tennessee — Page 2

→ September 23, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/23/23.

For subscribers to The Athletic, I posted my annual Minor League Player of the Year column this week, as well as my last regular-season scouting notebook of 2023, covering prospects I saw from the Red Sox, Orioles, and Nationals. I’ll head to Arizona in October for Fall League coverage, of course. My podcast will be back next week and I’ve already filed my next review for Paste.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas didn’t just take a bunch of free trips from billionaire Harlan Crow; he also attended donor parties hosted by the billionaire Koch brothers, as reported here by ProPublica.
The New York Times reports on child labor at Perdue and Tyson chicken-processing plants, where immigrant kids are exploited by factory officials willing to look the other way and who claim ignorance when these children are seriously injured on the job. The Department of Labor only investigates when they receive a tip, and fines top out at $15,000.
Penn Medicine hired a new facilities director for its hospital without checking his background, which included a five-year federal prison sentence for wire fraud and misuse of a social security number. Larry Butler was fired four days into his tenure as COO of a hospital in Oregon in 2022, but Penn still hired him in July of 2023, only for him to “resign” four weeks later.
The Indian state of Kerala is experiencing yet another outbreak of the Nipah virus, which causes severe respiratory illnesses in humans and appears to have jumped the species barrier from pigs about 25 years ago. This is the fourth such outbreak in Kerala in the last five years.
Elon Musk’s grandfather was an antisemite and avid supporter of South Africa’s racist apartheid system, according to this lengthy story from The Atlantic, which contradicts Musk’s own mythmaking.
The U.S. media continues to fuck up its coverage of the Presidential race, treating Trump as some sort of entertainment vehicle – as they did in 2015-16 – while playing into dubious narratives around President Biden’s age or his son’s behavior.
The daughter of Dennis Rader, the serial killer who called himself “BTK,” is an adult now and is trying to use her knowledge of her father to help police close more cases.
The Sound of Freedom was a surprise box-office hit this summer and sits in 10^th place this year for U.S. receipts thanks to a broad effort by conservative and Christian groups to sell tickets, but the subject of the film, Tim Ballard, was ousted from his anti-human trafficking organization after an investigation into sexual misconduct, and now the film’s producer also stands accused of sexual assault, in this case of a minor.
The all-Muslim city council in Hamtramck, Michigan, banned the display of any Pride flags on public property during June (Pride Month) this year, after LGBTQ+ groups had supported the Muslim immigrant groups when they arrived in the city. The issue came back up this past week when Mayor Amer Ghalib refused to march near the city’s queer alliance in a Labor Day parade.
South Africa is facing a new, xenophobic movement called Operation Dudula that is targeting foreigners in the country and blaming them for the rise in drug addiction, especially the drug known as nyaope, a form of black tar heroin that sellers claim contains antiviral properties. The group’s beliefs and philosophy seem to mirror those of right-wing, anti-immigrant groups in the U.S. and Europe.
Azerbaijan has reclaimed the majority-Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh after the region’s separatist government, which called itself the Republic of Artsakh, agreed to disarm and to seek reintegration with the surrounding nation. This should end the looming humanitarian crisis in the region but may lead to a large exodus of ethnic Armenians; it also may further reduce the influence of Russia, which had backed Armenia’s interests with military aid, in the Caucasus.
Russell Brand’s agency learned three years ago that a minor accused him of sexual assault, and they ignored her. Tavistock Wood dropped Brand from its roster with the revelations this month that three other women also accuse him of rape or sexual assault, and they’re claiming they knew nothing about it.
Gabrielle Hanson, a Republican and Trump-supporting candidate for Mayor of Franklin, Tennessee, used images of women culled from social media in campaign materials, claiming these women – many of them women of color – were her supporters. The women were actually selected seven years earlier for an ad campaign for the clothing brand The Limited and had posted photos of themselves at a celebratory brunch, which Hanson and her now ex-campaign manager Erin Mazzoni used without their permission. That link has an incredible video where journalist Phil Williams interviews Mazzoni, who sounds, to put it kindly, completely bonkers.
Alabama Republicans continue to fight to preserve their gerrymandered legislative map that suppresses the power of Black voters (who make up 27% of the state’s population), and they’re doing it with the backing of Leonard Leo’s dark-money network. Just this summer, Congressional Republicans blocked a bill that would have required such dark-money groups to come into the light and disclose their donors.
Both The New Yorker and Paste ran stories on The Baseball Project, the fun supergroup with members of R.E.M., Dream Syndicate, and the Minus Five, where all of their songs are about baseball. They’re great live, by the way.
Anti-vaccine misinformation is highly effective: More Oklahoma parents are skipping safe, effective childhood vaccinations against dangerous and incredibly contagious viruses like measles.
Climate change may cause 39 million U.S. homeowners to lose access to home insurance, including many homeowners who don’t accept the reality of climate change and vote for the one party that also denies it.
New York editor Katy Schneider describes “the pandemic skip,” the way we all lost about two years to the pandemic but may not have fully realized or internalized the passage of that time.
A sketchy group calling itself “NY Citizens Audit” has received a cease-and-desist letter from the New York Attorney General’s office, accusing the group of intimidating voters by posing as election officials to knock on doors and accuse people of committing voter fraud.
Australian officials visited D.C. this week to call on the United States to drop its prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing leaked documents, a call echoed here by the Freedom of the Press Foundation because the same overbroad reading of the Espionage Act could easily be used against all sorts of journalists anywhere on the political spectrum.
Believing transphobic things does, in fact, make you a transphobe.
Board game news: Undergrove, the next new game from Wingspan designer Elizabeth Hargrave, will go up on Kickstarter in November, and you can save the page now to be notified when it’s live.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alabama, board game news, climate change, coronavirus, frauds, free speech, health, labor rights, lgbt rights, links, longreads, metoo, oklahoma, scotus, south africa, stick to baseball, tennessee, vaccines, voter suppression

→ June 10, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/9/23.

I posted my first Big Board of 2023, ranking the top 100 prospects in this year’s MLB Draft class, over at The Athletic this week. I wanted to do a chat of some sort but my afternoons weren’t clear, unfortunately. Next up will be the ten-year redraft posts I do every year, this time looking back at the very mediocre 2013 class, followed by a fresh mock draft on June 21st. I also had a minor-league scouting post looking at some Yankees and Nationals prospects, including Spencer Jones and James Wood.

On the board game front, I reviewed Heat: Pedal to the Metal, a 2022 racing game that earned just the second perfect grade of 10 I’ve given to any game since I started reviewing for Paste in 2014. Heat’s a blast to play, and if you ever played the bike-racing game La Flamme Rouge from about five years ago, you will know a little bit of the mechanics, as one of Heat’s designers also did that game. Vulture asked me to list the best new games of 2023 so far.

I had Jonathan Mayo on my podcast last week to talk mock drafts, then took this week off to finish the Big Board and take care of some personal stuff. I hope to be back next week. In the meantime, you can listen & subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I sent a fresh version of my free email newsletter out to subscribers on Friday. Why not sign up?

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Columbia Journalism Review has a story on Defector, a writer-owned website founded by Deadspin refugees that’s making its model work in a difficult landscape that is seeing many other sites flounder.
This is appalling on so many levels – parents are paying to have their high school students’ papers published in junk journals to burnish the kids’ college applications.
The Washington Post looks at the “revolt of the Christian home-schoolers,” as some evangelicals who’d been brainwashed into avoiding public education are sending their kids back to regular schools.
A former gun industry executive turned gun safety advocate talked to ProPublica about how the NRA and gun manufacturers radicalized American gun owners.
The New York Times has a great story on a couple of crypto con artists whose last firm, Three Arrow Capital, went bust, so they’v e l e f t t h e U S f o r Bali and Spain … and have already started another crypto outfit.
Dr. Peter Hotez wrote in the Houston Chronicle that not only is the current pandemic not over, there will be more coronavirus pandemics to come.
The mother of an 18-year-old who killed himself is suing the publisher of a newspaper that used the teen’s image to claim he died from the COVID-19 vaccine.
Fidelity has marked down its investment in Twitter by two-thirds since Elon Musk’s purchase of the site.
Maybe it’s because Twitter no longer bothers to remove most hate speech on the site.
Or because Musk himself has gone over the right rail, quoting a neo-Nazi and spreading an antisemitic conspiracy theory.
Charlie Warzel writes in the Atlantic that all of this and more prove that Twitter is just another far-right social network. Parler, Truth Social, Gab – none of these could get a critical mass of users, so instead a right-wing nut job bought a site that already had it, then shifted it hard to the right, betting that the audience and advertisers would stick around.
Bans on drag shows are unconstitutional, writes Elie Mystal in the Nation. Of course they are. My guess is many of the laws Republicans have passed in this culture war will fail in the courts, but it won’t make an iota of difference.
A woman in Tennessee had to undergo an emergency hysterectomy after doctors in that state refused to give her a medically necessary abortion because of the state’s neanderthal abortion ban.
Two groups cancelled conventions they planned to hold in Orlando in response to the state’s anti-LGBT, anti-free speech, and anti-everything policies.
A woman in Washington state has been arrested after refusing treatment for tuberculosis, which a judge ordered her to receive over a year ago.
Rex Huppke takes aim at entitled right-wing protesters screaming at employees and damaging merchandise in Target over the chain’s line of Pride Month merchandise.
Charlotte Clymer had a thoughtful take on this topic, pointing out that giving in to the right-wing outrage machine doesn’t work: they’ll never be satisfied, and they’ll forever be in a shrinking minority.
The President of the Temecula Valley School Board referred to Harvey Milk as “a pedophile” before voting to ban a book that discussed Milk’s life and legacy. He doubled down on the comments after Gov. Gavin Newsom called him out.
Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville (guess) has been so blatant in his support of white nationalists that his own brother is disavowing him.
We’re finally getting a film adaptation of the first Flavia de Luce novel, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, with Martin Freeman attached, I presume as Flavia’s father.
Board game news: The designers of Three Sisters, Motor City, and Fleet: The Dice Game opened a Kickstarter for their next roll-and-write game, French Quarter.
Days of Wonder announced an upcoming Ticket to Ride legacy game, with original designer Alan Moon joined by Rob Daviau (Pandemic Legacy, Return to Dark Tower) and Matt Leacock (Pandemic).

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, board game news, book banning, first amendment, florida, links, longreads, Media, social media, stick to baseball, tennessee, vaccines

→ April 29, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/29/23.

I’m writing this from the press box at Alex Bos Stadium in Baton Rouge, so I’ll have something up on Dylan Crews and Paul Skenes on either Sunday or Monday, depending on whether I bounce to another game on Saturday with rain scheduled here. I’ve had two posts up in the last two weeks for subscribers to The Athletic, one a Q&A with our own Nick Groke about Brewers prospects, and a draft blog post covering some Virginia and California prep prospects plus general thoughts on the top 15 or so names in the class.

On my podcast this week, I spoke with Elizabeth McCracken, author of 2022’s The Hero of this Book and 2018’s Bowlaway, about the former of those two books, the craft of writing, and being short. The week prior, I spoke with David Grann about his new book The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder, whichI enjoyed so much I bought a copy for my dad for his birthday last month. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links:

Longreads first: This story on The Cut about how a woman coped with her husband getting a dementia diagnosis and then serving her with divorce papers as the disorder took hold is just devastating, especially when the twist in the story hits.

An Iowa middle school history teacher explained how the state’s ban on teaching about racism drove him out of the profession, especially when his boss wouldn’t say he could teach that slavery was wrong. Tennessee just passed a similar bill.

Parents across the political and income spectra are pushing back on school literacy curricula that aren’t doing enough to teach kids to read.

The New York Times magazine interviewed Deep Work author Cal Newport on the paradox of productivity in the digital era, where we have so many tools that are supposed to make us more productive, but we’re not.

The head of a law firm with frequent cases before the Supreme Court bought a property owned by SCOTUS justice Neil Gorusch, who didn’t identify the purchaser on disclosure forms.

Now Missouri and other states are banning or restricting gender-affirming care for trans adults. It was never about protecting kids.

In one of the more blatant First Amendment violations I can recall, Texas’s Senate passed a bill that would require teachers to display the Ten Commandments in their classrooms. It’s a waste of time and taxpayer, and ignores the clear intent and words of the Founding Fathers.

Conservatives are now targeting no-fault divorce in their attempts to force their religion’s values on the rest of us.

Iowa Republicans aren’t done – they held a pre-dawn session, always a great sign that you’re not doing anything sketchy, to pass a bill allowing for expanded child labor.

A non-binary high school student at Nashville Christian School wanted to wear a suit to their prom, rather than a dress, but the school banned them on dress code grounds. A local business stepped in to hold a prom just for them. Support AB Hillsboro Village if you live in that area.

West Texas A&M University faculty scheduled a no-confidence vote in school President Walter Wendler, who banned a student drag show because it conflicted with his personal religious views. The no-confidence vote passed with over 2/3 of the voters supporting it. Wendler is refusing to step down despite the non-binding result. The school faces a lawsuit over the cancellation, and a financial penalty would probably do more to get Wendler out of office than any resolution could.

Roadside drug tests aren’t accurate, yet courts have been using them regularly to convict drivers of drug-related offenses. That’s starting to change, slowly.

I certainly share enough negative news about my alma mater so I’ll share a positive story – Harvard raised the income threshold below which undergraduate students pay no tuition to $85,000.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: education, first amendment, harvard, iowa, links, longreads, missouri, police, stick to baseball, tennessee, texas, trans rights

→ April 15, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/15/23.

I haven’t written in the past week-plus due mostly to getting sick, something that wasn’t COVID-19 but might as well have been for this stupid cough I’ve still got. I did get to a couple of HS games in the Boras Classic in Orange County this week and will write that up after I get to another HS game on Wednesday.

My own podcast returned this week with guest Ozan Varol, author of How to Think Like a Rocket Scientist and the new book Awaken Your Genius. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I did appear on two other podcasts this week – Sports Sometimes, with my friend Chris Crawford; and the board game podcast Meeple Town, with Dean Dunning. (Not Dane Dunning. That’s Calcaterra’s bit.)

You can also get more of my words by signing up for my free email newsletter, which went out again on this past Monday.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This New Yorker profile of Pinky Cole and her fast-growing vegan burger chain Slutty Vegan probably isn’t as complimentary as the subject hoped it would be; if anything, it makes it sound like the quality of the food there is entirely secondary to the owner’s ambitions. It also highlights some of the challenges in bringing a broader audience to vegan food, given the latter’s reputation.

WIRED has a great look at how Bookshop has thrived against the behemoth of Amazon and stayed largely true to its original mission.

Brandy Zadrozny tracked down and interviewed the “Tennessee nurse” who became the target of anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories in late 2020. Tiffany Dover was one of the first people to receive the COVID-19 vaccine but fainted on camera – a common side effect of all sorts of injections, including vaccines – leading anti-vax nut jobs to claim she’d died and harass her workplace and her family. She’s alive and well, although no longer at that job.

Russian troops have kidnapped at least 19,000, and perhaps as many as 150,000, Ukrainian children and put them in Russian schools, indoctrinating them with pro-Russian propaganda and in some cases adopting them out to Russian families. The New York Times found several women who traveled thousands of miles to get their children back.

That same lunatic judge in Texas who decided he could overrule the FDA on drug safety is now going to hear an even more unhinged case around press freedom, as several anti-vax groups are claiming four major media outlets conspired with tech companies to suppress their “business” of spreading bullshit. There’s new evidence that their misinformation campaigns are working, too, as a new survey found an increased percentage of women think the flu and COVID-19 vaccines aren’t safe during pregnancy. Meanwhile, the dubious ruling on mifepristone has galvanized the pharmaceutical industry, who realized the leopards might eat their faces, too.

The declining constituencies of these cultural conservatives, with religiosity experiencing an inexorable decline in the United States and across the west, is leading more and more Republicans to pursue autocratic policies and even espouse political violence.

Brandon Johnson won last week’s mayoral election in Chicago; one core part of his platform was a public health model for improving safety, rather than the standard police-centric model (more cops, more funding for cops, more prisons). There’s good evidence the public health model can work, and a lot of evidence that the police-centric model does not. When people say “defund the police,” this is what they mean – and what they should be saying instead.

Chicha is a fermented drink of indigenous peoples in South America, and is making a comeback in Colombia even though it’s still officially illegal there.

Texas Rep. Bryan Slaton (guess) introduced a bill to ban kids from attending drag shows and has ranted about LGBTQ+ people “grooming children,” so it was no surprise at all to learn that an intern filed a complaint against him, saying that they had an inappropriate relationship and he served them alcohol even though they were younger than 21. Slaton, who likes to post Bible passages on his Twitter account, also proposed a bill to give property tax cuts to straight, married couples who’d never been divorced. To their credit, two Republican lawmakers in Texas have already called for Slaton to step down.

Former federal prosecutor Barb McQuade explains why white-collar crimes like those for which Trump has been indicted can’t just be ignored.

Crimes like those for which Rishi Shah and other executives of Outcome Health, accused of a billion-dollar fraud, were just convicted. The New York Times’ Erin Griffith looks at just how many startup execs are facing or have faced criminal charges and asks if this is the end of “fake it till you make it” in Silicon Valley. (I doubt it.)

Justice Clarence Thomas doesn’t have to take an actual bribe for his relationship with Nazi memorabilia collector Harlan Crow to compromise both himself and the institution of the Supreme Court.

All those conservative commentators rushing to defend Thomas and Crow? Yeah, a lot of them rely on Crow for their paychecks in one way or another, Ilya Shapiro, Jonah Goldberg, David French, and Charles Murray among them. Whatever you may think of the first three, if Charles Murray comes to your defense, you may want to ask him to pipe down.

Speaking of Goldberg, I did appreciate his longish essay in his Dispatch newsletter on how the rising generation of Republicans are becoming, in his words, jerks, taking their cues from Trumpism and the old-conservative God complex model of government (government should enact God’s will, and only we know what God’s will is). He argues that it’s not just bad for the Republican party, but bad for these kids as humans.

The Campaign Legal Center has asked DoJ to launch an investigation into Thomas’s free trips. And that was before ProPublica revealed that Crow also bought property from Justice Thomas, who didn’t disclose the transaction.

A unanimous vote by the Nashville Council has returned Tennessee Rep. Justin Jones (D) to his seat in the state legislature after he was expelled for ~~protesting while black~~ a supposed violation of ‘decorum’ rules. Rep. Justin Pearson (D) has also been restored to his duly-elected position.

Llano County in Texas was going to close its libraries, but the heavily Republican government there backed down after public pressure amplified by national media attention. They’re counting on us to stop paying attention.

Cosmic background radiation left over from the Big Bang is helping scientists map out dark and otherwise undetectable matter across the universe.

The city of Asheville promised to spend a bunch of taxpayer money to fix up the stadium where the privately-owned Tourists ballclub plays. Now they’re taking money away from a previously promised improvement to pedestrian areas in the South Slope neighborhood to help pay for the stadium fixes. Asheville already has two L’s in it. I think they’re taking another one.

Board game news: There’s a deluxe and co-op edition of the great abstract, two-player game Santorini up on Kickstarter.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, book banning, colombia, conspiracy theories, frauds, links, longreads, north carolina, physics, police, russia, scotus, stick to baseball, tennessee, texas, trans rights, vaccines, vegan

→ April 8, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/8/23.

I had two new pieces up this week for subscribers to The Athletic, my second minor league scouting notebook from the Cactus League and a draft blog post on a few potential first-rounders I saw in Arizona. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday. I’m down with some sort of cold right now, though, so I’ll be away from the stadium for a bit.

My first column for Wirecutter on board games, giving recommendations for five great roll-and-write games for different age/skill levels, ran this week.

My podcast will return this week, now that I’m off the road (and even if I’m still not 100% on Monday). I am about to send out a new issue of my free email newsletter today, though.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Atavist has the story of Lesley Hu, whose ex-husband was so brainwashed by anti-vaxxers whose content he found online that he killed their son rather than allow him to be vaccinated. It’s a horrifying story of misinformation, mental illness, and a court system unprepared to deal with these cases.

You’ve probably seen the ProPublica story about the conservative billionaire who’s been lavishing gifts on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for twenty-plus years. The most important thing to remember – and, if you’re outraged, to keep telling your Representative and Senators – is that it’s fairly clear that Thomas broke the law by failing to disclose these gifts.

BMC Infectious Diseases is set to retract a paper published last year that claimed, with insufficient evidence (to put it mildly), that COVID-19 vaccines had caused up to 278,000 deaths. How did such a terrible study get through peer review? The problem is with the process, not just this particular paper.

I linked to a story a few months back about a U.S. Marine who used the courts to kidnap an Afghan baby whose parents had been killed but who had living relatives willing to take her in. This past week, a different U.S judge voided the adoption. It’s not over, but this is a step in the right direction. The Marine and his wife used their Christianity as a justification for taking the child, who is now 4 years old.

Mississippi is about to create a separate, state-appointed court to oversee the city of Jackson, meaning white state officials will determine the judges who rule over the 80% Black municipality.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and his handpicked, denialist Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo omitted key data from a flawed COVID vaccine report that claimed that young men should not get these safe, effective immunizations. Infection with COVID-19 carries a much greater risk of cardiac-related deaths than the vaccines do, but the report left out data showing this.

A writer who used to cover the Tennessee State House says the legislature has been trending in the direction of autocracy for years now.

Iowa is increasing its funding to the so-called Field of Dreams stadium, which will run between $52 million and $57 million in public support.

Republicans are mad that young voters keep tipping elections to Democrats, often progressive ones, so now they’re trying to make it harder for college students to vote.

Why do so many of the people on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list of entrepreneurs and business leaders end up in prison?

There’s a shortage of the wonderful French herbal liqueur known as Chartreuse, but it’s not because of supply-chain issues: The monks decided not to make as much of it.

I wasn’t familiar with the Indian metal band Bloodywood, who fuse Western styles from thrash to death metal to rap-metal with Indian folk music, but they’ve become a breakout act in a country that has never embraced the metal genre the way other nations with comparable arts scenes have.

An atheist prisoner in West Virginia has sued the state for making Christian-affiliated programming a required part of his release conditions.

Board game news: Klaus Teuber, the designer of the game now known simply as Catan, died this week at age 70. The New York Times, Washington Post, and Boardgamegeek all published worthwhile obituaries, honoring the man whose creation has sold over 40 million copies and divided board game history into Before and After. Catan and Ticket to Ride are the two games that did the most to turn me into a board gamer, and in turn into something of a board game writer, too.

Inside Up Games has a huge hit on its hands with Earth, which I’ll be reviewing this month or in early May and which I think is the favorite right now to win the Kennerspiel des Jahres. Their next big release, the route-building and resource management game Terminus, is on Kickstarter now.

Alderac’s Kickstarter for Let’s Go to Japan ends in just over two more days.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, board game news, catan, florida, frauds, iowa, links, liquor, longreads, metal, mississippi, scotus, stick to baseball, tennessee, vaccines

→ March 11, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/11/23.

Nothing new at the Athletic this week, although I should have 2-3 coming up this week as my travels continue. I did hold a Klawchat on Thursday.

For Paste, I reviewed the game Gartenbau, which combines very simple rules with tight decisions that make it a real challenge to play it well.

On The Keith Law Show this week, I had my annual Oscars preview episode with Chris Crawford. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I was going to send another issue of my free email newsletter this week but got tied up with some other writing (board game stuff, actually), so it’s still on my to-do list.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: WIRED has the story of the takedown of a former Iraqi translator who became a major fentanyl dealer in the U.S. and is now serving a 30-year sentence in federal prison.

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is trying to strip the press of its First Amendment rights.

The rash of anti-trans bills across the south and Midwest are the work of a network of religious-right groups that operated in secret while pushing their bigoted agenda, according to emails between those groups and South Dakota state Rep. Fred Deutsch (R) obtained by Mother Jones.

ProPublica has more information on billionaire Leonard Leo’s new plan to try to “crush liberal dominance” in American politics and culture. He’s considered the main architect of the strategy that gave conservatives a 6-3 Supreme Court majority and control of much of the federal judiciary.

My wife and I watched the Oscar-nominated animated short My Year of Dicks, which is very funny and sweet, which led us down the rabbit hole of its writer Pamela Ribon, including this hilarious 2011 post from her now-defunct blog about how she might have become a new urban legend.

Walgreens won’t sell abortion pills in states that merely threatened legal action, even though the medication is still legal in those locations.

Failed actor turned conservative talking head Michael Knowles, called for transgender people to be “eradicated” in a speech at the far-right convention CPAC this week.

All of the rhetoric you’re seeing against trans people right now was previously used against gays/lesbians by the same sort of Christianist activists.

A girls basketball team in Hoover, Alabama, the host city for the SEC baseball tournament, was forced to play in a boys’ rec league if they wanted to continue to use city facilities. When they subsequently won the league’s tournament, they were denied the trophy, which was then given to the boys’ team that finished second, because they are a ‘competitive’ team playing in a recreational league.

An anti-vaxxer nurse in Spain is in court, accused of faking vaccinations of children.

After a woman went on a racist tirade in a pizzeria near Philly, TikTok vigilantes tried to identify her, and instead targeted three innocent women instead, leading to widespread harassment.

From January 2022: Ashli Babbitt, who some right-wingers want you to believe was a martyr, had a history of violent behavior prior to her participation in the January 6^th insurrection.

Witnesses at Guantanamo Bay recalled Ron DeSantis laughing while prisoners there were tortured.

Utah legislators have voted to change the law that made it nearly impossible for victims of sexual assault by doctors to sue their attackers.

The Tennessee House passed a bill gutting marriage equality, possibly allowing elected officials to decline to issue a license to a couple for any reason. The state’s Republicans also passed a law banning drag shows, which is nothing more than performative bigotry

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, alabama, first amendment, florida, links, longreads, social media, stick to baseball, tennessee, trans rights, utah, vaccines

→ March 4, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/4/23.

I posted an early draft ranking of just 30 names, enough for a typical round, for subscribers to The Athletic. I’ll expand that list a few times and eventually get to 100 by May or so, but I’d like to at least see all the high school players get started.

No podcast this week as the guest I had lined up had to reschedule. Feel free to sign up for my free email newsletter, as I’ll be sending another one out this week.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Financial Times has a deep dive into how Putin blundered into Ukraine and has continued isolating himself from would-be advisers who might have helped him out of this mess. The writer posits that Putin may try to hold on until January of 2025, hoping we elect a Republican as President and thus pull our military support of Ukraine.
Anything Elizabeth Kolbert writes is a must-read for me; her latest piece in the New Yorker covers how our mining of too much phosphorus and subsequent waste of much of it is choking our oceans while leading towards a bottleneck that threatens our food supply. The article also describes the world’s longest conveyor belt, a 61-mile track in the illegally annexed territory of the Western Sahara.
A former employee came out with claims about malfeasance at a St. Louis medical center that treats transgender youth, telling her story to a newsletter author who doesn’t engage in any sort of fact-checking of stories. The Missouri Independent and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch both investigated and found no corroboration, finding instead that parents had nothing but praise for the center and the treatment their children received. Newsletters are fine for some types of content, but not for actual news.
The New Republic profiled Dr. David Gorski, who has also blogged as Orac, and his battle against pseudoscience, quackery, and so-called “alternative” medicine online. (There is no such thing as “alternative” medicine. If it works, it’s medicine.)
I enjoyed this Slate story on the 25^th anniversary of Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea and the bizarre, cultlike fandom that album has generated. The title track from that record remains one of my favorite songs to play & sing.
The cesspool of Twitter had a debunked conspiracy theory trending earlier this week about Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs. It’s just one of several that Republican legislators there continue to push as they’ve seen the state turn increasingly blue.
There is no “lab leak theory.” There are a bunch of conspiracy theories, but no single, testable theory of how COVID-19 was supposedly engineered in and escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China. And the available evidence points to a zoonotic (natural) origin.
If you saw anything about Washington, D.C., attempting to update its criminal code this week, with hysterical tweets about reducing penalties for certain crimes like carjacking, there’s a lot more to the story. Most of this would be solved by just making the district a state with the same autonomy as the other fifty have.
Arkansas’ new education plan, which includes an extremely broad voucher program, is full of sops to banks and charter-school operators, and it’s also likely to gut public education in the state while favoring higher-income families. Sounds great!
Tennessee jumps on the bandwagon by banning drag shows. There is no evidence any drag show has ever harmed anyone. There is, however, copious evidence that guns have. The choice to ban harmless entertainment should tell you everything about this legislature.
Board game news: Restoration Games announced that they’re retiring the first two Unmatched sets, Cobble & Fog and Robin Hood vs. Big Foot, later this year, with no plans to reprint them.
The Gamefound campaign for Huang, a new game from prolific designer Reiner Knizia, is fully funded with five days to go.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, arizona, arkansas, board game news, conspiracy theories, coronavirus, links, longreads, pseudoscience, russia, science, stick to baseball, tennessee, trans rights, ukraine, washington

→ November 19, 2022
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/19/22.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I wrote two pieces this week, one on the Angels’ signing of Tyler Anderson and the Yankees’ re-signing of Anthony Rizzo, and one on four trades from earlier this week before teams had to set their 40-man rosters. I also held a Klawchat on Friday.

On The Keith Law Show, I spoke to Jessica Grose, New York Times opinion writer and author of the new book Screaming on the Inside: The Unsustainability of American Motherhood, about the book and what we might do to make being a working mother easier in the U.S. You can pre-order her book, which is due out December 6^th, and you can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

With Twitter imploding, you can find me in a bunch of other places, including Facebook, Instagram, counter.social, and cohost, as well as here and on my free email newsletter, which went out again yesterday. Also, you can buy either of my books, Smart Baseball or The Inside Game, via bookshop.org at those links, or at your friendly local independent bookstore.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Population projections have the stretch of West African coastline that runs from Lagos, Nigeria, to Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, becoming the largest zone of continuous, dense habitation on earth by 2100, with about 500 million people in it. The Guardian looks at what this means for the region, its people, and the planet as a whole.
Clint Smith’s story in the Atlantic on his visits to Holocaust memorial sites and what they might tell us about how to grapple with our own shameful past is one of the best things you’ll read this year.
And this New York Times Magazine article on the theft of an Afghan baby by a network of American evangelical Christians should win a Pulitzer. The lawsuit is still ongoing, but we should not be in the practice of stealing babies from countries we invade.
The United States lags badly behind other developed nations in researching and preventing stillbirths. We still have 20,000 stillbirths every year in the U.S., and at least a quarter of them are (likely) preventable.
A woman visiting Ohio had a miscarriage and began to hemorrhage. Because of Ohio’s anti-abortion law, the emergency room sent her home to wait because they couldn’t “prove there was no fetal development.” This is how these religiously-motivated laws will kill women.
I was obsessed with the computer game Age of Empires when it first came out in the late 1990s. WIRED has an interview with the current CEO of Microsoft Gaming and the head of the studio that makes the Age games as the game celebrates its 25^th anniversary and two new civilizations were added to the most recent version, Age of Empires IV.
ProPublica has the inside story of how anti-abortion groups helped write Tennessee’s extremely strict ban on the medical procedure and are working to defend it.
Colombia faces a difficult challenge as its new President wants to stop extracting fossil fuels and move to climate-friendly energy sources, including the lack of a transition plan for affected workers.
This 12-minute BBC podcast looks at online harassment and threats against scientists investigating the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
The CARES Act led to the release of 11,000 inmates from federal prisons during the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic. Only 17 reoffended. The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world and we spend nearly $200 billion just to keep people in prison. Maybe we should rethink this?
A new research paper in Nature found evidence that climate change is increasing the risk of bat pathogens spilling over into humans.
Yoel Roth was the head of trust and safety at Twitter, and wrote an op ed explaining why he quit a few weeks after Elon Musk took over the site. It’s not good, but it also explains how the company’s dependence on advertisers may prevent Musk from turning it into 8chan. Roth himself has some bigoted tweets from 10+ years ago.
Eighteen unvaccinated Ohio children, all but one under the age of 5, have contracted measles in an ongoing outbreak across two day care facilities. Measles is one of the most contagious viruses we know, and it can cause death up to ten years after the infection from a progressive and incurable neurological condition called SSPE.
More anti-vax loons are demanding “vaccine-free” blood and are trying to set up so-called “safe” blood banks.
Meanwhile, America’s Frontline Doctors, a quack group that took in millions from prescribing useless COVID-19 treatments and offering online “consultations,” is imploding now because founder and January 6^th insurrectionist Simone Gold may have been embezzling the group’s funds for personal gain.
Also, it appears that someone contracted dengue fever from a mosquito bite in Arizona. Climate change makes this almost inevitable.
Tucker Carlson’s attempt to play kingmaker this election season ended mostly with embarrassing defeats.
It’s a weak substitute for the real thing, but Democrats should codify Roe v. Wade right now, and force SCOTUS – with five justices who are religious zealots or otherwise openly anti-abortion – to grapple with it, according to The Nation’s Elie Mystal.
Mystal also wrote elsewhere about how Chief Justice John Roberts delivered the House to his fellow Republicans by gutting voting rights laws.
Tom Scocca writes that Trump’s hold on the GOP is stronger than ever despite the drubbing many of his preferred candidates took in the midterms.
The Virginia state education department has proposed major changes to social studies standards, written by five new appointees of the state’s Republican governor. Educators oppose the changes, calling them jingoistic and derogatory towards non-whites.
Moms for Liberty, the astroturfing, pro-white/anti-LGBT activist group that’s been targeting school board elections, threw out a Black superintendent in South Carolina and banned critical race theory
A Connecticut school district is so wedded to its racist mascot (the Redmen) that they’re forgoing $94,000 in state funding just to keep it.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is shipping more migrants to Philadelphia in another instance of human trafficking, but the government of the City of Brotherly Love has posted a list of resources for folks who want to help welcome these new residents. Love > hate.
And Texas Republicans have filed a bill that would criminalize gender-affirming care for minors – yes, putting parents in prison for getting medical care for their kids. Why is MLB putting the All-Star Game there?
The Biden Administration is giving Saudi Arabian “Prime Minister” Mohammed bin Salman immunity from a lawsuit filed by the fiancée of murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi, because oil.
All the news about Republicans investimigrating Hunter Biden’s laptop or something is overshadowing the real damage they’re going to do by going after science agencies.
Board game news: Pandasaurus Games owners Molly Wardlaw and Nathan McNair face accusations from former employees of creating a toxic workplace environment through “negligence, mismanagement, and manipulation.” I have met Molly and Nathan, although I can’t say I know either of them well, and I’ve reviewed many Pandasaurus Games over the years. The company denied the allegations and their response is at the bottom of the linked article.
Tabriz, the new game from the co-designer of the amazing Cascadia, is crowdfunding on Gamefound for two more days.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, africa, anti-science, board game news, carceral state, colombia, links, longreads, measles, philadelphia, scotus, social media, south carolina, stick to baseball, tennessee, texas, trans rights, vaccines, video games, virginia

→ November 12, 2022
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/12/22.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I wrote a piece on the folly of the five-year deal for Edwin Díaz, based on the dismal history of deals of four years or longer for free-agent relievers. This was on the heels of last week’s ranking of the top 50 free agents this winter.

Over at Paste, I reviewed The Spill, a Pandemic-like cooperative game where players work to contain the damage from a Deepwater Horizon-like oil spill.

My free email newsletter returned last weekend, and with Twitter possibly on its way out, that’s one good way to keep up with everything I write. I’ve also set up accounts on counter.social and cohost, in case either of those proves a worthy alternative (the former is actually okay, if a bit quiet). Also, you can buy either of my books, Smart Baseball or The Inside Game, via bookshop.org at those links, or at your friendly local independent bookstore. I hear they make great holiday gifts.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Fiji is among the countries most at risk from the negative effects of climate change, so the country has begun moving entire villages before they end up drowned by rising sea levels. Meanwhile, Egypt is trying to discourage families from having more than two children because climate change is threatening its water supply.
Intelligencer has a long profile of Axel Springer CEO Matthias Döpfner, whose empire includes Politico, Business Insider, and the highly influential German tabloid Bild, calling him part Murdoch and park Musk.
Jane Gross was a pioneer among sportswriters, becoming the first woman allowed to enter an NBA clubhouse (to do her actual job) in 1975, paving the way for generations of women sportswriters who asked for nothing more than the same rights afforded to their male counterparts. Gross died this week at 75.
Four conservative Supreme Court Justices attended a party held by the arch-right Federalist Society this week. Charles S. Pierce calls the four “lackeys” of the group that helped former President Trump shove the entire federal judiciary to the right.
Molly Jong-Fast wrote about Twitter’s implosion and why she’s not leaving it (yet), while one of Twitter’s own lawyers warned that Elon Musk is putting the company at risk of incurring millions of dollars in fines.
The Washington Post has a story on how Twitter & Facebook gave a free pass to GOP election deniers this year.
Dr. Jen Gunter, author of The Vagina Bible, wrote about medical misinformation, social media, and the illusory truth effect, concluding with some advice on how to spot and deal with misinformation when you see it.
60 Minutes ran a segment last Sunday on how social media algorithms further polarize the electorate.
It doesn’t help when Fox News “sources” a bogus story from the misinformation-purveying Twitter account LibsOfTikTok. The claim attacked Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and ran the night before the election.
The midterm results were far better for Democrats than any polls or pundits indicated. Elie Mystal says that taking this as good news is the wrong response, given how Republican gerrymandering continued to artificially boost their results in the House and in state legislatures.
Indeed, four states used gerrymandered maps that courts had deemed illegal in this election, including Ohio, where Republicans have flat-out ignored multiple rulings saying that their map violated federal law.
Meanwhile, Tennessee has made it harder for people convicted of felonies to vote, resulting in over a fifth of its Black citizens losing this constitutional right. That’s on top of gerrymandering the shit out of Nashville to create a red district in a heavily blue city.
I’m sure most of you have already seen this, but the plaintiff in the suit to stop President Biden’s student loan forgiveness program themselves took a $50,000 PPP loan and accepted forgiveness for it rather than paying it back.
The lack of a response from fellow NBA players to Kyrie Irving spreading antisemitic propaganda on social media is disappointing, writes Candace Buckner for the Washington Post.
If you can get past the clickbait tone, there’s a good parenting tip in this article from the mother of the CEO of Youtube and the co-founder/CEO of 23AndMe.
Claims of an “immunity debt” from several years of masking and isolation are unsupported by science. Your immune system doesn’t just forget everything it learned because you weren’t exposed to more pathogens.
The Dragonfly 44 Galaxy appears to comprise 99% dark matter, which would challenge existing ideas of how galaxies evolve.
Board game news: Fit to Print, a new game from the publishers of Cascadia/Calico and the designer of Wormholes & Tiny Towns, is already over $100K raised on Kickstarter in just a few days. I just played Verdant, the newest game from Flatout (the publisher), last night, and it’s excellent.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-semitism, astronomy, board game news, climate change, gerrymandering, links, longreads, ohio, scotus, social media, stick to baseball, tennessee, the swamp

→ April 16, 2022
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/16/22.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I had one new post this week, a roundup of top 2022 draft prospects I’ve seen, including Druw Jones, Termarr Johnson, and the now-injured Dylan Lesko.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Cascadia, one of the best new games of 2021, from the same publisher as Calico. It’s another hex tile-laying game but simpler to learn and play, with variable rules you can fine-tune to allow kids to join.

My own podcast returned with the Productive Outs guys – Ian Miller of Kowloon Walled City and Riley Breckenridge of Thrice – as guests. You can subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I’m due for another issue my free email newsletter this upcoming week. You can find both of my books, Smart Baseball and The Inside Game, in paperback anywhere books are sold, including Bookshop.org.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Child welfare workers in Texas are resigning rather than enforce the state’s hateful law denying medical treatment to trans kids.

Vanity Fair has a long investigative piece on EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit that has been at the center of the discredited lab-leak hypothesis, showing how EHA’s leader, Peter Daszak, made the situation worse both before the pandemic began and after the search for SARS-CoV-2’s origins began.

Firearms have surpassed motor vehicle crashes as the leading cause of deaths for U.S. children and adolescents.

Writing in the New Yorker, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Elizabeth Kolbert writes about how two Florida lakes are suing to stop a development that would destroy nearly 2000 acres of wetlands. The lawsuit includes one actual human, as well as a marsh and a stream, and is the first of its kind in the U.S.

The CEO of Flutterwave, a Nigerian online payments and financial services company with a $3 billion valuation, may have engaged in fraud and insider trading to enrich himself at the expense of shareholders and employees with stock options.

The Texas Observer, a progressive investigative journalism magazine that had a particular focus on Indigenous affairs, lost most of its staff in the last six months due to a series of bungled situations and a divide over the periodical’s mission.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) worked to try to overturn the 2020 Presidential election, according to texts he sent to Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.

Biologist David Sabatini resigned his tenured professorship at MIT after three senior officials at the school recommended revoking it in the wake of sexual harassment allegations against him and concerns over his behavior towards other members of his lab. He is still, however, suing one of the women who has accused him of harassment.

David French writes in The Atlantic that the American right has “lost the plot” on free speech.

The British national who killed MP Sir David Amess was a “textbook example of radicalization” who started reading extremist propaganda online during the Syria conflict.

The cops who shoved a 75-year-old man to the ground for protesting were cleared of all wrongdoing. Because of course they were.

Meanwhile, a panel on the Fifth Circuit of the US Court of Appeals ruled that police who tortured a teenage girl in custody didn’t violate her rights.

Former St. Louis police officer Luther Hall, who was beaten by his fellow officers while working undercover during protests in the city in 2017, spoke out about his desire to leave the city and the lack of justice for his attackers.

There’s very strong evidence that the Epstein-Barr virus causes multiple sclerosis, although why some infected people develop the autoimmune disorder and others don’t isn’t clear.

Why aren’t Democrats doing anything to combat the GOP’s deranged claims that Democrats are all pedophiles and groomers?

South Dakota AG Jason Ravsnborg, who killed a man in a hit-and-run accident, may face consequences after all as the Republican-led legislature has voted to impeach him.

Texas is a shitshow in so many ways. Gov. Greg Abbott’s political stunt at the border has led truckers to demand that he stop inspections of every truck, a move he put in place due to baseless claims about border security. For a party that claims to be pro-business, this is a hell of a way to show it.

Climate change is contributing to the spread of Japanese encephalitis in Australia.

Techdirt decries major newspapers’ continuing failure to grasp social media.

Opinion journalism is beset by structural problems and bad actors. There are ways to fix both of these issues, from better labeling of opinion vs. news pieces to proper editing (in a world where most publications have reduced editorial staff substantiall).

Ukrainian hackers have published a tremendous amount of personal data on Russian troopse fighting in the current war, as have other activists seeking additional ways to fight back against Russia’s pointless invasion of its neighbor.

The Titans’ new state-funded stadium will cost about $2 billion, and the economic impact figures the team has given the legislature appear to have been created out of thin air. Great use of public funds in a state that offers below-average education to its citizens.

A Toronto man amassed a huge cache of guns and killed two men at random before his arrest, which may have prevented a mass shooting given the arsenal he had in his apartment.

Board game news: Birds of a Feather is back on Kickstarter, and while it’s clearly meant to capitalize on Wingspan’s runaway success, it’s also a much lighter game aimed at a different audience.

The newest game from publishers Lucky Duck Games (Chronicles of Crime) to hit Kickstarter is The Dark Quarter, a co-op narrative game set in New Orleans.

Postmark Games has a print-and-play game called Voyages that just requires you to bring your own dice.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, climate change, coronavirus, environment, frauds, health, links, longreads, metoo, police, south dakota, stick to baseball, tennessee, texas

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