stick to baseball

→ March 8, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/8/20.

My entire top 100 prospects package is now up for The Athletic subscribers. That includes:

I also wrote my first draft post of 2020, covering a pair of potential #1 overall picks in Emerson Hancock and Asa Lacy. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Episode #2 brand-new podcast, The Keith Law Show (also on iTunes), went up this past week, with guest Carlos Rodriguez, VP of Player Development and International Scouting for the Tampa Bay Rays. My thanks to all of you who’ve subscribed and/or left five-star ratings.

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 say I’ll write more often than I actually write it.

I only have a few links this week, between travel and the way that the news has been so focused on coronavirus. The best thing I read this week on that topic was Julia Belluz’s piece for Vox on why China’s COVID-19 case rate started declining. An infectious disease doctor answered some common questions about COVID-19 for WBUR.org.

Stick to baseball, 2/29/20.

My top 100 prospects package began to run this week on The Athletic, with the global top 100 running Monday, the column of guys who just missed on Tuesday, and then the American League org reports running the rest of the week. (Here’s the Rangers’ report, and the Royals’, for example.) You can access everything via this index page. I also held a Klawchat this Thursday.

My brand-new podcast, The Keith Law Show (also on iTunes), debuted this past week as well, with a guest appearance from Fangraphs’ lead prospect writer Eric Longenhagen. My thanks to all of you who’ve subscribed and/or left five-star ratings.

I’ve also got at least five signings scheduled at independent bookstores already, with two announced on the stores’ pages: April 24^th at Politics & Prose in DC and April 25^th at Midtown Scholar in Harrisburg.

And now, the links…

This week’s must-read piece is from James Hamblin in the Atlantic, on how we are all likely to get coronavirus. A vaccine won’t arrive in time to stop the outbreak, with U.S. policy failures a big reason why, and the virus’s long incubation period and 2% fatality rate ensure it will continue to spread despite containment efforts. We should try to get all our red city cards to the Scientist.
Of course, our Dear Leader referred to concerns about coronavirus and the media coverage of it as a hoax, and then offered some false statements on the virus’s spread.
Longreads: This history of the failure of the startup Homepolish is fascinating if entirely familiar. A fast-talking, highly educated con man convinced a lot of seemingly smart people to fund his company-without-a-business.
GQ has the story of “the Great Buenos Aires bank heist,” meticulously planned and executed, only to collapse because of one gang member’s infidelity to his wife.
The Guardian looks at the lasting influence of Copenhagen restaurant Noma, which continues to alter the global food scene with its ethos of local, sustainable cuisine.
Writing for VICE, the great ex-Deadspin writer Laura Wagner details testimony in a lawsuit over the NYPD’s racist policing practices.
Pippa Norris, Harvard political scientist and director of the Electoral Integrity Project, discusses the rise of authoritarian populism as a response to social change and why populism lends itself to authoritarian impulses.
How Gmail filters emails from various candidates may affect how those candidates fare in the primaries.
The mass murderer who killed nine Turkish immigrants outside Frankfurt was a Trump-loving, QAnon believer.
Bloomberg profiled Restoration Games and founder Rob Daviau fresh off the company’s blockbuster Kickstarter effort for the Return to Dark Tower, a reboot of a cult classic game from the early 1980s, which raised over $4 million. Daviau is also the inventor of the “legacy game” concept, which turned Pandemic Legacy into one of the most acclaimed and highest-rated board games ever released.
Celtics rookie Grant Williams loves him some Settlers of Catan.
Jon Melli goes inside the campers where two Orioles pitching prospects make their homes.
Learning another language can alter your perception of time.
You can only be a writer if you can afford it.
Plaid Hat Games, acquired several years ago by Asmodee, has been sold back to founder Colby Dauch, although much of its catalog of games will stay with Asmodee.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, coronavirus, history of food, links, longreads, stick to baseball

→ February 15, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/15/20.

My only new content this week at the Athletic was a breakdown of the final Mookie Betts trade, as I continue to work on the prospect rankings, which will run the week of February 24^th. I’ll be working through the weekend to stay on schedule for that release date.

I do have a new game review up at Paste, covering Genius Games’ new title Ecosystem, a card-drafting, tableau-building game that moves very quickly but has intricate interactions among the cards you place. The deck has cards for two habitats and nine different species of animals, birds, fish, and insects, and where and how you place those cards in your 4×5 grid affects your ultimate scoring.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New Yorker has a giant profile of N.K. Jemisin on the eve of the release of her first novel since her Broken Earth trilogy won three straight Hugo awards.
The Guardian has an excerpt from Andrew Marantz’s forthcoming book Antisocial that looks at how far-right trolls took over social media, with a lot of help from Silicon Valley execs who view news as merely another commodity to be sold.
Melissa Clark has a buyer’s guide to chocolate, including explanations of some key terms and a discussion of the ethics of buying chocolate, in the New York Times.
A new federal lawsuit alleges that children held at Chicago Lakeshore Hospital were drugged and/or sexually abused while Cook County officials covered it up, according to ProPublica.
Shipt, the home-delivery company now owned by Target, has taken on some strongly anti-worker practices and encouraged its delivery folks to spend their own money to try to butter up customers.
From last March, Quinnipiac women’s rugby coach Becky Carlson looks at how colleges get rid of female coaches who dare to speak out against systemic sexism and other abuses of power.
A pediatrician in Illinois left a suicide note that implied that he’d been faking vaccination records, either to help anti-vaccine parents, or because he himself was anti-vaccine and simply lied to parents about vaccinating their kids.
If you live in Connecticut, call your state rep and your state Senator to tell them you support the bill eliminating all non-medical exemptions to childhood vaccination requirements. The claim that such a bill violates “religious liberties” is bullshit; no major religion opposes vaccinations, and anti-vaxxers use this as a cover story for their own ignorance.
MIT Technology Review looks at how the ‘manosphere’ of angry men, including so-called ‘incels,’ is become more radicalized on sites like Reddit and Gab. The Texas Department of Public Safety called incels “an emerging domestic terrorism threat.” Maybe we should ban men from immigrating out of Texas?
Also in Texas, a 16-year-old boy who came to the aid of another student who was being bullied was himself shot to death by the bully, who was no older than 15 but still somehow had a handgun.
In 2018, Rep. Jim Jordan (guess) begged a former Ohio State wrestler to deny reports of sexual abuse while Jordan was an assistant coach on the team.
Islamophobe Laura Loomer is probably going to be the Republican nominee for Florida’s 21^st district.
An abnormality in cells that produce myelin may be connected to how and why autism spectrum disorder affects so many parts of the brain’s functioning.
A Utah legislator has introduced a bill to stop usurious lenders from jailing borrowers and seizing their bail money. Does Utah send these people to Newgate?

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: connecticut, hugo award, links, longreads, social media, stick to baseball, texas, utah, vaccines

→ 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

→ December 14, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/14/19.

I was busy these last two weeks, with numerous reaction pieces for ESPN+ subscribers.

I also held a Klawchat, probably my last of 2019, on Friday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the new small-box game Ankh’or, which plays up to four but works nicely with two, and wrote up the best games I saw in two days at PAX Unplugged (before my daughter got sick and we had to skip day three #sadface).

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, comes out on April 21^st, 2020. You can pre-order it here, and I have tentative appearances for that week at Politics & Prose (DC), Midtown Scholar (Harrisburg), and One More Page (Arlington, VA).

My free email newsletter will return in the next few days – sorry, I got sick, then the winter meetings happened – and you can sign up here.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This New York Times piece on two woman artists, Celia Paul and Cecily Brown, is devastating in multiple ways as it explores divers forms of misogyny in the art world.
Former major-league pitcher Bobby Jenks opens up about years of substance abuse and pitching through pain.
A GP writes in the Guardian about things he’s learned from his suicidal patients, with a discussion of the death of Frightened Rabbit lead singer Scott Hutchison.
The Verge reveals the toxic work environment at the trendy luggage maker Away.
Multiple researchers and publishers worked together to try to come up with a definition of predatory publishers.
Nouns in romance languages have genders, and when a plural noun refers to a group of people that includes men and women (or any non-men), the default is to use the masculine plural. So a group of 100 teachers, 99 of them women and just one a man, would still be “los profesores.” Teenagers in Argentina are fighting to change that in favor of gender-neutral language.
I love The Monster at the End of this Book, having read it many times to my daughter (complete with my Grover impression), so of course I enjoyed author David Burr Garrard’s essay on how that book opened his mind to the world of literature.
Deposed Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin has been busy pardoning murderers who contributed to his campaign, as well as pardoning a man convicted of beheading a woman and a teacher convicted of possessing child pornography.
The Washington Post looks at Israeli people trying to escape Ultra-Orthodox communities, which keep their members in cult-like isolation from the outside world.
David J. Roth, formerly of Deadspin, writes about the Astros’ McKinsey connections and mentality. McKinsey’s business practices are under scrutiny elsewhere as well, such as how they charge U.S. taxpayers $3 million per year for the work of a recent college graduate.
France has mounted an extensive information campaign to fight vaccine hesitancy in a country with some of the highest levels of vaccine stupidity … er, distrust in the world. One side note in the article describes two families, one from France and the other from the U.S., bringing unvaccinated kids carrying the measles into Costa Rica. If I’m Costa Rica, or any other country, I would start demanding vaccination records for idiot travelers from rich western countries with vaccination rates below the herd immunity threshold (95% for measles), and making it a crime to bring an unvaccinated child into a country and putting my local populace at risk.
“Samoa buries its children as measles outbreak worsens.” I think that says it all.
That measles outbreak is what happens when anti-vaxxers win, according to this LA Times editorial.
Anti-vaxxers hate your children. Dead kids don’t bother them; they’re so obsessed with their fantasies of vaccine ‘injuries.’
Aung San Suu Kyi stands accused of deliberately saying nothing while the Burmese government massacred the Rohingya people in an International Court of Justice trial over the genocide.
A first-grade teacher in Alameda County, California, teaches his students about race, class, and privilege.
If you missed the Thanksgiving Twitter backlash over a now-deleted Scientific American editorial that (in my view) was just a hit piece on Dr. Jen Gunter, Slate offers one balanced take on the situation, while the American Council on Science and Health called out SciAm’s embrace of “anti-medical” pseudoscience. The piece’s author, Jennifer Block, maintains that she did nothing wrong, despite hiding her conflict of interest in the matter.
Climate change deniers love to argue that past climate models have been wrong … but that’s not true.
House Democrats have passed nearly 400 bills that Mitch McConnell refuses to even consider in the Senate. I’m reasonably certain that this is not how the Framers intended for our legislature to work.
My alma mater screwed up, again, this time denying a popular and highly regarded Latina professor tenure. Harvard President Lawrence Bacow could do something about it, but says that’s just not how we do things around here. Why does it matter? Because the rejection may push other minority professors and grad students out of academia.
If you live in or near Clarksburg, Maryland, there’s an indie bookstore that needs your help. The owner has Parkinson’s disease and is struggling to keep the store afloat.
If you’re not constantly on Twitter, you may have missed this video of British citizens aghast at how expensive health care is in the United States. Basic health care is a right, not a privilege for the wealthy or the employed.
Board game news: Dire Wolf Digital’s app version of Reiner Knizia’s Yellow & Yangtze, a sequel/reimplementation of his hit game Tigris & Euphrates, is now live for iOS, Android, and Steam.
Z-Man Games has a bunch of mini-expansions for Stone Age, Cacao, First Class, NMBR9, and the Voyages of Marco Polo.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, climate change, france, harvard, israel, links, longreads, mental health, myanmar, 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 16, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/16/19.

I wrote this week, but nothing has been published quite yet. Some of it will be in bookstores on April 21st of next year, though, as I work on the first edit for The Inside Game, my new book combining baseball decisions and cognitive psychology. I also am tentatively scheduled to appear at Washington, DC’s, Politics & Prose on April 24th, with other events likely in that first week. If you’re with a bookstore and interested in arranging an event, feel free to reach out to me in the comments and I’ll connect you with my publicist.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The legal battle over a 7-year-old trans girl in Texas could have substantial implication for trans rights of children in that state and across the United States.
The Guardian looks at the big-data approach to history and projecting the future, a new field of inquiry reminiscent of the psychohistory of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels.
Vanity Fair details the theft of 550 Bitcoin-mining computers in Iceland. The authorities know who stole the machines, but not where the machines are.
A New Jersey high school baseball coach ended up sued after he told a kid to slide, and the kid ended up with a horrible leg injury.
A woman who’s worked in the board game industry came out with her story of how designer/publisher JR Honeycutt manipulated and abused her across a months-long relationship. BoardGameGeek immediately removed him from a panel where he was supposed to speak at BGG.Con this month.
Deval Patrick wants to run for President. He helped a Republican billionaire make millions through foreclosures while he was Governor of Massachusetts.
Restaurant critic Adam Platt – you may have heard of his brother, Oliver – writes about what it’s like to be targeted by a chef whose food you’ve reviewed.
ESPN’s Kevin Arnovitz writes about the silence that follows the NBA’s and Daryl Morey’s China/Hong Kong controversy. I may be showing my age, but can you imagine a similar blowback in the 1970s-1980s if an athlete or GM had voiced support of Solidarity or the Helsinki Watch Groups?
Dignity Health stuck one of its own employees with a $900,000 bill for medical care for her daughter, born three months premature, by trying to use a loophole around a missed deadline. This ProPublica piece points out that “Dignity is also a religious organization that says its mission is to further ‘the healing ministry of Jesus.'”
“I was an astrologer – here’s how it really works, and why I had to stop.”
Anti-vaxxers are now targeting minority groups with their dangerous misinformation.
The Daily Beast got basic anti-vaccine ads approved by Google and Facebook despite those companies’ claims that they wouldn’t run such false or misleading advertisements.
A woman who’s active in promoting vaccine safety and accurate vaccine information on Twitter went to a screening of Vaxxed 2 and tweeted her thoughts.
The head of the Nutrition Department at Harvard’s School of Public Health weighs in on how much meat we should eat and on the new plant-based meat alternatives.
The founder of a site called NoFap, which is – and I’m not making this up – trying to tell men to stop masturbating, is suing a prominent sex researcher because she said masturbation isn’t bad and that porn addiction isn’t real.
Health officials fighting the Ebola outbreak in the north Kivu region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo will now have a second vaccine to try in the city of Goma, which hasn’t yet been hit by the outbreak. Over 2000 people have died already in the year-long Ebola flare-up, which has spread rapidly due to locals’ mistrust of government and NGO personnel.
The current way we use antibiotics to fight routine bacterial infections may be out of date, and contributes to drug resistance.
The lower house of the Ohiobama legislature passed a bill saying that teachers can’t grade students’ incorrect science answers as wrong if the answers reflect the students’ religious beliefs. Imagine paying your tax money so the public schools in your district could fail to teach kids basic science.
Deadspin’s last (interim) editor-in-chief Barry Petchesky wrote for the New York Times about being fired for refusing to stick to sports.
The United States talks about fighting global terrorism, but the country is now seen as a leading exporter of white supremacist terrorism, spreading to violence across the western world.
The Saudis are not our friends. They hacked into the phones of Twitter users critical of their dictatorial regime and extorted them into tweeting state propaganda.
A MediaMatters survey found that just 3% of news reports on the California wildfires pointed out the role of climate change in the conflagration.
Leaked emails show Trump consigliere Stephen Miller empathizes strongly with white nationalists.
Peter Nicholas writes in the Atlantic that Trump’s strategy of attacking his adversaries may not work given how many people are on the opposite side of the impeachment inquiry.
President Trump continued to funnel tax dollars to his friends as his administration hired $380-an-hour outside consultants to handle work ordinarily assigned to government employees, leading to nearly $750,000 in gains for Trump’s allies.
As many as 90% of domestic violence victims report possible traumatic brain injuries, according to two researchers writing for Scientific American.
A new outpost of Pizzeria Bianco, my #1 pizzeria in the United States, will open in Los Angeles in the space formerly occupied by Tartine Bianco.
Board game news: The designer and publisher of the role-playing game Gloomhaven, which costs $120 and comes in a 20-pound box, announced a streamlined version called Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion, which should cost around $50 and hit retail in Q3 in 2020.
Calliope Games is reissuing the 2004 game Station Master (Kickstarter link) with new artwork.
Next Move announced Azul: Crystal Mosaic, an expansion to the 2018 Spiel des Jahres winner that will include overlays to keep your tiles in place and new double-sided player boards.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, anti-science, basketball, climate change, health, lgbt rights, links, longreads, nutrition, pizza, pseudoscience, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ 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

Archives