social media — Page 9

→ February 1, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/1/20.

I had two posts for Athletic subscribers this week, one on whether the Reds have done enough to contend in the NL Central, and one on the Starling Marte trade. I held a Klawchat on Thursday, and a Periscope chat, my first since I started getting sick at Thanksgiving (after taking prednisone for just four days!) and had a cough for most of the next six weeks. My prospect rankings will run on The Athletic the week of February 24^th.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Hadara, a civ-building, card-drafting game that made my top ten games of 2019. I keep comparing it to 7 Wonders because of the similarities in themes and card selection, but it’s more in the “try this if you like 7 Wonders” vein than a “this is too similar” one.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, is due out on April 21^st from Harper Collins, and you can pre-order it now via their site or wherever fine books are sold. Also, check out my free email newsletter, which I’ll get back to again this upcoming week in between writing words about prospects.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This Atlantic piece asking whether domestic violence treatment programs work was both interesting and frustrating, as the author barely mentions whether any of these programs are evidence-based (DAIP isn’t) and focuses only on group treatment rather than individual.
A Wisconsin doctor and his wife have lost custody of their adopted daughter due to a child-abuse claim disputed by fifteen medical experts. The state’s system for detecting child abuse may encourage its own experts to find abuse even where evidence is weak or absent.
The Guardian caught up with Kelis and learned how badly the music industry mistreated her. She accuses the Neptunes, which include Pharrell Williams, of cheating her out of her share of royalties from her first two albums.
The Congressional Budget Office reported this week that the U.S. national debt will rise to 98% of GDP by 2030, with deficits of over $1 trillion a year for over a decade. The Wall Street Journal‘s piece ($) blames the 2017 Republican tax cuts.
Greenpeace is fighting the Philippines’ approval of Golden Rice, a far more nutritious rice strain, because it’s genetically modified – not, mind you, because of any evidence of harm.
The Columbia Journalism Review weighed in on the Washington Post‘s since-rescinded suspension of Felicia Sonmez over her tweets in the wake of the death of Kobe Bryant, a move the Post‘s own Erik Wemple excoriated in a column in that paper.
With 85% of the world’s languages reportedly endangered, the BBC looks further at alphabets and writing systems similarly threatened with extinction.
The BBC also profiled Duolingo founder Luis von Ahn, who explains why he created the free app, which includes lessons in 28 languages. I’ve used it a few times but find it less useful than hand-written flash cards (albeit a fraction of the time required), and I don’t think it teaches much grammer or syntax.
A Sandy Hook hoaxer was arrested after tormenting the families of the victims. He’s a former contributor to Alex Jones’s Infowars site.
Practice Fusion provided free health-records software to doctors’ offices, but they struck a secret deal with Purdue Pharma for the software to ‘recommend’ opioids as treatment in an effort to boost prescriptions.
Climate change is threatening many high-end food items like coffee and wine; a rise of 2 C would cause the loss of 56% of current vineyard land.
The WHO has warned that the well of new antibiotics is running dry. While it’s hardly the main concern about rising antibiotic resistance, think of how much professional sports will change if ‘routine’ surgeries are no longer possible because of the risk of infection?
Tennessee state legislator Mitch Van Huss (guess) submitted a resolution declaring CNN and the Washington Post ‘fake news.’
That same Washington Post has some good tips on how to impede Facebook from stalking your activity off the Facebook site.
Our country’s anti-Muslim travel ban was just extended to add six countries, not that you heard about it much in the news.
Chemical and Engineering News looks at how chemical changes to the baseball’s core have contributed to longer batted ball distances.
I enjoyed the Netflix documentary The Killer Inside, about the late NFL player and convicted murderer Aaron Hernandez, but Will Leitch has a very different, critical take on it.
Facebook has hired a former Fox News exec who oversaw the spread of multiple bogus conspiracy theories, like one that Barack Obama was educated in a Muslim madrassa, to help ‘curate’ content to be shown on Facebook’s News tab.
Darren Rovell re-used an image without permission and threw a fit when asked to delete it.
Board game news: Genius Games’ Genotype, a game of Mendelian genetics, hit Kickstarter this week and is already at 6x its funding goal. I have seen the prototype of this game and I’m very excited for it.
I missed this around the holidays, but Board & Dice announced Tekhenu: Obelisk of the Sun, the new game from the designers of Tzolkin, will be released right ahead of Gen Con 2020.
And finally, in a video for Eurosport, John McEnroe has some truth to share about the bigoted tennis legend Margaret Court.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, climate change, Languages, links, longreads, science, social media, stick to baseball

→ January 18, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/18/20.

I’ve written five pieces for the Athletic so far over the two weeks since I joined. In reverse chronological order, they are a ranking of the ten best prospects to change organizations this winter; a breakdown of the Josh Donaldson signing; a breakdown of last week’s Rays-Cardinals trade; notes on what I look for when evaluating players; and my introductory post. I also held a Klawchat this week.

Over at Paste, I reviewed The Taverns of Tiefenthal, the newest game from Kennerspiel des Jahres winner Wolfgang Warsch, who also designed The Mind, That’s Pretty Clever!, and The Quacks of Quedlinburg, all of which are quite good.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, is due out on April 21^st from Harper Collins, and you can pre-order it now via their site or wherever fine books are sold. You can also sign up for my free email newsletter for even more non-baseball content.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Slate has the story of a credible allegation of rape against three Mets from the spring of 1991, with Doc Gooden, Daryl Boston, and Vince Coleman all accused. None was ever charged.
The Root and the Young Turks detail outright racism in the South Bend police force under Pete Buttigieg. The details herein, and Mayor Pete’s unwillingness to answer basic questions about them, are quite damning.
Did an Oxford classics professor steal and sell ancient pieces of papyrus, including one that would be the oldest known piece of the gospels, to the billionaire owners of Hobby Lobby? (Also, how can you be a billionaire and a devout Christian? I’m reasonably sure Jesus said those two things could not be true at the same time.)
The New Yorker looks at a woman who can’t feel physical or emotional pain due to a genetic mutation, and whether the extent to which we feel pain is really an essential part of being human.
The New York Times describes how a recently-deceased real estate ‘star’ lied about her entire biography.
Peter Hotez, author of Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism, writes about how sick you’re going to get if you catch various vaccine-preventable diseases. It’s not pretty, and it’s all the more argument for tightening vaccination laws for schoolchildren.
Here’s a shocker: Gwyneth Paltrow’s new GOOP show on Netflix is a mixture of pseudoscience, bullshit, and tedium, including an episode with a so-called “energy healer” (which is not real) and another with a self-proclaimed psychic (also not real).
Michigan state senator Peter Lucido, who has delusions of governorship, told a woman journalist trying to interview him that a group of high school boys “could have a lot of fun” with her. As of Friday, he’s issued a half-assed apology, but remains in office.
The New Yorker talks to the two people behind the great @NJGov twitter account.
Writing for VICE, Laura Wagner (ex-Deadspin) writes about the Facebook ‘sponsored post’ fiasco at Teen Vogue.
A British Columbia court ruled that two young children must be vaccinated over their mother’s objections. The mother tried to cite one of the most vocal anti-vaccine cranks on Twitter, Toni Bark, who claimed the measles wasn’t a highly contagious disease (it’s considered the most or second-most contagious virus humans can catch).
Perhaps “cocktails” of multiple antibiotics aren’t as good of an idea for the long term as we thought, as one new study shows that they may accelerate antibiotic resistance.
Tabatha Southey writes for McLean’s about Watergate, my #3 game of 2019, and what a future board game of the Donald Trump presidency and impeachment might look like.
I’ve got four new board game Kickstarters to share this week. First is the one I tweeted about on Tuesday, Restoration Games’ Return to Dark Tower, which is already clear of $2.25 million pledged as of Friday afternoon. It’s an update to the 1981 cult classic, and I was hooked when I saw the demo at PAX Unplugged.
Next is AlderQuest, an area-control game from Rock Manor Games and Mike Gnade (Set a Watch, Brass Empire). Rock Manor pulled the original Kickstarter from before the holidays and restarted it; it’s about 2/3 of the way to its funding goal as I write this. Full disclosure: I met Mike this week to play an upcoming Rock Manor title, Lawyer Up, as he lives a stone’s throw from me.
Leder Games has the newest game from designer Cole Wehrle (Root, Pax Pamir), Oath: Chronicles of Empire and Exile, already more than 13 times past its initial goal.
Vesuvius Media has a Kickstarter up for Pacific Rails, a route-building/worker-placement game based on the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869.
Finally, here’s an intriguing game of dirty popes: Habeamus, which the publishers describe as “a game for ending 2-4 friendships. This is the farthest from its goal of these five Kickstarters right now.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, frauds, links, medicine, metoo, social media, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ January 4, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/4/20.

Happy New Year! I skipped last week since it was the holidays and I was offline quite a bit, but in the last couple of weeks I had a bunch of year-end board game posts, including my top 10 games of 2019 for Paste, my best games of the year by category for Vulture, and the top 8 board game apps of 2019 for Ars Technica.

My free email newsletter will return on Monday, time and health (I’m sick yet again) permitting. My second book, The Inside Game, will be out on April 21st and is available for pre-order.

And now, the links…

One longread this week, from the Guardian‘s best longreads of the year: Time management is making us miserable.
Figure skater Gracie Gold is working her way back to competition after a long fight with depression and an eating disorder.
One of the biggest funders of anti-vaccine groups has made millions selling “natural” health products. Joseph Mercola has also been fined by the FDA for making false health claims, and has promoted all kinds of pseudoscience on his site for over 20 years.
Joan Walsh writes about “this fucking decade” for The Nation: “The last decade showed that the United States can be dramatically changed by a minority of people seized by grievance, convinced that they’re the real victims, and determined to get revenge.”
The rivers and beaches of Guatemala are filling with trash, especially plastic, emblematic of a global problem with plastic waste.
An Alabama woman murdered by her former partner is another example why the NRA’s choice to kill the Violence Against Women Act will have deadly real-world consequences.
A study found that 39% of respondents in eight European countries would like to live in a world where chemical substances don’t exist. Good luck with that.
The search for new antibiotic drugs is hitting another roadblock: startups trying to develop these compounds are going bankrupt.
Congress appears on the verge of letting a program designed to help stop the next pandemic expire, likely because the GOP doesn’t want to spend money on anything but war.
I was obsessed with the periodic table when I was a kid, so of course I enjoyed this New Yorker piece on the search for larger and larger (and yet incredibly unstable) elements.
GQ interviewed Michael Caine about The Muppet Christmas Carol.
Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy signed letters authored by the Pebble Mining Company favorable to the company’s mining efforts in his state.
The U.S. held off on punitive tariffs against Argentina while the country reviewed two trademarks for Trump’s personal business.
Sacha Baron Cohen gave an incredible speech to the Anti-Defamation League on the failure of social media giants to regulate hate speech and fake news on their sites.
Capstone Games has really carved out a niche for itself for high-end games, many of them imported from Europe, including the popular train game Irish Gauge, which they imported and released in the U.S. in 2019. They just announced the follow-up game, Ride the Rails, will be released on July 1st, when Irish Gauge will also return to stores.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alaska, board game news, chemistry, environment, links, longreads, pseudoscience, social media, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ November 30, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/30/19.

I had one ESPN+ post this week, covering the Luis Urias/Trent Grisham trade with a note on the Kyle Gibson signing. No Klawchat due to the holiday, but I did do my annual Periscope live chat where I spatchcocked the turkey.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, comes out on April 21st, and you can pre-order it now through that link or anywhere fine books are sold. Also, I’m trying to be more diligent about my free email newsletter now that we’re in the offseason.

I’ll be at PAX Unplugged here in Philadelphia next weekend, and if you’ll be there and are up for a game, just drop me a line. I have some publisher meetings, but my goal is to check out as many games in the First Look section as I can, and I may bring a game or two from my review queue as well.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Guardian explores how how our obsession with home delivery is reshaping the world. I think the traffic angle was the most eye-opening – how much delivery trucks contribute to urban traffic, especially because of their frequent stops at the curb to drop off.
Graig Graziosi writes about the death of the Youngstown Vindicator, the 150-year-old Ohio newspaper where he’d worked as a reporter.
Baby bumpers have been tied to dozens of infant deaths. So why don’t regulators do something about it?
Andrew Yang is talking up a universal basic income but gets its tenets wrong while pandering to the investor class, failing to acknowledge the growing wealth and income gap in the United States that is the real problem his plan doesn’t address.
Is virtue signaling hypocritical? Is it even real? What about virtue signaling about others’ virtue signaling? The term gets thrown around a lot on social media, often as a way to shut down discussion about real societal problems, but this is a bit more thorough treatment of what the phrase implies.
Yet another anti-vax grifter has emerged, calling herself The Skeptical Doctor’s Wife; Orac has the details on her all-too-familiar shtick, and how she cloaks herself in some false appeal to authority to seem more reliable.
A woman who developed Guillain-Barré syndrome from a vaccination – an extremely rare side effect that affects about 1 in every 1 million recipients of the flu shot – did a Reddit AMA to explain why she remains staunchly pro-vaccine.
Anti-vaxxers targeted Samoan families with their disinformation, helping stoke a measles epidemic that has already killed 38+ kids aged 4 and under. Now a group of anti-vaxxers are claiming the disease is the result of “malnutrition” and are sending a bunch of worthless vitamins to the island. If you want to actually help, donate to this GoFundMe that is tailored to hospitals’ stated needs as they try to stem the spread of this highly contagious, dangerous virus.
Memorial Sloan-Kettering, a major cancer treatment and research institution, announced proudly that they’re going to waste $3.7 million studying acupuncture, a pseudoscientific ‘treatment’ that does not work.
Ohio continues its fight to be the most backwards state in the union as Republicans in the state’s lower house passed a bill that would require doctors to implant ectopic pregnancies, a procedure that does not exist, rather than abort them, which they do routinely to save the mother’s health and life.
Meanwhile, Kentucky Republicans, mad their guy lost the gubernatorial race, are trying a Wisconsin move to strip powers from the governor’s office before the incoming Democrat can take his seat. They say it’s a coincidence; sure, Jan.
West Virginia joined several other states in making prisoners pay by the minute to read e-books that are available free from Project Gutenberg. Other states have gone further and banned outside donations of print books to force prisoners to pay for e-books or simply not read, although Pennsylvania and three New York prisons relented after public outcry.
Author Tom Nichols showed his ass on Twitter last week by saying “Indian food is bad,” then tweeting through the reaction and defending his statement in a McPaper editorial. Madeleine Davies’ perfect response on Eater explains that you can always shut up.
If you’ve seen the great documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, Jiro’s restaurant in Tokyo lost its Michelin stars because you can’t get a seat there. It’s so exclusive that you have to have a connection or be staying at a luxury hotel nearby to eat there.
Zimbabwe is on the brink of man-made starvation, with 60% of the sub-Saharan African country, which is still just emerging from the nearly 40-year grip of dictator Robert Mugabe, considered “food insecure.”
Teen Vogue had a group of teenaged girls from groups indigenous to North America explain the real origins of Thanksgiving, which involved white settlers killing native peoples and then celebrating with food.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, Economics, links, longreads, social media, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ November 9, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/9/19.

My ranking of the top 50 free agents this winter went up on Monday for ESPN+ subscribers, before the actual start of free agency and thus the deadline for some player options, so a few players are on there who ended up staying with their teams (J.D. Martinez, for one). I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Silver, the new deduction/take-that card game from designer Ted Alspach, who set this new game in the same ‘universe’ (loosely speaking) as his One Night Ultimate Werewolf games.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, will be released on April 21, 2020, and you can pre-order it now. We’re working on some bookstore events for late April as well, with Boston, New York, DC, and Harrisburg likely in that first week after release.

I also have this free email newsletter, you may have heard about it, it’s kind of cool.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This Atlantic story on a San Francisco woman who repeatedly stole packages from porches in an affluent neighborhood, despite multiple warnings, arrests, and eventually the loss of of custody of her daughter, is something to behold. It’s a story about technology, including how customers are using video-camera doorbells without considering the loss of civil liberties that may come with it. It’s a story about race, certainly. But the one theme I felt the author understated was that it’s a story about mental illness: The ‘porch pirate’ is ill-served by the prison system, especially since she continues to steal packages even while out on bail, and is not getting the help she probably needs.
A Louisiana parish DA lets defendants pay his foundation to get out of doing community service, according to this investigative report from Radley Balko in the Washington Post. The article appeared on Sunday; since then, I see zero coverage of this in any Louisiana publication.
This episode of the podcast Citations Needed looks at ‘pundit brain’ and the increasingly less data-driven Nate Silver, whose track record of predictions has tapered off since 2008 and who has had to walk back numerous statements on Twitter. Jacob Bacharach covers similar ground in a post on Common Dreams.
Alex Pareene writes about the death of what he calls ‘rude media’, including two entities for whom he used to work, Splinter and Gawker Media.
The New Yorker‘s Louisa Thomas weighed in on the killings of Deadspin and Sports Illustrated by private equity bros.
A new study in Nature (journal access required) found that many ICU patients who received probiotic capsules developed bacteremia as a direct result, using DNA comparisons to show that the bacteria in the patients’ blood came from the same bacteria in those probiotic pills. There’s also zero evidence that probiotic pills are helpful; the acid in your stomach destroys bacteria in those pills, or in fermented foods we consume like yogurt or kombucha.
Aaron Calvin was fired by the Des Moines Register because, in short, the Twitter mob demanded it; he wrote his side of the story for the Columbia Journalism Review.
Clark University dismissed a graduate student who had complained about possible gender discrimination and mishandling of data. This is her side of this story, but Clark issued a general statement, saying that federal law prevents them from commenting on a specific student’s case.
Youngstown State disciplined a student-athlete who sexually assaulted a classmate by (checks notes) letting him serve as a volunteer coach on both the men’s and women’s tennis teams (blinking guy GIF).
Anti-vaxxers use a strategy called ‘firehosing,’ repeating the same lies over and over to drown out the facts and those who try to speak the truth. Fighting these tactics involves more than just debunking falsehoods, but disrupting them by removing their podiums and forewarning people about how these propagandists manipulate them.
A white judge in Virginia sentenced a black woman to ten days in jail because he didn’t like that she slammed the courtroom door.
This is America: A San Diego man brutally assaulted a Syrian teen for speaking Arabic. He has since pleaded guilty and will serve five years in prison.
This is America: A white Milwaukee man threw acid in the face of a Peruvian-born U.S. citizen after asking “why did you come here and invade my country?” Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett blamed President Trump for feeding and encouraging anti-immigrant sentiment.
A new book that fawns over President Trump claimed that the Obama Adminstration held regular “PC (political correctness) meetings.” The author didn’t realize those were NSC Principals Committee meetings, and obviously didn’t bother to confirm it, nor did Fox News before promoting the book and this claim on its site.
If you’ve seen the surprise hit film Parasite, which will pass the $10 million mark for U.S. box office this weekend and is by far the highest-grossing Korean-language film ever in the U.S., you know the use of basements is key to the movie’s story. NPR has snippets from writer/director Bong Joon-hoexplaining a bit more about why basements are so critical in South Korean society.
Martin Scorcese’s explanation of why he doesn’t care for comic-book movies is worth reading, as it’s far more nuanced than the quote that got MCU fanpeople all up in arms. (I tend to agree with him. Comic book movies are entertainment, but I would not say they rise to the level of great cinema.)
I reviewed Gary Smith’s book Standard Deviations this week; he emailed me to point to a post he wrote on October 22nd explaining the role of luck in short series in baseball.
Twitter’s Jack Dorsey announced a plan to ban political ads, but the plan is toothless and misunderstands the nature of free expression.
A tweet asking people to RT if they were spanked as children but didn’t become violent later in life went viral this week, but it misses the point: Corporal punishment is ineffective and harmful, while other methods of discipline, including positive reinforcement and setting clear expectations, do work, without the negative consequences of spanking.
Alison Turkos writes about how her Lyft driver raped her and the company took no action. The driver continued to work for Lyft, and the company even charged her for the trip.
I agree with Cass Marshall: I do not have time for or interest in video games with hundreds of hours of material. Pre-parenthood, I played the Baldur’s Gate trilogy all the way through, hitting almost every side quest, and I’m sure I put over 100 hours into it. I doubt I’ll ever have the time for that again or the attention span.
Board game news: A reader of mine, Kevin Bertram, has designed a game called The Shores of Tripoli now on Kickstarter. This was on my BGG wishlist before I even knew Kevin was a reader.
A digital adaptation of the acclaimed co-op game Spirit Island is also on Kickstarter, and just got funded this week.
PAX Unplugged takes place in Philadelphia on December 6-8 this year. The convention schedule is now up and badges are on sale. I’ll be there as usual.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, health, links, louisiana, media criticism, social media, this is america, vaccines, video games

→ 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

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