social media — Page 8

→ November 2, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/2/19.

This isn’t quite new, but I put out a formal announcement this week that my second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, will be out on April 21, 2020. You can pre-order it now on HarperCollins’ site.

On the board gaming front, I ranked the top 25 board games of the 2010s for Paste this week, and also wrote about some recent programming games, where players issue instructions as if they were writing code, over at Ars Technica. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

You can get more of me by signing up for my free email newsletter, which I send out irregularly but definitely not often enough to bother you.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: A ProPublica investigation found billionaire Dan Gilbert got a huge tax break with the help of the Trump Administration after making large donations to Trump’s campaign. The tax break in question involved “opportunity zones,” incentives aimed at spurring new development in disadvantaged urban areas – not, as in Gilbert’s case, for investments already made.
One dollar of every $10 spent on AmazonBasics products is spent on batteries. One writer tried to track where those batteries come from and what their impact is on the environment. She found a few answers, but not enough, and a lot of opacity from a company that is already under fire for labor concerns, climate impact, and its logistics operation’s effect on road safety.
Allie Conti, writing for VICE, describes discovering a vast, nationwide hosting scam on AirBnB that costs unsuspecting guests hundreds of dollars and leaves them without a place to stay.
The well-titled article “The Fight Over a Shitty Rock” has a very serious point: There’s a dispute roiling over Rockall, a tiny and uninhabitable islet in the North Atlantic claimed by the United Kingdom, and whether the islet extends the UK’s fishing rights against the wishes and claims of Ireland.
The chocolate industry has already been criticized for its use of child labor and even slaves; now the Washington Post points out that cacao farmers in West Africa are decimating forests, accelerating climate change, while western chocolate producers talk about sustainability without addressing this issue at all.
Spotify’s dominance in the streaming industry is still tenuous and hasn’t led to consistent profits, which explains in part the company’s acquisition of podcast producers Gimlet Media.
Anti-vaxxer nuts send racist, violent threats to people who post pro-vaccine messages, and Facebook does absolutely nothing about it. The people running these sites – Twitter is no better – talk a big accountability game when it comes to abuse and harassment, but they don’t back it up with actions.
Facebook also lets right-wing propaganda site The Daily Wire violate its rules by using sock puppet accounts to promote its content. Again, Facebook does … nothing. And they blocked pro-vaccine ads while letting anti-vaxxer ads run. It’s okay if we’re still getting paid.
Anti-vaxxers love to claim that measles is ‘benign,’ but there’s growing research on just how harmful a bout of the viral disease can be in the long term. New evidence shows that causes ‘immune amnesia’ in survivors, whose immune systems must relearn how to fight infections because measles wiped out 11% to 73% of antibodies already present in that person’s blood.
The anti-vaxxer faux-documentary Vaxxed has a sequel, but the producers aren’t saying where it’s playing for fear rational people will try to stop it, so keep your eyes open, rational people, and demand any theater near you that tries to show Vaxxed 2 pull their screenings.
An evidence-based technique called motivational interviewing is proving useful in addressing vaccine-hesitant parents. It involves one-on-one conversations between parents and trained counselors who don’t tell the parents what to do, but “simply talk through parents’ fears and goals, and let them decide what to do.”
Louisa Thomas wrote of the ‘stories’ the Houston Astros have told, which don’t always align with reality, in the New Yorker. I know of at least three more departures from their baseball operations department in the last few months, only one of which, longtime Jeff Luhnow lieutenant Oz Ocampo, is public.
Michael Stipe and Mike Mills spoke to the BBC about their album Monster on the 25th anniversary of its release.
Writing for Paste, Annie Merkley writes about what it’s been like as an American in the midst of the protests in Chile, a piece that also explained to me what the protests have been about.
It’s from June of 2018, but John Pavlovitz’s “Now You Want Civility?” post seems apropos after all the pearl-clutching over Nationals fans booing President Trump last Sunday. And, by the way, one of the clutchers was Delaware Senator Chris Coons, a Democrat I’m hoping gets primaried the next time he’s up.
VICE asks if sex addiction is real, or a misidentification of people who have sexual habits or preferences that might vary from the median.
A Spanish court acquitted five men of rape because the victim was drunk, so they didn’t have to use force. This is separate from the “Wolf Pack” rape case that led to protests earlier this year.
A legislator from Cobb County, home of your Atlanta Braves, is trying to make it a felony for trans kids to get gender reassignment via surgery or drugs. In two thousand and fucking nineteen, we are still doing this. This isn’t ‘protecting kids,’ as she claims; it’s going to do nothing but increase suicides.
Deep sleep may help protect the brain against Alzeimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases by triggering electrical pulses, according to one new study.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: chocolate, climate change, frauds, georgia, lgbt rights, links, longreads, sleep, social media, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ July 20, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/20/19.

No new ESPN+ pieces this week but I expect to have several next week. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Century A New World, the end of the Century trilogy that began with Spice Road and continued with Eastern Wonders.

If you read my free email newsletter, you learned at least two interesting things this week, one of which is that I’ve backed away from Twitter by logging out of it on my phone. I find the entire atmosphere on the site too toxic for my tastes, which even continued on Friday as I checked it on my laptop to find someone angry I didn’t tweet about a particular story that broke yesterday.

I’ll be at the Under Armour Game at Wrigley Field on Monday, a great event that showcases many of the high school players who’ll be drafted in the first round next June. It’s free to attend; you can request tickets ahead of time or just get them at the ticket windows that day. The game starts at 2 pm and I highly recommend it.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: If you enjoyed Fleabag, nominated for a slew of Emmy Awards this year, as much as I did, you’ll probably enjoy this GQ interview with star/creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge, conducted by Tina Fey.
The Guardian‘s The long read feature looks at the rise and fall of French cuisine, long considered the backbone of a culinary education, but now seen as stuffy and dated in many quarters.
I hate my lawn, other than the modest pleasure of mowing it (I listen to the Grierson & Leitch podcast, which correlates quite well with the time required to mow, and I use the cuttings in my compost pile), and I’m losing the battle to various native weeds. Lawn care in the U.S. is a $40 billion a year business, and it’s all a disaster for the environment. Maybe it’s time to turn away from grass; I’m faced with a decision this fall, as too much of my lawn has lost out to large and smooth crabgrass, a sign that my soil isn’t providing the real grass with the nutrients it needs, and don’t get me started on spurge.
The Guardian looks at the rise in audiobook sales, asking if it’s good, bad, or both.
I read & recommended Ed Yong’s book I Contain Multitudes about a year and a half ago; in the book, he described nascent efforts to combat mosquito-borne illnesses by using a Wolbachia bacterium to naturally sterilize mosquito populations in the wild. One such experiment in China has nearly eradicated Aedes albopictus from two islands,
For Athletic subscribers, I highly recommend the great Peter Gammons’ profile of the majors’ best rookie this year, Fernando Tatis, Jr.
I finally got to Razza in Jersey City this week, about a year and a half after the New York Times food critic said it was the best pizza in New York City. He recently revised that statement after Una Pizza Napoletana returned to Manhattan after several years in San Francisco. I went shortly before the move, and it was spectacular.
One of my favorite restaurants in the Phoenix area, Scottsdale’s Pig & Pickle, closed suddenly this week in what sounds like a dispute with a new landlord.
There’s an underreported scandal going on in Malaysia right now: ousted Prime Minister Najib Razak and his wife are on trial for corruption, and prosecutors showed his wife racked up $800,000 in jewelry charges on a credit card linked to a state-owned investment fund. President Trump welcomed Razak to the White House in 2017, when the embezzlement scandal had already become public but Razak had yet to be voted out of office.
LGBT rights are under attack in Poland too, as the right-wing party in power is cheering on towns creating “LGBT-free zones”.
An Arizona newscaster dropped an f-bomb on air after the Phoenix New Times wrote that she joined a far-right social networking site that has attracted several overt racists banned from Twitter. An Arizona Republic editorial wrote that it’ll probably make her more popular.
A Philadelphia pediatrician wrote about her attempts to empathize and reason with “vaccine-hesitant” parents, even though the best solution is to fire them into the sun.
Lots of board game news as we approach Gen Con (I’ll be there as usual): Ravensburger announced Villainous: Evil Comes Prepared, the second expansion to last year’s Disney’s Villainous. You can pre-order it exclusively through Target right now.
Dire Wolf is taking its free-to-play digital card game Eternal to tabletop, releasing a physical version of the game in August; you can pre-order it through Dire Wolf’s site.
Renegade Game Studios announced pre-orders for Paladins of the West Kingdom, the second game in Shem Phillips’ West Kingdom series and his fifth in the series of Viking-themed games that began with Raiders of the North Sea.
The role-playing game Gloomhaven is coming to Steam and just entered Early Access this week.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, baseball, board game news, lgbt rights, social media, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ April 20, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/20/19.

Nothing new for ESPN+ subscribers this week, although I’ll have another draft blog post next week, followed by a draft top 50 the week after (I got bumped by some other draft). My last ESPN+ post covered likely first rounders Alek Manoah and Josh Jung, with Manoah looking like a top ten pick when I saw him.

I reviewed the app version of Castles of Burgundy, one of my favorite high strategy games, for Ars Technica. MENSA also gave its Select tag to five games from 2019 and I’ve reviewed two already, Gizmos and Architects of the West Kingdom.

I rarely appear on podcasts due to time constraints, but when Kyle Bandujo asked if I’d come on his show, Trouble with the Script, to review the worst baseball movie I’ve ever seen, I couldn’t possibly decline. I think we properly eviscerated Trouble with the Curve.

My free email newsletter is becoming dangerously close to a weekly thing now. I must be mellowing in my old age.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This is from February but I hadn’t seen it until a friend sent it along this week – best-selling novelist Dan Mallory is a serial liar who has made false claims of cancer and bipolar disorder to try to further his career. None of the claims has anything to do with his book, The Woman in the Window, however; it’s just that much of what he says about his life to date is untrue.
Mariners pitcher Rob Whalen recently retired due in large part to anxiety disorder, and he says the Mariners handled his case extremely poorly.
WIRED has a long, in-depth look at the chaos inside Facebook in 2018 as the company was called to account for its role in influencing the 2016 election, the way it promulgates hate speech and fake news, and poor data privacy standards.
Audio link: KQED looks at the Coachella concert-goers and those of us at home don’t see, a community far less affluent than the attendees are, and that is dealing with environmental problems from the warming desert.
The Writers’ Guild of America has demanded that its members cut ties with their agents to protest conflicts of interest by agencies that also produce shows via “packaging” deals. This past week, the first writer came out to say he wasn’t going to do so, in a letter that is pompous, self-serving, and in at least one instance untrue.
Fair Harvard, doing me proud: The university’s health services rejected a student proposal to make naxolone, the treatment capable of reversing opioid overdoses, available on campus. The money quote: “They had some skepticism about whether the research actually suggested that naloxone would be effective at Harvard.” If Harvard students have different biology from other humans, I’d love to know about it sooner rather than later.
The FDA may start cracking down on the use of the Non-GMO Project label.
A Bangladeshi student who reported sexual harassment by one of her teachers to the police was burned to death by members of her community, sparking large protests in the Muslim nation in south Asia.
A pair of adults wore Nazi armbands and MAGA shirts in Providence, Rhode Island, and then stood atop the city’s Holocaust memorial where they gave the Nazi salute.
The Washington Post looks at one possible fix to the “nightmare” job market for academics.
Brewers reliever Jeremy Jeffress started a food truck with someone from his hometown to re-create a favorite childhood experience of fried seafood. I need reports from those of you in Milwaukee when it starts up on May 5th.
Apparently there’s a controversy brewing over a Canadian stamp with an inaccurate depiction of something called a Nanaimo Bar, which I’d never heard of it until this happened.
Board game news: Another Terraforming Mars expansion, Turmoil, is over $600,000 on Kickstarter already.
The unrelated game On Mars has also cleared the half-million mark on Kickstarter. The BGG listing for the game says playing time is 90-150 minutes, so I may end up giving this one a miss.
Not a board game, but after reading this review of Falcon Age at Paste, I’m suddenly interested in it despite my general avoidance of video games (because they suck up so much time).

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anxiety, bangladesh, board games, gmo, links, rhode island, social media

→ April 8, 2019
→ By keith

Longreads, 4/7/19.

My latest draft post for ESPN+ subscribers looks at the top prospects from last week’s NHSI tournament, including C.J. Abrams, Riley Greene, and Jack Leiter; as well as Saturday’s outing by Elon RHP George Kirby.

Here are some of the leftover longreads I hadn’t gotten through in time for yesterday’s post:

The Guardian looks at the evolution of the influencer market, which continues to grow even through scandals and fragmentation. The article also focuses, a bit oddly, on influencers’ drive for “authenticity,” which strikes me as a contradiction in terms.
A reader sent this lengthy Current Affairs overview of Pete Buttigeig as seen through his book Shortest Way Home, arguing that he’s not a progressive candidate and that progressive voters shouldn’t want any part of him as a Presidential candidate. I think the article makes many good points, notably when discussing his policies as South Bend mayor and how he seemed to deprioritize issues like poverty reduction or racial inequality, but also makes some dubious inferences and leans too much on the book itself, which is a campaign document. Buttigeig also wrote about his ten favorite books for Vulture and I find it hard to believe that these ten, which read like the list of books you want other people to believe are your favorite books, are actually his favorites.
The Indy Star profiles John Franzese, whose testimony sent his father, a Colombo crime family boss, to jail, and his life after leaving witness protection, trying to work with recovering addicts like himself.
I’ve read two great books on the Chicxulub impact event, the asteroid collision with the earth that wiped out the dinosaurs and caused the KT mass extinction event, in the last year: The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs and T. rex and the Crater of Doom. The New Yorker has a piece right in line with those, looking at the recent discovery of a site that may have a fossil record of the first few hours after the impact.
Matthew Komatsu documents his experiences as a Japanese-American in the wake of the 2011 tsunami, and what he found in his 2018 return to the country.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: history of science, links, social media

→ March 9, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/9/19.

No new ESPN+ content this week, but that will change now that I’m in Florida to see a little spring training and at least two potential first-rounders while I’m here. I did hold a Klawchat on Thursday and a Periscope video chat on Friday.

I sent out the latest edition of my free email newsletter on Friday, this time discussing a hypothesis I have on how some teams handle low-ceiling teenaged prospects; you can sign up here and maybe I’ll send you something too.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: I have four pieces in this week’s roundup from the New Yorker, including two longreads. I subscribe to their site – I signed up right after I cancelled my New York Times subscription – and, if you have the disposable income, I recommend it. The first is Jane Mayer’s incredible, horrifying piece on the transformation of Fox News into a Trump propaganda network, the closest thing we’ve ever had to state TV in this country.
The second longread profiles kaiseki chef Niki Nakayama, a pioneer here in a niche cuisine dominated by men.
Ben Lindbergh and Rob Arthur received a large file of thousands of scouting reports from the Cincinnati Reds from 1991 to 2003 and wrote up some of what they found from global analysis and looking at specific players in a three-part series. I’m quoted several times in the first piece, but I will mention again that I’m a little uncomfortable with this information, which is outdated but would still be classified as trade secrets, getting out to the public.
The Verge looks at popular Twitter user & activist Dr. Eugene Gu, who has been accused of sexual assault and of misrepresenting portions of his resume.
There’s been a lot of very bad writing in the last week over Congresswoman Ilhan Omar and her comments on Israel and AIPAC. I thought this Politico piece contrasting Omar’s place on the policy continuum with that of fellow Rep. Dean Phillips, who represents a district that borders on Omar’s, was one of the few good pieces. Omar ended up in the news again for her candid comments on President Obama’s tenure, including his decision to continue the drone strike program started by his predecessor, and for her comments that questioned whether some people have “allegiance” to Israel, the latter being taken completely out of context and used as more evidence of anti-Semitism. It’s not, as you can see from this transcript of her remarks. AIPAC is a powerful lobbying group, and AIPAC is not Israel is not Judaism.
A Florida massage parlor owner has been selling access to President Trump at Mar-a-Lago. I’m not sure how this isn’t a bigger story.
The framing here isn’t great but this New Yorker piece on the risk that we become so overwhelmed by climate change’s dangers that we give up is still worth a read. I haven’t run into this sentiment anywhere online or in the real world, at least not yet.
The New Yorker‘s Masha Green looks at why measles is “a quintessential political issue” of 2019, drawing parallels to Michael Cohen’s testimony while excoriating our public-health system.
Dorit Reiss writes in the San Francisco Chronicle that non-vaccinating parents should be liable for damages when their kids start outbreaks. This would put a stop to some vaccine refusals – plenty of wealthy or high-income parents are vaccine deniers, too – but even marginal increases in vaccination rates will boost herd immunity.
For example, many of you already saw the story of an Oregon boy, aged 6, who nearly died of tetanus and racked up about $1 million in hospital bills. One, the parents should lose custody; they subjected their son to an entirely preventable, prolonged period of physical suffering. (It’s described in detail in the article. Imagine putting your kid through that.) Two, those costs, which don’t include the opportunity costs of that helicopter or the associated doctors being unable to take care of other patients, are the result of the parents’ active decision not to vaccinate. They should be liable for all of it.
A Chicago man who wasn’t vaccinated as a kid, then caught measles at age 30 and nearly died from it says parents have “no excuse” for deciding not to vaccinate.
UK Health Minister Simon Harris has warned social media companies over anti-vaccine ads ($).
The Sackler family’s role in fueling the opioid epidemic to further enrich themselves represents a significant policy failure, according to the Washington Post‘s Charles Lane.
It looks like Big Tobacco and now its partners in the vaping world may have helped push FDA head Scott Gottlieb out of his job. He was a rarity in this Administration, an official who took a tough stance on regulating harmful products in the name of the public interest.
The era of easy recycling is over as China is no longer interested in our recyclables. Add this to your Green New Deal proposals: we need more reduction and reuse, and easier access to composting. I have had a working compost pile for five years now, and it makes a noticeable difference in reducing my trash, but even that isn’t enough to take all of my compostable plant-based items, and I can’t compost meat or dairy scraps or even most paper materials in there because it’s not big enough. (I have composted a few cotton shirts, though.)
Writer/producer Amy Berg posted a Twitter thread explaining the Writers Guild of America’s conflict-of-interest complaint that the major talent agencies representing them, which could lead to some pretty drastic action as soon as the end of this month. (Full disclosure: I am represented by WME.)
Steven Spielberg wants to ruin the Oscars out of spite. Well, the Oscars aren’t so hot anyway, but he wants to make them worse by ensuring that Netflix titles and, as a secondary consequence, other indie films have a harder time qualifying for the awards. Spielberg went on to yell at several clouds that he said looked too much like the amazon logo.
Drew Magary – back from the brink – goes goes General Sherman on Barstool Sports in the wake of the latter’s aggressive legal tactics to try to get away with copyright infringement.
Jane Coaston explains right-wing grifter Jacob Wohl, recently banned from Twitter for admitting he’s made and continues to make fake accounts to try to influence elections and/or get gullible conservatives to send him money.
Parker Molloy shows how conservative outlets and commentators use “Mister Gotcha”-like claims of hypocrisy against Democratic politicians or candidates to derail actual debate over policies.
An Alabama court ruled that an aborted fetus’s biological father had some say in whether the pregnancy was terminated while ruling the fetus had legal standing to sue, a huge step backwards for women’s rights and for secularism.
This video clip from INSIDER explains why white savior movies are bad for Hollywood and for viewers.
A new, deluxe edition of the Martin Wallace classic Age of Steam is now up on Kickstarter. The new version includes brand-new artwork and a better color scheme.
A roll-and-write version of the great tile-laying game Lanterns called Lanterns: Dice in the Sky is available for pre-order, with May delivery expected.
Game designer Rich Gain, who worked as an operations manager at Japanime Games until just a few months ago, lost his fiancée and infant son in a car accident last week; there’s a GoFundMe running on his behalf in the wake of the tragedy.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, board games, japanese cuisine, links, oscars, social media, the swamp, vaccines

→ March 2, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/2/19.

For ESPN+ subscribers this week, I wrote three pieces, breaking down the Bryce Harper deal, ranking the top 30 prospects for this year’s draft, and offering scouting notes on players I saw in Texas, including Bobby Witt, Jr. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

On the gaming front, I reviewed the Kennerspiel des Jahres-winning game The Quacks of Quedlinburg for Paste, and also reviewed the digital port of the game Evolution for Ars Technica.

I went on the Mighty 1090 in San Diego with Darren Smith to talk Manny Machado, Olive Garden, and the Oscars, and on TSN 1050 in Toronto to talk about Ross Atkins’ strange comments on Vlad Jr.. I also spoke to True Blue LA about Dodgers prospects, and joined the Sox Machine podcast to talk White Sox prospects.

I’m due for the next edition of my free email newsletter, so sign up now while the gettin’s good.

High Street on Market’s Sandwich Battles begin this Monday, with tickets available for $25. They’re my #1 restaurant in Philly, in large part because their breads are otherworldly.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: GQ has a length profile of the prolific and highly disturbed art thief Stéphane Breitwieser, who stole artworks valued at over $1 billion but never sold anything.
21st Century Fox was hit with a $179 million penalty by an arbitrator over a wide scheme to defraud the actors and producers of Bones of residuals from streaming on Hulu. Fox lied about the profits they were receiving from Hulu, of which Fox owns 30%, and at one point a Fox executive signed both sides of a deal between the two companies.
MLB.com’s Mike Petriello, who was a huge help to me when I was working on Smart Baseball, has a superb primer up on the Rapsodo and Edgetronic devices that are revolutionizing player development, especially in the area of ‘pitch design,’ where coaches and pitchers can work together to change or develop pitches by using real-time data that show how changes in grips or release points affect a pitch’s velocity and spin. Driveline Baseball, mentioned in Mike’s piece, has a blog post up on gaze research, or tracking how hitters see the ball. Technology has allowed teams and players to measure things that were either estimated by scouts/coaches in the past or that were simply brushed off as unmeasurable.
Little Falls, Minnesota, has found success in fighting opioid addiction by treating it as a disease, rather than as a crime or a personal failing. It’s an approach that has worked in other countries – Portugal is a paragon in this area – but goes against the Puritanical strain in American culture that sees addicts as degenerates.
What if climate change leads to enough cloud loss to further accelerate the warming of the planet? The odds of this are higher than we previously realized.
Why is California’s Attorney General refusing to release a list of cops convicted of crimes? Xavier Becerra, running for re-election this year, has even rejected public records requests from his own agency, which has led to lawsuits and would appear to violate open-records laws.
Marcela García writes in the Boston Globe how the should-have-won-Best Picture film Roma has exposed the deep racism within Mexican society.
A popular talking point among Republicans right now is that doctors are “killing babies” right after they’re born. The President said it in his State of the Union address, and it’s been repeated ad nauseam over the last month. Dr. Jen Gunter, an OBGYN who herself gave birth to a son so premature he could not survive, points out what a dangerous lie this line is.
Anti-vaxxer Forest Maready, who likes to depict people with autism as “tragedies,” has a new book coming out that resurfaces the debunked myth that vaccines cause autism. Amazon and Apple are planning to sell it, but I signed this petition asking them to pull the title from their stores. Meanwhile, an inquiry from Rep. Adam Schiff led amazon to pull six anti-vaccination “documentaries” from prime video.
Anti-vaxxer groups on Facebook are harassing pro-vaccine doctors by trashing their Yelp and Google ratings as well as flooding those doctors’ Facebook posts with comments. Facebook has done little to nothing to combat the problem. The Atlantic points out that the Facebook anti-vax community is quite small, just loud, and banning them would be easy for the platform.
WIRED argues that amazon’s anti-vaxxer problem is worse than Facebook’s.
A Nova Scotia chiropractor lost her license for spreading anti-vaccine information and making other unfounded claims. We should strive for the same kinds of laws around chiropractors, naturopaths, and even the rare medical doctor who embraces this sort of bullshit.
CNN also weighed in on tech outlets failing to police the anti-vaxx bullshit on their platforms.
The Washington Post looks at how anti-vaxxers are responding to the overdue public backlash against their efforts, as well as bills in various state legislatures to end religious and/or philosophical exemptions to mandatory vaccination requirements.
Scientific American presents public policies we can use to fight anti-vaxxer lunacy.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch‘s Kevin McDermott asks why so many Americans are rejecting science in the face of incontrovertible evidence.
Italian researchers used CRISPR to create a genetically modified version of a malaria-carrying mosquito; if released, it should lead to collapses of that specific species and thus reduce malaria transmissions.
Paste‘s Jacob Weindling noticed that CNN stacked its phony ‘town hall’ for Bernie Sanders with political operatives/lobbyists posing as regular folks.
LA Times movie critic Justin Chang wrote that Green Book is the worst Best Picture winner since Crash, calling the vapid white-savior film “an embarrassment,” “insultingly glib and hucksterish,” “a self-satisfied crock,” and a “palatable brand of godawful.”
Late Night with Seth Meyers rather perfectly sent up the film with their ‘trailer’ for White Savior.
And apparently Green Book producer sent critic Jenni Miller a condescending, tone-deaf email where he doesn’t even know the main character’s real name.
In a bit of things coming full circle, Pig Destroyer’s John Jarvis has formed a new baseball-themed grindcore band, Kolten Wong City, a name that alludes to Kowloon Walled City, whose bassist, Ian Miller, is part of baseball-themed grindcore band Puig Destroyer, whose name alludes to … well, you get it now.
Why are progressive artists still working with Morrissey despite his embrace of far-right causes and outright racist statements?
Talk Talk’s singer and main songwriter Mark Hollis died this week at age 64. His last release was a solo album in 1998, after which he retired from music to spend time with his family.
Splinter writer Samer Kalaf released an email exchange he had with conservative NY Times writer Bret Stephens, without Stephens’ permission, but I think Kalaf comes off far worse here than he realizes.
Roland’s Market, a collaboration between Chris Bianco and the couple behind Tacos Chiwas, closed without warning last month. The location will be converted into a larger outpost of Bianco’s Pane Bianco.
The former editor of the Rocky Mountain News writes of his fear that local journalism will continue to fade and die as newspapers are plundered by hedge-fund owners.
Charlotte Riley describes the game Patriarchy Chicken in a column subtitled “why I refuse to move out of the way for men.”
The FTC is finally cracking down on scammers who buy fake reviews on amazon, going after the seller of a bogus weight-loss ‘supplement.’
In board game news, Disney’s Villainous: Wicked to the Core hits Target tomorrow; it’s exclusive there for a month and will later roll out to other outlets. I’ve played it, and it’s as good as the original, but with rules that are much clearer for first-time players, enough that you might do better to start with this before going back to the first game. (This is a standalone expansion that you can combine with the original.)
Renegade Game Studios has Hex Roller, a new roll-and-write game that I haven’t seen yet, up for preorder.
Days of Wonder announced a few weeks ago that their next title will be Corinth, an update/retheme of the game Yspahan that alters some core rules and eliminates the caravan (which was a dominant strategy in Yspahan).

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 2018 movies, addiction, anti-science, art, baseball, board games, california, climate change, frauds, links, movies, oscars, pseudoscience, social media, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ November 4, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/4/18.

For ESPN+ subscribers, I ranked the top 50 free agents this offseason. I also held a Klawchat on Wednesday, before a brief vacation to Disneyworld to help my parents celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary.

I’ve been better about sending out my free email newsletter, which isn’t to say the content is better, just that I’m sending it more often.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Washington Post has a long investigation by writer Radley Balko into the rot inside the Little Rock, Arkansas, Police Department that led to an incompetent, racist cop shooting an unarmed 15-year-old black kid, lying about it, and escaping conviction in two trials. The cop in question, Terry Hastings, was hired over the objections of another officer, who pointed out that Hastings had attended a Ku Klux Klan meeting – normally a disqualifying event, but Hastings’ father was also on the LRPD force.
This Atlantic longread by a writer whose grandfather was ostracized for a failed attempt to solve a major physics problem also delves into deeper questions of what drives geniuses and how orthodox institutions treat apostasy.
A Harvard researcher has a new theory of mitochondrial function and evolution that may help lead to new treatments for diseases of mitochondrial dysfunction, including many fatal muscular diseases.
Stalwart indie bookstore The Strand is unionized, making it a bit unusual in the bookstore world, but the store’s very wealthy owners have fought modest pay raises and benefits increases. The Strand is a wonderful store with knowledgeable employees and an enormous selection of new, used, and rare books, but this column says much of its revenue comes from renting out its space rather than the sale of books.
The Washington Monthly has a longread accusing writer Salena Zito, whose pieces cover Trump voters out in rural America, of fabricating quotes and stories and manipulating quotes, as well as other journalistic sins, even as her conservative employers look the other way. She has taught at least one seminar at Harvard’s Kennedy School, but the school hasn’t responded to my request for comment yet.
Was Friends homophobic, ahead of its time, or both? This essay on LitHub argues both sides of it, and explains why the show was too cautious on LGBT issues even as it gently expanded the boundaries of what was shown on network television.
Facebook ignored warnings about Russian interference in Ukraine via troll farms, part of the company’s general unwillingness to look at information warfare outside the U.S. that could have tipped the company off to what Russia did here in 2016.
The white man who shot up a Tallahassee yoga studio, killing two women, was an ‘incel’ who had twice been charged with assaulting women as well as a history of posting misogynistic and homophobic content online. He was still able to buy an AR-15.
President Trump barely works at all, high irony after years of the right criticizing Obama, by all accounts a workaholic, if he dared to take an afternoon to play golf.
The self-immolation of white nationalist Twitter troll Jacob Wohl to smear Robert Mueller is lovingly detailed by The Cut.
Many western billionaires have invested in ‘doomsday’ properties in New Zealand, arguing that its isolation makes it ideal in case of a global pandemic, war, or other apocalypse. They don’t all sound terribly sane to me.
CRISPR gene editing has been long on promise but light on results so far, but a new research effort found it might help treat Duchenne muscular dystrophy.
Transgender neurobiologist Ben Barres died last year of cancer; his autobiography just came out and Nature has a very positive review.
The Supreme Court refused to block a lawsuit demanding that the US government act on climate change. You know my views on the subject, but do we have a constitutional right to a clean environment?
Fourteen teachers at a Middleton, Idaho, elementary school are on paid administrative leave after wearing racist Halloween costumes, as well as dressing up as the border wall with the MAGA slogan on it. I don’t have much hope under this administration, but it seems like a federal civil rights violation took place here.
A pediatrician in California rails against bogus vaccine exemption letters written by doctors who rely on genetic quackery. There is no such thing as a genetic predisposition to vaccine injury. Doctors who claim they have found these cases in children are merely profiteering and should lose their licenses to practice medicine.
The Daily Beast writes that vaccine denial is now a Republican epidemic. Voting for science increasingly means voting Democrat./
ThinkProgress talked to experts who explained that the claims about Bitcoin’s future energy consumption are bogus.
Ethiopia now has a female President, its first in the country’s history. The position is ceremonial, but she is still the sole female head of state in Africa right now, and her selection is more evidence that Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who set up a cabinet where half the posts were filled by women, is a great progressive hope for a country that has lived under tyrants since World War II.
The President sputtered out a false claim that he could revoke birthright citizenship by … I don’t know, tweeting about it, which is ironic since his Florida property does big business with Russians who want to give birth on U.S. soil to secure American citizenship.
Haaretz details Trump’s lengthy history of using anti-Semitic rhetoric and tropes to stir up his base, and how that contributed to last weekend’s massacre at a Pittsburgh synagogue.
Jewish leaders there told Trump he wasn’t welcome in their city until he disavowed white nationalism. He showed up anyway, and of course has blamed the deaths of eleven Jews in the shooting on the lack of armed guards at the temple.
The Atlantic‘s Adam Serwer points out that the inane story of the migrant caravan contributed to the shooting, part of yet another bullshit campaign from the GOP (“but her emails”), this time with anti-Semitic underpinning and violent consequences. As Serwer points out, this caravan is a threat to exactly nobody, and is still weeks away from reaching our border – if it even gets that far.
One other reason the caravan story is codswallop? There aren’t enough people in Central America to matter to U.S. immigration numbers.
Indiana Law Professor Ian Samuel writes in the Guardian that Republicans are close to an invincible grip on power, even as a clear minority party, thanks to vote-rigging, voter suppression, and some favorable SCOTUS rulings. The money quote: “For the first time, a president who lost the popular vote had a supreme court nominee confirmed by senators who received fewer votes – nearly 22 million fewer – than the senators that voted against him.”
Need another reason to vote blue on Tuesday? Global warming is more advanced than we thought, as the oceans have absorbed far more heat than we realized. The oceans absorb that heat, and carbon dioxide, and become more acidic, which leads to the deaths of coral reefs, and that in turn ripples up the food chain and threatens human diets.
The Arizona Board of Education rejected outgoing Superintendent Diane Douglas’ plan to push creationism in public schools, which was just going to lose in court anyway, but what a waste of everyone’s time.
Proof that evolution is real is right before us in antibiotic resistance, which British Chief Medical Officer Dame Sally Davies said last week threatens to take us back to the dark ages.
In a bit of good news, residents of Southampton, England, formed a human chain to help a small community book store relocate, with 250 volunteers passing the 2000 books person to person from the old location to the new one.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-semitism, arizona, arkansas, biology, bookstores, climate change, evolution, frauds, idaho, links, longreads, physics, racism, science, social media, stick to baseball, the swamp, tv, vaccines

→ September 9, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/8/18.

My one piece for ESPN+/Insider this week looked at the top prospects at last weekend’s Future Stars Series, including Daniel Espino, the top RHP for the 2019 draft, and Glenallen Hill, Jr. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

My annual minor league player of the year column is supposed to run this upcoming week, which means I need to write it (it’s not like the winner is a tough choice, but I like to highlight a few other dudes who had great years too), and I am hoping to get a new edition of my email newsletter out as well.

And now, the links…

Slate looks at the sustainability of The Athletic’s business model while raising critical questions about whether their content is actually as unique as they claim it is. (I’m an Athletic subscriber and happy to pay for good content, but I would say I read a very small number of writers on that site.)
Two longreads from the great investigative journalism site ProPublica this week. First, how Oregon keeps releasing violent criminals who were judged criminally insane, with several such convicts eventually reoffending for violent crimes.
Also, José Bacelga, a cancer researcher and the Chief Medical Officer at Sloan Kettering, failed on several occasions to disclose financial conflicts of interest when publishing cancer research in major journals. He was even editor-in-chief of one such journal that published his research yet broke its rules on disclosure.
I loved Will Leitch’s take on Nike choosing to ally itself with Colin Kaepernick despite the entirely expected outcry from the right. I also think they got more publicity value out of the announcement than they could possibly have bought. (Will is a friend of mine.)
Ars Technica, for whom I have written one freelance piece, has a short column asking BBQ pit masters for basic tips on pork butts and briskets. I’ve used the foil trick to get around the stall problem with pork shoulders, but prefer not to use it because it softens the bark that forms on the meat’s exterior.
The President’s increasingly overt racism shouldn’t be a surprise – he’s been attacking Elizabeth Warren for years by using ‘Pocahontas’ as a sort of racial slur to question her integrity. The Washington Post debunks Trump’s claims that she used her heritage to obtain promotions or admission to schools.
A trans woman of color was murdered in Philadelphia this week, and 2018 is shaping up to be an especially deadly year for trans people in the US, although it seems like hard data on the subject is hard to come by. I think it’s fair to say the trend isn’t good – such killings should be going down and they’re probably not.
Passengers on four Southwest Airlines flights may have been exposed to measles thanks to a sick passenger who traveled on those planes. The measles virus is extremely contagious and can be fatal at the time of infection or later in life. I would entirely favor a law criminalizing the woman’s actions: flying with a contagious, vaccine-preventable disease, thus putting hundreds of people at risk.
Ride-sharing services like Uber may be exacerbating traffic problems because riders choose them over public transportation, not over driving themselves. I do use these services from time to time, but not when public transit is available (and safe).
Twitter banned Alex Jones and InfoWars this week after months of pressure to rid the site of the hoax-peddling arch-right conspiracy theory factory and its corpulent founder. Jane Coaston covered these bans last month for Vox, looking at why YouTube, Apple, and Facebook took the same action.
Board games! Z-Man Games, an imprint of Asmodee, announced the latest extension to the Pandemic brand with Pandemic: Fall of Rome, which sounds a lot like last winter’s Pandemic: Rising Tide, another game that took the framework of the original Pandemic, added some clever twists to the rules, and shifted the theme away from fighting global epidemics.
Floodgate Games announced the Kickstarter for Bad Maps, a light family-level strategy game they demoed at Gen Con. It’s about 2/3 to its goal with 18 days to go. Floodgate also released the 5-6 player Sagrada expansion, which includes a private dice board to tweak the original’s dice-drafting mechanic, to retail this past week. It’s $25 on amazon via that link.
Starling Games announced a Kickstarter, opening to backers on September 10th, for Pearlbrook, the first expansion for Everdell, itself in the running for my #1 new game of 2018.
It seems like each week brings one great new(ish) comic on vaccine denialism, so here’s the latest.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: bbq, board games, links, media criticism, social media, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ August 25, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/25/18.

I had one Insider/ESPN+ piece this week, scouting notes on Tampa wunderkind Wander Franco and some Yankees & Rangers prospects, and held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I reviewed the gladiator-themed deckbuilding game Carthage for Paste this week. That’s the last of my pre-Gen Con reviews; I believe everything I review the rest of the year will either be from games I got/saw at Gen Con or that were released afterwards.

I’m about due for a fresh edition of my free email newsletter, to which you may wish to subscribe if you enjoy my ramblings.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: ESPN’s Jackie McMullen has an excellent piece on the NBA’s progressive efforts to help players battle mental health issues, interspersed with insights from Kevin Love, Paul Pierce, and other players who’ve dealt with anxiety, depression, and panic disorder.
The Guardian looks at TripAdvisor at a crossroads, beset by fake reviews and dealing with many of the same questions of responsibility for content that affect larger tech outfits.
Ten billion dollars a year goes to ‘charities’ who aim to shape public policy, which can both alter public discussion and political votes on topics while also depriving the U.S. Treasury of tax revenue from the associated income. That’s just one revelation in Pulitzer winner Elizabeth Kolbert’s New Yorker piece on the new era of philanthropy, where the wealthy have more power than ever and often wield it through their foundations.
Radiolab looked at Facebook’s own problems with regulating hate speech in a recent podcast episode that I found very thorough – it doesn’t let Facebook off the hook, but does a solid job of explaining some of the difficulties they face in making decisions on what content to allow and what to delete.
The BBC’s The Inquiry podcast asks if we might see another AIDS pandemic as global health initiatives slow and major aid donors (notably the U.S.) reduce their funding. If our government continues its lurch towards theocracy, you can bet AIDS research and international aid for AIDS treatment will drop.
Russian trolls/bots may have been spreading vaccine denialist views on social media, although Dr. David “Orac” Gorski argues that the media coverage has overstated its prevalence.
Orac was busy this week, with another post on how the Australian edition of 60 Minutes ran a puff piece on a quack stem cell clinic. So-called stem cell therapy has become the next big thing in separating gullible or desperate patients from their money, but the science itself is unproven and very much in its infancy.
Harvard Law Professor Jack Goldsmith writes in the conservative Weekly Standard that there is sufficient grounds for impeachment, and that may lead Trump to try to fire Mueller and any other investigators working on the collusion case.
How do microscopic plastic particles end up in our food chain? Researchers have found so-called microplastics in water supplies, in beer, and even in aquatic creatures we consume, with unknown consequences for the ecosystem and our bodies.
The multi-level marketing scheme known as Herbalife has been around, and been accused of being a scam, for decades now, but somehow they always skate by. (They’re a major sponsor of the LA Galaxy soccer team, and as good an argument as you’ll see for not putting corporate sponsor names on jerseys.) A new lawsuit alleges that Herbalife’s system of paid seminars misleads attendees by promising wealth while siphoning off their money.
Uganda, one of the few African countries where baseball has a presence, may be about to descend into chaos as a popular singer turned rising opposition politician has been jailed and beaten by agents of dictator Yoweri Museveni. Protests against the detention and Museveni’s oppressive rule continue to grow.
Corruption in Louisiana: The state’s Senate President, John Alario, has twice spiked a bill legalizing ride-sharing services to help his friend, who sells insurance to cab companies. This story appeared on ProPublica two days ago; it hasn’t been picked up by any local Louisiana news outlet since.
New EPA rules, relaxing regulations on clean, beautiful coal, will lead to 1400 more deaths per year and up to 15,000 additional cases of respiratory problems, including asthma, due to the fine particulate matter emitted by coal mining and production.
Brooklyn-based pizzaiolo Paulie Gee has been talking about opening a New York-style slice shop for years now, but it appears it will finally open at Franklin & Noble this month.
N.K. Jemisin won her third straight Hugo Award for Best Novel for The Stone Sky, and her five-minute acceptance speech is well worth your time, as it’s by turns funny and inspiring.
My Twitter friend Parker Molloy wrote for the Guardian how she can’t root for the Cubs after their decision to acquire Daniel Murphy, who has expressed anti-gay views without ever retracting or revising them.
Asia Argento, a prominent victim of Harvey Weinstein’s predations, now stands accused herself of statutory rape of a 17-year-old boy; we can believe her claims on Weinstein but still hold her accountable for her own transgressions.
Kelli Ward is running for Jeff Flake’s Senate seat in Arizona on a platform of pro-Trump, white nationalist talking points; she’s even been campaigning with Weird Mike Cernovich, the conspiracy theorist who gained an audience by pushing the bullshit Pizzagate story.
Blake Fahrenthold resigned from Congress over a sexual harassment scandal that U.S. taxpayers helped clear up for him, but blames everyone except himself for his career’s demise.
Georgia’s GOP is trying to suppress the black vote in November by closing polling stations, using the Americans with Disabilities Act as its justification. Majority-black Randolph County did reverse its plans to close seven of nine polling stations after the public outcry. If you live in Georgia, make sure your elected officials know you support voting rights and oppose any attempts to suppress the vote. And voters in other areas should know this is part of a broader, national vote-suppression effort using the same flanking maneuver.
The Washington Post‘s Elizabeth Bruenig argues that it’s time to stop thinking of ‘socialism’ as a dirty word in a piece that argues largely for ‘democratic socialism,’ which is a poorly-named platform of social welfare policies that by and large doesn’t actually require socialism. Socialism has a specific historical meaning: government ownership of major means of production and distribution. It’s been tried all over the world, and it has failed, as it wipes out many of the incentives that drive human decisions in the marketplace. If you want to argue for a stronger social safety net and for policies that strive to reduce structural discrimination and inequality, that’s a debate worth having, but it’s not ‘socialism.’
The New Republic‘s Sarah Jones writes (in a piece from April) that the real campus free speech problem is on the right, not on the left, highlighting cases of punishment for views handed down by evangelical Christian colleges.
A Kansas City TV station suspended a reporter for sharing an article on white privilege on her Facebook page. The incident may also have led to her termination; a KC Star editorial argues that the station was in the wrong. The reporter’s lawsuit against KSHB is still pending.
Amazon appears to have set up a slew of astroturfing Twitter accounts to fight news coverage of poor working conditions at its warehouses.
Researchers at MIT and Harvard have developed a genome test that may help identify patients at greater risk for diabetes, heart disease, breast cancer, and a few other common, often deadly diseases.
The longstanding hypothesis on the cause of age-related cognitive decline has been neuron death and insufficient replacement of those cells to make up for the loss. New research may counter that, showing that the cause might be lost neuron plasticity, which was reversed in mice using the drug fluoxetine, better known as Prozac.
Hua Hsu writes in the New Yorker about the ‘end point’ of representation and the hit film Crazy Rich Asians, the success of which has brought the term representation (back) into the mainstream conversation. Representation matters to the people who haven’t been represented, and if that inconveniences you as someone who has never had to think twice about seeing people who look and sound like you on the big or small screens, well, tough.
Red Raven Games has a Kickstarter running for the second edition of their game The Ancient World.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, arizona, charity, environment, hugo award, links, medicine, pizza, pseudoscience, representation, science fiction, social media, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines, voter suppression

→ August 11, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/11/18.

Just one Insider post this week, with scouting notes on some Yankees, Pirates, and Orioles prospects. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

My Gen Con wrap-up is filed to Paste and I’ll update this post with the link when I get it.

You can sign up for my free email newsletter, which I’ve been sending out every ten days or so. And my book, Smart Baseball, is now just $9 on Kindle.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Eater exposes the toxic workplace culture at Estela and other restaurants operated by chef Thomas Carter.
ProPublica exposes the unelected officials who are running the VA from the shadows of Mar-a-Lago.
Dale Murphy, former Atlanta Braves superstar and near-Hall of Famer, wrote the best piece I have seen to date on players’ social media gaffes, such as the extremely bigoted tweets from Josh Hader and Trea Turner. Murphy gets it, and speaks with the gravitas folks like me simply can’t muster. Over at Medium, Justin Megahan asked about the baseball culture that produces young men who think this shit is funny, although I think it’s not specific to baseball, but a function of societal views of masculinity.
A major investigation by liberal rag … um Forbes found that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross may have stolen over $120 million from investors, and lied about his assets and business activities on ethics disclosure forms when he was nominated. He’s still employed as of Saturday afternoon. Drain the swamp, indeed.
Twitter’s attempt to remain apolitical by refusing to ban conspiracy theorist and snake oil salesman Alex Jones is in itself a political choice. Parker Malloy writes here that Twitter still can’t figure out what kind of platform it wants to be; I don’t like the platform it has become.
WIRED‘s Issie Lapowsky writes that tech companies can’t win their war against Jones. That may be true, but doesn’t excuse inaction.
Also writing for WIRED, Clive Thompson offers thoughts on how to slow the spread of online hate. Doing nothing or disengaging are not good options.
Slate examines four hypotheses on why Twitter hasn’t moved against Jones yet, none of which is terribly satisfying.
Laura Ingraham went full white nationalist on Fox News this week; the Atlantic called her out on it, both in that her love of “country” seems to ignore this country’s founding principles, and that the population as a whole doesn’t agree with her.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the darling of the progressive left, but her increased media presence has just led to her producing a lot of bullshit answers, including the same kind of myth-repeating that characterizes the alt-right. Her policy proposals are at least interesting enough to discuss, but her sound bytes don’t reveal any depth to her ideas.
The Italian Senate is trying to delay the country’s new mandatory vaccination rules that arose in response to an ongoing measles epidemic in the supposedly developed country.
I’ve never had any use for PETA, and they reminded me why when they attacked Impossible Foods for testing its burgers on rats to satisfy federal safety requirements. If PETA’s interest is in improving the lives and welfare of animals … well, it’s not, as evidenced here. Their interest is in generating headlines. I guess they got their wish.
A couple in New Mexico appear to have stolen a $100 million painting just to keep it in their apartment, and perhaps stolen and sold other art works to finance a lifestyle beyond their apparent means. None of this was discovered until after their deaths, and family members still can’t believe it’s true.
The FDA has approved the first new malarial preventive drug in over 18 years.
One of my Senators, Tom Carper, wrote an editorial assailing the Trump administration’s plans to end emissions standards for cars. It’s going to take years to undo the environmental damage wrought by this regime.
Attorney General Jeff helped block an EPA action against Drummond Coal, one of his biggest donors, while he was still in the Senate, according to testimony in a recent bribery trial of a Drummond executive and a prominent Alabama law firm, both of whom had close ties to .
The sugar industry in Florida is under attack now for its role in pollution that is feeding toxic algae blooms; they’ve also got a long history of labor rights abuses and using tariffs to restrict sugar imports and raise consumer prices. The Florida GOP has historical ties to Big Sugar, and one leading gubernatorial candidate, Adam Putnam, has taken over $8 million in contributions from Big Sugar and its PACS.
Mike Salk, program director for ESPN Seattle 710 and longtime host of the Brock & Salk show, as well as a friend of mine, wrote about how Jim Abbott helped inspire him after an accident damaged his hand at age 12.
The online editorial comics site The Nib has a Kickstarter for them to start a print version of the publication. Some of the best editorial cartoonists online have appeared in the Nib or will appear in the magazine, including Matt “We Should Improve Society Somewhat” Bors.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alabama, baseball, environment, florida, health, links, science, social media, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

Archives