stick to baseball

→ May 12, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/12/18.

This week brought the return of the redraft columns, where I go back ten years and ‘redraft’ the first round with full hindsight. This year’s edition redrafted the first round of 2008, led by Buster Posey and with several guys taken after the tenth round (one in the 42nd!) making the final 30; as well as an accompanying look at the 20 first-rounders who didn’t pan out. Both are Insider pieces, as is my column of scouting notes on Yankees, Phillies, Nats, and Royals prospects.

My review of the new Civilization board game is up at Paste this week. Civilization: A New Dawn takes the theme of the legendary Sid Meier video game franchise and simplifies it to play in about an hour to an hour and a half, but I felt like some of the better world-building aspects were lost in the streamlining.

Smart Baseball is now out in paperback! I’ll be at DC’s famed bookstore Politics & Prose on July 14th to flaunt the fruits of noble birth and, perhaps, sign copies of the book. I’m also working on a signing in greater Boston for later that month, so stay tuned for details. Also, please consider signing up for my free email newsletter.

I also wanted to mention a few new baseball books by folks I know that have come out in the last six weeks: Russell Carleton’s The Shift: The Next Evolution in Baseball Thinking, which I think goes well with my own book without covering much of the same ground; and two books on the Dodgers, Michael Schiavone’s The Dodgers: 60 Years in Los Angeles and Jon Weisman’s Brothers in Arms: Koufax, Kershaw, and the Dodgers’ Extraordinary Pitching Tradition, even though Jon liked the movie Moneyball and therefore was wrong about it.

And now, the links…

The authors of the forthcoming book A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things write for the Guardian‘s Long Read about how the chicken nugget is the true symbol of modern capitalism, a cheap, highly processed foodstuff that fuels inexpensive labor without regard for the cost on the environment or the people consuming them. The authors make many good points along the way, but I think none is more important than understanding that the meat we buy at supermarkets is already “processed.” The claim that “processed” foods are killing us ignores how much processing happens even in foods billed as “natural,” including meats, milk, yogurt, even some types of produce.
A junk study claiming the HPV vaccine caused neurological damage has been retracted by the journal that published it, two years after its release. The original publication led to a near total collapse of HPV vaccination rates in Japan.
The Washington Post‘s Michael Gerson argues that if you’re anti-GMO, then you’re anti-science.
The New Yorker published a lengthy investigative piece on New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s history of domestic violence, which led to his resignation within days. Contrast that to Missouri Governor Eric Greitens, a Republican, who has been accused of sexual assault and blackmail, and been indicted on felony invasion of privacy charges, but remains in office.
North Carolina is a ‘purple’ state, split fairly evenly between the two parties, but horrendous gerrymandering has given the Republicans a stranglehold on the state legislature. Meanwhile, Republicans in Michigan, Arizona, and Pennsylvania continue to push pro-gerrymandering cases and legislation to try to retain control of the legislatures in those states.
Mass shootings inevitably lead to calls for mental health policy reform, but there’s scant evidence linking these events to mental illness.
The Anti-Defamation League sent out a release saying that Twitter users sent over 4 million anti-Semitic tweets last year.
Weeks of protests in Armenia pushed Parliament to elect opposition leader Nikol Pashinyan as Prime Minister.
The Guardian‘s Kieran Devlin wrote about the songcraft of Frightened Rabbit’s Scott Hutchison in the wake of the singer’s death, presumably a suicide, at age 36.
In the last week, three teenaged girls in India have been raped and burned, one of whom was killed after threatening to report her attacker to her family.
Writing for the Hardball Times, Rachael McDaniel describes growing up queer and finding inclusion in baseball.
Young Turks are increasingly rejecting Islam, turning to deism or even atheism in the face of a repressive, pro-Islam dictatorship. Turkey had been a secular republic since 1928, but President Recep Tayyip Erdo?an has embraced Islamism as a way to strengthen his grip on power.
George Will writes that Trump is no longer the worst person in government; that title belongs to Mike Pence.
A Moroccan woman who was married to a Libyan dissident wrote about being kidnapped and tortured at a CIA “black-ops” site that might have been run by CIA director nominee Gina Haspel.
A student at James Madison University who was raped, reported it, and told her attacker did nothing wrong was also told speaking out about the incident could violate university policies. The school’s lawyer later apologized.
There’s a ‘crab crisis’ in Maryland due to a lack of workers for the seasonal industry, a result of the Administration’s hard line on immigration, but the affected fishermen refuse to make that connection. Cognitive dissonance is a real motherhecker.
Fordham Law professor Jed Shugerman explains how the Russian payments to Michael Cohen may prove collusion, at least enough to enable Mueller to obtain probable cause for further warrants.
California has once again surpassed Great Britain to be the world’s 5th-largest economy (if we treat California as independent of the rest of the U.S.), despite progressive policies like higher minimum wages and taxes or bans on certain types of pollution. The growth has brought other negative externalities that the state will have to face, including rising homelessness and the pollution and economic losses of traffic.
Z-Man Games, now an imprint of Asmodee, acquired the great little social game Love Letter, which takes a 16-card deck and makes for a fun deduction game with lots of interaction that you can play in five minutes with three or four people.
Two new board game Kickstarters of note: Darwin’s Choice, another evolution-themed game (hi, Curt!) that has already funded but is open through June 5th; and Last One Standing, a battle royale-style tabletop game that’s past the halfway mark to its goal.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Armenia, british music, chicken, environment, history of food, india, links, Music, stick to baseball, suicide, turkey, vaccines

→ May 5, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/5/18.

My first mock draft for 2018 is now up for Insiders, as is a short post on the Ronald Acuña show. I also held a Klawchat on Friday.

I did some podcasts with friends this week. I appeared on the Productive Outs podcast to talk some baseball and music. Then I talked with Seth Heasley on his Hugos There podcast to discuss To Say Nothing of the Dog, one of my all-time favorite comic novels (and a Hugo Award winner). And of course on Thursday I was on the BBTN podcast with Buster Olney.

By the way, if any of you happen to live in/near Stockholm, there’s a pretty good chance I’m going to be there for a conference in the near future. Let me know in the comments what I should try to do or see in the few hours I’ll have free while there.

And now, the links…

I am quoted in this longread from Tim Grierson on the complicated legacy of sportswriter Jerome Holtzman, who invented the noxious save stat, ruining the sport for decades.
ProPublica investigates a private trash hauler in NYC that covered up the death of an off-the-books worker, claiming he was a homeless person who’d jumped under their truck.
Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources approved a plan to divert public waters from the Great Lakes to a Taiwanese electronics factory in Mount Pleasant.
Baseball Prospectus’ Matt Trueblood wrote about how Albert Pujols appears to have outed himself as age 40, at least if you follow the math as Trueblood did. Although rumors around Pujols’ real age have been around since he debuted in 2001, there’s never been anything more tangible than third hand hearsay. Also, if you’re a BP subscriber, Russell Carleton, author of the new and very good book The Shift, explains how many fans and writers misuse his ‘stabilization’ concept when looking at small, early-season samples.
Parker Molloy writes for GOOD that the White House Correspondents Dinner has always been a bad idea. I agree – it’s far too chummy for what should be an arm’s length relationship. And Charles P. Pierce wrote the best defense of comedian Michelle Wolf’s set at the WHCD in a column for Esquire.
Senate Republicans are prepared to ditch the so-called “blue slip” protocol by confirming a hard-right Ninth Circuit Court nominee over the objections of both of the candidate’s Senators (Democrats from Oregon).
Bitcoin is the greatest scam in history, according to the former CEO of Intuit and Paypal. I’m not worried: I’ve invested my entire 401k in tulips and South Seas stock.
The Arizona teachers’ strike is over, but not before Republican opponents came up with some bizarre conspiracy theories to attack the educators, who were fighting for living wages. Supermajority tax laws in many states, backed by the Koch brothers and other Republican donors, make raising teacher salaries difficult.
Speaking of the Koch Brothers, it turns out that George Mason University, the largest public college in the state of Virginia, gave the Koch foundation a say in hiring and firing decisions after taking a donation from the group.
Gilead update: Oklahoma’s House voted to let adoption agencies turn down LGBTQ couples (as well as single moms, Muslims, atheists, etc.). Meanwhile, Iowa has now banned nearly all abortions with a likely unconstitutional law that prohibits the procedure after a ‘fetal heartbeat’ is detected, around six weeks after conception.
Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams writes in Fortune why her $200,000 personal debt shouldn’t disqualify her from public office. Given the student loan burden of Americans, any stance that holds that people with large outstanding debts can’t be elected officials is awfully elitist and antithetical to democracy. For what it’s worth, I didn’t pay off the last of my own grad school debt until I wrote Smart Baseball.
The ‘biohacker’ Aaron Traywick, who injected himself with an untested herpes treatment in front of a live audience, was found dead earlier this week at some sort of weird spa. The life-extension advocate was 28.
Evolution in real time: Lizards on Redonda Island are evolving more quickly now that two of their main predators have been eradicated.
There’s a bird of paradise whose feathers are so black that they absorb 99.95% of visible light when faced head-on. It made the news in the last few weeks due to a new paper demonstrating there are two distinct species of this bird, rather than one, as previously believed. You can read the original research paper for free on PeerJ.
Orac details Chelsea Clinton’s #vaccineswork tweet and how it unhinged the denialists, including Andrew Wakefield’s partners in fraud.
Former anti-vaxxer moms say empathy is the way to get through to parents who still refuse to vaccinate their kids.
If you live in or near London, do not touch these caterpillars.
Private equity firm Alden Global Capital continues to turn big profits by gutting local newspapers.
Young Fathers’ third album, Cocoa Sugar, dropped in March, and their video for “Toy” features little kids as world leaders, with what appears to be a subtle jab at the President of the U.S.
Two board games designed by the CIA for internal training are now public and playable thanks to some FOIA requests and the print-and-play community.
Empyreal: Spells and Steam, a new fantasy-themed train game from Level 99, just hit Kickstarter this week.
Ruben Bolling’s latest Tom The Dancing Bug comic strip is titled What Trump Supporters See, although its ultimate target is the gullible media.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, baseball, board games, cryptocurrencies, evolution, iowa, links, oklahoma, rap, stick to baseball, vaccines, wisconsin

→ April 29, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/28/18.

My one Insider post this week looked at four pitchers who could go in the first round of this year’s draft, led by Florida RHP Carter Stewart, who was second on my latest ranking of draft prospects. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the board game Ancestree, a light, filler game from the designer of Blood Rage and Rising Sun, but one that I think borrows too heavily from other titles.

Smart Baseball is now out in paperback, and it’s a bestseller … (checks notes) in Sonoma, California. I’ll be at Washington, DC’s legendary bookstore Politics and Prose at 6 pm on July 14th to discuss & sign the book.

And now, the links…

The Guardian had three superb longreads this week, so I’m including them all. The first calls for universities to ‘bulldoze’ their business schools, as the author, a B-school prof himself, argues they do more harm than good. I have an MBA, and I agree with many of his points, as well as the additional evidence that expensive full-time MBAs do not provide sufficient ROIs to students. But some MBA programs include useful material, including accounting and operations research. There’s a worthwhile course of study in there somewhere, but perhaps under a new name.
The second looks at the challenge in updating the Oxford English Dictionary, producing a third edition in the digital era when language appears to be changing faster than ever. A good read for fellow fans of The Professor and the Madman.
The third is a bit weird, as it documents people who pretend to be wealthy influences on Instagram as a way to make money, somehow, although the main subject is more poseur than profiteer.
The Atlantic has a longread that argues that American democracy no longer accurately represents the will of the people. The anecdote that opens this story, in Oxford, Massachusetts, is absolutely infuriating.
Black students nationally are several times more likely to be suspended or disciplined than white students are for the same infractions. The Obama Administration had begun civil rights investigations into the practice in Texas, but this ProPublica/Mother Jones longread explains how Besty DeVos is ending the effort. If you can’t re-segregate the schools by law, do it by fact.
BuzzFeed investigates Facebook’s role in recent anti-Muslim violence in Sri Lanka, where the government temporarily blocked access to the site because Facebook wouldn’t take down bigoted posts and videos calling for Sinhalese Buddhists (!) to attack Muslims and Muslim-owned businesses.
The British morning show Good Morning Britain, hosted by Susanna Reid (who seems to be sharp) and Piers Morgan (a pile of wilted romaine lettuce in an expensive suit) ran a feature on people who didn’t vaccinate their pets for fear their pets would get autism. No, that isn’t actually possible, and some people are just really fucking stupid.
More and more research on behavior shows that changing attitudes isn’t enough to get people to do the right or smart thing, nor is giving them more information: If you want to change someone’s behavior, you need to convince them that everyone else is already doing what they should be. That’s why vaccine denialism is contagious, and why drowning out these cranks and charlatans with reminders that the vast, vast majority of parents still vaccinate their kids is so important.
Canadian fraudsters (they call themselves “homeopaths,” but homeopathy is just bullshit) are telling parents of autistic children they can ‘cure’ autism with diluted doses of vaccines. This nonsense, called CEASE, is just stealing money from desperate parents, and anyone who offers it should be tried for fraud.
A new study shows evidence that Trump’s election was driven by white racism, not by economic anxiety.
The Alfie Evans tragedy has been co-opted by grifters and vultures, looking to score political points off bogus claims of liberty that ignore the sad fact that there is no hope of recovery for the severely brain-damaged child.
Finland will not continue its Universal Basic Income trial after it reaches its scheduled end in 2019.
A former reporter for a Sinclair-owned station says she was pressured to include climate change denialism In her reporting on climate change itself.
Kansas gubernatorial candidate Kris Kodachrome mocked students protesting for reforming gun laws, and later in the week a law reporter found a huge gaffe in Kobach’s filings in the ACLU’s ongoing suit against his voter suppression law, which has done a great job of eliminating the voter fraud that didn’t exist in the first place.
Some Delaware news: a recent attempt to raise the state’s minimum wage to $9.25/hour failed, but it looks like a “red flag” gun bill will be signed into law soon.
Writer Rebecca Solnit, a contributing editor at Harper’s, asks who gets to control the narrative in a country that claims to want equality but is awfully abstemious about handing it out.
A fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School talked to the university’s alumni magazine about better ways to detect and fight the spread of disinformation online as we head towards another round of elections this fall.
Sacramento DA Anne Marie Schubert, who is up for re-election on June 5th, has a history of declining to prosecute police officers who injure black civilians or suspects in the line of duty. The Intercept reveals that she took $420,000 in donations from police organizations across her three campaigns. She may soon be handed evidence that would support charging the officers who killed Stephon Clark, an unarmed black man, in his own backyard.
Senator Marco Rubio writes for CNN.com that it is time to force Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro from power. I agree, but how? Sanctions, Rubio’s main solution, are unlikely to work in isolation. Maduro is planning to abolish more voting rights soon and has been raising capital by selling the “petro,” a new cryptocurrency that I’m sure is an excellent investment.
My employer ran a fairly favorable profile of Cleveland pitcher and climate change denier Trevor Bauer this week; Deadspin offered a rebuttal.
The EU is set to ban neonics, pesticides suspected of contributing to bee colony collapses worldwide. Meanwhile, here in the U.S., EPA chief Scott Pruitt proposed adding neonics to drinking water.
This essay on Theness.com makes a good point about GMO labeling: The government can’t regulate what it doesn’t understand, and in the case of GMOs, a functional definition of what O’s are GM and require labels may not be feasible.
Texas Monthly looks at the Texas gerrymandering case headed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The 2014 suicide of a student-athlete at the University of Pennsylvania has spurred an ongoing focus on mental health among Ivy League athletes, including the “success culture” that may have contributed to her death.
Protests in Armenia against a power grab by the country’s outgoing President have led to his resignation, although the protests have continued as the ruling Republican Party refuses to relinquish power.
Ali Noorani, the Executive Director of the National Immigration Forum and the son of Pakistani immigrants to the U.S., writes for CNN about the controversy over the Simpsons character Apu.
The alt-right front group Turning Point USA has hired numerous employees with histories of racist and/or bigoted tweets. I wonder why that is.
Could a postal banking system help ‘unbanked’ Americans while also providing much-needed revenue for the US Postal Service? Lack of access to capital is a huge obstacle to the upward economic mobility that is, or at least was, a hallmark of capitalist economies.
The Ringer examines Netflix’ strategy of buying or funding original movies no one can find on its service. Grierson and Leitch have discussed this as well on their podcast – the Netflix algorithm doesn’t even seem to effectively push this content to viewers whose own histories would indicate interest in these indie films.
A study funded by the U.S. military on climate change and sea level rise found that nearly a thousand islands risk becoming uninhabitable this century as a result of man’s effects on the global climate.
Citing low sales and supply chain problems, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson is discontinuing production of a pump used by cancer patients that extends their lives by two years. The headline makes it seem like this is just an evil corporate decision, but the story is more involved than that.
A British activist with cerebral palsy is asking the government to rethink a proposed ban on plastic drinking straws, saying for people with movement disorders, straws are critical to help them drink. (Perhaps reusable, more durable plastic straws, or straws made from paper, would work?)
The CJR interviews Steve Fishman about his podcast, Empire Of Blood, the story of how he helped exonerate a man who served 22 years for a murder he didn’t commit.
The Guardian looks at how the Michael Cohen case has exposed the extent of Sean Hannity’s real estate holdings, which is now in turn leading to stories on substandard living conditions and poor treatment of tenants in his buildings.
Jeet Heer’s Twitter thread on Kevin Williamson and the “troll three-step” move resembles all too well how opinion writers with extremist views try to both appeal to their base and dance around valid criticism from the center or the opposite end of the spectrum.
Alexandra Petri follows this by writing about how she’s been silenced In a column for a small paper in Washington called the Post.
Asmodee Digital announced an upcoming adaptation of the Lovecraftian board game Mansions of Madness, due out on Steam early in 2019.
I loved the Bard’s Tale PC RPGs when I was a teenager, eventually finishing the first two (I never tried the third), so I’m stoked to see inXile is developing a new sequel/update more than 30 years after the series appeared to be finished.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Armenia, board games, climate change, Economics, gmo, guns, history of language, links, longreads, mental health, pseudoscience, racism, rpgs, social media, Sri Lanka, stick to baseball, texas, tv, vaccines, Venezuela, voter suppression

→ April 21, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/21/18.

My one Insider post from this week is my ranking of the top 50 draft prospects for this June’s MLB draft, a strong year without a lot of clarity up top after #1 overall prospect Casey Mize.

Here on the dish, I ranked all 90 Pulitzer Prize winners in the Fiction/Novel category in advance of Monday’s announcement of this year’s winners. I’ve now read the newest entry, Less, and will update the ranking next week.

I have a new event to announce: on July 14th, the day before this year’s MLB Futures Game, I’ll be speaking at Politics & Prose, a Washington, DC, independent bookstore that is legendary for its author appearances. I’ll be signing copies of Smart Baseball, which is now out in paperback.

And now, the links…

SI‘s Greg Bishop tracked down former NFL QB Jake Locker, who opens up about why he retired in 2015. Locker was a first-round talent in baseball, too, but he says in this piece he never had the same passion for it that he had for football.
Liberty University, run by extreme right-wing conservative Jerry Falwell, Jr., has built a $1 billion empire by aggressively recruiting students for its online degree programs, according to this expose from ProPublica and the NY Times.
ProPublica also released a long investigative piece on how waste from burning coal has contaminated drinking water in nearby communities. The current Administration is pushing increased reliance on coal and rolling back environmental regulations on its use.
Lindsay Gibbs looks at the continuing institutional failures at Michigan State in the wake of the school’s two-decade refusal to consider complaints about Larry Nassar’s sexual abuse of patients on campus. MSU continues to deny any wrongdoing in the mishandling (or non-handling) of investigations into Nassar, even as one of his victims revealed that now interim MSU President John Engler tried to bribe her into staying silent.
New York ran a very long Q&A with many architects of the modern Internet, who then “apologize” for the way the stuff they built has been used to ruin everything.
Gizmodo’s John Cook argues that journalists should not be cheering the Sean Hannity-Michael Cohen revelation, as it’s deleterious to the operation of the free press. Hannity, meanwhile, has been busy promoting a company in which he holds an ownership stake, disguised by the use of a shell company, and may have violated federal securities laws.
Twitter accounts of questionable origin are pushing fake conspiracy theories around Syria, such as claiming the Assad regime didn’t use chemical weapons on its own people and calling it a ‘false flag’ operation.
Several Sandy Hook parents are suing Alex Jones & InfoWars for defamation in response to his repeated claims that the massacre was staged.
Surprising nobody, FiveThirtyEight reported that umpire calls in extra innings are biased towards ending the games. I wouldn’t really mind this if, say, the strike zone changed equally for both teams, but that doesn’t appear to be the case.
The Marlins, having already scammed Florida taxpayers for a new stadium, are now trying to dodge a lawsuit from the state over profits from the recent sale of the team, are claiming they’re actually based in the British Virgin Islands … but Marlins Man found their ‘office’ there is just a PO box.
Prince’s estate released an early recording of his song “Nothing Compares 2 U,”, which, of course, later became a global hit for Sinead O’Connor.
Commencement Day speakers at my alma mater have tended toward the famous and dreary, but this year’s class will get a treat: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Nigerian author of several novels, including the superb Half of a Yellow Sun.
Grand Forks, North Dakota, may be about to elect a white supremacist to its school board. Be better, North Dakota.
Chef and charcutier Matt Hinckley writes for Food & Wine about getting sober after years of drinking, which he had justified as part of his job working in busy restaurant kitchens and brewing/distilling at home.
A junk study in a predatory journal pushes, again, the bullshit claim that vaccines cause autism, as Skeptical Raptor breaks down on his site.
The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled unconstitutional an Indiana law restricting abortion rights. The law would have prohibited abortions based on potential disabilities in the fetus – so, if genetic testing found that the fetus had Tay-Sachs disorder, the woman would not have been able to abort the pregnancy even though infantile Tay-Sachs kills most victims before age 4.
Wisconsin’s Attorney General told a radio host last week that Trump carried the state because of its voter ID law, which primarily disenfranchised voters in heavily Democratic areas.
Eagle-Gryphon announced a Kickstarter for Fleet! The Dice Game, a spinoff of their popular 2012 game Fleet! (which I have not played)

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, football, harvard, links, stick to baseball, vaccines, voter suppression

→ April 15, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/15/18.

Two new posts for Insiders this week, both on draft prospects I went to see: one on Ryan Weathers, Ryan Rolison, and Ethan Hankins; another on Kentucky’s Sean Hjelle and Tristan Pompey. All five are likely first rounders, although Hankins, coming back from a shoulder issue, could end up going to Vanderbilt if teams aren’t willing to pony up.

My latest board game review for Paste covers the dice-drafting game Sagrada, which is easy to learn but has very high replay value. Players choose dice from a common set, rolled each round, to fill out their personal boards resembling stained-glass windows. I’ve also been playing a ‘pre-alpha’ release of the Terraforming Mars app on Steam, and it looks fantastic.

Smart Baseball is now out in paperback! Buy a zillion copies for all your Linkedin contacts. You should also sign up for my free not-quite-weekly email newsletter, which has more personal essays and links to everything I’ve written.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Dayn Perry writes about the new White Sox ballpark that should have been but wasn’t, a tight stadium in Armour Park that would have preserved more of the neighborhood and allowed for more economic development. Instead, the city and state caved to team ownership, funding a monstrous stadium, forcibly removing hundreds of families from their homes, and failing to even charge the team rent for 18 years.
The BBC has a story written by an American man who was a schoolteacher for 17 years despite being illiterate. He didn’t learn to read until he was 48, and how he got as far as he did is incredible.
The Guardian‘s long read of the week looks at the ongoing debate over the minimum wage, which tends to be expressed solely in economic terms and often involves one side or the other rushing to claim victory based on a single study.
Author Junot Diaz (The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao) revealed in a first-person piece for the New Yorker that he was raped by a family friend when he was eight years old, never got therapy or any kind of help, and spent the next few decades dealing with the consequences.
Also in the New Yorker, staff writer Adam Davidson looks at the Michael Cohen case, calling it the beginning of the end of the Trump presidency; I’m not so sanguine. The lawyerly folks at Popehat weighed in on what Monday’s raid on Cohen’s office implied.
A professor of social psychology and decision-making writes in Scientific American that targeted stories and fake news likely affected just a small percentage of voters in the 2016 U.S. election, but that small number was also more than enough to swing the overall result. The author also looks at why those stories were effective.
Adweek looks at the change in Facebook’s news feed is killing digital publishers. I’m still there with a public page for readers, but I get less traction there than on Twitter or via this site.
Franklin Foer writes in Atlantic about our new era of fake videos – not just the ‘deepfakes’ of the porn world, but the new potential for fake news videos or videos of politicians ‘saying’ things they never said.
Hamilton Nolan has an angry “guide” to how private equity firms are gutting companies for shareholder profits, which was in evidence recently at the Denver Post. A writer at the Boulder Daily Camera wrote an editorial about this very topic that the publisher refused to print, so he posted it on his own blog instead.
The former Texas Deputy DA who rejected a recommendation to pursue charges against Trump University just landed a nomination to a federal judgeship. I’m sure that’s all a coincidence, though!
The National Academy of Medicine is resisting efforts to expel a member who plagiarized and fabricated major parts of his C.V..
Australian novelist Tim Winton argues toxic masculinity in adults leads to the raising of misogynist boys as the latter are discouraged from showing empathy or tenderness to meet a one-sided standard of macho behavior.
The belief that people have different learning “styles,” usually categorized as visual or auditory, is not supported by any evidence. And folks have certainly tried.
Antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis is on its way, and North Korea may be its incubator, exacerbated by cuts to global funding (including sanctions by our current Administration) that will include money to try to fight the disease. While looking more into this I found an article from February 2017 explaining how human encroachment on rain forests leads to the emergence of new viruses, profiling one researcher trying to identify new pathogens before they start killing humans.
CMON Games announced the August 2018 (scheduled) release of a board game based on the Kick-Ass comic book series:

In 2018, @CMONGames will release Kick-Ass: The Board Game. Dudes on a map w/players managing social media, too. —WEM pic.twitter.com/vxOeKOfgsV

— BoardGameGeek (@BoardGameGeek) August 16, 2017

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, board games, Economics, links, ptsd, science, social media, stick to baseball, the swamp

→ April 8, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/7/18.

Three new pieces for Insiders this week – looking at the most prospect-laden rosters in the minors, and draft blog posts on the top prospects at the NHSI tournament and on Kentucky’s 6’11” RHP Sean Hjelle. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Smart Baseball is now out in paperback! You can buy it through HarperCollins directly or at any bookseller.

And now, the links…

Longread: Novelist Rana Dasgupta, writing in the Guardian, looks at the ongoing decline of the nation-state system and the lack of a promising structure to replace it.
The Useless Department of Agriculture ruled this week that organic food producers can use the bogeyman emulsifier carrageenan, derived from seaweed and blamed (without evidence) for lots of health ills. The real problem here is that the USDA shouldn’t be ruling on what organic means; it’s not clear any more that that term has any use, and one major reason is that the federal government has watered it down.
ICE is trying to deport a U.S. Army veteran, contrary to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis’ directive that they should not do that. I feel safer already!
The Thai government has had a long-running endeavor to open more Thai restaurants abroad, reasoning that it would help drive tourism to the southeast Asian country (which has a not entirely undeserved reputation for unsavory tourist business). It’s been successful enough, at least, that other countries are mimicking their strategy.
This week’s NPR Hidden Brain podcast, a repeat of an episode from about two years ago, covered the scarcity trap, or how a lack of something leads us to focus inordinately on getting it. Among other things, it helps explain why people who live paycheck to paycheck (or with less) have a hard time spreading out the funds they do have until their next deposit.
The Outline looks at why Wilmington, Delaware’s ongoing problem with gun violence hasn’t abated even as the national homicide rate has declined. Three major reasons: Urban poverty, the effects of trauma, and bureaucratic infighting.
JAMA ran an anti-glyphosate editorial recently without disclosing the authors’ substantial conflict of interest. The authors are running what sounds like a scam site offering to test customers’ urine for the presence of glyphosate for a significant fee.
The Athletic has a subscriber-only piece that includes a Q&A with Rob Manfred on MLB’s end run around the courts to suppress minor league salaries, and why Manfred’s answers don’t add up.
The Good Phight’s Paul Boyé looks at Nick Pivetta’s new, sharper curveball. Pivetta was a sinker/slider guy in the Nats’ system, and had no real weapon for left-handed batters back when I first saw him in 2015, when he had a wide platoon split. He had virtually no split in 2016, then had a huge reverse split in the majors in 2017. With two effective breaking pitches now, though, I’d absolutely expect him to show substantial improvement against right-handed batters.
Tim Grierson discussed the new film You Were Never Really Here with director Lynne Ramsey and star Joaquin Phoenix, who won Best Actor at Cannes for this performance.
A pair of stories around my alma mater: I saw folks claiming on Twitter that Harvard had somehow suspended its largest evangelical students’ group; the truth is that the Undergraduate Council suspended funding for an evangelical group that violated the Council’s rules on non-discrimination by expelling an officer who came out as LGBT. The UC is a student-run organization, not the university proper.
There’s also a stalking-horse lawsuit against Harvard alleging that the university discriminates against Asian-American applicants; the truth is that the lawsuit is arranged and funded by a white conservative who opposes affirmative action.
The headline here is terribly misleading, but there was a flurry of stories this week like this one, about a new study arguing that diet affects mental health, particularly depression. The quick-and-dirty: eat more fiber in your diet from vegetables, fruits, and whole grains. As a whole, the prescription doesn’t sound that different from the so-called Mediterranean diet.
James Beard award-winning chef Sean Brock went public with his alcoholism last year, and in a new piece for Bon Appetit he describes his new diet and self-care regime, a combination of good nutrition, mindfulness, and pseudoscience.
Serious Eats has a guide to Italian amari, potable bitters that include Campari and Montenegro. The guide includes comments from Sother Teague, owner of tiny Manhattan bar Amor y Amargo, profiled this week on Liquor.com. I’ve been to Amor y Amargo and it’s superb; Teague uses only bitters, no sodas or fruit juices, in his drinks, creating clever flavor combinations with some serious alcohol kick.
George Will writes that there’s no good reason to prevent felons from voting; there’s a reason states like Florida do it, of course, but it’s not a good one.
Board game news: The Fireball Island Kickstarter was fully funded in an hour and crossed the $1 million funding mark inside of a week.
Z-Man Games announced Taj Mahal, the upcoming game from Reiner Knizia, due out later this year.
Asmodee Digital announced the imminent release of the Terraforming Mars app, with Steam coming first and iOS/Android soon after.
In what appears to be an April Fools’ Day tradition, Berkeley Breathed released a new “Calvin County” crossover comic, bringing Calvin back to the meadow of Bloom County.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: boardgames, links, stick to baseball

→ March 31, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/31/18.

Three new Insider pieces since last week: My annual season predictions post, a Grapefruit League scouting roundup (including Phils, Tigers, O’s, Rays, Pirates, and Atlanta prospects), and a draft blog post on three possible first rounders. No chat this past week, as I’m in North Carolina for the NHSI and am headed over to East Carolina today to see the two big bats for Wichita State.

Smart Baseball is now out in paperback, just in time to put one in every Easter basket you hand out this year.

And now, the links…

Vox’s Ezra Klein dissects the insidious racism behind Sam Harris and Charles Murray’s claims that there are actual, inborn IQ differences between races. (There almost certainly aren’t.) Harris, perhaps more widely known for his atheist writings and advocacy, responded by throwing a tantrum where he revealed private emails between him and Klein that revealed Harris himself to be by turns intransigent and an expert goalpost-mover.
The Guardian’s long read of the week is by a woman suing over her “dream” internship with the publication Monocle for unpaid wages.
The Atlantic, an intellectual literary magazine with a progressive tradition that dates back well over 100 years, hired alt-right troll Kevin Williamson, who proposed hanging all women who’d had abortions and referred to a black kid as 3/5 of a person when he wasn’t referring to the kid’s “primate gestures.”
A Stoneman-Douglas student writes in the NY Times that her efforts to be kind to mass murderer Nicholas Cruz did nothing to prevent him from shooting up the school.
The Washington Post reports that the maker of Peeps is trying to end its pension, leading to a protracted fight with its union and an ongoing lawsuit.
Senator James Lankford (R) of Oklahoma spoke to NPR of continuing effort by Russian troll farms to sow dissent online in the U.S., often by weighing in on both sides of hot-button issues.
Indiana’s Republican government appears to wish to emulate other states to its south, first with the anti-LGBT bill of a few years ago and now with a new bill that stigmatizes any woman who’s had an abortion and later reports any physical or psychological problems related to it.
The plastic residues from take-out food containers are polluting the world’s waterways, as these single-use items don’t biodegrade, but instead break down into smaller and smaller particles of plastic.
More from the Washington Post – I subscribe, and I would recommend it to anyone interested in good journalism and current events – on how studies of the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum give researchers more evidence to fuel projections of the damage climate change will do to the earth.
Two great baseball articles this week, both connected to Nats players and authored by the Washington Post’s Chelsea Janes. The first is a superb profile of Bryce Harper as the young superstar begins his walk year before free agency. The second profiles Eireann Dolan and her husband Sean Doolittle, calling them baseball’s most ‘woke’ couple.
Former New York Giants player Corey Widmer withdrew his name from Montana Football Hall of Fame consideration because of the sport’s link to concussions and CTE.
Two-time Top Chef alum Mike Isabella is facing multiple sexual harassment accusations.
Staring at tiny screens is ruining our eyes — and perhaps also making us pay less attention than ever to the world around us.
Facebook’s ad-tracking scandal isn’t just limited to that site; Most online publishing relies on the technology, even the outlets who are busy writing about Facebook’s privacy ‘problem.’
Cancer researchers discovered lung tumors with rudimentary digestive tracts, which probably isn’t as terrifying as it sounds but would make a good starting point for a sci-fi/horror film.
Florida’s legislature just can’t stop making public education there worse, such as allowing creationism into classrooms and, now, through state lawmakers ignoring conflicts of interest in pushing school choice laws. The swamp you want to drain may be in Tallahassee.
My friend Kelly Swails, an author of fantasy and YA fiction, wrote about changing her lifelong baseball rooting interest as a result of love, life, and being in the right ballpark at the right time.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, climate change, environment, links, privacy, stick to baseball, top chef

→ March 24, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/24/18.

My column identifying some potential breakout players for 2018 is up for Insiders. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Reiner Knizia’s Sakura, a light, quick-playing game where players all chase the lead ’emperor’ token, but where you can move your opponents as well and try to push them into the emperor, costing them points and sending them to the back of the queue.

Smart Baseball is out in paperback! U.S. Residents can enter a sweepstakes from HarperCollins to win a copy of the book and a phone call with me.

And now, the links…

Former Utah State basketball player Jalen Moore explains in an essay on the Players’ Tribune why he walked away from the NBA to deal with what sounds like crippling panic disorder.
Writing for the New Yorker, Andrew Marantz went inside to see how Reddit is coping with trolls, abuse, and harassment while also considering the need to allow users to express themselves (or else they might not have a business). My personal experiences on Reddit have been largely negative, so while I have an account there, I rarely even open the site.
The Guardian looks at “joint enterprise” laws in the U.K., which led to eleven people earning jail sentences for one murder, even though only one of the eleven actually participated in the killing. The piece argues that the laws’ application particularly targets young black men.
Mari Uyehara writes for GQ about the ‘free speech’ grifters decrying so-called “PC culture” on campuses.
This longread on a snake-oil saleswoman pushing fermented cabbage juice belongs in an April Fool’s joke post.
Here’s an easy tip on how to turn off “platform sharing” on Facebook, now that we all have some evidence that Facebook never bothered to protect users’ data from illicit use.
Brian Wansink, the Cornell food “scientist” who has been repeatedly accused of p-hacking and otherwise manipulating data to produce misleading reports and headlines, appears to have fraudulently accused Joy of Cooking of promoting unhealthy eating.
FEMA ignored requests for fuel from Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands after Hurricanes Irma and Maria, so thousands of tons of food went to waste for lack of refrigeration.
The New York Times sent travel writers to five islands devastated by the pair of hurricanes to see how their tourism industries have rebounded, if at all. Most hotels and restaurants have yet to reopen on St. John, St. Martin, and other islands that were hit by both storms.
The newest nominee to lead the Centers for Disease Control is a virologist with a long track record of research into HIV and AIDS … and accusations of scientific misconduct as well as support for abstinence-only sex education, writes Ed Yong for the Atlantic. Robert Redfield also has virtually no public health experience, unprecedented for a CDC director.
The San Luis Obispo Tribune investigates the death in police custody of a schizophrenic man who was restrained, tortured, and who then died while officers watched. An FBI investigation appears to be ongoing.
Will Leitch looks back at baseball’s “tepid” offseason for New York and asks if we’re leaded for labor strife after 2021.
Former Congressman Joe Walsh, now a conservative talk radio host/provocateur, has become one of Trump’s most vocal critics from the hard right. Walsh has defended the Mueller investigation, argued against selling the 2017 tax bill to voters (saying it won’t have any impact for most people), and criticized Trump’s attacks on the press.
Pennsylvania Republicans are trying to impeach the state’s Supreme Court in retaliation for the latter’s ruling against the GOP’s gerrymandering the state’s Congressional districts. I feel like PA residents should send diapers to these clowns’ offices. Pennsylvania had repeatedly shown up in analyses of the most gerrymandered states, as the Republican Party there split up the heavily Democratic southeastern portion of the state to tilt those seats to themselves.
Michigan State Senator and now Republican gubernatorial candidate Patrick Corbeck is a pseudoscience-spouting loon, a creationist anti-vaxxer who is now touting baseless conspiracy theories about electromagnetic radiation.
Harvard Professor Jorge Dominguez, accused by ten women of sexual harassment who also say the school knew about Dominguez’s transgressions and did little or nothing, is retiring, although the investigation continues. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
An Alabama sheriff *legally* siphoned off $750,000 in public money meant to feed prisoners in his jurisdiction and used it to buy a beach house – and then he retaliated against the source behind a local newspaper’s investigation. Maybe this is just me, but I think any locale where this is legal and supported would qualify as a “shithole.”
I’ve criticized Arizona’s government many times for its general lack of urgency on issues related to the environment, including water usage and climate change, but the state’s utility regulatory commission did something very good, demanding that utility APS stop new natural gas projects and boost renewable energy sources. The commission, which comprises five Republicans, has long been a mere rubber-stamp group for the companies it regulates. The state is now in a drought that has been going on since 1996.
France is experiencing an uptick in measles again, yet more damage wrought by Andrew Wakefield’s debunked, fraudulent paper and the various idiots who still think vaccines cause autism. France made MMR vaccination for infants mandatory as of January 1st, so let’s hope that puts an end to this outbreak.
The House passed “right to try” legislation this week, even though it’s not going to help anyone and may just spread false hope while reducing patient access to these drugs through existing, more realistic programs.
The open-access journal Scientific Reports, published by the same group behind Nature, finally retracted a paper nearly two years after they learned parts of it were plagiarized — and after a dozen of its board members resigned in protest that it wasn’t retracted a year ago.
Biohacking is bullshit and probably dangerous too.
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker lost a lawsuit over his refusal to call special elections to fill vacated legislature seats in his state, a policy that would have left some residents without representation in at least one body for over a year.
Georgia Republicans are pushing a bill to restrict voting hours in heavily Democratic Atlanta. I assume next they’ll introduce literacy tests and a poll tax.
Opponents of abortion rights like to claim that the procedure is dangerous so they can pass laws that require doctors who provide abortions to have admitting privileges at a hospital or even to perform the procedures at hospitals or surgical centers. Five states require doctors to contradict known science and tell women there’s a link between breast cancer and abortions. (There isn’t, in case that wasn’t clear.) A new study finds that abortion in the United States is safe, which underscores that these laws are about religion, not about protecting women.
I just discovered that Elena Ferrante, the pseudonymous Italian author behind the bestselling Neapolitan Quartet, writes a weekly column for the Guardian. Her latest entry argues that everything in women’s lives has been “codified by male needs.”
No, there was not a Ku Klux Klan rally at the 1924 Democratic Convention. That didn’t stop people from spreading the lie on social media – or Breitbart from repeating it.
Gateway Pundit, another far-right blog – with White House press credentials – repeated a different lie, this one libeling the Democratic Sheriff Scott Israel of Broward County after the Parkland massacre.
If you own a VR device like Oculus Rift, you can now play the board game Catan on the platform. I tried a beta version back in November and it was novel, but still the same game.
Please enjoy this delightful Miyazaki-inspired tourism ad for the lovely state of Oregon:

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anxiety, arizona, baseball, guns, harvard, links, longreads, pseudoscience, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ March 17, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/17/18.

My biggest news this week is that Smart Baseball is now out in paperback. This edition has a new afterword covering a few new developments from the 2017 season.

For Insiders this week, I had three posts from the Cactus League, covering:
• Hunter Greene & prospects from four orgs (CIN, LAD, CWS, LAA)
• Chris Paddack, Adrian Morejon, and other Padres & Rockies prospects
• Mackenzie Gore and even more Padres prospects.

I also wrote about the Jake Arrieta contract. Due to spring travel, the next chat may not be until April, unless I get a rainout on the road somewhere.

Here on the dish, I wrote up a slew of new restaurants I tried in Arizona this month.

And now, the links…

One true longread this week: Jane Meyer profiles Christopher Steele of ‘Steele dossier’ fame for the New Yorker, which, in particular, shows the absurd, counterfactual lengths to which the President’s sycophants will go to defend him.
The Guardian has revealed how Cambridge Analytica used Facebook profile data on 50 million users, without authorization, to help Trump’s election campaign in 2016.
Meanwhile, the Administration is pushing new voter suppression efforts, like dispatching Secret Service agents to polling stations; fortunately Maryland is already considering legislation to combat such efforts.
This extremely candid interview with former ESPN President John Skipper was illuminating, and also explains why he quit so abruptly, just days after an all-hands meeting where he explained his strategy for the company going forward.
The Iowa GOP is hard at work trying to rig upcoming elections, through such means as putting the Republican candidate first on nearly all ballots in the state. Richard Thaler wrote in Nudge that the candidate listed first gets a 3.5% bump in votes, more if the candidates are generally not well known (e.g., there’s no incumbent).
The Justice Department is fighting for an anti-vaxxer parent in Wisconsin under the bullshit guise of “religious freedom.” The plaintiff was a nurse in a nursing home and refused to get the flu shot mandated by her employers, who fired her, because she’s a fucking idiot. I don’t think that goes far enough: You should lose any medical license you hold if you decline to get vaccinations mandatory in your profession.
The GOP tax bill, or “tax scam” depending on your perspective, was not really tax reform (which I favor), but just shifted around a bunch of giveaways to corporations. The Center for Public Integrity broke down the corporate welfare, including tax breaks for craft beverage makers, a rum tax that benefits distillers on Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, tax credits for mining operations on Native American reservations, and a faster depreciation schedule for people who own racehorses.
Matthew Yglesias examines the truth about public and campus support for free speech in the face of anecdotal claims that ‘political correctness’ is threatening it.
A disabled writer explains what the elegies to Stephen Hawking got wrong about the astrophysicist’s disability. Also, the death of a great scientist was a perfect time for a Republican Texas state rep to show his ass.
Is Russia fomenting anti-GMO sentiment online? One study looking at online coverage of the topic found Russian sites would slip anti-GMO content even into unrelated articles. GMO foods are safe, and public bias against them, which is rising, isn’t based on any actual science.
The Oath Keepers are a white, anti-government, extremist group that has, among other things, shown up unbidden to protect white businesses during the Ferguson riots or to ‘guard’ schools in the wake of shootings. Their founder stands accused of beating his wife and trying to choke his daughter, in a request his wife filed for a restraining order as she seeks a divorce.
The Guardian explores the questions and evidence around vitamin D’s role in health, including mixed signals on supplements and the difficulty of getting enough in plant-centric diets.
Climate change is very real, but FEMA has dropped the term from its strategic plans.
Arizona will hold a special election in April to fill the seat vacated by Trent Franks; it’s expected to go to Republican candidate Debbie Lesko, given how red the district is, even though Lesko denies climate change and blames it on the sun. Her opponent, Dr. Hiral Tipirneni, accepts the science on climate change and advocates increased solar and wind power in the state.
A new study by researchers at the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that people who believe the untruth that the MMR vaccine causes autism were then less likely to accept a hypothetical vaccine against Zika.
Our diets have shaped how our species has evolved, with adaptations like lactose tolerance and lighter skin arising in response to what we eat.
Michael Silverman of the Boston Herald caught up with former Red Sox prospet Ryan Westmoreland, whose promising career was cut short by a cavernous malformation in his brain. He just had his 16th surgery related to the issue on Monday.
My daughter and I both loved this photo essay from the BBC on the abandoned Ross Island in the Indian Ocean, which nature is slowly taking back, as it does.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, climate change, evolution, links, stick to baseball, vaccines, voter suppression

→ March 10, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/10/18.

I had two posts for Insiders this week, with another one on Shohei Ohtani just posted this morning. One piece looked at potential #1 overall pick Casey Mize, a right-handed pitcher at Auburn who threw a no-hitter last night. I ranked potential impact prospects for the 2018 season, which differs from my top 100 ranking, which looks at prospects’ long-term expected value. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Smile, a new, light card game designed by Michael Schacht, best known for Zooloretto.

The paperback version of Smart Baseball comes out on Tuesday! I’ll be at Twitter HQ that day, and will answer questions from readers via the site’s Q&A app. To submit a question, tweet it with the hashtag #smartbaseball.

And now, the links…

Longreads: The Atlantic on a serial con man who bilked a dozen women out of $1 million by finding them on dating sites, establishing relationships with them, and then doing everything from using their credit cards to pawning their jewelry to stealing one woman’s passport and birth certificate.
Politico examines how the Obama administration’s decision to normalize relations with Myanmar may have led to the ongoing genocide of the country’s Rohingya Muslim minority, many of whom now live in refugee camps in Bangladesh. The country, formerly known as Burma, made superficial moves towards democracy after decades of rule by a military junta, and the U.S. responded in kind by lifting sanctions, but in the process we never pushed for protections for threatened minorities, and still aren’t doing so.
The New York Times‘ news section remains excellent, as in this long profile of a once-promising dancer who ended up homeless in Manhattan, suffering from untreated mental illness. What the writer never seems to question or explore, however, is the link between the subject’s sexual abuse as a child and her mental illness as an adult.
Their opinion section remains a tire-fire, as anti-Arab troll Bari Weiss, who now writes for the NYT full-time, used a fake ‘antifa’ Twitter account as evidence for some point she was making.
Jane Coaston takes a long look for Vox at the current trial of several alt-right leaders for inciting violence in Charlottesville. Are they criminally liable for speech that the prosecution argues led to the death of Heather Heyer?
A new study in Science found that false news stories spread faster than true ones, because it’s more novel or interesting. They also found that bot accounts don’t spread false stories faster than true stories.
David Gorski, at Science-Based Medicine, goes long on the ‘unholy alliance’ in Texas between ultra-religious conservatives and anti-vaxxers to fight vaccine mandates under the bullshit guise of ‘choice.’ You have a choice not to give yourself medicine when you’re sick, because doing so only makes you an idiot. You do not have the choice to deny your children such treatments, nor do you have the choice to endanger vulnerable members of your community who can’t be vaccinated or who could die of vaccine-preventable diseases. If you live in Texas, speak up, assuming you’re not hospitalized with the mumps.
WIRED looks at our extremely vulnerable medical supply chain, as shown by how two hurricanes in Puerto Rico have led to a massive shortage of IV bags in the U.S. Too many drugs and supplies are made outside of the U.S., and, of course, the current Administration’s response to the disaster in Puerto Rico has been unacceptable.
An upcoming trial in Virginia (just postponed to May) will test an anti-abortion tactic of trespassing in abortion clinics to harass and obstruct patients seeking abortions or other related health services. I wonder what would happen if the abortion clinic employees invoked Stand Your Ground laws and shot the trespassers.
Cavaliers power forward Kevin Love wrote a piece for the Players’ Tribune about suffering a panic attack and the good that talk therapy has done for him since then. If you have mental health issues that aren’t trauma-induced, cognitive behavioral therapy can be a wonderful solution, or a major part of the solution.
WNYC’s On the Media podcast did an episode on how various reporters and outlets cover white supremacists. Is giving such racists and cranks publicity only helping them find new members?
An 83-year-old herbalist is now on trial in California for killing a 13-year-old diabetic boy by giving him herbs instead of insulin. The story doesn’t say if the mother is charged, but she should be.
Sinclair Broadcasting is taking over more and more local stations, and they’re forcing news anchors to read promos that bash mainstream media and report on right-wing bugbears like terrorism rather than cover local news.
Vaccines: There’s an epidemic of oral cancer in men, caused by the HPV virus, which men can catch while performing oral sex. The point of the article isn’t to tell me to make like Fat Joe, but to encourage parents to get their sons the HPV vaccine.
StatNews looks back at Albert Sabin, developer of the oral polio vaccine. He died 25 years ago this week and was lauded in his time for refusing to patent the new vaccine, thus making it cheap and affordable for patients around the world. With news that Nigeria appears to have gone a year without any new cases of polio, the disease’s wild form appears to be once again endemic in the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan and nowhere else.
Natural News, a pseudoscience site that trashes valid medicine so Mike Adams can sell you a bunch of useless supplements, was kicked off Youtube after posting videos arguing that the Parkland shooting survivors were just ‘crisis actors.’
GlobalNews looks at the spreading measles outbreak in Europe, which the authors trace back to the fraudulent Andrew Wakefield study that claimed the MMR vaccine caused autism (it doesn’t, no vaccines cause autism, and Wakefield fabricated the data).
Chefs and cooks are notorious for adopting a lifestyle that can be harmful to their long-term health. Kat Kinsman interviewed eleven chefs about their self-care routines.
The short documentary “Heroin(e),” which you can watch on Netflix, looks at three women in Huntington, West Virginia, the ‘overdose capital’ of the United States, who are trying to fight the tide of overdoses and opioid addiction. Vanity Fair looks at the film and story behind it.
High St. on Market is my favorite restaurant in Philadelphia, and now three alumni of the all-day café, built around their amazing house-made breads, are opening a new BYOB dinner-only restaurant called Cadence on the border of Fishtown and Olde Kensington.
LA Times food critic Jonathan Gold reviews the reopened Copenhagen restaurant Noma, often ranked as the best restaurant in the world.
The Irish Times looks at former billionaire Chuck Feeney, who gave his entire fortune to charity, mostly through his own foundation, which has wound itself down by using its endowment.
An ACLU-backed lawsuit accusing Kansas Klown Kris Kobach of voter suppression began this past week; the suit argues that the policy he crafted unfairly disenfranchised thousands of Kansans, and could do the same to a few million American voters if the law spreads. Two things you can do to fight this: Vote against politicians pushing voter suppression under the guise of “stopping voter fraud,” and get a passport.
Boardgame stuff: Designer Grant Rodiek argues that upcoming title Rising Sun is extremely important given the industry’s trend towards more complex games with overlong rulebooks or highly asymmetrical setups that can deter newbies to the hobby – and frankly just don’t have good designs.
Another designer, Bruno Faidutti (Citadels), writes about the flood of new releases every year and how it shrinks the selling windows for most games. I don’t think he has any answers, but his point, that 3000 new games a year probably isn’t sustainable for most publishers, is a real concern.
Restoration Games has updated its Design Diary for the upcoming Fireball Island, a reissue of a Milton Bradley title from 1986.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board games, con men, links, longreads, philadelphia, pseudoscience, stick to baseball, vaccines

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