stick to baseball

→ 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

→ October 26, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/25/19.

My one ESPN+ piece this week covered the possibility of realigning the minor leagues, possibly contracting several dozen teams or demoting them to nonaffiliated leagues. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Era: The Medieval Age, the new game from Pandemic designer Matt Leacock. It’s a roll-and-build game that reimplements his own Roll Through the Ages: The Bronze Age, but gives it better components and a spatial aspect absent from the first game.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, will be out on April 21st, 2020, from HarperCollins. You can pre-order it now through that link (and please do so!).

You should also subscribe to my my free email newsletter, because I said so.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Shane Mitchell writes for Bitter Southerner about the long transatlantic history of okra, a global plant that came to the west a few hundred years ago from Africa and that is now essential to the cuisines of the American south. I love it dipped in cornmeal and fried, or in a deep brown gumbo.
Why do people hate vegans? They’re a convenient punchline, says George Reynolds of the Guardian, but their dietary choices force us to confront harsh environmental and medical realities about the meat-centric diet of the west while also running up against a longstanding association of meat with prosperity.
Psychologist Hans Eysenck’s work has been highly influential but also criticized on multiple grounds, including his dubious support of work that claimed there was a link between race and IQ. Cosmos details a bigger scandal, that Eysenck and a longtime collaborator may have faked data and conclusions, including studies that claimed your personality could influence your chances of getting cancer or heart disease. If all 61 papers co-authored by Eysenck are eventually retracted, he would become, per Retraction Watch, the most retracted psychology researcher of all time.
Jerome Groopman writes in the New Yorker about brain science and successful ways to break bad habits. I don’t think these are panaceas, but they’re more likely to work than negative reinforcement, self-shaming, or just trying to beat bad habits with willpower. Excuse me, I feel like I need some Oreos after typing that…
Since Prince’s death in 2016, his estate has been releasing some of the trove of unreleased material the singer and multi-instrumentalist left behind – even though he was very protective of the same music while he was alive. Paste‘s Richard Aaron looks at the ethics and implications of listening to this music, some of which has been quite good, while some was clearly never intended to see the light of day.
In my chat this week, a reader sent a link arguing that wealth taxes failed in Europe. This is at least misleading, if not outright false, according to this editorial from the Washington Post, which highlights how much easier it is in Europe to evade taxes, how loophole-ridden their wealth taxes were, and how competition across the borderless EU made it easier to just pick up and move.
Philly magazine looks at the rise of food co-ops in the city, asking how well they actually serve the communities in which they’re located.
Amazon has spent nearly $1.5 million to defeat a socialist incumbent on Seattle’s city council. Kshama Sawant led the push for Seattle’s higher minimum wage, but lost (in the end) a battle to tax large corporations on a per-employee basis and use the funds to serve the city’s large population of homeless people.
Gun sellers at a show on the Iowa State fairgrounds used Nazi symbols and racist/anti-Semitic imagery to sell guns and explosives. The state fair’s CEO passed the buck, saying that they don’t control what independent companies that rent the space do once they use it.
Author Alex Berenson name-searched himself and showed up in my replies to harass one of my longtime readers on Twitter this week. I wasn’t familiar with him or his work before, but it appears that the scientific consensus on his book about cannabis is that it’s alarmist and highly misleading.
A new California law designed to curb abuses in the so-called ‘gig economy’ appears to hurt freelance writers more than anyone else because it would set such a low bar for the number of pieces someone could write before they’d have to be considered a full-time employee.
“Prime editing” could correct up to 89% of disease-causing errors in our genes, although the research and techniques are in their infancy. As someone with an inborn error of metabolism, I’m intrigued, but can we ‘fix’ one gene (two, in my case, since it’s autosomal recessive) without causing any other unforeseen consequences?
California’s state medical board has now targeted a second doctor accused of writing bogus vaccine exemptions for schoolchildren, asking that her license be suspended or revoked entirely.
Residents of Newtok, Alaska, are moving – yes, all of them – to a new village as climate change has eroded much of the land in Newtok and threatens to make the entire town unlivable.
Antibiotic resistance – and evolution – in real time: It took just three weeks for a ‘superbug’ to evolve resistance to the drug of last resort.
Board game news: Cities Skylines, the tabletop version of the popular citybuilder video game from Paradox Interactive, is now out from Thames & Kosmos. It’s a cooperative game, whereas I believe the video game version is competitive. I saw an early prototype last year, but at that point the game wasn’t co-op yet.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: climate change, drugs, evolution, frauds, links, longreads, prince, southern cooking, stick to baseball, vaccines, vegan

→ October 19, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/18/19.

For ESPN+ subscribers, I had a long piece covering all the players I saw in the Arizona Fall League plus some other notes from instructs and games I saw in September. I held a Klawchat on Thursday and Periscope on Friday.

Over at Ars Technica, I ranked all 18 Ticket to Ride maps available on tabletop. I also reviewed the new strategy game Tapestry, from the designer of Scythe and Charterstone, over at Paste.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, will be out from HarperCollins on April 21st, 2020. You can pre-order it now.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: My colleague Mina Kimes wrote about Houston Texans receiver DeAndre Hopkins and his mother’s survival story; she was disfigured and blinded by one of her ex-boyfriend’s girlfriends, who attacked her with acid and bleach.
The Guardian looks at the resurgence of traditional bread-baking methods in the UK, starting with naturally bred wheat strains and milling that retains more of the wheat’s germ and flavor characteristics. I don’t know that I agree with the author’s speculations on “gluten sensitivity,” but longer fermentations do make more nutrients in wheat available to our bodies.
Host to the 2022 World Cup, Qatar is one of the fastest-warming areas of the world outside of the poles, but the country’s solution to the rising temperatures is to air-condition open-air spaces, contributing further to emissions that warm the planet. There are some positive lessons here from changes to architectural designs and new materials for buildings and roads, but the overall message is not positive. And what happens in Qatar is a harbinger for what may happen in Arizona.
The Atlantic looks at the enduring appeal of children’s book author Sandra Boynton. My favorite of her books – one I’ve given many times as a gift – is Oh My Oh My Oh Dinosaurs!, mostly because of one specific panel.
Eric Asimov of the New York Times lists five ways climate change is already altering the global wine industry. Many of these same factors will also apply to other highly climate-sensitive crops like coffee and cacao as well.
Dan Wetzel of Yahoo! Sports says LeBron James whiffed with his ‘stick to sports’ comments on Daryl Morey. Longtime NBA player Etan Thomas uses James’ comments to talk about the hypocrisy of the player’s critics, nearly all of whom are right-wing pundits exploiting James’ fame to advance their own views.
Warriors forward Draymond Green writes in the Washington Post that college athletes should be allowed to profit from their own names and images, calling the NCAA a “dictatorship” and arguing that players might stay in college longer if they didn’t have to go pro to earn money.
The Philadelphia Inquirer‘s Craig Laban posted his ranking of the top 25 restaurants in the Philly area for 2019. I do need to update my own list; I’ve been to 9 of his 25, and I think he’s particularly remiss in omitting High Street on Market and The Love. I’m also kind of over seeing $200+ prix fixe places on these lists. So few readers can go there; the food may be wonderful, but if only a sliver of the 1% can try it, I’m not sure who is served by the restaurant’s inclusion on such a list.
Jay Greeson wrote a gross, misogynistic tweet that trashed Daniel Hudson for leaving the Nationals to attend the birth of his third child; he was excoriated, and worse, for the comment. I can’t excuse the original statement but Greeson wrote a thoughtful mea culpa about his poor judgment.
An Arizona policy adviser won her lawsuit alleging sex and race discrimination while she worked for state Senate Democrats, including lower pay based on her sex and unlawful termination. She’ll get $353,000 in back pay and damages, and will also get her job back. The main culprit, according to her lawsuit, is now the state’s Secretary of State, Katie Hobbs.
It appears that Germany denied visas to board game industry visitors from Iran who wanted to attend SPIEL 2019, the world’s largest board game convention and trade show, held every October in Essen.
Concerns about the addictive and deleterious nature of games go back thousands of years, from the Buddha to Fiorello LaGuardia to modern handwringers fretting over video games.
The New Yorker speaks to Anthony Veneziale, a member of hip-hop improv collective Freestyle Love Supreme about freestyling and what it might tell us about our brains and creativity. FLS is probably better known for some of its other members, like Lin-Manuel Miranda and Daveed Diggs.
A small Iowa newspaper reported on a local police officer’s inappropriate relationships with multiple girls aged 16 or 17, leading to the officer’s termination. He sued the paper and lost, but the paper’s costs to defend itself were substantial, so someone at the paper set up a GoFundMe to offset the expenses.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: basketball, bread, climate change, food science, football, links, longreads, stick to baseball

→ October 5, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/5/19.

Nothing new from me this week other than a Klawchat and a Periscope video as I try to finish off the first draft of my upcoming book The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, now available for pre-order. My next ESPN+ column will be a dispatch from the Arizona Fall League.

And now, the links – fewer than usual, for the same reasons, but these should get back to normal by the end of the month:

Longreads first: This New York Review of Books review of Tim Alberta’s book American Carnage doubles as a look at how the Republican Party was heading for this Trumpian moment for a half-century.
Haruki Murakami writes about memories of his father and their declining relationship for the New Yorker.
Deadspin has the inside scoop on how TheMaven plans to gut Sports Illustrated by turning it into a lousier version of SBNation or SI‘s own FanSided.
GQ takes readers inside the brutal dictatorship ruling Burundi, a tiny country in the heart of Africa, the southern neighbor of Rwanda. Burundi’s sectarian violence hasn’t become a global story like the Rwandan civil war and genocide did, but that doesn’t make its current regime’s crimes any less heinous.
The American Prospect looks at the novel campaign of West Virginia gubernatorial candidate Stephen Smith, which focuses more on philosophy than the candidate himself.
The BBC has a not-quite longread on the international heist of Saudi jewels, including the “blue diamond,” that has caused a rift between Saudi Arabia and Thailand, and that ultimately involved multiple murders.
Nestlé, whose products you should already think about avoiding given their exploitation of water resources, is now complaining that they don’t want to comply with Australian requirements to report on whether they rely on slavery in their chocolate supply chain, claiming it would cost consumers more money in the end. I mean, I’m good paying another dime for chocolate if it means the cacao wasn’t harvested by an eight-year-old slave in Côte d’Ivoire.
Susanna Clarke, author of one of my all-time favorite novels in Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, will release her second novel in September of 2020, sixteen years after her bestselling, critically-acclaimed, Hugo-winning debut.
Plastic tea bags release billions of plastic microparticles into your tea. I’ll stick with loose leaf teas at home, thanks.
Two women in New Zealand lost their pregnancies because they contracted measles. Remember that when someone tells you that measles is a benign childhood illness.
From 2017, the chief of the Guardian‘s Melbourne bureau, Melissa Davey, wrote that we need to teach science and health literacy in schools so those kids don’t grow up into gullible adults who fall for pseudoscience and anti-science myths they read online.
An “Actually Disabled” person penned an open letter to Andy Richter about the dangers of assuming someone who looks able-bodied is feigning a disability.
Why are Customs and Border Protection agents harassing journalists as they re-enter the United States? Probably for the same reason the U.S. has fallen to “problematic” on the World Press Freedom index.
Board game news: Reiner Knizia’s Yellow & Yangtze, which he calls his “spiritual successor” to Tigris & Euphrates, is coming to digital platforms and just hit Early Access on Steam. It’s from Dire Wolf, who did such great work on digital ports of Raiders of the North Sea and Lanterns.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, board game news, british literature, chocolate, food safety, longreads, murakami, science, stick to baseball, west virginia

→ September 21, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/21/19.

My one ESPN+ column this week looked at players I was wrong about, including Shane Bieber and Jeff McNeil. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday and a Periscope video chat on Tuesday.

I discussed details of my new book, due out in April 2020 from HarperCollins, in this week’s edition of my free email newsletter. You can pre-order the book already on amazon.

I joined the East Village Times podcast to talk about the Padres’ farm system this week.

And now, the links…

Longreads: WIRED has the story of a murderer undone by data on the victim’s Fitbit.
New documents have revealed Israel and the United States’ complicity in the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre of hundreds, possibly thousands, of Palestinian and Lebanese Shi’ite civilians. It seems like a precursor to modern attacks on civilian targets in the name of fighting terrorism.
Serious Eats’ J. Kenji Lopez-Alt wrote about how he helped his daughter become a better eater, even as a toddler. Two of his tips for which I can vouch: Repeated exposure to foods helps, and shopping and cooking with my daughter raised her interest in eating what we made.
Sandy Hook Promise has a powerful, harrowing new PSA to encourage more parents to push for sensible gun law reforms.
Most of the links I provide here are ones I recommend, but occasionally I include something I find interesting because of how egregiously bad it is. This link falls in the latter category: An author complains about how she totally mismanaged the money she earned from writing, and when her advances dwindled, she wasn’t prepared for the funds to dry up like that.
A reader of mine, Brian Godish, shared this story about his son, a cancer survivor already at age 9, and pitcher Michael Kopech.
I enjoy potable bitters, particularly Amaro Meletti and Amaro Montenegro, but had never heard of Amer Picon, which has a strange pocket of fans in western Nevada even though the spirit is not exported from France.
Rob Tannenbaum gives the history of A-ha’s song and video “Take On Me”, which has over a billion views on YouTube and over half a billion spins on Spotify.
I feel like every parent wants to see their children become readers; the Atlantic looks at some factors that actually matter in encouraging your kids to enjoy reading.
I haven’t watched Netflix’s Unbelievable yet, but the reviews are very strong, and it’s based on a true story of a serial rapist who was caught after Washington state cops coerced one victim into recanting her claims.
SkepticalRaptor has a new post countering some key flu vaccine myths, with a mention of yours truly when he drops a baseball analogy.
I’ve read two great books in the last year on the Chicxulub impact, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs and T. Rex and the Crater of Doom. This week scientists released new information from drilling into the crater to try to learn more specifics about the impact.
Pennsylvania state Senator Mike Folmer (R) resigned this week after he was arrested for possessing and disseminating child pornography. Last year, Folmer “opposed a bill that would have made it easier for survivors of child sex abuse to sue their perpetrators by extending the statute of limitations.”
The Department of Education is threatening to pull funding from programs at Duke and UNC because the programs show Islam in too positive a light.
Will Wilkinson writes in the New York Times why certain conservatives are so up in arms (pun intended) over an assault weapons ban. I think he’s right on the nose here.
Philadelphia magazine is suing the Governor of Pennsylvania for his office’s attempts to curtail the magazine’s access in retaliation for their coverage of the wasteful DROP program.
Violence and harassment against abortion clinics, providers, and patients is on the rise, according to a new CBS News report.
Facebook took down a fact-checking report on medically necessary abortions, part of how forced birthers are waging war on abortion rights the same way anti-vaxxers are trying to wage war on vaccinations: through disinformation and abuse of social media sites’ own policing.
Those of you in academia may appreciate this Twitter thread on bots infiltrating research surveys and tips for blocking them.
Slice Out Hunger is holding its annual Dollar Slice Night fundraiser in NYC on October 3rd.
Board game news: A group of gaming industry folk have created the American Tabletop Awards and named their inaugural winners, including the Quacks of Quedlinburg and Root.
They’re already 2000% funded (!) but there are two new Everdell expansions on Kickstarter.
Tweet of the week:

Teacher: Can someone give me an example of white privilege?
Student: Oh come on! I don’t want to talk about white privilege.
Teacher: Excellent job. Anyone else?

— Abbi Crutchfield (@curlycomedy) September 20, 2019

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, board game news, first amendment, guns, israel, links, stick to baseball

→ September 14, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/14/19.

For ESPN+ subscribers, my annual Prospect of the Year column went up this week, with Wander Franco, Luis Robert, and Gavin Lux the three finalists. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday and a Periscope video chat on Tuesday.

My latest game review for Paste covers Realm of Sand from Deep Water, a mashup of Patchwork and Splendor with incredible artwork by the same artist behind Hanamikoji and Shadows of Kyoto.

My latest email newsletter went out on Wednesday. You can sign up for free to get whatever topic is on my mind when I feel like I’ve gone too long without sending one.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This Washingtonian story about a hoarder, a would be tech bro, and a murder is really out there.
Lead poisoning may be the real explanation for the rise and fall of violent crime from the 1960s to the 1990s, and the problem isn’t gone because so much of lead belched out by cars burning leaded gasoline is still in our environment. (Small world department: I worked with Prof. Reyes for about a year at a consulting firm before I went into baseball and she returned to academia.) Of course, the Trump administration is rolling back regulations to keep lead and other pollutants out of our water supply.
In the New Yorker, Michael Schulman looks at the rise of the “superfan” and what it means for content creators, especially when those fans don’t agree with creative choices in books, films, or TV shows.
Garrett Graff, author of the new book The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11, ponders how much sheer luck or randomness determined who survived the 9/11 attacks in an essay for the Atlantic.
Vox looks at what “a Hurricane Katrina of heat,” caused by climate change, would look like for Phoenix, the second-fastest growing metropolitan area in the country, which already had 128 days over 100 degrees in 2018. Beyond the obvious strains on the power and water supplies, such extended heat waves would lead to substantial emergency room visits and deaths from heat stroke.
Panama disease is a fungus that attacks banana plantations and destroys entire crops; since the Cavendish bananas we see in every store are all genetically identical, the plants have no way to develop immunity through natural selection. Two gene-editing efforts are racing to create a new banana plant that can resist the fungus before the Cavendish goes the way of its predecessor, the Gros Michel, which disappeared in the 1950s for a similar reason. If you like that link, check out the book Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World, which I reviewed in 2013.
If you thought anti-abortion advocates were about anything other than subjugating women, look at this utterly absurd, anti-science ‘debate’ over surgery to treat ectopic pregnancies, operations that save the lives of the women while removing pregnancies that are nonviable by definition. Several anti-abortion zealots are claiming this surgery is abortion, and that ectopic pregnancies can magically relocate to the uterus (wrong), and that doctors should employ “watchful waiting” to see if the pregnancies miscarry on their own (risking the woman’s life in the process).
Florida’s race to codify woo into the state’s regular operations has gone from schools to medicine now, as a new law forces doctors to endorse nonmedical, ineffective pseudoscience as ‘alternatives’ to opioids. Remember, there is no such thing as “alternative medicine.” If something works, it’s medicine.
New Zealand is creating a firearm registry and increasing penalties for illegal gun sales, while we have a sitting Texas state representative threatening to use an assault rifle against a Presidential candidate. It took one mass shooting to galvanize their public and their government to take action on guns.
A woman frustrated by receiving unsolicited dick pics created her own filter to block them … which, I don’t know, Twitter and Facebook and most dating apps could buy and use?
A judge in Florida ruled that a four-year-old leukemia patient will remain with his grandparents because his own parents refuse to get him chemotherapy, instead claiming they’ll use “natural” treatments (i.e., they’ll let him die). This has important implications in the vaccine mandate debates: Your right to parent your children does not extend to denying them medical care.
Lee Salem was an influential comic strip editor who helped find or develop strips as diverse as “Doonesbury,” “Calvin and Hobbes,” and “For Better or Worse.” He died earlier this month at age 73.
Preorders for the latest game in the Azul series, Azul Summer Pavilion, are now available.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, climate change, environment, guns, links, longreads, pseudoscience, stick to baseball

→ September 7, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/7/19.

I had one ESPN+ piece this week, looking at the best or most interesting September prospect callups. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

For Paste, I reviewed Planet, a simple tile-laying game where you place those tiles on your own polyhedron planet, so you get to hold the whole world in your hands.

Now that this piece is done and I’ve already filed my ESPN column for next week (Prospect of the Year), I’ll work on my next email newsletter. You can sign up for free any time.

I’m selling off some of my board games, and once again I’m donating all proceeds to the Food Bank of Delaware. You can see the games I’m selling here. Thanks to those of you who’ve already bought some of my games, I’ve donated over $330 to the Food Bank.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Dan Piepenbring, writing in the New Yorker, describes the time he spent with Prince just before the singer’s death as the two collaborated on what would have been Prince’s autobiography.
Amazon’s private delivery network has led to accidents and fatalities, but the retailer hides behind its use of third parties to avoid any liability.
The Guardian‘s Nesrine Malik argues that there is no free speech crisis – there’s a hate speech crisis, and she puts particular blame on social media sites that do little to nothing to stop it.
Scientific American looks at how misinformation spreads and why we fall for it, using a model from economics called the network epistemology framework and discussing the human tendency towards conformism. The piece also puts some blame on social media.
Also from the New Yorker, emails from longtime GOP operative Thomas Hofeller show just how racially-motivated the Republican Party’s gerrymandering was across the country.
The New York Times examines the role Youtube’s algorithms played in helping radicalize Brazil, aiding the rise of their Trump-like, far-right leader Jair Bolsonaro.
STAT News describes the new effort to create and market a vaccine against Lyme disease and asks if the public will be more open to it than it was 20 years ago.
Saveur profiles the families that make L’Etivaz cheese in Switzerland, a sort of spinoff from Gruyère cheese that preserves older methods and is now protected by a national law.
Last month, the FDA approved a new, novel antiobiotic that can defeat extensively- and multi-drug resistant tuberculosis caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis.
School dress codes are a nightmare for parents and for educators, and they often directly or indirectly disfavor girls, especially girls of color. Now some young girls of color in Washington, D.C., are fighting back against rules that discriminate against them.
Adele Lim, co-writer of the script for Crazy Rich Asians, has left the project for the sequel after discovering that her white male counterpart was offered eight to ten times her pay. Warner Brothers explained to Lim’s representatives that making an exception to the standard industry pay scales “would set a troubling precedent in the business,” which ignores how those pay scales were first set (and by whom) or the disadvantages women writers or writers of color have from the start in an industry that has tended not to utilize them.
NPR looks at the ongoing fallout from the “shitty media men” list, including author Stephen Elliott, who wants everyone to know that he’s not a shitty media man who has assaulted women and is suing the list’s creator to ensure that nobody finds out that he was on it.
James Smyth has a great Twitter thread explaining how Mike Minor is leading AL pitchers in Baseball-Reference’s WAR.
A St. Louis police officer pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and a grand jury about an assault by cops on an undercover officer in the wake of the 2017 protests after the acquittal of officer Jason Stockley on a murder charge.
David Karpf responds to Bret “Bedbug” Stephens’ screed, published on the editorial pages of the New York Fucking Times, to say that Stephens has merely proved Karpf’s own point by comparing him to Nazi propagandists. Karpf’s best question is why the Times’ editorial page editor James Bennet allowed Stephens’ garbage column to see the light of day.
The third Azul game, called Azul: Summer Pavilion, is now available to pre-order. It’s a must for me given how much I loved the original Azul and the second game in the series, Stained Glass of Sintra.
Tapestry, the new civilization-building game from Scythe and Charterstone designer Jamey Stegmaier, sold out its first printing pre-orders in just a few days, but you can still reserve a copy from your Friendly Local Game Store.
And finally, happy 51st anniversary to my parents. I wouldn’t be the person I am without you two.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, baseball, board game news, brazil, free speech, links, longreads, medicine, metoo, prince, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ August 31, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/31/19.

I had two ESPN+ posts this week, both scouting blogs: one on Clarke Schmidt, Matt Manning, Julio Rodriguez, and other Tigers/Nationals/Mariners/Royals/Blue Jays prospects; and one on Spencer Howard and other Phillies & Orioles prospects. I held a Klawchat on Wednesday.

I’m selling off some of my board games, and once again I’m donating all proceeds to the Food Bank of Delaware. You can see the games I’m selling here; I’m going to continue to add titles over the weekend and next week as I go through my collection. In case you missed it, I also went through all the games I saw and tried at Gen Con 2019 over at Paste.

Also, this was kind of fun – I got a mention in roast magazine’s Daily Coffee News, which used my review of Coffee Roaster to cover the game’s upcoming second edition.

I sent out my free email newsletter again on Friday night, but you can still sign up for free and get more personal writing from me.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: “I see this as part of a larger war against science-based reality.” The New Yorker goes very long on how the return of the measles is a sign of a war against science, and how authorities must combat the dangerous ideas that threaten our species.
The Washington Post spoke to Caitlan Coleman, who was held by the Taleban for five years with her husband, giving birth to three kids while there. She’s since revealed that her husband brought her into Afghanistan, against her wishes, only to see them kidnapped and held hostage, where he became physically and psychologically abusive.
Sesame Street is about to begin its 50th season; the New York Times looks at how the show uses music – and celebrity musicians – to teach viewers and create iconic moments. Recently, I introduced my girlfriend’s children to “Me Lost Me Cookie At the Disco;” they introduced me to “Me Want It (But Me Wait).”
The Guardian looks at how air conditioning is heating the planet as it cools our homes, which in turn requires more energy in a vicious cycle. Oddly absent is a mention of powering it via energy sources that do not contribute to climate change.
The Guardian‘s Lizzie Cernik looks at why some people cut off all ties to their parents, usually the result of toxic relationships that date back decades.
Garrett Martin, my editor at Paste, called out Dave Chappelle for his sensitivity and entitlement, as well as his transphobia and derision of the men Michael Jackson molested.
A deranged man, radicalized by anti-vaxxers preaching hate and violence online, assaulted California Sen. Richard Pan, the doctor who pushed through the state’s essential, life-saving law that ended nonmedical exemptions to childhood vaccinations.
Two Washington Post editorials worth reading: Why a primary challenger to Trump is a good thing, and why white evangelical leaders should be panicking over the demographic demise of their movement. I can’t think of a worse way to market religion than the way the evangelical movement has acted in the last two decades.
Indonesia is moving its capital to Borneo as Jakarta is sinking into the ground at a faster rate than any other city in the world.
My friend Eric Longenhagen looked at the most interesting position player-to-pitcher conversion projects in the minors right now, starting with San Diego’s Javier Guerra.
This story of a few fifth grade boys in Minnesota who took a bullied kid with special needs under their wing is the sweetest thing I saw in this week of terrible news.
Another story of kindness, although the route there goes right through hate and ignorance, comes from Ferial Pearson, who was targeted for being Muslim and for being queer while speaking to schools in Mullen, Nebraska.
One Night Ultimate Werewolf fans may be interested in pre-ordering the new expansion containing all bonus roles and tokens from smaller expansion packs released in the last few years.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, climate change, links, longreads, stick to baseball, vaccines

Archives