispatch from spring training (mostly Cactus League), my annual breakout player picks, and a draft blog post on three potential first-rounders from Wake Forest and Miami.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the cooperative game Paint the Roses, which has simple rules but poses a difficult deductive challenge for players, working best with three or more.

I appeared on the streaming Scripps News Network to talk about why major-league salaries keep rising while minor leaguers’ haven’t, although this was recorded and aired before the recent CBA announcement.

My podcast will return now that my spring training travel is over, with David Grann lined up as my next guest. I did send out a new edition of my free email newsletter about two weeks ago.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Chronicle of Higher Education looks at Stanford Prof. Jo Boaler, whose arguments and research are driving changes to high school math curricula in California and beyond … but who has a history of playing fast and loose in her own work and with interpretations of others’ research as well. If her name is familiar, it might be for the time she implied she was calling the cops on Dr. Jelani Nelson after he criticized her in a tweet that pointed out that she charges schools up to $5000 per hour in consulting fees.
The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics honored three scientists for their work on quantum entanglement. Scientific American looks at the work of Chien-Shiung Wu, a Chinese-born American scientist whose 1949 experiment on entanglement paved the way for the three men who won the award this year. The Nobel Committee did not mention her contributions.
With Twitter gradually losing steam, the New York Times compiled a ranking of the 25 most important tweets in the site’s history.
TechCrunch took a more sober look at how the microblogging site is dying a slow death. Elon Musk is killing the site’s classic verification feature because he doesn’t understand the value it conferred not on the verified users, but on the site itself.
Simon Hattenstone’s mother sent hundreds of abusive tweets about the McCanns, the British family whose daughter Madeleine disappeared during their Portuguese vacation, taking her own life when she was outed as the troll behind those tweets by Sky News. Hattenstone remembers his mother and how little he really knew about her in a very thoughtful column in the Guardian.
Vanity Fair says Ron DeSantis plans to run for President on an anti-vaccine platform. I imagine that’ll also blend with a lot of railing against “wokeness” (see below), but will this stuff play outside of the states that the Republican candidate will win anyway? Or will it be about pretending the pandemic is over/never happened? Meanwhile, DeSantis’s book tour has been a fiasco so far.
Uvalde police were afraid of the Robb Elementary shooter because he had an AR-15, the very gun the NRA is working so hard to keep legal and accessible across the country.
Raquel Evita Saraswati became a major figure in Philadelphia’s advocacy community, especially for LGBTQ+ rights, as a queer, Muslim woman of color. Her colleagues at the American Friends Service Committee revealed last month that she’s not a person of color at all, assuming various ethnic identities to keep up the fiction.
Anti-gay activist and attorney Jared Woodfill, who was also previously the chair of the Harris County, Texas, Republican Party, maintained ties for over 15 years with a man he knew had sexually abused a child. Woodfill remains a major figure in Texas politics despite his lengthy personal, professional, and financial ties to Paul Pressler, his former law partner who has been accused by several people of sexual abuse and statutory rape over the last forty-five years.
Billy Ball’s six-year-old son died from a horrible accident that caused cerebral swelling that killed him. Vaccine deniers mocked and attacked Ball online, claiming the COVID-19 vaccine was the cause and Ball was culpable. Twitter, Facebook, etc. did little or nothing about the harassment.
Texas’s abortion ban is leading to a shortage of doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel. Why would you work there when there’s plenty of demand in states that let you practice medicine?
—
A girl in California gave her goat to the Shasta County Fair, then wanted it back because she found out they were going to kill and eat it. When her family refused to hand it over, the police came and seized the animal. Fair organizers said they intended to teach kids a lesson. I hope they learn something themselves.
A Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll of trans Americans found the majority were more satisfied in their lives after transitioning.
In Wyoming, Republicans’ attempts to ban abortion in just about every form and case ran afoul of Republicans’ attempts to circumvent the Affordable Care Act. Heh.
Austin police arrested a 71-year-old deaf woman at the airport after she missed her flight, and a jailer twisted her arm enough to break it while handcuffing her. The city charged her with criminal trespass, even though she had a ticket and was trying to change it to a different flight.
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R ) signed multiple anti-LGBTQ+ bills, including one banning gender-affirming care for trans kids, and then said she “didn’t like” doing it.
In neighboring South Dakota, some trans kids are being forced to detransition by that state’s anti-trans law. Who exactly is this helping?
Missouri’s Attorney General is ready to spend a bunch of taxpayer money attacking trans kids, and medical experts are saying his ideas are extremely harmful.
And in Uganda, which is just following the lead of various red states, there’s a new law that makes it a crime to be LGBTQ+ at all. Its proponents invoked the same language as Republicans here – they want to “protect traditional family values” and uphold the Church’s teachings.
When I was a kid, the Republicans used buzzwords like “socialism” to try to scare voters into supporting them, painting Democrats like Mike Dukakis as “card-carrying” liberals. That buzzword has now been replaced by “wokeness,” and the thing the two terms have in common is that people who use them can never define them.
President Biden issued his first veto, striking down a Republican resolution that sought to block retirement fund managers from considering environmental, social, and corporate governance issues, although this was all performative and is part of that whole “wokeness” thing.
A student at Eastern Florida State College said a lecture on civil rights in a U.S. history class made him uncomfortable, so the professor cancelled the class.
Ohio Republicans are trying to pass a law mirroring the Florida law that limits what can be discussed in public education, including banning discussions of so-called “controversial beliefs” like systemic racism and climate change.
Undercover agents (!) went to a drag show in Orlando in December and found nothing “lewd” or indecent, but Florida is going after the venue’s liquor license anyway.
The President of West Texas A&M University cancelled a student-run drag show, claiming it demeaned women and comparing drag to blackface. The students are suing on First Amendment grounds, while they’ve also rescheduled the event off-campus, so they might win twice.
Spotify puffed out its chest a year with the announcement of a $100 million “creator equity fund” that was supposed to boost voices from diverse backgrounds. One year on, they’ve spent less than 10% of it.
Infections with the fungus Candida auris are spreading at an “alarming” rate throughout the United States. It affects people who already have weakened or compromised immune systems, and the current wave of infections is largely resistant to anti-fungals.
With so much evidence of journalistic malfeasance at Fox News – and this was written before the recent summary judgment in the Dominion lawsuit – why won’t journalism schools ostracize the network from campuses? Stop inviting their people to speak. Limit their ability to recruit students through official channels. Anything to acknowledge that this isn’t journalism.
Board game news: Let’s Go to Japan, the new game from the designer of Santa Monica and Cat Lady, is probably going to clear half a million in funding on Kickstarter. The concept is pretty cool – Wood had saved for years for a trip to Japan, where he’d wanted to go since he was a kid, only to have his plans cancelled by COVID-19. So he made this game about it.
The medium-heavy strategy game Wild Gardens is more than 200% funded on Backerkit with 18 days to go.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, education, first amendment, florida, health, iowa, lgbt rights, links, longreads, missouri, ohio, physics, police, social media, south dakota, stick to baseball, texas, trans rights

→ March 11, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/11/23.

Nothing new at the Athletic this week, although I should have 2-3 coming up this week as my travels continue. I did hold a Klawchat on Thursday.

For Paste, I reviewed the game Gartenbau, which combines very simple rules with tight decisions that make it a real challenge to play it well.

On The Keith Law Show this week, I had my annual Oscars preview episode with Chris Crawford. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I was going to send another issue of my free email newsletter this week but got tied up with some other writing (board game stuff, actually), so it’s still on my to-do list.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: WIRED has the story of the takedown of a former Iraqi translator who became a major fentanyl dealer in the U.S. and is now serving a 30-year sentence in federal prison.

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is trying to strip the press of its First Amendment rights.

The rash of anti-trans bills across the south and Midwest are the work of a network of religious-right groups that operated in secret while pushing their bigoted agenda, according to emails between those groups and South Dakota state Rep. Fred Deutsch (R) obtained by Mother Jones.

ProPublica has more information on billionaire Leonard Leo’s new plan to try to “crush liberal dominance” in American politics and culture. He’s considered the main architect of the strategy that gave conservatives a 6-3 Supreme Court majority and control of much of the federal judiciary.

My wife and I watched the Oscar-nominated animated short My Year of Dicks, which is very funny and sweet, which led us down the rabbit hole of its writer Pamela Ribon, including this hilarious 2011 post from her now-defunct blog about how she might have become a new urban legend.

Walgreens won’t sell abortion pills in states that merely threatened legal action, even though the medication is still legal in those locations.

Failed actor turned conservative talking head Michael Knowles, called for transgender people to be “eradicated” in a speech at the far-right convention CPAC this week.

All of the rhetoric you’re seeing against trans people right now was previously used against gays/lesbians by the same sort of Christianist activists.

A girls basketball team in Hoover, Alabama, the host city for the SEC baseball tournament, was forced to play in a boys’ rec league if they wanted to continue to use city facilities. When they subsequently won the league’s tournament, they were denied the trophy, which was then given to the boys’ team that finished second, because they are a ‘competitive’ team playing in a recreational league.

An anti-vaxxer nurse in Spain is in court, accused of faking vaccinations of children.

After a woman went on a racist tirade in a pizzeria near Philly, TikTok vigilantes tried to identify her, and instead targeted three innocent women instead, leading to widespread harassment.

From January 2022: Ashli Babbitt, who some right-wingers want you to believe was a martyr, had a history of violent behavior prior to her participation in the January 6^th insurrection.

Witnesses at Guantanamo Bay recalled Ron DeSantis laughing while prisoners there were tortured.

Utah legislators have voted to change the law that made it nearly impossible for victims of sexual assault by doctors to sue their attackers.

The Tennessee House passed a bill gutting marriage equality, possibly allowing elected officials to decline to issue a license to a couple for any reason. The state’s Republicans also passed a law banning drag shows, which is nothing more than performative bigotry

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, alabama, first amendment, florida, links, longreads, social media, stick to baseball, tennessee, trans rights, utah, vaccines

→ February 25, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/24/23.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I’ve had several new posts, including a ranking of the top 20 prospects for impact in the majors in 2023 and a draft blog post on the Globe Life College Baseball Showdown, which featured TCU (Brayden Taylor), Vanderbilt (Enrique Bradfield Jr.), and more. I chatted with three of our beat writers about prospects – Dan Connolly about the Orioles’ farm system, Jen McCaffrey about the Red Sox’ farm system, and Dave O’Brien about Atlanta’s farm system.

I’ve done a bunch of podcasts and other interviews in the last few weeks, including the East Village Times’ podcast (Padres), the Seattle Sports Union podcast, the Phillies Nation podcast, WTMJ Milwaukee’s Extra Innings podcast, the Locked on Dodgers podcast, and the Sox Machine podcast (White Sox).

Over at Paste, I reviewed the game Quacks & Co., the kids’ version of the great push-your-luck game The Quacks of Quedlinburg.

On the Keith Law Show this week, I spoke with Fangraphs’ lead prospect writer Eric Longenhagen as we compared some of our rankings on our top 100s (here’s his top 100) and discussed the top of this year’s draft class. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I sent out another issue of my free email newsletter on Friday, which marks my sixth so far this year, a better pace than I had in 2022, something I hope to keep up now that I’ll be writing something pretty much every week for the Athletic.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New York Times Magazine has a long feature on Ghibli Park, a sort-of theme park built around the works of animation legend Hayao Miyazaki.

Ninety-four women allege a Utah doctor sexually assaulted them, but a judge said Utah law makes this medical malpractice and threw their cases out. Utah legislators could just change the law, but they’re too busy trying to kill trans kids.

Air pollution might be causing us to lose our sense of smell.

The Appeal has stories of pregnant people who’ve been shackled and abused while in custody in Harris County, Texas, jails, the same jail system that saw 28 prisoners die last year and four already in 2023.

De la Soul’s catalog is supposed to come to streaming platforms in March. OkayPlayer spoke to the attorney who helped clear most of the samples on their earliest work and made this possible.

Funds from two programs created by then-President Trump’s Department of Agriculture to provide disaster relief to farmers flowed to wealthy landowners instead, such as a $983 payment to the owner of a $23 million mansion right near Trump’s own Mar-a-Lago resort. Over $5.5 million in total funds from those programs went to residents of the 75 wealthiest ZIP codes in the U.S.

The New Republic is one of the few outlets doing real reporting on the effects of the train derailment and chemical release in East Palestine, Ohio, such as this article on dying animals and residents’ respiratory distress, and this editorial on the fake conspiracy theories around it and the real corruption that allowed it all to happen.

There’s a network of neo-Nazi home-schoolers operating in Ohio, and the state says they can’t do anything about it. Maybe if they were teaching critical race theory and trans rights?

Biden’s EPA has streamlined a program to approve alternatives to fossil fuels that originally covered biofuels but also includes fuels made from recycled plastics – even though one such process is likely to release a highly carcinogenic byproduct into the atmosphere. And the EPA won’t release details of the process, right down to the names of the chemicals involved.

The majority-Black city of Jackson, Mississippi, is likely to end up with a separate, state-run court district with judges appointed entirely by white politicians, thanks to a Republican-authored bill that already passed the state’s lower chamber.

A police officer in Pueblo County, Colorado, shot and killed an unarmed man in the car line outside a school because the man got into the wrong car by mistake. Video shows the officer gave no warning and neither he nor his partner gave the victim, 32-year-old Richard Ward, any assistance as he bled to death on the ground. The DA declined to charge the officers, saying they “justifiably feared for their lives.”

A publisher planned to revise several of Roald Dahl’s books to remove potentially offensive language, but after criticism it appears they relented. I have a lot of thoughts on this, most of them opposing the effort. You can’t undo history, and art is a comment and reflection of its time. With a children’s book, you always have the choice not to read the book to your kids, or to read it in full and explain why some language or imagery is inappropriate or offensive. I’m also not sure what good this does for books with millions of copies in print.

New York Times White House correspondent Peter Baker has a history of activism through his work and his social media commentary. He also criticized journalists who argued that the paper’s coverage of trans issues has been slanted when he co-signed a letter calling them “activists.”

From the Onion: It Is Journalism’s Sacred Duty To Endanger The Lives Of As Many Trans People As Possible.

The chaos and breakdowns within Twitter hampered rescue efforts after this month’s earthquake that killed thousands in Turkey and Syria.

Russia used state media to support Canada’s so-called “Freedom Convoy” that protested the country’s attempts to limit the spread of COVID-19.

I grew up in Smithtown, New York, and from kindergarten through twelfth grade I attended public schools in that district, which is now further embarrassing itself by adding armed guards at its schools despite no actual evidence that these prevent mass shootings.

Board game news: The small publisher Holy Grail Games announced they’re shutting down.

25^th Century Games has a Kickstarter up for three new tile-laying games: Agueda, Color Field, and Donut Shop. As of Friday morning it’s less than $2000 away from its funding goal.

The Search for Lost Species is over 11x funded already on Kickstarter; it’s the sequel to The Search for Planet X, my #1 game of 2020.

The Kickstarter for the last standalone expansion for Set a Watch is also fully funded, with just five days to go.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, children's literature, environment, hip-hop, japan, links, longreads, mississippi, miyazaki, ohio, police, russia, social media, stick to baseball, texas, the swamp, utah

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