stick to baseball

→ July 24, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/24/21.

I had two new posts this week for subscribers to The Athletic – an update of my ranking of the top 50 prospects in baseball, including recently-drafted players, and a look at which teams just drafted their new #1 prospects. I did include unsigned draftees on the former list, which is not my typical practice, but with the signing deadline so late this year (and maybe in all future years) I saw more value in this method than in pretending those players didn’t exist; if someone I ranked doesn’t sign, I’ll update the rankings with a new player.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Snakesss, the new social-deduction/trivia game from Phil Walker-Harding (designer of Cacao, Gizmos, Silver & Gold, and Imhotep). It’s quick and fun and appropriately silly, definitely the best party game I’ve tried so far in 2021.

On The Keith Law Show this week, I talked with Fangraphs draft analyst and prospect expert Eric Longenhagen about this year’s MLB draft. You can listen & subscribe on iTunes and Spotify as well.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Intercept goes deep on how pesticide companies took control of the decision-making process at the EPA, pushing the department to eschew further research that might reveal harm to humans or the environment from chlorpyrifos, neonicotinoid, glyphosate, and more.

The New York Times explains how the quack Joseph Mercola, who has been spreading bogus anti-science information online for at least a quarter century, is now profiting by lying about COVID-19 vaccines. He should be de-platformed everywhere.

Anti-vaxxers love to claim that vaccine mandates violate “the Nuremberg Code.” They’re wrong, of course – but I’m sure they understand the power of invoking something related to the Nazi regime.

The Washington Post explains how the despotic ruler of Dubai and Prime Minister of the UAE used the Israeli spyware product Pegasus to track and abduct his own daughter after she attempted to flee the country.

PragerU, the right-wing extremist site that distributes conservative “educational” videos online, has been pushing its content into schools as well through direct outreach to teachers and parents.

An Alabama doctor wrote about patients begging for the vaccine as they’re dying of COVID-19. Where are the consequences for the politicians – like Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, who was quick to sign a bill that banned so-called “vaccine passports” just two months ago – who discouraged vaccinations, or the people spreading misinformation online about the vaccines? It’s easy to mock the ignorant, but someone had to put the wrong ideas in their heads.

It looks like Southern Republicans in power are belatedly getting religion on vaccines, as the threat of an unvaccinated South begins to undermine any progress we’ve made against COVID-19.

The great Dr. Peter Hotez explains the triple-headed monster that President Biden and all pro-vaccination efforts face – disinformation groups, the money that funds them, and state actors like Russia that help spread anti-vaccine nonsense.

Meanwhile, anti-vaccine groups on Facebook are changing their names and using code to avoid detection and deletion. It’s good that they’re on the run, but Facebook has to be willing to continue chasing and removing them. Ben Collins also had a great Twitter thread highlighting how the evasion works.

A Trump-supporting vaccine denialist in Massachusetts died of COVID-19 last week.

Coal miners in Alabama have been on strike for over three months, seeking better pay and improved safety conditions. Why has there been no media coverage of it?

This may be an unpopular take, but I do not see the point of putting the couple whose gender-reveal party sparked a deadly wildfire in prison. It’s not going to undo any damage, it’s not going to bring the firefighter who lost his life trying to stop the fire back, and I don’t think it’s going to deter future idiots from doing the same thing any more than massive fines would. It’s a twisted sort of revenge, and just means the state has to incur the cost of keeping the couple in prison (if they’re convicted and sentenced).

A fundamendalist Christian church in Ireland with a history of spreading anti-Semitic views (e.g., that Jews are manipulating the stock market, and that Jews started the COVID-19 pandemic) has used an Irish law to have one of their critics arrested on charges of ‘inciting hate’ against them. Yes, a hate group is using a law designed to stop hate crimes to silence one of their critics.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alabama, carceral state, environment, links, pollution, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ July 17, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/17/21.

All of my draft coverage is now up for subscribers to The Athletic, including my team-by-team draft recaps, posted by division:
• AL East
• AL Central
• AL West
• NL East
• NL Central
• NL West

I also recapped the Futures Game with notes on prospects who stood out or who I saw for the first time. I held a Klawchat on Friday.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: A new preprint on the origins of SARS-CoV-2 states that “there is substantial body of scientific evidence supporting a zoonotic origin for SARS-CoV-2” and “there is currently no evidence that SARS-CoV-2 has a laboratory origin.” This failed hypothesis isn’t just the province of the right-wing; the anti-GMO movement has also latched on to it.
A conservative activist invented the nontroversy over critical race theory. If someone tells you CRT is bad, just ask them to name an author who’s written about it, or a book on the subject. Like this Alabama columnist did to a state lawmaker.
This ran a few weeks ago, during my hiatus from these posts, but former sportswriter Kat O’Brien detailed how she was raped by a major league ballplayer while she was on the Rangers beat.
Influencers who peddle anti-vaccine misinformation are raking in cash from their efforts. It’s almost entirely a grift, with a societal cost measured in bodies.
The Delta variant’s threat explained in three simple points by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ed Yong.
The “mystery Chinese seeds” that made the rounds of the news last summer? Probably just a brushing scam.
Why don’t we have a vaccine against Lyme disease? It’s complicated. Anti-vaxxers, a dubious claim about side effects, and the regional nature of the disease all contributed.
A nurse in Louisiana who posted anti-vaccine views and misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines has, in fact, died of COVID-19.
Poynter spoke to Walter Hussman, the conservative megadonor to UNC who led the school to deny Nikole Hannah-Jones tenure and ultimately cost them her services. He doesn’t think he did anything wrong, but also disputes some of the story that’s been publicly reported.
MEL magazine is coming back.
A power plant in upstate New York is primarily powering a bitcoin mining operation, warming Seneca Lake and polluting the air (as well as contributing to climate change). I’m not sure what the solution is – taxing bitcoin is the most rational economic move, but tricky because of its nature – but cryptocurrencies are an environmental threat that demands some sort of government action.
Why did three people in different states contract the often-fatal tropical bacterial disease melioidosis?
The state of Alabama took a man’s gun after he shot his wife. Nine months later, they gave it back to him, despite a protection order, and he used it to kill her. I’m sure the fact that he was a cop had nothing to do with this.
Men read far fewer books by women than women do. This has real-world implications for the way readers’ minds work.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, bitcoin, links, longreads, north carolina, racism, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ June 5, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/5/21.

For subscribers to the Athletic this week, I did my annual redraft column, looking back at the best players from the 2011 draft class, as well as the first-rounders who didn’t work out.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Umbra Via, an afterlife-themed game with route-building elements that just did not click for us at all.

My free email newsletter has returned, with my first edition in over a month, where I explain why I just haven’t felt much like writing lately – an unusual feeling for me.

My second book, The Inside Game, is now out in paperback, and I don’t think I’m just being a buy-my-book marketing guy when I suggest that it would make a great Father’s Day gift. Midtown Scholar still has a few signed copies of the paperback available, and you can buy the book via bookshop or amazon or anywhere else you buy books.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: America has a drinking problem. Well, I don’t, but the rest of you do.

There’s growing evidence that UNC’s decision not to grant tenure to Nikole Hannah Jones was driven by the interference and objections of mega-donor Walter Hussman, Jr, for whom their journalism school is named. In one email to a board member, he wrote that “he was concerned about how Hannah-Jones’s work could clash with his vision for the school and what it teaches.”

These “leaked” intelligence stories are often based on dubious sources that the authors fail to explain or even question. Indeed, the now widely-spread claim that COVID-19 leaked from a Wuhan lab is still free of actual evidence to support it.

A group of unvaccinated staffers at a Houston hospital have filed a lawsuit against the hospital’s vaccine mandate, aided by a Houston lawyer with a long history of deranged legal actions including homophobic and anti-trans moves. I can’t speak to the legal issues here, but the plaintiff’s claims (e.g., that the vaccine can alter your DNA, which, come the fuck on already) are crazy, and if a hospital can’t mandate vaccinations, we are going to have to live with the pandemic forever.

Sharyl Attkisson, a faux-journalist who has spread anti-vaccine disinformation for years and made the news in 2020 when she tried to air an interview with a conspiracy theorist who claimed COVID-19 was the product of a secret a government plan, is threatening to sue Dr. Peter Hotez, author of Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism, for defamation, a baseless threat aimed at silencing one of the most vocal and erudite advocates of vaccination.

A new editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine explores incentives for increasing COVID-19 vaccine uptake, including mandating it in health care settings, requiring it for access to events that “involve close person-to-person contact,” and raising life and health insurance premiums for people who refuse to get the shot. I’m a big fan of the last approach: people respond strongly to financial incentives, and those of us who have gotten vaccinated shouldn’t be subsidizing those who won’t.

We loved Mare of Easttown, especially since we caught many of the local references, living just a mile or two away from the border between Delaware (state) and Delaware County. The show’s depictions of the residents of DelCo, however, isn’t very accurate. That county has historically been quite red, with deep racial tensions going back to the Civil War.

Texas, whose tourism board has adopted the slogan Where The Cruelty Is The Point™, is trying to pass voting restrictions that will disproportionately disenfranchise voters of color. Because that too is the point.

Arizona has wasted a bunch of taxpayer money “updating” its execution systems, including buying the ingredients to make the same gas the Nazis used to kill Jews, Roma, and other victims in concentration camps. You know what would be cheaper, and also less murdery? Ending capital punishment.

Democrats in the House and Senate are showing no sense of urgency in the face of attempts to undermine our democracy by the January 6^th insurrectionists and their enablers in Congress. Meanwhile, over 100 scholars in political science and the law signed a letter stating their concerns over threats to our democracy and lack of national voting and election standards.

Climate change is an emergency, so why can’t journalists call it one?

The best reaction I saw this week to the French Open telling Naomi Osaka that she can go fuck herself was from the Guardian‘s Jonathan Liew, arguing that we in sports media are not the good guys here, and that press conferences are problematic. Indeed, the day after Osaka withdrew, some asshole reporter asked 17-year-old Coco Gauff an insulting, racist question that should have gotten his credentials yanked. (Apparently that only happens if you dial into a press conference from a supermarket.) Scottish tennis coach Judy Murray, mother of two tennis champions in Andy and Jamie Murray, supported Osaka and talked about the absurd demands of the press on players.

Stanford Law toyed with preventing a student from graduating because he’d distributed a flier mocking the Federalist Society, spawning a complaint from campus snowflakes – er, conservatives. The school eventually dropped its investigation on free speech grounds.

New York Times health writer Tara Parker-Pope writes about four lessons we’ve learned in the last year for your anxious brain. Strengthening your connections seems like an especially valuable one in a year when most connections have become slack (pun intended).

Monster Couch announced that they’re releasing the iOS adaptation of Wingspan on July 21st, with pre-orders now open.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: academia, anti-science, anxiety, arizona, board game news, climate change, coronavirus, links, longreads, pennsyvlania, Sports, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ May 29, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/29/21.

I had two posts this week for subscribers to the Athletic: my first mock draft of 2021, and a scouting post on high school pitchers Chase Petty and Frank Mozzicato, both of whom will be day-one picks. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste last week, I reviewed Cryo, a really engaging new worker-placement game from the designers of Manhattan Project: Energy Empire, where resources are always limited and you have to build your board to maximize your resource collection.

If you’d like to buy The Inside Game and support my board game habit, Midtown Scholar has a few signed copies still available. You can also buy it from any of the indie stores in this twitter thread, all of whom at least had the book in stock earlier this month. If none of those works, you can find it on Bookshop.org and at Amazon.

And now, the links:

Longreads first: This New York Times story on Andrea Smith, a professor at UC Riverside who has been falsely claiming Cherokee ancestry for at least 20 years, is one of the best-reported pieces I’ve read this year – and maddening.
The Berglas Effect, an amazing card trick created by the magician David Berglas, still fascinates and mystifies even other magicians decades after he invented it.
A New York law firm is behind most of the lawsuits against workplace vaccine mandates and other efforts driven by anti-vaccine grifter Del Bigtree.
From April 2019: Matthew Salesses wrote about grief and how it distorts our sense of time after the passing of his wife.
A former employee of the Chaplain’s Office at a small ‘elite’ college writes of the disconnect between progressive values and western religions on campus. I’m not sure the piece led mew to the conclusion the author intended.
Rosella, a NYC restaurant that only serves sustainable fish, might be the future of sushi. I’ve wondered for at least a decade now how there could possibly be enough fish in the oceans to keep all of these sushi places – they’re everywhere in the country, in the suburbs now, far too many for a dwindling supply of fish – in business.
Delaware Democrats have introduced a bill to make it harder for police to use force against citizens, and to make any materials in misconduct complaints and hearings public. The bill would also require that authorities collect data on the races of all people involved when officers use deadly force. No Delaware cop has been charged for shooting a citizen in at least the last 16 years.
The United States has a strong history of ethnic cleansing of its own. Teen Vogue looks at how our government used the 1830 Indian Removal Act to displace hundreds of thousands of Native Americans, with thousands dying as a result.
The Associated Press fired a young writer, Emily Wilder, after conservative trolls complained about her social media activity from when she was in college (before she was hired), but AP employees have mutinied and their leadership is on the defensive.
Texas will allow the unlicensed carrying of handguns. We won’t just see a rise in suicides there if this lasts, but I would bet we’ll see a surge in random shootings in situations like this road rage incident in DC.
Florida Republicans are ripping power away from local authorities to try to keep the state red.
Oklahoma Republicans are pushing a bill that would ban the teaching of critical race theory in public schools, and one community college has already cancelled such a class before the bill has even become law. If you live in Oklahoma, anywhere, call your state rep and Senator – no matter how right-wing crazy they might be – and tell them you oppose this bill.
Pennsylvania Republicans, meanwhile, have introduced three bills aimed at punishing women who have miscarriages or try to get abortions. The Democratic Governor has promised to veto them.
An Islamophobic ‘vlogger’ in Canada was arrested for punching a store employee and trying to make a citizen’s arrest.
COVID-19 isn’t spread through fomite transmission (by touching a surface that an infected person touched), so it’s time to end the hygiene theater.
A shady advertising agency offered to pay a bunch of French social media influencers to spread fake news against the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines.
A new coronavirus – not a variant, but a different virus from SARS-CoV-2 – is making people sick in Malaysia, and it appears to have jumped species from dogs.
Seth Rogen had some smart comments on comedians and so-called ‘cancel culture.’
Eric Carle, whose book The Mixed-Up Chameleon was the first book I ever read by myself, died this week at age 91.
Board game news: Heroes of Barcadia, a “pun-tastic” dungeon crawler, is coming soon to Kickstarter.
Capstone Games announced the new Kiesling/Kramer title Savannah Park, available at Gen Con and Origins in September.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, coronavirus, delaware, florida, links, longreads, oklahoma, pennsylvania, social media, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ May 23, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/23/21.

I had one post this past week for subscribers to the Athletic, breaking down the four-player trade between Milwaukee and Tampa Bay along with the implications for Wander Franco, Taylor Walls, and Luis Urías. I also held a Klawchat on Friday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Cryo, a really engaging new worker-placement game from the designers of Manhattan Project: Energy Empire, where resources are always limited and you have to build your board to maximize your resource collection.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul, & Mary received a Presidential pardon from Jimmy Carter for a charge of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl. It turns out that she was far from his only victim.
There’s a tradition in Alabama where sheriffs who lose elections waste a whole shitload of taxpayer money to make things harder for their successors, because Alabama is apparently some sort of developing-world dictatorship.
The BBC looks at “infinite plastic,” efforts to use chemistry to break down plastics back into a form of oil, which would make any plastic materials recyclable – even things like sandwich bags that contain multiple different types of plastic and can’t be recycled directly into new plastics.
Nik Sharma looks at the science behind vegan meringues, made from the liquid in canned chickpeas, for Serious Eats.
If staying at home with the kids (rather than working) is so wonderful, why don’t more men do it? Jessica Valenti explores the manipulation going on in the wake of a pandemic that has disproportionately hurt women in the workforce.
Saturday Night Live‘s sketch parodying the Muppets was embarassingly bad. A bunch of people thought the actual Muppets were part of the sketch.
COVID denialists have pounced on a CDC data set that they claim shows an increased incidence of suicides under age 18 during lockdowns. They are being disingenuous, at best, or are outright lying.
Justice Elena Kagan has had about enough of Brett Kavanaugh’s judicial activism. I still want to know who paid off his credit card debts.
A Missouri lawyer, who represented the gun-toting bigots who got famous for standing courageously on their front porch, drew fire this week for derogatory comments about people with autism and people with disabilities.
In Texas, where The Cruelty Is the Point, it is about to become almost impossible for a woman to exercise her right to abort a pregnancy. This Twitter thread elucidates just how cruel that law will be in practice.
Ethiopia expelled a New York Times reporter who’d written about the regime’s extensive human rights abuses in Tigray.
The BBC World Service looks at Africans who were forced to speak English growing up and now face an identity crisis of sorts when they find themselves unable to speak their native languages.
Two great pieces on the Yankees’ Corey Kluber in the wake of his no-hitter this week: my colleague Lindsey Adler on the development of his arsenal, and the New York Post‘s Dan Martin on what Yankees’ scouts saw in Kluber to convince the team to sign him.
The Onion, always on point.
Board game news: Brew is now available for pre-order from Pandasaurus Games.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, alabama, board game news, Cooking, links, longreads, metoo, missouri, stick to baseball

→ May 16, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/16/21.

I’ve had three posts up in the last week for subscribers to the Athletic: my ranking of the top 100 prospects for this year’s MLB Draft; a special Q&A about that ranking; and a post on my trip to see Vanderbilt and Alabama, when Jack Leiter was a very late scratch for his start. He did pitch yesterday and his velocity was completely normal.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Flourish, a new, quick-playing card game from the designers of Everdell.

For more of me, you can subscribe to my free email newsletter, which will return this week (tomorrow, I hope).

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Dyatlov Pass mystery may have a very mundane, anti-climactic solution.
The headline here doesn’t really summarize the article, but musicians are organizing to try to fight the vice grip Spotify has on the industry.
Policymakers ignored the United States’ near-total lack of child care infrastructure until the pandemic exposed this massive economic weakness. If you want to grow the economy, you need affordable child care.
The CDC’s statistic that “less than 10 percent” of COVID-19 transmission occurred outdoors is probably wildly misleading. The actual rate might be 1/100^th of that.
Adolescents can finally get their COVID-19 vaccines! My daughter got her first dose less than 24 hours after the approval came through. Her only complaint afterwards was two days of a sore shoulder. Go get your kids the shot.
Facebook deplatformed an Ohio-based anti-vaccine group, and then did the same to Erin Elizabeth, a major anti-vaccine wacko who is partners with longtime quack Joseph Mercola.
Activists opposed to syringe exchanges are just bizarre, but their work may lead a major success story in Indiana, which helped end an HIV outbreak, to close.
If the West Antarctic Ice Shelf collapses, the rise in sea levels will be 30% higher than originally thought.
The Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth may be misusing data from students’ electronic devices to accuse those students of cheating.
Frank Abagnale authored a best-selling memoir that became the movie Catch Me If You Can. It turns out that his story is probably a big hoax.
The cicadas are coming, so of course some folks suggest eating them.
Former UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s defence against a charge of improper lobbying is that he was undone by autocorrect. The lede here is spectacular.
Bari Weiss really took off her mask in a substack post that justified the killing of Palestinian children.
Two good op eds from the Washington Post this week on our current quaqmire: how two men named Joe (Biden & Manchin) hold the future of our democracy in their hands, and why democracy and cults of personality don’t mix.
I know Jonathan Chait’s reputation is … not great, perhaps, but I agree with him on the subject of Rep. Liz Cheney. She can be wrong on many issues, but she is right on Trumpism and the direction of the GOP, and we can acknowledge or even praise the latter without somehow tacitly supporting the former.
The bloated U.S. military budget isn’t just wasteful – its consequences disproportionately harm people of color.
Board game news: Board & Dice, publisher of some of really heavy Euro titles like Teotihuacan and Tekhenu, explained how and under what terms they’re continuing their relationship with designer Daniele Tascini, who made some insensitive comments on race last year. I think it’s a good blueprint for working with someone who might be too quickly ‘cancelled.’

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, climate change, coronavirus, hoaxes, longreads, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ May 8, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball , 5/8/21.

I got back out to a minor league game last week and wrote about the prospects I saw for subscribers to the Athletic, focusing on Jackson Rutledge (Nationals) and Grayson Rodriguez (Orioles). I’ll have a post up Sunday or Monday on Kumar Rocker and Jack Leiter, followed by a ranking of draft prospects later in the week.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the new card game Flourish, co-designed by the person behind the outstanding 2018 game Everdell.

On the Keith Law Show this week, my guest was Louisville catcher Henry Davis, one of the top prospects in this year’s MLB Draft; I also answered a number of your questions, mostly about the draft but also one about my three-legged cat. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify. I also appeared on the Athletic Baseball Show on Friday, which will be my regular slot for most of the year.

For more of me, you can subscribe to my free email newsletter

And now, the links…

Longreads first: And I do mean long, as this piece from WIRED‘s June 2020 issue – which I don’t remember seeing last year – on the rise, fall, and rise again of white-hat hacker Marcus Hutchins, who played the biggest role in stopping the WannaCry ransomware worm, is exceptionally well-written and well-reported, and it runs nearly 15,000 words.
Almost as good is this New Yorker profile of legendary yet reclusive Simpsons writer turned self-published detective novelist John Swartzwelder, who is responsible for “Homer At the Bat” and one of my favorite SNL sketches, “Those Unlucky Andersons.”
A small number of wealthy donors to Trump now wield outsized influence within the GOP – and potentially over our government, too – just by virtue of their seven- and eight-figure donations.
Four L.A. cops coerced a 13-year-old boy into confessing to a crime he didn’t commit. A court ruled they get qualified immunity on some of the potential charges against them, because they didn’t coerce him for a long enough period of time. What if – stay with me here – we just ended qualified immunity for cops?
The controversy over the University of Texas’ racist fight song continues, as a perfectly normal person brought a gun to a Zoom discussion on the topic. I assume he shot his computer to own the libs.
Anti-diversity activists won big in a school board election outside Dallas, because, you know, Texas has no history of racism you might want to teach to schoolchildren.
Teachers in Rockwood, Missouri, are now facing threats and harassment over that school district’s diversity curriculum. In a state where you stand on your porch with semi-automatic weapons to face peaceful protesters, this fits.
An Idaho legislative intern alleges her boss, Aaron von Ehlinger (who has since resigned in disgrace), raped her, and in return, several other members of the Idaho legislature – all Republicans – doxxed her, harassed her, and tried to get her charged with filing a false report. Two of those other legislators are women.
It’s time to start shunning the vaccine hesitant, says USA Today editorial writer and former federal prosecutor Michael Stern.
Centner Academy, a private primary school in Miami, has become a “beacon” for anti-vaxxers, as the school is turning away vaccinated students and staff because of the bogus idea that they can “shed” the virus. (The vaccine does not contain the live SARS-CoV-2 virus, and thus vaccinated people have nothing to “shed.” This is sheer ignorance.) Linda Centner, who founded and runs the school, has espoused all sorts of anti-science conspiracy theories, including anti-mask views and baseless fears of 5G cell towers.
Meanwhile, one former anti-vaccine influencer in Texas got her COVID-19 shot and is talking about it publicly.
Is some anti-vaccine loon in your life claiming there are hundreds of reports of adverse reactions to the COVID-19 jab? Well, here’s a thread explaining why those reports, from VAERS, don’t actually mean any of these reactions were to the vaccines – if they happened at all.
Is there some hope on the horizon for a vaccine against HIV? It’s still a ways off, but a new breakthrough at least means there’s the possibility of such an inoculation, although retroviruses are extremely difficult to treat with antivirals or prevent via vaccines.
Regardless of your opinion of the filibuster, it’s not the thing preventing Democrats from enacting major legislation right now.
Speaking of which, President Biden wants to create a family leave plan that would put the U.S. in line with other developed nations. We are far worse off than our peers in Europe and parts of eastern Asia when it comes to quality-of-life laws.
Hold your surprise, but white authorities in Arkansas executed a Black man who may very well have been innocent. The death penalty is barbaric and should be abolished everywhere.
A Black homeowner in Indianapolis found the appraisal of her house went up for $100,000 when she removed items that might have hinted at her race, and had a white friend pose as the homeowner.
An Israeli man visiting relatives in Baltimore was shot and killed, possibly because he was Jewish.
Eleven Madison Park, one of the most acclaimed (and expensive) restaurants in the world, will reopen with a completely plant-based menu, at $335 a person.
Signal tried to place ads on Instagram showing just how much the social-media site (owned by Facebook) knows about you, but Instagram banned the ads instead.
This BBC story of a stranded sailor who couldn’t leave his ship for four years is fascinating and a little horrifying.
Stars, they’re just like us! Kate Winslet loves Wawa. As a non-native who has been converted to the cult of Wawa, I say to Kate, welcome.
Google Doodle celebrated Teacher Appreciation Week by animating some StoryCorps stories of teachers who made a difference in specific students’ lives, such as this wonderful one from Dr. William Lynn Weaver.
The Guardian explains why the Carters looked so tiny in that photo with the Bidens. (I mean Pres. Jimmy and Rosalynn, not Jay-Z and Beyoncé.)
Board game news: The Kickstarter for Floodgate Games’ upcoming title Vivid Memories has 13 days to go.
Michael Luu, designer of the upcoming cooperative game Mission ISS, wrote a designer diary about his experience.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, baltimore, board game news, dark money, links, missouri, social media, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines, vegan

→ May 1, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/1/21.

I had two posts for subscribers to The Athletic this week, one on how the Rockies’ next GM might start to turn the franchise around, and a draft scouting notebook looking at several day-one candidates, led by Fordham lefty Matt Mikulski.

On the Keith Law Show this week, my guest was MLB Pipeline’s Jim Callis, talking about this year’s MLB draft class. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify. I also appeared on the Athletic Baseball Show on Friday, which will be my regular slot for most of the year.

For more of me, you can subscribe to my free email newsletter.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: One of the many victims of disgraced writer/teacher Blake Bailey came forward to tell how Bailey manipulated and raped her.
Alameda police killed Mario Gonzalez, who was unarmed, by pinning him to the ground for five minutes during an arrest on April 19^th. This is a systemic issue.
CloseCallSports has the best explanation of the obstruction call in Milwaukee that I tried to explain on Twitter, only to have my replies explode with people who didn’t like the call. An umpire can make a call that is technically correct – and Marty Foster’s was, indeed, justified by the rules – but so rarely made that we assume it’s wrong.
Tony LaRussa’s animal welfare nonprofit is plagued by claims of racism and a toxic workplace environment. Between this and his multiple DUIs, LaRussa’s hiring by the White Sox this offseason looks even more suspect. Over at Sox Machine, Jim Margalus talks about some of what LaRussa is doing wrong on the field, too.
West Virginia Governor Jim Justice (R) announced that residents aged 16-35 who get the COVID-19 vaccine will get a $100 savings bond, an ingenious use of the stimulus funding the state has received.
After years of misguided opposition, Florida officials will finally release genetically modified Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, the kind responsible for spreading the Zika virus, dengue fever, chikungunya, and more, to stop the insects’ offspring from surviving into adulthood.
Anti-vaxxers are adopting yellow stars and other symbols of the Holocaust, in case you were wondering how low they would sink in their war against science and rationality.
The official Twitter account for the Auschwitz Museum is pushing revisionist history that absolves Poles of their role in the Holocaust (Haaretz, $ required).
PBS has a new series coming up on May 11^th called Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer, about the extraordinary success of vaccines and other major medical advances that helped double our life expectancy in a century.
Facebook claimed they removed the “Disinformation Dozen,” twelve people responsible for the vast majority of anti-vaccine lies on the internet, but ten of them are still active on the site.
Joe Rogan told his millions of young listeners not to get a COVID-19 vaccine. That is dangerously irresponsible, and he shouldn’t be issuing medical advice.
Julie DiCaro reminds us not to listen to people with obvious conflicts of interest – agents, lawyers, fans – when they try to downplay charges of sexual assault against popular athletes.
Fox News is struggling to “pick a side” when their culture-war takes conflict with the facts, as with two recent manufactured outrage stories that turned out to be false – that Biden would ban or limit meat consumption, and that migrant children were being given Kamala Harris’ book.
The BBC asks why the west neglects a potential superfood source that’s efficient, sustainable, and climate-friendly: insects.
Epicurious revealed that they won’t publish any new beef recipes, part of an effort to encourage more sustainable eating. They stopped publishing those a year ago and they say nobody has noticed.
Conservative writer Gary Abernathy argues that all conservatives should support reparations to Black Americans.
From the National Review, the “Fairness Doctrine” is not the answer to Tucker Carlson’s misinformation.
University researchers appear to have moved and possibly lost the remains of two children killed in Philadelphia’s bombing of its own citizens in 1985, part of a government assault on the MOVE cult.
Deforestation in the amazon has soared under the reactionary Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, devastating native homelands and reducing one of the world’s most important carbon dioxide sinks.
A teacher in Washington State’s Issaquah School District is on administrative leave after parents objected to a poem she used in her anti-racism curriculum
Ashley Feinberg may have found JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon’s secret Instagram and Twitter accounts. Dimon has been accused of misleading investors in the “London Whale” investment disaster and of overseeing a culture of discrimination at his banks.
Board game news: Capstone Games is reissuing the Uwe Rosenberg worker-placement classic Glass Road, and pre-orders are open now at $10 off.
Renegade has a Kickstarter going for the ‘epic mad scientist’ game My Father’s Work, which they say will only be sold through their website once it’s released.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, baseball, board game news, coronavirus, links, longreads, police, racism, stick to baseball, sustainability, vaccines

→ April 24, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/24/21.

I had two posts this week for subscribers to the Athletic. I wrote a draft scouting notebook that focused on Louisville catcher Henry Davis, who might be the best prospect in this class. I also collaborated with Britt Ghiroli to look at the MLB Draft League, which sent out its initial rosters this week and earned negative reviews from scouts and executives. I also held a Klawchat this week.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the Princess Bride Adventure Book Game, a slight but fun co-operative game you can play with your kids or just because you love the movie, to which the game is very faithful.

On the Keith Law Show this week, my guest was our White Sox writer James Fegan, talking about Carlos Rodón, the Yerminator, and more. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify. I also appeared on the Athletic Baseball Show on Friday, which will be my regular slot for most of the year; and on the Sports-Casters podcast, talking about the draft and my second book.

If you’d like to buy The Inside Game and support my board game habit, Midtown Scholar has about a dozen signed copies still available. You can also buy it from any of the indie stores in this twitter thread, all of whom at least had the book in stock earlier this month. If none of those works, you can find it on Bookshop.org and at Amazon.

For more of me, you can subscribe to my free email newsletter.

And now, the links…

Longreads: Vietnam has beaten COVID-19, with just 35 deaths in a country of over 96 million people. They did it with strict travel restrictions even as health experts said those were the wrong policy response.
There’s a movie coming out about Tim Ballard, former CEO of the anti-trafficking group Operation Underground Railroad, but he and his group have a history of exaggerating their feats as well as their (limited) links with law enforcement.
Cops who break the law in New Jersey often avoid prison, even when the crimes they commit should result in time.
Harvard profiled Professor Sandra Susan Smith and her work on the relationship between urban poverty and the prison-industrial complex.
NPR tells the story of the SolarWinds hack, one of the most extensive corporate hacks in history, which went undiscovered for nearly a year even as the company’s compromised software went out to customers.
With vaccination cards come frauds selling (and buying) fake vaccination cards, a crime made easier by sites like eBay refusing to crack down on their sale.
That “Stanford” study saying masks don’t work? Yeah, it’s not a real study, and the author has nothing to do with Stanford. Anti-mask loons lapped it up, though.
An editorial in Nature argues that social media sites should remove accounts that spread anti-vaccine misinformation or face stricter regulation.
A threatened advertiser boycott over Tucker Carlson’s embrace of white supremacist rhetoric hasn’t cooled Fox’s commitment to him.
Republicans who don’t believe in the First Amendment are introducing and passing bills that limit protestors’ rights and remove sanctions for people who hit protestors with their cars. We had a right to peaceable assembly, once.
Minor Figures, a London-based producer of coffee-related products, plastered ads for its new oat milk product all over existing street art in Philadelphia, spurring a backlash from artists and people in those communities.
Shock G, the main MC of Digital Underground who also played the character of Humpty Hump, died this week at age 57. He might be best known for “The Humpty Dance,” but Digital Underground was responsible for many better songs, including their first single, “Doowutchyalike,” and the track “Same Song,” which introduced the world to a 19-year-old rapper named 2Pac.
Jonathan Capeheart wrote in the wake of the Derek Chauvin verdict that being Black in America is exhausting.
President Biden appears to be on the verge of calling the Turkish massacre of Armenians in 1915 a genocide. Here’s what that means in practical terms.
A former producer of deceptively edited right-wing videos explains how he gamed the YouTube algorithm to rack up views and followers.
Board game news: Z-Man Games is putting out a new Carcassonne Big Box to celebrate the game’s 20^th anniversary.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, coronavirus, first amendment, hip hop, links, longreads, philadelphia, social media, stick to baseball, vietnam

→ April 17, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/17/21.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I ranked the top 50 prospects in this year’s MLB draft class, a list I’ll expand to 100 in early May. I had to skip the chat this week due to travel and the two-hour round trip on Thursday to get my first vaccine dose (Pfizer). I’ll do one this week.

On The Keith Law Show this week, I had our Padres beat writer Dennis Lin on to talk about Musgrove’s no-hitter, Tatis Jr.’s injury, and more Padres/NL West news. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify. I also co-host our daily baseball show every Friday, and on this week’s episode we talked about Rodon and a number of pitchers who appear to be on the rise.

I appeared on the Huddle Up with Gus Frerotte podcast to talk about my book The Inside Game, now out in paperback. I also spoke to Chris Phillips, Associate Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon CMU, about The Inside Game in a half-hour conversation for the CMU Alumni Association.

If you’d like to buy The Inside Game and support my board game habit, Midtown Scholar has several signed copies available. You can also buy it from any of the indie stores in this twitter thread, all of whom at least had the book in stock earlier this month. If none of those works, you can find it on Bookshop.org and at Amazon.

For more of me, you can subscribe to my free email newsletter.

Longreads first: This New Yorker post on a suicide cluster at a small Midwestern college, and whether one person who knew all the victims was somehow responsible, is extremely well-reported and written.

The Burmese genocide of the Rohingya is a massive humanitarian tragedy, but there are other consequences to ethnic cleansing, such as the loss of native foodways.

Does urban planning produce ‘bad cities?’ Is there a third way to balance the need for affordable housing and the desire for certain aesthetics in design?

Earlier this month, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins tried to claim that acceptance of transgender people means we should accept so-called “trans-racial” people (like Rachel Dolezal). Here’s a rational response to that sort of argument.

Polygon has a column that tries to explain why the Muppets have had a hard time catching on in recent years.

Why did a Queens judge dismiss a DWI charge and seal the case against a Bronx ADA who crashed her car into a line of parked vehicles? Does everyone charged with a DWI get that treatment in NYC?

Jorge Cham, aka Phd Comics, has a great comic strip on the recent discovery of an anomaly in the behavior of muons that might break the Standard Model of physics once and for all (but might not).

Could the pandemic lead to a massive drain of women working in the sciences? There’s a growing body of evidence that the pandemic and associated lockdowns have had a disproportionate impact on working women.

This is from a couple of weeks ago, but Islamist insurgents took over a town right near a Total natural gas installation in Mozambique – the largest foreign investment project in Africa to date.

I’m so sad that last week’s White Lives Matter rallies were a giant flop. (I’m not actually sad about it.)

A virologist who got the Johnson & Johnson shot explains why she’s not losing any sleep over the federal investigation into a very rare blood clot disorder that might (but might not) be caused by the vaccine.

The Atlantic’s tremendous coverage of the pandemic continues with Derek Thompson’s article calling for an end to hygiene theater now that the CDC has acknowledged that SARS-CoV-2 spreads through the air, not surfaces. My daughter’s school closes one day a week for “deep cleaning” that, it turns out, is unnecessary.

An immunological process called imprinting could make second- and third-generation COVID-19 vaccines less effective, although there are reasons why that may not be true for this particular virus.

Media Matters’ Bobby Lewis spent a month watching and documenting the racism and lunacy aired daily on One America News Network. If you have cable, you’re probably paying something for OANN whether you know it or not.

The Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law has released a brief on the spate of anti-trans bills, especially those banning gender-affirming medical care, appearing in state legislatures across the country. These bills, if passed and upheld, are going to result in unspeakable harm to trans kids, including a more suicides, but they’re sold to gullible (or bigoted) voters under the guise of preventing “child abuse.”

Mississippi passed an anti-trans law and the NCAA might pull sports championships from the state as a result. Hard for me to believe the NCAA is on the right side of a progressive issue, but they are.

One of the officers who shot Breonna Taylor got a book deal from a small right-wing press; Simon & Schuster bowed to public pressure and declined to distribute it. I see a thorny issue here – we may all believe he committed multiple crimes, but without a conviction (he’s still on the police force in Louisville), I’m not sure what legal recourse there would be to stop him from writing about what happened, as vile as it seems.
Florida plans an “audit” of a state regulation that prohibited parents of children who suffered brain damage in childbirth from suing.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, blm, coronavirus, longreads, new york city, racism, stick to baseball, trans rights, vaccines

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