texas

→ February 21, 2026
→ By keith
→ 2 Comments

Stick to baseball, 2/21/26.

I was on PTO from Wednesday to Wednesday, so I haven’t written anything new on the Athletic in nearly two weeks. I’ll begin draft content this upcoming week.

Over at AV Club, I reviewed two smaller games with surprising depth and complexity for their size in Oddland and Neko Syndicate.

I appeared on Sox Machine to talk about the White Sox’ farm system and a little more about Colson Montgomery.

I sent out another edition of my free email newsletter on Friday.

And now, the links…

ProPublica got a hold of letters written by children being held in one of ICE’s concentration camps. The camp’s Schutzstaffel responded by raiding the facility to destroy any further missives. Meanwhile, a group of pediatricians wrote about the harm that ICE detentions are already doing to children. Remember that when anyone tells you they’re concerned about, say, what bathroom a person uses because of “the children.”

The American Prospect’s Ryan Cooper explains why Democrats should defund ICE and CBP permanently. The Nation’s Andrea Ritchie says essentially the same thing.

ICE agents zip-tied a 14-year-old girl in Idaho in October during one of their ‘raids.’ She is a U.S. citizen, but that’s beside the point.

Futurism’s Maggie Harrison Dupré has been all over the harms propagated by the AI sector and the amoral actors pushing the technology. Her latest piece looks at how ChatGPT is fueling and encouraging stalkers, because these LLMs are nothing more than compliment machines – they tell you what you want to hear. Well, that, and plagiarism.

The Guardian exposes just how Substack profits from all the neo-Nazi content it hosts.

A new study published in Nature found that X/Twitter users who had the For You feed turned on saw their political views shift to the right, but turning it off did not move them back towards the left (or center).

The Heritage Foundation published a “roadmap” for the country that is really a playbook for a Christian nationalist future; Jessica Valenti exposes this under the headline “they’re coming for our daughters.” I can’t describe the Heritage Foundation’s worldview as anything other than sick. It is a diseased way of looking at women and humanity as a whole.

Israeli settlers shot and killed an American in the West Bank. No one will do anything about this.

The far-right elites in Texas are backing MAGA candidate Don Huffines for state comptroller as he promises to “DOGE Texas government.”

Meanwhile, the self-immolation of Texas’ public universities continues, as UT-Austin is consolidating four departments relating to Black, Latino, and women’s studies, a move that appears motivated by ideology; and all University of Texas schools now must limit discussion of “controversial topics” in the classroom. I wonder who decides what is “controversial.”

I am shocked, shocked to note that cryptocurrency is now being used to facilitate human trafficking.

A brainwashed mother in South Carolina whose unvaccinated son is hospitalized with complications from the measles told The Independent that she still wouldn’t vaccinate him. There is no risk from vaccines even close to what that poor kid has already suffered, and what he’ll suffer in the future if he survives.

The FDA’s site removed pages that exposed fake autism treatments like MMO (bleach) and raw camel milk.

However, the FDA’s thoroughly unqualified leader Vinay Prasad reversed course and will now review Moderna’s mRNA-based flu vaccine. I wonder what pushback got to him; I suspect it wasn’t the public outcry, but the business one.

Why is Prasad unqualified? Well, for one thing, he’s already facing sexual harassment accusations, and is making us taxpayers pay over $65,000 a year for him to commute from California to DC. And he’s only been on the job for 9 months.

Oklahoma’s radical Gov. J. Kevin Stitt (R) says he will eliminate tenure at most public colleges in his state, a great move for a state widely ranked in the bottom five for education.

Also in Oklahoma, a man speaking out at Claremore City Council meeting against the construction of a new data center was arrested – not stopped, but fucking arrested – for going a few seconds over his allotted time.

There’s some real evidence that Putin murdered dissident Alexei Navalny … and it barely made a dent in the news this week.

The Lemoneads’ Evan Dando is a creep.

Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL) has taken up MTG’s mantle as the most overtly racist member of Congress; he has a challenger this fall in Democrat Jennifer Jenkins, who has a history of calling out Fine’s bigoted language and rhetoric. I knew Fine in college; I thought he was pretentious, but if he held these views back then I didn’t know it.

Harvard took a $350 million gift from Gerald Chan, the second-largest in the university’s history, and then named their school of public health after his father. Chan had a close relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Harvard physics professor Lisa Randall is also all over the Epstein files. I’ve seen some comments that mere association with Epstein, especially for scientists (given his interest in patronizing scientific research), shouldn’t be a capital offense; I might be sympathetic to that perspective if any of these assholes owned up to schmoozing with the convicted sex offender before their names appeared.

At Salon, Andi Zeisler writes that academics who communicated and fraternized with Epstein may not be criminals, but they did so in pursuit of a shared vision of a world where only certain people (men, mostly) were worthy of attaining knowledge and the status that comes with it.

The same folks who were all about “free speech” and talking about opposing cancel culture have been dead silent as the Trump Administration attempts to quell free speech by demanding that social media platforms reveal the identities of users who criticized ICE. Maybe it wasn’t actually about free speech after all.

Defector’s Patrick Redford wrote how Eileen Gu will never be the ‘traitor’ that J.D. Vance and other nationalist nitwits are calling her.

Astronomers might have seen a star in the Andromeda Galaxy become a black hole.

The delightful folks at Flatout Games have a new Kickstarter up for two smaller games, Forage and Honeypot.

Two minor scandals in the gaming world from the last two weeks: Dice Tower contributor Sam Healey resigned from the site – claiming God told him to step away or some other non-apology nonsense – after he said that Alex Pretti and Renée Good were to blame for being murdered; and Alderac (AEG) COO Ryan Dancey, who has left a trail of messes and controversies behind him in his three decades in the industry, was forced out by CEO John Zinser after Dancey posted a pro-AI and very anti-designers rant on LinkedIn. Hey, I guess something good did come out of that site!

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ai, astronomy, board game news, christian nationalism, education, florida, harvard, immigration, israel, links, longreads, measles, oklahoma, russia, social media, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines

→ February 10, 2026
→ By keith
→ 1 Comment

Stick to baseball, 2/10/26.

The top 100 index page is here, with links to all 30 team reports and everything else in the package. If you’re looking for the highlights, you can go right to the top 100 prospects, the prospects who just missed the top 100, and my ranking of all 30 farm systems, as well as the Q&As I did on top 100 day and this past Monday.

Over at AV Club, I reviewed the small-box game Point Galaxy, a sequel game to Point Salad; and Knitting Circle, a lighter game with a similar theme and art to Calico.

My free email newsletter is back as well, and you should sign up for more of me.

I appeared on the Detroit News’ Tigers Today podcast to talk about Detroit’s loaded farm system; on Friar Territory to talk about what’s left in the Padres’ system; on the JD Bunkis Show to discuss the state of the Jays’ system after their World Series run; and on Halo Territory to talk about the Angels’ system and why it’s so bad.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Texas Monthly looks at the meltdown – or self-immolation – at Texas A&M. The Republicans who run the state are going to ruin their public universities to the point where they don’t get the same kind of out-of-state interest that helps add revenue to the system.
Grub Street looks at the decline of the veganism movement in the restaurant world (and our tables). I’m not vegan, or vegetarian, but eating more plants is clearly better for our health and that of the planet.
Deadline doesn’t mince words in its headline about Disney’s new CEO choice: “Dana Walden Expands Oversight To Film in New Role As Media Glass Ceiling Remains Intact.”
That was not Liam Conejo Ramos in Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show; he is in hiding with his family and still traumatized from being kidnapped by ICE.
Writing in Vanity Fair, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about the white nationalist movement that led to the murders of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti.
ProPublica named the two ICE employees who killed Pretti.
Meanwhile, a comedy club in St. Paul cancelled an upcoming series of shows by a comedian who made vile, hateful comments about Renée Nicole Good, and CAA is threatening to sue the bar over it. Maybe CAA should drop Ben Bankas instead.
Why do ICE agents wear masks? So it’s easier for them to violate our Constitutional rights. Duh.
Jonathan Haidt is making bank by running around telling anyone who’ll listen that social media is wrecking the current generation of kids. Two new studies undermine his claims, as the evidence of harm just isn’t strong enough.
The Israel Defense Force accepted the Gaza Health Ministry’s estimate of 71,000 Gazans killed in Israel’s war on the Palestinian territory.
Saudi Arabia is pulling back plans for its new city project Neom, which included the especially bizarre project known as The Line (apparently now dead).
The mass-market paperback is going extinct. What a gigantic shame; I understand the economics of it, in general, but the lower price point can get more people into books or new authors or new-to-them genres, and the smaller form factor is a godsend to people who travel and or just love to stuff a book in a pocket.
Members of our military have reported that their commanding officers are mandating that they go see the fawning ‘documentary’ Melania.
Harvard is, again, all over the Epstein files, including the campus Jewish center Harvard Hillel soliciting donations from Jeffrey Epstein after his 2008 conviction for child sex trafficking.
Yale isn’t faring much better; computer science professor David Gelertner recommended a graduate student to Epstein by praising her looks, and he defended those messages to the dean of the school’s engineering department. Meanwhile, Yale sociologist Nicholas Christakis also seems to have been rather cozy with the convicted sex offender.
I prefer the original headline for this op ed by Molly Jong-Fast, which called Jeffrey Epstein “the devil’s concierge.”
Physicists sort of turned lead into gold at the Large Hadron Collider, smashing lead atoms into each other at such high speeds that a few spit out exactly three protons, which made them gold atoms. Others spit out one proton, making thallium, or two, making mercury, but that’s hardly as fun.
Agrovoltaic canopies – solar panels installed above crops to protect them from excessive sunlight and heat – increased crop yields and reduced water loss in trials in France.
The Burn It All Down podcast has a Kickstarter up to try to fund a return of the show, which features two people I’ve met (Jessica Luther and Lindsay Gibbs) and another I know from the site formerly known as Twitter (Shireen Ahmed). The show is about feminism in sports, and feminism and sports, and women’s sports, and men’s sports through a feminist lens. I don’t understand the podcasting space; it seems like it’s just getting overrun by celebrities with podcasts and nothing interesting to say.
There have been a slew of new boardgame crowdfunding efforts in the last three weeks. Here’s a list:
- Stellar Ventures, a heavy, 150-minute game for 3-5 players about space exploration for fun and profit. I know one of the publishers and have a prototype (yes, I need to play it) and have gotten a demo, and I think it looks pretty fantastic, even though it’s about as heavy a game as I typically play.
- A second edition of Logic & Lore, one of the best games I saw at Gen Con last year, along with a brand new expansion.
- Red Leaf University, a midweight worker-placement game co-designed by Adrian Adamescu, who co-designed Sagrada.
- LODGE, a small spatial-puzzle game from the designer of Tiny Towns and Wormholes. I’ve played this on BGA; the game is very good but I hate the art.
- Gold Country, yet another game from Reiner Knizia, based loosely on his 2012 game Spectaculum.
- Tinctura, a worker-placement game about apothecaries in the 18^th/19^th centuries where players gather ingredients and fulfill contracts.
- Spirited, a hand-management and set collection game co-designed by Shem Phillips (Raiders of the North Sea, Architects of the West Kingdom).
The BBC podcast Witness History has an 11-minute episode on the creation of the game Catan.
And finally, for the August 2024 issue of newsletter-magazine Wyrd Science, Dan Thurot spoke to the designers of three politically-themed board games about incorporating real politics and history into tabletop play, including Tory Brown, designer of the fantastic Votes for Women.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, books, climate change, epstein, gaza, harvard, immigration, links, longreads, physics, podcast, social media, stick to baseball, texas, vegan

→ December 6, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/6/25.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I wrote my analyses of the Sonny Gray trade; the Dylan Cease signing (featuring a massive temper tantrum by Jays fans in the comments); the Cody Ponce & Devin Williams signings; and the Jhostynxon Garcia-Johan Oviedo trade.

At AV Club, I reviewed the game White Castle Duel and wrote up my weekend at the PAX Unplugged board game convention here in Philly.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter last weekend, right after the holiday.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: ProPublica has the story of another woman killed by Texas Republicans and their anti-abortion crusade. Just worth noting that the unholy marriage between Christians and the anti-abortion movement is an entirely modern creation, not supported by the Bible or the previous 1700 or so years of Christian thought.

Bill McKibben, an environmental activist and lifelong Methodist, writes in the Guardian of how Trump and his allies are doing to America what they did to Christianity – subverting their meanings and destroying them from the inside.

Dr. Atul Gawande, author of The Checklist Manifesto and a professor at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, says that the ending of USAID funding has already killed hundreds of thousands worldwide.

Princeton Prof. Robert P. George, a highly influential conservative philosopher and legal scholar who was in the news recently for his resignation from the board of the Heritage Foundation, spoke to The Chronicle of Higher Education about the state of academic thought and the growing ‘illiberalism’ on the far right.

Also in ProPublica, a Minnesota pediatrician who challenged the methods of the director of the child abuse team at the state’s primary children’s hospital says he was sacked for speaking out. The director in question, Dr. Nancy Harper, appears to still use debunked ideas like “shaken-baby syndrome” and thus overdiagnoses child abuse, separating children from families without sufficient cause.

Twitter turned on location identification for its accounts, and shocker of shockers, a huge number of self-proclaimed MAGA accounts are based in Pakistan or Morocco or elsewhere outside the U.S.

Prof. Jack Goldsmith, a conservative scholar at Harvard Law School who authored the memos authorizing the Bush Administration’s use of warrantless wiretaps in 2004, writes that the U.S. strikes on boats in the Atlantic are murder even if you assume all of the government’s claims are true.

I won’t link to too much about the Olivia Nuzzi scandal, given how much attention it’s received and the fact that Vanity Fair finally undid its mistake in hiring her (although whoever approved that hiring needs to be held accountable for the decision), other than this New Republic piece on the public-health cost of Nuzzi’s utter lack of ethics.

Speaking of which, Kentucky has reported its third infant death in the last year from pertussis, a vaccine-preventable disease; all three infants were unvaccinated, as were their mothers.

Michael Scherer writes about the delusions of RFK Jr., who is dismantling public health in the face of all available evidence and massive pushback from the scientific community.

Dr. Rachael Bedard writes in the Times about her experiences attending an anti-vaccine conference and why these grifters and liars are so easily able to capture people’s minds.

Scientific American has a somewhat related story about how AI chatbots could sway voters’ opinions even when the bots were fabricating ‘facts.’

Drew Magary writes that it is time to declare war on AI, and I couldn’t agree more.

Government bans on the use of puberty blockers for trans teens set a dangerous precedent for further intrusion into individual health-care decisions.

Concerned Republican Senator Susan Collins (ME) is backing a referendum to overturn Maine’s protections for trans students. National media members need to stop calling her a “centrist.” She is as extremist as the rest of the party.

Drain the swamp! Trump commuted the sentence of David Gentile, who had served just two weeks to date for his role in defrauding investors of $1.6 billion through his private equity funds. The corruption is coming from inside the White House.

Tennessee libraries have begun shutting down to purge books that Republican theocrats wish to ban because they contain LGBTQ+ characters or themes.

I’m absolutely stunned that a Turning Point staffer and Arizona city councilwoman has been accused of sexually harassing another TP employee – and kidnapping his daughter when he rebuffed her. People that obsessed with others’ sex and sexuality are telling you something about themselves.

The government of the Caucasus nation of Georgia sprayed anti-government protestors with bromobenzyl cyanide, a toxic form of tear gas introduced by the Allied Powers during World War I, according to a report from the BBC.

Disgraced New York City Mayor Eric Adams signed an order that would ban any city agency heads or staff from doing pretty much anything in line with the BDS movement against the government of Israel, just a month before the door hits him on his way out of Gracie Manson in four weeks. Incoming Mayor Zohran Mamdani could undo this with a similar order, but of course there will be an outcry calling this antisemitism if he does.

Europe’s water reserves, especially those in southern Europe, are drying up due to climate change, while Tehran is approaching day-zero for water.

There’s a new Kickstarter from Spanish publisher Salt & Pepper Games, publishers of the solo game Resist!, for Queen of Spies, another solitaire game, set this time set during World War I.

Mike Drucker’s parody of Isaac Chotiner interviewing Santa Claus is note-perfect.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, academia, arizona, artificial intelligence, board game news, book banning, climate change, journalism, kentucky, links, longreads, maine, minnesota, new york city, religion, science, social media, stick to baseball, texas, the swamp, vaccines

→ November 22, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/22/25.

One new post for subscribers to The Athletic this week, breaking down the surprise trade that sent Grayson Rodriguez to the Angels for Taylor Ward.

Over at AV Club, I reviewed the game Ink, the newest title from Kasper Lapp and his best game since his award-winning Magic Maze.

My next free email newsletter might have to wait until after this weekend’s PAX Unplugged convention, as I’ll be there gaming as much as humanly possible.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Toronto-based site The Local has a piece on a freelance scammer who published pieces at some legitimate sites that appeared to be entirely AI-generated. I ran into something similar recently, where a site and writer I’d never heard of had a quote from me that I’d never said and that made no sense.
Mother Jones digs into the grifter Riley Gaines, who finished 5^th in a swim meet, was gracious in defeat, and then realized she could make a career out of bashing trans people – and even cis women who she just decides are trans.
This October 2024 story from Stereogum on the end of Japandroids is a tremendous piece of writing, not just music writing but any writing, especially with the Japandroids’ lead singer/guitarist Brian King being such a notoriously difficult person to get to know.
The Guardian – one of the sites fooled by the AI scammer that The Local exposed – has the story of two men who have made a career of helping people leave cults. They eschew the term deprogramming and the sometimes coercive methods involved in that process in favor of an approach where you try to convince the cult member-victim that leaving was their idea.
The Harvard Crimson has been all over the Larry Summers-Jeffrey Epstein connection, to a degree that professional outlets have not, highlighting how Epstein was Summers’s wing man as the Harvard professor tried to sleep with a student, and breaking the news that Summers reversed course and immediately left his teaching responsibilities for the semester.
NPR details the backlash to Megyn Kelly’s claims that Epstein raping 15-year-olds doesn’t make him a pedophile, including this superb video by a 14-year-old girl named Eloise. (There are, in fact, some very good things on TikTok.)
President Trump pardoned a January 6^th rioter who has now been charged with molesting an 11-year-old. I don’t know why Democrats aren’t pushing this headline everywhere; in 1988, Republicans used the case of Willie Horton, a Massachusetts convict who fled while on furlough, assaulted two people, and raped a woman, to help defeat Presidential candidate Michael Dukakis.
A new research paper documents the discovery of a chemical found in a common soil bacterium that is 100 times stronger than current antibiotics and would be effective against MRSA.
Thanks to climate change, the Aedes aegypti mosquito, carrier of dengue, Zika, and chikungunya, is now appearing in the Rocky Mountains.
Texas A&M now prohibits any classroom discussions of topics related to “race or gender ideology” or sexual orientation.
Switzerland has passed a law expanding the state’s power to force email and VPN providers to decrypt user messages and log IP addresses.
Several countries are developing their own messaging apps to compete with and/or separate their people from the global behemoths of Meta, TikTok, etc., most of which are based in the unstable and uncertain United States.
Amine Kessaci is a 22-year-old activist in France who started an organization to help victims of drug-related violence after his brother was killed for his involvement in the drug trade. This week, another of Amine’s brothers was killed in apparent retaliation for Amine’s political work.
Wisconsin House Speaker Robin Vos (R) blocked a bipartisan bill that would expand Medicaid coverage from 60 days after a mother gives birth to a full year. ProPublica has more on this story, noting that Vos claimed he would “protect the unborn” but doesn’t seem to care if they die after that.
A rare bit of positive news: A Republican candidate for Governor in Michigan had been demonizing the Muslim population in Dearborn, claiming Sharia Law was imminent and organizing a (white) march there, but after visiting the town and speaking to religious and civic leaders, he admitted he was wrong and said the propaganda about the Muslim community there was all lies. I’m most impressed that Anthony Hudson took the time to go to Dearborn and visit mosques and businesses, meaning his mind was at least somewhat open to the possibility that his views were based on misinformation.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: artificial intelligence, cults, epstein, france, frauds, harvard, health, links, longreads, michigan, Music, privacy, science, stick to baseball, switzerland, texas, trans rights

→ October 25, 2025
→ By keith

I ended up unable to do a links post last weekend because I was out scouting the Arizona Fall League (which also prevented me from doing something else on Saturday morning), so we’re back now and at least I can post my AFL wrap-ups. I broke them up into one post on the notable pitchers and another on the notable hitters I saw in the eleven games I attended, but of course I couldn’t see everyone.

Over at Endless Mode, I reviewed the games Twinkle Twinkle, a solid family-level tile-laying game; and Duel for Cardia, an excellent two-player capture-the-flag game that gets a lot of mileage out of its two 16-card decks.

I sent out another issue of my free email newsletter about two weeks ago, so I’m due for another one now that I’ve written some more stuff.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: You’ve probably seen the Politico story on the incredibly racist, anti-Semitic, and generally hateful group chat featuring a bunch of adult Republicans, including a state Senator from Vermont who’s since resigned.

Charlie Warzel writes in The Atlantic (not my employer) about how AI slop is taking over the internet, stifling or threatening to stifle real creativity. He’s casting about a little for an analogy; it’s just Cory Doctorow’s enshittification write large. (Link is free to read.)

Mother Jones exposes the hacking software company First Wap, whose products use SS7 to track phone users anywhere in the world, without requiring that they click on a malicious link or otherwise put some sort of tracking app on their phones.

ProPublica found that ICE has held at least 170 U.S. citizens against their will so far, in many cases physically abusing them, and I’m sure that’s an undercount. The site also reported that Kristi Noem took campaign donations from a dark-money group for her personal use.

The Athletic (my employer) has a story by Carson Kessler and Gabby Herzig about catfishing scams that convince men they’re talking to top women golfers, eventually conning them out of thousands of dollars and posing new safety risks to the athletes from men who think they have romantic relationships with them.

An Arizona wannabe influencer tried to extort a local bakery, JL Patisserie, for a collaboration fee, or at least a bunch of free food, in exchange for a favorable video. The bakery declined; the woman showed up anyway, and then posted a negative review that had some false claims in it, so the bakery posted a point-by-point response … and then all hell broke loose. I went there and got a chocolate-pistachio croissant for $8.50; it was probably the best croissant I’ve ever had, and I’ve been to France three times.

Starving children screaming in agony: the inevitable result of the Trump Administration’s devastation of the USAID program.

Sen. “Cancun” Ted Cruz is targeting Wikipedia, claiming the site – which has extensive rules on reliable & verifiable sourcing – has a “left-wing bias.” Well, if you’re saying facts have a left-wing bias…

Christian Pastors Gone Wild: A Utah youth pastor says young black men should be executed and cites the Bible in his arguments … a former South Carolina pastor was sentenced to 20 years in prison after authorities found over 5000 CSAM images on his phone … an Ohio pastor who said that being gay was a “health risk” and that gay literature made him “sick” has been arrested and charged with raping a 14-year-old girl. No trans people or drag queens were involved in any of these stories.

Indiana University fired its student newspaper’s advisor, then shut down the newspaper entirely because the students were publishing … news. Purdue students stepped up and distributed 3000 copies of their own paper, with the front-page headline “We Student Journalists Must Stand Together,” on IU’s campus.

The Guardian reported on the justified backlash against comics who took the Saudi dictators’ money to play the Riyadh comedy festival.

Former anti-vaxxers told Raw Story that they’re “horrified” by RFK Jr’s gutting of the American health system, including eroding Americans’ trust in vaccines (which are, again, highly safe and effective). Meanwhile, measles cases continue to rise across the U.S.

And hundreds of anti-science bills have hit state legislatures as evangelicals and ‘do-your-research’ loons try to make America die of preventable diseases again.

A viral story about an Olive Garden waitress who threw breadsticks at customers is fake … but uses the identity of a real person, with her picture, and it’s made her life needlessly difficult.

Texas police who said they used a network of license-plate cameras to try to track the safety of a woman who’d self-administered an abortion. Turns out, of course, they were actually trying to track her so they could charge her with murder.

Professor Lisa Moore, who heads the Department of Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at the University of Texas, writes that she doesn’t recognize the place where she’s worked and taught for 35 years.

Two Harvard professors wrote that the school must reject the Trump Administration’s so-called “compact” and take a public stand against it.

This is how you report on the President: “Clueless Donald Trump, 79, Humiliated After Dodging Legal Question.”

Did President Trump push Israel to accept a ceasefire to protect his own financial relationships with the Qatari emirate?

As Trump spends $130 million or more on the vanity-project ballroom at the White House – which he is not allowed to do without Congressional approval, not that they’ll stop him from doing anything – a typhoon destroyed villages and killed at least one person in Alaska.

Data centers make bad neighbors. If they’re trying to build one near you, speak out against it.

An El Paso family claims a Border Patrol agent shot and killed their dog during a search; the incident took place in September and ended up in the national news earlier this month, but I can’t find any more recent update.

Kevin Howley, a writer and media critic, writes about the harm of the “fact-free anarchy” that has taken over public discourse in the U.S. with the full complicity of the mainstream media.

Defector has a good laugh at the Free Press writer – I’m not calling them journalists, sorry – Olivia Reingold, who is complaining that most of her friends are shunning her after she wrote a story claiming that the Gazan babies who died of starvation were actually sick with other things, so it wasn’t that big of a tragedy. I need a quantum violin to play for her, because anything else would be too large.

The hosts of a left-wing podcast called out Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) for his votes for Trump appointees and generally clubby attitude towards the rise of authoritarianism.

Your brain adjusts to doing things you think are morally wrong, so that doing the same sort of thing again becomes easier and easier. The good news is you can go in the other direction by doing the right thing, and make it easier to be honest or brave or otherwise virtuous.

Raas: A Dance of Love is an upcoming board game from two Indian designers, now up on Gamefound; it’s the first game I’ve seen that uses an aspect of Indian culture and is also designed by people from the subcontinent.

Boardgamegeek has an entertaining designer diary from two of my favorites, the folks behind the new game The White Castle Duel, as well as the original The White Castle and The Red Cathedral.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, board game news, environment, frauds, indiana, links, longreads, neuroscience, religion, stick to baseball, texas, the swamp, vaccines

→ September 27, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/27/25.

For subscribers to The Athletic, I wrote my annual column with my ballots for the awards I don’t have this year. A record number of people didn’t read the intro this year.

At Endless Mode, I reviewed the two-player game Naishi, which is a solid enough game, but which is yet another example of white European designers & illustrators using Japanese culture and history as a theme, and in this case they really misused it in a way that I couldn’t get past.

I sent out another edition of my free email newsletter on Friday, touching on (waves hands pathetically) all of this happening around us.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: A team of Bloomberg reporters gained access to 18,000 emails from Jeffrey Epstein’s Yahoo account, and found that a number of prominent lawyers and academics continued to help him even after his crimes against children were first exposed.
For Pioneer Works, Lauren Markham describes how climate change is already making parts of Greece uninhabitable in the summers, with fires and temperatures topping 110 degrees.
Texas Monthly examines the water wars in the eastern part of Texas, as politicians, residents, and carpetbagging investors try to claim the increasingly scarce resource.
ProPublica exposes how a Florida donor got Kristi Noem to fast-track disaster aid for a tourist pier in Naples. Drain the swamp!
Jamelle Bouie calls out the MAGA movement’s complete disinterest in debate, despite the disingenuous claims to the contrary in the last two weeks.
The Stranger reports on the rise in attacks on trans women in the Seattle area, part of a larger increase in attacks on LGBT people in general.
Writing in Stat News, Arthur Caplan, head of the Division of Medical Ethics at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, says that Americans can no longer trust their government’s so-called health advice.
As you may have seen already, White House border czar Tom Homan accepted $50,000 in a CAVA bag from FBI agents posing as business executives in 2024, but Trump’s DOJ and FBI shut the investigation down. Drain the swamp!
Antibiotic-resistant Enterobacteles infections rose 461% in U.S. hospitals from 2019 to 2023; while still rare overall, it’s a “nightmare” bacterium due to the lack of treatments and high fatality rate.
Bill Berrien, a Republican candidate for Governor in Wisconsin, followed a number of sexually explicit accounts on social media until reporters from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel asked him about it. He has, of course, taken up the party line in attacking trans people.
Ryan Walters, the Republican superintendent of public instruction in Oklahoma, resigned to take a job with a reactionary nonprofit that he says is going to “destroy the teachers’ unions.” Walters tried to force Oklahoma teachers to teach the Bible in public classrooms, but all he really did was drive Oklahoma’s national education ranking down even further, while also facing allegations that he was watching porn in his office.
ICE agents held a five-year-old girl hostage to try to get her father to surrender to them.
A Los Angeles-area woman with bipolar disorder gave her life savings to scammers, even selling her house to send them money, because she fell for their AI videos showing a soap opera actor saying he was in love with her.
After The Guardian revealed that Israel was using Microsoft cloud and AI services to conduct mass surveillance on Palestinians, the software company blocked the country from using at least some of those services. Meanwhile, more experts have come out to call Israel’s actions in Gaza genocide.
The Concho Observer reports on the fear and confusion at Angelo State University due to Texas’s transphobic law that prohibits faculty from mentioning the fact that there are more than two genders, discussing anything relating to transgender people, or using trans students’ correct names.
Meanwhile, an anonymous Texas A&M professor wrote an open letter to students there, asking them to be agents of change and fight the state and federal governments’ attempts to bowdlerize their education.
Task & Purpose tracked down the flag-bearing marine in this viral photo at the protests outside of ICE’s Chicago facility last week.
The Trump Administration is gutting the Fair Housing Act in addition to all of the other havoc and harm they’re causing.
Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) voted against the resolution to “honor” Charlie Kirk last week, saying that Kirk “resurrected dangerous prejudices of a dark past” and that the activist’s “rhetoric was divisive, disparaging, and too often rooted in grievance.”
The Dean of Harvard’s School of Public Health took $150,000 to lie under oath by claiming that Tylenol causes autism.
Slovakia’s right-wing leader pulled the country further from the west with a constitutional amendment that only ‘recognizes’ two genders, putting EU aid at risk and earning condemnation from Amnesty International.
Chicago will pay $90 million to victims of one crooked cop, Sgt. Ronald Watts, who planted drugs on suspects, falsified reports, and threatened to charge people with drug-related crimes if they weren’t paid off. The city faced over 170 lawsuits related to Watts’ conduct and those of officers who served under him.
Three really exciting board game Kickstarters launched this week. Container is a ‘grail game’ that’s been out of print for years; it’s an economic game about shipping containers and people freaking love it. The Voynich Puzzle is a heavy-ish Eurogame from the designer of Barcelona and Windmill Valley. Kalypso is a midweight tile-laying game from a first-time designer and from the publisher of Earth.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, climate change, first amendment, greece, harvard, health, immigration, lgbt rights, links, longreads, oklahoma, police, scams, stick to baseball, texas, the swamp, vaccines, water crisis, wisconsin

→ August 23, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/23/25.

I’m on PTO this week, but a piece I helped report ran at The Athletic this week, with Brendan Kuty taking the lead, looking at why the Yankees took a player in the draft last month who, as a college freshman, drew a swastika outside the door of a Jewish classmate. It’s not about his baseball ability, but what the player, Core Jackson, did to try to convince teams that that’s not who he is as a person, and what the Yankees did to decide they were willing to take him in spite of that. I got the initial scoop, and expected that I would end up writing a straightforward story about a kid who’d done an inexcusable thing – and maybe one that no one would want to discuss on the record. It turned out to be something very different.

Over at Endless Mode, I reviewed the two-player game Gatsby, which is an above-average (and very spiteful) game with a well below-average theme that has nothing at all to do with the great novel.

I wanted to get this posted and the next time I get a window to write I’ll work on my free email newsletter, which you should sign up for because it’s awesome but also it’s free so if it’s not awesome have you really lost anything?

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Scientific American explains how a cure – or at least a life-changing treatment – for peanut allergies may be upon us.

Hannah Keyser wrote in the New York Times about the system that encourages very young pitchers to throw harder at younger ages, and what the costs may be. Note this quote from Dr. Brandon Erickson, a surgeon who’s performed many UCL repairs: “The harder you throw, the more likely you are to have a Tommy John.”

WIRED looks at the rising problems for Roblox, as the company faces lawsuits over the lack of moderation and claims that the platform is a haven for child predators.

A new research brief published by the Housing Initiative at Penn found that cash rental subsidies helped reduce the rate of forced moves and of major housing quality concerns among recipients in a controlled pilot program.

ProPublica examines just how badly Trump has gutted our public health agencies. It’s worse than you thought.

A couple of people who look exactly like you’d expect are trying to create a whites-only community in a state where you’d expect it, Arkansas. I saw some negative reaction to this New York Times article, but I don’t think the authors went easy on these neo-Nazis at all – and this is a good example of where sunshine should work as a disinfectant.

An Israeli official was arrested in Nevada in a sting operation aimed at pedophiles after he tried to lure a police decoy into meeting him for a sex act, as was a local evangelical pastor. Tom Alexandrovich, the director of the Israel Cyber Directorate, brought a condom to meet what he thought was a 15-year-old girl. The Trump Administration intervened to get him released and returned to Israel.

A Yale epidemiologist and a former CDC employee write in STAT News that the CDC shooting is public health’s January 6^th, putting the blame squarely on RFK Jr.

Colorado has their 17^th measles case this year, this one of an unvaccinated child under the age of 5. You can put the blame for that on RFK Jr. and his cronies, too, profiting off years of spewing false information about the MMR vaccine.

There’s now a cholera outbreak in refugee camps in Sudan, and climate change is making the spread of the disease.

Trump’s pick to juke the stats at the Bureau of Labor Statistics posted all manner of insane conspiracy theories on his now-deleted Twitter account.

Bradford William Davis spoke to Texas state Rep. Nicole Collier (D), who spent two full days round the clock in the Texas Capitol building in protest against Republicans’ extreme gerrymandering of the state, about her action and how it’s the kind of move that more Democrats need to make to show voters they’re actually fighting.

A Senate probe led by Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) found hundreds of reports of physical and sexual abuse at ICE detention centers.

Eddie Kim, a reporter for the new worker-owned San Francisco publication The Gazetteer, went to report on an ICE kidnapping action and got pepper-sprayed by an ICE officer. They wear masks, they attack the press, all because they know what they’re doing is wrong.

A Seattle restaurant called Stuffy’s II has to pay $936,000 in fines for violating the city’s ban on indoor dining in 2020-21. Good.

Harvard Magazine reveals the hard shift to the right among many students at my alma mater. The opening quote, from a current senior named Leo Koerner, absolutely reeks of privilege: He turned conservative because he had to stay inside during COVID? Grow up, buddy.

I had several links to pieces in WIRED this week, but they also fell for a scammer who sold them AI-authored articles, doing the same to Business Insider and possibly other sites. Both WIRED and BI have taken articles under that byline down.

More great board game Kickstarters: Keymaster has one up for Hanami, the retheming of my all-time favorite game by Reiner Knizia, Samurai; and Weird City has one up for Satchel Quest, a competitive bag-building dungeon crawl game from the designers of Point salad.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, board game news, colorado, coronavirus, harvard, health, immigration, links, longreads, seattle, stick to baseball, texas, the swamp, vaccines

→ August 16, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/16/25.

Over at Endless Mode, I reviewed the light but very fun game Wine Cellar, which scales really well up to 8 players, an unusual player count for anything that’s not a party game. It’s out of stock at Miniature Market but the bad place still has it.

My free email newsletter went out last weekend, and I’ll send another one out whenever my next piece at the Athletic runs (I do like to time them so that they serve the function of catching readers up on things I’ve written).

And now, the links…

Longreads first: My new colleague Nathan Fenno detailed the highly disturbing story of the stalker who has hounded former Rams lineman Aaron Donald for years.

A Facebook/Meta AI chatbot engaged in flirty conversation with a 76-year-old man who was suffering from cognitive decline, eventually giving him an address in New York City so he could come “meet” her. He fell while racing to catch a train and died from his injuries.

The New York Times exposed how the AI bubble is going to drive up energy costs for everyone. Not mentioned is how it’s probably going to drive water shortages as well. If you’re searching for something on Google, by the way, you can disable the automatic AI-generated tosh that appears at the top of the results just by adding “-ai” to the end of your search terms.

Brandy Zarozny exposes the chaos and infighting at HHS under RFK Jr., who didn’t even tell his own staff – or maybe even the President – before announcing that he was killing funding for further research into safe, effective mRNA vaccines.

One woman in Oregon is using an old law aimed at stopping nuclear power plants there to fight green energy projects like wind and solar. Nuclear power was and is much safer and far more efficient than its critics (mostly on the left) claim it is, so while this is just bad for humanity, it is a bit of perverse justice to see the same side that fought nuclear plants hoisted on their own petard.

Scientists have found ‘sex reversal’ in five different species of birds in Australia, including one bird that was genetically male but laid eggs. Taxonomy is a human creation. Nature is too complex to make our artificial categorization schemes as accurate as we pretend they are – which makes the war on trans people even more disgraceful than it is just on humanist grounds.

A professor at Southeastern Louisiana University whose research uncovered high levels of heavy metals, including arsenic and lead, in and around Lake Maurepas was abruptly terminated from the project without explanation, even though she is the only analytical chemist at the entire college.

ICE kidnapped a woman here legally from New Zealand and her six-year-old son when they re-entered the U.S. after dropping her two older children off at the Vancouver airport, holding them for nearly a month now in isolation at an ICE prison. (UPDATE: On Saturday evening, ICE released the pair.)

The staff at an English pub threatened to walk out if the restaurant accepted a reservation from Vice-President JD Vance, so they turned him away. It’s even more humiliating because Kamala Harris ate there a few weeks earlier.

The cases before the Supreme Court on states’ powers to discriminate against trans athletes are about much more than just sports. The seat has been open for years because Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS) blocked a nomination by then-President Joe Biden, just because she could.

The same bigoted judge from Mississippi who denied a trans teen’s right to change his legal name and repeatedly misgendered the teen in his ruling has now been nominated for a US District Court judgeship.

A Texas DA who incorrectly charged a pregnant woman who took abortion pills with murder paid for his own mistress to have an abortion in the 1990s. The charges were dropped a few days later, but the woman is suing authorities over the incident.

There was a global summit on plastics pollution this past week, where talks on a pact to fight the issue broke down (something that plastic doesn’t do!). I didn’t see this in any U.S. press, probably because our current government is cutting every effort to help the environment.

Such as the White House’s decision to stop a wind-power project, claiming it was based on “flawed science,” and then redacting the entire 27-page report that purports to explain their logic.

Two very exciting games I saw at Gen Con went up on crowdfunding sites this week: The Voynich Puzzle, a crunchy worker-placement game based on the unsolved Voynich manuscript; and Camp Grizzly, a co-op title based on 1980s slasher films that is a reprint of a game so hard to find that full copies have gone for $600.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, artificial intelligence, board game news, environment, football, immigration, links, longreads, mississippi, oregon, science, stick to baseball, texas, the swamp, trans rights, vaccines

→ July 19, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/19/25.

My recaps of all 30 teams’ draft classes are now up for subscribers to The Athletic, organized by division:

I wrote up a recap of day one that ran overnight Sunday into Monday, and my editor Melissa helped compile all of my comments on first & comp round picks as they happened into a single post.

I also wrote up some observations on the Futures Game.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the new edition of the push-your-luck game Celestia, which really needs the expansions and promo cards that will come in the redo of the big box version, supposedly out later this year.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: ICE arrested a teenager in Milford, Massachusetts, who was on his way to volleyball practice because they were looking for his father. The arrest mobilized the town to help get him freed through the legal process.

The Wall Street Journal has the exclusive story of a “bawdy” letter that Donald Trump sent to pedophile and rapist Jeffrey Epstein on the latter’s 50^th birthday.

Multiple police chiefs and sheriffs in Louisiana have been charged with handing out fraudulent visas to immigrants in exchange for cash.

ICE and Customs and Border Protection have held a family of five U.S. citizens in custody for two weeks with no contact with other family members or legal representation. We live in a police state, but they’re imposing it on us so slowly that no one seems to notice.

The Trump Administration also deported a Guatemalan pastor and father of five who had lived in the U.S. for twenty years. The people posting videos of themselves applauding ICE agents need to hear about these stories.

Israel is destroying civilian buildings in Gaza as part of its genocidal war on the Palestinian people. This is a war crime, by the way.

Israel also killed six Gazan children who were waiting to fill water containers in what they’re calling a “technical error.”

A group of San Francisco-area journalists have joined together to form Coyote Media, a worker-owned publication due to start publishing later this summer.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) is fighting public records requests for his emails with Elon Musk because he claims they are too “intimate and embarrassing” to be made public.

Hugo Award-winning author Paolo Bacigulpi said in an interview with Colorado Public Radio that the future is even stupider than he imagined it would be.

How stupid? The Trump Administration is spending over $160,000 to destroy contraceptives meant for women outside of the U.S.

More stupidity: The Secretary of Transportation keeps lying about the safety of the New York City subways. Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) finally called him out on it in a hearing that devolved into Secretary Duffy shouting that Nadler was the one lying (another lie).

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: gaza, immigration, journalism, links, longreads, louisiana, massachusetts, new york, police, stick to baseball, texas, the swamp

→ July 13, 2025
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/13/25.

I had a fourth mock draft go up Saturday morning for subscribers to The Athletic and then updated it on Sunday (same URL), following one I published just this past Tuesday. I also wrote up short capsules on fifty more players who might be drafted this week, beyond those on my top 100. I recapped Saturday’s Futures Game with notes on the standouts and a couple of disappointments. And I wrote up a scouting notebook on some guys I saw in triple A and high A games the previous week, including Cam Schlittler and Konnor Griffin.

At Endless Mode (formerly Paste Games), I reviewed the light tile-laying game Flower Fields, which reminded me a bit of Patchwork, but less tense and for up to four players rather than just two.

I really meant to get a newsletter out last week but never had time enough to write up the first half (the part that matters). Anyway, sign up here for free and I’ll try to do one after the draft dust settles.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Hollywood Reporter describes the celebrity-impersonation scams that proliferate on social media, and how those celebrities may be the best hope for fighting back against this scourge.

Anas Baba, NPR’s producer in the Gaza Strip, described the horrendous conditions there in a story on how difficult it is for Gazans to secure food from one of the few distribution centers. Meanwhile, the IDF bombed a queue of mothers and children lining up to receive nutritional supplements in Gaza, and it appears that Israeli ‘settlers’ in the West Bank beat an American citizen visiting family there to death. I’ve seen no comment or demand from our federal government about his murder yet.

The New York Times has an in-depth story on a woman who kidnapped her daughter after her divorce, because in the 1970s courts would not award custody to mothers if they were gay. The piece focuses on the child, who has very mixed feelings about what her mother did and how it altered the course of her life forever.

The family of a Northwestern University Professor who killed herself during a (dubious) federal investigation into whether she was some kind of spy for China is suing the school for contributing to her declining mental state.

The author Gary Shteyngart visited the country of Georgia and wrote about its food and sights for Condé Nast Traveler.

A few months ago, Texas Republicans voted down a bill to improve local disaster warning systems, such as tornado and flood sirens.

The Guardian’s Margaret Sullivan asks why The New York Times appears to be trying to take down Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign, focusing on the paper’s recent story about what she calls a “made-up scandal.”

I included a link on John Wilson, who was running for executive of King County (WA), getting arrested for stalking and violating a restraining order, in the links a week or two ago; this week, charges were dropped, but he also ended his campaign.

Rare good news on the vaccine front, as NBC News reports on some states, mostly blue ones, trying to end the fake ‘religious exemptions’ to school vaccination requirements.

That’s important because, as this BMJ piece notes, the vaccine-denial movement is threatening global health.

Texas AG Ken Paxton (R) loves to talk about what a strong Christian he is, and has attempted to bring religion into government since he took office a decade ago. His wife announced this week she’s filed for divorce because he keeps cheating on her. Thou shalt not, or something like that.

Paste explores how AI-generated content is drowning the publishing industry in slop.

The Intelligencer explains how a combination of changes at Google, Twitter’s self-destruction, and AI have led to a traffic apocalypse for media companies.

The Guardian has a story on just how dangerous choking during sex is, even as the practice seems to be becoming more prevalent – and it’s almost always women being choked, of course. The whole story made me feel very old and creeped out.

Libraries in Kent, England, have been instructed by the Reform-led council there to remove any trans books from their shelves if they might be seen by children. There are many problems here, but the most fundamental one is the idea that books about trans people – or other LBGTQ+ people, or Black people, or Jewish people – are inherently inappropriate for children. They’re not.

Some board game Kickstarters of note: Allplay has one for Sail Legacy, a legacy version of the cooperative two-player trick-taking game; and Restoration Games has one for a storage solution for players of their Unmatched card-game series.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: artificial intelligence, board game news, book banning, gaza, georgian cuisine, links, longreads, new york city, scams, sex, social media, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines

Stick to baseball, 11/22/25.

Stick to baseball, 10/25/25.

Stick to baseball, 9/27/25.

Stick to baseball, 8/23/25.

Stick to baseball, 8/16/25.

Stick to baseball, 7/19/25.

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